The
Lost Light
AN
INTERPRETATION OF ANCIENT SCRIPTURES
Alvin
Boyd Kuhn
Electronically typed and edited by
Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. Please do not remove this
notice. I can be contacted at pc93@bellsouth.net. I will be greatly indebted to
the individual who can put me in touch with the associates of the Estate of Dr.
Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following works:
The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon,
Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark
and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At
Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes -
But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Through Science
to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of
Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at
Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished
autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
To
THE
MEMORY OF
DR.
ROBERT NORWOOD
WHOSE
CHARGE TO ME TO WRITE THIS
BOOK
WAS AN IMPELLING AND SUS-
TAINING
INSPIRATION TO THE
TASK,
THIS WORK IS
AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
I. TRAGEDY DIES IN LAUGHTER
II. ECCE HOMO-EOCE DEUS
III. TRUTH CRUSHED TO EARTH
IV. WISDOM HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
V. LOOSING THE SEVEN SEALS
VI. THE DESCENT TO AVERNUS
VII. COLONISTS FROM HEAVEN
IX. ALIVE IN DEATH
X. THE MUMMY IN AMENTA
XI. DISMEMBERMENT AND DISFIGUREMENT
XII. AMBROSIA AND NECTAR
XIII. EARTH, WATER, AIR, FIRE
XIV. FIRE ON HEAVEN’S HEARTH
XV. NOXIOUS FUMES AND LURID FLAMES
XVI. BAPTISM AT THE CROSSING
XVII. THE
XVIII. THE
XIX. WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE
XX. SUNS OF INTELLECT
XXI. AT THE EAST OF HEAVEN
XXII. SKYLARK AT HEAVEN’S GATE
NOTES
INDEX
PROLOGUE
Coming forth in a day when theology
has long been discredited--even in its own ecclesiastical household--and
religion itself is threatened with obliteration by rampant forces hostile to
it, this book aims to rehabilitate theology and to stabilize true religion. It
must be said at the very outset and with blunt insistence that it is for religion
and not in any way against it. It is written to establish religion again as the
cornerstone of human culture, when civilization has largely turned away from it
to seek elsewhere the guiding light. It is designed to redeem Divine Theology
from her outcast condition and place her again beside Philosophy and Science on
the throne in the kingdom of man’s mind.
It needs sharply to be asseverated
that the book is for religion because many will pronounce it the most
forthright attack on ecclesiastical doctrinism yet presented. It can hardly be
denied that it sweeps away almost the entire body of common acceptance of
biblical and theological meaning. But it makes no war on anything in religion
save the idiocies and falsities that have crept into the general conception of
orthodox belief. Finding the chief enemies of true religion were those within
her own gates, the book has had to address itself to the ungenerous task of
repudiating the whole untenable structure of accredited interpretation in order
to erect on the ground the lovely temple of ancient truth. If theology is to be
rescued from its forlorn state of intellectual disrepute into which not its
enemies but its friends have precipitated it through an unconscionable
perversion of its original significance to gross repulsiveness, the errors and
distortions perpetrated upon it by those of its own household must be
ruthlessly dismantled. Hence to many the book will seem like a devastating
assault on the very citadel of common religious preachment. In the face of all
this it must be maintained that the work is written to support and defend
religion against all its foes and that it is constructive and not destructive
of true religious values at every turn. It was no light or frivol-
1
ous gesture to affront a settled and
rooted growth of beliefs and doctrinal statements that have been cherished for
centuries around the hearthstone of Christian culture and become hallowed by
age-long acceptance and the strong loves and loyalties inbred in sensitive
childhood. But it was seen to be a drastic operation quite necessary to save
the organism of religion itself from further decay and menacing death.
Excrescences of misconception and superstition had to be heroically cut out of
the body of theology and the calcareous incrustations of ignorant
interpretation dissolved and carried away by the acid stream of living truth
flowing forth, after centuries of suppression, from the mighty scriptures of
the past.
The Western world has too long and
fatuously labored under the delusion that a pious and devout disposition
fulfills the whole requirement of true religion. Ancient sagacity knew that
piety without intelligence, or religion without philosophy, was insufficient
and dangerous. It knew that general good intent was not safe from aberrancy,
folly and fanaticism unless it was directed by the highest powers and resources
of the mind. And the mind itself had to be fortified with specific knowledge of
the nature of the cosmos and of man and the relation between the two. Following
the dictum of the sage, Hermes Trismegistus, that "the vice of a soul is
ignorance, the virtue of a soul is knowledge," the scriptures of old
inculcated the precept that with all man’s getting he must first get wisdom and
understanding. These were related to his well-being as health to his navel and
marrow to his bones, and would alone give him a crown of eternal life. They
were pronounced more precious than all the things that he could desire. The
council of Illuminati therefore laid down their systems of cosmology and
anthropology, which have become by immemorial tradition the Bibles of humanity,
universally reverenced. In them were given the ordinances of life, the
constitution of the cosmos, the laws governing both nature and mind. They still
constitute the Magna Carta of all human action guided by intelligence. For they
were the first Institutes embodying the Principia and Fundamenta of all moral
behavior, the only true chart and compass to guide human effort in a line of
harmony with an overshadowing divine plan of evolution for the Cosmos.
The corruption and final loss of the
basic meaning of these scriptures has been, in the whole of time, the greatest
tragedy in human
2
history. Like Shakespeare’s tide,
which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune, but, omitted, casts all the
rest of life in shoals and quicksands, the wreckage of the Esoteric Gnosis in
the centuries following Plato’s day, culminating in the debacle of all
philosophical religion about the third century of Christianity’s development
and ushering in sixteen centuries of the Dark Ages, has thrown all religion out
of basic relation to true understanding and caused it to breed an endless train
of evils, fanaticisms, bigotries, idiosyncrasies, superstitions, wars and
persecutions that more than anything else blacken the record of man’s historic
struggle toward the light. The present (1940) most frightful of all historical
barbarities owes its incidence directly to the decay of ancient philosophical
knowledge and the loss of vision and virtue that would have attended its
perpetuation.
What, then, must be the importance
of a book which restores to the scriptures of ancient wisdom the lost light of
their true original meaning?
In a very real and direct way the
salvation of culture and a free spirit in the world is contingent upon this
restoration of the ancient intelligence to modernity. For man at this age has
had new and mighty powers of nature suddenly placed in his hands, and yet lacks
the spiritual poise and sagacity to use them without calamity. Most strangely,
the control of the lower physical, natural or brute forces by the mind or
reason was the one central situation primarily and fundamentally dealt with in
the sage tomes of antiquity. To effect that control in a perfect balance and
harmony, and to train the reasoning intellect in the divine art of it, was the
aim and end of the Arcane Philosophy. Ideology in the Western world has
endlessly vacillated back and forth between the cult of the inner spirit and
engrossment in objective materialism. Ancient philosophy taught that the true
path of evolutionary growth was to be trodden by an effort that united the
forces of the spirit with those of the world, the lower disciplined by the
higher. The whole gist of the Esoteric Doctrine was the study and mastery of
the powers engaged in working out the evolutionary advance, so that the
aspirant might be able to align his cultural effort in consonance with the
requirements of the problem and the end to be achieved.
Without this guiding data and this
evolutionary perspective modern man is totally at a loss how to focus his
endeavor and is unable to point
3
his direction in line with anything
more fixed and basic than his next immediate objective of apparent
desirability. He has neither a knowledge of his origin, a chart of his path, an
inventory of his capacities or a vision of his goal. Hence he travels the long
road still a benighted wanderer without compass. He can but recoil from one
mistaken plunge after another, learning sporadic lessons from pain and
misfortune. The ancient torch that was lighted for his guidance he has let burn
out. This lamp was the body of Ancient Philosophy. In this critical epoch in
the life of the world this book proclaims afresh the message of lost truth.
.
. . . . . .
Three ancient and long-discredited
sciences have had a surprising renaissance in popular fancy and scientific
interest: symbolism, alchemy, astrology. The last has particularly come into a
general vogue, but on a basis which still inclines conservative positivism in
science and scholarship to regard it as allied closely with "popular
superstition." In its predictive or "fortune-telling" aspect it
is generally looked at askance. But there is another side on which it has
pertinence and value that has not been recognized in the modern revival and on
which perhaps its most legitimate claim to consideration rests. This is its
function as symbolic theology. Unquestionably cosmic operation, cosmic
significance, lie behind the twelve constellations of the zodiac and the
thirty-six or more other stellar configurations. The planisphere or chart of
the heavens was doubtless the first of all Bibles, pictorially edited. Not
quite simply and directly but intrinsically, all Bibles are amplifications and
elaborations of the original volume of ideography first written on the open
face of the sky, charted in the zodiac and heavenly maps, and later transferred
to earth and written in scrolls and parchments. Man was instructed to fashion
his new body of spiritual glory "after the pattern of things in the
heavens," the heavenly or zodiacal man. And a graph of the structure and
history of this celestial Personage was sketched by the enlightened sages in
the configurated star clusters. Zodiac comes from the Greek word zodion, a
small living image, signifying that it is a graph of the microcosmic life of
man, which is cast in the form of the macrocosmic life of the universe, or of
God. Man’s own small body is a replica of this body of God, made in its image
and likeness. The vast frame of Cosmic Man
4
was outlined in the scroll of the
heavens, the solar systems and galaxies being living cell clusters in his
immense organism.
A deal of this adumbrative symbology
elucidating theological doctrinism is set forth in the body of the present
work. But there is a group of its data that strikes so deeply into the heart of
general theology that it is given here at the outset for the sake of its
overwhelming impressiveness. It must prove to be so conclusive an evidence that
Biblical theology rests more solidly than has ever been believed on zodiacal
backgrounds that its presentation will be admittedly a matter of great moment.
It traces the unsuspected significance of two of the twelve signs, Virgo and
Pisces, in the very heart of New Testament narrative. Let the reader picture
before him the ordinary zodiac, with the house of Virgo at the western equinox
point and that of Pisces directly opposite on the eastern side. The simple fact
that they stand six months apart will presently be seen to assume great
importance in Gospel determination.
The exposition must begin with the
puzzling and hitherto unexplained item of ancient religious myth, that the
Christs, the Sun-Gods, the Messiahs, all were depicted as having two mothers.
How, one asks, could there possibly be rational significance in this? It has
been put aside as just some more of the mythical rubbish and nonsense of early
Paganism. The profundity of pagan intelligence, hiding sublime cosmic truth
under glyph and symbol, has not been dreamed of.
The depiction should not have
created incredulity, seeing that the Gospel Jesus himself, dramatic figure of
the divine principle in man, announced it categorically in declaring to
Nicodemus that "ye must be born again." Nicodemus asks if this means
that we must enter a second time into our mother’s body and experience a second
birth in the natural manner. Jesus replies that we "must be born of water
and the spirit." Attention must be directed a moment to the fact that the
Latin word spiritus, translated "spirit" in many passages,
means as well "air" or "breath." One of the great keys to
Bible meaning is the series of the four "elements" of ancient
mythicism: earth, water, air and fire. The body of the physical or natural man
was conceived as being composed of the two lower, earth and water, while air
and fire, representing mind and spirit, commingled to make the higher or
spiritual man. Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus, then, could have been rendered,
"born of water and air." And John the Baptist uses three of the four
ele-
5
ments when he states that he, the
forerunner of the Christos, and therefore a type of the lower natural
man, indeed baptizes us with water (omitting earth), but that there cometh
after him one higher than himself who shall baptize us with the holy spiritus
(air) and with fire. Jesus thus affirms that we have two births,
necessitating two mothers, and John the Baptist adds that we must have two
baptisms.
Since man’s spirit is an
indestructible fragment of God’s own mighty Spirit, truly a tiny spark of that
cosmic Intelligence and Love which we call the Mind of God, the ancients
typified the divine element in man by fire and in contrast the lower or human
element by water. The fiery soul of man is housed in a tenement of flesh
and matter which is seven-eighths water by actual composition! The crossing of
the rivers and seas and the immersion of solar heroes in water in olden
mythologies, and the rite of baptism in theology, signified nothing beyond the
fact of the soul’s immersion in a physical body of water nature in its
successive incarnations.
Now man is distinctly a creature
compounded of two natures, a higher and a lower, a spiritual and a sensual, a
divine and a human, a mortal and an immortal, and finally a fiery and a watery,
conjoined in a mutual relationship in the organic body of flesh. Says
Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of
earth and water." Speaking of man Plato affirms: "Through body it is
an animal; through intellect it is a god." To create man God incarnated
the fiery spiritual principle of his life in the watery confines of material
bodies. That is the truest basic description of man that anthropology can
present. All problems spring from that foundation and are referable for
solution back to it.
Man is, then, a natural man and a
god, in combination. Our natural body gives the soul of man its baptism by
water; our nascent spiritual body is to give us the later baptism by fire! We
are born first as the natural man; then as the spiritual. Or we are born first
by water and then by fire. Of vital significance at this point are two
statements by
6
he can cognize spiritual things.
Evolution will thus transform him, and nothing else will.
Using astrological bases for
portraying cosmic truths, the ancients localized the birth of the natural man
in the zodiacal house of Virgo and that of the spiritual man in the opposite
house of Pisces. These then were the houses of the two mothers of life. The
first was the Virgin Mother (Virgo), the primeval symbol of the Virgin Mary
thousands of years B.C. Virgo gave man his natural birth by water and became
known as the Water-Mother; Pisces (the Fishes by name) gave him his
birth by the Fish and was denominated the Fish-Mother. The virgin mothers are
all identified with water as symbol and their various names, such as Meri,
Mary, Venus (born of the sea-foam), Tiamat, Typhon and Thallath (Greek for
"sea") are designations for water. On the other side there are the
Fish Avatars of Vishnu, such as the Babylonian Ioannes, or Dagon, and the
Assyrian goddess Atergatis was called "the Fish-Mother." Virgo stood
as the mother of birth by water, or the birth of man the first, of the earth,
earthy; Pisces stood as the mother of birth by spirit or fire, or the birth of
man the second, described by
There must now be brought out an
unrevealed significance of the fish symbol in the zodiac and in mythical
religion. It is of astonishing import. Water is the type of natural birth
because all natural birth proceeds in and from water. All first life originated
in the sea water. The fish is a birth in and from the water, and it stands
patently as the generic type of organic life issuing out of inorganic! The fish
typifies life embodied in a physical organic structure. Organic life is born
out of the water, and is the first birth, child of the water-mother. And if
organic life is in turn to become mother, its child will be mind and spiritual
consciousness, son of the fish-mother! In brief, water is the mother of natural
physical being, and organic structure becomes the later mother of divine mind.
Now, strangely enough, water is the
type of another thing which is still more germinal of life, namely, matter.
Matter is the virgin mother of all life in the aboriginal genesis. All things
are generated in the womb of primordial matter, the "old genetrix" of
Egyptian mythology. And it is by a consideration of the nature of matter and
its evolution
7
that we are enabled to arrive at
last at the true meaning of the double motherhood of life. For oddly enough,
matter is seen to exist in two states, in each of which it becomes mother of
life, at two different levels. Primordial matter, the sea of (to us) empty
space, is the first mother of all living forms. This is the primal "abyss
of the waters" in Genesis. The Latin word for "mother" is
our very word "matter," with one "t" left out--mater. And
how close to mater is water! And organic structure is the second
mother, parent of spiritual mind.
The ancient books always grouped the
two mothers in pairs. They were called "the two mothers" or sometimes
the "two divine sisters." Or they were the wife and sister of the
God, under the names of Juno, Venus, Isis, Ishtar, Cybele or Mylitta. In old
8
Nephthys, the second mother, the
immediate incubator and gestator of its manifest expression. One might
paraphrase this situation by saying that a human child is first conceived in
the love, or mind, of its parents, and later born from the womb of its physical
mother. Thus life has two births and must of necessity have two mothers. Life
is spiritually conceived and materially born. Or, man may be said to be born as
a natural creature from spirit into matter, and born later as a spiritual god
when he emerges from his baptism in the water of the body and re-enters the
bosom of his Father. Or, finally, he is born first as man, by water; and reborn
later as god, by fire. And the first birth was depicted as taking place on the
western side of the zodiac, in the house or womb of the Virgin Mother, Virgo,
because in the west the sun, universal symbol of spiritual fire, descended into
organic matter in its setting, or incarnation. So man is born as natural man on
the west, to be regenerated as spiritual man on the east. Spirit’s descent on
the west makes it man; its resurrection on the east, like the summer sunrise,
makes it deity again. This is the death and resurrection of the god in all
religions. It is incarnation and return to spirit. It is the descent of the
Messiah into
Further scrutiny of such data brings
to light links of connection with the Bible. The chief one is found in the
symbol of bread in connection with both Virgo and Pisces. Pisces is the house
of the Fishes by name, but it is not commonly known that Virgo in astrological
symbology was the house of Bread. This is indicated by several items of ancient
typology. Many centuries ago in the precession of the equinoxes, the end of the
year was marked by the position of the great Dog-Star Sirius, mighty celestial
symbol of the divinity in man. Precisely at
9
down from heaven, that if a man eat
of it he shall hunger no more." Jesus broke a loaf into fragments and gave
to his disciples, saying that it was his body, broken for them.
We now have Virgo established as the
house of Bread and Pisces as the house of Fish. But the characterization of the
two houses must be brought along to a more specific evolutionary reference.
What are these "houses," thus delineated? They are, as at first, the
two states of matter, but now to be taken in immediate reference to the life of
man on earth. They are in the final stage of the meaning man’s body itself,
which consists of matter in both its invisible and its visible forms. For man
has a natural body and a spiritual body. Man’s body itself houses the two
mothers. The body is this double house of Bread and of Fish.
And the next link is seen when it is
considered that this physical body is for the soul the house of death and in
its regenerative phase, the house of rebirth. It is the house into which the
spirit descends to its partial obscuration in the darkness of the grave of
matter, into the night of death, or incarnation, out of which it is to arise in
a new birth or resurrection on the opposite side of the cycle. A significant
passage from the Book of the Dead recites: "Who cometh forth from
the dusk, and whose birth is in the house of death"--referring to the
incarnating soul. In a spiritual sense the soul "dies" on entering
the body in incarnation, but has a new birth in it as it later resurrects from
it. The body is therefore the house of his death and rebirth, or the place of
his crucifixion and resurrection.
And the Egyptians had a name for the
body as the locus of these transformations, which carry the central meaning of
all theologies. This name now rises out of the dim mists of ancient Egyptian
books to enlighten all modern Bible comprehension. This city of the body, where
the sun of soul sank to its death on the cross of matter, to rearise in a new
birth, was called the city of the sun, or in Greek,
The name is obviously made up of NU,
the name for the mother heaven, or empty space, or abyss of nothingness, and
Alpha privative, meaning, as in thousands of words, "not." A-NU would
then mean
10
"not-nothingness," or a
world of concrete actuality, the world of physical substantial manifestation.
Precisely such a world it is in which units of virginal consciousness go to
their death and rise again. A-NU is then the physical body of man on earth. The
soul descends out of the waters of the abyss of the NUN, or space in its
undifferentiated unity, which is the sign and name of all things negative. The
NUN is indeed our "none." Life in the completeness of its unity is
negative. To become positively manifest it must differentiate itself into
duality, establish positive-negative tension, and later split up into untold
multiplicity. This brings out the significance of the Biblical word
"multiply." Life can not manifest itself in concrete forms until it
multiplies itself endlessly. Unit life of deity must break itself up into
infinite fragments in order to fill empty space with a multitude of worlds and
beings of different natures. The primal Sea or Mother must engender a
multitudinous progeny, to spawn the limitless shoals of organic fish-worlds.
This is the meaning of the promise given to Abraham, that his seed should multiply
till it filled the earth with offspring countless as the sands of the
seashore. And if life was symboled by bread, as the first birth, and by fish,
as the second, then we might expect to find in old religious typology the
allegory of a Christ figure multiplying loaves and fishes! Are we
surprised to find that the Gospel Jesus does this very thing, multiplying the
fish loaves and two small fishes to feed a multitude!
This is astonishing enough in all
conscience, but it yields in wonder to the next datum of Comparative Religion
which came to our notice as a further tie between the Bible and antecedent
Egyptian mythology. Who can adequately measure the seriousness of the challenge
which this item of scholarship presents to Gospel historicity? For a discovery
of sensational interest came to light when a passage was found in the Book
of the Dead which gave to Anu the characteristic designation, "the
place of multiplying bread"! Here in the long silent tomes of old
Egypt was found the original, the prototype, of the miracle of the loaves and
the fishes in the Gospels of Christianity. And a meaning never before
apprehended had to be read into this New Testament wonder. At last we were
instructed to catch in the miracle the sense that the physical body, as A-NU,
was the place where the corpus of the Christ’s deific power was broken into an
infinite number of fragments and distributed out among a multitude of
creatures, enhungered after
11
a three-days’ fast, or deprivation
of the food of spiritual life in their sojourn in the three kingdoms, the
mineral, vegetable and animal, before reaching the plane of mind. Here are all
the elements of the inner meaning of the Christian Eucharist: the broken but
multiplied fragments of the body of the god, distributed to feed hungry
humanity. And as humanity is composed of twelve groups of divine conscious
units, there were gathered up twelve baskets of fragments! And this episode of
the Christ’s ostensible life is found to be Egyptian in origin and meaning and
symbolic in character!
But new implications arise and lead
us on to more startling disclosures. The Hebrews came along and appropriated
Egyptian material. They picked up the name ANU and fitting it back into its
zodiacal setting as Virgo, they called it the "house of Bread." This
required their adding to ANU their word for "house," which, as anyone
knows, is Beth. This yields us Beth-Anu. Now it is a fact of common
philological knowledge that the ancient Greek and Egyptian "U" is
rendered as "Y" when the words are brought over into English. The
"U" became a "Y," and Beth-Anu now stands before us as the
Bethany of the Gospels! Bethany is thus just the sign of Virgo, as the
"house of Bread," the home of the great star Spica, the head of
wheat!
But let us say "house of
Bread" in ordinary Hebrew. What further astonishment strikes us here, as
we find it reads Beth-Lehem (Lechem, Lekhem), for lechem, lekhem, is
bread in everyday Hebrew. The Christ was born in Bethany or Bethlehem, the
astrological "house of Bread." (Later it seems that the two signs,
Virgo and Pisces, and their symbols, bread and fish, were almost
interchangeably confused or commingled in the symbolic imagery. This was
natural, since the two signs represented the same body of man in its two
aspects of dying and being reborn, and the two processes are confusedly
interblended.)
If Pisces is then the
"house" in which the Christ in man comes to his birth, it is
pertinent to ask if there are evidences in the Bible or Christianity that Jesus
was colored with the fish typology. Here we encounter material enough to
provide another nine-days’ wonder. For we find the Gospel Jesus marked with
many items of the Piscean symbology. He picks his twelve disciples from the
ranks of fishermen (in Egypt they were as well carpenters, reapers, harvesters,
sailors, rowers, builders, masons, potters, etc.); he told Peter to find the
gold in the fish’s mouth; he performed the miraculous draught of fishes; he de-
12
clared that he would make them
"fishers of men." In the catacombs under Rome the symbol of the two
fishes crossed was displayed on the Christ’s forehead, at his feet, or on a
plate on the altar before him. And the Romans for several centuries dubbed the
early Christians Pisciculi, or "Little Fishes," members of the
"fish-cult." And the Greeks denominated the Gospel Jesus as Ichthys,
the Fish. All this fish symbolism can not be explained away as sheer incident
material. It is the product of ancient custom, which figured the Christs under
the symbolism of the reigning sign of the zodiac, according to the precession
of the equinoxes.
And yet another surprising
correlation comes to view. The Christ, as it has here been delineated, is the
offspring or creation of a conception of deific Mind, first in the inner bosom
of spiritual matter, then in organic bodily structure. Primeval space, we have
seen, was called in Egypt the NUN, or the Waters of the Nun. All Bible students
recognize a familiar ring in the phrase "Joshua, Son of Nun." But so
far has ignorance and obscurantism gone with its deadly work in Christian
literalism that hardly anyone knows with definiteness that Joshua is just a
variant name for Jesus. The phrase is actually written in some old documents as
"Jesus, Son of Nun." At any rate Joshua is just Jesus, no less. So
here is the Christ, called Jesus, son of the aboriginal space, or the NUN. But
the wonder increases when we turn to the Hebrew alphabet and find that while
"M" is called and spelled "Mem" and means
"water," "N" is called and spelled "Nun" and
means--of all things--"Fish"! Jesus, then, is son of Pisces, the
Fish-sign, as he indeed is in the Gospels themselves.
And Horus, the Egyptian Christ, who
is identical with the Jesus of the Gospels in some one hundred and eighty
particulars, performed at Anu a great miracle. He raised his father Osiris from
the dead, calling unto him in the cave to rise and come forth. Anu, as we have
seen, became Bethany of the Gospels; and it was at Bethany that Jesus raised
Lazarus from death! And who was Lazarus? Here the greatest of all the marvels
in this chain of comparative data unfolds under our eyes. According to Budge
and other eminent Egyptologists the ancient designation of Osiris was ASAR. But
the Egyptians invariably expressed reverence for deity by prefixing the
definite article "the" to the names of their Gods. Just as Christians
say, or should say, the Christ, they said: the Osiris. It will be
found that the article connoted deity in an-
13
cient usage. Our definite article,
"the" is the root of the Greek word theos, God; the Spanish
article, masculine, "el," is the Hebrew word for God; and the
Greek masculine article, "ho," is a Chinese word for deity. To
say the Osiris was equivalent to saying Lord Osiris. When the Hebrews
took up the Egyptian phrases and names they converted the name of "the
Osiris" or "Lord Osiris" directly into their own vernacular, and
the result was "El-Asar." Later on the Romans, speaking Latin, took
up the same material that had come down from revered Egyptian sources and to
"El-Asar" they added the common Latin termination of the second
declension masculine nouns, in which most men’s names ended, namely, "-us";
and the result was now "El-Asar-us." In time the initial
"E" wore off, as the scholars phrase it, and the "s" in
Asar changed into its sister letter "z," leaving us holding in our
hands the Lazarus whom Jesus raised at Bethany! To evidence that this
derivation is not a fanciful invention or sheer coincidence the Biblical names
of High Priests may be cited. We find one with the name of El(e)azar and
another by name Azar-iah, "iah" or "jah" being suffixes of
great deific connotation, matching "el." And so we are faced with the
irrefutable evidence of Comparative Religion that Jesus’ raising of Lazarus at
Bethany is but a rescript of the old Egyptian dramatic mystery in which Horus,
the Christ, raised his "dead" father Osiris, or El-Asar-us from the
grave. And the Egyptian recital was in the papyri perhaps 5000 years B.C.
Also at the Egyptian scene were
present the two divine sisters, Isis and Nephthys. An old source-name for Isis
was Meri, basic for the Latin mare, the sea. The Egyptian plural
of Meri was Merti. In Latin feminine form this became Mertae. In
Hebrew it resolved into what was rendered in English as Martha. So even in the
ancient Egyptian transaction there were present the two Maries, or Mary and
Martha, the sisters of Lazarus!
All this sets the stage for the
crowning item in the correspondence. In the Gospel drama John the Baptist bears
the character of the firstborn or natural man, coming first to prepare the
ground or make straight the path for the advent of the spiritual man or Lord
Christ. He would therefore stand as the son of the water-mother, Virgo, and
under the astrological symbolism would be born at the autumn equinox, or in his
mother’s house. On the other side of the cycle of descent and resurrection
Jesus, the Christos, would be the son of the
14
fish-mother, and would be born in
his mother’s house, Pisces. These houses are six months apart astrologically.
The whole edifice of Gospel historicity trembles under the impact of the
strange dramatic circumstance, given in Luke, that the annunciation to
Mary of her impregnation by the Holy Ghost came when John the Baptist was six
months in Elizabeth’s womb. The natural man, having covered the "six
months" between his birth and the date of his quickening into spiritual
status in the evolutionary cycle, was thus quickened, or leaped in his mother’s
womb, when the time for the birth, or advent, of the spiritual Christ had
arrived. The water baptism was to be consummated with the fire at the baptism
of Jesus by John, a fire was kindled in the waters of the Jordan!
St. Paul declares that we come to
birth spiritually only as we die carnally, which means that the quantum of
divine character in us grows in proportion as the quantum of raw nature
declines. As the spiritual man, Jesus, son of Nun, the fish, increases, the
natural man, John, son of Virgo, the Water, must decrease. Astrologically, as a
constellation or star sinks below the horizon in the west, its opposite
constellation would be rising in the east. As John, type of the natural first
birth, went down, Jesus, type of the spiritual second birth, rose on the world.
And, says John the Baptist: "I must decrease as he must increase"!
.
. . . . . .
On the analogy, might one venture to
predict that a new day of brotherhood in human society may be about to dawn, as
the "six months’" reign of a degrading literal interpretation of the
Sacred Scriptures goes down to desuetude and the day-star of a transfiguring
spiritual interpretation rises in the east?
15
Chapter 1
TRAGEDY
DIES IN LAUGHTER
Little could the ancient
mythologists and sages have foreseen that the "fabulous narrations"
which their genius devised to cloak high truth would end by plaguing the mind
of the Western world with sixteen centuries of unconscionable stultification.
They could not possibly imagine that their allegorical constructions to
dramatize spiritual truth would so miscarry from their hidden intent as to cast
the mental life of half the world for ages under the cloud of the most
grotesque superstition known to history. Nor could they have dreamed that the
gross blindness and obtuseness of later epochs would cite these same
marvelously ingenious portrayals as the evidence of childish crudity on the
part of their formulators. Who could have suspected that a body of the most
signal instrumentalities for conveying and preserving deep knowledge ever
devised by man would become the means of centuries of mental enslavement?
Nothing more clearly evidences the
present age’s loss of fixed moorings in philosophical truth than the
inconsistency of its attitudes toward the sacred scriptures of antiquity. The
general mind, indoctrinated by priestcraft, regards them as infallible
revelations and holds them as fetishes, which it were a sacrilege to challenge;
while theological scholarship hedges from pious veneration of them over to
outright skepticism of their divine origin, swinging more recently to a view
which takes them to be the simple conceptions of men just emerging from cave
and forest barbarism. The character of divine dictation and absolute wisdom assigned
to them on the one thesis has yielded to that of ignorant speculation of
primitive folk on the other. That there is a possible truer characterization of
them lying midway between the extravagances of these two extreme views has not
seemed to come through to intelligence at any time. It has not occurred to
students of religion that ancient scripts are the work neither of Supreme Deity
on the one
17
side, nor of groping infantile
humanity on the other, but that their production must be sought in a region
intermediate between the two. They came neither from supernal Deity nor from common
humanity, but from humanity divinized! They were the output of normal
humans graduating to divine or near-divine status, St. Paul’s "just men
made perfect." Their divinity is therefore not transcendent and exotic,
and their humanity is not crude and doltish. They bear the marks, therefore, of
human sagacity exalted to divine mastership.
When a student graduates creditably
from a college he is presumed to have acquired a mastery over the field of
knowledge covered in his course. Human life is a school, and why should not its
graduates be presumed to have gained mastery over the range of knowledge which
it covers, and to be able to write authoritatively upon it? Humans must at some
time attain the goal, the prize of the high calling of God in Christly
illumination, the crown of glorious intelligence. Life’s school issues no
diploma of graduation without attainment, for the graduation is the
attainment. We have here the ground for the only sane acceptance of the ancient
scriptures as books of accredited wisdom. We are neither asked to believe them
inscribed by the finger of omnipotent Deity, nor forced to attribute them to
the undeveloped brains of primitives. They can be seen as the products of the
sage wisdom garnered by generations of men who had finally risen to clear
understanding. They are the literary heritage bequeathed by men grown to the
stature of divinity. Their veneration by the world for long centuries, even
carried to the extreme of outrageous sycophancy, attests an indestructible
tradition of their origination from sources accredited as divine and
infallible. Their successful hold on the popular mind for many ages bespeaks
also the unshakeable foundations of their wisdom. They have withstood
consistently the test of generations of human experience. Their wisdom holds
against life; it rings true. And it is all the more precious to us because of
its authorship by men of our own evolution, since thereby it does not miss
immediate pertinence to our life.
Both the conventional views of Bible
authorship have militated against the possible high service of the scriptures
to mankind. The theory of their divine dictation to "holy men of old"
has led to the abject surrender of the rational mind before their impregnable
fortress of direct assertion, its hypnotization by a fetish, and the crippling
of its native energies. The theory of their production by early crudity tends
18
to the disparagement of the value
and validity of their message. The other view here advanced preserves their
venerated authority while it brings their authorship from alleged Cosmic
Divinity back to men of earth. It saves us from the fatuous claim that
"God" took time out to dictate a volume of absolute verity for the
inhabitants of a minor planet amongst millions of trillions of such worlds.
Relieving us of the necessity of asserting that Supreme Deity went into the
book publishing business on this globe and took advantage of his commanding
position to write the planet’s "best seller," it preserves mental
integrity by enabling us to assign scriptural authorship to human agency, where
alone it is acceptable. It is understandable that evolved men, with vision
opened to knowledge of the laws of life, would indite sage tomes for the
enlightenment of those less advanced. In any case the Bibles are here; they
must be accounted for. The phenomenon of their existence among the nations,
their hoary age, their escape from destruction through the centuries, the ineradicable
tradition of their divine origin and authority, their almost universal
veneration, must all find some factual ground of explanation. The theory
offered in refutation of the two conventional ones seems the only one that
provides such a rational and acceptable basis. And since the belief in their
sacredness generally persists, it can not be regarded as less than momentous
that the world should know of a surety that, while these revered relics are not
the voice of the personified Cosmos, neither are they the mere speculative
romancing of cavemen or scholastics. They are the sure word of perfected
wisdom.
There was a time, then, in early
human history, when enlightened men possessed true knowledge, the passport to
wisdom. Clear and concise answers to the profoundest problems of philosophy
were known. In so far as the human intellectual faculty is capable of it, an
understanding of the mystery and riddle of life itself and the laws of its
evolutionary unfolding, was achieved by men who, as Hermes says, had been
"reborn in mind." Philosophy was no mere "speculative
enterprise," or tilting at logical windmills; it was a statement of the
fundamental archai, or basic principles, of the science of being. It
formed the groundwork for the elevation of theology to its true place as the
King of Sciences, or the Kingly Science. Together philosophy and theology held
the throne in the mental life of mankind; and justly so, for a reason which
modern thought would do well to consider: they must ever be the ultimate science
because they motivate finally the use we
19
make of all other sciences! They
hold final answers to all life’s problems. They are the determination of all
human action in the end. They alone can direct man finally to the path of good,
for by no other means can he learn to know what constitutes the good. The sore
need of the world today is the restoration of philosophy, to supply the proper
motivation and end of action.
Though zealously guarded from the
unworthy by its accredited custodians, knowledge was extant in the ancient day.
Modern zeal for publicity finds it hard to understand why it was so sedulously
kept esoteric. Briefly--for the full reason is a lengthy matter--a thing so
precious, the distillation of ages of experience and the deposit of many lives
of painful earning, could not be given out loosely to the undisciplined rabble
to be violated and despoiled. Yet it was withheld from no worthy aspirant. No
bars of bigotry or persecution interdicted its free culture. The Societies in
which it was secretly pursued were honored by kings and the populace alike.
That halcyon age passed, that
priceless legacy of knowledge was threatened with extinction, its pursuit was
forbidden, its devotees assailed and exterminated; and for more than fifteen
centuries the Occidental world has muddled through its age-to-age existence in
nearly total ignorance of the fact that antiquity held, in its philosophy and
theology, an adequate answer to the great interrogatory, the Sphinx riddle of
human life.
The gift and then the loss of primal
wisdom are the two most momentous events in human history. This age will be
spectator to the third most significant event--the Renaissance of Ancient
Culture. The plans of demi-gods and divine men, interrupted for fifteen
centuries of the Dark Ages, will move forward again toward destined goals.
This age faces the denouement of a
drama the like of which has not been unrolled in world history before and will
hardly be repeated in aeons. Tragedy and comedy being copiously admixed in
mortal existence, the astounding spectacle to which the world will shortly
awake will exhibit untold calamity and the ludicrous conjoined in incredible
fashion. We are destined soon to pass from a stunning sense of tragic loss to a
world-echoing burst of laughter. The sting of our realization of our
duo-millennial loss will melt away under the dawning recognition of our
previous unbelievable stupidity. We are in a little time to be made acutely
aware of a situation that will become the butt of hollow
20
mirth for ages to come. Other
egregious follies of history can be accepted or extenuated to the point of
being condoned and forgotten. But this colossal ineptitude, prolonged over
sixteen centuries, can not escape being laughed at for centuries more. A joke
owes its character to the miscarriage of the intended sense into something
ludicrously different. This denouement will stand as the historical joke of the
ages. No less than this quantity of hilarity can balance the weight of the
tragedy which loads the joke at the other end. For the ludicrously different
direction in which the intended sense of the great mythical religions and
dramatic rituals of the past took its perverted course entailed as a
consequence the greatest of all historical tragedies,--the frightful chapter of
religious bigotry and persecution. This worst of all forms of man’s inhumanity
to man was bred out of the miscarriage of the concealed meaning of the ancient
spiritual myth. The transaction carried the form of a joke, but it also carried
the substance of the most appalling terrorism in history. And this most
calamitous of all blunders was the mistaking of religious myth, drama and
allegory for veridical history!
The promise of our coming awakening
lies in the progress made and to be made in the study of Comparative Religion,
Comparative Mythology and Comparative Philology. What they will ere long make
clear to us beyond further dispute is the almost unthinkable fact that for
sixteen centuries the best intelligence of the West took the ancient sages’
Books of Wisdom, which were in all cases the spiritual dramatizations of the
experience of the human soul on earth, for objective historical narratives. The
spectacle that will soon throw a world first into wonder, confusion and dismay,
and then into clownish laughter, is that of a civilization covering one third
of the globe, and boasting itself as the highest in culture in the historical
period, all the while taking its moral and spiritual guidance for an aeon from
a Book or Books, of the true content and meaning of which it never for a moment
has had the slightest inkling.
The superior knowledge vouchsafed
from early graduates in life’s school to disciplined pupils in the Mysteries of
old was transmitted from generation to generation by oral teaching and
preserved only in memory. But later, lest it be lost or corrupted, it was
consigned to writing. Hence came the Sacred Books, Scriptures, Holy Writ, of
antiquity. So highly were they held in the esteem of early men that when in
21
later days their true origin and
character had been forgotten, they were exalted to the position of veritable
fetishes and assigned a quite preternatural source and rating. Regarded as
books of superhuman intelligence, men have in face of them practically set in
abeyance their human reason and bowed to them as the oracles of absolute Truth.
This was natural and to a degree inevitable. But it spelled catastrophe to the
general mental life of man by fixing upon him the basest hypnotization in all
the annals of record, when a literal and historical, instead of a purely
spiritual and typical interpretation of the books was broadcast to general
acceptance. The evidence is mountain high that the taking of ancient ritual
dramas and scriptural myths for objective history and the figures in them for
human persons has been the fountain source of the most abject corruption of
man’s mental forces since the race began.
In mechanical exploit this is an age
of marvel, and credit for this type of achievement should not be withheld. In
study of life and its objective powers it has labored with wondrous
accomplishment. In psychological delving into deeper phases of consciousness it
has begun a pursuit long neglected. But in religion and philosophy it is one of
the blindest of ages. It is not overstating the case to say that in these areas
of human enterprise the mind of this era still slumbers in a state of
ineptitude and gross darkness at least a degree or two below that commonly
termed barbaric. At this moment the common mentality of the day, led and fed by
a compactly institutionalized ecclesiastical power, stands committed to ideas
as to the origin, structure, meaning and destiny of life which have not been
surpassed in crudity and chimerical absurdity by the tribes of the forest and
the sea isles. Conceptions in theology having to do with basic realities of
man’s relation to the universe are still presented in pulpits, Sunday Schools
and Theological Seminaries which the uncorrupted native intelligence of
children of eight and ten years shrinks from or accepts with startled
dismay,--to the subsequent confusion of their whole mental integrity. A
"scheme" of explanation of cosmic processes and world design, of
human and angelic relations, of the plan and purport of life itself, is advanced
for popular acceptance, yet is grotesque to common sense and fantastic to
rational thought. Philosophy and religion are still propagated on the basis of
a theology that is received without understanding by the "common
people," entirely repudiated by the intelligentsia and brazenly
22
dissembled by the very priesthood
that lips its cantos and its oracles from Sunday to Sunday. In sum it can be
said without the remotest possibility of successful dispute that the general
grasp of the mind of this age on philosophical verity and the truth of life, as
proffered by orthodox religionism, is still steeped in the crassest forms of
dark superstition. And this has been due to the miscarriage of ancient
symbolism.
History would seem to present a
pattern of retrogressive current if it can be shown that this late epoch
grovels in a mire of semi-barbaric philosophical grossness from which a former
period was free. Degeneracy must have set in at some distant time and swept
onward to this day. And such a phenomenon must have had its due cause. A great
work of a learned author some years ago pointed to the approaching
"decline of the West." What has not been seen, however, is that the
West has long been in decline, is at a low stage of decay, and has not risen
out of the murks of the Dark Ages. This has come in the wake of causes long
operative in the world situation, which have been overlooked or failed of
discovery through an egregious obscuration of the vision of scholars since the
early centuries. And if this failure of insight is not to be attributed to
stupidity that is in itself beyond understanding, then it becomes necessary for
the historian of these things to posit for it another cause, one that casts the
dark shadow of sinister motive over the whole course of that historical
enterprise in which sinister motive is of all places most unpardonable.
Corruption in politics or in economic or social life can be understood in
relation to the imperfection of human nature, and in a measure pardoned. But
designed corruption in religion is shattering to the very foundations of human
aspiration. It shocks and paralyzes fundamental urges to sincerity. It weights
the human spirit with the hopelessness of its effort to conquer imperfection.
Dishonesty and insincerity in worldly dealings may entail disaster of greater
or minor degree. In religion they are never less than fatal. There is one
domain in which untruth is insupportable, that field of the human soul’s
endeavor of which Truth is the very substance and being,--religion.
Whether stupidity or sinister design
prove to have been the cause of the loss of true original meaning must be left
to the historical sequel to disclose. And whether the cause of the perpetuation
of rank superstition in the present day of alleged enlightenment is to be laid
at the door of ignorance or knavery or a combination of both, must likewise
23
be determined as time moves on. It
is certain that both the primal and the present causes of nescience are
kindred, if not identical.
It is the purpose of the present volume
to set forth to the modern mind the extent of the wreckage which splendid
ancient wisdom suffered at the hands of later incompetence. And it is designed
to accomplish this by setting up the sharp contrast between the present
disfigurement and the past glory of the structure. This purpose entails the
task of revealing for the first time the hidden meaning of the body of archaic
scriptures by means of a clear and lucid interpretation of their myths and
allegories, fables and dramas, astrological pictographs and numerological
outlines. It will be at once seen to be a labor of no mean proportions to
convert the entire mass of antique mythology and legend, Biblical graph and
cryptogram, from presumed childish nonsense into an organic corpus of
transcendent scientific significance. It involves the reversal of that mental
process which in the days of early Christianity operated to change myth and
allegory in the first instance over to factual history. As third century
ignorance converted mythical typology to objective history, the task is now to
convert alleged objective history back to mythology, and then to interpret it
as enlightened theology. The almost insuperable difficulty of the project will
consist in demonstrating to an uncomprehending world, mistaught for centuries
and now fixed in weird forms of fantastic belief, that the sacred scriptures of
the world are a thousand times more precious as myths than as alleged
history. It can only be done by showing that as myths they illumine and
exalt the mind to unparalleled clarity, while as assumed history they are
either nonsensical or inconsequential. But centuries of erroneous
indoctrination have so warped and victimized the modern mind that the effort to
restore the scriptures to their primal mythical status will be met with the
objection that the transaction will wipe the Bible and other sacred literature
out of the realm of value altogether. In the common mind this would be to rob
them of worth and significance utterly. So wretchedly has the ancient usage of the
religious myth been misunderstood that the cry, "the Bible only a
myth!", will fall upon the popular ear with all the catastrophic force and
finality of the tolling of a death knell. And no statement that words can
phrase will stand as a more redoubtable testimony to the correctness of this
estimate of the present stupefaction of modern intelligence concerning
religious philosophy than just this reaction. Ridi-
24
cule, contempt and flat rejection
will be the greeting accorded the proclamation that Biblical myth is truer and
more important than Biblical history. Our book aims at nothing less than the
full proof of this contention. It flies directly in the face of the awaiting
scorn of common opinion on the point at issue. Yet nothing is easier than to demonstrate
that Bible material taken as history is the veriest nonsense. Anyone with an
analytic mind and an imagination to convert its narratives into realism can
make it a laughing-stock. The Voltaires, Paines, Ingersols and the freethinkers
have done this successfully enough. But having disproved it as history, they
have not redeemed it as spiritual mythology. The world awaits this work of
interpretation, and only when it is supplied will the full force of the tragic
humor of mistaking drama for history be grasped.
The loss or corruption of the
philosophical interpretation of ancient scriptures precipitated the West into
the Dark Ages, and a main factor in this disaster was a general obscuration of
intelligence concerning the myth. Catastrophe was made the more readily
possible because the rationale of the use of the myth in ancient hands passed
from knowledge. When the recondite suggestiveness of the myth was lost, the
inner essence of esoteric wisdom was dissipated away. Philosophy died out. And,
bereft of its inner soul, the myth came to stand as the mere ghost of itself.
With its hidden significance gone, it read nonsense and caricature. And so it
has stood till this day. The word connotes in the popular mind of the present
something about equivalent to fairy-tale, a fiction little removed from a
"hoax." It is something that is sheer fanciful invention. To declare
a narrative formerly believed to be true "only a myth" is to toss it
out on the rubbish heap as a thing no longer of value. This attitude of mind
toward the myth is itself the sign and seal of the decadence of this age. For
ancient sagacity could hardly have assumed that any succeeding age would prove
so obtuse as to take the outward form of its spiritual allegories for factual
occurrence, or suppose that their formulators believed them to be true
objectively.
To be sure, they are fanciful
creations and entirely fictitious. They are fables of events which, as events,
never happened. The aim was never at any time to deceive anybody. It was never
imagined that anybody would ever "believe" them. Nevertheless the
myth was designed to tell truth of the last importance. Its instrument was
fancy, but its purpose was not falsehood, but sublime truth. Outwardly it was
not
25
true, but at the same time it portrayed
full truth. It was not true for its "characters," but was true for
all mankind. It was only a myth, but it was a myth of something. It used
a false story to relate a true one. While it never happened, it is the type of
all things that have happened and will happen. It is not objective history, but
it embalms the import and substance, the heart’s core, of all human history.
Such authors as Spengler and Lord Raglan have begun to see that the ancients
regarded it of far less importance to catalogue the occurrences of objective
history than to dramatize its inner "spirit." The outward actions of
humans are in the main trivial, because they constitute in the end only a
partial and ephemeral account of whole verity. Ancient literature aimed at something
infinitely higher and more universal. It strove to depict in the myths and
dramas the eternal norms of life experience, which would stand as truth for all
men at any time in evolution. The myths were cryptographs of the great design
and pattern of human history, limning in the large the truth that is only in
fragmentary fashion brought to living enactment in any given set of historical
circumstances. The myth is always truer than history! Only in aeons will
history have caught up with the myth, when it will have unfolded the entire
design of the original mythograph. Hegel indeed essayed to read the features of
a grand cosmic design in the straggling line of actual events. But the myth
already foreshadows the ultimate meaning of history.
Such being the portentous function
of the myth in the early stages of the life of humanity, it becomes in some
degree apparent what blindness must have fallen upon the mental eye of
practically a whole world to have blotted out in little more than a single
century the knowledge of a thing of such vast utility. No matter how
conclusively the data may prove the fact, it will probably remain forever
incomprehensible to unstudied folk that whole bodies of ancient mythology and
spiritual typology, suddenly became metamorphosed into alleged history. And
because it ensued through sheer gaucherie and clumsy loutish dumbness, it will,
as predicted, rise on our horizon as the supreme folly of the ages. When it is
realized that an early gift of divine wisdom, planned to aid the race fight through
the exigencies of its historical evolution, totally miscarried into tragic
nonsense through the simple mistake of taking spiritual allegory for literal
history, a
26
humiliated world will find
difficulty in ridding its memory of this preposterous blunder.
Deprived thus of a legacy of
transcendent knowledge vouchsafed for its instruction, Western humanity has
wound a tortuous path through dangerous terrain that the lost wisdom would have
enabled it to avoid. It has been a journey made without the guiding light that
had been given to render the road more easily passable. Civilization has
floundered in the shoals and quicksands of ignorance. And its contemporary
phase presents the strangest of spectacles,--that of a modern culture boasting
its superiority over any antecedent one, yet admittedly guided in its ethical
life by a Book of which it is now possible to affirm that not the most
rudimentary sense of its message has ever been apprehended. The declaration can
be made and supported that the Bible is still a sealed book. This study will
vindicate that declaration by setting forth the hidden meaning of ancient
scripture for the first time. Gross misinterpretation cannot be seen as such
until its product has been set down alongside a true rendering. The crudeness
and baseness of a literal and historical translation of the sense will only be
brought into glaring light by being held up against a background of the clarity
and dignity of a true spiritual meaning.
The promised interpretation is not
predicated upon the play of a genius superior to that of the accumulated
scholarship and acumen of centuries of religious students and theologians in
Christendom. It was made possible purely by the discovery of clues and
"keys" to the old scriptures hidden deeply in the tomes of ancient
literature, which had escaped the notice of the long line of exegetical
inquirers. If wonder and skepticism arise over the difficulty of understanding
why discovery was made at this epoch and not in so long a time before, the
answer is most probably to be found in the fact that the thousands who failed
approached the study of ancient treasure-tomes with an attitude of mind that
made defeat inevitable, while success came finally through an attitude that, if
it did not of itself guarantee victory, at least opened the door to it. This is
of immense significance and carries a weighty moral connotation with it. With
the scales fallen at last from the eyes of purblind prejudice, it can be
patently enough seen that there was little chance of discovery of the cryptic
burden of ancient books as long as scholars undertook their study with the
ingrained and obstinate assurance that they were the products of primitive
infantilism. Ever thus
27
have the archaic volumes been
approached by Orientalists and Western savants. It is next to unbelievable to
discover in what a rigid posture of predetermined estimate the scrutiny of
antique writings has been undertaken by Western Christian scholars. Even when
the evidence of sage wisdom was present under the eye, the relentless force of
the fixation could never rest content until it had read the imputation of
simpleness and crudity into the text. If early literature did not manifestly
read as folly, it had to be made to do so. The inviolable presupposition in the
case was that by no possibility could it be admitted that the ancients knew a
modicum of what we know today. If it was to be granted that the seers of yore
knew life truly and profoundly, it would be gall to modern intellectual pride,
and the very walls of boasted modern superiority would be breached. The content
of old scripts, mysterious and haunting as it often appeared, had to be
explained on the basis of primitive naïveté of mind. By no right were the
supposed aborigines of remote times entitled to the presumption of high
knowledge or a scientific envisagement of the world. No thesis found in modern
view could account for the prevalence of developed culture in the early stages
of the chart of progressive evolution as at present conceived. The assignment
of puerile nescience to the civilizations of even three and four thousand years
ago had to be vindicated at all costs. The rating of primitives for early men
had to be maintained.
Little wonder, then, that a
literature scanned with such a blighting spirit never yielded its buried light.
Supercilious contempt blinded the eyes of inquiry and closed the mind to all
discovery. Obdurately refusing to admit the possibility of the presence of
knowledge, no amount of search would reveal it. All the surer was inquiry
doomed to failure in this field, when the most exalted genius the world ever
knew had been at pains to disguise the outward appearance of that knowledge. It
was only when at last the arcane writings were inspected with the eager spirit
of genuine seeking and the reverent assurance of their holding precious mines
of instruction, that the open sesame unlocked a hoard of hidden wealth.
If it shatters current orthodoxy in
science or philosophy to establish the fact that archaic man possessed supernal
sapiency, then shattering there must be. The thing cannot be obviated. It is a
fact that out of the night of antiquity looms the giant light of transcendent
intelligence on the part of numerous sages. At a period remote enough to be
con-
28
temporary with the times
incorrigibly marked as "primitive" by historians, the ancients
possessed books of such exalted spiritual and intellectual content as to lie
yet beyond the comprehension of vaunted modern intelligence! Modern pride must face
the situation: "primitive" people already possessed books which by no
possibility could have been produced by "primitive" mentality. Books
which only sages could have written bespeak the presence of sages on the scene.
And sages there were. Popular
academic theory must perforce revise its postulates in the case. It has
stubbornly refused to admit the operation of a law of life in this situation
which it sees at work everywhere else in the realm of genetic procedure.
Universal observation yields the truth that infant life is everywhere parented.
The period of helpless infancy is safeguarded by parental oversight. The elder
generation is at hand to protect, nurture and instruct the young of every kind.
Modern theory admits the prevalence of this rule everywhere--except strangely
in the biological history of the human race as a unit. Granting the sway of the
principle in the case of the individual, animal or human, it has refused to
predicate its governance over the early life of humanity as an entity. But the
presence of sapient writings, the evidence of great lost arts, and the remains
of structures surpassing present achievement, attest incontrovertibly the
uniform working of the law of parenthood here as elsewhere. The human race was
parented. It was not left to struggle through its helpless infancy without
guardianship. Ancient legend in the mass bears this out. Prehistoric lore teems
with the stories of heroes and men of divine stature, demi-gods and sons of God
who mingled with humanity, and who left codes of laws and manuals of
civilization that manifest a mastery not possible of acquirement by primitives.
Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Zoroaster, Hammurabi, Manu, Buddha, Laotse, Moses, and
even Plato and Pythagoras, hover in the dim light of remote legendary times as
figures transcending normal human stature, and leaving behind writings that
have been held up as the norm of perfect wisdom and conduct down the centuries.
The Laws of Manu have stood for ages as the prototype of all legal and social
codes since formulated. Hermes, Orpheus taught the nations agriculture,
writing, astronomy, language, religion, philosophy and science, the saga runs.
Hence there is posited for the first
time a natural and competent answer to the great and insistent question of the
authorship of
29
primeval books overpassing even
present capability. The authorship of the sages removes these books at once
from the category of merely human speculation and places them securely in the
place of authority and authenticity. They were the products, not of early man’s
groping tentatives to understand life, but of evolved men’s sagacious knowledge
and matured experience. On no other ground can their perennial durability and
universal power be accounted for. The early races obviously received and
treasured these documents with the same high reverence with which the human
child receives the codes and rules of conduct first handed down to it by its
parents, who stand to it in loco Dei. If the primal world-reverence is
found wanting in certain groups today, it is due not so much to the fact that
the books have proven of unsound merit, but to the failure to know what they
actually say. They are uninterpreted to this moment. They could not be scorned
if their intrinsic meaning was known. The republication of that lost meaning
will restore the bibles to universal veneration, but not as fetishes.
Incidentally all speculation of
scholars as to the date of the personal authorship of the Bible books or other
ancient documents of the kind must be declared to be pure and simple
impertinence. Nobody knows or can know what hand first set these verses to
paper, or at what epoch. The books are of unknown antiquity. They were extant
thousands of years B.C. When they passed from oral impartation to written form
none can say. Hundreds of volumes proclaim Moses to have been the writer of the
Pentateuch. Yet the last of the five books describes Moses’ death and
burial, and adds that not in a long cycle since his day (estimated by scholars
at six hundred years at least) hath there been found one like unto him in
wisdom and piety in all Israel! To ascribe any of the Bible books to any named
writer is to trespass on the ground of folly. Indeed it is possible to assert
that, in the common meaning of the term, they were never "written" at
all. No man sat down and composed them out of his thought or his knowledge.
They were the outlines of a great universal tradition formulated by the
accumulated wisdom of those first "parents" or "guardians"
of infant humanity, and, like the thousands of lines of the great Homeric
poems, which had been held purely in the memory of the Hellenes for five
hundred years, were finally committed by scribes to written form. Thus came
those set formulations of systematic knowledge, cosmic data and moral
30
codes, that have survived the test
of time and still stand as sacred commitments. Their material presents the
substantial truth of life, and not primitive man’s erratic guessings. And
sixteen hundred years of the most consecrated effort to study them has left their
meaning still unrevealed.
But the Western mind has begun to
delve into the fathomless spiritual philosophies of the ancient East. The
renaissance of Oriental thought, which was first quickened by Schopenhauer in
Europe and by Emerson in America, is now sweeping Occidental religious
consciousness to a new and lofty height of vision and uplift. The eminent
psychologist, C. G. Jung, declares this movement to be the most significant
taking place in the thought life of today. The philosophy that could give an expansive
illumination to a brain like Emerson’s is proving a fount of light and
incentive to millions more at present.
The mask of literary disguise is
being slowly lifted from the face of ancient scripture, and what has been
gratuitously assumed to be the product of primitive naïveté and ignorance is
now seen to be the many-colored cloak of recondite wisdom. Even so apparently
quixotic a construction as the body of Greek myths, which has gained for its
originators the imputed status of moronism, bewildering and baffling the world
for two millennia, is to be revealed as perhaps the most lucid presentment of
philosophical truth ever given to the world. The light so long buried under a
bushel of myths is beginning to shine through. Not only do they bear the impress
of a genius able to portray mighty truth in fable and fiction, but they
register an equal skill in artful concealment. Their employment of the craft of
disguise has carried them so far beyond us that we have been gulled into taking
the mask for the reality. The devisers of the myths were master dramatists and
poets. With such deft touches did they weave the pattern of cosmic, mundane,
spiritual and physical truth through their myriad narratives of gods and men,
mermaids, harpies, satyrs, centaurs, stags and boars, labyrinths, rivers, trees
and stars, that not the most outlandish detail of their fabrications can be
ignored without the loss of some signal link of meaning. Generations of
scholars, chained in the cave of orthodoxy with their backs to the light, have
perennially scoffed at the idea that the myths might be fanciful portrayals of
esoteric truth. And we have charged the most enlightened races in history, the
Greeks, Chaldeans and Egyptians, with possessing the mentality of immature
children.
31
We accused them of taking their
three-headed dogs, their fire-breathing dragons, their griffins, naiads,
Cyclops, Circes and Medusas for sure-enough actualities. We were sure we could
afford to laugh at the simpleness of a people who ascribed the summer’s drought
to Phaëthon’s losing control of the horses of Apollo’s sun-chariot. But modern
presumption must brace itself for a rude jolt, when it shortly transpires that
not one in a hundred of our population will be able to grasp the involved and
profound signification of the Phaëthon myth even when it has been clearly set
forth. Face to face with what we could not understand in ancient literature, we
assumed that the unintelligibility was due to ancient unintelligence in the
construction. That it might be due to our unintelligence in the
comprehension was unthinkable. We could only hold our ground of supposed
enlightenment by shifting our ignorance to the ancients. If the myths made no
sense to us, it was proof that there was no sense in them. But history is soon
to reverse judgment. The comics in the case will be found to be modern, not
ancient. Not they, but we, will be adjudged the simple-minded children lacking
insight. And we will see ourselves at last, clowns and buffoons, laughing and
grimacing in hideous mockery of a treasure the value of which we cannot grasp.
Perhaps there will be wanting to us
the powers of discernment needed to catch the grandeur of arcane systems of
philosophy under their covering of allegory. Habits of thought and postures of
mind hostile to the presuppositions of the archaic knowledge will not easily
adjust themselves to new views. The attempt at a full revelation of buried
meaning will come with a shock to current theological vanity, to the pride of
present knowledge and to the complacency of the mechanistic cast of modern
thought. But the release of the hidden significance of the world scriptures at
this epoch may be destined to achieve our salvation from threatened social
catastrophe. For the ancient wisdom held the prescription for both individual
sanity and a righteous social order. Folly flourished only by grace of its
despoliation.
The release of the enlightenment
potentially held in the old books will challenge many traditional habitudes of
mind and most of the lingering relics of theological inculcation. It will
republish the postulates of ancient knowledge that have been lost or
discredited and establish them once more as the principia of understanding for
both the
32
phenomena of life and the deep lore
of the scriptures. Some of these, long without the pale of orthodox acceptance,
will strangely have been found corroborated by late scientific discovery. The
philosophical method was that of deduction, since it conceived life as
unfolding in the outer order the pattern of things innately involved in its
inner heart. The conclusion reached by evolutionists in present studies is that
"evolution is centrifugal, developing outward from within the geneplasm,
rather than centripetal, developing inward from without the geneplasm," in
the words of Henry Fairfield Osborn. Another late finding is that
"evolution is creational rather than variational. Variation of the species
is the result of an original creative pattern within the geneplasm which is
there from the very beginning." And a third pronouncement demolishes
completely the theories of materialism, affirming that "evolution is
prot-empirical rather than meta-empirical; the organs developing before there
is any actual need for them rather than after the need for them arises."
Nature already carries in her womb the embryo of that which will come to form.
Life works ahead to an end premeditated in the beginning, so that Aristotle’s
scheme of "entelechy" is a sound principle in philosophy. Plato told
us twenty-four hundred years ago that life is weaving on the field of
manifestation the design of the archetypal ideas in the Cosmic Mind. Modern
science and the clear interpretation of the arcane philosophy of the past will
together restore Plato to his seat on the throne of mind.
The debate on teleology has been
long and acrimonious. Negative conclusions have been fostered and apparently
affirmed by the shortness of our perspective. The immensely extended outline of
evolution envisioned by the cosmology of old will enable the mind to see the
working of design. Mr. Clarence Darrow asks skeptically if the Lisbon
earthquake was designed. As well might a colony of ants ask if the destruction
of their burrow as we spade our garden was designed. Neither to the citizens of
Lisbon nor to the ants in the garden would the philosophy of design be
comforting. But we know that the digging was designed, not to destroy the
ant-city, but to prepare the garden. So we may equally well know that the
processes of world building were designed, not to destroy Lisbon, but to adjust
the earth’s crust properly about it. The designed activities progressing in two
different worlds happened to clash, man being no more intelligent about the
plans of cosmic beings than the ant about human intentions. And as
33
man cannot change his larger designs
always for the convenience of ants in certain situations, or indeed may not
even be aware that his designs jeopardize their lives, so neither presumably
can higher beings alter their operations for the temporary advantage of little
man. Neither man nor nature has yet learned how to work on in evolution without
the element of some sacrifice of life. It does not impugn design in the course
and speed of an automobile that a child has been unfortunate enough to drift
into its path.
Centuries of world life have been
lived all awry because the philosophical insight into the structure of
archetypal design has been dulled and obscured. The outlines of the pattern of
evolution formulated in the beginning by Cosmic Mind were known of old, but
lost in the long interim. The world being the crystallized projection of a
divine thought-form and history the slow filling out of the lines of the
pattern, what man can know of the structure of the original ideation, or the
Great Plan, becomes of incontestable importance. This was the base and content
of the Ancient Philosophy. It must be restored to knowledge. Fortunately it has
never been lost beyond recovery, merely lost out of common thought. It was safe
even while unknown, being preserved in the amber of a subtle cryptography.
Ignorance came along and swept out of ken the esoteric purport; but at the same
time it perpetuated the myths and allegories, believing them to be history.
Deluded piety made a hash of the sense of the scriptures, yet all unwittingly
saved them for the advantage of a wiser age.
On the one hand materialism has
ignored the spiritual nature and motivation of the universe; on the other,
ecclesiastical zealotry, blinded by stupid literalism, has rendered religion
ridiculous. The truth must combat untruth on both these fronts, rebuffing a
philosophy that denies the ideal frame of things, and rebuking an eccentric
religionism that distorts early truth into revolting irrationality. To redeem
religion from ignominy it is necessary to stigmatize its historical caricature,
ecclesiasticism. War must be declared on its falsities to vindicate its truth.
Medieval and modern incrustations, excrescences and abnormalities of a hundred
types must be brushed away, if the brilliance of the splendid original creation
of supernal genius is to shine forth again. Plato’s theology and "divine
philosophy" must be vindicated.
34
Chapter II
ECCE
HOMO--ECCE DEUS
The modern zeal to exploit "the
practical" is about one part good philosophy and nine parts sheer fatuity.
The whole matter has been involved in the utmost fog and mental haze. The
groundlessness of current notions of what constitutes "the practical"
is readily disclosed by asking the question: What does modern man do with the
gains which his practical effort has brought to him--wealth, comfort, means,
freedom, competence? They bring him certain satisfactions, no doubt, and the
answer in part is there. But often the satisfactions turn to ashes in his
hands, or melt away as he reaches out to grasp them, or prove hollow soon or
late. Their inadequacy and shallowness attest their futility and give
"practical" philosophy the lie.
The entire question rests on the
determination of what constitutes ultimate values in life itself, and this is
only fixed by an adequate philosophy. To be sure, a basic ingredient in
philosophy is experience, and a philosophy is largely a digest of experience.
But philosophy is finally and inexorably the mind’s grasp of a set of formulas
of meanings which array the data of experience into a meaningful pattern, or
structural design, which design must eventually match the outline of the
archetypal noumenal thought form projected by Cosmic Mind for this area of
creation. Harmony with this immanent pattern is the insistent demand, as
well as the touchstone and seal of truth. The lower mind in man, being a
fragment of cosmic intellect, is by nature keen to recognize and register, by
an expansive pleasure, the concord of its ideas with the overshadowing form of
truth. Some knowledge of the features of this living mosaic is essential to the
final allocation of values, else there will be no criterion other than an
unauthoritative sensual hedonism to determine whether an experience or a
philosophy is good or detrimental. All actions and opinions rate a final
appraisal on the ground of a deposit they leave in consciousness, according as
35
they harmonize or disagree with the
cosmic thought structure that is working to manifestation in the process. They
accord, or not, with the elemental pattern of creation. Deep within is a sense
that registers in the outer mind the thrill of that accord or disagreement. The
acuteness of this barometer of values may be viciously blunted, so that its
registering sense is sadly vitiated. Yet in the end it speaks in the stern
language of pain and discord for violation of its principles, and positive
pleasure for virtuous action. And the final definition of "the
practical" is that which relates the life of man ever closer to the form
and substance of the primordial pattern laid down for human evolution.
Early theology presented the general
cast and outline of the great cosmic plan of creation, in the reflected light
of which mortal mind could frame the more or less definite graph of the
structure of this life on earth. The profound philosophy, then, that rested on
this stratum of basic knowledge brought the offices of the enlightened
intelligence to the aid of the outer and less reliable pragmatic criteria in
the ego’s effort to direct the evolution of the organism. Philosophical
understanding thus in large measure could be made to obviate the toilsome
methodology of trial and error, and both conserve available force and save
valuable time and much suffering. One of the deep principles of the Buddha’s
system was that "right knowledge" must come to save the individual
from pitiable suffering arising from ignorance. If, as he averred, it is a
fundamental truth that ignorance is the cause of sorrow, then knowledge is its
antidote. And all the great religions of antiquity make this assertion. Says
Hermes: "The vice of a soul is ignorance; the virtue of a soul is
knowledge." The Book of Proverbs in the Bible enjoins at length the
prime necessity of getting wisdom, understanding, knowledge. Its preciousness
is set above "all the things that thou canst desire." It is glorified
as an ornament of grace and a crown of life unto its possessor. In this
document it is not placed second to Love or Christly Charity. By an invincible
dialectic Plato and Socrates work out in dialogue after dialogue the
proposition that one cannot be good until one knows what the good thing
is, and even what it is good for. According to Rhys Davids in his Hibbert
Lectures of 1881 on The Origin and Growth of Religions: Buddhism (p.
208), "it is not by chance that the foundation of the higher life, the
gate to the heaven that is to be reached on earth, is placed, not in emotion,
not in feeling, but in knowledge, in the victory over delusions. The
36
moral progress of the individual
depends, according to Buddhism, upon his knowledge. Sin is folly. It is
delusion that leads to crime." An editorial in the New York Times of
June 20, 1938, well says that the hearts of such folks as the German
persecutors of Jewry "are bitter only when their minds are dark," and
cites Voltaire’s trenchant utterance that "men will continue to commit
atrocities as long as they continue to believe absurdities." In so far as
men act for reasons--instead of sheer brute impulse--the soundness or the
imperfection of their "philosophy" in the case determines the good or
evil quality of their deeds.
Knowledge has long been
apostrophized as a beacon light, a lamp unto the feet. It seems to be an
inexpugnable datum of history that fully enlightened sages of the past gave to
infant humanity mighty formulations of cosmic truth, evolutionary schematism,
wisdom of the last practical utility, and supernal knowledge of the worlds of
men and of angels. They placed this torch in the hands of the early races for
the advantage and behoof of all succeeding humanity. Precautions of the most
extraordinary nature were taken to safeguard the deposit. But, miserabile
dictu, the doltishness of historical groups at various times so far
imperiled the gift that in a long period, roughly from the third century of
Christianity until almost the present day, the open promulgation of the high
teaching invited the bitterest persecution from the entrenched forces of cruder
belief. Esoteric philosophy was forced to hide underground and make its way
through the centuries by subterranean channels and covert devices. Barbarism
threatened the utter extinction of previous light. Supervening ignorance
swooped down upon and buried earlier knowledge. But in one of the resurgent
waves of revival, the ancient light is breaking through the incrustation of
ignorance once again. Wisdom is having its rebirth.
Obscuration enveloped brighter
enlightenment because mankind seems unable to maintain its hold on the golden
mean between extreme views. It is constantly following the swing of the pendulum
from one movement to violent reaction in an opposite direction. Religious
history is in the main a record of oscillation between arrant supernaturalism
and soulless naturalism. The group mind bends far over to mystic or spiritistic
faith on one side, and then sways equally far over to a dead materialism. It is
either believing in angels, ghosts, spirits, saints, virgin births, elementals,
divine interventions, miracles, transfigura-
37
tions, salvations, vicarious
atonements; or it is rebounding from these to blank mechanism which rates all
such things as delusions. In his revulsion from eccentric mysticism man has
sought always the wrong antidote--a barren naturalism. In his revulsion from
the latter he has again always gone too far into uncritical mysticism. But
there is a middle position that meets the essential truth between both
attitudes. And the soul science of old set forth this median position. It
presented mystic elements without irrationality, and advanced such knowledge of
spiritual experience as to make the negation of such values impossible. Ancient
theology was the science that dealt with the more sublimated essences and
forces latent in the human endowment, exploiting them for the vast enrichment
of the conscious life. It was the science of spiritual growth without mystic
extravagance, the science of dynamically real elements in the psychic
constitution of man, the very existence of which mechanistic science has
disregarded. What the ancients called esoteric science is but the steady direct
penetration of human intelligence into the deeper heart of nature, to
manipulate creatively her hidden springs of power. It was based on a knowledge
of the laws ruling the higher octaves in the diapason of consciousness. It was
firmly grounded on premises which authenticated the existence of the soul as an
entity. The soul has ever been the scarecrow in the garden of positive science.
But modern science has itself re-established the ground for such a predication
in its recent findings with regard to the more sublimated constitution of
matter, making a way for the reification of bodies of sub-atomic or
ethero-spiritual composition, in which a unit of soul might find subsistence
when disengaged from a fully substantial body. Late physics has gone far toward
hypostasizing St. Paul’s asserted "spiritual body," and his other
statement that he knew a man "who was caught up into the third
heaven." In the rarer forms of matter now hypothecated by our adventuring
science will be found the rarefied physical implementation of whole octaves of
"spiritual" phenomena catalogued by ancient psychic discernment, but
looked at skeptically by positivism in our day. There is a spiritual evolution
proceeding pari passu with the physical, and implemented by it. Our late
science has only now come into view of nature’s sublimated matter of varying
gradations of density, enabling it for the first time to give body to the
beings of ancient hierarchies and to give veritude to the ancient affirmation
of "spiritual bodies." In proportion as the
38
redoubtable solidity of science’s
basic stuff melts down into mere swirls of force, to that extent can the angels
and demons of ancient systems stalk forth in something like veritable
substantiality.
A penetrating view of the interior
sublimation of matter opened to the eye of antiquity a fuller and more detailed
charting of the basic components of man’s constitution. Human nature was seen
as a compound of at least four segments or strata of being, possessing four
bodies of differentiated substance ranging from dense physical coarseness
through etheric and mental gradients to spiritual tenuity. In short man has a
physical, an emotional, a mental and a spiritual body, each finer one
interpenetrating successively its coarser substrate and being held in linkage
to it by vital affinities. Hence the deep lore of old dealt with a keen
analysis and formulation of the laws of interaction between the several
"men" in us and catalogued the extensive schedule of reactions in
consciousness in that amplified psychology to a degree that proves astonishing
to students of our time. The psychology of past days has names for a host of
sharply drawn segmentations of subjective activity that modern probing has
never systematically distinguished. Their "gods" were the living
energies of nature and of mind, realities of the cosmos, and by no means
fanciful and fictitious nonentities. They were the personified rays and
energies that our science is now discovering. The broad field of what is termed
mystical experience was mapped, with every section of its area charted in
relation to the economy of the whole. It was no realm of whimsical
idiosyncrasy, of sheer feeling. The revelation that the ancient East had
perfected the technique of an elaborate spirito-psychological science, surpassing
anything yet adduced by modern genius, is a marked denouement of current
history. The renaissance of this buried "science of the soul" is
giving birth again to the knowledge that man may pass from unconscious drifting
with the tide of evolution to a conscious self-directed mastery of his
progress. He may step from the status of a victim of evolution’s forces, such
as he is when without cognizance of its laws, into the ranks of those who work
intelligently with its plan. Hence he can advance more smoothly and swiftly
with the tide, as Shakespeare asserted, instead of being tossed about by cross
and counter currents whose play he does not understand. The vitalizing item of
ancient knowledge was the prime datum that man is himself, in his real being, a
spark of divine fire struck off like the flint flash from the Eternal
39
Rock of Being, and buried in the
flesh of body to support its existence with an unquenchable radiant energy. On
this indestructible fire the organism and its functions were "suspended,"
as the Orphic theology phrased it, and all their modes and activities were the
expression of this ultimate divine principle of spiritual intelligence,
energizing in matter. Philosophy so grounded was able to meet the exegetical
demands of the "mind-body problem" by its hypothecation of states of
rarefied matter mediating between immaterial spirit and gross body and linking
them commodiously in one organism. How the gross body holds connection with
sheer "anima"--how it holds on to its "ghost"--was readily
understood in the terms of their knowledge of intermediate structures which
bridge by several steps the wide gap between pure spirit and palpable matter.
At the summit, or in the interior
heart, of man’s nature was the divine and immortal Atma or spirit; on
the lower level there was the body, with its twofold equipment for sensation
and emotion. Bridging the gap between the two was the principle of conscious
mind called Manas. It could span the gap between "quickening
spirit" and inert matter; because it stood between them and possessed
affinities with both of them, which they lacked with each other. It could touch
soul above and flesh beneath and pass the lofty motivations of the one across
the gulf to the beneficiary below. Modern religious conception faces the absurd
situation of envisaging man as obviously physical and animal by virtue of his
body, and as obviously intellectual and spiritual through his soul, but with
the ancient hierarchical grades of intermediacy torn out of the gap between the
two. Early Christian revolt against esotericism threw down the ladder of
linkage between man below and his soul above, and now has no resources to
diagram the steps of his possible communion with his Emanuel. The gap left
vacant had perforce to be filled in by theology with the single figure of the
historical Jesus as mediator between man and his God. A historical personage
was called in to implement a function that was originally assigned to one of
the principles of man’s own constitution. This was one of those
consequences which the little blunder of mistaking myth for history entailed
for succeeding ages.
On the strength of the new data
furnished by modern science, present thought must orient its attitude toward
basic problems, since it must view life as the play of causal forces in
consciousness more sub-
40
limated and potent than any of the
energies so far discerned in matter. It will then be in position to take
counsel again with the primeval divine revelation. It will be able to predicate
again the human soul and the divine spirit in man. In the ultimate it has been
its failure to posit the independent Atmic entity in our life that has blocked
its every excursion toward a vital religious philosophy. It has made philosophy
the dead speculation it now is and religion both a chimerical and a fruitless
enterprise. When theology wisely guided the effort to relate the lower man to
the god within, it was the central pursuit in the life of the world and stood
at the apex of dignity and importance. But the loss of vital premises of
understanding blinded following ages to the value of spiritual culture, and
theology and philosophy now go abegging for recognition, bereft of their former
kingly renown. And now their continued abeyance threatens civilization itself.
No age calls so piteously for the certain knowledge of the science of the soul;
since to soul alone can be attached the anchor for all shifting human values. Without
the scientific grounding of an inner principle in man which is itself a portion
of Eternal Durability, and which will carry the values built up in life to
endless perpetuity, human philosophy must forever lack stability and prime
utility.
Such a carrier and preserver of
values was the Atmic spark, described by Heraclitus as "a portion of
cosmic Fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." It was on earth to
trace its line of progress through the ranges of the elements and the kingdoms,
harvesting its varied experiences at the end of each cycle. It was described by
Greek philosophy as "more ancient than the body," because it had run
the cycle of incarnations in many bodies, donning and doffing them as garments
of contact with lower worlds, so that it might treasure up the powers of all
life garnered in experience in every form of it. The mutual relation of soul to
body in each of its incarnate periods is the nub of the ancient philosophy, and
the core of all Biblical meaning. As the Egyptian Book of the Dead most
majestically phrases it, the soul, projecting itself into one physical
embodiment after another, "steppeth onward through eternity." No more
solid foundation for salutary philosophy can be laid than this rock of
knowledge, and civilization will flounder in perilous misadventure until this
datum of intellectual certitude is restored to common thought.
The practical service of philosophy
is the proper direction of effort.
41
Its function is to furnish guiding
intellectual light. Religion is the consecration of purpose to attain the goal
indicated as blessed. But knowledge is the only guarantee of right effort. Misunderstanding
leads the feet into morasses and quicksands. An errant philosophy is the
poison of human endeavor at its source. Modern psychology loudly asserts
that failure of the mind to know the answers to life’s riddles breaks down its
integrity and racks even the body. Philosophy, reduced now to tedious and
jejune speculation, is that very bread of life for which we starve. It was once
a body of positive truth. To it the mind could anchor. Only intelligence can
save motivation from rank exuberance of eccentricity. Despoiled of the early
truth, later ages have been in the position of a person trying to think without
true premises. It is the function of science and philosophy to furnish the mind
true premises. As Gerald Massey says, thinking is in essence a process of
"thinging," since thoughts must rest on the nature of things. And
things are themselves God’s thoughts in material form.
The one grand premise for
constructive thinking is that man is a god functioning in the body of a human
animal, and that this situation is typical of all other existent life, and a
key to the comprehension of all. Religion is that field of effort in which man
strives to relate a divine element, transcending immeasurably his own natural
powers, to a lower self in which it is tenanted. In this comparative sense, its
true function is and always will be to deal with those three elements which it
has so shockingly abused and misapplied, the supernatural, the miraculous and
the magical. In any absolute sense, to be sure, these terms are misnomers and
can become misleading. But relative to the viewpoint of the merely natural man,
the work of the god in his nature is transcendent and is indeed fittingly
termed supernatural. For it is the province of religion to transfigure the
natural life of man with the irradiance of cosmic romance, magical potency and
unearthly splendor. It is designed to refashion the natural man into the
likeness of a glorious spiritual being, the cosmical man of the heavens. To
lower orders of life the capabilities of beings of a superior kingdom of life
are justifiably designated as supernatural. Our brain power is supernatural to
the dog.
Even now Socrates’
"daimon" (daemon), that hovering presence which guided and warned him
constantly throughout his life, is being entified as the
"unconscious" mentor of present psychology. The res-
42
toration to Western thought of the
divine monitorial guardianship of the individual will instigate the mightiest
reformation in the history of Occidental religion. It will enforce a drastic
alteration in theological dogma. For it will demand a discarding of the
conventional form of the God idea and a return to that of learned antiquity.
It flouts current belief most
flagrantly to assert that the Christian movement represented a descent from
high pagan levels of knowledge and spiritual insight. Not a churchman but
harbors the smug assurance that Christianity arose like a stately phoenix out
of the ashes of a decadent paganism, to save a benighted world from sinking
into a morass of degradation horrendous to contemplate. But current notions,
however sanctified by pious belief, must yield before the influx of positive
facts and the light of a proper interpretation of revered scriptures. This only
means, however, that Christianity must cast off a heavy incrustation of
exoteric literalism and reassert its own primal majestic message. No student
conversant with the history of early Christianity will for a moment maintain
that medieval or modern presentations of theology are identical with those held
at the start. One of the most influential and admittedly the most learned of
the Church Fathers, whose scholarship had been powerfully instrumental in
formulating the early creedology, was excommunicated as a heretic within three
hundred years after his death by a Church that had so quickly lost the light of
its original inspiration.
"Origen, the pupil of St.
Clement of Alexandria, and the best informed and most learned of the Church
Fathers, who held the doctrine of rebirth and karma to be Christian, and
against whom, 299 years after he was dead, excommunication was decreed by the
exoteric Church on account of his beliefs, has said: ‘But that there should be
certain doctrines not made known to the multitude, which are revealed after the
exoteric ones have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone, but
also of philosophical systems in which certain truths are exoteric and others
esoteric.’"1
Both Origen’s statement and his
posthumous discrediting at the hands of the Church Council make it clear that
Christianity had been radically transmogrified within a few hundred years after
its inception. And every individual or sect in the centuries following the
third that endeavored to revive the pristine purity of the original
formulations was acrimoniously hounded and persecuted. Paulinism itself, which
43
represents perhaps the clearest
stream of high spiritual teaching, was hard put to escape being torn out of the
context of scripture or defeated in ecclesiastical controversy.
The issue must be faced and
determined now if religion is to live and exalt the race. The crux of the
entire problem is the conception of deity in a form perennially available for
man in the heart of his own nature. This conception is the core of all
religious theory, and loss of it has been the cause of doubt, confusion and
despair. Light and truth long lost are once more at hand to illumine minds now
groping in darkness. False notions of deity have nearly cost mankind the loss of
its birthright of knowledge.
The boast of Christianity and
Judaism is that they alone have presented to mankind its purest concept of
deity in the form of the One God--Monotheism. The claim is by no means true as
fact. They may more correctly be said to have been the first to present the One
God without the ancient train of the subordinate gods. They boast of having
abolished the magnified evils of polytheism. But to the ancient sages the task
of handling the Supreme God without his pantheon of lesser divinities was much
the same as trying to deal physiologically with a man without consideration of
his arms, feet, head and several organs. The gods of primeval religion were the
active manifest powers, faculties, organs of God himself. Nature was his body, elemental
forces the agents of his operative economy, universal mind his thinking faculty
and ultimate beneficence his spiritual heart. The ancient systems of wisdom
thought it not blasphemy to delineate the organic structure of deity to explain
to human grasp the cause and nature of the world. Reverence was not withheld
from even the lowest instrumentalization of Godhood. And God organically
apprehended was to be better adored than God as an abstract "nonity."
But some strange quirk of
philosophical revulsion against the function and nature of matter militated
later to cause theologians to deem it a blasphemy to give God a body, parts and
divisions. The mind could only be saved from defiling his purity by keeping him
an empty abstraction. Unknowable and Absolute, he was to be kept ineffable. He
was not to be dragged into the purlieus of mortal description, degraded into
the semblance of a creation of man’s low thought.
But the astute Greeks kept the one
without foregoing the other. They reverenced the One as beyond the reach of
thought, yet portrayed
44
his emanations in the field of
manifestation. And they ranked themselves as his sons. They deemed it not
dishonoring to deity to recognize his being in all things. They saw him in
nature, and not as abstracted from nature. And they studied nature as the
living garment of God’s immanence.
Therefore, though the monotheistic
concept has a place in man’s thought problem, it is nevertheless to be
appraised in its final utility to religion as practically valueless. The human
mind cannot think without the concept of First Cause, and God must stand in the
thought problem to fill this need. It has this dialectic utility. But it must
ever remain a contentless abstraction. As such it turns out that the chalice of
divinity that the Church proffered to benighted nations as the supreme boon of
religion, was well-nigh an empty cup. And engrossing the mass mind with a
philosophical concept that is unassimilable and must forever remain
meaningless, ecclesiasticism perpetrated the far worse crime of condemning to
desuetude that more realistic conception of resident deity which alone is
fraught with pregnant power to apotheosize human life. Holding out a supreme
Ineffability to its followers, it withheld from them at the same time the
knowledge of that deity that is lodged immediately within their own selfhood.
Giving them a God who is utterly inaccessible, it blocked their approach to the
god who was "closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet."
This is of surpassing importance. It
is revolutionary. It is devastating to prevalent orthodoxies. It shocks
traditional piety to hear that the concept of the One Supreme can never be of
great practical utility to man. But apart from its offices in generating in us
perpetual wonder and awe, our dealing with it ends when we have placed it in
the thought problem where the mind demands the postulate of First Cause. Beyond
that it has little service to render us. Give it form, substance, content,
description, we cannot, without destroying its necessary being. Whatever good
will flow from our knowing that the Unknowable is back of all phenomena is
ours. We can hardly love or worship what we cannot know. The boundary of our
reach is wonder and speculation. Our attempts to worship it are the fluttering
of a moth about the light we dare not look at. Ancient religion was suspected
of having left the monotheistic God out of its picture. It did not leave it
out, but it had the discretion to leave it alone! The sage theologists
reverenced it by a becoming silence! Communion has never been established be-
45
tween man and an Absolute God in the
cosmic heavens. But the pagan world provided a contact with a god dwelling
immediately within the human breast. No reaching after the moon of the Absolute
diverted conscious purpose from actual touch with the god who stood at one’s
elbow. The seers of old held it a sacrilege for mortals to worship any power
outside themselves. And this implied no spirit of vaunting humanism or affront
to deity. It was just the recognition of deity at the point where it was
accessible. The real heresy and apostasy, the gross heathenism, is to miss
deity where it is to be had in the blind effort to seek it where it is not
available.
Deity for man is at home, not afield
in distant skies. The kingdom of heaven and the hope of glory are within. They
lurk within the unfathomed depths of consciousness. Divinity lies buried under
the heavier motions of the sensual nature and the incessant scurrying of the
superficial mind. It is the still small voice, drowned out mostly by the
raucous clamor of fleshly, material and mental interests. It is a pure, mild
Presence, awaiting the day when the outer man will give more heed to its quiet
speech. The Supreme God is not available; but within the quietude of his own
being every man may find a fragment of that same God, made personal in his own
individuality. This is the burden of the lost wisdom of antiquity. Other than
potentially, God in his wholeness is not present with man; but he has not left
man without that measure of his grace that man can utilize. He has projected
into our nature a portion, a ray, of his own life. He has apportioned amongst
all his creatures that measure of his ineffable power which each is capable of
receiving. Yet potentially he has lodged the whole of himself in every man, for
the nucleus of his divinity that he has implanted in every creature is a seed
of the whole of his being. In man the divine seed is the Christos, the
son of the Almighty Father. It is no negative statement, but the glorious
affirmation of all attainment, to assert that this germ of divinity within the
heart is all of God that man can possibly absorb in the present cycle. The
cosmic God is hardly an object of worship by humanity; but that segmented portion
of infinite Being that is tabernacled within the flesh of mortals--that is the
actual divinity assigned to receive the attention and homage of mankind, and
sacrificially to be eaten.
The indwelling god is himself being
brought to birth within the womb of humanity. Each individual is gestating a
divinity within the
46
deeps of his own nature.
Christianity has fervently exhorted us to look into the empyrean to find the
unapproachable God. All the while the infant deity slumbers unheeded within the
heart. Christianity has largely nullified the force of St. Paul’s almost
frantic cry to us: "Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is
within you?"
The seers of old distinguished
between the Unknowable God of the thought theorem and the actual Presence in
the human constitution by denominating the former "God" and the
latter "the god." Intermediate deities were called variously
"the Gods" and "the gods." The object of most constant
attention in philosophy was "the god," the personal daemon of the
individual. On the plane of all practical living value, it was useless to look
to higher evolutionary forms of deific expression unless and until that was
brought from infancy to maturity of function, since its qualities had to be
assimilated into human nature before anything higher could be received. It can
be stated as a matter beyond controversy that the vital concern of ancient
religion was with the god lodged within the human psyche. If man missed contact
with deity there, he missed it utterly.
Christianity euhemerized the pagan
conception of the germinal deity in us in the historical Jesus. But this has
left the rest of mortals unsanctified. The personalized Christ cuts the
commonalty of mankind off from its divinity. An "only-begotten son of
God," made to carry all the values and meanings in his human person, robs
mankind at large of its birthright. The mistranslation of the Greek "monogenes"
as "only-begotten" was an error fraught with the most terrific
consequences for Christendom. It properly means "born of the one parent
alone" (the Father, Spirit), in contradistinction to the idea of being
born of the union of Father and Mother, or spirit and matter. It was a
reference in ancient theogony to the descent of the Logos (the cosmic
counterpart of the Christos in man) from the spiritual side of God’s
nature alone, as distinct from its progenation from the union of spirit with
matter. The doctrine was primordial in the Egyptian conception of the god
Kheper or Khepera, symboled by the scarab, which, the Egyptians asserted,
produced its young through the male or father alone. If Jesus was the sole
epiphany of deity on earth, then the promises of our universal sonship are made
nugatory. We are assured again and again that we are all sons of God and sons
of the Highest. Christianity not only thrust upon the man Jesus the divinity
that was appor-
47
tioned amongst us all, but also, in
its confusion and ignorance, forced upon his mortal person the function, power
and office of the Cosmic Logos, which in the carefully graded system of the
hierarchies could not conceivably have been embodied in the constitution of a
mere man on earth. How could the mighty power that organized and ensouled
galaxies of solar systems be confined within the tiny limits of a physical
brain and nervous system? The great Christian Fathers, Clement of Alexandria
and Origen (and others) expressly repudiated the possibility of the Logos
taking flesh in one person of merely human stature. Such a limitation
blasphemed Deity.
What has not been recognized is that
the solitary exaltation of the man Jesus has inevitably demeaned humanity. His
lonely apotheosization has disinherited us. And the general revolt of the
intellectualism of this age against the resultant debasement of human nature to
the level of the worm of the dust through Augustinian and Calvinistic
impositions should stoutly attest the falsity of the orthodox characterization.
The mythical as opposed to the
historical interpretation of the Gospels has been presented with some clarity
by such men as Dupuis, Drews, Robertson, Smith, Renan, Strauss, Massey,
Higgins, Mead and others. The historical view of Jesus’ life is stubbornly
maintained in spite of the evidence adduced by Comparative Religion and
Mythology, which points with steady directness to the fact that the events of
the Gospel narrative are matched with surprising fidelity by the antecedent careers
of such world saviors as Dionysus, Osiris, Sabazius, Tammuz, Adonis, Atys,
Orpheus, Mithras, Zoroaster, Krishna, Bala-Rama, Vyasa, Buddha, Hercules,
Sargon, Serapis, Horus, Marduk, Izdubar, Witoba, Apollonius of Tyana, Yehoshua
ben Pandira, and even Plato and Pythagoras. It is also held in the face of the
consideration that the body of the material used in the ceremonial dramas
performed by the hierophants in the early Mystery Religions for 1200 years B.C.
constitute by and large the series of events narrated as the personal biography
of the Galilean. It is worth impressing on all minds that the legend of the
historicity of the Gospels is only to be held by ignoring the solid weight of
such--and vastly more--significant testimony. Instead of permitting its
adherents to move in the freedom of a spiritual interpretation, the
ecclesiastical power is holding them rigidly to a doctrinal meaning that is
badly vitiated by literalism. In exalting Jesus in unique magnificence, it lets
the divinity in every man’s heart lie
48
fallow. The deity that needs
exaltation is that which is struggling within the breasts of the sons of earth.
Theological dogmatism fails utterly to see the ultimate Pyrrhic nature of its
victory. Jesus’ enthronement is the disinheritance of common man. Taught to
look outside ourselves for the source of power and grace, we ignore the real
presence within us that pleads for closer recognition. The historical Jesus
blocks the way to the spiritual Christ in the chamber of the heart.
All Christian history would have
been markedly different had not the historical Jesus been interpolated into the
spiritual drama. By this diversion the aims of a true spiritual culture were
sentimentally turned outward to the worship of an extraneous but romantic
impersonation. The consecrated devotion of hundreds of millions of souls in
Christendom for centuries, instead of being focused upon the effort to nurse to
life a Christly spirit within the collective body of Western humanity, has been
dissipated in almost total fruitlessness upon the figure of an historicized
myth. The present demoralized state of civilization in countries most
thoroughly saturated with Christian doctrinism confirms the sorry truth of this
statement. And the earlier Christian history lends further corroboration in its
record of bickering, heretical persecution, violent warfare and ghastly
crucifixions that sicken the heart. And all this was perpetrated in the name of
the personal Jesus! It could hardly have been done in the name of the spiritual
Christos.
If it be advanced in rebuttal that
the example of the historical Jesus has stood as a loadstone and beacon to
inspire and attract the hearts of millions of devotees, and that the
contemplation of his excellency will work a miracle of uplift in the believers’
nature, this but proves the efficacy of psychology and not a fact of history.
Ecclesiastical propaganda has more than once produced psychological hysteria,
as witness the Crusades and the Inquisition. And religious hysteria has ever
produced its marvels--stigmata, speaking in tongues and healings. Every
religious psychologization has run into phenomena and sums its lists of
"demonstrations." It is folly to question the psychological power of
an example such as the pictured Jesus. Humans are almost helpless in their
tendency to ape some paragon. It was precisely because mankind needed to be
inspired to idealism that the formulators of the dramas in the Mystery Rituals
introduced the Messiah, the Sun-God, the Christos as the central
character of the piece. But he was there as ensampler and by no means as
substitute or scape-goat. Much as man-
49
kind needs to be confronted by the
constant presence of a model of its own destined perfection, it needs far more
the invincible knowledge that divinity is its own inner possession.
To hold his place in mass reverence,
Jesus had to be made matchless, incomparable, unapproachable. No man dared
stand beside him. But overpowering splendour only twits and chides mediocrity.
It reminds us of our littleness. It leaves us gazing blankly, hopelessly. The
higher the elevation of Jesus, the vaster the gulf fixed between the ideal and
the adorer. It clips the wings of aspiration. The setting up of a figure of
perfection outside is in part psychologically hazardous. To approach him, to
match his purity, is to reduce his stature. He must be kept beyond compare, the
ever-receding ideal.
Ancient psychology of religion
worked on a different principle. The motive to zeal was an ever-present
possibility of attainment. Numbers of the sages were men who had gained the
sunlit summit. They thought it not robbery to be equal with the god, for he was
sent to call them into the mount of fellowship.
To sense poignantly the degradation
to which literal caricature of spiritual knowledge has reduced theology, one needs
but to point to the picture of millions of votaries gazing into the physical
heavens to find God, where Laplace said that no telescope had ever located him,
and searching the map of Judea to localize the Christos, whose dwelling
can be only in the heart and conscience. And the Prince of Peace still awaits
to be crowned the King of Glory.
50
CHAPTER III
TRUTH
CRUSHED TO EARTH
The resolution of the "birth of
Christ" into the delivery of a babe in a localized Bethlehem has kept the
race from realizing the true meaning of the Messianic fulfillment. With the
third century conversion of the features of the age-old spiritual drama into
the alleged biography of a man-savior, the outlines of the great truth that a
ray of the solar Logos was incorporated distributively in animal humanity faded
out and were obliterated. All sound sense of the inner signification of the
Christmas nativity tableau was irrevocably lost. The annual celebration of the
advent of deity to earth remains a meaningless travesty to this day.
It becomes necessary, then, to
outline the historical trends that led to the obscuration of this central
feature of religious cultism. This is in no sense a diversion, but the most
direct approach to the correct envisagement of ancient material. It will reveal
items of the utmost strategic importance for a true evaluation of archaic
structures. The restoration of the lost meaning will be given greater credence
if the causes of its decadence are set forth.
The knowledge that a fragment of the
spiritual heart of the sun was implanted in the body of each son of man to be
his soul and his god was the golden secret imparted by the hierophants in the
Mystery Schools to their qualified pupils. It was regarded as such a priceless
treasure that these Secret Brotherhoods were organized specifically to guard
its esoteric inviolability. From age to age it passed down the stream of oral
transmission, now waning in one quarter, but spreading in another, and was
revived periodically by messengers who came as the agents of a hierarchy of
perfected men. From remote antiquity it was present in China, Tibet, India,
Chaldea, Egypt. It was carried by the priests of the Orphic Mysteries over to
the Hellenic world.1 It was disseminated in the Greek areas in the philosophies
of Pythagoras, Plato, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras;2 was embodied in the
51
poetry of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; in
the dramas of Euripides and Aeschylus. From Egypt and Chaldea it emerged in the
religion of the Hebrews, who wrought its myths, allegories and symbols
obscurely into their Old Testament, but had more authentically kept the deposit
in their ancient Kabalah. It was taken up by pre-Christian and early Christian
Gnostics, being contained with sufficient clarity in the great Gnostic work, Pistis
Sophia, a work conjecturally of Basilides or Valentinus. Its
Orphic-Platonic rescension was widely republished by the Neo-Platonist school
in the second, third and fourth centuries, with ample elucidation, a measure
adopted in all likelihood by the spiritual hierarchy to check the growing trend
of the nascent Christian movement toward the complete exoterization of its
esoteric message. It was reintegrated eclectically around Alexandria by such
syncretists as Maximius of Tyre, Ammonias Saccas and Philo Judaeus, powerfully
influencing the character of primitive Christianity. It was carried most
directly into Christian documentation by St. Paul, whom many scholars claim on
evidence to have been himself an Initiate in the Greek Mysteries (as were
Clement and Origen in the Egyptian), and also by St. John, whose Bible writings
are decidedly more Platonic than distinctively Christian. The visible thread of
its transmission runs on to Plutarch, after whom it became more subterranean,
being propagated by Hermeticists, Therapeutae, Rosicrucians, Platonists,
Mystics, Illuminati, Alchemists, Brothers of various designations and secret
fraternities in Europe, out of sight of the jealous eye of the all-powerful
Church. At the period of its lowest ebb in Europe it was tided over the danger
of total extinction by Arabian and Moorish scholars and Jewish students in
Spain. The teaching was preserved and handed on by such associations in
Medieval Europe as the Cathedral Builders, the Platonic Academy of Florence,
the Alchemists, the "Fire Philosophers," the Troubadours and
Minnesingers, by secret printers, among them Aldus Minutius of Venice, who
reprinted the classic Greek literature that ushered in the Italian Renaissance.
Sporadically, now in one region, now in another, it took form in outward
movements in groups of mystic and pietistic tendency of many names. It was the
secret spring of motive and meaning in most medieval literature, in the
folk-lore, the hero legends, the fairy myths, the Arthurian cycle, the
Mabinogian tales, the Peredur stories, the Niebelungenlied, the castle ballads,
the Romance of the Rose and many another invention of esoteric skill.
52
Features of it came to be embodied
in a thousand conventional forms of common "superstition." It was
pictorially outlined in the set of Tarot Cards of the Bohemians in the twelfth
century. Philosophers such as Paracelsus, Raymond Lully, Pletho, Cardano,
Philalethes, Robert Fludd (from whose work on Moses Milton is said to have
derived his theses on which Paradise Lost was built) and others presented
aspects of it in more or less surreptitious fashion. Jacob Boehme’s
"Theosophical Points" vitally influenced Newton’s thought in
important directions, as he confesses. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo
acknowledge their debt to the principles of the ancient science. Later came the
English Platonists More and Cudworth, and it is alleged that Francis Bacon and
the mysterious Count de St. Germain formulated the body of Masonic ritualism
upon the old principles.
Coming to the surface again in recent
years it is being revived by Rosicrucians, Theosophists, Kabalists,
Esotericists, Mystics, Spiritual and Psychic Scientists and Parapsychologists
in large numbers, and is perhaps the most vital movement in the thought life of
today.
The door to this rejuvenescence of
an influence so long buried was opened during the last century by the studies
in Comparative Religion and Comparative Mythology assiduously pursued by many
scholars. There was needed nothing but a mind free from bias to discern the
unity, amounting virtually to identity, underlying all the old systems, which
expressed so clearly the characteristic features of what appeared to have been
a universal primal world religion, with the solar myth as its corner-stone.
Every great historical religion is readily seen to have been, at its start, a
pure expression of the basic elements of this outline, and equally readily seen
to have badly vitiated the pristine purity of teaching in later decadence. A
gross transgressor in this respect is seen to be Christianity, which carried
original spiritual meaning further afield than perhaps any other. It is
desirable to trace the causes and progress of this corruption.
The blanket assertion that ancient
spiritual light was darkly obscured under Christian handling is a challenging
statement and must be given the room to vindicate itself. This work in its
entirety will amount to a substantiation of that claim. The point can be
carried only by an ample reproduction of the substance of the archaic world
religion, so that the clear outlines of the great pristine doctrines of
theology as they were apprehended in the arcane schools, may by contrast reveal
the darkness
53
and vacuity of present readings.
Only in the light of the radiant wisdom of the past will the glaring corruption
of current interpretation become discernible.
The stream of degradation of
originally pure teaching flowed in through the channels of literalism. The
simple but still nearly incredible truth of the matter is that elaborate charts
of spiritual ideography, devised with poetic genius and analogical skill, were
mistaken for literal objective fact. The ancient theologists had sought to
portray the essence of deep truth by means of fanciful constructions of many
kinds. The whole of early Egyptian and Greek religious literature was a
construction commonly termed mythology. What now looms as the consummate
catastrophic stupidity of the centuries was the traducing of it into alleged
history. This has been perpetrated in spite of the obvious impossibility of
explaining how a people that produced Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pericles,
Heraclitus, Homer, Pindar and Demosthenes could gull itself into taking poetic
fiction for objective occurrence on a grand scale. Our explanation of the
mythology of the Greeks commits us to accrediting such sages with the minds of
children. The myths were the lenses through which the gaze might be focused on
the realities of recondite truth. Only to the crudely ignorant were the
representations not diaphanous. But, oddly enough, blind misapprehension
carried the day, and the transparency of the myths was darkened into solid
opaqueness.
Christianity started out as a system
closely kindred with the cults environing it, and boasting of conformity with
them. The early Church Father, Justin Martyr in particular, is at pains to
protest that Christianity in no wise differs from pagan usages. But a strange
and curious thing then happened. There came to a head a virulent rebellion of
mediocrity and inferiority against the aristocracy of intellect and culture.
Christianity carried in large measure the impetuosity of this revolt. It became
the embodied expression of a vehement assault on the esotericism of the Mystery
Religions. It was evidently motivated by a popular resentment against the exclusiveness
and aristocracy of the cults. Only a restricted and tested minority was
eligible to admission into the Associations. The hidden teaching was withheld
from the populace, under the strictest of secret bans. A wave of hostility to
the privileged groups swept over the masses and culminated in an effort to
crash through the restrictions of esotericism and bring out the secret
54
doctrine for general behoof.
Distrust of the possession of any real truth beyond ordinary grasp and perhaps
the degeneracy of the Mysteries themselves to some extent, lent substance to
the popular enmity. A movement to spread abroad a plain man’s simple
enunciation of the truths gained heavy momentum. A definite trend away from
esotericism carried the impulse far over into literalism. The genius of culture
in mankind has constantly had to contend with this effort of dull mediocrity to
tear down its best structures of truth and beauty.3 The attempt to unmask the
myths for commonplace rendering was quite like the present-day demand upon
popular publicists for a reduction of their best wisdom to the level of moronic
bluntness. But the effort to simplify the esoteric purport was to lose it, to
wreck the spiritual edifice altogether. Truth can make no terms with
incapacity.
When, later, the headship of the
early Church passed out of the hands of the academicians of Athens and
Alexandria, of Antioch, Tarsus and Ephesus, and fell into those of the less
studied Romans, the trend to literalism had gained such volume that there swept
into the movement a spirit of fell vindictiveness against the dominant systems.
When the conception of the purely spiritual Christos could no longer
successfully be imparted to the turbulent masses, who were clamoring for a
political savior, it was found necessary, or expedient, to substitute the more
concrete idea of a personal Messiah, who would be so obviously factual and
realistic as to preclude the possibility of being misconceived by the most
doltish. The swell of this tide of force carried the Church Fathers to the
limit of recasting the entire Gospel in the terms of a human biography. So that
what had been originally in the Mysteries and the sacred scripts a combined
astrological and mythical dramatization of man’s total experience, was now
turned into the story of one character put forth as a "life." In
spite of almost insuperable obstacles and the outcropping of endless
absurdities and inanities of meaning in the transposition, the undertaking was
carried through. The outcome has been that the theology handed down to us by
the early reformation is the crudest, least rational and intellectually most
disconcerting rendition of the ancient revelation anywhere extant. Philo,
Origen, Clement and Josephus had expressly declared that scripture shielded
beneath the literal narrative a secret profundity of meaning, which was its
true message. Philo specified four distinct levels in which the sense of
scripture was to be apprehended, the purely literal,
55
or physical, the moral or emotional,
the allegorical or mental and the anagogical, or lofty spiritual. The later
Church discarded or disregarded the two or three more abstruse ones and held
only to the lowest and the basest.
The drive to convert the highly
concentrated "meat" of spiritual truth into "pap" or
"milk" for the babes in capacity probably gave to Christianity that
volcanic fervor that swept it forward among the lower ranks and shortly enabled
it to turn the tide against its chief rival, Mithraism. The masses will always,
as they did in Luther’s Reformation, seize upon a sweeping current of
ideological force and attempt to utilize it as a means of escape from their
lowly economic lot. The hopes of the rabble interwove the dream of political
liberation with the religious message, adding an extraneous factor to the
pressure to translate allegory into a tale of history. Then as now low culture
soon turned from the fervor to achieve the slow laborious task of mastering an
inner kingdom of spiritual character to eager expectation of a utopian regime
in world affairs. In the spiritual drama were many lines which could be so
misconstrued.4
Thus Christianity lost its Gnosis;
and all Christendom has since had to suffer the blighting of its best
spiritual effort. If by the tactic the Church may be said to have gained the
whole world, it lost its own soul in the process.
That Christianity after its
inception was a ferment confined largely to the poor and untutored classes is
indicated both by the Gospel story itself and by much data of history. Some
authentic testimony may be useful in impressing the little-known fact upon
general knowledge. The cultured Celsus, writing about 200 A.D., cannot refrain
from commenting on the social complexion of the Christians of his day. He
wrote:
"It is only the simpletons, the
ignoble, the senseless--slaves and womenfolk and children--whom they wish to
persuade . . . wool-dressers and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and
vulgar persons . . . whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent, or a fool, in a
word, whoever is god-forsaken (kakodaimon), him the kingdom of God will
receive."5
Edward Carpenter, an unbiased and
kindly student of early Christianity in relation to its contemporary faith,
says:
56
"The rude and menial masses,
who had hitherto been almost beneath the notice of Greek and Roman culture,
flocked in; and though this was doubtless, as time went on, a source of
weakness to the Church, and a cause of dissension and superstition, yet it was
the inevitable line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis."6
Many additional statements in the
same tenor could be quoted, but it is needless to enforce what is known and
indisputable.
But one hears the protestations of
Christians that the ministrations of their faith to the simple and the
downtrodden was its glory and demonstrated a sounder humanitarianism than the
Mystery Schools displayed. Let it have whatever praise goes with this part of
its program. It is to the credit of any system that it gives to the lowly the
food they need. The default of Christianity is that it gave to one class and
withheld from another. Even to that one class it gave the poorest of
bread--truth vitiated, devoid of nourishing sense, corrupted and corrupting--as
witness its own unconscionable history. It attempted to furnish to the
uncultured the easily digested provender they required, but swung with such
zeal into this labor that it denied the need of strong meat to more capable
digestions. Christianity’s culpability was not that it fed the outcast and the
sinner, but that it denied the Gnosis to the intelligent--or to any. Its
Roman revolt against the spiritual esotericism constituted its betrayal of the
innermost heart of all religion. It chose to feed the religious hunger of all
grades of people with food that was not even wholesome for the simple.
And it must answer for its vicious
resentment and unholy violence against the high-minded groups that again and
again in the whole course of its history essayed with sincerity to restore it
to the lost message of the Gnosis. Students of the situation in the
early Church will know the factual ground beneath the Emperor Julian’s caustic
observation that "there is no wild beast like an angry theologian."
And the murder of the learned Hypatia and the burning of the priceless books of
the Alexandrian library are sufficient attestation of the level of savage
ferocity to which the reaction against the lofty wisdom of the past had reduced
its uncultured opponents. Christianity now lives to witness a world of more
general intelligence, after repression by fiend-like persecution for fifteen
centuries, once more and this time with irrepressible purpose, turning with an
eagerness born of long denial to the
57
esotericism of revived Oriental
philosophies for the deeper nourishment of the human spirit.
Christianity can not shake off its
pagan parentage. It must be seen that in spite of the almost complete
dismantling of the esoteric interpretation, the system retained practically all
the outward vestments of the hidden truth. That Christianity presented to the
world a complete new system of high truth unknown before is of course now
understood to be an unfounded legend. That it failed to make any single advance
from ignorance to wisdom is not so obvious to its partisans or to the general
public, but seems nevertheless indisputable on the evidence. It sadly bedimmed
the old splendor of knowledge. For it threw away the golden grain and kept only
the husk. The legitimacy of such a dogmatic assertion can become evident only
in the light of the entire study here undertaken, since such a lengthy scrutiny
is required to demonstrate that in dogma after dogma, rite after rite, and
parable after parable, Christianity substituted a mean and valueless literal
sense for the original inspiring message. If this was the sacrifice it made on
behalf of the lowly masses, it wrote off the payment by a total suppression of
light for those in higher intellectual brackets. It sealed up the anagogical
meaning and hounded to the death the parties that strove for its dissemination.
Devising nothing new and retaining
the outward form and dress of pagan systems, Christianity has ever been hard
put to explain the undeniable similarity between antecedent religions and its
own faith and practice. Intelligent churchmen have seen the futility of denying
the fact and have readily admitted the pagan sources of Christianity. But in
the third century it was a matter of critical importance to maintain the novel
and superior character of the new religion. The device resorted to by numbers
of the Fathers bears indisputable testimony to the desperateness of their
plight. Church membership today will be loath to credit the reliability of the
evidence on this matter, so nearly does it exceed all belief. Confronted from
time to time with amazing evidences of identity between their own and pagan
material, there was no recourse save to that negation of all logic, that last
resort of bigotry and zealotry--the plea of diabolism! Christian pride should
blush at the disingenuousness of its founders in this matter. The evidence
bearing on the point is neither inconsiderable nor vague. In his
58
excellent work, Pagan and
Christian Creeds, Edward Carpenter comments at length on the subterfuge, as
follows:
"The similarity of these
ancient pagan legends and beliefs with Christian traditions was indeed so great
that it excited the attention and the undisguised wrath of the early Christian
Fathers. They felt no doubt about the similarity, but not knowing how to
explain it, fell back upon the innocent theory that the Devil--in order to
confound the Christians--had centuries before, caused the pagans to
adopt certain beliefs and practices! (Very crafty, we may say, of the Devil,
but very innocent of the Fathers to believe it!) Justin Martyr, for instance,
describes the institution of the Lord’s supper as narrated in the Gospels, and
then goes on to say: ‘Which the wicked devils have imitated in the
Mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For that bread and a
cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one
who is being initiated you either know or can learn.’ Tertullian also says (De
Praescriptione Hereticorum, C. 30; De Bapt., C. 3; De Corona, C.
15) that ‘the devil by the mysteries of his idols imitates even the main part
of the divine mysteries. . . . He baptizes his worshippers in water and makes
them believe that this purifies them from their crimes! . . . Mithra sets his
mark on the forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread; he
offers an image of the resurrection and presents at once the crown and the
sword; he limits his chief priests to a single marriage; he even has his
virgins and ascetics.’ Cortez, it will be remembered, complained that the Devil
had positively taught to the Mexicans the same things which God had taught to
Christendom."
To which may be added the
astonishing statement of a modern Catholic priest, quoted by Carpenter (p. 68):
"And the Tartary Father Grüber
thus testifies: ‘This only do I affirm, that the Devil so mimics the Catholic
Church there, that although no European or Christian has ever been there, still
in all essential things they agree so completely with the Roman Church as even
to celebrate the Host with bread and wine; with my own eyes I have seen
it!’"
There are many accusations against
"the devil" in the same strain from Christian apologists. Not only
were the theory and practice of the new cult identical in most respects with
those of previous systems, but its own central thesis--the divinity of the Savior--had
been anticipated by some hundreds of years in other cults.
59
"If we look close," says
Prof. Bousset,7 "the result emerges with great clearness, that the figure
of the Redeemer, as such, did not wait for Christianity to force its way into
the religion of Gnosis, but was already present there under various
forms."
Discussing the doctrine of a Savior,
Carpenter writes:8
"Probably the wide range of
this doctrine would have been far better and more generally known, had not the
Christian Church, all through, made the greatest of efforts and taken the
greatest of precautions to extinguish and snuff out all evidence of the pagan
claims on the subject. There is much to show that the early Church took this
line with regard to pre-Christian Saviors."9
Carpenter makes it clear that the
coming of a Savior-God was in no sense a belief distinctive of Christianity. He
explains that the Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the fifty-third chapter
of Isaiah infected Christian teaching to some degree with Judaic influence.
The Hebrew word Messiah, meaning "The Anointed One," occurs some
forty times in the Old Testament; and each time in the Septuagint, written
as early as the third century before our era, it is translated Christos,
which also means "Anointed." It is thus seen, says Carpenter,
that the word "the Christ" was in vogue in Alexandria as far back as
280 B.C. In the Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170, the
Christ is spoken of as already existing in heaven, about to come to earth, and
is called "The Son of Man." The Book of Revelation is full of
passages from Enoch, likewise the Epistles of Paul and the Gospels.
These statements are but a
suggestion of the full truth in this direction. The Christians were not content
to let the matter rest with the explanation that Satan had teased them with
some anticipatory resemblances. They resorted to the most violent measures to
blot out all links between their body of doctrine and former pagan material.
This is a black page in the history of Christianity and a measure of evil
policy not easily condoned. They destroyed as far as possible the entire body
of pagan record to obliterate, as Carpenter says, "the evidence of their
own dishonesty." Porphyry tells of their destruction of elaborate
treatises on Mithraism. And his own work on Christianity fell a prey likewise.
Their vandal work is of record. The whole matter may be tersely summed up in
the world of Sir Gilbert Murray: "The polemic
60
literature of Christianity is loud
and triumphant; the books of the pagans have been destroyed."
It is clear, if comment be not
superfluous, that Christianity has lost, not gained, by its masking the truth
about its origins. Rabid fanaticism and the destruction of literature are
always the resort of a bad cause, revealing a want of a good defense on open
ground. The frenzy of zeal to wipe out all the testimony that pointed to
derivation from pagan forms argues a weak confidence, if not a bad conscience.
It may be said, in partial
extenuation of the Fathers’ conduct in the second, third and fourth centuries,
that their discovery now and again of the startling similarities between their
religion and earlier paganism may have come with genuine astonishment. It is
commonly believed that the Greeks and Romans of the early Christian days stood
far closer to the great Egyptian and Chaldean cultures than we do today. Such
is far from the truth. The Egyptian papyri, monuments and tablets were a sealed
book to the Christian Fathers, and remained so until Champollion worked out the
key to the hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone in the early nineteenth
century. The connection between the Christian cult and its antecedents in
India, Chaldea and Egypt was not seen then as it can be today. We can in a
measure understand the indignant surprise of the propagators of the new faith
on finding that their alleged novel truth had been copied ahead of them by the
heathen!
The crux of present interest in the
matter is the consideration that the Christianity of our time is imperiling its
own standing and repute by perpetuating a mistake made at its inception.
Continuance in a folly so obvious in the face of modern scholarship will
henceforth be an open confession of disingenuousness. It will be at the risk of
the loss of the last vestige of respect yet accorded to it by studied
intellectuals. Its only salvation from neglect and scorn constantly augmenting
is a frank admission of its outgrowth from pagan antecedents, and a willingness
to reconstruct its interpretation in relation to them. It must manifest a disposition
to lift the stigma of "heathenism" from off the ancient faiths and
restore them to their high place of nobility and worth. For in elevating its
sources it will exalt itself. The outcome has been disastrous.
61
The Church might be well advantaged
by paying head to Carpenter’s candid conclusions on the subject. He says:
"I have said that out of this
World-Religion Christianity really sprang. It is evident that the time has
arrived when it must either acknowledge its source and frankly endeavor to
affiliate itself to the same, or failing that, must perish. . . . Christianity,
therefore, as I say, must either now come frankly forward and, acknowledging
its parentage from the great Order of the Past, seek to rehabilitate that, and
carry mankind one step forward in the path of evolution--or else it must
perish. There is no other alternative."10
It will be hard for an ingrained
devotionalism to turn back and embrace what it had been so long taught to
despise. But it must be done, or all pretense at regard for the truth be
abandoned. The grand body of ancient teaching should never have been brought
into contempt. Convicted of its error the Church must go the whole way in
making the correction. No course but that of candor and honesty will now
suffice, if indeed it is not too late even now to make amends and save a bad
situation. Further concealment and evasion will only prove the more surely
disastrous. For the sun of the moral zodiac has swung around into the sign of
Libra, where the good and evil of historical action are weighed in the balance,
and piled high on the adverse pan are the knavery and ignorance of early
policies, the violent treatment of earnest esotericists, the destruction of
priceless books and the cruel persecution of sincere sectaries. The way in
which ecclesiastical Christianity meets this issue will determine its fate. If
it confronts it with honest humility it may rise again in power. For there is
power in the ancient spiritual science to transfigure Christian nations
with the glow of righteousness. Readoption of the pagan wisdom will glorify a
movement now sunk in nearly hopeless ineptitude. The Dark Ages are not yet
past, and that treasure which slipped away through the fingers of early
Christianity has not yet been restored.
62
Chapter IV
WISDOM
HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
We have remained stodgily and
stupidly impervious to the infiltration of ancient truth because we have
remained blind to the method of its presentation and preservation. We have
lost the power to grasp the premises of true knowledge laid down by sage
ancestors because we have been too dull to see through the subtleties of a
methodology different from our own. These premises for thought will only be
regained as the devices resorted to in their statement are comprehended. The
very possibility of making the interpretation at all is intimately bound up
with the use of abstruse keys to bring to light meanings covered under an
adroit strategy of concealment. Modern mentality almost instinctively resents
the presumption that sages of old put truth under a mask of subtle disguise.
Modern canons of utility can admit no sense or sanity in a procedure of the
sort. Truth is for general broadcasting, if only that its discoverer or author
may get his financial reward for his contribution. But truth in ancient days
was not sold to the public. There were, in the first place, no printing presses
to manage its general and quick distribution. Secondly, it had to be
safeguarded from the undisciplined who would misuse it. And thirdly, it had to
be preserved. To this end it had to be embalmed in the amber of such myths,
legends, folk-tales, parables and structures of natural symmetry as would
become unforgettable mnemonics through the power of tradition. And finally it
had to be expressed in a language that would be universally comprehensible--a
language of living symbols. Therefore truth was dramatized and symbolized. The
figures in the drama were the elements of divine and human nature; and the
symbols were an alphabet of truth because they were phrases of truth itself in
the world of flesh and matter. They carried to the mind their message of
invisible truths because they were those invisible truths themselves appearing
in man’s cognizable world clothed in a garment
63
of concreteness. Words are
themselves but symbols. Objects of living nature are more definite speech to a
discerning mind than formal language. It is as if one could throw the ideas of
the mind on a screen. And Universal Mind did throw its archetypal ideas
onto the screen of matter, where mortal man may look at them in their
appearance that is not false, as philosophy has so mistakenly alleged, but
true.
Unable to decipher the archaic
language used, we have made hash of the true meaning of sacred love. The
grandest of structures for truth-telling have been made into the grossest of
fabrications. What the Bible has been declared to mean is inane nonsense; what
it does actually mean is splendid truth. And the gross perversion and loss of
its sense have come solely through our unfamiliarity with the special and
involved techniques employed in writing the sacred books. Our efforts to read
the texts in total ignorance of their art of literary indirection have run into
the territory of the ridiculous.
The ancient scribes were, first of
all, esotericists and wrote esoterically. All spiritual wisdom was held in
secret brotherhoods and rigorously safeguarded from common dissemination. There
existed a spiritual aristocracy quite difficult for us to conceive of, based on
considerations the force of which we have lost the insight to appreciate. There
were intellectual and spiritual castes, and the lower orders of mental capacity
were not regarded as fitted to receive information where the qualifications for
its social use were not fulfilled. Sheer pious faith could not alone gain one
admission into the Mystery Schools. Actual discipline of body and mind, and
certain inner unfoldments of faculty were held as requisite for the grasp of
deeper truth. Initiation was to some real extent a matter of the mastery of
theurgic powers dependent in the main upon purity of life. Esotericism arose
primarily from the necessity of safeguarding the use of dynamic knowledge.
Religion was far from being the jejune shell of social or mystical
sentimentalism that it has so largely come to be at this epoch. It aimed to
liberate the powerful forces hidden in the depths of man’s psyche. It bore an
immediate reference to individual evolution, in the processes of which nature’s
dynamic energies had to be controlled and intelligently directed. What we have
derided as "magic" in the religion of old was just the control of
subtle powers which we mostly permit to slumber in dormancy beneath the surface
of our superficial life. Religion touched man so deeply in olden times that it
awakened the
64
potencies of his godlike endowment,
an enterprise which concerns us rather little now. The imputation of sacredness
to the rites of religion flowed directly from recognition of the vital issues
at stake in the soul’s incarnation on earth. And the right to participate in
the higher mysteries, of which St. Paul speaks, belonged to those who had won
it from nature by the payment of the full price--a life schooled to harmony by
intelligent consecration of every personal force.
In spite of the enormous quantity of
evidence pointing to the existence of a great body of esoteric teaching in the
Mystery Brotherhoods, such a scholar as Renouf asks:1 "Was there really,
as is frequently asserted, an esoteric doctrine known to the scribes and
priests alone, as distinct from the popular belief?" And his answer is:
"No evidence has yet been provided in favor of this hypothesis." But
how can Renouf support so negative a statement in the face of the positive
testimony offered by Plato, Porphyry, Apuleius, Herodotus, Plotinus, Proclus,
Iamblichus, Euripides and Cicero? He is decisively contradicted also by many
modern writers, among them Angus, Kennedy and Halliday, who have undertaken
profound and searching studies of the Mysteries. Certainly a man like Cicero
can not be scorned when he testifies as follows:
"There is nothing better than
those Mysteries by which, from a rough and fierce life, we are polished to
gentleness and softened. And Initia, as they are called, we have thus
known as the beginnings of life in truth; not only have we received from
them the doctrine of living with happiness, but even of dying with a better
hope."2
And is such a statement as the
following from Plato without weight:
"But it was then lawful to
survey the most splendid beauty, when we obtained, together with that blessed
choir, this happy vision and contemplation. And we indeed enjoyed this blessed
spectacle in conjunction with Jupiter . . . at the same time being initiated in
those Mysteries which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all Mysteries. .
. . Likewise in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of
entire, simple, immovable and blessed visions in the pure light. . . ."3
To Renouf’s ill-founded assertion it
need only be rejoined that, to be sure, there is little or no evidence of
esotericism, for the good reason
65
that esotericism is the one thing in
the world that is bound by its nature to leave little evidence! Does the
scholar expect that the members of the Mysteries would have published their
secrets abroad? On the contrary, they were bound to secrecy by the severest of
all pledges.
Religious books have been written,
if written at all, in cryptic form, with truth heavily veiled under the garb of
cipher and symbol. Figures and glyphs had to be devised that would convey
meaning to the initiated, but conceal it from the uninstructed. To interpret
archaic literature one must learn to discern the intent of truth under the
disguise of designed duplicity in the telling.
And it is further absurd for a
Christian apologist to protest the fact of ancient esotericism, seeing that
Christianity itself perpetuated esoteric distinctions in its own practices for
two centuries. To this effect there is a mountain of evidence. Even the Christian
Creed was kept largely a secret down to the fifth century. It was to be
preserved in memory only. St. Augustine urged that no writing be done about the
Creed because God had said that he would write his laws in our hearts and
minds. According to J. R. Lumby, in his History of the Creeds (pp. 2, 3)
there is found no specimen of a Creed until the end of the second century, and
the oldest written Creed dates about the end of the third century.
The demands of an esoteric
methodology account for the ancient use of mythopoeia. Here we encounter
that feature of ancient procedure that has bred the prevalent wide confusion
with respect to past wisdom, and find the solution of our bewilderment and
ineptitude in face of ancient mythology. Our childish misconstruction that has
written the record of our dull incomprehension across the scroll of literature
for a millennium and a half, comes out in glaring silhouette as we fathom the
devices of this cryptic treatment. We have mistaken symbolic language for
direct speech. We have pitying condescension toward early races who
explained the discovery of "fire" by the Promethean legend. We laugh
at Hindus for saying that the earth is upheld by an elephant, which stands on a
tortoise. We pridefully ask them on what the tortoise stood. Their pertinent
answer might well be: "On modern stupidity." Not the ancients, but
we, are the puerile party in the case. We, not they, have "believed"
their myths. The apparent childishness of the myths is far overmatched by our
real childishness in supposing they were taken as factual. One can not read in
any mod-
66
ern academic work on ancient culture
in Greece, Egypt, Chaldea or India without having to witness the birth anguish
of the laboring idea that the myths reveal an inceptive stage of the slow
evolution from primitive infantilism to our smug all-knowing wisdom.
We cast in the face of this
presupposition the statement that the mythos was the designed instrument
of consummate poetic and dramatic art!
The stories were devised to convey
cosmical history, theogony, anthropogenesis, and finally individual experience
of humans in the psycho-physiological development of mortal life. The whole
cycle of the history of unfolding divinity in humanity was dramatized for stage
enactment in the annual round of Mystery festivals. And portions of this drama
have filtered down into the ritualism of practically every religion in the
world. The epic of the human soul in earthly embodiment was the theme of every
ancient poet and dramatist, and each strove to dress out the elements of the
struggle in a new allegorical garb, with a new hero, whether Achilles,
Hercules, Horus, Theseus, Aeneas, Orpheus, Jason, Dionysus, Buddha, Ulysses or
Jesus, enacting the central role of the divine genius conquering the animal
nature. In lieu of love, sex, detective, murder and gangster novels, the
writers of the bygone era could deal but with one theme, that of the pilgrimage
of the soul through the gamut of the elements. Each work was a Pilgrim’s
Progress. And novelty could be introduced only by the device of depicting the
soul’s experiences under a new allegorical situation, symbolizing afresh the
old, old story of the immortal spirit’s immersion in the sea of matter. In all,
combats with dragons, wrestling with serpents, harassments by brute creatures,
enchantments by Sirens, plottings of conspirators, imprisonment in dungeons and
struggling through to an ultimate return to the original home of felicity, find
their place. In one type of adventure after another the many features of the
history of the divine Ego in its progress from earth back to the skies were
allegorically portrayed. Every aspect of the experience had its appropriate
myth.
Indeed there is every presumption in
favor of the belief that the mythos was an infinitely more profound
instrument in the hands of its inventors than we yet can fathom. It is hardly
too much to affirm that it was the echo of the Logos itself carrying the form
of the emanational Voice out into the material realm. The mythos brought
the
67
unseen forms of abstract truth out
into physical representation for the grasp of thought. There is warrant for
believing that mutheomai, the Greek, meaning "to fable,"
"represent," "invent," is derivable from the Egyptian mutu,
"quick utterance." It would suggest a form of direct speech to
the intuitions. The myth made an outward picture of ideal forms. It dramatized
truth. It had the graphic impressiveness of a cinematograph. This view is
upheld by a writer who yet refutes at every turn the mythological basis of
religion:4 "It is the property of the mystic to proceed by way of images
to the summit of a pure idea and the intellectual vision of the
substance." That the myths were thus the vehicles for conveying the
realization of abstract truths which could not be presented so forcefully in
words alone seems indisputably clear. What is equally clear now is that, in the
hands of ignorance, an exoteric rendering has taken the place of the esoteric,
depriving the mind of its grasp on the essential truth intended in the
adumbration. The danger of such a confusion was seen by Philo, the learned Jew,
who when speaking of the Mosaic writings told his countrymen that "the
literal statement is a fabulous one, and it is in the mythical that we shall find
the true."5 Philo’s statement is not less apt for the present age.
Reluctant as is the modern scholar
of repute to assent to the ascription of vital hidden meaning to the ancient
legends, the truth in this regard is occasionally seen and admitted. It is
refreshing to read such a passage as the following from one of the accredited
authorities in the field of Egyptology. Speaking of the Mysteries of Osiris and
the dramatic representations enacted each year at Abydos, he says:
"Every act was symbolical in
character and represented some ancient belief or tradition. The paste, the
mixture of wheat and water, the egg, the naked goddess Shenti, i.e., Isis in
her chamber, the placing of the paste on her bed, the kneading of the paste
into moulds, etc., represented the great processes of Nature which are set in
motion when human beings are begotten and conceived, as well as the inscrutable
powers which preside over growth and development. . . . And there was not the
smallest action on the part of any member of the band who acted the ‘miracle
Play’ of Osiris, and not a sentence in the Liturgy which did not possess
importance and vital significance to the followers of Osiris."6
In the light of such true words from
one of the most eminent of Egyptologists it becomes next to incomprehensible
that modern schol-
68
ars have so wretchedly misconceived
the inner purport of these old Mystery rituals and that the same scholar has
himself most ridiculously misconstrued their meaning in many particulars. The
broad modern assumption has been that the mythos was in toto a
lot of mummery and that the rituals were a lot of hollow ceremonialism based on
superstition. That they shadowed the greatest of spiritual truths has not yet
entered the mind of any man highly received in the ranks of orthodox
scholarship. No one has yet been able to tell these savants that they have been
handling pearls, and not rubbish.
Yet they have been told, and by no
one more courageously and vehemently than Gerald Massey, a scholar of
surpassing ability whose sterling work has not yet won for him the place of
eminence which he deserves. The wrecking of the mythos by ignorant
literalism stirred Massey to bitter resentment against the perpetrators of the
crime. His own words will speak best for him, while they support our own
contentions:
"The aborigines did not mistake
the facts of nature as we have mistaken the primitive method of representing
them. It is we, not they, who are the most deluded victims of false belief.
Christian capacity for believing the impossible is unparalleled in any time
past amongst the race of men. Christian readers denounce the primitive
realities of the mythical representations as puerile indeed, and yet their own
realities alleged to be eternal, from the fall of Adam to the redemption by means
of a crucified Jew, are little or nothing more than the shadows of these
primitive simplicities of an earlier time. It will yet be seen that the
culmination of credulity, the meanest emasculation of mental manhood, the
densest obscuration of the inward light of nature, the completest imbecility of
shut-eye belief, the nearest approach to a total and eternal eclipse of common
sense, has been attained beyond all chance of competition by the victims of the
Christian creeds. The genesis of delusive superstition is late, not early. It
is not the direct work of nature herself. Nature was not the mother who began
her work of development by nursing her child in all sorts of illusions
concerning things in general. . . . Primitive man was not a metaphysician, but
a man of common sense. . . . The realities without and around him were too
pressing for the senses to allow him to play the fool with delusive idealities.
. . . Modern ignorance of the mythical mode of representation has led to
the ascribing of innumerable false beliefs not only to primitive men and
present-day savages, but also to the most learned and highly civilized people
of antiquity, the Egyptians."7
69
He asserts again that the Egyptians
"knew, more or less, that their own legends were mythical, whereas the
Christians were vouching for their Mythos being historical."
Concerning symbolism and mythical representation he emphasizes that "the
insanity lies in mistaking it for human history or Divine Revelation."
Mythology, he avers, is the repository of man’s most ancient science, and "when
truly interpreted once more, it is destined to be the death of those false
theologies to which it has unwittingly given birth." Holding that all
mythologizing originated in Egypt, he fights the conclusion of Renouf that "neither
Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt." The eminent
scholar could not have known of Herodotus’ statement that it was Melampus, the
son of Amytheon, who introduced into Greece the name of Dionysus (Bacchus) and
the ceremonial of his worship, having become acquainted with these and other
practices in Egypt. Herodotus concludes:
"For I can by no means allow
that it is by mere coincidence that the Bacchic ceremonies in Greece are so
nearly the same as the Egyptian."8
Elsewhere (II, 81) he repeats:
". . . the rites called Orphic
or Bacchic are in reality Egyptian and Pythagorean."
Massey claims that modern
misinterpretation of ancient typology has made a terrible tyranny in the mental
domain, much of our folklore and most of our popular beliefs being fossilized
symbolism. "Misinterpreted mythology has so profoundly infected religion,
poetry, art and criticism that it has created a cult of the unreal." He
asserts that "a great deal of what has been imposed upon us as God’s
direct, true and sole revelation to man is a mass of inverted myths."
Massey insists that theology is a
diseased state of primitive mythology, contradicting the renowned Max Müller,
who has stated the contrary--that mythology was a disease of theology.
Elsewhere he says that the Marchen are not reflections, but refractions,
of the ancient myths. The mythos passed over into the folk-tale, not the
folk-tale into the mythos. He contends that in truth the myths were the
earliest forms taken by primitive thought in formulating representations of
reality. Simple-minded early man saw life pictured by the living processes
under his observation. Our own opinion diverges considerably from
70
Massey’s at this point, since there
is massive evidence, of the general type adduced in this work, to show that the
myths were not the product of "primitive" simplicity, but on the
contrary were devised by the highest mythopoetic genius. They were the output
of a line of sages who knew the truth of what Paul has told us, that the
inner world of ideality is understood by those things which are made, in the
outer world of physis. They traced a marvelous series of parallels,
correspondences, analogies between things seen and things unseen, the better to
illustrate the latter. They knew that physical nature typed spiritual reality,
and used the outlines of the former to pictorialize the latter. They took the
tadpole or the serpent as the type of resurrected life, because they saw the
spiritual process exemplified in these creatures. They took the hawk as the
symbol of the risen soul because they saw the bird soar into the airy heights.
They found in the mole a fit symbol of the soul immersed in the dark underworld
of flesh, because the analogy was evident and under their eye. Nature supplied
the suggestive identity, and they used it to teach subjective truths. Primitive
man may well known the simple processes of nature from first-hand contact; but
he will not know that they bespeak a spiritual counterpart of themselves in the
interior life of man unless the sages so inform him. Massey’s view was not well
considered in this regard. Whole generations of civilized folks have gazed upon
the phenomena of nature and failed to be instructed spiritually by the
spectacle. One must ask Massey if primitive fancy could construct allegories so
profoundly elaborated that the united intelligence of the world for centuries
has been unable to fathom their hidden significance. Millions of intelligent
persons today have looked upon the sun and moon throughout the whole of their
lives and have never yet discerned in their movements and phases an iota of the
astonishing spiritual drama which the two heavenly bodies enact each month, a
drama disclosed to our own astonished comprehension only by the books of
ancient Egypt. Hundreds of celebrities in the field of Egyptology have mulled
over the same material and have not yet lifted as much as a corner of the veil
of Isis. Primitive simplicity could not have concocted what the age-long study
of an intelligent world could not fathom. Not aboriginal naïveté, but exalted
spiritual and intellectual acumen, formulated the myths. Reflection of the
realities of a higher world in the phenomena of a lower world could not be
detected when only the one world, the
71
lower, was known. You can not see
that nature reflects spiritual truth unless you know the form of spiritual
truth. And such knowledge would be an a priori requirement to making the
comparison at all! Did primitive man possess such profound knowledge of
subjective truth?
But whence, it will be asked, came
such exalted intelligence amongst the early undeveloped races? This question
has been answered by the earlier statement that graduates of this or other
cycles of growth had parented and tutored early mankind. A parent or guardian
gives to the immature child a set of high maxims into the practical wisdom of
which he is to grow in the course of his later development. Humanity was the
ward of the demi-gods in remote times. And none but an intelligence beyond
Shakespeare’s, beyond Plato’s, could have framed so marvelous a quiver of
myths, the interior purport of which cannot even now be grasped save by the
help of most recondite keys, themselves the distillation of a whole course of
philosophical education. We have not read into the myths, as Massey claims, an
unwarranted implication; we are only now, all too belatedly, drawing out of
them some portion of a meaning deep as life itself, which they were from the
first designed to embody. We do not have to superimpose extraneous meaning upon
them. We find them already pregnant with truth. They shine with the flashing
light of an inner connotation which they were intended to reflect. They were
themselves the shadow in objective form of the substance of truth, and Massey
must not object to our working from the shadow, as Plato suggested in the
"cave allegory," back to the substance. It is the only method
operable by men in the "cave."
The religious texts of old are at
least one thing that did not arise from "primitive" ignorance.
Says Budge, in speaking of the Egyptian Book of the Dead: "They
can’t be the literary product of savages or negroes."9 He adds elsewhere:
"The descriptions of the heaven
of the Egyptian depicted in the Pyramid Texts represent the conceptions
of countless generations of theologians."10
Yet he refers to these Egyptian
people as primitives. He reveals his mental obfuscation again in speaking of
the Egyptian judgment:
"The pictorial form of the
Judgment Scene cannot fail to strike us as belonging to a primitive period,
when the Egyptians believed that hearts were actually weighed in the Balance
before Osiris, while the words of the
72
texts . . . suggest a development of
ethics which we are accustomed to associate with the most civilized nations of
the world."11
Apart from the fact that almost
certainly no age of Egyptian history was so stupid as to believe that a living
Osiris ever observed the weighing of physical hearts in an actual Judgment
Scene--it being all a symbolical depiction--the passage discloses the confusion
of the scholastic mind at the contemporaneous presence of elevated spirituality
or ethics with alleged primitive culture. We see the same inadequacy of the
"primitive" theory to meet the facts again in the following quotation
from Budge:
"Mr. Dennett, after a long
study of the religions of many tribes in Western Africa, says that the Bavili
conception of God is so spiritual, or abstract, that he fears the reader will
think him mad to suppose that so evidently degenerate a race can have formed so
logical an idea of God."12
It seems never to have occurred to
either Budge or Mr. Dennett or others that some saner age might some time pass
upon our scholars the judgment of madness in thinking that the sublime
spiritual conceptions of the Book of the Dead, the Chaldean Oracles, the
Orphic Hymns, could have been the product of primitive peoples.
In discussing the (figurative)
partaking by the ancient votaries of the bodies of their gods in the
Eucharistic festival, which he mistakes for a literal eating (!), Budge traces
the practice to a savage custom of cutting out and eating the vital organs of
the bodies of captives in order to imbibe their courage, and says that "it
is hard to understand the retention of such a notion in a text filled with
sublime thoughts and ideas." Could not this distinguished scholar see that
the sole difficulty in the matter was caused by the foolish attempt to read
poetry and allegory as objective occurrence?
It is perhaps permissible to
interject here an instance of the incapacity of modern academicians to
interpret the ancient use of symbols. Says Budge again:
"The Egyptian Christian also
associated the frog with new birth and on a Christian lamp described by
Lauzone, is a figure of a frog surrounded by the legend ‘Ego eimi
Anastasis,’ ‘I am the Resurrection.’ It is not easy at first sight to
understand why the frog should have been a symbol of new life to the Egyptian
any more than the beetle. . . ."13
73
He finally arrives at the solution:
"The frog appears with the coming of the rain, just as the beetle appears
with the rising of the Nile, and so the ideas of new life and fertility became
associated with them." That so eminent a scholar as Budge should admit the
difficulty of understanding why the frog--which transforms from the
tadpole--and the beetle--which goes into the ground only to reissue after an
incubation of twenty-eight days as a new generation of himself--should have
been taken as apt symbols of the resurrection is a sufficiently striking demonstration
of the blindness with which modern presumption has approached the study of the
lore of antiquity. The frog, the beetle, the snake, the worm becoming the
chrysalis, were the obvious visible types of transfiguration and regeneration,
the outward mark of the spiritual idea. Massey states that the Christian
Fathers, with the exception perhaps of Clement of Alexandria, "had
scarcely enough knowledge of the ancient symbolism to put any perceptible
boundary to their ignorance."14 They did not know that their Gospels were
old Egyptian myths ignorantly literalized. Massey notes that Celsus "asked
concerning the Christian legends, made false to fact by the ignorant
literalization of the Gnosis,--‘What nurse would not be ashamed to tell such
fables to a child?’" One might paraphrase Celsus’ question today by
asking: "What age would not be ashamed to confess that it could not tell
the difference between myths and actual history?"
Every religion apparently has begun
at a high level and become corrupted until it stood in need of reformation and
purification. Religions decay through atrophy of spiritual vision. Their course
is marked by a blurring of the original light. Their fiery motivating spirit
ever tends to become static. Early passion for radical regeneration of the life
dwindles into a conservative tendency. The early dynamic symbols and slogans
after a time lose their pristine significance. Hence the traditions, legends
and rites found to be cherished by many semi-civilized tribes of our day are
doubtless the decadent remnants or mere husks of former grand representations
of spiritual truth. They do not represent the beginnings of crude
religious apprehension; they are the crumbling ruins of once noble structures
of wisdom and genius. Modern insight has entirely failed to sense this status
of the religious material in anthropological study, in consequence of which the
handling of religion as a sociological investigation has been
74
marked by the grossest
misconception, bewilderment and confusion. Academic opinion is that the myths
and folk-tales are the groping efforts of undeveloped mind to interpret nature.
But, on the contrary, they are the floating debris of splendid old formulations
that once brimmed with the golden wine of high meaning. They are the wrack of
mythology. "Whoever begins with the myths as a product of the ‘savage’
mind as savages are known today is fatally in error."15 Years of study
convinced Massey that all the Marchen were the flotsam of old Egyptian
wisdom-structures. He avers:
"We must go back to the
Proto-Aryan beginnings which are Egyptian and Kamite. In Africa we find those
things next to Nature where we can go no further back in search of origins.
Egypt alone goes back far enough to touch Nature in these beginnings, and . . .
Egypt alone has faithfully and intelligently kept the record."16
In Budge’s Osiris and the
Egyptian Resurrection (Vol. I, p. 365) the author writes of the people of
West Africa in relation to the assertion that they were primitive savages:
"This is a great mistake, for
they possess the remnants of a noble and sublime religion, the precepts
of which they have forgotten and the ceremonies of which they have
debased."
Here for once the scholar glimpsed
the truth of the anthropological situation as regards religious origins and
subsequent decadence, and had he followed the light which here shone in his
mind for the moment, he would have been spared the floundering in bogs and
swamps of misconception which makes his treatises so nearly worthless in the
end. In treating of that supposedly most debased of African religious customs,
fetishism, he writes:
"Wherever we find fetishism it
seems to be a corruption or modification of some former system of
worship rather than the result of a primitive faith."
"All this is only theory as far
as the Egyptians are concerned, but authorities on modern African religions
tell us that this is exactly what has taken place among the peoples of West
Africa. Thus Col. Ellis says that there is more fetishism among the negroes of
the West Indies, who have been Christianized for more than half a century, than
amongst those of West Africa; for side by side with the new religion have
lingered the old superstitions, whose true import has been forgotten or
corrupted."17
75
It served partisan ecclesiastical
purposes in early times to weave some history into the texture of the allegory
or to use certain bold historical events as the frame for the allegorical
depiction. And this mixture has made the determination difficult in places. It
is not an overstatement of truth to aver that the systems of mythology have
served little better purpose in the Christian era than to detail the entire
train of meaning. They have proved to be insoluble puzzles and enigmas. Our
inability to make sense of them has totally distorted our estimate of Greek,
Egyptian, Hindu and Chinese mentality, causing us to belittle their product
most egregiously. Evidences of our erroneous estimates of their work are
abundant. Lewis Spence quotes Budge (Egyptian Magic) as asserting that
the Egyptians believed the gods could assume at will the forms of animals, and
that this belief was the origin of the most sacred position accorded to animals
in Kamite religion.
"This was the fundamental idea
of so-called ‘Egyptian animal-worship’ which provoked the merriment of the
cultured Greeks and drew down upon the Egyptians the ridicule and abuse of the
early Christian writers."18
Budge is of record in a statement
that
"it is doubtful if the
Egyptian, at that time, had developed any spiritual conceptions, in our sense
of the word; for although his ideas were very definite as to the reality of a
future existence, I think that he had formulated few details about it, and that
he had no idea as to where or how it was to be enjoyed."
Such a quotation provokes the
comment that it might be heartily agreed that the Egyptians had no
"spiritual conceptions in our sense of the word," for their
understanding of eschatology far transcended ours in definiteness and lucidity,
being both scientific and consistent, while ours is hazy and conjectural. And
again, one could ask Budge just where in modern life the details as to the
future state have been so expressly "formulated" on an accepted
basis, and where one can gain explicit information nowadays as to "where
and how it is to be enjoyed." For the Spiritualists are the only ones who
have tried to set forth these matters with definiteness, and are we to
understand that Budge regards their theories as the accepted knowledge of our
brilliant era? Have not both science and the academic world scoffed at Spirit-
76
ualistic offerings? Budge goes on to
say that the student who views Egyptian religion "from the lofty
standpoint of Christianity only," will regard it as gross polytheism or
pantheism, expressed through rites that were cruel, bloodthirsty and savage,
embellished with legends of the gods that are childish, the outcome of debased
minds and imaginations, featuring a story of the resurrection of Osiris that is
a farrago of nonsense in which absurd magical ceremonies play an impossible
part, and a conception of heaven that bespeaks the imagination of a half-savage
people. Yet he has more than once expressed his surprise at the sublimity and
lofty purity of their presentments!
In his sorry effort at
interpretation of the Egyptian Myths and Legends Lewis Spence adds
clinching evidence of the utter incapacity of academic brains to discern in the
least degree what the sages of old were laboring to do, when he permits himself
to place the following shameful appraisal upon archaic intelligence:
"Again, to the Egyptian mind, incapable
of abstract thought, an immaterial and intangible deity was an impossible
conception. A god, and more so by reason of his godhead, must manifest and
function in an actual body. . . . As the Egyptian everywhere craved the
manifestation of and communion with his gods, it thus came about that
incarnations of deity and its many attributes were multiplied."19
The consummate obtuseness that could
prompt the ascription to the ancient Egyptian seers of the flat incapacity for
abstract thought may not be comprehended in its bald grossness until the reader
has finished the perusal of the present volume. We have not hitherto had the
presentation of the lucid meaning of Egypt’s religion to enable us to gauge the
amazing injustice, as well as the crass stupidity, of so rank a judgment
pronounced by ignorance against wisdom. In spiritual science we are
still the barbarians.
Further comment would call attention
to the sagacity of the Egyptians in refraining from doing the very thing of
which Spence accused them,--of actualizing their deities as persons. Not the
Egyptians but the Christians did this, in the person of Jesus. Personal gods
were precisely the kind they did not have. What they had was representations
of the gods, which is a whole kingdom’s length away from the other
conception. Their "gods" were in reality the actual energies of
nature, of matter and of mind in the universe, graded in a wonderful hier-
77
archy. These are intangible powers,
and what can puny man do other than represent them by one or another
type of image? The Egyptians had quite unaccountable knowledge of these
sublimer forces, with some of which, as the ethers and the rays, modern science
is now slowly becoming acquainted, and they poetically imaged them under deific
names, as Thoth, Anup, Kheper, Khnum, Osiris, Horus, Ptah, Set, Isis, Nephthys
and Ra. But gods in human flesh (except by personation) they expressly did not
have. Budge wastes pages over the discussion as to whether Osiris was a living
character; and decided that his tomb, with his actual bodily remains, was at
Abydos. The time has come to cry out against such incompetent muddling and to
bend ourselves with what capacity we have to unravel the golden threads of
supernal wisdom running their magnificent design through the old books of
Egypt.
Budge was a few times astute and
fair enough to admit that injustice had been done to pagans by Christian
aspersions as to their addiction to idol-worship and fetishism. He well recalls
that the Portuguese Christian explorers adjudged the African tribes to be
practitioners of witchcraft and sorcery simply because they were themselves
familiar with it and gratuitously translated observed African ceremonies as
such. He is good enough to say that "neither the Egyptian nor the modern
African ever believed in the divinity of their amulets or fetishes, and they
never considered them to represent deities." He quotes Dr. Nassau as a
final authority in stating that "the thing itself, the material itself, is
not worshipped. . . . Low as is fetishism, it nevertheless has its philosophy,
a philosophy that is the same in kind as that of the higher forms of
worship." The apex of fairness is reached in Budge’s statement in the Osiris
and the Egyptian Resurrection, Vol. I, p. 198:
"From first to last there is no
evidence whatever that the Egyptians worshipped a figure or symbol, whether
made of metal or wood, stone, porcelain or any other substance, unless they
believed it to be the abode of a spirit of some kind. So far from fetishism
being peculiarly characteristic of Egyptian religion, it seems to me that this
religion, at all events in its oldest forms, was remarkably free from
it."
78
Chapter V
LOOSING
THE SEVEN SEALS
If the mythologies of the early
nations have been a source of perplexity and bafflement to students, no less so
has been the Christian Bible itself. Not even the most rabid Christian partisan
could claim that the book has throughout a clear message, clearly to be
apprehended. Outside of much simple homiletic truth which has yielded comfort
to troubled hearts, the Bible is as yet practically a sealed book. Its meaning
is not known at the present day. Nothing but the thinnest shadow of the truth
that the book portrays has yet fallen across the threshold of modern
understanding. No suspicion of the grand completeness of its message has yet
dawned upon us. Nineteen hundred years of theological digging has not unearthed
the treasure buried under its allegorical profundities. And this failure has
been due to our stubborn refusal to reject the Bible as history, and to accept
it as cryptic typology. From beginning to end the Bible is nothing but a series
of spiritual allegories traduced to history or interwoven with some history.
A further startling discovery along
this line is that the series of myths deals not with a wide variety of
spiritual or cosmical situations, but only with the same one situation in
endless repetition! There is but one story to religion and its Bibles, only one
basic event from which spring all the motivations of loyalty and morality that
stir the human heart. The myth-makers had but one narrative to relate, one
fundamental mystery of life to dilate upon. All phases of spiritual life arise
out of the elements of the one cosmic and racial situation in which the human
group is involved; and all scriptural allegory has reference to this basic
datum, and meaning only in relation to it. The myths are all designed to keep
mankind apprised of this central predicament. It is the key to the Bible. And
it is the loss of this key situation that has caused the Book to be sealed
against the age-long assaults of our curious prying and delving. The
restoration of this key to our hands will
79
be seen at once to open the doors to
a vision of clear meaning, where now stalks dark incomprehensibility. Cosmology
has been almost wholly discarded from religion since Milton’s day, yet a
cosmical situation provides the ground for all adequate interpretation of Bible
representation. The one central theme is the incarnation.
Beside esotericism and allegorism
the Bible composers had recourse to another method which is less readily
demonstrable and which has caused the confusion incident to mistaking myth for
history to be far worse confounded. It was the method of uranography. The
uranograph was the chart of the heavens with the constellated pictography. From
remote times the ancients dealt with a celestial chart or map, on which their
earliest teachers had essayed to depict the features of the soul’s experience
in the scenes which their enlightened imaginations had traced about the star
clusters. The stellar zodiacs left at Denderah, Pylae and elsewhere are
impressive reminders of the influence of this heavenly scenograph. The
discovery in quite recent years of the Somerset zodiac in England, a giant
zodiac wrought, it is calculated, 2700 B.C. in the natural features of the
countryside covering one hundred square miles, with the figure of Leo, the
Lion, four miles from nose to tail-tip, is another most authentic attestation
to the basic significance which symbolical astrology has held in ancient
religious formulations. Present students have as yet little conception of how
generally this graph was employed in spiritual ideography and how pervasively
it colored the composition of the scriptural writings. It is next to impossible
to grasp subtle references in the Bible and other archaic literature without a
knowledge of the features of this planisphere. Bibles are in fact, in a broad
general sense, just the literary extension and amplification of the symbology
of the zodiac! The sages had first written the history of the human soul upon
the starry skies.
If we hold them guilty of having
thus perpetrated what seems to us pure whimsicality, we are convicted of
ignorance on another count. They were depicting history in that sphere where it
had first occurred, before it began with man on earth. Spiritual history had
been enacted on a cosmic scale in the heavens, in higher ranges of cosmic life,
before it was repeated and copied in the human drama on this globe. The
heavenly man, in whose image and likeness earthly man is made, and in whose
body the suns and planets are but cells and organs, was the prototype of man
himself. And so it comes that humanity was in pri-
80
mordial times instructed to build
its life "after the pattern of things in the heavens." The
planisphere was the historical and anatomical graph of the Divine Cosmical Man,
and it became at once a secret glyph for the behoof of mundane humanity.
In the spirit of this understanding
the religious teachers of yore ever sought to write into human, racial,
national and individual history the reflection or pattern of the uranograph. This
effort was the secret motif back of all national epics! The epic was an
attempt to fashion national history in the similitude of the structural unity
of the divine plan for macrocosmic, and by reflection, microcosmic, man. This
is in general the theme of such an esoteric work as the Jewish Kabalah.
The distinctive features of the
cosmograph are in evidence in every case. In every religious epic there is
first and centrally a Holy City, a "Jerusalem," residence of the king
and the eventual home of all the elect. There is next an Upper and Lower Land,
typifying the dual segmentation of heaven and earth, or spirit and body, in
man’s nature, which was in all systems held to be the union of a divine with an
animal principle. The two sections were always connected by a river, rising in
the higher mountainous sources in the Upper Kingdom and flowing thence,
carrying its blessings of fertility, down into the Lower Kingdom, which is thus
nourished by the living water from above. Then there was always a bordering
sea, symbolical in every case of the stormy ephermeral scene of the mortal
life. No less was there a smaller water, a lake, Sea of Galilee, Dead Sea,
Black Sea, Red Sea, Jordan River, Styx River, or the marshes or fens, which
were to be crossed by the voyaging soul to reach the more blessed isles, or
farther shore of spiritual bliss. Strangely enough there, was a further
division of the land into seven tribal provinces, a heptarchy or heptanomis, as
in Egypt, Judea, England and elsewhere. This division was representative of the
seven kingdoms of nature, the seven stages of unfoldment through which life
must pass in the completion of every cycle. At other times the division was a
decad, after the pattern of the Sephirothal Tree of the Kabbalah, but
eventually redistributed in twelve sections, as in the case of the Hebrews,
Athens, Afghanistan and some others, reflecting the twelvefold segmentation of
the zodiac, which in turn typified the twelve levels of man’s evolutionary
attainment, or "twelve manner of fruits" on the branches of the Tree
of Life, the twelve divine elements of man’s perfected being. Likewise there
was
81
always a definite locality
designated as the birthplace of the god, which was in many instances also his
place of death and burial and following resurrection. Other centers marked the
scene of his initiations, temptations, baptisms, trials, crucifixion and
transfiguration, every stage of his evolutionary experience, in fact. Then
there were cities dedicated to the special cult of the sun, the moon, and even
such stars as Orion, the stellar symbol of the Christos; or of Sirius,
the great Dog-Star, symbol of the advent. The four cardinal points were
featured, as emblematic of the four pillars of man’s constitution, his
physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies and natures. A warfare between
the Upper and Lower Lands and their kings was generally a part of the
"history," ending in the conquest of the Lower by the Higher and the
union of the two under the crown of dual sovereignty. This drama was enacted so
often in the "history" of so many kings of Egypt that even a scholar
of the eminence of the late William H. Breasted, in his History of Egypt, expresses
his puzzlement over the fact that nearly every Pharaoh of the dynasties had to
conquer Lower Egypt afresh and unite the two halves of the country under a common
hegemony! In all likelihood the physiography and organic structure of the
heavenly man was to some extent copied in the distribution and construction of
pyramids, tombs, temples and other sanctuaries, and the pyramids themselves
were quite obviously astronomical graphs with ceremonial design and
conformations. There was a mountain or holy hill of the Lord, and there were
points of entrance and exit from and to the lower world of Amenta.
The celestial typology having been
engrafted on the topography of the country itself, the next measure was to
weave the dramatic features into the national history. Egypt and the Hebrew
tribes are perhaps the most outstanding examples of the operation of this
methodology on an extensive scale, how extensive the general student of the
present age is unprepared to believe. Thus the names associated for ages with
cosmic and spiritual typism were spread out over the maps of the different
lands; and the national kings, heroes, warriors, sages became titular
characters in the immemorial heavenly drama. In the light of this custom we are
in a position to reach a conclusion of the very greatest importance for
research, affecting the entire view of scripture as history. For we are
confronted with the inexpugnable fact that the names and events in religious
scripts were for the greater part not
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the products of objective history in
the first place, but on the contrary the names and events in assumed history
were a deposit from the religious books! The names of kings, heroes, cities,
lakes, rivers and mountains were on the uranograph long before they appeared on
national maps! They were transferred from the uranograph to the maps! The
occurrences of Bible "history" had been enacted annually or nightly
among the stars of the sky long before they became incorporated in the epics of
religion. And they had been in the epics before they became assigned to actual
localities and personages. Heavenly regions and spiritual transactions were
finally brought to earth and given a local habitation on land and in history.
In short, the naming of geographical features was done by the sacerdotal castes
in each country, in which task they simply sought to pattern their country and
its history after the scheme of the uranograph! Their map and their history
were cast as far as could be done in the mold of the cosmic chart. Each nation
designed to make its configuration and history reflect and fulfill the
heavenly model!
A partial exemplification of the
same tendency can be seen even in our own American history, where the priestly
class gave religious names to the earliest settlements and geographical
features. The practice is attested by such names as Salem, Providence, New
Haven, Newark, New Canaan, Bethlehem, Nazareth (Pennsylvania), Sante Fe,
Sacramento, Corpus Christi, Los Angeles, Vera Cruz, San Salvador, San Domingo
and a list of saints’ names and holy appellations. The Puritans from England
and Holland emigrated to New England actuated powerfully by the assurance that
they were going to fulfill in the new continent the ancient Covenant between
Jehovah and the Israelites. The Mayflower was part of the religious
epic. The Anglo-Israel movement of the present day manifests largely the same
tendencies.
The theory here advanced is not
without support from other authorities. The following brings the weight of a
very venerable document to the endorsement of the idea:
"It has already been suggested
that the mapping out of localities was celestial before the chart was
geographically applied and that all common naming on earth came from one common
naming of the heavens, commencing with the Great Bear and the Dog. The mapping
out of Egyptian localities according to the celestial Nomes and scenery is
described in the
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inscription of Khnum-hept, who is
said to have ‘established the landmark of the south, and sculptured the
northern--like the heaven. He stretched the Great Bear on its back. He
made the district in its two parts, setting up their landmarks, like
the heaven.’" (Records of the Past, XII, 68.)
An evident additional corroboration
of the theory is contained in the injunction given to Moses in the Bible:
"See that thou make all things
after the pattern shown thee in the Mount . . . the pattern of the
heavens."
"Jerusalem, the Mount of Peace,
the Nabhi-Yoni of the Earth, was one of these sacred cities that were mapped
out according to the Kamite model in the heavens."1
"The pattern of things in the
Mount," "the pattern of the heavens," has not hitherto been seen
to be the Biblical analogue and symbol of Plato’s ideal forms. The Mount, the
heavens, are of course the heights of divine ideation, whereon God projected
his new world in thought forms before he impressed them upon matter. The
heavens are the uplands of consciousness, or spheres of being, not physical
localities. God formed his mental models on the Mount of Vision and Imagination
before he cast them into concretion.
So far from grasping the
uranographic art as the key to the historical problem in all scriptures, late
writers vent their skepticism on this point in passages such as this:
"What proof is there--we ask
once more--that the people, the mystics even, of two thousand or more years
ago, read all this into the heavens; that they regarded the various divisions
and towns, and the river and name of Galilee, as mystical and earthly reflexes
of these celestial phenomena!"2
There is proof enough in the very
fact that the ancient seers were poets and allegorists, and not historians.
Practically conclusive evidence that Bible names are not objective or
historical (in the first place) is to be found in the fact that there are in
the Bible some scores of allusions to such local names as Egypt, Jerusalem,
Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, Sidon, Gilead, Assyria, Galilee, Ethiopia and others
which, if taken in the earthly geographical sense, yield no intelligible
meaning whatever. Further evidence is to be found in the notable fact that the
divisions and localities on mundane maps do in the main largely match the
celestial features. Charts of the "Holy Land of Canaan" have been
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found extant in early Egypt as much
as three hundred years before the alleged Israelite exodus, whence it is to be
presumed that this promised land of peace and plenty was allegorical before
it was historical. Massey states that an entablature on the wall of an
Egyptian temple bore a list of some hundred and twenty place names afterwards
localized in Palestine, at a date at least one hundred and fifty years before
there could possibly have been an exodus of Israelites from Egypt. It requires
little "proof" to ascertain that "Egypt" as used throughout
the Bible has the meaning of the lower self or animal-human personality, indeed
the physical body of man itself. Jerusalem means the "holy city" or
the heavenly realms, which are in consciousness, not on the map.
"The picture of this paradise
in the Hebrew writings, the Psalms, the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah and
Revelation, were pre-extant long ages earlier as Egyptian. What the
so-called ‘prophets’ of the Jews did was to make sublunary the vision of the
good time in another life. There were always two Jerusalems from the time when
Judea and Palestine were appendages of Egypt. Two Jerusalems were recognized by
Paul, one terrestrial, one celestial. The name of Jerusalem we read as the Aarru-salem
or fields of peace in the heaven of the never-setting stars. The burden of
Jewish prophecy, which turned out so terribly misleading for those who were
ignorant of the secret wisdom, is that the vision of this glorious future
should be attained on earth; whereas it never had that meaning. . . . Thus
Jerusalem on earth was to take the place of Jerusalem above and the Aarru-hetep
became Jerusalem simply as a mundane locality."3
From numberless texts in the Bible
itself which point to the correctness of the uranographic interpretation of
names we take one alone, which by itself is enough to substantiate the claim
made in this connection. In Revelation (II: 8), speaking of the two
witnesses whom it is said the dragon will rise up and slay, the apocalyptic
writers says:
"And their dead bodies shall
lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom
and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified."
There is enough in this verse to
confound the entire schematism of Christian theology as historically based. It
implies a clear refutation of the whole Passion Week and Good Friday ritual, as
commemorative of "history." Jesus, so it says, was not crucified in
an earthly Jerusalem,
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but only in a spiritual one, the
name of which is indifferently Sodom or Egypt, the latter not even the name of
an earthly city, but of a country! Jesus crucified in Egypt! And what becomes
of the Gospel "history"? It is left to take its only true place,
which is among the sacred myths! The crucifixion was, on the authority of the
Bible itself, a spiritual and not a historical transaction.
T. J. Thorburn, author of a work
aiming to invalidate the mythical nature of the Gospels, reveals the perplexity
as well as the ineptitude of orthodox scholars in the face of the ancient trick
of uranography and allegory:
"And if their statements are
not to be taken in their natural and historical sense, then we must hold that
in ancient literature it is more than doubtful whether writers ever mean
precisely what they say."4
They surely never dreamed that an
age would come, so far lost to the mythical intent of their writings as to
suppose they ever meant literally what they said. They could not know
that the wisest savants of a distant epoch would be so blinded by the forces of
obscurantism as not to realize that the old books spoke only in the terms of
those earthly forms that adumbrate spiritual realities. The old masters of
religious science were not in the habit of speaking "precisely"; they
spoke under the forms of figure always. They could not suspect that their
indirect poetical method would so outrageously befuddle modern
"intelligence."
Ancient philosophy was intensely
responsive to the conception that all things mundane were a lower copy of
things empyrean. On the theory that all forms of life were typical of the one
basic nature of all life everywhere, the sages read into earthly things the
reflection of things celestial. Jesus said he could not tell the disciples of
heavenly things unless they had first believed in earthly things. The sea of
earth life reflected heavenly life in its bosom. The seers who knew that nature
was a dramatization of cosmic archai, sought for the evidence of the
archetypal design in every phenomenon on earth. With what remarkable nicety
they traced higher truth in the mirror of nature we shall see clearly as the
story unfolds. So, in the end, in their religious life they labored to
represent their history as conforming to the primordial type. To this end they
resorted to a measure which has caught and deceived purblind scholarship since
that time.
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From the general thesis that their
national history reflected God’s plan for the world, it was an easy step to the
more explicit assumption that their national life embodied the divine
plan. They threw about themselves the aureole of divinely constituted agency to
fulfill the cosmic plan. They therefore arrogated to themselves the title of
"God’s chosen people," and took the names allotted only to the
spiritualized humans, the men evolved to divinity! This tack will not appear
either unlikely or outlandish when we ponder the disposition of nations in our
own day to put forth blatant claims to be the chosen agents of Providence for
the cultural rulership of the world.
Even if there seems to be veridical
history in the Bible, it can be viewed properly as a setting for the spiritual
dramatization, or as the clothing in which the drama was garbled. At times,
perhaps, the writers appear to have utilized the data of actual history to stage
the symbolic figurations. To this task the religious poets dedicated their
ingenuity.
It becomes evident on this thesis
that the historical element of the scriptures is of far less significance than
has been supposed. It is the philosophy of history and not the data of history
that is of foremost concern. As exhibiting providential design in world life it
becomes of epic moment. The Hebrew race has exploited this phase of the old
methodology to its highest possibility, only, however, as Egypt had done before
it; and has been so successful that it has left the impression of a unique and
exalted hierarchical status for the Jewish race. The outcome of our correction
of vision will be that we shall for the first time properly regard the Old
Testament books as, in the main, the universal drama of the spiritual life
masquerading in the disguise of Hebrew history subtly woven into the great
cosmic epic! The Biblical title Israelites is a spiritual designation
purely, and is wrongly taken in the sense of the name of an ethnic group.
"My people of Israel" or "the children of Israel" of the
Hebrew deity are just the divinized humans, mortals who have put on the
immortal spiritual nature, men graduated into Christhood, a spiritual group in
the early Mysteries. Gentiles were those who were not yet spiritually reborn.
The word comes from the Latin and Greek roots, "gen,"
"gent," meaning simply "to be born." They were those
born as the first or natural man, but not yet reborn as the spiritual Christ.
It can be given no ethnic reference. The name "Israelite" is
obviously compounded of "Is," abbreviation of Isis, or Eve’s original
name, Issa (See Josephus); "Ra," the great Egyptian
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solar god, male and spiritual; and
the Hebrew "El," God. It would then read, Father-Mother-God, making
his "children" the sons of God, i.e., Christs. Likewise the name
"Hebrews" means "those beyond" (the merely human state),
and therefore is practically identical with "Israelites." Finally the
term "Jews" (from the plural of the Egyptian IU--Latin JU)
refers to the "male-female divinities," a title given in the
Mysteries to men made gods and thus restored to androgyne, or male-female,
condition. The national Jews thus adopted for their historical name all three
of the exalted spiritual designations conferred in the Mysteries on the Epoptae
or completely divinized candidates.
It was hardly expected that any
positive documentary evidence could be found in support of the evident fact
that these names had simply been appropriated by the race using them as
illustrious titles abstracted from the uranograph. But a direct statement to
that precise effect was found in the Hebrew Grammar of Gesenius, a learned
German scholar, (on p. 6):
"Of the names Hebrews . . . and
Israelites . . . the latter was more a national name of honor and was
applied by the people to themselves with a patriotic reference to their
descent from illustrious ancestors; . . ."
This is of vast significance as
affecting the historical view of the Bible, with possible extremely severe
repercussions on world history of the present.
The fourth consideration found
essential to a grasp of archaic meaning is the knowledge that religion was an
outgrowth from a specific situation involving the human race at its beginning.
Religion is commonly assigned to a category under the head of psychology. It is
a matter of mind and emotion.
But the roots of religion are found
to go deeper than any mere inclination of the psyche. Eventually religion took
psychological forms of expression, but it was originally not mere psychology. It
was an outgrowth of anthropology. It took its rise out of the racial or
evolutionary beginnings and bore an immediate relation thereto. Every feature
of it was engendered out of the interrelation of the several elements entering
into the compound of man’s constitution.
Human nature was composed of more
than one element. There were the physical, the emotional, the mental and the
spiritual. More
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compactly viewed, there are the human-animal
and the divine. Religion is just the play of the factors of the
interrelationship subsisting between these several natures in man. Or it is the
relation between man and his god, the latter being universally existent
primarily within him, secondarily without. It details the history of the soul
or divine spark of spirit in its cyclical incorporation in human bodies. Its
central fact is the incarnation, the relation of soul to body, God to man, man
to God.
According to Plato’s Timaeus and
other archaic documents a group of twelve legions of "junior gods,"
who were sparks of the eternal Flame of cosmic mind, were ordered, as their
assignment in the cooperative work of creation with Deity, to descend to earth
and elevate the races of the highest animal development by linking their own
mental capacity with the organisms thus far developed by the evolution of form.
They were to lift the animals across the gulf between the summit of instinct
and the beginnings of reason. These angels were devas, "bright" or
"shining" emanations of divine intelligence, but were not exempt from
the "cycle of necessity," or periodical immersion in forms of
physical embodiment on a planet for purposes of their own further
self-evolution. It subserved both the interests of their own progress and that
of the animals they were to uplift, that the two races, the one germinally
conscious and immortal, the other dumbly brutish and mortal, should be
periodically joined together, the higher to be the king and ruler of the lower.
The procedure thus adopted by life gave to the animal the possibility of
evolving a mind through association with a mental nature, and to the
intelligent spirits the physical bodies that were their particular requirement
for contacting the type of experience they were destined to undergo. If this
seems bizarre, it must be remembered that all living entities are the result of
the linkage of a spiritual nucleus with a material organism. No creature lives
but what is compounded of "soul" and body.
In conformity with evolutionary law
these legions of devas or angels, we are told, descended to earth, took
lodgment in the bodies of higher animals and began their career of redeeming
the lower creatures to mental status. In the Timaeus these "junior
gods" are addressed by the Demiurgus (the creative Logos, Jupiter) and are
told to descend and "convert yourselves according to your natures to the
fabrication of animals," the gist of their mission being summed up in the
command
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to "weave together mortal and
immortal natures." This is one of the most important utterances of ancient
scripture, because it announces the character of our constitution and sets
forth plainly our evolutionary commission. It tells us that we are both
animal-human and divine at once, animal as to our bodies, divine as to our
intellects. For Plato says: "According to body it is an animal, but
according to intellect a god." Our earthly task, according to St. Paul, is
to link together the two natures in "one new man," bringing to an end
in a final "reconciliation" "the battle of Armageddon," the
aeonial warfare between the "carnal mind" of the animal and the
spiritual mind of the god. This warfare is also Plato’s strife between noësis,
the spiritual intelligence, and doxa, the motions of the sense
nature. The soul is here in body to discipline the latter by the inculcation of
habits of rectitude until the animal learns to use the powers of mind. Tutoring
the animal, the soul at the same time achieved its own higher schooling in
deific unfoldment. This interlocking of the two grades of life in one organism
must be constantly kept in view if the proper study of religion is to be made.
No organic evolution can proceed from one kingdom to another without the
deploying of the mental resources of a superior kingdom in aid of the level
below it. And each kingdom profits by the act of brotherhood. The god achieves
his own further apotheosis by reaching down to raise the animal to human
estate.
It must be noted that when the
intelligence of the god is joined to the life of the animal, it communicates
but a fragment of its power to the organism, remaining for the larger part of
its conscious being hidden on its own spiritual plane. It thus becomes an
invisible guardian, or what the ancients called the "daimon." Lurking
in the background of consciousness, it is what modern psychology has lately
discovered and named the "collective unconscious." From behind the
curtain, as it were, it directs the animal with only a tentacle of its power.
It can not incorporate in the animal a greater measure of its capacity than the
latter can suitably accommodate and carry. It will push down into expression
more and more of itself as the refinement of the coarse body goes on apace.
Like a radio, the mechanism must be tuned up higher to register finer
vibrations. In the Greek theosophy it is stated that "the gods distribute
divinity" to the grades of beings below them, which "participate
according to their capacity."
In briefest summary (to be amplified
to greater elaboration in the
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sequel) this is the basic
cosmological and racial datum of every old religion. Together with its
implications it is the basis of every religious interpretation ever made or to
be made. Every problem of ethics, devotion, discipline and intellect receives
its full complement of value and meaning only in reference to this fundamentum.
Religion is far more than a posture of mystic feeling; it was in origin a
series of codes, principles and practices given by the demi-gods to early
mankind to awaken the torpid genius of our actual divinity. In a true sense it
was designed to wield a semi-magical influence to transform animal man into the
divinized human! Its rites were formulated with a view to bestirring man’s
memory of his essential deific character. It was in no sense merely worship. It
was the most intensely practical and utilitarian culture the world has ever
known. It was designed to prevent the utter loss of purpose and failure of
effort in the cosmical task to which man, as a celestial intelligent spirit, had
pledged himself under the Old Testament covenant and "the broad
oaths fast sealed" of Greek theology. In coming to earth to help turn the
tide of evolution past one of its most critical passages, he bound himself to
do the work and return without sinking into the mire of animal sensuality. We
must henceforth approach religion with the realization that it is the psychic
instrumentality designed for the use of humanity in charting its way through
the shoals of the particular racial and evolutionary crisis in which it was
involved. All the stupendous knowledge relating to the entire cosmic chapter
was once available, given by the gods to the sages. We have nearly lost it
beyond recovery because the ignorance of an early age closed the Academies and
crushed every attempt to revive the teaching. The prodigious folly of the
modern essay to vitalize religion through piety alone will be more fully seen
as the ancient picture takes form in the delineation. Our present business is
to struggle to regain that lost paradise of intelligence. We must work again to
the recognition of our high cosmic mission, and revivify the decadent forms of
a once potent religious practique, based on knowledge. For spiritual cultism
was once vitally related to our evolutionary security, which stands jeopardized
by present religious desuetude.
The nature of the material to be
presented in volume will enforce by the sheer illuminative power of the
interpretation itself the necessity for this extended introduction. It was
quite impossible to undertake the exegesis of recondite scriptures long
misinterpreted or never
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interpreted at all, without
providing a rationale of ancient literary methodology and setting up a
background of philosophical light. The erection of this background was made all
the more necessary by the inveterate recalcitrancy of modern scholarship to
recognize the applicability of the methods and principles outlined. Their
validation by the substance and meaning of the larger presentment now to be
made involves nothing less than the complete revision of all our interpretative
norms in religious study.
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Chapter VI
THE
DESCENT TO AVERNUS
The rectification of misguided
rendering of holy writ in its entirety is a work of great magnitude and will
tax severely the capacity of a single book. Particularly in regard to the
traditional dogmas of theology, where misconception has become embedded in set
habitudes of mind, the reinterpretation can be established only by the
presentation of material in overwhelming quantity. The bare statement of the
main theses of the venerable philosophy would be met with contempt or arrogant
rejection. The claims must therefore be buttressed by a mass of irrefutable
data. This material has not been marshaled for this use before in anything like
organic array.
The story most properly begins with
what is called in theology "the descent of the gods." Traditional
lore is replete with legends of the "expulsion of the angels,"
"the fall of Lucifer and his hosts," "the fall from heaven,"
and the more philosophical "descent of the soul." These phrase-titles
relate to the first step in the series of pre-historical and even pre-mundane
episodes which culminated in the establishment of humanity on earth and the
fabrication of human nature combining both a natural and a supernatural
element. The substrate datum in religion is that man is an animal and a god in
union. There were animals on earth and angels in heaven; and the counsels of
cosmic intelligence decreed that the angels should join forces with the animals
and be their gods. The conjunctive experience would educate both parties. The
effort to overcome matter’s inertia and the sense urge of the flesh would
develop more dynamic spiritual initiative for the gods. They would be forced to
deploy more of their potential and as yet static divine power to gain mastery
over the elementary forces of the physical world.
Hints are not wanting in the old
scripts to show that their obligation to leave their home of blissful rest in
dreamy sub-consciousness in
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the ethereal spheres and suffer the
hardships of earth life in gross animal bodies was in some part at least a
measure of karmic retribution for past dereliction elsewhere. Pride and
insolence are ascribed to them by Greek theology. Violated oaths and
"Moira’s bounds transgressed" are alluded to by the philosophic
poets. As evolution links penalty with readjustment and forward progress, it is
not difficult to admit the play of both retributive and normal procedure in the
enforced descent of minor deities to our globe. It is the expulsion of Satan
and his hosts from heaven in Paradise Lost and Revelation. So
presented, it has been taken either as a mythical unreality or an inscrutable
chapter of celestial history, and discarded from serious consideration in
religious systematism. It is, however, the central situation and must be
restored to its pivotal place of consequence in the picture. The doctrine of
the "descent" is crucial for the interpretation. True or false, it is
what the scriptures are building their narratives upon.
Of the original twelve legions of
deities, ten have plunged into the stream of incarnation and are now passing
through the experiences incident thereto. At the conclusion of the venture,
after many incarnations for each individual member, they will return to their
celestial abodes, transfigured and further divinized. The allegory of the
Prodigal Son is a short glyph or graph of this evolutionary descent and return.
There is hardly a religious book of any ancient nation that does not deal more
or less directly with that event.
To see the "descent" as an
integral function of cosmic process and not as a calamitous "fall,"
it is quite necessary to expound a portion of Orphic-Platonic cosmogony.
The beginning must be made where
creation itself begins. It starts from Unity. All things proceed from what was
aboriginally and ever ultimately is, the One Life. The pagan name for the
Supreme Power was commonly The One. All things ultimately resolve into the
primordial One, since they emanate from that One in the beginning. Before
manifestation takes place, Being is homogeneous, undifferentiated. It is
uniform similitude and excludes dissimilitude. It is all One Essence, alike in
every part, if parts there are.
But in such state it is unmanifest,
and from our point of view unconscious, asleep, inert. The Hindu term is Pralaya.
And out of Pralaya it must awake, for it sleeps only in alternate
turn with waking
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activity, as do all its creatures
made in its likeness. It passes, like them from death to life and back again,
in eternal routine.
To awake and come into being it must
by force of logic perform an operation upon its own nature which is the first
ground of manifestation. It can not create a universe in which to live and
suffer experience without breaking its Unity apart into duality. For it must
become Consciousness on the one side, in order to know what and how to
create, and Matter on the other, if it is to have material with which to
create! So it must split its primal Oneness into a dualism which however is
still subsumed under the unity. It becomes two in one or the One in two. The
One has not become Two, but a twoness.
It virtually can not create without
throwing itself into the condition of being at a tension between two aspects of
itself, on the strength of which tension it can exert its inchoate energies. It
must therefore manifest itself as the two ends of a polarity, positive and
negative. It must become polarized in relation to itself; and so it takes on
the double-aspected characterization of spirit and matter, male and female,
consciousness and vehicle, function and instrument, attraction and repulsion,
visible and invisible, real and actual. Positively, like the proton of the
atom, it must stand stably in the center, governing, holding, regulating the
cyclical whirl of negative force about its eternal rock of durability.
Negatively, like the electrons, it must revolve in the periodic swing of active
life. It must provide the dual grounds for living existence, a conscious nucleus
presiding at the heart of moving, changing embodiments. It must become, out of
itself, subject, knowing, and object, to be known. Its entire purpose is
obviously to arise out of unconscious slumber and become ever more awake and
more concretely conscious. Since there is nothing of which it can be conscious
save itself, the aim of Life is thus ever to become more Self-conscious!
Therefore it must, so to speak, set itself as object over against itself as
subject, and down the ages and the cycles ever thus contemplate itself. It is
the seeing eye and the thing seen, as all profound esoteric philosophy asserts.
As Genesis puts it, God
effected his creation, gazed upon it with gratification and pronounced it good.
To see his creation he had to objectify, hypostasize, reify his thoughts, the
radiations of his subjective aspect. For he creates by thoughts. He must see
his ideas form in
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concretion before him, take on
material body and come to visible manifestation for himself and his creatures.
So his expression proceeds from
unity to duality, and from duality it runs further onward to infinite
multiplicity. Multiple manifestation is achieved by the operation of a
principle which is easily comprehended. As life has split into spirit and
matter, the one mobile, the other inert, the unity of the mobile is broken up
into multitude as it moves against the immobile. The lighter essence, spirit,
is broken and divided as it moves outward against the resistance of matter. A
suggestive illustration is the infinite division of a body of water dropped as
one unit from a height as it falls against the resistance of the air. Its sheer
motion and speed throws it apart. The circulation of the blood from the central
heart, dividing endlessly till it reaches the periphery in numberless
streamlets, is a similar reflection of the universal law. Outward bound, it
divides; on the return it reunites! Life descends, "falls," from the
summit of its primal unity down into the arms of matter, dividing as it goes.
Division is a logical necessity if it is to multiply itself, for unity can not
multiply out of itself without first dividing itself. And it can not divide
itself unless it falls or descends against resistance. The importance of this
determination for clear grasp of basic theology can not be overstressed. Angels
"fall" by divine ordinance, and not by literal folly of rebellion
against deity. Evolutionary gravity brings them down from heaven to earth.
The wind does not commonly blow a
steady gale, but comes in rhythmic puffs. Creative impulse acts similarly.
Every cycle of energization of the universe finishes its work in seven waves or
impulses, and the sub-cycles have also seven waves. Life projects its formative
energies outward, or matterward, in surge after surge. Each one carries the
impulse as far as it will go under its original force, or until the wave is
brought to a dead standstill by the inertia of matter, the carrying and
resisting medium. Each propulsion of power comes to a stop, locked in the
embrace of matter. In this embrace the capacities of the two nodes of being
interplay, fecundate each other, generate a growth of new life, and build up
what is termed a plane or level or kingdom of nature, with creatures embodying
the type of life there engendered. Thus there are terrestrial and celestial
worlds (as Paul says), noumenal and phenomenal realms, physical and ethereal
planes, material and spiritual bodies, heavens, fairy-lands, underworlds,
hells, limbos, Isles
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of the Blessed, Elysian Fields, the
meadows of Aarru-Hetep and homes on high. And the beings on the ranges from
high divinity down to man are the gods of ancient mythology.
The capacities of life on each level
are expressed and given play by the organic beings built up thereon. Thus each
kingdom has its own specific nature and determinations. But life is not static;
it is generative, reproductive, forward-moving. It creates anew, in its turn,
at its level, and passes the stream of creative force on down the line. Thus
the succession of waves of projection runs down the scale, each one carrying
the formative force one surge farther out. On and on it goes, establishing the
kingdoms of nature and the living citizens on them. The contiguous planes form
a link of connection from top to bottom of the series, and this is the golden
chain of life. And each level bears a definite relation to its neighbor on
either side.
The explication of this relationship
involves a law that is basic for all evolution. Its statement will render
understandable the constitution of man. It tells why he is a soul and a body
linked together. It may be called the great Law of Incubation.
Under its terms each plane is mother
to the life on the plane above it and father to that of the plane below it. It receives
from above the seed germs of higher life and harbors them in the womb of
its soil, or matter, gestates them and eventually gives them their new birth.
This is the function of motherhood. And matter (Latin mater, mother) is
the universal mother. But, having received from above, it also gives the
impulse to the order below; and as giver it is active, aggressive,
generative--the father function. Feminine to life above, masculine to life
beneath, it is the link and bridge between two worlds.
But at each step of transmission the
primal impulse suffers a diminution of its impetus, a weakening of its force,
and in consequence a further and further fragmentation. The matter of each
plane on the downward or involutionary track being more dense in atomic
structure than that of its superior, the living bodies it provides can not bear
as heavy a life charge as the beings above can support, and the voltage of
power must be stepped down if it is to be incorporated fittingly in the less
capacious bodies of a lower kingdom. To effect this reduction in dynamism the
bodies carrying the life of each plane act as electric transformers, changing a
high current into numerous lesser currents to be accommodated to the lower
carrying capabilities of bodies on the
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plane beneath. Hence the unit charge
received from the plane above by each life structure on any place must, in
falling one step further downward, be again broken up into a large number of
fragments, each of which will become the energizing soul of a lower body. The
Greek philosophers say in this connection that "the gods distribute
divinity," scattering its higher units abroad from plane to plane, the
units multiplying in number, but diminishing in power, as the stream flows on.
This is what ancient theology connotes by "the river of life." The
Orphic system speaks of "rivers of vivification," which, they say,
"proceed from on high as far as to the last of things," or to the
lowest stratum of the mineral kingdom. And as the gods distribute divinity, the
secondary ranks in each case are said to "participate according to their
capacity." The gods pour out their life for the vivifying of all lower
beings, and the latter partake of this bounty or "grace" to the
measure of their receptivity. Nothing other than this is meant by the
"shed blood" of the gods, given for the life of the worlds. All old
theologies aver that the blood of the gods, or of God, mixed with the clay of
earth, makes the "red earth" which is given as the etymological
signification of Adam in Hebrew, i.e., man. Man is compounded of the red life-blood
of deity and the dust of the ground, which in Hebrew is Adamah, purely
the feminine or material aspect of Adam, spirit, itself. Deity mixed
together spirit and matter to make man.
One more step in the analysis yields
the final phase of the Law of Incubation. If life is to be propagated in
eternal renewal, in multiplied individualization, it becomes necessary for any
living creature on each plane to produce a multiple progeny of the seeds of its
own life and "plant" or bury them in the soil of the kingdom
immediately below it. There they go first to their "death," after
which they are reborn or resurrected in the sprouting of the seeds and their
growth back to maturity. Each generation lives anew in its regeneration, but
multiplied by as many times itself as the number of seeds it produced and
successfully germinated in the plane below.
The vegetable buries its seeds in
the soil of the kingdom beneath it, the mineral. The animal’s life is embodied
in a corpus built up of vegetable material taken in each day as food. The human
is rooted in an animal body. And now comes the pivotal fact in theology. The
lowest ranks of gods, in their position just above humanity, must, by the Law
of Incubation, send down their seeds, plant (incarnate) them
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in the bodies of humans, and win
their next cyclical generation of divine life in that ground! Centuries of
theological maundering have not told the millions of hungry sheep this plain
truth as to why man nurtures a winged spirit of intelligence--a soul--in his
physical body. The soul of man is in his body as a seed of divinity planted,
buried, gone to its "death" in the soil of the human kingdom, and
bears the same relation to that soil as does any seed to its bed. The greatest
truth that can be told to mortals is that their bodies are each the gestating
womb of a god. As said St. Paul, the Christ is being "formed within"
each mortal body. Man has a soul because his physical human self is the nursery
or breeding ground of the seeds of divinity. And man’s divinity is, or begins
as, a seed. His duty is to cultivate the growth of that deific embryo. It is
gestating in the womb of his physical body, and he must, as said Socrates,
become a philosophic "midwife" and aid in its birth. Plato reports
the Demiurgus in the notable speech to the legions of devas in the Timaeus as
saying that "whatever is immortal and divine" in the human makeup,
"of that I will furnish the seed and the beginning. It is your
business to do the rest; to weave together mortal and immortal natures."
The upper plane furnishes the seeds of godhood, the lower furnishes the soil or
garden. Divinity is planted in "the garden of the world." It is the
seminal soul of divine mind, destined to germinate and eventually blossom in
the ground of humanity.
If, in sum, God is to multiply
himself, his tree of life must reproduce on its branches a numerous progeny,
each child bearing the potentiality of renewing the parent life in its
fullness, and of carrying its eternal unfoldment one step ahead. As no
living thing can subsist save as a result of a linking together of spirit and
matter, a germinal unit of spirit must be incubated as the god in a body of
material structure. This divine economy gives every creature its soul, which is
its god. In the long chain of linked lives, from God down to mineral crystal,
no being is deprived of its possibility of immediate communion with deity, up
to the border of its capacity. But the "arm of the Lord" that is
potent to bless and to save is within, not without. It is Emanuel, God with us,
the hope of our glory. God is everywhere, within and without; but his son, the Christos,
is only within. If he is not sought there, he will not be found. His inner
presence is the provision of life that no entity should be bereft of instant
contact with its parent god, who dwells on the plane just over its head, though
rooted in its very
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body. Man’s deity is not a personage
in a distant land and time, but, as an Eastern saga puts it, "closer is he
than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." No man can fail of touching
his divinity, but failure of his knowledge that his deity is in himself
may palsy his effort to arouse its latent faculties.
A legend of India tells of a council
of the gods at which it was purposed to invest man with deity. A debate arose
as to how it might be entrusted to him without his misusing it. One suggested
that it be buried in the depths of the sea, so that he would not easily find
and abuse it. Another advised placing it on the most inaccessible mountain top.
Finally the supreme head of the assembly declared he had thought of a place
where no man would ever think of looking for it,--in the deepmost chambers of
man’s own heart!
The basal truth that every living
thing is a union of spirit and matter, soul and body, was put in a graph by the
Egyptians. It is perhaps the oldest and most meaningful of signs. The great
symbol carried in the hands of the gods was the Ankh, or crux ansata (ansated
cross), a "T" topped with the circle. The circle is the female
symbol, the boundless infinite matter, the mother of all things in endless
round. The vertical line is the male symbol, a ray of intelligence that goes
out from the heart of the universe to impregnate the worlds. The horizontal
line is the line of division between the two, at the point where they are
joined. It is the cross-line between them. The word Ankh means three most
significant things: love, life and tie. It is a formula of all
life, signifying that life is the resultant of a tying together
of two things, spirit and matter, by the force of an attraction, which is love.
The great doctrine of the
"descent" or "fall" can now be clearly envisaged. Deity, in
the form of its seed potency, must descend from its own plane into the soil of
the plane below it and be incubated there. It must leave its own home, its
father’s house, and go out into another country, where it will be an exile and
a stranger. And like the youth going out from home into a rough world to make a
fight of it under temptation and gross influences, he must undergo a long
toilsome trial and testing and crucifixion to become an eventual victor and
return with laurels. Said Jesus: "I came forth from the Father and am come
into the world."
Additional elucidation of basic
meaning flows from the consideration of the great doctrine of the Trinity in
theology. One is not too bold
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in asserting that this formula of
ancient truth is not comprehended in its clear and profound significance by the
Church which still blindly offers it. Once a year the pew occupants listen to a
sermon on the Trinity, but go away unenlightened. Yet it is the heart of the
mystery of life, the base of theology, and--easily comprehensible.
Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist of the
third century, who gave the doctrine to Christianity through Augustine, has
given us an analogy with a natural phenomenon by which it is possible, with the
additional link of a finding of modern science, to see the simple meaning of a
doctrine that has baffled comprehension for sixteen centuries. He said that we
can understand how one deity can have three aspects if we think of the sun, its
light and its active energy. The sun in heaven is comparable to the Father of
the Trinity. It is a glowing globe of fire. The fire of the sun does not
go forth into the ends of space, but abides at home. Like a match which you
strike in a dark room, the fire stays on the match; it does not leave
it. The fire stays’ but it generates and sends forth its son,--the light.
This is the second aspect or "person." It is of the same essence
with the Father, yet not he. And the Psalmist sings: "Send out thy
light"!
Now a flood of clear light is
released on the problem by following the implications as to the identity of the
third "person," the Holy Spirit. But here it is necessary to adduce
some pertinent data which is given to us by modern physical science to round
out our analogy. We are told that a ray of the sun’s light out in the void of
space (not near a planet) is inert. It is both cold and dark. If one could reduce
one’s body to the size of a pin-point, one would be in total darkness and the
intensest cold, though the sun be glaring overhead. The ray is impotent,
inactive, uncreative and can generate no life until--and here is the nub of all
philosophy--it falls upon a surface of a material body, a globe or planet! Only
by incidence upon its opposite pole, matter, can the light of spirit come to
its creative function. There is required the interplay of its rays with a
resistant surface to bring out its own powers from latency to potency. Matter
is, as already shown, the "mother" of life, while spirit (God) is its
father. And, as everywhere, father spirit can not become creative until it
unites with and fecundates mother matter! His ray of power, his son, is in a sense
the phallic emanation of his seed, and the seed must become coefficient with
the unfructified egg of life in matter’s bosom to bring a new birth to
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pass. Almost it might be said,--here
is all truth in a nutshell. The light of God would remain uncreative unless it
entered the body or womb of mother life and aroused the slumbering
potentialities therein. And here is the solution of a riddle of mythology which
has baffled and horrified Christian moralists no end. The fables of the gods
represent the son of deity as turning about and creating upon his own mother.
Horus is called "the Bull of his Mother"--Isis. The sons of God marry
their own mothers! Horrible! Detestable! shout the offended Church Fathers. Yet
the son of present life marries and impregnates his own mother every time an
acorn or grain of wheat falls into the ground and germinates! It is discernible
at last why the letter H comes a second time into the form of the sacred
tetragrammaton, or four-letter name of Jehovah, the Ineffable Name of ancient
Kabalism--JHVH. "J" is the Father God, the line that comes down from
on high, goes deep into the heart of matter and then turns upward to return to
deity. The H represents by its two vertical lines life divided into its two
aspects, spirit and matter, joined by the cross line, and so brings its
activity into the realm of the mother, matter. The V is their son, who goes
down in his turn into matter and returns. Now, why does the mother H come into
the formula of creation a second time? The J H V would be a formula covering
one--the first--generation of life. It would take it through one cycle. But
that would not be a glyph that would represent life as perpetuating itself
through endless cycles of renewal. It would end there. The graph must carry it
on. As, then, the son must take up the line and become father in his turn, he
must unite his productive fecundation with his old mother, matter. And so the
H, or mother, must be brought into the picture once more. And the holy name
becomes thus a descriptive form for all creation. For spirit is creatively
helpless, like the sunlight, without the co-operation of its opposite, matter,
which is dramatized as its wife and sister. Hence every mythological deity was
linked with his shakti or spouse, his creative potency, without whom he
would remain forever ungenerative. The implications of this determination are
tremendous, for if spirit can not give birth to its archetypal conceptions
without the implementation of matter in actual creation, neither can it function
apart from matter in philosophy! And a thousand fantastic "spiritual"
cult systems that have deluded uncritical minds in every age by a denial of the
utility of matter, are at one stroke given the coup de grâce as
illogical fallacies.
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Reverting to the Trinity, it is
desirable to go further with the Greek elaborators of the Orphic wisdom in
delineating the aspects of divine activity.
Of the Father they assert that he
"abides." A Hindu script has the passage in which Lord Krishna says:
"Having impregnated the universe with a portion of myself, I yet
remain." He remains on his own plane. He is the unmoved Mover and the
uncaused Cause. He is without experience himself, delegating the function of
acquiring it to his Son. He is unaffected, undivided, unchanging and
undiminished.
Of the Son they say that he
"proceeds." He bears the Father’s potentialities out into all the
universe. He is the radiating arm of his Father’s power. He goes out to do the
will of his parent and become his vicegerent in the worlds. He becomes God’s
spoken Word. He conveys the Logoic ideas out upon the bosom of his Father’s
emanations to stamp them upon plastic matter. And proceeding from the bosom of
the Father, he goes forth into every condition which is precisely the opposite
of that of the Father. He will become subject to experience and suffer all
things, while the Father abides unmoved. He will be affected, divided, changed
and be sadly diminished, suffering the loss of all that he enjoyed with the
Father. He will endure all experience in every kingdom, will be fragmented into
"partial natures," will enter a moving stream of endless change, and
will be reduced to a minimum of his glory on the cross of suffering.
Of the Holy Spirit they say that it
"converts" matter to its own likeness; "is converted" by
matter to its next higher estate; and finally "returns."
What, then, is the Holy Spirit, the
Third Person? It is the first Ray of divine life, undergoing its final
conversion into active creative agency. It is latent power of God’s mind,
transformed into working efficacy. It is static divinity become kinetic. It is
God’s Logos, or Word, carrying the command of his creative Voice, now converted
into an energy that moves matter and builds worlds. It is, finally, God’s
spirit at work; no longer static, or merely potential, but released upon matter
in moving force--kinesis.
It may be helpful to present a
diagrammatic sketch of this formulation, as it is a brief but complete graph of
the entire rationale of all incarnation, or involution of life in matter, and
its evolution back to
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spirit. It is thus a concise formula
comprehending all that ancient scriptures have been designed to elucidate.
SUN .............. FATHER ..........
ABIDES.
LIGHT .......... SON
................. PROCEEDS.
{{CONVERTS (Matter).
{{IS CONVERTED (By Matter).
EARTH ......... HOLY SPIRIT ..{
{
{ RETURNS
All "history" takes place
at the point where the light, or latent radiation of divine force, comes in
contact with matter, earth, the mother. For there involution is brought to a
halt and, spirit being implanted within the heart of matter and awakening its
slumbering potencies, there is begun at that point a new growth of life,
actuated by the union of intelligence with sheer energy. And this new growth
begins the evolutionary stage, or the return unto the father, or parent,
status.
When Trinities are given as Father,
Mother and Son, the aspect here characterized as the Holy Spirit is the
"Son," the product of the union of Father and Mother. When given as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Mother is implicit, being the material element
necessary at all times.
The Son’s, or the ray’s,
impregnation of Mother matter begins a new process of growth from seed to
adulthood, which through a cycle of "conversion" and "being
converted" lifts up the new form of Sonship of deity to the stage which
the Father had reached in its last previous cycle. The cycle is completed with
the "return"; but after aeonial rest life gets ready to make its next
rhythmic movement outward to unite again with the Mother.
Having set forth in the most compact
form the outline of the structure of ancient evolutionary knowledge, it is
incumbent on us now to trace the origin and fix the place of every single
doctrine of theology in the draft. It is requisite also that sufficient space
be granted to present as much as is permissible of the vast body of data
supporting each phase of the exegesis. The "descent" is the first
feature of the chart that relates heavenly creation to earthly life, and is
logically the first aspect of divine activity to be taken up. Its groundwork
and presuppositions having been laid down, its presence in ancient religion
must be demonstrated with sufficient fullness.
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Chapter VII
COLONISTS
FROM HEAVEN
To begin with there is that vast
mass of Medieval legend that became focused in Milton’s grand epic. The
tradition of man’s having lost a Paradise, having been cast out of heaven and
thrown into a prison, a dungeon, a pit, a lake of pitch, a dark cavernous
underground where suffering was intensified by fire, was almost universal in
the background of theological belief over a long period. This wide possession
might have remained highly instructive had not Milton, in common with all save
isolated groups of Hermeticists in Europe, lost in signal knowledge that the
fallen angels, the rebel hosts, the armies of Satan-Lucifer were, collectively,
man himself, and that the fiery lake into which they were hurled was
just our good earth! This tradition was the far-trailing descendant of the
ancient Mysteries, in which the entire drama of man’s evolution was enacted at
the great annual festivals. Says Thomas Taylor, perhaps the most understanding
of all Plato’s interpreters:
"I now proceed to prove that
the dramatic spectacles of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by the ancient
theologists, their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the
unpurified soul invested with the earthly body, and enveloped in a material and
physical nature: . . ."1
Cocker in his Greek Philosophy says
that Plato in the Phaedrus, under the allegory of the chariot and the
winged steeds, represents the lower or inferior part of man’s nature as
dragging the soul down to earth and subjecting it to a slavery under corporeal
conditions. Taylor says2 that
"the descent of the superior
intellect3 into the realms of generated existence becomes, indeed, the greatest
benefit and ornament which a material nature is capable of receiving; for
without this participation of intellect in the lowest department of corporeal
life, nothing but the irrational soul and a brutal life would subsist in the
dark and fluctuating abode of the body."
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The whole design of the Mysteries,
according to the great Plato himself, was "to lead us back to the
perfection from which, as our beginning, we first made our descent." One
of the mysterious significations of the Thyrsus or reed used in the Mysteries
was connected with the descent of the soul, for, "as it was a reed full of
knots," it became "an apt symbol of the diffusion of the higher
nature into the sensible world." Bacchus (the divine self) carried a reed
instead of a scepter, and it betokened the god’s "descent into our partial
nature." "Indeed the Titans are Thyrsus-bearers; and Prometheus
concealed fire in a Thyrsus or reed; after which he is considered as bringing
celestial light into generation, or leading the soul into the body."
The Greeks allegorized the descent
of the soul again in the fable of Ceres and Proserpine. Ceres is the higher
intellect, Proserpina being her daughter, the soul. Edward Carpenter says
"that there were ritual dramas
or passion plays [in the Mysteries], of which an important one dealt with the
descent of Kore or Proserpine into the underworld, as in the Eleusinian
representations, and her redemption and restoration to the upper world in
spring."4
No less applicable to the same
fundamental situation is the Greek fable of Eros and Psyche. Love, the divine
Eros, descends into the mortal sphere to redeem the human soul, or Psyche, from
suffering in its animal habitat by marrying her. In the Mystery celebrations
lasting nine days, Taylor tells us that on the eighth day the "fall of the
soul into the lunar orb" was commemorated,
"because the soul in this
situation is about to bid adieu to everything of a celestial nature; to sink
into a perfect oblivion of her divine origin and pristine felicity; and to rush
profoundly into the region of dissimilitude, ignorance and error. And lastly,
on the ninth day, when the soul falls into the sublunary world and becomes united
with a terrestrial body, a libation was performed such as is usual in the
sacred rites."5
Proclus, the great Neo-Platonist of
the fourth century, expounding Plato’s theology, says that it is the peculiar
function of "heroic souls" (an order above daemons) to express
"magnitude of operation, elevation and magnificence," but that this
order "descends indeed for the benefit of the life of man, as partaking of
a destiny inclining downwards."6
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Iamblicus corroborates Plato as to
these grades of the hierarchy:
"Angles above dissolve the
bonds of generation. Daemons draw souls down into nature; but heroes lead them
to a providential attention to sensible works."7
Iamblichus makes an unequivocal
statement of the descent when he says:
"But from the first, divinity
sent souls hither in order that they might again return to him."8
He reiterates the idea (p. 68) when
speaking of the gods:
"These, therefore, descend with
invariable sameness for the salvation of the universe, and connectedly contain
the whole of generation after the same manner."
He utters a strange sentiment when
he affirms (p. 89) that the
"magnitude of the epiphanies
[or manifestations] in the Gods, indeed, is so great as sometimes to conceal
all heaven, the sun and the moon; and the earth itself, as the Gods descend,
is no longer able to stand still."
Greek philosophy, as we have seen,
embodies the traditions of the descent in several molds. In the cycle of the
twelve mystic operations of Hercules, the hero is ordered to go down into Hades
(our world) and bring up the three-headed Cerberus. His journey is a symbolic
tracing of the experiences undergone by the soul on earth, not in some
mysterious underworld below it. Orpheus descends to the underworld to recover
his lost Eurydice, the soul. In Virgil’s epic Aeneas finds the gate to Avernus
and descends for the inspection of the Tartarian regions. It is instructive to
note the etymology of this word "Avernus." It is the Greek ornos, a
bird, and alpha (@insert greek alpha) privative, meaning "un-" or
"not" or "-less." The "v" is thrown in for
euphony between the two vowels, and the "o" is shortened to
"e." It would therefore read "not birds" or "no
birds," with the implication of "not a good place for birds."
When it is known that in all arcane systems the bird was the universal symbol
for the soul, the meaning comes clear that this earth was regarded as the place
where souls were poisoned by the noxious fumes arising from the carnal life,
since the birds were lethalized by the vapor rising from the mouth of the pit
of Avernus, became stupe-
107
fied and fell into the underworld.
The allegory tells the story of our descent with a force that no philosophical
descanting could match. So deftly has ancient philological skill woven a
theosophical meaning into the structure of language.
Dante’s tour of Purgatory and the
deeper Inferno is a treatment of the old myth, with political and other connotations.
Ulysses’ visit to the cave of Polyphemus is again a form of the representation,
and Theseus and his labyrinthine adventure underground is another rendering of
it. From Herodotus we have an account (II, 122) of the descent into Hades of
King Rhampsinitus, in whose honor the priests of Egypt instituted a rebirth
festival. The Rig Veda parallels this story with an account of the boy
Nachiketas, who descended into the realm of Yama, the deity of the earthly
underworld, in Yama-Loka, the kingdom of the dead, and then returned to the
world of life. Needless to say, neither Egyptians nor Hindus took their
theological myths for history.
A number of utterances in the Chaldean
Oracles point to a quite complete harmony with Orphic Platonism and
Neo-Platonism. Indeed opinion veers strongly to the conclusion that
Pythagorean, Platonic and Greek philosophy generally was formulated out of the
principles of theology promulgated through the powerful agency of the Orphic
Mysteries, and that those principles were brought by the Orphics into Greece
from Chaldean sources. The Oracles agree with Greek doctrine that higher
deific energies emanated outward from a spiritual focus into the material
worlds. One of them runs: "For all things thence begin to extend their
admirable rays downwards." The life of the gods rays outward into
corporeal beings and becomes the animating principle or soul of living things.
A passage from the Tibetan Book
of the Dead (p. 130) warns devotees to "be not attracted towards the
dull blue light of the brute world," under penalty of falling into that
kingdom of nature. It asserts (p. 125) that the predilection of our immortal
nature toward animal grossness will cause it to "stray downwards."
The text represents the human soul as beseeching the "Knowledge-Holding
Deities" not to let it drift further down, but to lead it to the holy
paradise. The soul exults that "These Knowledge-Holding Deities, the
Heroes and the Dakinis have come from the holy paradise realms to receive
me." The text traces the descent of these divinities who, false to
their oaths, fall
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from lower to still lower stages of
the Bardo, or world of dark embodiment.
A cuneiform tablet in the British
Museum holds a legend of the rebellious angels who broke into the Lord’s song
with impious shouts, destroying the harmony, and who, for punishment, were cast
down out of heaven. They are referred to in the Book of Jude (Ch. 6) in
the line: "They kept not their own habitations." These in the Book
of Enoch are the seven stars which "transgressed the commandment of
God and came not in their proper season" (Enoch 18, 21, 22). It is said in
the cuneiform text, "May the God of divine speech expel from his five
thousand those who in the midst of his heavenly song shouted evil
blasphemies."
Of tremendous significance to the
thesis that early Christian doctrine was intimately allied with and influenced
by the prevalent esoteric wisdom of environing cults, is a fragment called the Naasene
Hymn, preserved by Hippolytus (Haer. V. 5). After describing the
woes and sufferings of the human soul during its wanderings on earth, the hymn
continues:
But Jesus said: Father, Behold
A war of evils has arisen upon
earth;
It comes from thy breath and ever
works;
Man strives to shun this bitter
chaos,
But knows not how he may pass
(safely) through it;
Therefore, do thou, O Father, send
me;
Bearing thy seals I will descend (to
earth);
Throughout the ages I will pass;
All mysteries I will unfold,
All forms of Godhead I will unveil,
All secrets of thy holy path
Styled Gnosis (knowledge) I will
impart (to man).
The Jesus character alluded to here
is, it seems certain, the Gnostic Jesus, or Ieou, whom we shall see is
traceable to Egyptian origins many centuries B.C. Scholars will haggle over the
question of the date of the hymn, whether A.D. or B.C. The possibility that it
dates B.C. has already been repudiated with great speciousness.9 The name
Naasene, of apparently Ophite connection, seems to have etymological relation
to both the names of Essene and Nazarene. If an Essene production it could
109
readily be given a B.C. placing
without violent improbability. There is evidence that cults of Nazarenes (Nazaraioi)
teaching Egypto-Gnostic Christolatry antedated the coming of the Gospel Jesus.
The Ophites (serpent-symbolizers, not serpent-worshipers) were a Gnostic sect
of early Christianity, later persecuted as heretics, who believed in a
spiritual Christ-Aeon that descended into the material chaos to assist Sophia
(Wisdom) in her efforts to emancipate the soul from the bondage of the flesh.
Turning to the material of Egypt we
find the descent traced unmistakably in a thousand references. The conception
is so pervading that all three persons of the Egyptian Trinity, Isis, Osiris
and Horus, are represented as descending to the nether earth. Osiris, the
Father God, descends, is cut to pieces by Sut (Satan) and the fragments of his
body scattered over the earth. Isis, the Mother, descends to earth to search
for the fragments. Horus, the Son, comes down in the identical character as the
Christian Jesus in the advent at Christmas as the bringer of peace. As Jesus
descends into hell (Apostles’ Creed), so Horus came from heaven into the
realm of darkness as the light of the world. It is said that he descends into
the funeral land, the abode of darkness and of death. The Speaker in the
Egyptian Ritual (representing always the human soul) says: "I have
come upon this earth, and I take possession of it with my two feet." It is
said that Osiris goes down into Tattu (another name for Amenta) and finds there
the soul of the sun, and is united thereto. The Manes (again the human soul)
says: "I am he that cometh forth by day . . . I descend upon earth and
mine eye maketh me to walk thereon." It is said of him: "Thou
enterest in to the place where thy Father is, where Keb [Seb, the god of earth]
is." Again: "Thou descendest under protection. Ra ferries thee to
Amenta." In the Ritual (The Book of the Dead) it is said:
"This is he who in his resurrection says, ‘I am the Lord on high and I
descend to the earth of Seb that I may put a stop to evil.’"
Such references to the advent of
divinity in the scripts of Egypt could be multiplied to great length. Likewise
the religious lore of scores of aboriginal tribes in all continents hold
multitudinous corroboration of the fact and confirm its status as the basic
datum of all religious construction. A hundred folk-tales begin with the coming
of some hero from heaven to earth, or with the flinging down of some object em-
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blematic of divinity. The variety of
symbols used is wide, and to one lacking the keys of interpretation,
bewildering. It is enough to say that in all such legends the idea of the
descent is central.
Looking now at the Christian Bible
we shall find in plenty the features of the same myth. Bible students are not
generally aware of the directness with which the descent of the gods to earth
is there told. There is first the well-known declaration of God himself
(distorted into a reference to the historical Jesus) that he sent his
only-begotten son into the world that all believers might have everlasting
life. Then there is the remarkable pronouncement in the Gospel of John (3):
"No man ascendeth into heaven but he that cometh down from heaven."
From Luke (19:10) we have: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to
save that which is lost." Then there is Jesus’ direct statement to his
disciples: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above." The Lord’s
affirmation that he laid down his life for his sheep surely means not that he
was immolated on a wooden cross, but that he resigned his celestial life to
endure the burden of the cross (of flesh and matter). The Apocalyptist’s vision
of the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven is a reference to the
descent of divinity in its fragmented form. The line that follows--"Behold
the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them . . . and God
himself shall be with them and he shall be their God" (Rev. 21:1),
is to the same effect. Jesus declares that he came from the Father into the
earth.
Lifting from the term Christos the
Christian limitation of its personification in the body of the historical
Jesus, and reading for this distorted meaning the idea of the gods incarnated
distributively in all men, it is possible to discern allusions to the descent
all through the Bible. Though not so immediately obvious, the Lukan account
which states that Jesus came down from the mount and "stood on a level
place" (Ch. 6:17) before he delivered the Sermon, is another indirect
allusion to the same fact. For the Pistis Sophia, the Gnostic Gospel,
states that Jesus preached his discourse to his disciples "in the midst of
Amenta"! Later comparison of many texts discloses the surprising fact that
both the mount and the level plain, whereon the Sermon was delivered in the
Gospels, are diverse forms of the same symbolism! Both refer to our earth,
under the terms of equinoctial symbolism. The "mount" in the mythos
was never in any sense an earthly elevation. Paul in one passage propounds
the logical problem, which should have
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been given consideration,
analogically, by our scientists,--how we can envisage the resurrection without
the postulation of a previous descent from heaven. He asks (Ephesians
4:9): "Now he that ascended, what is it but that he also descended
first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also
that ascended far above all heavens. . . ." The pertinence of this
material for science is that science has studied life as in evolution without
having postulated a necessary involution antecedently! Science must meet
Paul’s significant query. Likewise must theology restore to its high place the
doctrine of the descent.
Symbolizing the divine nature as
bread for man, John gives Jesus’ announcement of his descent (6:47, 48) :
"I am the bread of life . . . such is the bread that came down from
heaven, that a man shall eat of it and shall not die." The general
allegorism of scattering or sowing seed is employed to depict the Platonic
"distribution of divinity" among men. In the parable of the sower we
have a portraiture of the partitive incarnation of divine natures in mortal
bodies. The falling of the seed into various types of soil is a natural version
of the diversified embodiments the descending souls might have apportioned to
them. This interpretation raises the parable to infinite heights of dignity and
meaning above the feeble and ineffective rendering of uncomprehending thought,
which is able to see in the figured situation nothing higher than the sowing of
the "word," that is, the Sabbath droning from pulpits, impinging upon
different grades of mental acumen or moral character! The "Word" is
in no case the written Bible, even, but the Logos, or form of divine ideation,
powerfully stamped upon the physical universe by the deific utterance. No
student is in position to grasp the significance of the Logos doctrine until he
has mastered the principles of Platonic theology, as outlined by Proclus10 or
Plotinus. Christian interpretation has merely shuffled along in the darkness
without a light. "Like the streams in the circle of heaven I besprinkle
the seeds of men," runs a text in the Records of the Past (Vol.
III, 129).
The angels in Revelation pour
out the contents of their censers over the earth, granting a nucleus of solar
"fire" to each mortal to divinize him. As the Timaeus of Plato
reports, the deity was to furnish the collective seed of what was to be
immortal in humanity.
In Old Testament allegorism
the doctrine is found most unexpectedly to be the core of meaning in the
Abraham story. Like the Prodigal
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Son of the New Testament he
was sent out from his home, country and kinsfolk (in the heavenly Eden) to go
to a strange land (incidentally to the West, where was the Tuat, or gate of
entry to the earth!). There his seed was to multiply until it filled the earth
with his children, the heirs of supernal grace.
But the hidden sense of the name
Abraham or Abram has escaped notice, and it is of great moment, as are all
Bible names. Scholars may protest, but it seems obvious that the word is simply
A-Brahm, (Hindu), meaning "non-Brahm." Abraham, the Patriarch or
oldest of the aeons or emanations, was not Brahm, the Absolute, but the first
emanation from Brahm; the first ray, the first God, perhaps equivalent to
Ishwara of the Hindus. He was the first life that was not Absolute, yet from
the Absolute. He was to go forth into the realms of matter, divide and
multiply, and fill the world with his fragmented units. To return to Abraham’s
bosom would be just to complete the cycle of outgoing and return, to rest in
the bosom of the highest divinity close to the Absolute. Also he came out of
Ur, of the Chaldees (or Kasadim), which is another key word, since Ur is the
Chaldean word for "fire," the celestial empyrean, out of which all
souls, as fiery sparks, are emanated. Kasadim, or Kasdim, was a term given to
the highest celestial spirits, who fathered the production of the divine sparks
of soul. It is practically equivalent to "Archangels."
Then Abraham went straight to Egypt
from the land of Canaan, and his descendants were to suffer bondage in that
lower country. It is a crushing blow to the historical rendering of Bible
narrative to declare, on evidence that is incontrovertible, that the
"Egypt" of the scriptures is not the country on the map. It is the
term used in the allegories to designate the plane, state or "land"
of embodied life, life on earth. "Egypt" is just this earth, or the
state or locale of bodily life on it. It even at times connotes the physical
body itself, as in "the flesh pots of Egypt." Hence the descent of
Abraham, and later of the twelve sons of Jacob, into "Egypt" are
again the fable of the soul’s adventure here. If the term Egypt is taken as the
geographical unit, many passages in which it occurs will be found to read as
sheer nonsense. Had theology known that "the strange land" and
"the far country" were glyphs for this earth of ours, greater sanity
would have marked the counsels of ecclesiasticism down the centuries. If the
"bondage in
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Egypt, that slave pen," as the
Eternal repeatedly calls it (in the Moffatt translation), has been in some way
interlocked with an historical servitude (as may have been the case), it still
does not prove that the allegory intended to recount the bondage of a nation.
It was a bondage of spirit under sense that was thus portrayed. Many passages
from the Old Testament books refer to the Israelites as captives,
outcasts, expatriates and exiles, matching Greek, Egyptian and Gnostic
terminology, and alluding of course to the expulsion of the angelic hosts from
a celestial Paradise to a bleak earthly exile. The sons of God had to go to
Egypt also in order that fulfillment might be given to the hoary scriptural
line from the Mystery drama: "Out of Egypt have I called my Son." For
resurgent deity in the wandering exiles would eventually lead them back to
their home on high.
In Luke (10:18) Jesus says
that he "beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." As Satan is
identical with Lucifer, the bringer of deific light, or the god (collectively),
and the hosts of angelic souls (distributively), Jesus’ utterance is readily
seen as another affirmation of the descent of the spiritual principle,
eternally symboled by "fire" from heaven. Again, in the resurrection
scene "an angel of the Lord descended from heaven." Once more this is
not a fragment of veridical history, but another brief figuration of the
descent. In an Egypto-Gnostic fragment the same ideograph is repeated under the
double representation,11 when "the heavens opened and two men descended
thence with great radiance," and both the young men entered the tomb. The
seer in Revelation descries an angel in flight toward the earth and also
sees the holy city of Zion, radiant with the glory of God, descending from the
skies.
One of the Old Testament allegories
has to do with the Lord’s reminding Israel that he had "opened the doors
of heaven" and "rained down manna upon them to eat." As bread is
the Johannine symbol of divine nature on which the mortal race was to feed, so
manna in the Mosaic narrative stands in the same usage. There is reason also to
suppose that manna is cognate by derivation with the Sanskrit "manas,"
the principle of intelligence, which was the gift of deity to
"man." Its distribution over the ground in a thin layer like frost
and glistening white is a symbolism of the spirit, which comes to us in the
form of a distillation over the ground of our concrete experience out of the
brood-
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ing atmosphere of divine
super-intelligence. And all deity is described as shining with radiance.
A frequent figure for the descending
spirits of light is the falling star. In the Egyptian Records of the Past (Vol.
II, p. 16) the Speaker says: "The place is empty into which the starry
ones fall down headlong upon their faces and find nothing by which they can
raise themselves up." In the same thought the Chinese have a venerable
proverb which runs: "The stars ceased shining in heaven and fell upon
earth, where they became men." That the star as an emblem of the divine
soul is not altogether a sheer poetic fancy, is shown by the fact that, as
Massey points out,
"The Elementaries or brute
forces of nature may be said to have obtained their souls in the stars. Hence,
as Plutarch says, the Dog-Star is the soul of Isis, Orion is the soul of Horus,
and the Bear is the soul of Typhon,--Soul and Star being synonymous in the
Egyptian word Seb."12
In one of the addresses to King Pepi
it is said to him: "Thy soul is a living star at the head of his
brethren."13 In the texts of Egypt the evil crocodile, typifying Paul’s
"carnal nature," is said to swallow the sinking stars," the
souls that fall into the darkness of incarnation. Among the ancients the stars
that dipped beneath the horizon were emblematic of souls in physical incarnation,
in contradistinction to those that never set, which typed the non-incarnating
gods. Souls in incarnation were dubbed by the Greeks "moist souls,"
since they were immersed in the body, which is seven-eighths water by
composition. The redeemed souls rejoiced in the Egyptian Ritual (Ch. 44)
at being lifted up "among the stars that never set." Those condemned
to descend were represented as falling stars in danger of being devoured by the
open jaws of the dragon (of mortal life). This reptile lurked in the
"bight of Amenta" or the bend of the river "where the starry
procession dipped down below the horizon." The Swabian
"Lindwurm" was another form of the dragon that "swallowed the
setting stars." Indeed the entire myth of the casting down of Saturn and
his hosts was figured under the symbolism of falling stars. The dragon that
"made war with the woman drew down into his kingdom many of the stars of
heaven." One of the phenomena of the Crucifixion mentioned in Revelation
along with the darkness over the earth, the
115
veiled sun, the blood-stained moon,
is that "the stars from the heavens fell." In the same place we read
that "when the message of the third angel was sounded forth, a great star
went down from heaven and it fell upon the earth." Another star fell at
the sounding of the trumpet of the firth angel. The various legends, then, of
falling stars become invested with unexpected significance as being disguised
allusions to the descent of the angelic myriads to our shores,--to become our
souls.
But nowhere is the statement of the
descent of soul made more explicitly than in the very Creed of the Christian
Church, wherein the second person of the Trinity is described as he "who
for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven . . . and was
made man." Our material will show that the idea was common to many early
nations, in whose literature it is stated with more definiteness than in the
Christian.
If the descent was in partial degree
a karmic punishment for sin, an enforced expiation of evolutionary dereliction
in past cycles, as is hinted in Greek philosophy, it was also pictured as a
seeking of refuge or a hiding for safety. Some contingency or crisis in
celestial affairs, not fully divulged, made it both obligatory and advantageous
for the angel hosts to flee heaven and find on earth, or in "Egypt,"
an escape from danger involved in some evolutionary impasse. It is not
customary to think of hell as a haven, but certain implications in the old
theology require us to do just that. At all events the legend of the hiding
away of the young divine heroes is too general to be without deep significance.
Adam hid himself when the Eternal walked in the garden. Moses as an infant was
hidden in the papyrus swamps of "Egypt"; later he was hidden by the
Eternal in a cleft of the rock as the majesty of the Lord swept by. Jonah ran
and hid from the Eternal when first commanded to execute a mission to the
Ninevites. The child Jesus had to be hidden away from danger in
"Egypt"! The Old Testament Joseph went down to
"Egypt" to be saved from danger. Jotham preserved his life from his
murderous brother Abimelech by hiding. Saul was found in hiding among the
baggage when he was chosen to be king in Israel. In Egypt, Buto, the nurse,
concealed Horus, the analogue of Jesus, in Sekhem, "the hidden shrine and
shut place,"--our earth. Horus’ birth was in a secret place. A similar
legend is related of the mythical Sargon in the cuneiform tablets. He says:
"My mother, the Princess, conceived me; in a secret place she brought me
forth." The
116
supreme Egyptian Sun-God, the mighty
spiritual divinity Ra, says to the earth: "I have hidden you."14 He
says that in the "Egypt" of this lower world he had prepared a secret
and mysterious dwelling for his children. This divine dwelling created by Ra as
the place of protection for the elect, is called "the Retreat." Amen,
an aspect of Ra, was termed "The Master of the Hidden Spheres"; and
Amen itself means "the hidden god." In the Ritual (Ch. 22)
Osiris cries: "I rise out of the egg in the hidden land." Under
another name, Qem-Ur, he addresses the earth (Aukert, the underworld) as the
land "which hidest thy companion who is in thee." The god again
speaks of "hiding himself to cast light upon his hidden place." This
is the typical Lucifer character of the descending god, the Light-Bringer. He
hides himself in order, it is said, to perform there the "mysteries of the
underworld." "These things shall be done secretly in the
underworld." (Rubric to Ch. 137A of the Ritual.) Under the title of
Unas he "gathers together his members which are in the hidden place."
He says that he has "made Horus enter into the Hidden Shrine to vivify the
heart of the god."
It is desirable to search a little
more closely for the rationale of this hiding in the secret place of earth, as
the bases of the whole theological situation are involved in this dark
background. Two causes can be assigned for the descent, a normal evolutionary
one, and another rising out of the motives for karmic punishment for error,
stubbornness, pride or wrong. As to the first, the Greeks postulated the Cycle
of Necessity, which required that all souls or fragments of divine being must
pass through the round of all the elements, in order to embody in their
finished perfection the qualities of every modification of life. The second
cause is less philosophically rationalized and--hints are given us--grew out of
a special situation involving the recalcitrant behavior of twelve legions of
angels, who, in retribution for evolutionary irregularities on their part, were
forced into an earthly incarnation distasteful to them. In the character of
King Teta, Osiris is made to say: "This Teta hath detestation of the
earth, and he will not enter into Seb" (god of earth). There are also references
to the anger of the higher gods, enkindled against them. Plato (Phaedrus)
speaks of those souls who were "subject through the ancient indignation of
the Gods in consequence of former guilt" to severe penalties on earth. In
the Cratylus he concurs with the doctrine of the Orphics that the soul
is punished through its union with body. Iamblicus (Mysteries of the
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Egyptians, Chaldeans and
Assyrians, p. 133) states
that a partial motive in the celebration of the Mysteries of Sabazius was the
appeasing of "the ancient divine anger." Clement of Alexandria (Stromata,
III) preserves a passage from a celebrated Pythagorean, Philolaus, which
runs: "The ancient theologists and priests also testify that the soul is
united with body as if for the sake of punishment." The Book of Enoch points
to a motive for this punishment in that the deities "came not in their
proper season." It is given that they were ordered to incarnate at an
earlier period, when the bodies of the animal race were of a requisite
preparedness to receive the principle of intelligence, but that they refused
and in consequence were forced to descend much later, when the animal vehicles
were far gone in a state of degeneracy. Proclus in his Hymn to Minerva prays
to the goddess:
"Nor let these horrid
punishments be mine,
Which guilty souls in Tartarus
confine,
With fetters fastened to its broken
floors,
And locked by hell’s tremendous iron
doors."
Dante in the Inferno alludes
to the souls in bondage:
"Hither for failure of their
vows exiled."
There is ground for connecting all
this allusion to the penal character of our adventure on earth with the
oft-cited "rebellion of the angels." Theological students should be
more familiar with Plato’s version of the Demiurgic speech to the hosts about
to incarnate, the "junior gods," in the Timaeus. The Creator
covenants with them to insure their immortality, to support them with his
power; and then charge them to come to earth and "weave together mortal
and immortal natures." It is said they rebelled, procrastinated and, when
finally forced to descend by virtue of karma, missed the crest of a wave of
evolution that would have carried them more smoothly forward past a crucial
point. As it eventuated, their delay brought them to the earth when the lower
race they were to uplift had sunk back into brutal degradation, and their penal
infliction became the greater by the enhanced grossness of the bodies they were
to inhabit. Their proper season had passed, as say Jude and Enoch.
Strangely we find in an old Egyptian
inscription called "The De-
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struction of Mankind" a
parallel to this somewhat anomalous situation in Platonic systematism. There is
a rebellion against Ra, the Sun-God, followed by a great destruction and a
deluge. Atum-Ra had been established as the king of gods and men, the God
alone. There is a revolt against his supremacy. He calls the elder gods around
him for consultation and says to them:
"You ancient gods, behold the
beings who are born of myself; they utter words against me. Tell me, what would
you do in these circumstances? Behold, I have waited and I have not destroyed
them until I should hear what you have to say."15
The elder gods advise that he permit
them to go and smite the enemies who plot evil against Ra, and let none remain
alive. The rebels are then destroyed by being cast down for three days. Here
is the distinct clue to true meaning, for the three days are a glyph for the
time spent by evolutionary consciousness in the three lower kingdoms beneath
man, the mineral, vegetable and animal. And "destruction" in this
usage can not be taken as equivalent to actual annihilation or extirpation.
This latter point is an extremely important one, as it saves many a Biblical
allegory from utter perversion of meaning. After the exaction of the penalty,
the "majesty of Ra" declares that he will now protect men on this
account. "I raise my hand (in token) that I shall not again destroy
men." The similarity of this description to more than a score of such
narratives of the almighty anger against "a stiff-necked and rebellious
people," their being cast out from celestial court and favor, and the
eventual divine relenting and restoration of them to his providential care,
must strike any fair-minded student who has read the Old Testament.
It is charged that Job, when cause
is sought for his trial, had added "rebellion unto his sin."16 It
does not seem to be well known that the Old Testament contains an
account of the "rebellion of the angels" in the guise of alleged
Hebrew history. It is the rebellion of the "Sons of Korah," given in
the Mosaic books, and recalled to the attention of the Israelites several times
by the Eternal. It is told that at the rebellion the Lord caused the earth to
open and swallow them up. It should be noticed that they were engulfed by the earth.
It is known that two different groups of Psalms, thirteen to
forty-nine, and eighty-four to eighty-eight, are specialized as "Psalms of
the Sons of Korah." It is to
119
be remarked as significant also that
while swallowed up by earth, they were not destroyed! The rebel hosts, cast out
of heaven, were not annihilated! What can this mean but that the term
"destruction" is purely a glyph for the enforced descent to earth?
Here they could expiate their contumely by sojourning in the untoward conditions
of animal embodiment. Milton in the Paradise Lost, expresses Adam’s
surprise to find that his sentence of "death" for disobedience is a
long, living death, not extinction. The account of the Korahitic rebellion
expressly states that they were swallowed alive.
Happily Chaldean as well as Hindu
records reaffirm the correctness of our interpretation, for Massey says:
"The Chaldean and Hindu legends
know nothing of a human sin as a cause of the deluge. The sin against
the gods, however, is described as the cause of the deluge in the so-called
‘destruction of men.’ . . . But these beings in the case were elemental, not
mortal, and the sin was not human."17
This is quite important. The beings
were pre-human and angelic, not elemental in the theological sense. Their
rebellion, in short, occurred in heaven, not on earth, though indeed it has
been prolonged into the earthly life. They carried their rebellious attitude
down with them and exhibit phases of it to the present!
An Egyptian text says of the god Anhur
that he had seen the malice of these gods who "deserted their
allegiance to raise a rebellion," and "he refused to go forth with
them." Other texts contain references to "the children of impotent
revolt," and tell of their "inroad into the Eastern part of heaven,
whereupon there arose a battle in heaven and in all the earth." And
another passage alludes to the "carrying out of the sentence upon those
who are to die," and says it is "the withholding of that which is so
needful to the souls of the children of impotent revolt." The meaning here
is obviously their expatriation and consequent cutting off from participation
in the life of their celestial estate.
In general summary of this point, it
may be said that the implications and the moral of these traditions of
rebellious and outcast angels are these: our divine souls (for we are
those rebellious deities) fled under karmic pressure from heaven to earth, and
we have carried the same refractoriness down in our racial history. We refused
at first to incarnate in the animal forms, and we still are rebellious in our
refusal
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to take full charge and assume
complete mastery over the "animal" segment of our composite nature.
Hence the frequent injunctions in old scriptures to "kill out" the
lower elements in us, and such a statement as that in the Egyptian text of Unas
to "slay the rebel" in consummating our work of redemption.18 Angels
indeed were despatched to this realm, and their presence in the human
constitution accounts for the divine element apostrophized in all religion. In
the Epistle to the Hebrews (1:14) it is asked: "Are they not all
ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who should be heirs of
salvation?"
The next step in the unfoldment of
the theme is to establish beyond dispute that it was to our earth that the
descent was made. This is tremendously vital to true interpretation.
In Egyptian scriptures we encounter
the promise that "if Pepi falleth on to the earth, Keb [Seb] will lift him
up." Pepi here stands for the divinity in man, the god come to earth. To
him in another place it is said: "Thou plowest the earth . . . Thou
journeyest on the road whereon the gods journeyed." Here is identification
of the earth as the place to which the gods were sent to travel the road of
evolution.
One of the most conclusive
statements of this fact in Christian scriptures is that memorable passage in Revelation
(12:7-9), where we have a succinct rehearsal of the "war in
heaven" and the casting down of the angel hosts in the character of Satan,
as the dragon or serpent.
"There was war in heaven.
Michael and his angels went forth to war with the dragon; and the dragon warred
and his angels; and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more
in heaven. And the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is
called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world; he was cast down into
the earth and his angels were cast out with him."
It is of prime interest to note that
the war in heaven was continued on earth, as has been intimated before. For after
the dragon had been cast down to earth, he "waxed wroth with the woman
and went away to make war with the rest of her seed."
This can be seen as the confirmation
of the narrative in Genesis, wherein the Lord swore to place enmity
between the serpent, or dragon, and the seed of the woman.
In the Egyptian Ritual, in
the "chapter by which one cometh forth by day," the spirit of the
descending god pleads:
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"Let me have possession of all
things soever which were offered ritualistically for me in the nether world.
Let me have possession of the table of offerings which was heaped up for me on
earth." He asks "that he may feed upon the bread of Seb [the
earth god] or the food of earth." Proceeding he urges: "Let
the Tuat be opened for me. Here am I."
This is an announcement of his
advent upon earth, for the Tuat is the gate of entrance to Amenta. He is coming
to this world to feed upon that type of concrete experience which the
conditions here alone afford, under the name of "the bread of Seb."
Later, following his resurrection, he says: "The tunnels of earth
have given me birth." "I rise as a god among men," he exclaims.
If there are men elsewhere than on earth, they are not those referred to in the
old scriptures. He is described again as "Thou who givest light to the
earth" (Rit., Ch. 15). Again he says: "I come that I may
overthrow my adversaries upon earth." It is on earth that his opposition
is to be met and hither he must come to conquer it, for his undeveloped
divinity must grow by overcoming opposition. He is spoken of again as "he
who has caused the authority of his father to be recognized in the great
dwelling of Seb,"--earth. Another passage (Ch. 64) describes the lower
self in man as saying: "I draw near to the god whose words were heard by
me in the lower earth." As the god-soul descends he says: "My body
shall be established and it shall neither fall into decay nor be destroyed upon
this earth." His mission to earth is proclaimed as being to "vivify
every human being that walketh upon the regions which are upon the earth."
In another place we have a combined reference to the earth both as the
"hidden place" and as the globe where the young gods came to
progress. It is said of Isis that "she suckled the child in solitariness,
and none knew where his place was, and he grew in strength and his arm
increased in strength in the house of Keb," or the earth. Egypt will offer
us in later connections a superabundance of testimony to the thesis under
discussion, the relevance of which can not be so well appreciated until other
phases of the mundane journey of the god can be presented. The localization of
the place where the gods fell when ejected from heaven in the mythos as
being our earth is one of the three or four major postulates of the ancient
theology which this work is undertaken to establish, and its implications must
alter all religious construction drastically.
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The point was once known, but was
obscured by ignorant handling of the Gnosis and was lost. It is almost
unthinkable that it could have met such a fate when the Church had constantly
before its eyes the legend of Christmas, with its clear imputation of the
incarnation of the children of spiritual skies on earth. But the distributive
nature of the Christhood had been submerged, and the tradition of the fall of
the angels had been wrenched out of all relation to the Nativity at the winter
solstice.
The passage in Revelation (22:16)
that has left theological thought in such deep obscurity, may find acceptable
rendition of its meaning in the light of the thesis of the descent: "I,
Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the
churches." To apprehend the statement clearly we are required to read the
name "Jesus" in the light of its Gnostic meaning as an Aeon, or
emanation of divine spirit, an interpretation that is not at odds with its
usage in the Book of Revelation. Students have been impressed with the
evident resemblance of the Apocalypse to Gnostic literature, and one writer has
ventured the opinion that it could have been written only by a Platonist versed
in Mystery and Magian symbology. It bears quite pointed resemblances to such a
Hermetic book as the Enoch. The Jesus referred to in it obviously has no
identic relation to the Jesus personalized in the Gospels. His figure here is
of cosmic proportions and equates the stature of the Logos. His dispatching of
his angels to testify unto the churches can mean only that the Demiurgus, or
Cosmic Intelligence embodied in an exalted being of the hierarchy, ordered the
incarnation of the legionary hosts in the interests of the human evolution on
earth. The "churches" can by no possible sophistry be distorted into
a reference to the early Christian congregations. This would be to bring the
dignity of cosmic operations down almost to the level of the monthly meeting of
the Ladies’ Auxiliary! The "churches" were groupings or gradations of
spiritual beings at or near the completed state of human development, if not the
"ecclesia" or "assembly" of the divinized mortals.
Theology has never adequately traced
the course of the evolutionary processes by which the simple fact of the
descent of the angels for incarnation took on the character of a
"fall," with the implication of disaster. Says Cocker: "The
present life is a fall and a punishment."19 Many passage from the Bible
could be adduced to show that the
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incarnation was held to have
resulted in a fall or debasement of pristine angelic virtue. The Revelation apostrophe
to the fallen Babylon, the mighty, whose ancient glory had departed, giving
place to the glory of the Beast, whose courts had become the habitation of
devils, and whose fornicatory wines had made the nations drunk, is doubtless an
allusion to the situation here envisaged. To what else could St. Paul
conceivably be referring when, speaking of the Gentiles, he says:
"And they changed the glory of
the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and
of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things."
An earlier paragraph has corrected
the miscomprehension of the meaning of the term "Gentiles," which has
beset the theological mind for centuries. It would be illogical to ascribe so
dire an evolutionary degeneration to the mere accident of non-membership in a
religious caste, or nation of allegedly "chosen" people. The Gentiles
were the as yet undivinized "sons of men," as distinct from the
"Sons of God," or Israelites, and it was their unpurified natures that
dragged down the gods who incarnated in their bodies and dimmed their glory.
The Gentile is the man "from beneath"; the Israelite is "from
above," as Jesus affirmed. "The first man is of the earth, earthy;
the second is the Lord from heaven," says St. Paul. The immersion of the
latter in the bodies of the former reduced their originally vivid intelligence
to such a point of stultification that they sank by degrees under the dominance
of the sensual disposition. And here is found the conversion of the
evolutionary "descent" into the theological "fall." The two
terms Gentiles and Israelites can not be attached to any historical nationals.
Their employment by several nations was at first only an allegorical flourish.
The Greek use of the term "barbarians" and our own recent literary
use of the word "Philistines" somewhat parallel this treatment of the
word "Gentiles." The Gentiles were the party of the first part in
evolution, who drew down the gods and changed their glory into the semblance of
grinning hyenas, chattering apes, braying asses and rapacious wolves, in spite
of "broad oaths fast sealed" and a covenant with deity.
The advent of the Prometheans to
earth was the oblation, the divine sacrifice, the sacrifice "for
sin." Yet it is only a perverted connotation of the word "sacrifice"
that has caused this act of cosmic policy to be
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taken in the light of a
self-privation on the part of the Luciferian hosts. Few words of noble meaning
have not been touched by the disfiguring hand of low human understanding.
Sacrifice (Latin: sacra and facio) means "to make
sacred," and has no immediate correlation with the denial to oneself of
benefits. If privation came in the process of incarnation, it was incidental,
not inherent. The angel legions descended to make a lower order of life holy--"to
adorn what was below them," as Plotinus puts it. Their labor was to the
end of "sacrifying" a merely natural kingdom of life. It was to
sanctify with the gift of divinity the mortal race, and make it immortal and
divine.
This is not to assert that the enterprise
did not entail hardship. The labor of evolution especially when
self-consciousness had been awakened and the Ego became aware of his failures,
and knew that he bore responsibility for his conduct, is more likely to be a Via
Dolorosa than a path of roses. The reason for the accentuation of the
denial aspect of the sacrifice is to be found in the fact that the upliftment
of the lower grade entailed a long relinquishment of paradisiacal blessedness
for the spirits of light, and a quenching of their deific fire in the moist
humors, or "water," of the body. The adventure brought privation,
torture, woe. It was an exile from a home of beatific happiness. To be plunged
from a state of dreamy blissfulness into a state of dull realism and concrete
objectivity, where the golden glow of idealism faded from every sight, was for
them a dimming of the bright lamp of life. It was indeed a plunge from lively
consciousness into partial unconsciousness. It was an ostracism from heaven
into a long, hard and unattractive migration. They were to become colonists of
a strange, distant land, if not castaways on its unfriendly shores. Cocker,
already quoted, comments, in reference to Plato’s Cave Allegory: "Their
sojourn on earth is . . . a dreary exile from their proper home." Earth
life is only a shadow of reality. In Egyptian scriptures the holy city of
Aarru-Hetep (Salem) was to be built up by "the outcasts or the colonists
from Egypt." St. Paul states that "we are a colony of heaven"
(Moffatt translation). This is a clear Biblical intimation that we are
expatriates from a higher world. Greek philosophy and mythology are replete
with allusions to souls wandering on earth, exhiles from a diviner sphere. Most
of the semi-divine heroes had long journeys and crusades assigned to them. And
the Prodigal Son is of course the unquestioned representative of the exile’s
role in Bible lore. From the
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Greek philosopher Empedocles comes
the echo of the sentiment that the soul has migrated to a foreign country:
"For this I weep, for this
indulge my woe,
That e’er my soul such novel realms
should know."
Moses’ son was Gershom, which the
Moffatt translation gives as meaning "Stranger," with the
parenthetical explanation: "For I have been a stranger in a foreign
land."
In this connection there is the
possibility of a rational solution of the meaning of a text in the Bible which,
in its conventional reading, has proven a perplexity and a "hard
saying." It appears to be a stroke at the fundamental integrity of human
kinship, family affection. In Luke (14:26) Jesus tells the multitude
that no one can be his disciple unless one hate father, mother, brother, sister
and all kin. In the great Gnostic-Christian work, the Pistis Sophia (Bk.
2, p. 341) a text runs to nearly the same effect:
"For this cause have I said
unto you aforetime, ‘he who shall not leave father and mother to follow after
me is not worthy of me.’ What I said then was, ye shall leave your parents, the
rulers, that ye may all be children of the first, everlasting mystery."
In the light of the additional
explanatory material given in the Pistis Sophia and omitted from the
Gospel account, it is possible to see that this necessity of the disciple’s
leaving father, mother and kin and breaking all home ties in an apparently
ruthless disruption of the most commendable of earthly loves, bore no original
reference to human parents and kindred, but was another of the many illusions
to the expatriation of the angelic orders. This breaking of home ties occurred
in the celestial paradise, which in all portrayal is called "the
Homeland." To be a follower of Jesus in his mission to a submerged
humanity was to accompany him in his descent to earth from heavenly Father and
empyrean home. If religion had kept its original knowledge of our cosmic
errand, we could have been saved the perennial perplexity of wondering why the
Lord’s disciples are commanded to flout the tenderest of human ties.
Many of the allusions to the
children of Israel as exiles, captives in a foreign land, hostages and
outcasts, are made during periods when the historical Hebrews were not in
either the Egyptian or the Babylon-
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ian or Assyrian captivities, and
were not in any mundane sense exiles. Empedocles describes mortals as
"Heaven’s exiles straying from the orb of light." In line with our
thought are the words of the Christian Advent hymn:
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Nor less grandly true are the lines
of the "Gospel" hymn:
I’m but a stranger here;
Heaven is my home.
The various exiles, captivities and
wanderings of the children of Israel were not historical. They were symbolic
accounts of the descent of the twelve "tribes" of angelic spirits,
"chosen" by the higher Lords in heaven to come to earth and divinize
incipient humanity.
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Chapter VIII
IN
DURANCE VILE
Having established the place of the
soul’s fall or descent as our earth, the next task is to present the teaching
of ancient philosophy as to the character of the soul’s actual experience in
the dismal habitat of the animal bodies. Christian theology makes much of the
doctrine of the Incarnation, but a vast amount of primary knowledge that would
enlighten the mind with reference to this cardinal item has been lost by the
Church’s flouting of the early Gnosis. The doctrine has been to ecclesiasticism
such a baffling conundrum that it was shelved to a place of happy security in
the person of the historical Jesus. Indeed the evidence grows stronger, as
study proceeds, that the theory of a carnalized or personalized Savior,
comprehending in himself every divine attribute, became established in early
polity from the sheer fact of its serviceableness, it being found an easy
solution of many a knotty problem of exegesis to ascribe every aspect of
Godhood to the man Jesus. All divinity once safely localized in his person, a
hundred confusing questions arising from the entanglement of deity with mortal
flesh in all humanity could be summarily disposed of. Pagan philosophy required
the presence of divinity in every son of earth. But a decadent religionism
found the rationale of the situation too difficult to purvey to its ignorant
following, and the euhemerized Jesus proved an easy evasion. Was not Jesus the
only-begotten son of God? Insecure as this left the hierarchical status of
every other Christian, it was sufficient for pious zealotry. The Incarnation
was condensed in Jesus, touchingly born in the climate of tropical Egypt, and
heralded by a star which in any astronomical view whatever becomes a natural
monstrosity. All things considered it was a device of consummate utility to
consign the whole matter of the Incarnation to the distant and sacrosanct
person of the Nazarene. Beside bearing in his body the sins of the world, he
has borne also in
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his frail person the unsolved
problems of a blind and errant theology! The Jesus of Christianity was as much
an intellectual necessity to a befuddled ecclesiasticism as Voltaire’s God has
been to a humanity trying to rationalize the universe. To a theology plunged
into dialectical difficulties by its rejection of esotericism, a Jesus who
"paid it all" has indeed been "a very present help in
trouble." By cramming all the essence of divinity that came to earth into
the sainted confines of Jesus’ body and life, all qualms concerning the
neglected "Christ in you" could be overborne by a wave of the hand
toward the picture of the man of Galilee on the cross.
But pagan thought faced the
implications and the data of the incarnation problem squarely. A fragment of
deity was brought and lodged within the breast of every animal form evolved to
the verge of the human kingdom. The animal race awaited the implantation of the
divine spark, as their hope of a link with the order of responsible free agency
and self-conscious intelligence. They stood at the point at which physical
evolution could take them no farther toward mentality without the endowment of
a nucleus or seed of potential mind from the plane above. They awaited the
incubation of divine intelligence in their physical forms. The agents of such a
blessing were at hand in the legions of Asuras, who had evolved the desired
element of mind in former cycles elsewhere, but yet required some rounds of
incarnate experience to complete the perfection of their divinity. After
rebellion and delay they came to fulfill their cosmic destiny. We are
those "unwilling Nirvanees," those "junior gods," those
angelic hosts! By our coming and sharing our nature with the lesser creatures,
they, too, become the heirs of immortality; for the essence of which our higher
nature was nucleated is imperishable. If the animal could append it to his
being, he would be immortalized also. The Demiurgus in charging us with the
commission, assured us that we "should never be dissolved" (Timaeus).
The gist of Plato’s, as of Paul’s, writings is that man is a being compounded
of a lower perishable and a higher indestructible vesture, the two linked by an
intermediate principle which may be inclined to a union with either, and which
therefore stands at the place of the balance in human destiny. The fleshly form
was contributed by physical evolution on earth, but it was molded upon the
matrix of an emotional body of finer etheric substance supplied by the men of
the previous Moon race,
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or the Lunar Pitris, at the end of
their life period on our satellite.1 A higher race, concluding a course of
incarnations upon another planet of our system, Venus or Mercury, contributed
the mental or manasic principle, which was to control emotion and
sensation. And the highest spiritual node of being was the gift of entities
embodying the soul of the sun. We can see now why in ancient legends of the
formulation of mankind, the various gods are said to contribute each a bit of
his own nature to compile the final product, as in the Pandora myth. Manas or
mind was the intermediary between emotion and spirit. Spirit was to control
mind as mind controlled emotion. With the descending Asuras2 came potential
mind and the germ of undying spirit.
To present briefly the archaic
legend of the advent, the accounts relate that of the twelve legions chosen to
undertake the adventure in the far country, two were lost and had to find their
place again in evolution later. Of the remaining ten, one group of five
responded willingly to the order. They were therefore known as the Suras, or
"willing Nirvanees." They are the obedient elder brother of
the Prodigal Son allegory! But in their effort they did not descend to full
incarnation in animal bodies, but remained suspended, so to say, over the
earthly scene in what might be called spiritual bodies. They never reached the
flesh, never became the souls of fleshly creatures. They were obedient, but
never fully executed their commission. The remaining group of five legions,
profiting by their example, at first refused to run the risk of the same
abortive effort, and were known as the Asuras, or "unwilling
ones." (Syrians and Assyrians became their earthly counterparts in the
handling of the uranograph, the ancient "u" changing always to a
"y" when Anglicized.) However, they could not avert their destiny,
and reluctantly obeying, they succeeded in linking their divine principle of
intelligence to the mortal forms of the animal-men awaiting them. "The
underworld awaits your coming" is a statement made to them in one of the
prophetic books of the Old Testament. They were the younger and wayward
son in the Prodigal Son allegory! But they did go out from home, as the elder brother
did not. Therefore they were worthy of the fatted calf and the shining robe on
their return, victorious. The elder brother, though obedient, had not earned
the reward. This is the solution of the difficult situation in the allegory, in
which the sulkiness and apparent neglect of the obedient son who had remained
faithfully at home, have so
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universally defeated the exegetical
efforts of the theologians. The parable of the five wise and five foolish
virgins is likewise a glyph of this same cosmic predicament. For one of the
names of the Asuras was Kumaras, meaning "celibate young men,"
or "spiritual virgins." They are the "Innocents" of the
Gospel story and the Hamemmet Beings of the Book of the Dead. Their
virginity is by virtue of the fact that they were entities of pure spiritual
nature, radiations of basic Spirit, who had not yet had full incarnation, which
was ever symbolized as a "marriage" of spirit with flesh! They were
cosmically unmarried, hence "virgin" young men.
We have here a new intimation of
profound meaning back of the feature of the "virgin birth" and the
"immaculate conception." The virginity pertained to both sides, the
spiritual as well as the material. If the matter that was to give birth to
spiritual mind was hitherto unwedded to spirit, never impregnated by spirit, so
likewise were the spiritual units who were sent to be the
"Bridegroom" of New Testament dramatism to wed these
immaculate virgins of the material nature. They were yet "innocent"
of copulation with matter. They were the ones chosen to descend to earth and
wed material forms, inoculating virgin matter with the principle of immortal
mind. They were "young men" and "celibate." Beside Hamemmet
Beings the Egyptians termed them "younglings in the egg" and the
"younglings of Shu," the god. And they dramatized them as birds’
(souls’) eggs in the nest in the tree of life in danger of being devoured by
the serpent--of the lower nature! One Egyptian name given, in addition to Apap
or Apep, or Apepi, to the great Hydra serpent that lay in wait to devour the
Manes in the "bight of Amenta" was Herut or Herrut. Evidence that is
not lightly to be brushed aside in derision can be adduced in support of the
suggestion that the name Herod, foisted on this serpent character in the myth when
drama was historicized, is just a cover for the Herut reptile that threatens
the Innocents! The historical Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, was dead at the year
4 B.C. Christian chronology has had to shift the "date" of Christ’s
"birth" to the year 4 B.C. in order to be able to include Herod in
the story. But Cyrenius (Quirinus), the "Governor in Syria" at the
time of Jesus’ birth according to the Gospel account, reigned from 13 to 11
B.C. Will another shift of seven to nine years be made to include him?
The Kumaras in the Egyptian books
exult in their escape from the
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serpent threat with the cry:
"Apap hath not found my nest. My egg has not been cracked!" The
infant Hercules in his cradle strangled the two great snakes that crept up to
devour him, and both Horus and his cat symbol stand with feet upon the giant
serpent’s neck, the cat severing its head with a knife.
Thomas Taylor, the discerning
Platonist, states that we mortal men are composed of the "fragments"
of the Titans. In Platonism generally the Titans were styled Thyrsus-bearers,
as having "led the soul into the body," or "brought ungenerated
into generated existence." Their part in implanting the seed of
intelligence in man is poetically set forth in Proclus’ Hymn to Minerva:
"Invigorated hence by thee we
find
A demiurgic impulse in the
mind."
Massey tells us that
"in the Latita-Vistara eight
heavenly beings are enumerated as the Gods or Devas. They are the Nagas,
Yakshas, Gandharvas, Asuras, Garudas, Kumaras and Mahorgas."3
They are the gods who (collectively)
in Leviticus (26) say to the Israelites:
"I will ratify my compact with
you; I will pitch my tent among you and never abhor you. I will live among
you and be your God, and you shall be my people."
In this great enterprise of leading
whole and impartible natures into the realm of division and darkness they were
said to have established "the garden of the Asuras" about the South
Pole of the heavens, the Paradise of Yama, Lord of the region of death, whilst
the Suras, or unfragmented deities, are said to have dwelt in the locality of
the North Polar region, the fabled Mt. Meru, or Paradise of Indra. This
opposition of the two races of divinities, termed the War in Heaven, was the
celestial counterpart and prototypal aspect of the later struggle inaugurated
between the heavenly and the earthly elements in human nature when the Asuras
descended to assume physical vestures. It was the pattern in the heavens of the
war between the first Adam, or natural man, and the second Adam, or the man
regenerated by the infusion of a spiritual consciousness.
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The point now to be demonstrated
beyond cavil is that the incarnation was localized in the bodies of a race that
at the beginning was animal and in the end was to be human. The
"tabernacling with men" which the deities undertook consisted in
effecting the incorporation of their subtler faculties and capacities in bodies
originally animal. The ancient apothegm of the sages--"Nature unaided
fails"--must be given due consideration in the scheme of things and
accepted as one of the canons of understanding. It seems to introduce into the
system of evolution a bizarre and unaccountable factor. It appears to thrust
the causative principle of mind, intelligence, into the order of natural
unfoldment in a purely arbitrary way, such as science can not countenance. It
appears to make evolution jump over the gap between beast and human, and
suddenly presents man endowed with self-determinative intelligence with no provision
made for his having earned it in orderly development. But the ancient wisdom
does supply the link that to science is missing. It reveals the
irrationality of science’s attempt to account for the presence and growth of a
plant without permitting the assumption that its seed was first planted in the
soil. Science has been straining to explain the presence of mind in man without
knowledge of the ancient theorem that each kingdom serves as the seed-bed for
the generation of life of the kingdom above it. It has been searching for
formulae of explanation in total want of the understanding that
"one long immortal chain, whose
sequence is never-ending, reaches by impact with that immediately above and by
contact with that immediately below, from the very lowest to the very
highest."4
It is possible to discern a replica
of this same linkage of principles in the functioning of our bodily organism,
reaching from spirit at the top to flesh and bone at the bottom. Spirit touches
and influences mind, mind touches emotion, emotion modifies nerve impulse,
which affects the composition of the blood, and blood builds cell structure,
eventuating in actual flesh and bone. The spirit in the human body is like a
power current in a dynamo, motivating a dynamic impulse which reaches to the
utmost bounds of the organism. But man, like nature, is composed of a series of
structures of different tenuity, and each member of the series is a link in the
chain, bound above and below to the contiguous links. The interrelation of the
links is governed by the Law of Incubation, by which the seed germ of life on
the level
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above is deposited in the soil of
the level below, there to be hatched to new generation. In the Egyptian Ritual
(Ch. 85) the incarnating Ego says: "I am the soul, the Creator of the
god Nu, who maketh his habitation in the underworld; my place of incubation is
unseen and my egg is not cracked." And in the resurrection scene in
the Ritual the revivified Ego, figured as a dove, exclaims: "I am
the Dove; I am the Dove,"! as he rises from the realm of darkness wherein
the "egg of his future being was hatched by the divine incubator" (Ch.
86).
In the Pistis Sophia of the
Gnostics the doctrine of the incubation finds clear expression when Jesus says:
"I found Mary, who is called my
mother, after the material body; I implanted in her the first power which I had
received from the hands of Barbelo, and I planted in her the power which I had
received from the hands of the great, the good Sabaoth" (Mead’s Trans.,
Bk. I, 13).
It is of transcendent importance to
note that the Greek (Gnostic) work directly identifies Mary, the mother of
divinity, with the physical body! Let Christian theology be advised of the
long-lost truth of this matter. The mother in all ancient allegories typifies nothing
more than the physical body which in man becomes the womb or matrix in which
the radiant Christ-body of spirit is brought to birth. Is Christianity to fall
below heathenism in its inability to rise above the level of the symbols to the
discernment of the abstract truth behind them?
Proclus speaks of the soul having
fallen like seed into the realms of generation.5 Paul’s characterization
of the nature of man as sown in corruption is a resort again to the
imagery of incubation. The "junior gods," potentially if not yet
actually divine, were sown, planted in a soil prepared by evolution to nourish
their latent fires to expansion and full function, and this was the
incarnation. The "fleshly" connotation of the word leaves no doubt as
to the full reality of the process; the ground prepared was the physical body
of animal-men. The entry of these divine seeds of life and mind into each
animal form made possible for those creatures their transition across the gap
of the "missing link" to the plane of humanhood. The link between
brute beast and thinking man is missing on earth; for it was forged by
evolutionary process in another realm, on another planet, and transferred to
earth at a given critical epoch in mundane history. As Plutarch tells us, only
one fourth of man, his physical body, is derived directly from
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the earth; the other three parts are
brought here and linked to his material frame by appropriate affinities. That
this may not remain an insoluble enigma to modern skepticism about such things,
it may be said that each of these principles intermixed in man’s constitution
was the product of an evolution on its particular globe, and that, since these
globes themselves are but cells or organs in a larger composite living stellar being,
the possibility of their sustaining vital relations or co-operative linkage
in a common creative work is far from an unnatural presupposition. Science must
go several steps deeper than it has yet gone into the secret workshop of nature
before it can admit the legitimacy of such predications. Yet ancient
psycho-physics faced the problems of life with the knowledge that all living
organisms are concocted of a perishable material element and an imperishable
subjective element bound together in temporary union. When the corruptible
sheath fades away the imperishable nucleus floats free, persists and may later
be embodied in another form. Science is to be reminded that substances are the
more enduring in proportion to their tenuity, that "soul," as the
Greeks affirmed, is far more lasting than body. Hence impressions made upon it
are a more ineradicable book of life than any cemetery epitaph. Our emotional
body, our mental vehicle and our immortal spiritual vesture each brings the
record of its past indelibly imprinted upon the underlying etheric substance of
its composition.
From Greek Platonism we draw some of
the most direct and dialectically essential support for the thesis of the
bodily incarnation. From Olympiodorus’ Commentary on the Phaedo of
Plato we take the following:
"It is necessary, first of all,
for the soul to place a likeness of herself in the body. This is to ensoul the
body. Secondly, it is necessary for her to sympathize with the image, as being
of like idea. For every eternal form or substance is wrought into an identity
with its interior substance, through an integrated tendency thereto."
We are here enlightened about the
interior affinities which the two partners to the union manifest toward each
other, the bonds that draw and hold and eventually weld them together.
Another pointed assertion comes from
the Chaldean Oracles:
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"For the Father of Gods and men
placed our intellect in soul, but soul he deposited in sluggish body."
Perhaps we shall find nowhere else
so detailed and analytic a statement of the principles on which life and nature
regulate the metamorphoses which divine consciousness undergoes as it descends
the Jacob’s ladder from spirit heights to mortal sense on coming into
incarnation, as in a paragraph from Proclus in the quaint style of Thomas Taylor’s
rendering:
"In order likewise that this
may become manifest and also the arrangement, let us survey from on high the
descent, as Plato says, and defluxion of the wings of the soul. From the
beginning, therefore, and at first the soul, departing from this divine union,
descended into intellect, and no longer possessed real being unitedly and in
one, but apprehended and surveyed them by simple projections and, as it were,
contacts of its intellect. In the next place, departing from intellect, and descending
into reason and dianoia, it no longer apprehended real being by simple
intuitions, but syllogistically and transitively, proceeding from one thing to
another, from propositions to conclusions. Afterwards, abandoning true
reasoning and the dissolving peculiarity [analysis], it descended into
generation, and became filled with much irrationality and perturbation. It is
necessary, therefore, that it should recur to its proper principles and again
return to the place from whence it came."6
Nothing would so quickly aid modern
psychology to work for fruitful results in understanding as to adopt this table
of the successive "defluxions of the wings of the soul" in Plato’s
magnificent analysis. Surely the present status and modus of the psyche’s operation
are to be better envisaged if they are known to be the lowest and most darkened
activity of a spiritual intelligence that on the heights above functioned by
flashing intuition. Clearly outlined are the several steps which the soul takes
from piercing light into murky darkness as it descends into body: first from
identity with reality and direct inclusion of consciousness in it; then the
plunge downward into that form of intellect which apprehends by immediate
intuition; again the dip into the more sluggish processes of logical reasoning,
in which, the inner relations of things being lost, the mind must establish
them slowly by syllogistic process; and finally the dropping altogether from
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rational procedure into following
the lead of sheer sense and impulse of the lower nature. With mighty
realizations we are now able to see what St. Paul meant in saying, "Now we
see through a glass darkly."
From a dissertation on Theurgy translated
by the Renaissance Platonist, Ficinus, we take the following clear statement of
the gradations in the chain of the descent:
"So that all things are full of
divine natures; terrestrial natures receiving the plenitude of such as are
celestial, but celestial of supercelestial essences; while every order of
things proceeds gradually, in a beautiful descent, from the highest to the
lowest. For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of
things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed
under their various ruling divinities."7
From the grand master of divine
knowledge himself, Plato (Timaeus, xliv), comes the remarkable
declaration:
"The Deity (Demiurgus) himself
formed the divine; and then delivered over to his celestial offspring
(the subordinate or generated gods), the task of creating the mortal. These
subordinate deities, copying the example of their parent, and receiving from
his hands the immortal principles of the human soul, fashioned after
this the mortal body, which was consigned to the soul as a vehicle, and in
which they placed also another kind of soul, which is mortal and is the seat of
violent and fatal passions."
For sheer enlightenment these
passages are worth whole libraries of modern speculation. The lower soul spoken
of is the one which emanated from the moon race, and is, strictly speaking, the
soul of the animal, not the god-soul of the man. It is this lower soul, called
often the "elemental," the seat of the animal instincts, that the god
has come to educate, and in the same body with which it has come to dwell. When
Plato describes it as "the seat of violent and fatal passions," he is
definitely identifying our mortal tenement with the body of an animal. This
conclusion is strengthened by one of the Zoroastrian Oracles, which declares:
"The wild beasts of the earth shall inhabit thy vessel."8
Edward Carpenter, in reviewing the
multifarious forms of the "sacrifice" doctrine in religions, says
that "Brahma, . . . Indra, Soma, Hari and other gods, became incarnate in
animals."9 And it is not without extreme significance that we have
such a statement as the following from a scholarly authority:
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"The sense of an absolute
psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized
world, is hardly to be found among lower races."10
Naturally so, because the gap
between man and animal there is less wide than it now is in cultured
races. The animal did not at one jump land into full manhood. He was given the
as yet ungerminated seed of divinity to nurse within the depths of his own nature.
Only a tiny segment of the god’s life was in conscious manifestation in and
through the lower mentality of the beast at the start. The god could put little
of his full power and capacity into expression through the imperfect brain of
the animal. For a long time, or until the angel’s presence in the brute body
could refine the latter’s impulses and proclivities and increase brain
expansion, the deity could only lurk in the background of consciousness,
becoming what we now so ignorantly term "the subconscious mind."
There was obviously little difference between the first humans and the nearest
animals. The difference did not assume marked proportions until ages had rolled
by and the slow march of development had enabled the god to project more and more
of his innate endowment into the sluggish nature of the beast he was tutoring.
We have here, systematically propounded for the first time, the basic criterion
for evaluating the progress of human culture. Culture is essentially nothing
but the gradual modification of crude animal impulses into the gentler motions
of the higher self. Modernity has never concisely known the cosmic or
evolutionary foundations of this transaction. These lay hidden under the
rejected esotericism of Platonic and other arcane teachings.
The Bible sets forth the
implications of the incarnation in sensationally direct form in the Book of
Daniel. Addressing the king (always a figure for the god) Daniel tells him
that he will be taken away from human beings to dwell with the wild animals;
and he condenses volumes of Platonic philosophy dealing with the obscuration of
deific intellect in the descent, into the pithy statement, repeated three times
in the first five chapters, that "you shall be given the mind of an
animal"! An animal’s mind was given unto him and his dwelling was with the
wild beasts." Also: "He ate grass like cattle, and his nails grew
like the claws of a bird." (Incidentally, here is positive proof of the
non-historicity of Bible narrative, since these things did not happen
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to the historical King,
Nebuchadnezzar!) But the Paradise lost in the incarnation was regained in the
end, for finally, "When the time was over, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up my
eyes unto heaven; my reason returned unto me, and I blessed the Lord,
praising him and honoring him forever." The period of the duress in animal
habitat is given as "seven years," each cycle of incarnate life being
completed in seven ages! And all the mighty meaning of this grand allegory was
missed because Nebuchadnezzar was taken for an historical personage, instead of
a figure for the god in man.
Egypt furnishes us with one of the
most direct and indubitable bits of testimony to the animal incarnation of the
soul in one of the numberless prayers addressed to Osiris:
"Hail, Osiris Khenti-Amentiu
(Lord of Amenta)! Thou art the Lord of millions of years, the lifter-up of
wild animals, the Lord of cattle; . . ."
As Amenta is the region in which the
Osiris-soul contacts the body, the verse is of surpassing meaning in this
connection.
Massey writes in The Natural
Genesis (Vol. I, p. 71):
"A very comprehensive
designation for the divinities of all kinds, says Gill (Myths and Songs, p.
34), is the Mangaian ‘te anau tuarangi,’ the heavenly family. This
‘celestial race includes rats, lizards, beetles, sharks and several kinds of
birds. The supposition was that the heavenly family had taken up their abode
in these birds and fishes.’"
"Plutarch refers to the idea
‘that the Gods, being afraid of Typhon; did, as it were, hide themselves in the
bodies of ibises, dogs and hawks,’ and repudiated it as ‘foolery beyond
belief.’ This, however, is a matter of interpretation. We know that such
representations were part of the drama of the Mysteries. Many descriptions
might be quoted to show that in their religious ceremonies, the actors
performed their masquerade in the guise of animals."
We have here a sterling clue to the
lost meaning of most of the weird ritualism still carried out in our celebration
of Hallowe’en. The importance and gripping significance of this remnant of
ancient symbolic dramatism is not dreamed of today. The masks worn were
originally those of animal faces or hides. The festival, coming at the time of
the September equinox (with a forty-days’ interval), when the sun, eternal
symbol of the divine soul, was descending across the line which
139
marked the boundary between
disembodied spirit and soul embodied, dramatized the entry of the god into the
animal body. "Mask" is in Latin "persona." The god
was then putting on the mask of his personality; and all the weird
capers, grimaces, horseplay and general buffoonery of the Hallowe’en revelry
most piquantly prefigure the deity’s ungainly animalish behavior when cavorting
behind the outward mask of the animal’s nature! The moon being the parent of
the mortal body, lunar symbolism was prominently introduced into the portrayal.
And all this is another strong proof that it was the primal religious ritual
drama that gave rise to social tradition and celebratory custom, and not
folk-practice that gave rise to the myth, as scholars have always so
erroneously contended.11
A patent hint of strong esoteric
significance is found in the following:
"Diodorus has it that the gods
were at one time hard pressed by the giants, and compelled to conceal themselves
for a while under the form of animals, which in consequence became
sacred."12
Here is straight anthropology hidden
under semi-fable. It is the true explanation of a vast amount of tribal custom
that has perplexed the learned world no end. Whole chapters of Frazers’s Golden
Bough and similar works, of which the authors have offered no rational
interpretation and believed none possible, become intelligible at one stroke,
and such a cultured people as the ancient Egyptians are exculpated from the
charge of crude animism and fetishism in "worshipping animals."
The incarnation was incontestably
the most fateful event that had ever taken place in the evolutionary career of
animal-man, giving him a status far above that of his former condition. It was
the far-away beginning of his apotheosis. It was his passport of entry into the
kingdom of mind. The folk-lore and Märchen of the nations carry the
story of this mighty crisis in evolution in an apparent mélange of
childish fancy, flippant caprice of invention and forms of the grossest
imagery. These seeming qualities have been the means of derailing the train of
our understanding of the hidden purport of the relics. We have but to use our
imagination constructively to see how mythography passed first into the realism
of dramatic representation, then
140
into legend lacking the original
spiritual meaning, and finally into a sadly distorted and barren folk-tale.
"Herodotus was told that the
Neurian wizards among the Scythians, settled about the Black Sea, became each
of them a wolf for a few days once a year. The Texan tribe of the Tonkaways did
the same, when, clothed in wolf-skins, they celebrated the resurrection of the
wolf from the Hades. The head of a wolf was worn in the Mysteries of Isis;
because the wolf (Anup) was her warder and guardian during the search for
Osiris in the underworld. . . . The candidate as the Loveteau of French Masonry
still enters as a young wolf."13
A Chinese remnant relates that a
maid conceived by air (the Holy Spirit!) and brought forth a child, which the
father then threw into the pig-yard! "It was the rightful heir, who
lived to become the monarch." If this seems tawdry and profane, let the
reader note the obvious resemblance to the Prodigal Son allegory and the
conception story of Mary.
The Shilluks have a tradition that
"Nyakang then created men and women out of the animals he found in the
country." The promise to mankind in the Genesis account, that the
human should be lord of the animal creation, ruler of the beasts of the field,
has obvious reference to the headship of the mental man over the body itself,
which would be assumed by the soul or god upon his entry therein, under the
terms of his covenant with Deity. His task in the incarnational assignment was
to tame, subdue, discipline and finally exalt the lower personality, which was
the depository of all animal experience in its soul,--our sub-conscious
mind. Passages in the Book of Enoch state that man shall dwell with the
wild beasts and shall subdue and overcome them. A verse in Ezekiel declares to
the soul: "I shall fill the wild beasts of the earth with thee." But
one of the most straightforward figurations of the incarnation in all religious
literature is found in the Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans, an
apocryphal New Testament Gospel, when the soul, speaking as one of the
characters in the drama, most beautifully poetizes his nature and mission in
this remarkable utterance: "Suffer me to be food to the wild beasts, by
whom I shall attain unto God. For I am the wheat of God, and I shall be ground
between the teeth of the wild animals that I may be found the pure bread of
Christ." The crushing of wheat into flour for bread was a
141
widely used symbol of the fragmentation
of unitary deity consequent upon his descent into bodies. The statement here
that the crushing was done by the teeth of the wild beasts is beyond cavil a
positive reference to the animal embodiment. And the added information that by
such lowly incarnation the soul shall attain unto God should restore to
theology the lost conception of the importance of the bodily life.
The Bible’s declaration that we
"shall be as sheep among wolves" is a slanting hint at the picture of
the gentle Christ spirit tenanting the bodies of the wild beasts of earth! And
the scene of Daniel, the man of God, in the lion’s den, is another suggestion
that the soul may safely reside in the animal’s body or "den," if it
holds true to its divine ideal.
An Egyptian text addresses Thoth as
"he who sendeth forth his heart to dwell in his body." Another
presents us with a definite corroboration of the incarnation thesis. It speaks
of Annu (in this case our earth) as "the land wherein souls are joined
unto their bodies even in thousands."
An Arunta legend describes the
animistic powers attributed to beings as the "ancestors who reproduce
themselves by incorporation in the life on earth in the course of becoming men
or animal."
It was the fundamental Egyptian
conception that the god, on descending to earth, became "fleshed."
The word Karas, which was used to designate the mummy, is traced to the
Greek kreas, flesh. The taking on of a carnal form was in its true
connotation the mummification of the Osiris or spirit.14 An Egyptian text
asserts most positively the union of soul and body. Chapter 163 of the Ritual
says: "Let his soul have its being within his body, and let his body
have its being within his soul." And another chapter (89) is entitled
"the chapter by which the soul is united to the body." This can not
mean the dead body, since obviously the soul is separated from, not united
with, the cadaver. It can mean nothing but the conjunction of the incoming soul
with the body at birth or a little later.
The amassing of so much data in
support of the Incarnation, a doctrine of theology that is still included in
ecclesiastical acceptance, may appear a labor of supererogation. Far from it.
The data presented have been assembled with the purpose of restoring the dogma
to its pivotal place of importance in the theological temple. It has been so
viciously emasculated that a mass of testimony as to its original cardinal
utility had to be adduced, if it is to be re-established in its rugged pristine
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meaning. Mankind works blindly at
the main problem confronting it so long as this doctrine is obscured. It was
never intended to mean that the whole of the power of the Logos was crowded
into the admittedly limited area of a single personality. It was not accepted
in this light by the intelligent Fathers of the early Church, such as Clement
and Origen; for they are on record as expressly repudiating such an
eventuality. They regarded a personalized embodiment of deity as infinitely
degrading to the Logos, verily a blasphemy.
Furthermore how can we understand
Paul’s preachment of the warfare between carnal and spiritual natures unless we
are assured that soul and flesh were conjoined in intimate and affective
relationship? If theology is to rise again to benignant influence, it must be
mounted again upon its ancient bases of anthropology. If the advent, the
incarnation, the birth, the temptation, the baptism, transfiguration,
crucifixion and resurrection can not be shown to be the type of our own actual
experience in present living, the temple of theology can not be expected to be
rebuilt on a foundation of mystical sentiment alone. If the cosmological and
anthropological aspects of the original esotericism had not been disdained,
theology would not now stand in such forlorn case before a world styling itself
intelligent. Thrown down from her pedestal of ancient dignity, she lies
prostrate in the courtyard of the Church, and the busy populace hurrying by on
worldly bent mocks her or heeds her not. She has no place in the hall of
science, no true home in the human heart. Hardly even in the somber pulpit does
she stand in honor. Her only place is in the dim and darksome alcoves of the
ecclesiastic’s library; and priestly zeal essays in vain to win back for her
the departed power.
On this score it is desirable to
give assent to one or two of Massey’s discerning judgments before passing on to
the corollaries of the doctrine:
"The doctrine of the
incarnation had been evolved and established in the Osirian religion at least
four thousand years, and possibly ten thousand years, before it was purloined
and perverted in Christianity."15
"The legend of the voluntary
victim who in a passion of divinest pity became incarnate and was clothed in
human form and feature for the salvation of the world, did not originate in a
belief that God had manifested once for all as an historic personage. It has
its roots in the remotest past. The same legend was repeated in many lands with
a change of name, and
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at times of sex, for the sufferer,
but none of the initiated in the esoteric wisdom ever looked upon the Kamite
[Egyptian] Iusa, or Gnostic Horus, Jesus, Tammuz, Krishna, Buddha, Witoba, or
any other of the many saviors as historic in personality, for the simple reason
that they had been more truly taught."16
The incarnation, however, only
begins the impartation of deity to the human race. It inaugurated on the planet
a chain of events, the circumstances and trend of which must now be outlined.
All of these involvements are profoundly relevant to the system of theology.
Greek philosophy viewed the descent
and incarnation of the gods as entailing upon these exalted beings an almost
total loss of their pristine glory and felicity, and a devastating reduction of
their coefficient of consciousness. The soul became "cribbed, cabined and confined"
in the sorry limitations of the carnal body, as it lost a dimension of
consciousness at each step on the downward path. It becomes bound to the
sensual and the palpable, after having been able to range at will throughout
the limitless spaces of universal thought. It is impossible to surpass in
lucidity the language of Greek philosophy in delineating these matters.
Proclus, as reported by Iamblichus, avers that17
"the soul by descending into
the realms of generation, resembles a thing broken and relaxed. . . . Hence the
soul energizes partially and not according to the whole of itself . . . the
intellectual part of it is fettered . . . but the doxastic18 sustains many
fractures and turnings."
Proclus elucidates Plato’s findings
to the effect that
"it is impossible while here,
to lead a theoretic life in perfection, as is evident from the causes which are
enumerated in the Phaedo, viz., the occupations and molestations of the
body, which do not suffer us to energize theoretically without impediment and
disturbance."19
And his fellow-Platonist, the
learned Iamblichus, adds a forceful assertion of the same idea:
"For the human soul is
contained by one form and is on all sides darkened by body, which he who
denominates the River of Negligence or the Water of Oblivion, or ignorance and
delirium, or a bond through passions, will not by such appellations
sufficiently express its turpitude. How therefore is it possible that the soul
which is detained by so many evils can ever become sufficient to an energy of this
kind?"20
144
Empedocles, evidently drawing his
philosophical ideas from Orphic Mystery cultism, has a poem, a fragment of
which speaks of the "joyless region" in which the souls on earth
"Through Ate’s meads and
dreadful darkness stray."
The soul descends from the realms of
light to the region of gloom:
"She flies from deity and
heavenly light
To serve mad Discord in the realms
of night."
A dialectical echo of Plato’s Cave
Myth is heard seven centuries after the Republic was written, in the
language of the great Plotinus, mystic Neo-Platonist of the third century.
Dealing with the fable of Narcissus and elucidating its hidden purport, he
says:
"Hence, as Narcissus, by
catching at the shadow, plunged in the stream and disappeared, so he who is
captivated by beautiful bodies, and does not depart from their embrace, is
precipitated, not with the body, but with his soul, into a darkness profound
and repugnant to intellect, through which, remaining blind both here and in
Hades, he associates with shadows."21
In the Phaedrus Plato, in the
beautiful allegory of the Chariot and the Winged Steeds, portrays the soul as
being dragged down by the lower elements in man’s nature and subjected to a
slavery incident to corporeal embodiment. Out of these conditions he traces the
rise of numerous evils that disorder the mind and becloud the reason. Indeed he
shows with convincing dialectic that evil is just this breaking up of the
vision of whole natures into distracted particulars where the interconnection
of part with part is lost sight of. Evil is seen to be due to the condition of
partiality and multiformity inseparable from the incarnate state, "into
which we have fallen by our own fault." The rational element, formerly in
full function, now falls asleep. Life is thereupon more generally swayed by the
inclinations of the sensual part. Man becomes the slave of sense, the sport of
phantoms and illusions. This is the realm in which Plato’s noesis, or
godlike intellect, ceases to operate for our guidance and we are dominated by doxa,
or "opinion."22 This state of mental dimness is the true
"subterranean cave" of the Platonic myth, in which we see only
shadows, mistaking them for reality.
Thomas Taylor’s clear language
enforces these ideas for our benefit:
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"Such indeed is the wretched
situation of the soul when profoundly merged in a corporeal nature. She not
only becomes captive and fettered, but loses all her original splendor; she is
defiled with the impurity of matter; and the sharpness of her rational sight is
blunted and dimmed through the thick darkness of a material night."23
Proclus, an expounder of Plato rated
nearly equal with his great inspirer, writes:
"when it [the soul] energizes
according to nature, it is superior to the influence of Fate, but when it falls
into sense and becomes irrational and corporeal, it follows the natures that
are beneath it, and living with them as with intoxicated neighbors, is held in
subjection by a cause that has dominion over things that are different from the
rational essence."24
Indeed we have here the Greek
philosophical root of one of the pivotal phases of Pauline doctrine. It was the
descent and mooring of the soul "to the ruinous bonds of the body"
that brought the spirit of man under the dominion of what Paul calls "the
law"--of Fate, Karma and Necessity. This, too, was "the bondage in
Egypt" of the Old Testament. On her own high plane the soul was in
a state of liberty, "the glorious liberty of the sons of God." Only
by her incarceration in a vessel whose constitutional functions were under the
laws of physics and chemistry was she subjected to the rule of matter. The
Greek philosophers declared that her release from this bondage was to be won
only through the discipline of "philosophy." It taught the earnest man
to abjure the motions of the flesh and to rise to the delight and freedom of
the noetic consciousness. Paul couched the process in the language of religion,
and called it spirituality or "grace."
"The dark night of the
soul," no less than the Götterdämmerung, was, in the ancient mind,
just the condition of the soul’s embodiment in physical forms. Taylor reasons
that Minerva (the rational faculty, as Goddess of Wisdom) was by her attachment
to body given wholly "to the dangerous employment and abandons the proper
characteristics of her nature for the destructive revels of desire." All
this is the dialectic statement of the main theme of ancient theology--the
incarnation of the godlike intellect and divine soul in the darksome conditions
of animal bodies.
The modern student must adjust his
mind to the olden conception--
146
renewed again by Spinoza--of all
life as subsisting in one or another modification of one primordial essence,
called by the Hindus Mulaprakriti. This basic substance was held to make
a transit from its most rarefied form to the grossest state of material
objectivity and back again, in ceaseless round. Darkness was the only fit
symbol to give to the mind any suggestive realization of the conditions of
living intellectual energy when reduced in potential under the inertia of
matter.
So severely curtailed were the
soul’s powers in bodily life that it was denominated her incarceration. The
soul was a captive, caught in a prison, the doors of which were clamped fast
upon it. Its jailer was the body with its sensuous nature. And like Paul in
prison at Philippi, the soul would have to convert her jailer and transform his
nature to the likeness of her own, to gain her release.
The implications of this cardinal
item for ethics, pietism and spirituality are of the highest moment. For all
such philosophies as Buddhism, Christian Science and Spiritualism (of certain
forms), which seek escape from the rigors of incarnation by a sheer fiat of
philosophical thought, and look to a disembodied state for immediate bliss,
this principle is very directly an antidote and corrective. It points clearly
to the false premises of all philosophies of "escape." We can not
escape our obligation to the animal who is lending us his body for our own
advancement. We came hither to transfigure these brute bodies, and such a
miracle demands the exercise of the highest philosophical virtues and the fixed
habits of theoretic contemplation of the beautiful and the good. Job asks if
the days of man on earth "are not the days of an hireling," and
declares that he has "found a ransom."
The Greeks believed "that human
souls were confined in the body as in a prison, a condition which they
denominated generation; from which Dionysus would liberate them." Their
sufferings, their progress through the ascending stages of being, their catharsis
or purification, and their enlightenment constituted the theme of the
Orphic writers and the groundwork of the mystical rites.
We have Proclus declaring that Plato
in the Phaedo
"venerates with a becoming
silence the assertion delivered in the arcane discourses, that men are placed
in the body as in a prison, secured by a guard, and testifies, according to the
mystic ceremonies, the different allotments of purified and unpurified souls in
Hades."25
147
Here is evidence that the Mystery
Plays were dramatic representations of our earthly imprisonment, with all that
was corollary to it.
Of our condition of bondage Plato
speaks in the following manner: ". . . liberated from this surrounding
vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an
oyster in its shell." It is Plato who states that the function of
philosophy is to "disenthrall the soul from the bondage of sense." We
are "captives chained to sense."
It seems never to have occurred to
modern classical students that the many descriptions scattered through the Aeneid
of Virgil, of shadowy groves, vales and caves, are allegoric of the gloomy
conditions the soul encounters in her residence in bodies. The woods whose
bristling shades terrify the hero (the soul) are the dismal murks of physical
incarceration. Physical imagery must be translated over into spiritual or
psychic realities. For of such matters only were the early sages discoursing.
Speaking of the removal of the junior deities from heaven to earth, the poet
writes in the Aeneid: "Nor do they, thus enclosed in darkness and
the gloomy prison, behold the heavenly air."
One of the Egyptian texts says that
it is impossible for the shade (soul) to leave the body on earth until the latter
is raised up. After the telestic or perfecting work is finished, it is shown (Rit.,
Ch. 91) that the soul "does not [any longer] suffer imprisonment at
any door in Amenta," this lower earth, "either in coming in or going
out."
David echoes the Egyptian idea when in
the cave (Ps. 142) he cries to the Lord: "Bring my soul out of
prison." In the great Kamite religion Horus, exactly as the Christian
Jesus, comes to "the spirits in prison" to set them free from bondage
and darkness and lead them to the land of light. The Manes, or soul in the
body, cries to the keepers: "Imprison not my soul, keep not in custody my
shade. Let the path be open to my soul. Let it not be made captive by those who
imprison the shades of the dead. O keep not captive my soul, O keep not ward
over my shadow" (Rit., Ch. 92). Says Massey:
"Horus is the Kamite prototype
of the chosen one, called the servant by Isaiah, who came ‘for a light to the
Gentiles,26 to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeons, and
them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.’" (Isaiah 42:7.)27
An allied appellation of the
"spirits in prison" is "those who are in their cells."
Horus comes to wake "those who sleep in their cells."
148
Again the Manes in the prison of
Osiris cries" "Let not the Osiris enter into the dungeon of the
captives." "Let not Osiris advance into the valley of darkness."
Osiris says to the warders of the prisons" "May I not sit within your
dungeons, may I not fall into your pits." (Ch. 17.) Osiris elsewhere asks
to be delivered from "this land of bondage." Sut, the personified
evil one as opponent of the deliverer Horus, is called "the keeper of the
prison-house for death," to which Horus comes as the lord of life and
freedom. Horus, as deliverer, is said to come "to those who are in their
prison cells," held captive by Sut. An interesting sidelight is thrown on
one aspect of the function of the Goddess Hathor, who was the "habitation
of the hawk, or the birdcage of the soul"! Hathor was the goddess
of material creation, to which the body belonged, and the hawk represented the
soul. The soul is caged in the body. The latter is even called "the
chamber of torture" in the title to Ch. 85 of the Ritual. In Ch.
164 it is promised that the soul "shall not be shut in along with the
souls that are fettered," and the prayer is uttered: "Let him escape
from the evil chamber and let him not be imprisoned therein." The title of
Ch. 91 of the Ritual is: "The chapter of not letting the soul of Nu
. . . be captive in the underworld." In Ch. 130 there is a prayer:
"Let not the Osiris-Nu fall headlong among those who would lead him
captive."
In the Egyptian fable of the lion
and the mouse, the mouse, a symbol of the quick energic life that descends into
the underground and lives in subterranean darkness, comes like Jesus and Horus
to gnaw the bonds of the great lion, here seemingly standing for the animal
soul in the toils of flesh and matter.
In the Egypto-Gnostic text, the Pistis
Sophia, there were twelve dungeons of infernal torment, in which the twelve
legions of angels were imprisoned. The souls could only escape by pronouncing
the name of the god who guarded each dungeon door. To pronounce a god’s name
was to become equal to him in nature.
In the Bible Exodus recounts
that the children of Israel, who are figured as these twelve legions of devas
"chosen" for the specific work of incarnation, "were groaning
under their bondage, and the wail of their cries for help came up to God."
The land to which they had been sent to work their redemptive errand in bondage
to the flesh was "Egypt, that slave pen." In Leviticus (16) he
admonishes them: "Remember, you were once a slave in Egypt."
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A passage from the Logia, or
recovered "sayings of the Lord," declares that "whosoever
followeth the Beast, into captivity he goeth; for the Beast maketh captive all
who so will to follow him."
Beside Plato’s immortal allegory,
there are many uses of the cave as emblem of the dark chambers of the body.
David’s pleading in the cave to be delivered from his prison is paralleled by
Osiris’ crying for deliverance in the cavern of Sut in Amenta.
Thomas Taylor expressly says that
the cavern was used to "signify union with the terrestrial body."
In the fables of the Hercules cycle
the hero (the soul, as always) tracks the Nemean lion into a cave where its
capture is effected. As it was in the body that the divine nature in man was to
"capture" or embrace the animal soul to lift it up, the cave
symbolism for the body is again indicated.
In the Egyptian Ritual (Ch.
28) the soul affirms: "This whole heart of mine is laid upon the tablets
of Tum, who guideth me to the caverns of Sut," or through the dark
passages of Amenta. The tablets of Tum are records of the law, or Maat. They
are kept by Taht, the divine scribe, in the Hall of Judgment. Thus to come
under the law (St. Paul) brings the deity to the caverns of Sut, the physical
body. Of Horus it is written again that he comes to awaken the "prisoners
in their cells, the sleepers in their caves."
As ancient burial places were
frequently caves in the hillside, we shall have little difficulty in tracing
the symbolic meaning of the cave in both the birth and the resurrection scenes,
not less than in the raising of Lazarus at Bethany, in Palestine, and of
El-Asar(us) at Beth-Anu in Egypt.
Another direct employment of the
cave emblem in Egyptian scripture is in Ch. 182 of the Ritual: "Taht
says: ‘I gave Ra to enter the mysterious cave in order that he may revive the
heart of him whose heart is motionless.’" As Ra is always the divinest
spirit, there is again a clear allusion to the god descending into the cave of
the body. In the Egyptian Bethany scene the "dead" soul is called
aloud nine times to come forth from "the mysterious cave." Massey
traces the word "cave" to the Egyptian Kep, which he says
means a secret dwelling. It is obvious that, whether this etymology stand the
scrutiny of linguistic scholarship or not, the mythologists of old did at any
rate conceive the body to be that mysterious hidden dwelling, that shadowy
cavern into
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which the legionaries of heaven were
obliged to plunge for added physical experience. With this point established
beyond cavil, one of the great stones in the arch of ancient interpretation
will have been put in place and one of the supports of the structure of a
correct theology will have been set up.
From the idea of a cave it was but a
short step to that of a pit. In Job a remarkable verse adduces the
theory that in sleep, when the lower mind is in abeyance, the inner soul, the
god, speaks to Job and admonishes him as to the fluctuating issue of his battle
with the flesh: "He keepeth back his soul from the pit." "The
Lord is gracious unto him and saith, deliver him from going down into the pit."28
In the Biblical account of the
rebellion of the sons of Korah, already noticed, it is said that they went down
into the pit in death, but lived on, as did the Manes in the Egyptian Amenta.
As the earth opened to swallow these rebels (ourselves), the pit is equated with
our mundane home. In the Hebrew writings the pit is identical with the region
known as Sheol, equivalent to the Greek Hades and the Egyptian Amenta. Horus is
cast into the mire of the pit.
Jonah, upon being saved from the
sea-monster, exclaims: "Yet thou hast brought up my life from the pit, O
Lord, my God." Ezekiel contributes a reference both to the pit and
to Egypt in a passage which appears to be beyond question a replica of the myth
of Joseph in Egypt. The prophet says (19:1-5):
As "a lioness she couched among
the lions and she brought up one of her whelps; he became a young
lion"--Jesus as lion of the house of Judah--"nations also heard of
him; he was taken in their pit, and they brought him with hooks into the land
of Egypt."
On this portion of Bible text Massey
comments as follows:
"The descent of the sun-god
into the lower Egypt of Amenta is portrayed in the Marchen as the
casting of Joseph into the pit, and the ascent therefrom in his glory by the
coat of many colors," adding: "in an exodus from Egypt which can no
longer be considered historical."29
In the Book of Hades (10th
division) there is a scene "of making fast the dragon in the pit,"
which is preparatory to the rising of Ra, or the birth of the divine in and
from the human.
In Revelation (20:2, 3) the
seer visioned an angel coming down out
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of heaven, having the keys of the
abyss, or pit, and a great chain in his hand, with which he bound the dragon,
the devil or Satan, for a thousand years, and sealed him fast in the pit. Horus
makes war on the powers of evil for what they have done to his father Osiris,
and calls to the gods to strike them and "punish them in your pits."
To them he says: "Your particular duties in Amenta are to keep the pits of
fire in accordance with Ra’s command, which I made known to you."
Let the reader estimate how far
theology has departed from understanding that these "evil spirits"
that were cast down and bound for a thousand years, or a long series of
incarnations, were the angels of light, denominated Satan because of their
rebellious and recalcitrant behavior under the hard decrees of incorporation in
beastly bodies, and that these fiery pits are none other than our very physical
bodies. Is not Satan equated with Lucifer, and is he not the Promethean
Light-Bringer?
In Budge’s account of the functions
of the ba-soul in Egyptian spiritism, he states that in the Papyrus
of Nebqet the ba is seen, depicted as a human-headed hawk, flying
down the funeral pit, bearing air and food to the mutilated body lying in the
mummy-chamber. Here is additional confirmation that the pit designates the
human body. Another Egyptian text, the Book of Am-Tuat (Division 20)
describes the mutilation of the gods and their being cast down into pits of
fire. Revelation tells of the horsemen, ten thousand times ten thousand,
going forth to battle with those forms which had come up out of the smoke that
ascended from the pit of the abyss, emitting fire. These may be taken as the
forms of evil generated in the struggle between the gods and the animals whose
natures are long in combat with each other.
Massey links the Egyptian Tepht, the
abyss, with our "depth." He equates it also with Tevthe, and
that with the Babylonian Tiamat, as well as the old Egyptian underworld
monster, Typhon, the Dragon of the Deep. As such it figured the original
birthplace of creation, and in a more human application it meant the human body
as the seat or birth-place of the spiritual life. For the body is composed of
matter, the infinite abysmal mother of all things. Typhon, who brought
forth her brood of chaos in the abyss, later brings forth the young Sun-god,
the divine immortal soul. The figure in this connection is common, we are
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told, in Akkad, China, Egypt and
inner Africa. It is but a step in etymology from Tepht to the Hebrew Tophet,
the dark pit.
There were said to be "seven
sons of the Abyss,"30 or the seven powers generated in nature, to be
matched later by seven phases of growth in the human constitution--the
ubiquitous seven in archaic literature.
The universal religious myth of the
descent of the solar hero, ever typical of deity, into some dark abysmal
region, emerging from it after ordeals of suffering, can have but one
explanation: the incarnation of the hosts of light in the dense physical body.
Another earthly figure much used to
type the dreary existence in the flesh was that of the "wilderness."
A variation of it was the "desert." The people in the Typhonian
darkness of Amenta were furnished a guide "through this wilderness."
The Quiché Popul Vuh portrays the ancestors of the race as wanderers in
a wilderness upon their way to their final homestead. A Hawaiian legend has it
that the progenitors "wandered in a desert wilderness until at last they
reached the promised land of Kane"--Canaan!
Numbers (14:33, 34) reads: "Your children shall
be wanderers in this wilderness even forty days, for every day a year."
The same book supplies another highly elucidative text (14:31, 32) which says:
"Your little ones will I bring in, but as for you, your carcasses shall
fall in this wilderness." The spiritual meaning here adumbrated is that
the earthly or carnal nature in which the gods took residence would be
conquered and disintegrated, or die, as the substance of the old seed dies in
the ground in generating its offspring, while only the new-born god, the
"little ones," the resurrected sons of dying fatherhood, would
achieve the spiritual homeland of Canaan.
Elsewhere the term "desert in
the Amenta of Egypt" is used to name the locality of bodily life. The
people there are said to "dwell in darkness and black night."
The wanderings of the Biblical
Israelites are a symbolic graph of this spiritual and racial experience, and
have no other meaning, historical or literal, whatever. Hagar’s fleeing into
the wilderness under the compulsion of her situation, is but another similar
picture of the same truth.
The hiding of the various Sons of
God in a mysterious cave or secret earth of Amenta is but the mundane segment
of a drama, the full
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action of which is involved in the
grand play of forces and sweep of relations in higher spheres, as to the
complete outline and significance of which we have not been fully informed by
the archaic writers. Earth, it is clear, is but an appanage of heaven, and our
history here is without full meaning when detached from its celestial base. The
old books of Greece, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, India are priceless for what they
give us of this material.
It has been impossible in these
excerpts entirely to avoid anticipation of the next symbol of earthly life,
darkness. The body was pictured as the abode of night and gloomy shadows.
We have noticed Plotinus’ statement
that in her descent the "soul was precipitated into a darkness profound
and repugnant to the intellect," which was obscured by it. The body is
"night’s dark region" and the soul’s "sojourn on earth is thus a
dark imprisonment in the body."
One of the riddles of Greek
mythology--why so intelligent a people as the Greeks symbolized deity as
Bacchus, the god of intoxication--is solved by the keys here presented.
Intoxication was used to image the befuddlement and mental darkness, the
scattering of the god’s high intellectual powers in mundane life. Says Thomas
Taylor:
"For Bacchus is the evident
symbol of the imperfect energies of intellect, and its scattering into the
obscure and lamentable dominions of sense."31
And Revelation declares that
even the Saints (the gods) have been made drunken with the power of the lower
contacts. Soul had been intoxicated with the wine of sense.
The body is thought of as actually
seizing souls. The Speaker in the Ritual cries to Ra:
"O deliver me from the god who
seizes souls. The darkness in which Sekari dwells is terrifying to the
weak."32
In this darkness Osiris suffers,
supplicating Ra for light. Ajax cries for light. Horus in his resurrection
rises "from the house of darkness." Sut (Satan), the twin of Horus,
is portrayed imprisoning his brother the soul of light, in the realm of
darkness. He is called "the power of darkness." A dozen sections of
the Pyramid Texts and the Records of the Past describe the
journey of the soul through a "valley of darkness." The place to
which the soul in the Egyptian scripts was con-
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ducted was termed "An-ar-ef,
the house of obscurity, the city of dreadful night." The mole or
shrewmouse was the animal symbol used by them to depict the god groping his
earthly way in an underworld region of darkness. Horus, coming as deliverer,
says: "I have sung praises unto those that dwell in darkness." The
chapter in which this occurs is entitled "the chapter of making the
transformation into the god who giveth light in the darkness." He comes to
set prisoners free, and also, it is said, "to dissipate darkness."
Incarnation being necessary for the higher birth of the soul, an Egyptian text
reads: "The soul is brought forth through the embrace of the Lord of
Darkness. He is Babi, the Lord of Darkness." In Ch. 175 "saith
Osiris, the scribe Ani: Hail, Tmu! What manner (of land) is this into which I
have come? . . . it is black as blackest night, and men wander helplessly
therein. In it a man may not live in quietness of heart, nor may the longings
of love be satisfied therein."
The very name of the great Egyptian
script, the Book of the Dead, hints at the realm of darkness from which
the soul emerges in its resurrection; for the title, translated, means
"The Coming Forth by Day,"--or into the daylight, ostensibly from
some region of darkness.
Our Hebrew and Christian scriptures
provide a multitude of fitting texts which might be used to enlarge vastly this
résumé of the old material that points to the earthly body of man as the
theological world of darkness. Notably there is that in Matthew (4:16)
which recites:
"The people which sat in
darkness saw a great light; and to them that sat in the shadow . . . did the
light spring up."
And is it not the universal prayer
of Christendom each Sabbath that the deific power should "enlighten our
darkness"?
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Chapter IX
ALIVE
IN DEATH
Such then was the archaic view of the
origin of the soul from on high, its fall into the darkness and distractions of
the body and its consequent submergence in carnal sense. And, drastic as is
seen to be the necessary rehabilitation of all scripture on the basis of this
revised understanding, it will be far overshadowed in theological importance by
a still more radical reconstruction arising from the ancient use of the figure
under which life in the body was mythically represented. For everywhere
throughout antiquity earthly life was depicted as our death! It is of
little avail that the portraiture be uproariously protested as not befitting
such a condition of vivid life as is ours in the body. We may indignantly cast
back upon ancient heads the obloquy of such an inappropriate metaphor. But our
repudiation of their choice of figure falls entirely wide of the mark as
affecting the meaning of ancient texts. The fact stands that they did call our
life here death, and that when they spoke of "the dead" in
sacred books, it is indubitable that they meant the living humans. The words
"death" and "the dead" are used in the old scriptures to
refer to living humanity in earthly embodiment. We scurrying mortals are
"the dead" of the Bible and other sacred books, and the "death"
spoken of there is our living existence here. We may reject the aptness of
their symbolism, but it is past our prerogative to read a meaning into their
books other than the one they intended; or to read out of them a meaning they
consistently deposited therein. The astonishing point, of revolutionary
significance for all religion, will receive textual treatment in the present
chapter, and a later one will further vindicate the correctness of the thesis.
It is perhaps the cardinal item of the whole theological corpus, the real "lost
key" to a correct reading of subterranean meaning in esoteric literature.
In ancient theology "death" means our life on earth.
Be the figure apt or be it
considered unthinkable--as it will be at
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first by many--the texts of
scripture will yield their cryptic meaning on no other terms. And the Bible is
a sealed book mostly because these two words, "death" and "the
dead," have not been read as covers of a far profounder sense than the
superficial one.
To be sure, it is death in a sense
to be understood as dramatic and relative only. And it pertains to the soul in
man, not to the body. Life and death are ever as the two end seats on a
"see-saw." As the one end goes to death the other rises to life. The
death of the body releases the soul to a higher life; conversely, the
"death" of the soul as it sinks in body opens the day of life to that
body. The theological death of the soul in incarnation is a death that does not
kill it in any final sense. It is a death from which it rises again at the cycle’s
end into a grander rebirth. It is a death that ends in resurrection. And
sixteen centuries of inane misconception of the resplendent glory of the
greatest of all doctrines, the resurrection from the dead, will be resolved at
long last into the bursting light of its true meaning when the dust of
ignorance is brushed away.
For animal man the advent of the
gods was propitious; indeed it was the very antithesis of death. The plunge
into carnality that brought "death and all our woe" to the soul,
brought life to the lower man. That was part of its purpose. The gods came to
"die" that we mortals might "live." They came that both
they and we might have life more abundantly, but at what cost to themselves--a
long "walk through the valley of the shadow of death." Theirs was the
death on the cross of flesh and matter.
The use of the term
"death" must be in any case a comparative one, for there strictly is
no death, in the form of total extinction of being, for any part of real being.
All death, so called, is but a transition from state to state, a change of
form, of that which is and can not cease to be. Life and death are eternally
locked in each other’s arms, for as Thales says, "Air lives the death of
water; fire lives the death of air," and so on. So body lives the death of
the soul, and soul lives the death of the body. It thrives by virtue of that
death. The germ and young shoot of any seed live the death of the body of the
seed. The law of incubation brings high deities into their Hades, into Pluto’s
dark kingdom. For the gods the cycle of incarnations was the descent into
hell--their crucifixion, death and burial, in all archaic literature!
The material demonstrating this
proposition must be of sufficient
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volume to obviate all doubt as to
its validity. Upon its successful vindication hinges the final determination of
meaning for hundreds of passages, and the ultimate interpretation of the main
theses of all theologies. As will be shown later, it carries with it the
purport of the resurrection doctrine, the cornerstone of religions. When we
come to that climactic doctrine, it will be possible to locate with exactness
what and where that tomb was whose gates and bars were rent asunder by the
resurgent Lord. Modern theology little dreams, to this day, the truth back of
its own mishandled, but still grandiose, symbols.
The incarnation, for the soul, was
its death and burial. But it was a living death and a burial alive. It was an
entombment that carried life on, but under conditions that could be poetically
dramatized as "death." Our inability to comprehend any but a physical
sense of the word "burial" has left us easy victims of ancient poetic
fancy, and led to the foisting upon ourselves perhaps the most degraded interpretation
of the crucifixion, death and resurrection of deity in mortal life ever to be
held by any religious group. Not even woodland tribes have so wretchedly missed
the true sense of the great doctrines. Literalism in this instance has debased
the human mind more atrociously than fetishism or totemism.
The textual testimony supporting the
thesis is so voluminous that practical considerations forbid its full amassing.
Nothing less, however, than the serried marshaling of much material will avail
to carry conviction to minds unalterably set to opposing views.
Proclus advises us that the
incarnating Egos were forewarned that their venture into flesh would be
successful on condition that they achieved it "without merging themselves
with the darkness of body." They were to make a magnetic connection with
the animal body by means of a linkage of their currents of higher life with the
forces playing through the nervous system of the animal. They were thus to be
in position to pour down streams of vital power into the body, but were not to
sink their total quantum of divine intellection into the sense life of the
beast. They were to hover over the physical life of the body, touch it with
divine flame, but not be drawn down into it. To fall into this dereliction would
be to sin, to lose a measure of their vivific life and eventually to die. For
there were always two deaths spoken of in the books of the past. It was death,
in the first place, for them to come under the heavy depression of fleshly
existence. This was the first
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death. But to sink farther down and
be lost in the murks of animal sensualism to a degree that made a return to
their heavenly state next to impossible, was to suffer the "second
death," of which the soul ever stood in fear and terror in the old texts.
The first death was the incarnation; the second was failure to rise and
"return unto the Father."
As Apuleius says, the soul, then,
approached the "confines of death." And on her approach, and at the
moment of her divulsion from her seat on high, there ensued an intermediate or
preparatory stage, a partial loss of consciousness termed by the writers a
"swoon." Corroboration of this experience is found in a very old
document known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead (44):
"In the Bardo Thödol the deceased1
is represented as retrograding step by step into the lower and lower states of
consciousness. Each step downward is preceded by a swooning into
unconsciousness; and possibly that which constitutes his mentality on the lower
levels of the Bardo is some mental element or compound of mental elements . . .
separated during the swooning from higher and more spiritually enlightened
elements. . . ."
This swooning on the downward path
to earthly death is likened to a falling asleep. Jesus’ assertion that Lazarus
was not dead but only sleeping, and needed only to be awakened, is a picturing
of the same condition. Incidentally the same thing is said of the earth-bound
Osiris in Egypt. "That is Osiris, who is not dead but sleeping in Annu,
the place of his repose, awaiting the call that bids him come forth to
day." Massey comments:
"Osiris in Annu, like Lazarus
in Bethany, was not dead but sleeping. In the text of Har-Hetep (Rit., Ch.
99), the Speaker, who personates Horus, is he who comes to awaken Asar (Osiris)
out of his sleep. Also in one of the earlier funeral texts it is said of the
sleeping Asar: ‘The Great One waketh, the Great One riseth . . .’ The Manes in
Amenta were not looked upon as dead, but sleeping, breathless of body,
motionless of heart. Hence Horus comes to awaken the sleepers in their coffins."2
Horus says (Rit., Ch. 64):
"I go to give movement to the Manes; I go to comfort him who is in a
swoon,"--showing the perfect matching of Egyptian and Tibetan
"necrological science.
The swoon attending each further
step matterward deepens by degrees until it amounts to the full
"sleep" or "dream" of mortal ex-
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istence, introduced by the incubus
of body upon spirits of light. It is the Oriental Maya. The vivid
awareness of existence which we feel so indubitably is to the ancient sages
only a dull slumber and stupor in comparison with that life of ecstatic realism
from which we were divulsed by the decree of our Fate.
Thomas Taylor expounds Greek
Platonism as holding that the soul "in the present life might be said to
die, as far as it is possible for a soul to die." He asserts directly that
the soul, until purified by "philosophy," "suffers death through
this union with the body."
We have the whole idea most tersely
expressed in the Gorgias of Plato:
"But indeed, as you say also,
life is a grievous thing. For I should not wonder if Euripides spoke the truth
when he says: ‘Who knows whether to live is not to die, and to die is not to
live?’ And we perhaps are in reality dead. For I have heard from one of
the wise that we are now dead; and that the body is our sepulchre; but that the
part of the soul in which the desires are contained is of such a nature that it
can be persuaded and hurled upward and downwards."
If incarnate life is the burden of
this death, then release from it must presuppose a liberation from the
thralling "dead weight." Our work aims to correct the misconceptions
that have vitiated previous studies in eschatology. Reputed savants in the
field give no evidence of having the remotest apprehension of textual meanings
pertaining to this phase of theology. Even Massey and Taylor have fallen just
short of that final step in comprehension which would have taken them into the
temple of truth, the threshold of which they never quite crossed. They knew
that the ancients styled this life "death," but they were unable,
apparently, to apply the connotations to the Bible and theology. The obsessions
of current thought were too strong for them, and overrode the logic of their
own premises.
The great Plotinus (Enneads I,
lviii) gives us a clear presentment of the Greek conception:
"When the soul had descended
into generation (from this first divine condition) she partakes of evil and is
carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity,
to be entirely merged in it . . . and death to her is, while baptized or
immersed in the present body, to
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descend into matter and be wholly
subjected to it. . . . This is what is meant by the falling asleep in Hades,
of those who have come there."
It is worth noting that he uses the
word "baptized" to describe incarnation. To incarnate was to be
plunged into the watery condition of the body! This is the whole of the meaning
of the baptism in ancient theology!
To the above may be added a
supplement from Pythagoras, according to Clement, "that whatever we see when
awake is death; and when asleep a dream."
It is sometimes true that archaic
usage of the word "death" makes it cover the period following the
occurrence of death in its common meaning, the demise of the body. Incarnation
was regarded as a continuing experience, the periodical rhythm of release from
the body no more breaking the sequence of lives than does our nightly sleep
break the continuity of the experience of the days. But as our waking days are
the important parts of our earthly activity, the nights being but interludes of
repose and renewals of strength, so the positive incarnate periods of our
larger lives are the primarily significant phases of our mundane history. The
ancient seers both knew more about the subjective experiences of the soul when
out of the body and were less concerned with them than modern Spiritualists.
They regarded the phenomena of discarnate manifestation as but the more or less
automatic reaction of the soul to the sum of its impressions in its last
incarnation, a kind of reflex, threshing over the events of the life just
closed. They would have regarded it as preposterous to use the vaporings of the
spirits for the tenets of a religion. They were but the products of a mental
automatism set up by the engrossments of the last life. The post mortem existence
of the soul was only the hidden side of the life on earth, and regarded as
comparatively inconsequential to the larger processes of conscious living.
Theologically, "death" was the bodily life on earth, but comprising
its two aspects of sleeping and waking, living and dying, in its comprehensive
unity. Activity in the body during the waking phase of the "death"
was alone determinative of destiny. By unfortunate diversion of the original
cryptic sense, the unimportant portion of the experience, the interlude between
lives, became the locale to which practically all religious values were shunted
when esoteric knowledge was lost. The meaning of all religion has in consequence
161
fled from earth, where it properly
belongs and where alone its true value is realized, to heaven, where present
focusing of meaning has little utility for man.
Taylor quotes the priests as
testifying "that the soul is buried in body as in a sepulchre."3
Alexander Wilder, in a note to Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p.
31), comments:
"Hades . . . supposed by
classical students to be the region or estate of departed souls, . . . is
regarded by Mr. Taylor and other Platonists as the human body, which they
consider to be the grave and place of punishment for the soul."
Virgil adds significant testimony.
In the Aeneid, writing of that "interior spirit" which
sustains the heavens and earth, men and beasts, "the vital souls of birds
and the brutes," he continues:
"In whom all is a potency . . .
and a celestial origin as the rudimentary principles, so far as they are not
clogged by noxious bodies. They are deadened by earthly forms and members subject
to death; hence they fear and desire, grieve and rejoice."
Plato’s able expounder Proclus,
writing that the soul brings life to the body, says that
"she becomes herself situated
in darkness; and by giving life to the body, destroys both herself and her own
intellect (in as great a degree as these are capable of receiving destruction).
For thus the mortal nature participates of intellect, but the intellectual
part, of death, and the whole, as Plato observes in the Laws, becomes
a prodigy composed of the mortal and the immortal, of the intellectual and that
which is deprived of intellect. For this physical law which binds the soul to
the body is the death of the immortal life, but vivifies the mortal
body."
Wilder in his Introduction to
Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries comments again:
"The soul was believed (by the
Greeks) to be a composite nature, linked on the one side to the eternal world,
emanating from God, and so partaking of Divinity. On the other hand, it was
also allied to the phenomenal and external world, and so liable to be subjected
to passion, lust and the bondage of evils. This condition is denominated
generation; and is supposed to be a kind of death to the higher form of
life. Evil is inherent in this condition; and the soul dwells in the body as in
a prison or a grave."
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It has been claimed in some quarters
that the death here mentioned is simply Greek tropology for a state of
spiritual decay into which mortal man sinks. But a proper view sees such
degeneracy as the result of the incarnation, which was the occasion of it. The
concrete and the moral situations do image each other; but it is a matter of
vast importance which one is primary and casts the reflection. There was a
descent in historical fact. From it flowed the moral delinquency.
Having seen the lucid presentation
of the "death" philosophy in Greek systems, we turn to Egypt. Does
the wisdom of this venerable nation support that of Greece? With such fullness
and positiveness does it agree with Greek conception that dispute as to the
legitimacy of the interpretation must henceforth be silenced forever. It is
from these unfathomable wells of Kamite knowledge that we draw the water which
nourishes our intellectual life. Again the volume of material is prodigious.
It must be prefaced that the
Egyptian writings use more than one character to personate the incarnating god.
We may find Osiris, or Ra himself, or Tum, Atum or Horus taking the role. Then
there are the two characters which we meet most often, the "Speaker"
and the Manes in the Ritual. These appear to be distinctly the human
soul. Sometimes again it is represented as the "deceased," again as
the "Osirified deceased." Besides, the names of four or more kings
are used to stand for deity: Unas, Ani, Pepi and Teta, frequently with
"the" prefixed.
It is definitely corroborative of
the thesis here defended that the central god figure in Egyptian religion,
Osiris, the Father, in distinction from Horus, the Son, is consistently
assigned the functions, prerogatives and sovereignty of the "king of the
dead." He is hailed in a hundred passages as the Ruler of the Underworld,
or as Lord of Amenta (Amenti, Amentiu), the Egyptian Hades, the correct
locating of which region in theology is one of the major aims of this work. He
is assimilable to the Greek Pluto, ruler of Hades, the dark underworld. That
this dismal limbo of theology is actually our earth is a fact which has never
once dawned upon the intellectual horizon of any modern savant, however high
his name. Osiris, the "Speaker," the "Manes," the incarnating
deity, is indeed the king in the realm of the dead. For we are those dead, and
the god within us came to rule this
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kingdom, according to the arcane
meaning of every religion. For the Egyptians called the coffin "the chest
of the living."4
A passage from Budge is of
importance here:
"About the middle of the
Ptolemaic period the attributes of Osiris were changed, and after his
identification with Serapis, i.e., Pluto, the god of death, his power and
influence declined rapidly, for he was no longer the god of life. In the final
state of the cult of Osiris and Isis, the former was the symbol of death and
the latter the symbol of life."5
This change does not betoken what
Budge supposes, but quite the contrary. It hints at the fact that the Egyptian
conception of the character of Osiris as Lord of the Underworld of death began
to weaken in the later days, as foreign influences crept in, and the profound
esoteric meaning of "death" became obscured. The god’s influence as
Lord of Death declined rapidly at this epoch, not because of the ascription to
him of a new and untrue character, but because of the decay of the true
comprehension of his place and function in the pantheon. His influence in his
perennial office decayed because knowledge of him in that role had decayed. With
many such misapprehensions must the battle for a sane grasp of the ancient
wisdom contend. The actual issue has been beclouded at almost every turn.
In confirmation of our claim that
death in the ancient usage did not imply extinction, the Manes in the Ritual
(Ch. 30 A) says: "After being buried on earth, I am not dead in
Amenta." Horus knows that though he enters the realm of the dead, he does
not suffer annihilation. He knows that he is that which survives all
overthrow. Even though, as he adds, he is "buried in the deep, deep
grave," he will not be destroyed there. He will rise out of the grave of
the (living) body in his final resurrection.
Such a passage as the following
carries in its natural sense the allocation of the term "dead" to
living inhabitants on earth, not to the spirits of the deceased: "The
peoples that have long been dead (?) come forth with cries of joy to see thy
beauties every day."6 It pertains to the resurrection. Another text says:
Tanenet is the burial-place of Osiris." Tanenet, along with Aukert,
Shekhem, Abydos, Tattu, Amenta and half a dozen others, is a designation for
the earth as the place of burial for the soul living in death.
Cognate with the idea of death is
the presumption of burial in a
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tomb, grave, coffin or sepulcher.
Evidence of the prominence of these terms in relation to the descent into earth
life is not wanting in the old texts. The matter is not left in any state of
doubt or confusion. A sentence from Cocker’s Greek Philosophy speaks in
terms of unmistakable directness: "The soul is now dwelling in ‘the grave
which we call the body.’"7 Here is indeed the undebatable clarification of
that poetic imagery, the confusion of which with the natural fact of bodily
decease has cost Christianity its heritage of wisdom.
In the Egyptian records we have
Osiris as the god who "descended into Hades, was dead and buried" in
Amenta. Massey’s succinct statement covering the point is: "The buried
Osiris represented the god in matter,"--not in a hillside grave. The
hillside grave, however, was the typograph used to designate the non-historical
burial in the body. What could be more pointed and conclusive than Massey’s
other declaration: "In the astronomical mythology the earth was the coffin
of Osiris, the coffin of Amenta, which Sut, the power of darkness, closed upon
his brother when he betrayed him to his death"?8 "The coffin of
Osiris is the earth of Amenta," he says again.9 It is worthy of note that
the shrine in the Egyptian temples, representing the vessel of salvation, was in
the form of a funeral chest, the front side of which was removed so that the
god might be seen. Chapter 39 of the Ritual contains a plea for the
welfare of the incarnated soul: "Let not the Osiris-Ani, triumphant, lie
down in death among those who lie down in Annu, the land wherein souls are
joined unto their bodies." So that it is quite apparent that the land
in which souls lie down in "death" is this old earth of ours. For
nowhere else are souls joined unto their bodies! This is the only sphere in the
range of cosmic activity where this transaction is possible, and this fact is
sufficient warrant for focusing upon it all that mass of vague meaning for
which theologians have been forced to seek a locale in various subterranean
worlds whose place is found at last only in their own imaginations.
Horus says in one text: "I
directed the ways of the god to his tomb in Peqar . . . and I caused gladness
to be in the dwellers in Amentet when they saw the Beauty as it landed at
Abydos."10 Abydos was claimed to be the place of entry to the lower world
where the "dead" lived, but in this use it was another of those
transfers of uranographic locality to a town on the map in some way
appropriately symbolizing the spiritual idea involved. There was no actual
entrance to an actual
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underworld at Abydos (or anywhere
else), but to complete the astral typology a temple, tomb and deep well (of
great symbolic value) had been constructed there to the god Osiris. It was
mythically and poetically the door of entry to the lower world, or realm of
death, Amenta. Budge does not realize that he is writing only of the historical
adaptation of a spiritual allegory when he says:
"But about Osiris’ burial-place
there is no doubt, for all tradition, both Egyptian and Greek, states that his
grave was at Abydos (Abtu) in upper Egypt."11
He argues that Osiris must have been
a living king, who was later deified. This is not likely, as there is little to
indicate that the Egyptian gods were other than abstract personifications of
the powers of nature and intelligence. The legend that his body was cut into
fourteen pieces, scattered over the land and then reassembled for the
resurrection could have no rational application to the life of an actual king.
Myth has been taken for history on a vast scale.
Another text carries straightforward
information of decided value: "In the text of Teta the dead king is
thus addressed: ‘Hail! hail! thou Teta! Rise up, thou Teta! . . . thou art not
a dead thing." 12 What can be the resolution of so evident a contradiction
of terms--telling a dead king he is not dead--unless the new interpretation of
"death" as herein advanced and supported be applicable?13 The souls
as deities entered the realm of death, our world, but were not dead; philosophy
dramatized them as such, however.
In a different symbolism the Eye of
Horus, an emblem typifying his life and said to contain his soul, was stolen
and carried off by Sut, the evil twin. Of this Budge says that "during the
period when Horus’ Eye was in the hands of Sut, he was a dead god." His
regaining possession of his Eye symbolized the recovery of his buried divinity
and his restoration to his original godhood. Horus elsewhere (Rit., Ch.
85) says: "I come that I may overthrow my adversaries upon earth, though
my dead body be buried." If such a declaration is not to be taken for a
species of after-death spiritism, it can have logical meaning only in reference
to the contention that the buried god is the soul in the fleshly body.
It is imperative to look next at the
conceptions of the sphere of death that were expressed through the use of the
term "underworld." This
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region of partial death in which the
outcast angels were imprisoned was styled the dark "underworld." A
variant name was "the nether earth." It is often actually pictured as
a subterranean cavern. It may be asked if it has ever occurred to any scholar
of our time that "the underworld" was but another figurative
appellation for the condition of life in the human body. Again a mass of data
is available.
All nations of antiquity show in
their literature traces of a legend in which the soul makes a journey through a
dark underworld. The vagueness of its location, however, has failed to give any
scholar an illuminating suggestion as to its totally figurative and unreal
character. Nobody has ever seriously presumed to locate this dreary region, in
spite of the fact that it was childishly regarded as an actual place. It was
hazily associated with the grave or assumed to lie in some dim region into
which the soul passed after death, somehow, somewhere "under," but
under what, it was not apparently ever determined. The cause of bafflement was
the ineradicable assumption that its "underness" was to be oriented
in relation to the earth! No one has caught the idea that its location was under
the heavens, and hence that it was our own earth itself! The surface of the
earth, man’s world, was assumed to be obviously not an "underworld."
But the problem of locating another limbo beneath it baffled theological
speculation through the ages. The outcome is that the locale of Pluto’s shadowy
kingdom has been hung indeterminately between the surface of the ground and the
dubious dim region of after-death spheres. All the while a thousand texts point
to its location in the physical body!
Lewis Spence cautiously admits that
the court of the Mayan underworld seems to have been conducted on the
principles of a secret society with a definite form of initiation, and that the
Mysteries of Eleusis and others in Greece were concerned with the life of an
underworld, especially dramatized in the story of Demeter and Kore.14 He admits
that the Greek deities were gods of the dead. But he mars his tentative
approach to the truth by advancing the conjecture that the Book of the Dead may
have been the work of prehistoric Neolithic savages! We refrain from caustic
comment, save to aver that if the Egyptian Book of the Dead was the
product of Neolithic savages, the status of modern mentality which is as yet
totally incapable of understanding its high message, must by inference lie a
stratum or two below that level.
The Mystery Rituals did dramatize
the life of an underworld, but
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the gods, as kings of this nether
realm, were not subterranean deities. The gnomes and other nature sprites were
the only "deities" that were believed to subsist beneath the surface
of the physical earth. The gods of the underworld were always the gods of the
dead. And as the souls of deceased mortals were in all religions asserted to
ascent to heaven and never to remain in the burial ground with the corpse, it
was again impossible to place the underworld down with the gnomes. But it seems
next to incredible that academic diligence should have missed the plain
correlation which would have made the descent of spirits from heaven equate the
descent of all the divine heroes and sun-gods into the dark underworld--of
earth.
From the great Egyptian Ritual, which
so cryptically allegorizes this earthly death, we learn that the mystery of the
Sphinx originated with the conception of the earth as the place of passage, of
burial and rebirth, for the humanized deities. An ancient Egyptian name for the
Sphinx was Akar.15 This was also the name for the tunnel through the
underworld. And it is said that the very bones of the deities quake as the
stars go on their triumphant courses through the tunnels of Akar (Pyramid
Texts: Teta, 319). As the stars were the descending deities, the metaphor
of stars passing through the underworld tunnels is entirely clear in its
implication. The riddle of the Sphinx is but the riddle of mankind on this
earth. The terms of the riddle at least become clearly defined if we know that
the mystery pertains to this our mortal life, above ground, and not to our
existence in some unlocalized underworld of theological fiction.
The entrance to Amenta, with its
twelve dungeons, consisted of a blind doorway which neither Manes nor mortal
knew the secret of and none but the god could open. Hence the need of a deity
who should come to unlock the portals and unbar the gates of hell, and be
"the door" and "the way." The god came not only to unlock
the door of divinity to human nature, but to be himself that door. The giving
of the keys to bolt and unbolt the doors of the underworld was but the allegory
of this evolutionary reinforcement of the human by the divine nature.
Descriptions of this dark realm of
our present state are given in the texts. "It is a land without an exit,
through which no passage has been made; from whose visitants, the dead, the
light was shut out." "The light they beheld not; in darkness they
dwell." Massey ventures the
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assertion that "the inferno,
the purgatory and the paradise of Dante Alighieri are extant recognizably in
the Book of the Dead as the domains of Amenta."16
The first chapter of the Book of
the Dead was repeated in the Mystery festivals on the day when Osiris was
buried. His entrance into the underworld as a Manes corresponds to that of
Osiris the corpse in Amenta, who represents the god rendered lifeless by his
suffocation in the body of matter. The dead Osiris is said to enter the place
of his burial called the Kasu. In this low domain of the dead there was nought
but darkness; the upper light had been shut out. But Horus, Ptah, Anup, Ra and
others of the savior gods would come in due time to awaken the sleepers
"in their sepulchres," open the gates and guide the souls out into
the light of the upper regions once more. One of the sayings of the soul
contemplating its plight in the underworld is: "I do not rot. I do not putrefy.
I do not turn to worms. My flesh is firm; it shall not be destroyed; it shall
not perish in the earth forever" (Ch. 154). Inasmuch as the flesh of the
physical body most certainly will perish, rot, putrefy, and turn to food
for worms in the only grave that Christian theology has been able to tell us
of, the term "flesh" in the excerpt can not be taken as that of the
human body. And that it is not to be so taken is obvious from other passages.
It refers to the substance of another body which does not rot away.
The same sense may distinctly be
caught in the term "body" as used in the prayer uttered by the soul
in the body when it says: "May my body neither perish nor suffer
corruption forever." Such a prayer directed to the physical body would be obviously
irrelevant, expecting the impossible. Horus, on his way to earth to ransom the
captives, says: "I pilot myself towards the darkness and the sufferings of
the deceased ones of Osiris" (Ch. 78). Massey sums the discussion:
"The wilderness of the nether
earth, being a land of graves, where the dead awaited the coming of Horus, Shu,
Apuat (Anup), the guide, and Taht . . . as servants of Ra, the supreme one god,
to wake them in their coffins and lead them forth from the land of darkness to
the land of day."17
Analysis of other types of
representation will disclose the fact that the Egyptians, in their lavish use
of animals as symbols, filled the underworld with a menagerie of mythical
monsters. Without trespassing on the ground of later discussion, it may be
briefly said that a
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number of animals--dragons,
serpents, crocodiles, dogs, lions, bears, etc.--lay in wait in the underworld
to devour the luckless Manes. What is the significance of this? Patently it
figures the menace to the soul of its subjection to the constant beat upon it
of the animal propensities, since it had taken residence in the very bodies of
the lower creatures. In a measure detached, it was yet not immune to being
drawn down into ever deeper alliance with the carnal nature. Ever to be
remembered is Daniel’s statement that "his mind was made like the mind of
an animal."
Etymology supplies a sensational
suggestion of the soundness of the present thesis in the similarity of the two
words "tomb" and "womb," which Massey avers rise from the
same root. At all events it is rigorously in accord with the Greek theory that
the body, as the tomb of the soul, is at the same time the womb of its new
birth. In the Egyptian Ritual the soul is addressed as he "who
cometh forth from the dusk, and whose birth is in the house of death."
This was Anu, Abydos, On (Heliopolis), or other uranographic center localized
on the map, or the zodiacal signs of Virgo and Pisces. The Greek language bears
striking testimony to the same kinship of the two words, as Plato points out in
the Cratylus, in the practical identity of soma, body, and sema,
tomb.
In the Christian Bible the textual
evidence is multitudinous. A few excerpts only can be culled. First is St.
Paul’s clarion cry to us ringing down through nineteen centuries: "Awake
thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon
thee." Job, combining his death with its correlative resurrection,
exclaims: "I laid me down in death and slept; I awaked, for the Lord
sustaineth me." Paul cries in the anguish of the fleshly duress, "Who
shall deliver me from the body of this death?" And it is an open question
whether the final phrase might not as well have been rendered "this death
in the body." And Jonah, correlative name with Jesus, cries from the allegorical
whale’s belly: "Out of the belly of death have I cried unto thee, O
God." Paul again pronounces us "dead" in our trespasses and
sins, adding that "the wages of sin is death" and "to be
carnally minded is death." It is sin that brings us back again and again
into this "death" until we learn better. And the Apostle affirms that
we are dead and that our life is hid with Christ in God. Our true life is as
yet undeveloped, buried down in the depths of the latent capacities of being.
The Psalms say
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that we "like sheep are laid in
the grave," though "God will redeem my soul from the power of the
grave." The death spoken of is at one place defined as "even the
death of the cross," when spirit is bound to the cross of matter and the
flesh. Isaiah declares that "we live in darkness like the dead." And
Jesus broadcasts the promise that whosoever believeth on him, "though he
were dead, yet shall he live." Assurance is given (Peter 4:6) that
the Gospel is preached "to them that are dead." Would not such
addresses to the dead, as noted in several of these passages, be absurd if not
referable to the living on earth?
Then there is the ringing
declaration of the Father God in the Prodigal Son allegory, rebuking the
churlish jealousy of the obedient elder brother at the rejoicing over the
wastrel’s return: "This my son was dead and is alive again."
The thing described here as death was just the sojourn in that "far
country"--earth.
A most direct and unequivocal
declaration, however, is found in the first verse of chapter three of Revelation:
"Ye have the name of being alive, but ye are dead." And this is
at once followed by the adjuration to "Wake up; rally what is still left
to you, though it is on the very point of death." This is again a strong
hint of the danger that the soul might be so far submerged under sense as to
fail to rise again, and sink down into the dreaded "second death."
But the most astonishing material
corroborative of the thesis here propounded is found in St. Paul’s discussion
of the problem of sin and death in the seventh chapter of Romans. The
statements made can be rendered intelligible and enlightening only by reading
the term "death" in the sense here analyzed. He says first that
"the interests of the flesh meant death; the interests of the spirit meant
life and peace." And then he says: "For when we were in the flesh,
the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to
bring forth fruit unto death."
In this chapter Paul concatenates
the steps of a dialectical process which has not been understood in its deep
meaning for theology. It is concerned with the relation of the three things:
the law, sin and death. He asks: "Is the Law equivalent to sin?" And
he replies that sin developed in us "under the Law." What is this
mysterious Law that the Apostle harps on with such frequency? Theology has not
possessed the resources for a capable answer, beyond the mere statement that it
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is the power of the carnal nature in
man. It is that, in part; but the profounder meaning could not be gained
without the esoteric wisdom--which had been discarded. This Law--St. Paul’s bête
noir--is that cosmic impulsion which draws all spiritual entities down from
the heights into the coils of matter in incarnation. It is the ever-revolving
Wheel of Birth and Death, the Cyclic Law, the Cycle of Necessity. As every
cycle of embodiment runs through seven sub-cycles or stages, it is the
seven-coiled serpent of Genesis that encircles man in its folds.
Now, says the Mystery initiate, by
the Law came sin, and by sin came death. Here is the iron chain that binds man
on the cross. The Law brings the soul to the place where it sins and sin
condemns it to death. Death here must mean something other than the
natural demise of the body, for that comes to all men be they pure
or be they sinful. Reserving a more recondite elaboration of the doctrine of
sin for a later place, it may be asserted here that the great theological
bugaboo, sin, will be found to take its place close along the side of
"death" as the natural involvement of the incarnation itself. Sin is
just the soul’s condition of immersion or entanglement in the nature of the
flesh. And happily much of its gruesome and morbid taint by the theological
mind can be dismissed as a mistaken and needless gesture of ignorant pietism.
Neither as animal below our status
nor as angel above it can man sin. For the animal is not spiritually conscious
and hence not morally culpable. And the angel is under no temptation or
motivation from the sensual nature, which alone urges to "sin." Only
when the Law links the soul to animal flesh does sin become possible. Romans
(7:7) expressly declares: "Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law .
. . For without the law sin was dead." Paul even says that at one time he
lived without the law himself; this was before "the command" came to
him. And what was this command? Again theology has missed rational sense
because it has lost ancient cosmologies and anthropologies. The
"command" was the Demiurgus’ order to incarnate. It is found in
the Timaeus of Plato and Proclus’ work on Plato’s theology. Then the
Apostle states the entire case with such clarity that only purblind
benightedness of mind could miss it: "When the command came home to me, sin
sprang to life, and I died; . . ." He means to say that sin
sprang to life as he died, i.e., incarnated. And then he adds the
crowning utterance on this matter to be found in all sacred literature:
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"the command that meant life
proved death to me." He
explains further: "The command gave an impulse to sin, sin beguiled me and
used the command to kill me." And he proceeds to defend the entire
procedure of nature and life against the unwarranted imputations of its being
all an evil miscarriage of beneficence: "So the Law at any rate is holy,
the command is holy, just and for our good. Then did what was meant for my good
prove fatal to me? Never. It was sin; sin resulted in death for me to make
use of this good thing."18
The clarifying and sanifying
corollaries of this explication and St. Paul’s material are so expansive that
pause should be made to consider them. In this light it may be seen that the
whole of the negative and lugubrious posture of theology as to "sin,"
and "death" as its penalty, might be metamorphosed into an
understanding of the natural and beneficent character of all such things in the
drama. Ancient meaning has miscarried, with crushing weight upon the happy
spirit of humanity; and rectification of such misconstruction is urgently
needed.
In I Samuel (2:6) it is
written: "The Eternal kills, the Eternal life bestows; he lowers to death
and he lifts up." Job says: "I shall die in my nest, and I shall
renew my youth like the eagle."
And a most significant verse from Isaiah
(53) can be rescued from mutilation and sheer nonsense only by the application
of the new meaning of "death." Speaking of the divinity, it says that
"He hath made his grave with the wicked and the rich in his death."
A marginal note is honest enough to tell us that the word "death"
here used was in the plural number--"deaths"--in the original
manuscripts. Here is invincible evidence that the word carries the connotation
of "incarnations," for in no other possible sense can
"death" be rationally considered in the plural number. In one
incarnation the Christ soul is cast among the wicked; in another among the
rich. This is a common affirmation of most Oriental religious texts. And his
body is his grave.
St. Paul says some man will ask how
the dead are raised and in what body do they come. And Christian theology has
stultified the sanity of its millions of devotees by giving the answer in the
words of the Creed: "The resurrection of the body"--leaving untutored
minds to understand the physical body, or the corpse. The only comment provoked
is to say that the picture of the cemetery graves being opened at the last
trump, and the "dead" (cadavers) arising to array them-
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selves in line before the tribunal
of the judgment, has turned millions in disgust and revulsion away from the
fold of orthodoxy. Paul states in the verses immediately following that the
dead will rise in a spiritual body.
And then we face that climactic
assurance that "the last enemy to be overcome is death." In lack of
the covert intent of the word, Christian thought has ever believed that in some
way this promise meant we should overcome the incidence of bodily decease, and
live on in the physical vessel indefinitely. This would paralyze evolution. It
would wreck the Cyclical Law. The Trinity is the Creator, the Preserver and the
Destroyer. Without the periodic destruction of form there could be no renewal
of life in higher and better forms. Life would be imprisoned forever in matter,
and choked to its real death. Its charter of liberty is its periodical release
from forms that while they enable, they also limit. What, then, means the
passage? If death is the incarnation, the significance is found in the
assurance that at the conclusion of the cycle, when the spirit has mastered all
its mundane instruction, it will be made a "pillar in the house of God and
shall go no more out." Its descents into the tombs of bodies will be at an
end at last. "Death" will then be finally overcome.
In the Egyptian Ritual the
soul rejoices in life, shouting, "He hath given me the beautiful Amenta,
through which the living pass from death to life." Amenta is
this world, and the soul is pictured as running through cycles of descent from
life to "death" and back again. The same sequence is set forth in the
first chapter of Revelation: "I am he that liveth and was dead,
and behold I am alive for evermore!" The Law precipitates us
from the life above to the "death" down here, but lifts us up again.
There is no sublimer chapter in the
entire Bible than the fifteenth of I Corinthians. And perhaps this
treatment could not possibly be more fittingly concluded than with some of St.
Paul’s magnificent utterances therein. It may give us at last the thrilling
realization of their grandeur when grasped in the majestic sense of their
restored original meaning. Need we be reminded that these words of the Apostle
will ring from our own throats in ecstatic jubilee, when, victorious at last
over "death" and the "grave," we arise out of our final
imprisonment in body and wing our flight like the skylark back to celestial mansions?
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"So when this corruptible shall
have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then
shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in
victory."
"O death, where is thy sting? O
grave, where is thy victory?"
.
. . . . . .
We have drawn enough material from
the ancient fund now to have bountifully supplied the demand for
"evidence" that in archaic philosophy the field of our life here is
depicted as the dark cavern, the pit, the abyss, the bleak desert, the wilderness,
the grave, the tomb, the underworld and hell of a life that migrated here from
the skies. "We are a colony of heaven." Our deific souls are at the
very bottom of the arc of death, and can never be as dead again as they are
now, and have been.
But stranger revelations await us
still.
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Chapter X
THE
MUMMY IN AMENTA
We now approach a phase of the
general theme, the correction of popular misconception about which will be
attended with the most momentous consequences for the whole of world religion.
Only one or two other items of our revision of current belief will prove to be
of more sensational interest. The matter that promises so largely is the
Egyptian mummy and the practice of mummification. When the true signification
of this marvelous custom of a sage race begins to dawn in clear light, it will
assuredly seem as if modern appreciation of a great deposit of ancient
knowledge could hardly have suffered so utter a rout, so total a wreckage.
General opinion, expressed and
shared by the most learned of the Egyptologists, holds that the Egyptians
mummified their dead for the reason that, believing in reincarnation or forms
of transmigration, they desired the physical body to be preserved intact for
the reoccupancy of the Ego or soul upon its return to earth. Common belief
asserts that they hoped by this provision to make reincarnation easier for the
returning soul, inasmuch as he would find his former body ready for him, and
would not have to build a new one or enter the body of some animal. The
quantity of "explanation" of this sort that one reads in the works of
reputed scholars is indeed enough to drive any astute reasoner ad nauseam. Nothing
betrays the shallow insufficiency of our knowledge so flagrantly as does this
matter.
It would seem as if it should be
unnecessary to issue a denial of the correctness of the popular theories just
indicated. The truth of the matter should be evident to anyone who can frame a
syllogism. One fact alone should have been sufficient to forestall the arrant
blunder in misconceiving the mummification motive. An act performed for the
alleged purpose of preservation began with a gross mutilation! The viscera, the
whole of the organs of the chest and abdominal cavity
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were first removed, and the entrails
placed in the Canopic jars at the four corners of the coffin. One does not
mutilate that which one wishes to preserve. If this be not conclusive, let us
add that at times both the head and the feet were cut off! Could the returning
soul profitably use this old shriveled, leathery and mutilated shell as its
next living tenement? Our idea has been a tacit insult to Egyptian
intelligence. Surely we might have credited them from the start with being no
such fools. Because we believed, under the lashing of medieval theologians,
that Christ rose in his flesh and that we should do likewise at the last trump,
we assumed that the Egyptians indulged their credulity in the same weird
fashion. We are yet as children essaying to frame an explanation of the most
profoundly symbolic act of the most illumined race of history.
It is the declaration drawn from our
studies and supported by the evidence to be submitted, that the practice of
embalmment was nothing more than a mighty rite of symbolism! One immediate item
of confirmation is the fact that it was performed for only a relatively few of
Egypt’s deceased, notably kings and functionaries. It was costly, required a
hundred days, and so was indulged in only in the case of those who could afford
such an elaborate funeral ritual. If the motive for mummification had been one
arising out of universal philosophy or accepted religious theory, it would have
been practiced generally, with rich and poor alike. Not all Catholic Christians
can afford elaborate masses. No enlightened nation would countenance for
centuries a practice based on a theory which made the difference in worldly
wealth critical for the whole future destiny of the great mass of its
inhabitants. If the hope of future evolutionary welfare depended on this
performance with the cadaver, then Egypt was guilty of a felonious neglect of
her general population in favor of her overlords. And we know that early
nations were, as we like to say, superstitious in the extreme about the
punctilious observance of funeral rites. Virgil tells of the dread of the
heroes of having their dead bodies lie unburied on the sand (inhumatus arena).
Egypt could not have given the benefit of a vital ceremony to only a limited
class.
The effort is here made for the
first time in our day to set forth the inner spiritual significance of this
great rite. Our development of the obsolete meaning of "death" in
primal theology has led us right up
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to the threshold of the denouement.
One further step will take us into the heart of the age-old mystery.
In the esoteric doctrine which
regarded the present life as death, and the living body as the soul’s tomb, we
have the necessary background for adequate elucidation of the matter. The body
was mummified to serve as a powerful moving symbol of the death of the soul in
matter, and the various features of the meaning of this mundane life! Nothing
more. But this far transcended in graphic impressiveness and cathartic virtue
any theoretic dramatization of the philosophy of life made by any people since
the days of Egypt’s glory. The mummy was designed to point the whole moral of
human life in a form of overwhelming psychological power. To a deeply
philosophical people the lifeless body became at once the most impressive
symbol of the entire import of life itself. The preserved corpse became the
mute but grandiloquent reminder of life and death, mortality and immortality,
in one mighty emblem.
The custom was an attempt to utilize
the cadaver as the central object in a ritual designed to incorporate the
essential features of their entire philosophy of life. The import of a ceremony
based on the ostensible preservation of a thing which obviously could not be
preserved for living purposes, was the enforcement upon all minds of the truth
that the mortal part of man could be immortalized! Concomitant with this, the
ritual bore the message that the divine part of man, the immortal soul, though
in this body it has gone to its "death," is immortal still. It will
defy death and corruption, as will the mummy.
The mummy was the cardinal object in
a grandiose ritual precisely because it was a dead thing! It prefigured the
nature of this life, which was, philosophically, death. The dead thing thus
became the emblem of immortal life itself. The "dead" shall live forever.
The mummy symboled life as death, and death as the gate to immortal life. And
the preservation or immortalizing of the dead mortal by the infusion of
spiritous oils, balsams, ichors, was to emblem the raising of this mortal to
immortality through the adoption by the lower man of the spirit of eternal life
from the injected Christ nature. By the infusion of the mind of Christ into the
dead Adamic nature, born to sin, it could be raised to eternal life out of the
realm of decay. To associate ritualistically the idea of undying existence with
the defunct relic was to impress the lesson of the burial in matter of that
divine fragment whose
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attribute is "life and
everlastingness." Under the garb and swathings of death, its mission was
to bring life and immortality to light.
The embalming was not the enactment
of a vague spiritual ideal. Every detail of the process, as Budge testified,
was a typical performance with specific relevance. The injection of
preservatives was designed to do for the corpse symbolically what the putting
on of the Christ spirit would do for "the body of this death."
An elaborate ritual was built up
about the mummy. There were the mutilations and exsections, symbolizing the
dismemberment or fragmentation of the divine intellect when cast into the
distracting turmoil of sense life. The facial mask carried the implication of
the "false" nature of the physical man, the personality, which was
the mask (Latin: persona, a mask) the soul donned over its true self.
The bound legs and arms symboled the limitation and motionlessness which matter
ever imposes upon active spirit. The four Canopic jars at the corners of the
coffin stood for the physical world, which is ever four-square as the base that
upholds all higher life. The mummy case itself signified the body or earth, the
physical house and habitat of the soul. The coffin lid served as the table for
the mortuary meal, or the partaking of the "bread of Seb" or food of
earth. The bandages were emblematic of the material vestures or bodies which
enwrapped the soul, for one coming to earth it was "all meanly wrapped in
swaddling clothes," the "coats of skin" that God gave to Adam
and Eve in Genesis. Then there was the light, signifying of course the
presence of the glowing power of deity within the fleshly house. When darkness
was over the land of Egypt, "the Israelites had light in their
dwellings." More meaningful still was the image of the hawk, or the
hawk-headed Horus, which hovered over the mummy; for this was the figure of the
resurrection, the soul as a bird leaving the body to return to the upper air of
heaven. The ankh-cross, symbol of life when spirit and matter are tied
together, the ankham-flower of immortality, the Tat cross, symbol of eternal
stability, the level of Amentu, symbol of the balance of nature’s forces, the
scarab, symbol of the resurrection, the vulture, the greenstone tablet of
resin, all shadowed in one way or another the immortality of the spiritual
principle lodged within the mortal vehicle. The spices and balsams were
preservatives, sweet of savor. And the fluids that did so marvelously work
their miracle of preservation upon the substance of decay, were as "the
Amrit juice of immortality." In
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many countries a liquor called Soma
(the Greek word, incidentally, for the "spiritual" body) was
considered to bestow immortality. A tribal chant runs, in one verse:
"We’ve quaffed the soma bright
And are immortal grown
We’ve entered into light
And all the gods have known."
The lower man’s immediate relation
to his soul permits him to drink of that immortalizing nectar, and as it was
always Eve, or Hathor, or Ishtar, a goddess, a woman, who offers to man the
tempting cup, the inference is that mundane experience with matter, the mother
of life, is the brimming chalice for our deification.
The mummy thus stood for the soul
buried in body, or sometimes perhaps for the body itself. By its descent the
soul had become, as it were, the mummy. It became the Manes, or shade of a dead
person, in the depiction.
Massey comes very close in one place
to sensing that the mummy must be given a spiritual significance:
"Hence the chapter of
‘introducing the mummy into the Tuat [underworld] on the day of burial’ deals
not with the earthly mummy, but the mummy of the dramatic mysteries as a
figure of the living personality."1
This is the truth; but having seen
the mummy in its true light for a moment, Massey still adheres to his
precarious endeavor to read "the mummy in Amenta" into the life after
(bodily) death, instead of allocating it to its relationship to earth,
where only the living personality was in function. His phrase--"the mummy
of the dramatic mysteries"--to all intents and purposes concedes the
legitimacy of our thesis as to the mummy’s true function.
But this scholar’s study is so splendid
in the main that we will be enlightened by looking at portions of his material:
"Amenta as the place of graves
is frequently indicated in the Hebrew scriptures, as in the description of the
great typical burial-place in the valley of Hamon-Gog. This was in the Egypt
described in the Book of Revelation as the city of dead carcasses, where
also their Lord was crucified as Ptah-Sekari or Osiris-Tat. Amenta had been
converted into a cemetery by the death and burial of the solar god, who
was represented as the mummy in
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the lower Egypt of the nether earth.
The Manes were likewise imaged as mummies in their coffins. They also
rose again in the mummy-likeness of their Lord, and went up out of Egypt in the
constellation of the Mummy (Sahu-Orion), or in the coffin of Osiris that was
imaged in the Great Bear."2
Can we miss the plain evidence here
presented? The Manes were imaged as mummies in their coffins! Amenta (this
earth) converted into a cemetery by the advent of the gods, our souls!
We, the living on earth, figured unmistakably as mummies in our sarcophagi!
Hence the grave and tomb of all ancient theology is the living physical body of
man!
There will be profit in considering
another Massey statement, since it reveals how he stumbled and fell at the very
door of the truth:
"There is no possibility of the
Manes coming back to earth for a new body or for a re-entry into the old
mummy. As the Manes says, ‘his soul is not bound to his old body at the
gates of Amenta’" (Chs. 26, 6).3
That the soul would not re-enter the
old mummy is a vital point of truth, and Massey deserves all credit for
discerning it. But that it would not return to enter a new body flies in
the face of all ancient and universal belief in reincarnation. This is just the
point of issue to be clarified. The soul returns from life to life to be
re-clothed in new garments, since it assuredly does not take up life again in
the mutilated and decomposed old hulk. The Manes positively states that he is
not bound to the old body; but a score of times he says he will construct, or
reappear in, a glorious new vesture. This of course is the spiritual body of
the resurrection. But it is not built up in one brief life on earth. It is the
product of many successive lives, each in a new physical body. There is
no room for confusion or dispute on this matter.
Ptah, Atum and finally Osiris are
described at different stages as the solar god in mummified form in Amenta.
"He was the buried life on
earth, and hence the god in matter, imaged in the likeness of the mummy.
. . . Such was the physical basis of the mythos of the mystery that is
spiritual in the eschatology."4
And we find desirable explicitness
in the following passages:
"In the Osirian mythos, when
the sun-god enters the underworld, it is as a mummy or ‘coffined one’ upon his
way to the great resting place."
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"The mummy-Osiris in Amenta is
the figure of the sleeping deity. He is the god inert in matter, the
sleeping or resting divinity."5
Another most pertinent corroboration
of our thesis that the mummy was but a ritualistic figure for the human soul
"dead" in the body, is found in the following from Massey:6
"And just as Ra, the holy
spirit, descends in Tattu on the mummy Osiris, and as Horus places his hands
behind Osiris in the resurrection, so Iu7 comes to his body, the mummy in
Amenta. Those who tow Ra along say, ‘The god comes to his body; the god is
towed along toward his mummy.’ (Records, Vol. X, p. 132.) The sun-god,
whether as Atum-Iu (Aiu or Aai) or Osiris-Ra, is a mummy in Amenta and a soul
in heaven. Atum or Osiris, as the sun in Amenta, is the mummy buried down in
Khebt,8 or lower Egypt."9
These passages conclusively indicate
that the mummy was the type of the god in the body.
Conquest of the carnal nature and
escape from it is in another place called the "overthrowal of your
coffins." (Book of Hades, Fifth Division, Legend D.) Again, the
earth is denominated "the coffin of Osiris, the coffin of Amenta."
In his descent to open the tombs for
the release of the sleeping captives Horus says: "I am come as the
mummified one," that is, in fleshly embodiment. It should be noted that
this explicit statement of the god himself that he comes in the character of
the mummy, taken with his other assurances that he comes to "those
in their coffins," must be admitted to certify the truth of our contention
throughout--that it is the god who comes to be buried in the matter of a lower
kingdom, from which burial both he and the lower entity will be raised again to
higher estate. When the sun-god entered "the ark of earth, which is called
his coffin or sarcophagus," he was buried in obscurity and shorn of his
power. In a sculptured sarcophagus of the fourth century the three Magi are
offering gifts to the divine infant, a mummied child! Here the mummy is a
figure of the divine nature circumscribed tightly by the garment of flesh. Need
we remind the student that numberless images of the mummied Child-Jesus were
found in Christian catacombs, tombs and chapels in the early centuries? At first
view the linkage of the idea of death as suggested by the mummy, with the
infant figure, rather than with the more appropriate stage of senility,
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seems an ineptitude. In early
Christian and pre-Christian iconography Jesus was indeed often figured as an
aged one, about to enter the grave. It only requires that we move the symbolic
hint one short step forward to see the pertinence of the mummified child,
called by the Egyptians the Khart. For the buried god was to have his
rebirth in matter and to begin life anew as an infant. The deceased father god
was to metamorphose into the new form of himself as his own child, as God the
Son. While yet a baby-god, beginning his new career, he was cramped by the
limitations of matter and the undeveloped stage of his own powers. He was the
new god, who had not yet broken his bonds or risen from the limitations of his
new incarnate situation.
It is evident that Hebraic
development of archaic typology did not carry the figure of the mummy into
Biblical literature. Yet a cognate symbolism is expressed through the word
"flesh" mainly. Where the Kamite Ritual says: "My dead
body shall not rot in the grave," the Hebrew Psalmist writes: "My
flesh shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol;10
neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption."
But occasionally an original
Egyptian term has been retained in Hebrew transcription. Such a term is Sekhem,
one of the names of the burial-place of the Osiris-mummy in the Ritual. The
deceased is buried as a mummy in Sekhem. Also the well of Jacob near Sechem
answers to the well of Osiris at Abydos, and the oak or terebinth in Sechem to
the tree of life in the Pool of Persea. The fields of Sechem correspond to the
Sekhet-Hetep or fields of peace and plenty in the Kamite original.
Also the incident of Joseph carrying
Jacob’s coffin matches Horus’ carrying the Osiris-mummy.
The word mummy is perhaps derived
from the Egyptian mum, to "initiate into the mysteries." This
origin would suggest that the elaborate procedure of mummification was
inaugurated to typify the whole broad meaning of the incarnation, as a
submerging of high spirit in the dense state of mortal matter. For such a
downward sweep through the world of material inertia was, as we shall see, the
only, if fateful, path leading to the "initiation" of the spirits
into the higher mysteries that lurk in the depths of life. The Sphinx riddle of
life can be solved only by a living experience in all worlds from the lowest to
the highest. Life’s own justification of its processes is the raison d’être of
our mum-
183
mification in gross earthly bodies,
and the great Nilitic rite was designed to express nothing more.
Attention must now be given to the
Egyptian word which was used to designate the mummy. It was usually marked upon
the coffin lid. It may offer a connection of great potential fruitfulness for
knowledge. It consisted of the consonants K R S with a suffix T, giving K R S
T. The voweling is indeterminate, as it always was in ancient writing. Scholars
have introduced an A before the R and another after it, making the word K A R A
S T as generally written. There is probably no authoritative warrant for this
spelling, but there has ever been a stout resistance to all suggestions that
the alternative vowels, E, I, O or U be used in the form. Yet scholarship would
be hard put to substantiate any objection to the spellings Karist, Karest,
Kerast, Kerist or Krist. Indeed, as the root is very likely a cognate form with
the Greek kreas, flesh, there would be more warrant for writing it
Krast, Krest or Krist than the usual Karast. If we know how easily a
"Kr" consonant metamorphoses into the Greek Chr, we can not dismiss
the suggested closeness of the word to the Greek Chrestos or Christos
as an absurd improbability. This may indeed be the Kamite origin of our
name Christ, whatever be the outcry against such a conclusion.
There are presented some other
extremely interesting possibilities in this etymological situation, for by the
use of another vowel we stand very close to the Latin crux, cross, the
Middle English cros (cross) and our own word crust. For indeed
the ground meaning of the entire incarnation story might well be expressed in
the grouping of these very terms: The Christ on the cross is the encrusting
of the divinity with flesh (Greek kreas). Not far away also is our word crystal,
which contains the root meaning of any process of incrustation, or the
precipitation of spirit energies into forms of solidification around an
actuating nucleus of force. The large idea behind all these forms that stand so
closely related in spelling is just that of spirit crystallizing and forming a
crust about a spiritual node of life. And then the Greek word chruseos, golden,
points to the end of the process to be consummated by the spirit in matter,
when, metaphorically speaking, all baser forms of the encrusted covering or
mummy will be transmuted by the divinity’s glowing fire into the purest
spiritual "gold." The "crystal sea" that is to receive all
back into its depths links the two ends of the chemicalization, first downward,
then upward, together in one
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coherence. Our kreas or mummy
case, that becomes but the crust of our life here on the cross of
flesh, kreas, will be translated into crystals of pure gold, chrysos,
by undergoing the chrysalis transformation into full deification.
Still within the circle of these meanings we have chrism, cruse (of
ointment), chrisom, charism, an anointing oil (our cream--French
cresme, with the "s" dropped out, being a derivative of this
stem), and finally within the glow of its influence comes the bright outline of
the meaning of the great sacrament of the Eucharist. If all this
etymological flourish appears to be highly fanciful, let the reader be assured
that not a single term of the interwoven ideas in this chain is missing from
the ancient symbolism. If it is a delightful play of fancy, its poetic
originators were the sages of old.
When, then, Osiris is called the
Karast-mummy, the meaning is doubtless that of spirit "fleshed" or
incarnate. The flesh was the crust crystallized about the soul and as such
became not only the cross, but the cruet or cruse containing the golden liquor
of life. The partaking of it was our Eucharist, and our final transfiguration
will be the putting on of the golden hues of immortality, symboled by the
insect chrysalis operation.11 "O thou who risest out of the golden"
is an address to the soul in the Ritual.
Finally, then, we have Massey
breaking through the philological defenses thrown up by the alarmed orthodox
scholars and openly connecting the Egyptian Karast with the Greek Christos or
Christ. He announces the derivation dogmatically:
"Say what you will or believe
what you may, there is no other origin for Christ the Anointed than for Horus
the karast or anointed son of God the Father. . . . Finally, then, the mystery
of the mummy is the mystery of Christ. As Christian it is allowed to be forever
inexplicable. As Osirian the mystery can be explained. It is one of the
mysteries of Amenta, with a more primitive origin in the rites of
Totemism."12
He adds that Osiris as the
Karast-mummy was the prototypal Corpus Christi. As Osiris-Sekari he was
the coffined one. Aseris, or the Osiris, represented the god in the anguish of
his burial in the cerements of the mortal body, whose cries and ejaculations
are to be heard ascending from Amenta in many a page of the Ritual, or
from Sheol in the Hebrew scriptures. Massey states what has not been readily
acceptable to Christian apologists hitherto when he writes:
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"Indeed the total paraphernalia
of the Christian mysteries had been made use of in Egyptian temples . . .
Osiris in the monstrance should of itself suffice to show that the Egyptian Karast
is the original Christ, and that the Egyptian mysteries were continued by the
Gnostics and Christianized in Rome."13
Immediately connected with the Christos
is the term Messiah, since both terms, the one Greek, the other
Egypto-Hebraic, mean "the anointed." The word Messiah is
traced to the Egyptian mes or mas, to steep, to anoint, as also
to be born. Messu was the Egyptian word for "the anointed"
initiate in the Mystery rites. The "-iah" was a quite
significant suffix added by the Hebrews, meaning, like the ubiquitous suffix "el,"
deity or God. As "-iah" or "-jah," it
occurs in many Hebrew sacred names, sometimes as a prefix, as in Jahweh,
but mostly as a suffix, as in Elijah, Halleluiah, Messiah, Zechariah,
Abijah, Nehemiah, Obediah, Isaiah, Hezekiah and
a long list more. The name Messiah then denotes the "divinely
anointed" one or the "born (reborn) deity." When the first or
natural man was anointed with the chrism of Christly grace, he was reborn as
the Christos.
An item of great importance in this
ritual was its performance always previous to the burial. It was a rite
preparatory to the interment. Said Jesus himself of Mary: "In that she
poured this ointment upon my body, she did it to prepare me for my burial"
(Matt. 26:12). She was symbolically enacting the Mystery rite of the
chrism, and her performance quite definitely matched the previous practices of
the Egyptians, from whom it was doubtless derived. But what does such an act
denote in the larger interpretation here formulated? If the burial was the
descent of the gods into bodily forms, then the anointing must have been
enacted immediately antecedent to it or in direct conjunction with it. The
etymology of the word sheds much light upon this whole confused matter. The "oint"
portion of it is of course the French softening of the Latin "unct"
stem; and this, whether philologists have yet discovered the connection or
not, is derived from that mighty symbol of mingled divinity and humanity of
ancient Egypt--the A N K H cross. The word Ankh, meaning love, life and tie,
or life as the result of tying together by attraction or love the two nodes
of life’s polarity, spirit and matter, suggests always and fundamentally the
incarnation. For this is the "ankh-ing" of the two poles of
being everywhere basic to life. The "unction" of the sacrament is
really just the "junction" of
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the two life energies, with the
"j" left off the word. Therefore the "anointing" is the
pouring of the "oil of gladness," the spiritual nature, upon the
mortal nature of living man. The "unguents" of the mummification were
the types of the shining higher infusion, and they prepared the soul for, or
were integrally a part of, its burial in the grave of mortality. And the
Messiah was then crucified in the flesh. On this point Massey speaks clearly:
"In preparation of Osiris for
his burial, the ointment or unguents were compounded and applied by Neith. It
was these that were to preserve the mummy from decay and dissolution."14
Neith applies the preservatives in
Egypt; Mary in the Gospels. And as the feminine figures emblem matter, we must
take the ritual as dramatizing the anointing of divinity with materiality,
rather than just the anointing of the physical man with divinity. The same
situation is found in the baptism allegory, where the lower man, John the
Baptist, anoints with his element, water, the very deity, Christ, himself. In
that close conjunction and interrelation of the two natures which the great
Ankh symbol connotes, each nature "anoints" the other, and it matters
little for final outcomes of meaning which is considered. All ancient symbols
denoting the two elements in life are not only dual in themselves, but may
generally be interchanged without damage to the ground signification. This
strange--and practically unknown--aspect of the science of typology merits a
full chapter in itself; but perhaps it will be enough to point out its
application in specific situations where it will clarify the exegesis. Since
the soul’s burial in body is the cause and occasion of the release of its own
higher potencies, its being anointed or baptized by matter (or
"water") is thus both its active and its passive anointing. Let it be
remembered, it both converts matter and is converted by matter. This is ever
the basic formula. The anointing thus becomes kindred with the embalming. The
chrismatic ceremony was the "ankh-ing" or tying together of soul and
flesh for fuller outflow, giving in the outcome the Karast or Christ. In man
the angel and the animal-human anoint each other.
As the climactic step in a series of
benefits which Horus, the deliverer and reconstituter of his father Osiris,
enumerates in an address to the latter, he likens the anointing to the gift of
grace and spiritual unction:
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"I have strengthened thine
existence upon earth. I have given thee thy soul, thy strength, thy power. I
have given thee thy victory. I have anointed thee with offerings of holy
oil."15
The whole procedure of incarnation
from its inception to the Prodigal’s return, is to be seen as an anointing,
first of spirit with flesh, then of flesh with spirit. Massey says that
anointing was the mode of showing the glory of the Father in the person of his
Son, and that Horus was anointed when he transformed from Horus the mortal to
Horus the divine man.
The usual material for anointing was
oil, but at least one other comes in as symbol. We are familiar with Jesus’
mixing his spittle with a little earth to anoint the eyes of the blind man in
the Gospels. A Hawaiian legend also has it that the first man was created from
red earth (the meaning of "Adam") mixed with the spittle of the gods,
and the triadic god then blew into his nose and bade him rise a living human
being. Egyptian ideography pictures that the primeval god Tum conceived within
himself, then spat, the spittle becoming the gods Shu and Tefnut, whose union
as male and female produced the world. Another Kamite construction holds that
the Eye of Ra (symbol of divine intelligence), being injured by the violent
assault of Sut, was restored when anointed with spittle by Thoth.
In many more legends the gods are
said to have mixed mortal clay with their blood, emblematic of their living
power. The early myth-makers were adept at variation of the symbols. Horus,
representing the god in man, says:
"He anointed my forehead as
Lord of men, creating me as chief of mortals. He placed me in a palace as a
youth, not yet come forth from my mother’s womb."
This is a reference to the god’s
burial in matter, where life was a process of gestation for a new birth in
spirit. The mortal man has not yet resurrected, not yet come forth from mother
nature’s womb! The spirit entombed is like Joseph in "Egypt" and
Daniel in "Babylon" before they rose from out their
"prisons" to become the rulers of the kingdom. We are still to have
our birth out of matter into spirit. Our incarnation is our birth into body;
our resurrection is to be our second birth, this time out of body.
Isaiah (61: 1,2) emphasizes the anointing in a
famous verse:
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"The spirit of the Lord is upon
me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the poor. He
hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,16 to proclaim liberty to the
captives. . . ."
The "poor," it is to be
recalled, are equivalent to the Gentiles, the unregenerate natural man. They
were the ones for whom the message of the Messiah was intended. The
announcement from heaven to earth that a race of deities was about to descend
to lift animal life into the kingdom of reason and articulate speech was verily
"the good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people," the
best news ever wafted to the denizens of the planet up to that period.
"Thou hast anointed my head with oil, my cup runneth over," echoes
the immortal Psalm (23). "Having had my flesh embalmed," says the
Osirified deceased in the Ritual (Ch. 64), "my body does not
decay." Hence flesh, inoculated with spirit, or the mummy embalmed,
becomes immortal. And the Word was made flesh! And flesh will be
immortalized!
But the Egyptians had a correlative
phrase with "the Word made flesh." It was "the Word made
Truth." The Logos or spirit made flesh produced the first birth, the
natural man, the first Adam. This was not the true Word, for it was falsified
by the admixture of the earthly, natural element, by which it voiced the animal
note. As the boy’s voice at the age of manhood changes from a feminine to a
masculine timbre, so the speech of the mortal had to swing away from the tones
of its mother nature and issue as the voice of the spiritual Self. Figuratively
at the human race’s age of twelve, always the number marking our spiritual
perfecting, the Christ within us has to abandon the concerns of the maternal
physical life and "be about his Father’s business,"--the
spiritual life. The race must turn from Mother Nature to Father God at its
spiritual puberty.
It is quite noteworthy in this
connection that one of the most eminent of modern psychologists, C. G. Jung,
has divided human life into two periods, which he calls the forenoon and afternoon
of life, the boundary line being placed at the age of thirty-five. He says that
in the forenoon mankind lives the life of "nature," but turns in the
"afternoon" to a life of "culture." So that we find even
the span of mortal life epitomizing the larger scheme, in that we begin the
"day" of life by living under nature, and turn in the afternoon to
the concerns of the spirit and the mind. "First that which is natural,
then that which is spiritual," St. Paul has reminded us.
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The world took form upon the model
of divine ideas, Plato affirms. In us men a god is striving to stamp his lines
of beauty and grace upon the features of an animal! The God-word was fleshed so
that it could preserve and finally transfigure the mummy with its splendor.
But--and let ultra-idealists be advised!--spirit had to have plastic matter
upon which to imprint its form and comeliness, else it would have remained
forever unknown. The visible manifestation of latent wisdom, power and love
could be achieved only by the spirit’s encasement in a body. Matter, so derided
by extreme "spiritual" theory, is the womb in which alone divine
conceptions can be brought to birth. So that the fleshing of soul works the
miracle of its own anointing. Flesh is the way and the means by which man, the
divine thought, is christened with an ever fuller measure of the oil of
beatification.
Carried some distance afield by
certain involvements of the mummy discussion, we return to that aspect of it
suggested by the mythical underworld. It has been already hinted that this
nether world is our earth itself. But readers may not be fully aware that this
assertion is here made directly in the face of all previous and present
scholarship, and that it flouts all scholastic opinion. So open a challenge to
world scholarship must summon additional proof to its support. The
substantiation of the point is pivotal to the entire interpretation here
advanced. The case wins or loses on the determination of this issue. Likewise
the correct understanding of all theology hinges upon the outcome. As the many
transactions involving the experience of the human soul in the body were
enacted in Amenta, the underworld, the final meaning of the whole structure of
theology is bound up with the correct location of this realm of gloomy shade.
It is believed that the correction of the error under which the academic world
has labored for centuries with regard to this region will necessitate the most
sweeping alterations in religious and philosophical ideology, nothing short, in
fact, of a total recasting of all meanings and values.
Amenta, the Egyptian term for this
underworld, is given as a compound of the Egyptian "Amen," meaning
"secret," "hidden"; and "ta," "earth"
or "land." In this formation it becomes "the hidden earth"
or "secret, hidden land." It is the land where the divine sons were
hidden away in "Egypt" till the "wrath" of the Karmic Lords
should be appeased. "Amen" was the "hidden deity," "the
god in hiding." His hieroglyph pictures him as kneeling under a canopy.
The "wrath" of
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God, be it proclaimed at last, is no
divine "anger," in any human sense of the word, but the universally
burning, consuming, transforming, building and destroying energy of Life
itself, always anciently characterized as a "fire." And the word
seems derivative from "Ur-ath," the original fiery force in
matter, as "Ur" is "fire" and "-ath" is
the feminine, that is, material classification. It therefore connotes the
cosmical transforming energies locked up in the bosom of matter! This is of
consummate importance. And all this complex ancient indirection of description
is just to carry the idea that the soul must be tied down in its linkage with
the deeply hidden energies of matter and body until the fiery potencies burning
at that level refine and purify its grosser elements. A Biblical text speaks of
its being "thrice refined in the fire," and Egyptian scripts abound
with statements of its purification "in the crucible of the great house of
flame." Maintaining the revolutionary thesis that Amenta is this earth,
and not some realm elsewhere into which men relapse after earthly
demise, the exposition will establish the fact that all the typology referring
to it pertains to our own world. In every ancient system of cosmology this globe
is the lowest of all planetary spheres. There can be no other hell, Tartarus,
Avernus or Orcus, Sheol or Tophet below it. It is that darksome limbo where the
Styx, the Phlegethon, the river of Lethe and other murky streams run their
sluggish courses through the life of mortals.
Very apt, then, is the story of Isis
and Osiris. Their infant, Horus, was suckled by Isis in solitude. She reared
him in secret, and his limbs grew strong in the hidden land. None knew the
hiding place, but it was somewhere in the marshes of Amenta, the lower Egypt of
the mythos. This is matched in toto by the story of the birth of
the mythical Sargon of Assyria. Likewise it is the background of the
"flight into Egypt" of Jesus in the Gospels. The divine child had to
be taken down into "Egypt" until the Herut menace was passed and in
order that the son of God might be brought up out of it. As the angel of the
Lord says to Joseph, "Arise and take the young child and his mother and
flee into Egypt," so at the birth of Horus the god Taht says to the
mother, "Come, thou goddess Isis, hide thyself with thy child." She
is bidden to take him down into the marshes of Lower Egypt, called Kheb or
Khebt. But the Egyptian version gives us more ground for understanding the
maneuver as a cosmographic symbol, because Taht tells Osiris that there
"these things shall befall: his limbs will grow, he will wax
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entirely strong, he will attain the
dignity of Prince . . . and sit upon the throne of his father." This is
highly important, since it makes the hiding away a part of the cosmic process
and not a mere incredible incident in Gospel "narrative." In the
mutilated Gospel account the sojourn in Egypt is left as if it were a matter of
brief duration, followed by the child’s return. In the fuller Egyptian record
it is seen that the dip into Lower Egypt is that necessary incubation in matter
that must continue until it has brought the infant potentialities to
actualization and function. As the seed in the soil, so the god in the earthly
body and the "child" in "Lower Egypt"--all are hidden away
for the growth that only thus could be attained. The secreting of the child is
no more than the planting on earth of the divine seed in its appropriate
soil--humanity.
In the Ritual the Manes, or
Osiris-Nu, says: "I am he whose stream is secret." Of Ptah it is also
said: "Thy secret dwelling is in the depths (or the deep) of the secret
waters and unknown" (Renouf: Hibbert Lectures, p. 321).
The presentation of the evidence
supporting the mundane location of Amenta takes on from this point largely the
semblance of a debate with Massey. If our study seems overburdened with his
material, apology may be found in the explanation that, in the first place, he
has fairly earned this amount of recognition, and secondly that his
presentations focus the issues at stake with more definiteness than those of
any other scholar. Though he missed the golden truth of this matter in the end,
he still comes so close to it that he at times almost states it in spite of
himself. The truth can hardly be better expounded than as the correction of his
error, which proved so fatal at last to his work. No one has ever put more
succinctly and clearly the nature of the experience of the soul or divine child
in Amenta than he has done in the following excerpt:
"In the eschatology Horus, the
child, is typical of the human soul which was incarnated in the blood of Isis,
this immaculate virgin, to be made flesh, and to be born in mortal guise
on earth as the son of Seb (god of earth) and to suffer all the afflictions of
mortality. He descended to Amenta as the soul sinking in the dark of
death. . . ."17
Everything in this passage points to
the identity of Amenta with earth. Clearly as Massey saw through the thousand
disguises of ancient
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method, he was tricked at last by
the arcane ruse of presenting earth experience under the mask of a ritual for
the dead. He could hardly bring himself to believe, sharp as was his break with
orthodoxy, that the miscarriage of esoteric sense had gone so utterly awry as
to misplace all religious values finally in a wrong world. The enormity of
cleric aberrancy was already so shocking to him that he can be pardoned for
failing to perceive that it was indeed still seven leagues worse.
He fought his way through by what
seemed the only devise which would enable him to keep the judgment, hell,
purgatory and the underworld in the after-death realm. He was forced to split
the term "earth," so frequently used with Amenta, into two parts,
distinguishing an "earth of time" from an "earth of
eternity." He took Amenta to be this fancied "earth of eternity"
beyond the grave or death. He located it vaguely in the post mortem state,
and segregated it from the earth of time, or the earth we know. But a little
reflection on his part would have told him that the term "earth" has
no possible appropriateness to a non-physical existence in spiritual areas. The
designations "land," "country," so often applied to the
heavenly state of being, are used only by grace of euphemism or figure. Massey
must have felt this, but it permitted him to use the word "earth" in
reference to a purely celestial locale. This could not have been other than a
bit disingenuous; and it cost him his place in renown and kept us an additional
forty or fifty years in bondage to religious superstition.
He rightly insists that "not
until we have mastered the wisdom of Egypt as recorded in Amenta shall we be
enabled to read it on the surface of the earth." This is precisely what
should be said, but where do we have access to "wisdom recorded in
Amenta" (considered as his spirit world) if not on this earth, either in
books or in experience? Can we go to (his) heaven and read records left there?
He speaks of a first paradise as being celestial and a second one as "sub-terrestrial,"
and says that the latter is "the earthly paradise of legendary lore."
But, as has been shown, a "sub-terrestrial" residence for man is
meaningless verbiage, imagery without possible counterpart in actuality. The
"sub-" was to be taken as subsolary and perhaps sublunary, at any
rate sub-celestial, but never--really--sub-terrestrial. If it was used for
poetic figure, there need be no quarrel. The ancients did use subterranean
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caverns as types of our life
in Amenta, but only as types. Of a surety we shall not read old Egypt’s
mighty wisdom aright until we read it on the surface of this earth, for the
inexpugnable reason that the "wisdom recorded in Amenta" is the
wisdom pertaining to this earth! Amenta and this earth are one and the same
place. Religion must bring back to this earth the core of all those
meanings which took their flight from this sphere on the wings of scholarship’s
egregious mislocation of the mythical region of Amenta.
His mistake, as that of all other
scholars, was occasioned by loss of the archaic signification of
"death." Books of the dead, forsooth, must inescapably apply to
deceased humans, and hence their rituals must be designed for the spirits of
the departed on "that other shore." It was thus not possible for
anyone under this persuasion to discern that the Biblical phrase "after
death" could mean its precise antithesis, as commonly viewed; that is,
after entry into this life. It could not be seen that the phrase
"deceased in their graves" had already been appropriated by the sages
of Egypt to type the living denizens here on the globe.
Nevertheless the identification of
Amenta with a post mortem state should have been seen at one glance as
inadmissible in the light of a single consideration. Amenta, Hades, Sheol are
always portrayed as the land of gloom, darkness and misery. These terms are
often translated "hell" in the Bible and elsewhere. They are the
dismal underworld. In it souls are imprisoned, captive, cut to pieces,
mutilated, buried. Exactly opposite in description in every religion is the
state of life after decease! It matches the Amenta characterization in no
particular, but is its exact opposite. In it the soul finds release from the
dark, heavy, dreary, wretched conditions that are descriptive of Amenta. It is
the land of light, bliss, surcease from distress, rest and peace! The two
portraitures will not mix! The Amenta of misery and gloom can not be at the
same time the Happy Isles, the Aarru-Hetep and the asphodel meads! If to enter
the body is to undergo captivity, then to leave it is to regain freedom, not to
enter Amenta. Surely in this confusion of two worlds of diametrically opposite
classification our savants are convicted of the most amazing want of acumen in
reaching conclusions preposterously out of line with the data of scholarship.
Massey should have been enlightened by what he wrote in this passage:
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"Except when lighted up by the
sun of night, Amenta was the land of darkness and the valley of the shadow of
death. It remained thus, as it was at first, to those who could not escape the
custody of Seb, the god of earth, ‘the great annihilator who resideth in the
valley.’"
If Amenta was the place where the
god of earth detained souls in darkness, its localization on earth would seem
to be incontrovertibly indicated. Or was not the god of earth on earth? We
might expect a god to inhabit his own kingdom, the one over which he ruled.
Osiris, king of the land of the
dead, is denominated "lord of the shrine which standeth at the center of
the earth." (Rit., Ch. 64.) Massey speaks of "the human
Horus"--and Horus was in Amenta. Humans exist only on the earth. The earth
must be Amenta, then. He writes again that the drama "from which scenes
are given in the Hebrew writings, as if these things occurred or would occur upon
the earth, belongs to the mysteries of the Egyptian Amenta, and only as
Egyptian could its characters ever be understood." The scenes in Hebrew
scriptures are drawn largely from the early Egyptian Mysteries, which
typified cosmic and racial history under the forms of dramatic ritual. But they
were not events of either Egyptian or Hebrew objective history. They did
not "occur" anywhere on earth, but they portrayed the interior
meaning of all that did occur on earth. The events were not here, but their meaning
was. They were not occurrence factually, but the key to all occurrence. Massey
thought the myths must be veridically true in (his) Amenta, since they were not
objectively true on earth. He caught half the truth only. The myths were only
symbolic language telling human dullness of mind what life meant. The moment
the myths are alleged to have taken place in heaven or anywhere else, that
moment superstition begins to stalk into the counsels of religion. Nothing
could occur in Amenta as a place distinct from this earth, since it was a
mythopoetic name for earth itself.
But the sad part of Massey’s story
and the reason it is important for us to scrutinize his mistake is that it is
the story of a whole race’s deception for sixteen centuries! The localization
of Amenta in heaven instead of on earth has defeated the whole purpose of
religion for ages. And no pen or tongue will ever record the monstrous fatuity
involved in the spectacle of a race looking into the wrong world and waiting
with sanctified stupidity for the fulfillment of values that have slipped
195
by them ungrasped all the while!
When religion gave up its effort to realize values in the life here and fixed
despairing eyes on heaven, it betokened the decay of primal human virtue and a
sinking back into mystical fetishism. Came the Greek "loss of nerve"
and the turning from earth to heaven for the realization of hopes ground to
dust on earth. And this shift of philosophical view left the ground of culture
lie fallow, and bred the rank growth that covered the whole terrain of the Dark
Ages. There is needed no other warrant for the extension of the material of
this chapter to some length. As things have turned out, it may well be that
true location of the Egyptian Amenta, instead of being a mere point in academic
scholarship, is the critical item in the life of culture today. The collapse
of true religion is ever marked by its turning for its real experience from
earth to mystical heavens.
Scholars have not sufficiently or
capably reflected on the significant fact that ancient sacred books or Bibles
have been largely Books of the Dead. The obvious glaring peculiarity of
this fact has never seemed to occur to students. It should from the first have
provoked wonder and curiosity that the sages of antiquity would have indited
their great tomes of wisdom in such a form as to serve as manuals in the
life to come, and not as guides for the life lived in the sphere in
which the books were available! Only the heavy tradition that religion was
a preparation for a life to come, instead of a way of life here, could have
stifled this natural reaction to a situation that is odd enough in all
conscience. It is no slight or inconsequential thing that Budge writes in one
sentence of ". . . religious texts written for the benefit of the dead in
all periods . . ." (of Egyptian history), without the least suspicion that
he was penning an astonishing thing. It had been ponderously assumed by
scholarship that the ancient sages were more concerned with the hereafter and
the next world than with life down here. How the march of history would have
swung into different highways had the world known that we living men were those
"dead" for whom the sagas were inscribed by the masters of knowledge!
And what must be the sobering realization for present reflection of the fact
that the primeval revelation given to early races for the guidance and
instruction of all humanity has missed entirely the world for which it was intended!
The scene of critical spiritual
transactions is not "over there" in spirit land, but here in this
inner arena of man’s consciousness. Life’s ac-
196
counts do not remain suspended
during our active experience on earth, to be closed and settled when the
exertion is over. We are weaving the fabric and pattern of our creation of
ourselves when we are awake on earth, not when we are at repose in ethereal
heavens. The droning cry of lugubrious religionism for centuries has been to
live life on earth merely as the preparation for heaven. But there is no logic
in the idea of making preparation for rest! It is the other way around: rest is
a preparation for more work. The positive expression of life is the exertion of
effort to achieve progress. Rest is just the cessation of the effort, and needs
no preparation. The character of our effort may, to be sure, determine the
nature of our rest, yet one should say, rather, its completeness. Rest is in
some degree correlative with the effort. Still the logic is indefeasible, that
we work to achieve our purposes, and not to gain rest. The presumption that
this life is of minor consequence and has value only as the stepping-stone to
another where true being is alone achieved, is one facet of that enormous
fatuity of which we are holding orthodox indoctrination guilty. It is the last
mark of the miscarriage of primal truth in the scriptures that its meaning and
application have been diverted from that world it was intended to instruct, and
projected over into another where its code can have no utility whatever. The
offices of religion have fled to heaven, and must be brought back to earth.
This return can be effected only by the right interpretation of the term
"the dead" and the true location of Amenta, the scene of the judgment,
hell, purgatory and the resurrection, and the seat of all evolutionary
experience.
Massey asserts that "the nether
earth was the other half of this" and that the "Gospel history has
been based upon that other earth of the Manes being mistaken for the earth of
mortals." But he errs on both counts. For the "other half of
this" life is lived in a sphere which all faiths have located above this
one, and not nether to it. The spirit world can in no way be localized as under
our world. His second statement misses truth through the fact that the
events in the life of the Manes are not, as he supposes, actual transactions in
the afterdeath life of the spirit, but are only allegorical depictions of the
soul’s history in this life.
But he makes a point of great moment,
worthy of transcription, when he states that the miracles of Jesus were not
possible as objective events:
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"They are historically
impossible because they were pre-extant as mythical representations . .
. in the drama of the Mysteries, that was as non-historical as the Christmas
pantomime. The miracles ascribed to Jesus on earth had been previously assigned
to Iusa, the divine healer, who was non-historical in the pre-Christian
religion. Horus, whose other name is Jesus, is the performer of the ‘miracles’
which are repeated in the Gospels; and which were first performed as the
mysteries in the divine nether-world. But if Horus or Iusa be made human on
earth, as a Jew in Judea, we are suddenly hemmed in by the miraculous, at the
center of a maze with nothing antecedent for a clue; no path that leads to the
heart of the mystery, and no visible means of exit therefrom. With the
introduction of the human personage on mundane ground, the mythical
inevitably becomes the miraculous; thus the history was founded on the
miracles, which are perversions of the mythology that was provably
pre-extant."
It was in these discernments that
Massey rose to heights of clear vision and made a contribution to the cause of
religious sanity that can not be rated too highly. This passage is a clear and
courageous declaration of the long-lost truth of the matter. He performed a
great service in discrediting the myths as history; but by thrusting them over
into a purely suppositious world as alleged realities in the "eschatology,"
he committed his costly blunder.
It was into Amenta that both Horus
and Jesus descended to preach to the souls in prison. Horus’ object in making
the descent was to utter the words of his father to the lifeless ones. So in
the Pistis Sophia Jesus passed into Amenta as the teacher of the great
mysteries. It is said in this Gnostic work: "Jesus spake these words unto
his disciples in the midst of Amenta."18 Moreover a special title
is assigned to Jesus in Amenta. He is called Aber-Amentho; "Jesus,
that is to say, Aber-Amentho," is a formula several times repeated.
Aber means lord or ruler; so that again Jesus and Horus are exactly
matched in title.
If Jesus delivered his discourses to
his disciples "in Amenta," all question of where this hidden land is
located should be settled forever. For unless all Gospels are accounts of the
doings of wraiths in a spectral underworld, as even Massey suggests, we are
bound to suppose that their transactions, historical or mythical, transpired on
earth.
The hazy character of current
Egyptological scholarship is notably manifest in a passage from Budge dealing
with the location of the Tuat. It is clearly given in the Ritual as
the gate of entry to the under-
198
world. But Budge gives it as
"the name of a district or region, neither in heaven nor upon earth, where
the dead dwelt and through which the sun passed during the night."
Where else the Tuat might be, if neither in heaven nor on earth,
deponent saith not. In another place (Egyptian Literature, Vol. I) he
defines the Tuat once more. "Tuat is a very ancient name for the
Other World, which was situated either parallel to Egypt, or across the
celestial ocean which surrounded either world." This goes far to prove
that the science of Egyptology has been but a blind groping amid ideas utterly
uncomprehended by the "learned" men in the field. Indeed Budge
himself has penned what may be called his own "confession" on this
score. For its downright candor and its general importance, it is quite worthy
of insertion:
"Is it true that the more the
subject of Egyptian religion and mythology is studied the less is known about
them? The question is, however, thoroughly justified and every honest
worker will admit that there are at the present time scores of passages even in
such a comparatively well-known compilation as the Book of the Dead which
are inexplicable, and scores of allusions to a fundamentally important
mythological character of which the meanings are still unknown." (Gods
of the Egyptians, Vol. I.)
The sun passing through the Tuat depicted
the divine soul as passing through its incarnation, which being in the darkness
of the body was charactered as the "dark night of the soul." As it
entered the gate of Amenta, called the Tuat, it crossed the horizon line
dividing the region of spirit or heaven from earth or embodiment, and there it
stood in the twilight. Budge says that "the Tuat was a duplicate of
Egypt," laid out in nomes, with a river valley and other similar features.
This should further identify it with our earth.
In Amenta the soul was said to
receive a new heart shaped "by certain gods in the nether world according
to the deeds done in the body whilst the person was living on earth." Here
again is confusion and a missing of the intent. The award of a new heart is not
made like that of a prize on graduation day. The larger meaning is that the
whole long experience of many lives creates a new heart, which is the resultant
of the transformation of nature that is gradually accomplished by the whole
process. It is quite impossible to draw intelligible meaning from the
scriptures if we limit our survey to a single span of earth life as a prelude
to an infinite "eternity" in its wake. Reason forbids
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our conceding to the actions of a
single life on earth sufficient moment to fix the destiny of a soul forever. Ancient theology rested on no such irrational
presumption.
Many statements aver that the soul
passes into Amenta at death. Massey felt sure that this clinched his location
of Amenta in the ghost world. He did not dream that the "death" the
ancients spoke of brought the soul here instead of taking it away. The soul’s
statement that it came "to overthrow mine adversaries upon the earth"
should have enlightened him. The soul descends here to battle the lower nature,
the only adversary contemplated in the whole range of holy writ.
The attendants of the soul in its
incarnational descent say to it (Ch. 128): "We put an end to thy ills
through thy being smitten to earth"--"in death," Massey himself
adds. But not even this brought discovery to his mind. The following is highly
indicative also:
"From beginning to end of the Ritual
we see that it is a being once human, man or woman, who is the traveler
through the underworld. . . ."19
Even though the Ritual assigned
to this underworld pilgrim all human characteristics, scholars still have
missed the hint that he was the human. Later texts give to the Manes in
Amenta all the traits and features of the earth mortal.
The solar god in Amenta is addressed
as "thou who givest light to the earth." This again is definite
localization on earth. It was the sun-god who "tunneled the mount of earth
and hollowed out Amenta,"--mistaken for two operations when they are of
course one and the same. The sun-god’s "boring through the earth" was
one of the tropes.
Instruction is derived from noting
how Massey’s erroneous idea entangled him in the following passage:
"The lower paradise of two is
in the mount of earth, also called the funeral mount of Amenta. [Identification
again.] The departed are not born immortals in that land; immortality is
conditional. They have to fight and strive and wrestle with the powers of evil
to compass it."20
His own exegesis convicts him of
shallow thinking here. For he has stated repeatedly that the soul enters his
spectral Amenta with character already formed by "the deeds done in
the body." His Amenta could not be the arena of moral conflict or
fight to win immortality.
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He has indeed called it "the
earth of eternity." It is too late to writhe and wrestle for moral victory
when that "Amenta" is entered. The earth is the one and only
theater of spiritual struggle. So he errs in reiterating:
"The world-to-be in the upper
paradise was what they made it by hard labor and by purification in
Amenta."21
Massey’s mistake, in common with
that of much general religious opinion on these matters, lies in his affirming
that after the termination of life in the body the soul first descends into
Amenta, then later rises into Paradise. This flies in the face of all basic
postulation of theology itself. The soul descends in coming to earth,
and there is no lower region left into which it can further descend on
quitting the body. Its incarnation in flesh drags it down, its release at
decease lets it free to return upward. The false downward direction
assigned to the soul on leaving earth is a perversion of true original
conception due to the loss of the meaning of the term "death" in
world religion. Profound philosophical insight corroborates the instinctive
unconditioned idea which rises in connection with physical death, that the soul
when released begins its ascent to celestial habitat. Only perverted
theology inculcated the thought of further descent when the war between flesh
and mind is over. The dissipation of that idea is ample justification for this
chapter. Another sentence pictures his entanglement in the net:
"The sub-terrestrial paradise
was mapped out for the Manes to work in, and work out their salvation from the
ills of the flesh and the blemishes of the life on earth."
But how can he call this dark,
murky, dismal underworld of sub-terrestrial life a "paradise"? In no
religion is paradise pictured as a gloomy and forbidding place. This obsession
of his, that the soul must first go down into a region of agony and bloody
sweat and fiery torture after separation from the body and be purged of its
earthly sins before it can rise into paradise, warrants all this dissertation
upon it because it is the delusion of millions.
It is conceivable and admissible
that the soul upon release from body may need a period of time to throw off
some heavier portions of its clinging earthly mires, before it can return to
the highest place of purity. But in all reason it must be contended that the
locale of such
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a stage must be above, not below,
the earth life. If the soul lingers a while on a level of purgation after
life here, it is at least on a plane one step higher than this.
The general commitments of this
whole discussion are of sufficient importance to excuse a general critique of
the pious theory that life equalizes the balance of her forces by having us
commit error in one world and do penance or make atonement in another. Almost
universal as is the idea, there is little foundation for it in the great
systems of early racial instruction. It is an excrescence on the body of saner
teaching.
We must reap as we sow.
"He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap
corruption." Half the world has been hypnotized with the belief that
mankind can atone in an ethereal world for "deeds done in the body."
Perfect justice would obviously require that we return to the same world in
which acts were committed to square the Karmic accounts engendered by them. To
work out our salvation from the ills of the flesh, the soul must at least be
where flesh is! If we are to erase the blemishes of earth life, we must return
to those conditions which constituted the nature of the problem in the first
instance. In spirit world the problem is no longer present; it has been
dissolved with matter. If we break the dishes in the kitchen we can hardly
atone by singing in the parlor. How it is presumed by an eccentric theology
that we can work out concrete problems in a world where concreteness has been
dissolved, is not at all easy to see. Those who plan to win the unfought
battles of spiritual life from a bower in Paradise had better take counsel with
the ancient wisdom. There is no heavenly "peace without victory," or
a victory without St. Paul’s long fight. The arcane science tells modern
ignorance why we are on earth. If there was some sufficient primal necessity
for our coming to wrestle with flesh and sense in the first instance, then it
must be essential that we continue to come until these forces and natures are
overcome and raised. The wisdom of civilizations already hoary in Egypt’s time
is back of that pronouncement, and it is back of no other. The static angelic
immortality of the Christians, the "eternal spiritual progress in
heaven" of the Christian Scientists, Spiritualists and other cultists,
find their rebuke and their correction in the venerable knowledge of the
ancient sages.
The divine word or the Logos
"is to be made truth in the life lived
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on earth, so that the spirit when it entered the hall
of judgment, was, as it were, its own book of life, written for the all-seeing
eye." This is magnificent truth that Massey states; but how infinitely
more meaningful it becomes when it is known that the hall of judgment entered
by the spirit to reap the fruits of former action and amend its ways, is not a
spirit plane after death, but this present "underworld," to which it
will return, after a rest, to face the further issues involved in its
evolution. Returning here again and again, the soul brings its own record book
of life with it, written in its own character. Character can be built nowhere
else than on earth. No religion has ever said that we would be judged for deeds
done in the spirit world! We are asleep then and inactive, and making no Karma,
as the East phrases it. As St. Paul says, sin is lying dormant until
incarnation again brings the moral agent, the soul, into subjection to the body
of sense, when "sin springs to life."
The title of one of the chapters of
the Ritual is: "Of introducing the mummy into the Tuat on the day
of burial." This becomes absurd if the mummy is the corpse and the Tuat a
spectral realm of wraiths. No more than that a man can take his gold watch with
him to heaven could a mummy be introduced into Massey’s and Budge’s Tuat! The
burial is the advent of the "mummified" soul or Karast into its
coffin-case of the physical body.
Elsewhere Massey equates "the
pillar of earth" with "the Tat of Amenta" and still fails to see
identification. In another connection he writes:
"Thus we can identify Eve or
Chavvak, as Kefa or Kep, the Great Mother, with Adam or Atum in the Garden of
Amenta."22
Were not Adam and Eve on earth?
A striking pronouncement in the Papyrus
of Ani should have awakened true intelligence in his mind: "The soul,
or Manes, makes the journey through Amenta in the two halves of sex."
Where are there male and female sex distinctions save on earth? And one wonders
how the scholar could have written the following and failed to see the basis of
identity suggested:
"The mortal on earth was made
up of seven constituent parts. The Osiris in Amenta had seven souls, which were
collated, put together and unified to become the ever-living one."
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But all students of ancient
literature are aware that earth was the place where the collecting and unifying
of the seven constituent souls of man were accomplished. Again a most direct
hint of the truth was ignored by the savants. Also Greek metaphysical science
asserts that the soul came down through nine stages "and became connected
with the sublunary world and a terrene body, as the ninth and most abject
gradation of her descent."23 Here is philosophical testimony that negates
the existence of any hell or underworld below life in the body. Any
observer of human life knows that it is possible for the soul to fall to the
most abject baseness while in the body. We are in the lowest of the
hells--Amenta.
Again and again the texts say that
Amenta is the dwelling of Seb, the god of earth.
Massey states that in the
resurrection "man ascended from the earth below, or from below the
earth." The first point of departure is correctly placed; but the
alternative, meant to be an appositive, is ruled out of court. Man was never
below the earth.
In the Jewish scriptures twelve sons
of Jacob go down into Egypt for corn; in the Book of Amenta twelve sons
of Ra make a journey toward the entrance to Amenta, represented as a gorge
between two mountains, heaven and earth, and they go down into the lower Egypt
of the twelve sons of Ra make a journey toward the entrance to Amenta,
represented as a gorge between two mountains, heaven and earth, and they go
down into the lower Egypt of the mythos. All this is figurative for the
descent of the twelve legions of angels of light (sons of Ra, the Light-God)
upon this planet. These are the true prototypes of the twelve tribes of Israel,
to whom the Eternal as recorded in one of the prophetic books of the Old
Testament, before their descent, calls: "The underworld awaits you
with eager joy. It watches with open jaws to receive you." (Moffatt
Trans.) In the Egyptian this is matched by the statement that "the
reptile, or dragon, ‘eternal devourer’ is his name (Ch. 17), lurks and watches
in the ‘bight of Amenta’ for its prey." The "bight of Amenta"
accurately matches the "recess of earth" in the Greek terminology. In
another form of typology the twelve are called "the twelve reapers of the
harvest on earth, which was reaped in Amenta by Horus and the twelve."24 If
the spiritual harvest was reaped "on earth" and "in
Amenta," earth and Amenta must be the same place.
Massey places the habitat of those
"people that sat in darkness" and who saw a great light, in Amenta.
When Horus descends to them to bring the divine light, he is declared to
"descend from heaven to the
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darkness of Amenta as the Light of
the World." How could he be the light of the world if he did not come to
the world? It is our earth, surely, and this is once more equated with Amenta.
When Satan takes Jesus into a high
mountain for his trial (against the powers of matter) it was a place whence
"all the kingdoms of the earth could be seen."
Horus in his coming is said to
kindle a light in the dark of death for the soul "or spiritual image in
Amenta." But he came to earth to bring light. When he arrived at the outer
door of Amenta in his rising Horus says: "I arrive at the confines of
earth." Says Massey himself: "He was to be the light of the world in
the mortal sphere." And when Horus comes to give the breath of life to the
inert Manes in Amenta and delivers his message, it is declared in the Rubric
(to Ch. 70): "If this scripture is known upon earth, he (the Osiris) will
have power to come forth to day and walk upon the earth among the living."
An important link in the chain of
evidence is the statement that the seven principles or vehicles that were
integrated in one organism to form perfect man "were all believed to come
into existence after death."25 But as the khat or physical body was
one of them, and it was incontestably dropped from association with the others
after death, the phrase "after death" must here be taken in the
peculiar theological sense delineated in this analysis. For only after the
death and burial in body could the god begin the work of wedding the
seven principles into an aggregate harmony. We are now put in position to grasp
the works that take place "after death." For in the light of the
new-old meaning of "death" all the experiences dramatized as
occurring after bodily demise can be seen as falling within, not outside of,
the limits of earthly life. Physical birth here is the beginning of that
"death" and the events of life thus come "after (the beginning
of) death." Even that redoubtable verse in the Bible, "It is given
unto man once to die, and after that the judgment," does not overrule the
exegesis here advanced. The integration of the seven constituent principles in
man can not be carried on without the khat in a spirit-Amenta.
In describing the judgment of Ani
(the Manes-soul) in Amenta, Budge writes: "Ani is here depicted in human
form and wearing garments and ornaments similar to those which he wore on
earth." To
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explain this, to him, odd
phenomenon, Budge weaves an intricate conjecture that
"the body which he has in this
hall of judgment can not be the body with which he had been endowed on earth,
and we can probably understand that it is his spiritual body, wearing the white
robes of the beatified dead in the world beyond the grave, that we see."
But what more natural than that the
hierophants should portray the personage in the drama representing the human in
the likeness of the human? The scrolls of old Egypt depicted Ani in human form
and dress because it was to him as a human being that the meaning of the drama
applied. Budge (and all others) first allocates the trial of the deceased to
the nondescript astral world and then wonders why the human character is
represented as human! If the pundits will have it that the Amenta in which the
judgment trial takes place is the realm of flitting specters, they will have to
contrive as best they can to solve the perplexities of Egyptian procedure
created by their own preconceptions. But if they will follow the indicated
guidance of the symbology employed, they will find their difficulties obviated
as if by a touch of magic. For if Amenta is our earth, then Ani may be expected
to appear as the typical human, with flesh, complexion and ornaments to match,
and a little clothing if needed!
The text says of Teta: "This
Teta hath broken forever his sleep in his dwelling which is upon earth."
This assures us that the Amenta sleep takes place upon our earth.
Using "day" in the sense
of incarnation, another text reads: "Thou appearest upon the earth each
day," under the figure of the rising sun, of course.
Another chapter title (132) in the Book
of the Dead gives a clue that is inerrant: "The chapter of causing a
man to come back to see his house upon earth." And in the Saitic Recension
the "house" is said to be in the underworld. The two are then
equated.
Another chapter (152) gives a quite
illuminative title: "Of building a house upon the earth." As this
"house" is the temple which Jesus said he would re-erect "in
three days," and is the central structure of all Masonry, it is important
to note that its erection takes place on earth.
"I died yesterday, but I come
today," exclaims the Manes (Ch. 179).
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"He sitteth as a living being
in Amenta," affirms another verse. These do not sound like the expressions
of the real defunct.
Budge tells us that the duty of
supplying meat, drink and apparel to the "dead" was deputed to Anup,
Keb and Osiris. Anup was the guide of souls in the underworld; Keb (Seb) was
the god of earth; Osiris was the ruler of the kingdom of the dead. All three
distinctly locate the region of death on this globe.
The following from Budge is
noteworthy:26
"For the goddess
(Taht-I-em-hetep) adds, Amenti is a place of stupor and darkness, and death
calleth every one to him, gods and men, and great and little are all one to
him; he seizeth the babe as well as the old man. Yet [Budge adds] the Egyptians
did not27 live wantonly, as if this life were a preparation for a gloomy
death. They lived in expectation of passing into a region of light and
glory."
Here is powerful confirmation of the
contention that the Egyptians could not have regarded the gloomy and darksome
Amenta as the region of life after death, and that the soul ascended to realms
of glory and brightness on leaving the body instead of descending into the
scholars’ purgatory--Amenta. The Egyptians were taught in the Mysteries that
this life was the Amenti of stupor and darkness, and out of it they
would pass to rest and brighter scenes in the empyrean. Budge supposes the call
of "death" to be from the earth to heaven, when it is from heaven to
earth, on the thesis here established. The call of death was the summons to
bright angelic spirits to enter the life in body. It was St. Paul’s
"command." No wonder the noted Egyptologist has to register some
incomprehension over the fact that the Egyptians were cheery in the face of
passing at death into what he supposed was the fearsome Amenta. Pluto’s rape of
Proserpine should have enlightened him. The Grim Reaper calls all souls, when
ready for the human trial, into the kingdom of "death." The other
Egyptian designation for death is notable: "‘Devourer of Millions of
Years’ is his name." This would indicate the total cycle of incarnations
to be of great duration, which indeed all esoteric teaching asserts it to be.
And still more significant is another title given him: "His name is either
Suti (Sut) or Smam-ur, the Earth-soul." There is no escaping the
invincible evidence: to die is to live on earth.
There are not wanting forthright
statements from the Egyptians
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themselves which should prove
conclusive as to the point under discussion. Massey himself gives one of them:
"In the inscriptions on the
sarcophagus of Seti the earth is used as equivalent to Amenti and
opposed to heaven."28
Yet he did not see that this
inscription was destructive of his own interpretation. He says further:
"Also the sun descending into
the underworld is thus addressed: ‘Open the Earth! traverse the Hades and the
Sky! Ra, come to us!"
If now mundane life be found to be
the seat of all human experience and human meaning, what must be made of the
Biblical adjuration not to lay up treasures on earth? If this life is the scene
and theater of destiny, why should it be ignored and scorned?
A part of the answer is that, to be sure,
values are not held here in permanency. Obviously they could not be, if the
bodies through which they are implemented disappear. But neither are they
enjoyed forever in the spiritual existence which the soul has in the interim
between lives. But the great and momentous question then arises: if they abide
in perpetuity neither on earth nor in heaven, where are they preserved?
The answer is: in the inner spiritual entity of the man wherever he goes; it is
his permanent possession and he takes it with him always. It is his, whether in
or out of the body, as St. Paul says. But--and this is the item of final import
for man--though the gains of evolving life are not held on earth in perpetuity,
it is on earth that they are won! And this knowledge is the sum and
substance of philosophy. The soul comes to earth to win its pearl of great
price in the depths of what is called the great sea of mortal life.
The scholar’s thesis that religious
texts were written for the benefit of the dead is the dire result of the complete
reversal of the meaning of ancient typology. All the offices of poetry
vindicate the claim that imagery uses the less real to depict the more real; a
natural process to depict a spiritual one; a fairy tale to portray the deepest
living realities. But a perverted theology used the real to depict the unreal.
As to the mummy, current misconception holds that its preservation was to
suggest an absolutely unreal future for the defunct body that could have no
future and for the soul that as certainly could not return to it. On
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the contrary, the symbolism
centering about the mummy, an entirely insignificant and unreal thing, was an
elaborate device to impress on living humanity the far more real experience of
the immortal self interred in the coffin of the fleshly body, but immortalized
there.
The Books of the Dead should be
pondered by the Western world with a new intensity. For with the new canon of
interpretation laid down in the present work to guide our thinking, the title
will yield a stunning realization of the catastrophic blunder of sixteen
centuries of theological blindness. And flashing through awakened intelligence
will dawn that benign understanding that religious scripts were meant for human
guidance through this benighted land of the dead, the only Amenta,
Sheol, Hades, Tophet or underworld ever contemplated by the original framers of
the grand mythos. And not the less impressive will be that philosophical
recognition, at last as at first, that man is himself the mummy,
"dead" on earth, but preserved to immortality by the injection of the
Amrit or Soma juice of the Christ nature.
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Chapter XI
DISMEMBERMENT
AND DISFIGUREMENT
The answer to the riddle of the
generally feeble pulse of religion in the modern age has been compounded out of
the material adduced in the preceding chapters. But there are many distinct
doctrinal items the corruption of the significance of which is a strong
ancillary cause of the reduced power of ancient faith, and one of these can now
be enunciated. In the light of extended exposition we shall be able to see why
it was that the gods’ descent into our realm, heralded by angel hosts as the
event of supreme omen thus far in the history of the globe, has failed to bring
to every mortal the climactic joy it was designed to release. It will be seen
why the celestial tidings proclaimed of old to bring an era of peace and
good-will to all men have stirred us so faintly. A false theology has stepped
in between the supernal messengers and the minds of the sons of earth to dull
the thrill of the "good news." On the day of the Advent heaven’s
arches rang with the proclamation of peace and amity among men on the basis of
the fact that a fragment of divinity had been lodged in the holy of holies of
the temple of each human body. Emanuel had come to dwell with man. But the
exuberant joyousness of all mortal hearts over the event has been clogged. No
longer the substance but only the shadow of the truth remains to kindle
Yuletide ecstasy. The allegory of the birth in the stable or cave was devised
to keep mankind in exultant memory of its divinity. Alas! It speaks no more of our
divinity. It extols the godly nature of but one. The paeans of sacred
hilarity that are raised for the birth of our Savior are appropriate and
efficacious only as that Savior stands as symbol of the glorious birth within
ourselves. Long ago Angelus Silesius, a Christian mystic, admonished
Christendom:
"Though Christ a thousand times
in Bethlehem be born,
But not within thyself, thy soul
will be forlorn;
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The cross on Golgotha thou lookest
to in vain
Unless within thyself it be set up
again."
If the birth of the god in each
individual heart is not the interior meaning of the Nativity, then we celebrate
the event to no purpose. No amount of adoration accorded to a newborn king in
Judea will avail to redeem a single wayward heart if the Christ Child is not
eventually domiciled in the breast of the individual. The King of Righteousness
must be cradled in the manger of each human self ere the myth can work its
magic in the world.
This miscarriage of the vital
significance of the event has come about entirely through the desuetude of the
doctrine that may be denominated by the Greeks’ philosophical term, the god’s dismemberment.
The reconstruction of pristine wisdom can not be encompassed without the
rehabilitation of this great doctrine. Sunk entirely out of sight, its
restoration to its integral office in the body of theology will enable that
science to function again with the semblance of its former power.
For the god came to earth not in his
entirety, not in his single deific unity, but torn into hosts of fragments,
grouped in twelve principal divisions. How could he hope to enter every mortal
life, to tabernacle in every breast, if he came as one unit? This is just the
mistake that Christian doctrinism made, fatal to humanity at large. It is a
matter of simple logic. To be the divine guest in every human life he had to
suffer fragmentation into as many portions as there were to be mortal children
for him to father, in order that each might possess a share of his nature. This
procedure was necessitated by the conditions extant. The terms under which the
law of incubation operates require that the forces of life on any plane must
take rootage in the soil of the kingdom below, as the sheer seeds of their own
capabilities, and fragment their unity by division to accommodate their higher
potencies to the lesser capacities of the lower organisms. These could not
carry the heavier voltage of life in its unitary volume on the plane above. Man
on earth could never implement and incorporate the full power of heaven. The
embodiment of superior force in less capacious vehicles is accomplished by the
partition of that upper unity into fragments, after the analogy of the oak tree
in its annual production of a thousand embryonic units of its potential nature,
each of which, when incubated in the mothering womb of the soil below it, is
capable of regenerating its dying
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parent. And so every divine son of
God raises his Father from the dead, as did Jesus and Horus. The god in man can
not move across the dividing line between the kingdoms, stepping from the
divine level down into the human, without suffering a dismantling of his
integrity and a partitioning of his "body" into a multitude. He must
experience a diminution of his intellectual genius analogous to what a human
mind would suffer if it was to be incorporated in the brain of a dog. And Daniel
does say this very thing! "An animal’s mind shall be given unto
him." Only a portion of the god’s intellectual light, and that reduced in
strength and luminosity, could function in the brain mechanism of animal man.
In short, the gods could not transplant their full and mature selfhood into
man, but only the seeds of its next cycle of growth. Indeed all
projection of deity outward into matter is in embryonic form. Divine
thought is sent out to take root in matter, there to have its cycle of new
growth. The analogy of the oak and its acorns leaves nothing wanting for understanding
of the evolutionary method. And it clarifies for us the incarnation, as being
the planting, germinating, budding and flowering in mortal life, of the
seed-germ of divinity. Jesus is the embryonic deity, born in the crib or crypt
of man’s mortal nature.
Clement of Alexandria, describing
the sacra of the Mysteries, speaks of those who ignorantly worship
"a boy torn to pieces by the Titans." This was Bacchus, in a part of
whose Mystery ritual the body of the god was represented as torn into pieces by
the Titans and scattered over the earth! It is significant that in the
drama the god is cut into pieces while enticed into contemplating his image in
a mirror. Greek philosophy spoke of the soul’s projecting a similitude of
herself into matter. She was to reproduce a likeness of herself in flesh, for
the lower must be formed in the image of the higher. Man is to reproduce, as
the acorn the oak, the image of his maker. This detail is an intimation that it
was the god’s inclination toward a life of sense, depicted by his bending down
(Cf. the fable of Narcissus) to gaze delightedly at his reflection in the water
of generation, that preceded his fall and divulsion into fragments. Jupiter,
hurling his thunderbolts at the Titans, the forces of elementary nature,
committed the members of Bacchus to Apollo, the Sun-god, that he might properly
inter them. The god’s heart, which had been snatched away by Pallas (the
higher mind) during the laceration, and preserved for a new generation,
emerges,
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and about it as a nucleus the
scattered members are reassembled, and he is restored to his pristine
integrity!
Turning to Egypt there is found an
exactly parallel mythos, which has the god Osiris in place of the Greek
Dionysus. Says Budge:
"Throughout the Egyptian texts
it is assumed that the god suffered death and mutilation at the hands of
his enemies; that various members of his body were scattered about the land of
Egypt; that his sister-wife Isis ‘sought him sorrowing’ and at length found
him; that she fanned him with her wings and gave him air; that she raised up
his body and was reunited with him; that she conceived and brought forth a
child (Horus); and that he (Osiris) became the god and king of the underworld.
In the legend of Osiris as given by Plutarch (De Iside et Osiride)
it is said that he was murdered at the instigation of Typhon or Set, who tore
the body into fourteen pieces, which he scattered throughout the land; Isis
collected these pieces. . . ."1
It is hard to think that this legend
or glyph of our evolutionary history has stood in the books for five thousand
years and failed eventually to illuminate the race’s understanding of its own
cosmic situation.
Osiris was not the only sun-deity
whose body suffered dismemberment in the Egyptian pantheon, for Ptah, an
earlier god, shared the same mythic fate. Under his name of Ptah-Sekari he
underwent fragmentation as did Osiris. For "Sekari is the title of the
suffering Ptah, and sekar means to cut; cut in pieces; sacrifice; or, as
we have the word in English, to score or scarify."2 Ptah was
said to be the earliest form of God the Father, who became a voluntary
sacrifice in "Egypt," and who, in the name of Sekari, was the silent
sufferer, the coffined one, the deity that opened the nether world for the
Manes. As a solar god he went down into Amenta. There he died and rose again.
Atum, son of Ptah, also became the voluntary sacrifice as the source of life to
mortals. As the "silent Sekari" Ptah was an earlier type of the
figure of Jesus, who was as a lamb dumb before his shearers, and opened not his
mouth against his accusers. The title of Sekari is in fact added to Osiris, as
well as to Ptah, and as Osiris-Sekari he is the dismembered and mutilated mummy
in his coffin. The Speaker in the Ritual cries: "The darkness in
which Sekari dwells is terrifying to the weak." The Egyptian festival of
the resurrection, celebrated every year in the
213
month Choiak (Nov. 27 to Dec. 26,
Alexandrian year) was devoted to the god Osiris-Ptah-Sekari, "who had been
dead and was alive again; cut to pieces and reconstituted with his
vertebrae sound and not a bone of his body found to be broken or missing."
(Cf. the Gospels: "And they brake all his bones." This was the form
of the dismemberment, to be followed by the reconstitution.)
That which applied to the Osiris-god
also applied to "the dead in Osiris." (Cf. the Gospels: "Dead in
Christ.") "They were figuratively cut in pieces as the tangible image
of abstract death."3 "When the mortal entered Amenta it was in the
likeness of Osiris, who had been bodily dismembered in his death, and
who had to be reconstituted to rise again as the spirit that never died."4
It is certain that the Manes was considered to have suffered dismemberment like
his ensampler Osiris, because it is written that before the mortal Manes could
attain the ultimate state of spirit in the image of Horus the immortal, he must
be put together part by part like Osiris, the dismembered god. From a divided
being he had to be made whole again as Neb-er-ter, "the god entire."
In one phase of the drama the deceased is put together bone by bone after the
model of the backbone of Osiris. The backbone was an emblem of sustaining
power, matching indeed the Tat cross of stability. In the Ritual (Ch.
102) Horus says: "I have come myself and delivered the god in his
dismembered condition. I have healed the trunk and fastened the shoulder and
made firm the leg." Horus, entering the lower world to seek and to save
that which is lost in the obscurity of matter, says (Ch. 78): "I advance
whithersoever there lieth a wreck in the field of eternity." On
their drop into matter, the first episode in the gods’ mutilation was the loss
of their intellectual unity, typified by the figurative cutting off of their
heads. "And the god Horus shall cut off their heads in heaven where they
are) in the form of feathered fowl, and their hind parts shall be on the earth in
the form of animals. . . ." It is even directly stated that "Ra
mutilates his own person" for the benefit of mortals. Thoth later came and
healed the mutilations. As Thoth was the god of knowledge, it can be seen on
what plane of comprehension the mutilation and healing are to be given meaning.
The dismemberment was only the division of unified intellect into partial
vision. The reconstitution of the torn divinity is referred to in the address
to Teta, the "dead" king on earth: "Hail, hail! Rise up, thou
Teta! Thou hast received thy head,
214
thou hast embraced thy bones, thou
hast gathered together thy flesh."
In far India the Lord of Creation,
Prajapati, was represented as having undergone dismemberment. Likewise
Sarasvati. There is no question as to the wide prevalence of the symbol.
Nothing is more shattering to our
modern sense of superiority and condescension with regard to early nations
believed to have been "primitive" and ignorant, than to find in their
literary relics the outlines of some of the grandest conceptions of Platonic or
other high philosophic theory. In a Mexican legend we come upon the idea of the
god’s dismemberment in a striking form. A story portrayed the union of physical
man with a higher spirit under the imagery of mixing a bone with blood. The
tale runs to the effect that the Great Mother of the gods instructs them, in
the creation of man, to go down to Mistlanteuctli, the Lord of Hades, and beg
him to give them a bone or some ashes of the dead, who are with him. These
would represent the lower natural body. Having received this, they were told to
sacrifice over it, sprinkling the blood from their own bodies upon it. This
would typify the impartation of their own divine natures to the mortals. After
consultation they dispatched one of their number, Xolotl, down to Hades. He
succeeded in procuring a bone six feet long (a certain identification
with the human body) from Mistlanteuctli and started off with it at full speed.
Wroth at this, the infernal chief gave chase, causing Xolotl a hasty fall, in
which the bone was broken in pieces. The messenger gathered up in all
haste what he could, and despite the stumble made his escape. Reaching the
earth he put the fragments of bone into a basin and all the gods drew blood
from their bodies and sprinkled it into the vessel. On the fourth day there
was a movement among the wetted bones and a boy lay there before all, and in
four days more of blood-letting and sprinkling, a girl came to life. If the
Bible student is inclined to disdain this myth as profitless, let him turn to Ezekiel
(37) and reflect on what he finds there. For the Biblical fable of the
valley of dry bones contains five or six distinct points of identity with this
legend: the operation of the gods upon the lifeless bones, a noise, a stirring
and movement among the bones, a coming together and eventual constitution of
them into living bodies, with flesh and sinew, and their creation as humans,
male and female, as in Genesis.
The early Egyptians laconically
dramatized the doctrine of dismem-
215
berment, but the intellectual Greeks
wrote elaborate disquisitions upon its import. It is set forth by the
Platonists with dialectical precision. The doctrine grows out of the very laws
of thought. It is no whimsical speculative fancy. It rests on a logical
necessity. For if life is to proceed from primal unity to manifest multiplicity
and diversity, there is no way for the One to multiply itself save by an
initial division of itself. Life proceeds from oneness and identity of
nature into number and differentiation, and the structure of thought requires
that multiformity arise from unity by partition of that unity. The One must
break himself into pieces, tear himself apart, and this is the meaning of the
mutilations and exsections of the gods. The One must give himself to division.
And with division comes addition of forms, multiplication of units and
combinations, but subtraction of deific power in the divided parts.
Each wave of creative impulse
quivered outward from the central heart of being and, like falling water,
body-blood and tree-sap, was fragmented by the resistance of matter. From plane
to plane the dispersion continued. Wholes were broken into parts, which as
wholes on their own plane went into further partition to plant the field of the
next lower level. With his own inseparable being torn into multiple division,
and each part an integral unit of the total, his life is seminally distributed
in each. He lives in the parts and the parts live in him. The fragments are the
cells of his body. "We are the members of one body, and Christ is the
head." So Greek philosophy states that "each superior divinity
becomes the leader of a multitude, generated from himself." And at last
there is the basis for comprehensible sense in the phrase "the Lord of
Hosts." Each deity is the lord of a host, who are the fragmented children
of his own body.
Each unit of division, when
incubated in the lower realm, begins to renew its father’s life. It must arise
and return unto the father’s estate. The son must restore the parent who has
died in him to his former greatness, with something added. He must raise that
which has fallen and redeem that which has been lost. No one shall see the
father save him to whom the son revealeth him. This was the typical function of
Horus in relation to Osiris in Egypt, as it was that of Jesus to God his Father
in the Gospels.
Buried within the heart of each
fragment, then, is the hidden lord of divine life, and from no one is he
absent. He dwells there to be the
216
guide, the guardian, the comforter
and informing intelligence of the organism. He is the holy spirit, the flame,
the ray, the lamp unto our feet. Says St. Paul (I Cor. 4:7): "For
God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our
hearts . . . but we have this treasure in earthen vessels." The
ancients oft termed this presence the daemon or guardian angel, as in the
famous case of Socrates. He is that attendant monitor who stands behind the
scenes of the outer life, instant to bless, ready to save, a never-failing help
in trouble. His counsel is never lacking, if one seeks it or has not previously
stilled its small voice. It reasons with us until many times seven. It abides
within our inner shrine, patiently awaiting the hour of our discovery and
recognition of its presence.
We must take time to hear the voice
of Greek wisdom anent the dismemberment:
"In the first place, then, we
are made up from fragments (says Olympiodorus), because, through falling into
generation, our life has proceeded into the most distant and extreme division;
and from Titanic fragments, because the Titans are the ultimate artificers of
things, and stand immediately next to whatever is constituted from them. But
furthermore, our irrational life is Titanic, by which the rational and higher
life is torn to pieces. Hence when we disperse the Dionysus, or intuitive
intellect contained in the secret recesses of our nature, breaking in pieces
the kindred and divine form of our essence, and which communicates, as it
were, both with things subordinate and supreme, then we become the Titans (or
apostates); but when we establish ourselves in union with this Dionysiacal or
kindred form, then we become Bacchuses, or perfect guardians and keepers of our
irrational life; for Dionysus, whom in this respect we resemble, is himself an ephorus
or guardian deity; dissolving at his pleasure the bonds by which the soul
is united to the body, since he is the cause of a parted life. But it is
necessary that the passive or feminine nature of our irrational part, through
which we are bound to body, and which is nothing more than the resounding echo,
as it were, of soul, should suffer the punishment incurred by descent; for when
the soul casts aside the (divine) peculiarity of her nature, she requires her
own, but at the same time, a multiform body, that she may again become in need
of a common form, which she has lost through Titanic dispersion in
matter."5
"Now we know in part and we
prophesy in part, but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in
part shall be done
217
away." Had we held our culture
closer to the heart of Greek philosophy we should have seen the whole of things
more clearly. We are the Titans who tore the divine philosophical fire away
from the central altar in the empyrean and scattered it like sparks amongst the
race of mortals. And these Titans, or Satanic hosts, were those apostates who
compounded the felony of stealing divine fire by further carrying its
dispersion into remote depths of matter. Yet they were the agents of deity to
bring salvation, or the purifying, cleansing fire, to man on earth. They
distributed the divine life in fragments among mortals, administering the
cosmic Eucharist of the broken body and shed blood of the gods for a benison to
all humanity. The divine intellectual power, the mind of the god, was divided
amongst us, not, however, with the loss of the total unity of the godhead on
his own plane. Only his lower fragments in body felt their reduction to
poverty. Says Taylor:
And thus much for the mysteries of
Bacchus, which, as well as those of Ceres, relate in one part to the descent of
a partial intellect into matter, and its condition while united with the dark
tenement of body; but there appears to be this difference between the two, that
in the fable of Ceres and Proserpina, the descent of the whole rational soul is
considered; and in that of Bacchus the scattering and going forth of
that supreme part alone of our nature which we properly characterize by the
appellation of intellect."6
In Proclus’ Hymn to Minerva we
have a spirited statement of the unified god-mind, Bacchus, fragmented:
"The Titans fell against his
life conspired;
And with relentless rage and thirst
for gore,
Their hands his members into
fragments tore."
Olympiodorus unfolds the dialectical
thesis in three propositions: (1). It is necessary that soul place a likeness
of herself in body. (2). It is essential that she should sympathize with this
image of herself, as it tends to seek integration with its parent. (3).
"Being situated in a divided nature, it is necessary that she should be
torn to pieces and fall into a last separation," after which she shall
free herself from the simulacrum and rise again to unity. The gods impart their
divided essence to mortals and then the fragments seek to rejoin their parents
and be united again with them in nature. Bacchus pursued his image,
218
formed in the mirror of matter, and
thus was carried downward and scattered into fragments. But Apollo collected
the fragments and restored them to union in the heavens.
If the Bible student judges all this
to be foreign to his interpretation of his Book of Wisdom, let him consult the
nineteenth chapter of Judges, and read the story of the rape and
destruction of the concubine of a man whose name is not given, but described as
"a Levite . . . in the remote highlands of Ephraim," which would seem
to identify him with some higher spiritual principle. The concubine, who left
for her father’s house in a fit of rage, would perhaps correspond to
Proserpina, the detached incarnating soul. The man sought her, and after long
dallying with her reluctant father, started home with her, "from Bethlehem
to the remote highlands of Ephraim." At Gibeah, among the Banjaminites,
they lodged over night, and there the unruly citizens, "certain sons of
Belial" (our lower propensities) attacked the house, forcing the man
finally to send out his host’s virgin daughter and his own concubine to be
ravished by the crowd. In the morning he lifted the concubine’s body on his ass
and took her home. Here "he took a knife and cut up the concubine’s
body, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, which he sent all over the
country of Israel, telling his messengers to ask all the inhabitants, ‘Was ever
such a crime committed since the Israelites left Egypt?’" Twelve baskets
of fragments in the New Testament miracle; twelve legions of
angels ready to come to Jesus’ assistance in the garden of Gethsemane; twelve
stones set in the midst of the Jordan when Joshua led the Israelites from
Amenta into the Promised Land; twelve fragments of the soul’s dismembered life
in the story in Judges! If the literalist insists that Judges is
talking about a concubine in the flesh, and not a principle of divided
intellect in Greek philosophy, the all-sufficient answer is that he thus keeps
the incidents of his Book on a level where they mean nothing and hold no
instruction or appeal for the mind of man. And the proof of this is that on the
level on which he keeps them nobody pays any attention to them. Only through
Greek philosophy can we lift such neglected allegories to a height of
impressive significance.
In the "miracle" of the Lord’s
feeding the five thousand with the loaves and fishes in the Gospel narrative we
have a repetition of the dramatization of the Eucharistic rite minus only the
accompanying statement from the Christ himself that the loaves were his own
body,
219
broken for the multitude of humans.
We have set the stage certainly however, for the first full and clear
comprehension of the meaning of the disciples’ "gathering up" (the
Egyptian reconstitution) twelve baskets of fragments. In multiplying
the bread, he dramatized the doctrine of the dismemberment, which was in
twelve main sections or groups.
But Christian intelligence is not
aware that in the very heart of its own chief rite of formalism this great
doctrine lives in unsuspected completeness. St. Paul makes a specific
announcement of it in I Corinthians (11:23):
"I pass on to you what I
received from the Lord himself, namely, that on the night he was betrayed the
Lord Jesus took a loaf, and after thanking God he broke it, saying, ‘This means
my body broken for you; do this in memory of me."
Here is the fragmentation of the god
announced at the heart of the Christian Eucharist! The body of the Messiah broken
for us! The main symbol in all Christian ritual is the breaking of a
piece of bread into fragments and distributing them out among the communicants!
And all theological acumen has missed the relation of this to Greek Platonism
just because the recital was not explicit enough to state that the Lord’s body
was broken into pieces.
Scholars have long quarreled over
the word translated "broken," and will do so again, doubtless more
violently than before, when the attempt is made to relate its meaning to the
Greek doctrine of dismemberment here suggested. But the quarrel is gratuitous.
There may be dispute about the word, but there can be no dispute about the act
of breaking the bread, which dramatizes the meaning. For Jesus
dismembered the bread as the indisputable outward symbol of the cosmic truth of
his fragmented body of spirit; and to avoid the use of the participle
"broken" in the verse would be a faithless betrayal of the obvious
meaning of the text. Here then is Greek esoteric philosophy functioning on the
innermost altar of the Christian faith!
The entire temple of Christian
theology would be beautified and strengthened if this cardinal doctrine could
once more be adequately envisaged and included in living presentation. But, the
true meaning lost, and the spiritual signification deeply buried under the
outer debris of the myths, the Church has nothing more sublime to offer its
devo-
220
tees than the picture of a physical
body suffering alleged laceration on a wooden cross! Such a body could not
rise and be reconstituted. But the unit body of deific virtue, distributed
out into myriad earthly vessels of human life, broken thus and buried piecemeal
in the soil of mortal flesh, could be reassembled and reunited in the
increasing brotherhood of humanity. There is no truth in ancient scripture
outside of a spiritual rendering of the material. As soon as the Church returns
to the true original meaning of the "broken body of our Lord," it may
take up again its prime function as nourisher of the souls of men.
Incarnation brought dismemberment;
but this was not the only form of diminished power and beauty incurred in the
process. The god also suffered many kinds of disfigurement. Dead and
buried in matter, he was typed under a variety of figures representing his
suffering and deformity. The depictions included those of a decrepit old man, a
wizened babe (the mummy-Christ), a maimed, crippled, wounded, dumb, deformed,
disfigured, demoniac, deaf, naked and ugly little child! He was bereft in every
particular. Several of the early Church Fathers, misled by the change from drama
to alleged history, actually described the person of Jesus as not comely and
radiant, but ugly and deformed! This is but one of the many absurdities that
came to light when allegorism was converted over into realism. Some of the
disfigurement material from the Scriptures must be presented here briefly:
"In the Egyptian mysteries, all
who enter the nether world as Manes to rise again as spirits, are blind and
deaf and dumb and maimed and impotent because they are the dead. Their
condition is typified by that of the mortal Horus who is portrayed as blind and
maimed, deaf and dumb, in An-ar-ef, the abode of occultation, the house
of obscurity . . . where all the citizens were deaf and dumb, maimed and blind,
awaiting the cure that only came with the divine healer, who is Horus of the
resurrection in the Ritual, or Khnum, the caster out of demons, or
Iu-em-hetep, the healer, or Jesus in the Gospels, gnostic or agnostic. This
restoring of sight to the blind man, or the two blind men, was one of the
mysteries of Amenta that is reproduced amongst the miracles in the canonical
Gospels."7
When Horus, the deliverer, descends
into Amenta he is hailed as the Prince in the City of the Blind; that is, of
the dead who are sleeping
221
in their prison cells. He comes to
shine into their sepulchers and to restore spiritual sight to the blind on
earth. Horus is designated "he who dissipates the darkness and gives
eyes to the gods in obscurity."8
"The typical blind man in
Amenta is Horus in the gloom of his sightless condition, as the human soul
obscured in matter, or groping in the darkness of the grave. Sut has
deprived him of his faculties. This is Horus An-ar-ef in the city of the
blind."
What becomes of the Gospel healings
and miraculous cures in the light of this antecedent material in the
Egyptian scripts? It is a question momentous for the future of orthodoxy. There
seems to be but one answer open to sincerity: the New Testament "miracles"
are the reproductions of ancient Egyptian religious dramatizations in the
Mysteries, and not actual occurrences.
Horus, prince in the city of
blindness, as his father was king in the realm of the dead, comes to
reconstitute his father whole and entire, and to give lost sight to all those
dead as and in Osiris. The Manes were all blind, and the god had to work a
magical operation on them to restore their sight. We have the Gospels
dramatizing the god’s opening up of intellectual faculty when at the typical
age of twelve years he makes his transformation into the adult. The Egyptian
emblem of the hawk’s head given him at that epoch betokens his restored sight.
His eye, stolen from him by Sut, is then restored. Under the astrological sign
of Orion Horus was typed as the god of the night or dark, the blind god who
received sight at dawn. He describes himself as the mortal born blind and dumb
in An-ar-ef, the abode of occultation, but who in regaining his own
sight will likewise open the eyes of the prisoners in their cells. The circle
of the gods rejoices at seeing Horus take his father’s throne and scepter and
rule over the earth, replacing blindness with spiritual sight.
A most suggestive portrayal of this
condition was hinted at in a calendar published in 1878 at Alexandria, in which
there is recited a tradition that on December 19 "serpents become
blind," and that on March 24 they "open their eyes." (A. Nourse,
p. 24). As the serpent typed here the divine soul, the imagery is readily
grasped. One must connect the story with the yearly astrology to see its full
appropriateness. We read that three months of the year were assigned to the
blind serpent or dragon in the abyss. The three months, as elsewhere three
222
days and the three kingdoms below
the human, figured the period of the god’s burial in the material worlds.
"As Jonas was three days in the whale’s belly, so must the Son of Man be
three days in the bowels of the earth."
Jesus after his baptism announces
his messianic commission to preach "recovery of sight to the blind,"
and healing to them that are bruised. And St. Paul writes that we wait for the
coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, "who shall fashion anew the body of our
humiliation." Of Jesus it is written that "to many blind he gave
sight," not physical but spiritual.
The story of Samson, the luni-solar
hero, does not omit the feature of loss of sight, when, as the god in
incarnation, he is shorn of his power and bound helpless. He is eyeless in
Gaza, pitiful and forlorn, like "the blind Orion hungering for the
morn"--the return of the lost light. The Hebrews have a Talmudic tradition
that Samson was lame in both his feet, which was also the status of the
child-Horus, who was pictured as maimed and halt in his lower members, the
crippled deity, as he is called by Plutarch.
Isaiah’s chapter (61) in which the Manes announces
that the Lord has sent him to bind up the broken-hearted and to open
blind eyes, has been noted. But Isaiah has a far more touching
portraiture of the suffering servant in reference to his disfigurement in
chapter 53:
"His visage was so marred, more
than any man, and his form more than
the sons of men.
Disfigured till he seemed a man no
more,
Deformed out of the semblance of a
man."
Horus bewails the loss of his eye to
Sut who has pierced it, or stolen it. He cries: "I am Horus. I come to
search for mine eyes." In the spring Sut restores the god’s sight.
The mouse, the mole and the
shrewmouse were all employed as symbols of the soul shut up in darkness, in the
crypt of the body. Yet only by such burrowing in the dark underworld could the
soul be transformed into a new and higher stage of life.
Harpocrates, the Greek-Egyptian god
of healing, is traceable to the Egyptian Har-p-khart, who as a crippled deity
was said to be begotten in the dark. The term "khart" signifies a
deformed child, and includes also the idea of speechless. It should not be
overlooked that our own
223
word "infant," from the
Latin, means "speechless!" Har(Horus) -p(the) -khart(speechless
child) was the character depicting the god just born into matter, and not yet
able to manifest or utter "the Word made Truth." One of the supreme
features of Horus’ mission was to open dumb mouths, or to give mouths to the
dumb. This was to cause their lives to express the words of power and truth. Isaiah
sings that "the dumb are to break forth into singing and the lame to
leap for joy." Jesus was silent when accused. This is all to typify the
infant god in the flesh, who has not yet learned to articulate the living
reality of spiritual truth. As the human infant is speechless for an initial
period of some two years, so the god is silent in the expression of his divine
nature for a corresponding period at the beginning of his incarnate nature for
a corresponding period at the beginning of his incarnate sojourn. At the
judgment trial vindication for the Manes was assured if he could assert that he
had given bread to the hungry, speech to the speechless, drink to the
thirsty, clothes to the naked and a boat to him that had suffered shipwreck on
the Nile--of life.
A further anthropological reference
of great importance is suggested by the typology of the dawn of speech, in that
it carries an allusion to the opening up of the faculty of speech by the race
with the coming of the gods. Psychology reveals that speech was necessary for
the development of thought. But it is just as rational to say that the power to
think made speech possible.
Deprivation of breath was another
form of typology for "the dead." And with breathing stopped, there
was also the motionless heart. The Osiris says:
"I am motionless in the fields
of those who are dumb in death. But I shall wake, and my soul shall speak in
the dwelling of Tum, the Lord of Annu."
For it was in Beth-Annu (Bethany) in
Egypt, the place of weeping, that Osiris lay in his coffin inert and
motionless. Hence Osiris is portrayed in the likeness of the mummy called
"the breathless one"; also "the god with the non-beating
heart." Mummification set the seal of indestructability on the soul. The
god in his advent announces:
"I utter Ra’s words to the men
of the present generation, and I repeat his words to him who is deprived of
breath"--the Manes in Amenta. (Rit., Ch. 36).
224
Multitudes of crippled people
followed Jesus into the mountains and cast themselves at his feet to be healed.
"And he healed them; insomuch that the multitude wondered when they saw
the dumb speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking and the blind
seeing." (Matt. 15:29 ff.).
A festival known as the Hakera was
celebrated in Egypt. The name means "fasting" and the festival
terminated the fasting with a feast. It was for the benefit of those who had
been deprived of breath, who were dumb and blind, motionless and inert--in
short, the deceased lying helpless like "wrecks" in the fields of
Amenta.
Upon the Gnostic monuments in the
Roman catacombs Jesus is portrayed in one of his two characters, matching
Horus, as the little, old and ugly Jesus; in the other he corresponds to Horus
of the beautiful face. The first is the suffering infant Messiah, the man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief, the despised and afflicted one. As Jesus in
this character was never more than twelve years of age, "Old Child was his
name." In the Pistis Sophia Jesus is again pictured in his two
characters, the first being that of the puny child, the mortal Horus, born of
the virgin mother (nature) as her blind and deaf, her dumb and impubescent
child. It was the human Horus again who was pierced and tortured by Sut in
death until the day of his triumph, when he rose to become king and conqueror in
his turn. We are by this exposition permitted to see the mythical character of
Job, the assailed one, subjected to the assaults of Sut (Satan). Practically
all the central figures of the Old Testament enact the role of the
Manes, the soul of buried deity.
In the Orphic Tablets the
dead person is thus addressed: "Hail, thou who hast endured the suffering,
such as thou hadst never suffered before; thou hast become god from man!"
One portion of the Mystery ritual recited the sufferings of Psyche in the
underworld of Pluto and her rescue by Eros, as described by Apuleius (The
Golden Ass), in the cult of Isis. "Almost always," says Dr.
Cheetham, speaking of the Mysteries, "the suffering of a god--suffering
followed by triumph--seems to have been the subject of the sacred drama."9
The minds of the neophytes were prepared for the glorious breaking of the light
by the preliminary ordeal of darkness, fatigue and terrors, typical of this
earth life. Carpenter10 compares with the wounding of the side of Jesus an
Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and communicating
225
it to the multitude from the wounded
breast of a human victim, celebrated every fifty-two years, when the
constellation of the Pleiades is at the zenith. (Prescott, Conquest of
Mexico, Bk. I, Ch. 4).
In the Ritual the Manes
cries: "Decree this, O Atum, that if I see thy face, I shall not be pained
by the signs of thy sufferings." In Luke (24:26) it is asked:
"Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and enter into his
glory?" And John declares that in the world we shall have tribulation.
Budge describes a form of the
suffering Messiah:
"Thus the great god Ra, when
bitten by the adder which Isis made, suffered violent pains in his body, and
the sweat of agony rolled down his face, and he would have died if Isis
had not treated him after he revealed to her his hidden name."11
The serpent formed by the goddess is
the lower nature which is made to sting the life of the god into a coma upon
his incarnation. A prayer in the Ritual pleads that the divine beings do
away with the sorrow of the Osiris-Nu, his sufferings and his pains, and that
his ills be removed. Massey draws a composite picture of the god beset with
material limitation:
"This was the Horus of the
incarnation, the god made flesh in the imperfect human form, the type of
voluntary sacrifice, the image of suffering; being an innocent little child,
maimed in his lower members, marred in his visage, lame and blind and dumb and
altogether imperfect."12
But the most appealing portrayal of
this phase of the Christ experience, save that of the crucifixion of Jesus, is
the picture of the "suffering servant" in Isaiah (Ch. 53). It
is so striking that we must make space for it, in the beautiful language of the
Moffatt translation:
"He was despised and shunned by
men,
A man of pain who knew what sickness
was;
like one from whom men turn with
shuddering,
he was despised, we took no heed of
him.
And yet ours was the pain he bore,
the sorrow he endured!
We thought him suffering from a
stroke
at God’s own hand;
226
yet he was wounded because we had
sinned;
‘twas our misdeeds that crushed him;
‘twas for our welfare that he was
chastised;
the blows that fell to him
have brought us healing.
.
. . . . .
And the Eternal laid on him
the guilt of all of us.
He was ill-treated, yet he bore it
humbly,
he never would complain;
Dumb as a sheep led to the
slaughter,
dumb as a ewe before the shearers.
They did away with him unjustly;
and who heeded how he fell,
torn from the land of the living,
struck down for sins of ours?
They laid him in a felon’s grave,
and buried him with criminals,
though he was guilty of no violence
nor had he uttered a false word.
.
. . . . .
he shall succeed triumphantly,
since he has shed his life-blood,
and let himself be numbered among
rebels,
bearing the great world’s sins
and interposing for rebellious
men."
This is a graphic depiction of the
nature and office of the Christos, and written long before the
appearance of any historical Jesus! The Gospel "life" of Jesus, Isaiah’s
account of the suffering servant, the chronicle of Job’s afflictions, the
pre-Christian Gnostic story of the suffering Christ-Aeon and the description of
the pierced, wounded, crucified Horus of antique Egyptian records, match each
other with unmistakable fidelity.
The diminished glory of descending
godhood is also portrayed under the figure of disrobing. As the soul descends
from one plane to another she is represented as being divested of one of her
robes of glory at each step. The student of esotericism will see at once the
meaning of this. Each plane clothes the soul with a body of its proper matter, pneumatikon,
psychikon, physikon, or spiritual, psychic, physical. As the
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soul steps down the grades of being
she takes on a coarser body, which is equivalent to her losing a more ethereal
one, at each landing. And the incubus of each heavier one yields her a less and
less vivid contact with reality. At last she descends virtually disrobed into
the prison and tomb of the gross body.
In the Ritual (Ch. 71) we are
told that in his incarnation Horus, or Iu, the Su, (Iusu, Jesu, or Jesus)
"disrobes himself" to "reveal himself" when he
"presents himself to the earth." The Babylonian goddess Ishtar is
said to have made her descent through seven gates, at each of which she was
stripped of one of her robes of glory.13 Massey gives us an important point in
Comparative Religion in the following:
"The mutilation of Osiris in
his coffin, the stripping of his corpse and tearing it asunder by Sut, who
scattered it piecemeal, is represented by the stripping of the dead body of
Jesus whilst it still hung on the cross, and parting his garments among the
spoilers. ‘For they stripped him and put on him a scarlet robe.’"14
The god sinking into earthly
embodiment is stripped of his finer robes and covered with the scarlet,
red-blooded body of flesh!
In the Ritual (Ch. 172) the
text runs:
"Thou puttest on the pure
garment and thou divistest thyself of the apron when thou stretchest thyself
upon the funeral bed. Thou receivest a bandage of the finest linen."
Which is to say, that on the return,
the coarse bodies are thrown off and the robes of radiant light resumed. And
what more apt symbol of the fleshly body than an apron? It is a garment put on
to fend off the grime of earth, to hang between the purity of spirit and the
smudginess of matter!
It is of the utmost significance
that in the Genesis account it is twice said that Adam and Eve knew they
were naked, and that they felt no shame the first time, but were overcome with
shame after their fall into nakedness. The sense is that their first nakedness
came while they were still in the "garden," the celestial paradise,
and probably intimates their freedom from coarse garments of the lower natures.
Their later nakedness came when they had been spiritually stripped, though
clothed with coats of skin, or fleshly vestures. The "shame" arose
from the god’s recognition of his having fallen into a state of comparative
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degradation in which he would have
to resort to sexual methods of procreation, when hitherto his life had been
renewed by the sheer force of divine will, called kriyashakti in the
East. Paul speaks of this body of our shame, as do Plotinus and the
Neo-Platonists generally. It is the main basis of the widespread ascetic inclination
in history. And the Jesus of the Pistis Sophia tells Salome that his
kingdom shall come when "thou hast trampled under foot the garment of
shame" and restored the soul, split into male and female segments here on
earth, to its pristine whole, or androgyne condition.
In the Ritual the judgment is
designated as that of the clothed and naked. If the Manes appeared naked before
the judges, it meant that he had not overcome the grossness of his physical
nature and robed himself in more radiant spiritual garb. To appear clothed was
to have resumed the shining vestments of light. There is comment on this in Revelation
(16:15): "Blessed is he that watcheth and keepeth his garments lest he
walk naked and see his shame." The seductions of earth and flesh were
strong enough to cause many of the Manes to lose the luster of their inner
vestures. Thus disrobed of their finer garments, they presented the evidence of
their poor condition to pass the ordeals of the judgment. What further light do
we need to interpret Jesus’ parable of the man ejected from the marriage feast
because he came in without a wedding garment? Massey comments:
"The Manes in the Ritual consist
of the clothed and the naked. Those who pass the judgment hall become the
clothed. The beatified spirits are invested with the robe of the righteous, the
stole of Ra, in the garden."15
In the resurrection ceremony of
Osiris, the god is divested of his funerary garment and receives a bandage of
the finest linen from the attendants of Ra (Rit., Ch. 172).
It is notable in this light that in Revelation
the angel discerned in flight toward the earth came with outstretched wings
"and veiled face." And what Exodus says of Moses has meaning
in this connection (Ch. 34):
"Whenever he went into the
presence of the Eternal to speak to him, he took the veil off, till he came out
again; and when he came out and gave the Israelites the orders he had received,
the Israelites would notice that the face of Moses was in a glow; whereupon
Moses drew the veil over his face again till he went into the presence of the
Eternal."
229
In this symbolic fashion the wise
seers of old represented the incarnational going in and out before the Lord,
the adventuring of the immortal soul out into body where it put on the veils of
matter and flesh, and its retiring again into the holiest shrine of spirit
where it dropped its heavier outer bodies and again became "clothed in
light as with a garment."
In the Hindu, Egyptian and Greek
Mystery rites the ceremony of indicating the soul’s pilgrimage round the Cycle
of Necessity was performed over what was called the "Snake’s Hole,"
and the "Inevitable Circle." It was imaged by a coiled snake. A part
of the rite was to strip the snake in token of its sloughing, a symbol of the divestiture
of the soul to be clothed anew in bright raiment. Proclus states that in the
most holy Mysteries the mystae were divested of their garments to
receive a new divine nature, or vestment of salvation.
Horus covers the naked body of
Osiris with a white robe when he comes to raise the inert one. This act is
paralleled in the Hebrew scriptures when Shem and Japheth go in backward to
cover the nakedness of their father Noah. The drunkenness of Noah here betokens
the swooning which accompanies the descent, as already set forth.
A number of verses in the Bible
yield new and impressive evidence if read in the sense here indicated. The
"coats of skin" made for Adam and Eve by God would be taken as the
outer physical vehicles. The Psalms entreat that "thy priests be
clothed with righteousness." Proverbs states that "drowsiness
shall clothe a man with rags." Isaiah speaks of the joyful ones
being clothed with the garments of salvation and the robe of righteousness.
Jesus’ declaration that he was naked and "ye clothed me" would be
inconsequential if taken as a historical fact. But in II Corinthians (Ch.
5) Paul gives strong confirmation of the higher sense:
"(For in this we groan,
earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven. If
so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked. For we that are in this
tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we should be unclothed, but
clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life)."
"It makes me sigh, indeed, this
yearning to be under the cover of my heavenly habitation, since I am sure that
once so covered I shall not be ‘naked’ at the hour of death. I do sigh within
this tent of mine with heavy anxiety--not that I want to be stripped, no, but
to be under cover of the
230
other, to have my mortal element
absorbed by life . . . Come what may, then, I am confident; I know that while I
reside in the body I am away from the Lord (for I have to lead my life in faith
without seeing him); and in this confidence I would fain get away from the body
and reside with the Lord."
This is direct and eloquent
confirmation of Greek and Egyptian philosophy in the Christian Book. Here is
the soul conscious of its alienation from heaven, miserably exiled in the
flesh, made poor in spirit, yet striving resolutely to carry the mortal burden
up the hill to its summit. Revelation (3:17) has a passage hardly less
germane:
"Thou knowest not that thou art
wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked; I counsel thee to buy from
me gold refined in the fire, that thou may be rich, white raiment to clothe you
and prevent the shame of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to rub on
your eyes that you may see."
Revelation (19:8) gives a definition of our spiritual
clothing, when referring to the soul, the bride: "And to her was granted
that she should be arrayed in fine linen, dazzling white; (the white linen is
the righteousness of saints)." For those who rebel stubbornly against the
mythical interpretation of the Bible, let it be noted that here the writer of
holy gospel positively states that a physical thing, linen, is a
spiritual quality.
And he that rode on the white horse
is described as "clothed with a vesture dipped in blood; (his name is
called THE LOGOS of God)." And here a Bible personage is merely a figure
of an item of Greek philosophy! Will we not be instructed by such things?
It needs but to make the transfer in
meaning from material to ethereal or spiritual clothing to discern the depth of
practical significance in these allusions. The revelation will be lost only for
those who persist in the assumption that Oriental imagery was so much fanciful
froth, and not an endeavor to delineate by poetic figure a veridical basis of
fact and phenomena. Instead of vaunting ourselves in superiority over presumed
primitive crudity, we may have to demonstrate even our own good rating as
pupils of sage wisdom when that is presented. The ancients had more to conceal
than we yet seem capable of grasping.
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Chapter XII
AMBROSIA
AND NECTAR
Theological confusion over the
ancient use of bread and wine and various foods as types of spiritual
nourishment makes necessary a chapter to clarify these matters. All such
figures--heavenly manna, bread, wheat, ambrosia, nectar, meat, corn, wine,
honey, barley--are forms of typology suggestive of the deific life ordered to
mortals for their immortal nutriment. The body of spiritual intellect, Ceres,
which was the true "cereal" food for man, was crushed into bits and
then welded into cake so that it might be "eaten" by mortals. The
body of Christ was the intellectual bread broken to be made edible and
assimilable by our lower range of digestive capacity. We could not eat the god
in his wholeness, or his rawness. The golden grain of life-giving wheat had to
be crushed, ground, lacerated, before it could be rendered fit food for our
consumption, in the Eucharistic cake and the sacrificial meal on the altar.
Jesus says that we must "eat" his body, and the Epistle of
Ignatius to the Romans (Apocryphal) says that the wheat of God must be
ground between the teeth of wild animals, our animal bodies, to be made the
pure bread of Christ.
The breaking of the bread and the
libation of the wine are now clearly seen to be emblematic of the partition of
the unified energy of the god’s life for distribution to the races of men. The
banquets of the gods, the Passover feasts, the funerary meals, the last suppers
and the Totemic repasts were all forms of a primary Eucharist. Man was given
the transcendent privilege of feeding upon the life of the gods! And it can be
freely admitted that nowhere is the necessity of transferring a literal
physical meaning over to a spiritual one more definitely apparent than here.
The final definitive meaning of the
great Eucharistic rite is bound up in the reconstitution of lost significance
in this doctrine. The entire debate as to the matter of transubstantiation,
transfusion, the partaking
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of the material body and blood or
their inner essence, finds its resolution in the premises of this
interpretation. Strangely enough it is now seen to be possible to give up the
physical meaning of the sacrament and yet take it as a thing of literal
reality. Man is literally to eat his Lord’s body; only it is not a physical
body. The eating is literal and real enough, but neither it nor the body eaten
is physical. Stout human good sense has revolted at a rite of swallowing a physical
body, but theology has failed to picture how we can partake of a spiritual
essence or body of divinity. The absorption and transmutation of currents of
deific life in our own nature is as possible as our digestion of food. The
physical rite was only a symbol and, its higher meaning once apprehended, its
efficacy is secured. The eating of bread and drinking of wine outwardly
dramatize the inner reality, a transubstantiation which can be literally,
though not physically, true.
Says St. Paul:
shun idolatry, then, my beloved
[doubtless the material sense of
the symbols.]
I am speaking to sensible people:
weigh my words for yourselves.
The cup of blessing which we bless,
is that not participating in the
blood of Christ?
The bread we break,
is that not participating in the
body of Christ?
(for many as we are, we are one
Bread, one Body, since we all
partake of the one Bread)."1
But the nauseous ecclesiastical
wrangling over whether the bread and wine were the body and blood of a
historical Jesus, or merely symbols of them, points to the frightful
desecration of the wholly spiritual and figurative nature of the drama. The
inner sense of this mighty typology passed out of ken with the submergence of
Greek wisdom under canonical literalism. The body of Christ, emblemed by bread,
wheat, ambrosia, meat, flesh or other forms of solid food, can mean nothing but
the substantial essence of divine nature; the blood, wine, nectar, ichor, honey
and liquid forms of nourishment can mean only that same divinity when liquefied
to be poured out in streams of nourishment for man. The cutting of meat is to
render it macerable; the grinding of grain is to render it edible; the crushing
of the grape for wine is to liquefy it for drinking. In every case there is the
destruc-
233
tion of the bodily integrity of the
food, and a fragmentation for better assimilation. The ritualism of
Christianity thus still dramatizes the principles of Greek spiritual
philosophy, which it persists in denying as part of a true religious system. If
we were to eat the body of Christos and drink his blood, the first had
to be macerated and the second liquefied.
Briefly, solid food typified divine
essence on its own high plane, the more ethereal states being the more
substantial! Liquid forms emblemed the same divine nature poured out in
streams, "rivers of vivification," for the feeding of "secondary
natures." Also in its descent godhood became admixed with the
"watery" elements of the life down here and were further liquefied
thereby. Solid food was the emblem of stability; liquid food the sign of that
mobile essence which was to run out in blessing.
The several symbols must be looked
at more minutely, for they cover deep suggestions of vital meaning. We take
first that of bread. There is in all literature no more direct and compelling
statement of the spiritual significance of bread than the verses of John’s
Gospel (6:47 ff). Says Jesus:
"I am the bread of life. Your
fathers did eat Manna in the wilderness and have died; such is the bread that comes
down from heaven, that a man shall eat of it and shall not die.
"And in truth the bread which I
shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.
"Verily, verily I say unto you,
Unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you have not
life in you. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life,
and I will raise him up at the last day.
"For my flesh is food indeed
and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood
abideth in me and I in him."2
The bread is, then, the radiant
divine principle of light and life. The blood is the pledge of the same life
poured out for man’s behoof. But Jesus was not the only divine personage who
offered his body and blood for the nourishment of mortals. Says Massey:
"Horus was not only the bread
of life derived from heaven and the producer of bread in the character of Amsu,
the husbandman; he also gave his flesh for food and his blood for drink."3
234
Horus says (Rit., Ch. 53A):
"I am the possessor of bread in Annu. I have bread in heaven with
Ra." Again the deceased says: "I am the lord of cakes in Annu; and my
bread is in heaven with Ra, and my cakes are on the earth with the god
Seb." The distinction here between bread in heaven and cakes on earth is
perhaps of vast significance, matching, as it does, many assertions that the
soul is in heaven and the body on earth. The cake form of the divine pastry
must have been regarded as a state of soul more highly advanced or refined by
organic evolution. Many texts carry out the two types. The soul continues:
"I eat of what they [the gods] eat there; and I eat of the cakes which are
in the hall of the lord of sepulchral offerings"--or bread with the gods
in heaven and cakes with the "dead" on earth. And in the Rubric to
the 71st chapter of the Ritual this meaning is confirmed:
"Sepulchral bread shall be given to him and he shall come forth into the
presence of Ra day by day, and every day, regularly and continually."
Sepulchral bread, like the funerary meals, undoubtedly refers to the
"bread of Seb," or food of earth, earth and body being the sepulcher
of the soul.
Wheat is much employed as a symbol.
The law of divine incubation in matter is expressly intimated in Budge’s
account of the Resurrection in Egypt:
"The grain which is put into
the ground is the dead Osiris, and the grain which has germinated is the Osiris
who has once again renewed his life."4
The resurrection of Osiris is
closely interwoven with the germination of wheat. Jesus announces: "My
father giveth you the true bread out of heaven and giveth life unto the
world." And as Jesus was the divine bread out of heaven, the
consubstantial essence with the Father, so Horus: "He is Horus, he is the
flesh and blood of his father Osiris." Horus in his Christological character
says: "I am a soul and my soul is divine. I am he who produceth food. I am
the food that perisheth not--in my name of self-originating force, together
with Nu"--the Mother Heaven. (Rit., Ch. 85).
The body of Christ could not be
mystically eaten in its wholeness and unreduced power. It had to be crushed and
bruised, broken and mutilated, so that from its deep gashes would flow out the
living streams. If taken literally and materially, the wounded side is not only
235
gruesome, but carries only a feeble
suggestion of its grand meaning. And herein lies the spiritual meaning of all
blood sacrifice and "shed blood." There is no truth found in it until
for "blood" (of the gods) we read "divine intellect." Had
early theology made it clear, in a word, that the "shed blood" of God
connoted spiritual force, which we must embody in our lives, there would have
been a vastly less amount of actual "bloodshed" in European history!
The god shed his life essence for us out of his earth-bruised body of deific
mind.
On this divine wheat, it is said,
Osiris and his followers lived. It was a form of Osiris himself, as the god who
brought it from heaven, and those who are it and lived upon it nourished
themselves upon their god. As he came to feed them, he is declared to have
"provided them with food and drink as he passed through the Tuat."
How the partaking of the divine body would affect man is set forth by Budge:
"Eating and drinking with the
spirits raised man’s nature and ‘made his spirit divine,’ and destroyed the
feeling of separation which came with the appearance of death . . . And it must
always be remembered that the altar was the place to possess the power of
transmuting the offerings which were laid upon it and of turning them into
spiritual entities of such a nature that they became suitable food for the god
Osiris and his spirits."5
But we are those spirits, the living
men or Manes in this underworld. The recovered Logia, or "sayings of the
Lord," give a most direct allusion to the dismemberment doctrine of the
Eucharist in the line: "the flesh of the Son of God, broken for all
souls."
By a slight shifting of the symbol,
the ceremony performed in the rites of many lands, of eating the serpent and
drinking the dragon’s blood, was a replica of the Eucharistic festival. For the
serpent was universally a type of supernal wisdom--"wise as
serpents"--or the intellectual nature of the gods.
Horus, we find, was the Kamite
prototype of Bacchus, Lord of Wine. Like Bacchus and Jesus, Horus is the vine,
whose season was celebrated at the Uaka festival, with prodigious rejoicing and
a deluge of drink. The divine mania, declared by Plato to be better than
laborious reason, was the heady transport resulting from the imbibing of the
spiritual liquor of life. The Bacchic feast of intoxication was, however
sensual in later performance, a token of the legitimate and blessed ecstasy of
the soul upon partaking of the heavenly wine. The
236
vine and the mixing bowl were
constellated as celestial symbols, the latter as the cluster called the Crater
(Latin: bowl) or the Goblet, the sacramental cup or grail. The juice of the
grape was the blood of Horus or Osiris, in the Egyptian Eucharist.
The Manes in one of the chapters in
the Ritual prays that he may have possession of all things whatsoever
that were offered ritualistically for him in the nether world, the "table
of offerings which was heaped" for him on earth, "the solicitations
that were uttered" for him, "that he may feed upon the bread of
Seb," or food of earth experience. "Let me have possession of my
funeral meals." A fact that should loom large in any valuation of
Eucharistic meaning is that the flat surface of the coffin lid of the mummified
Osiris constituted the table of the Egyptian Last Supper. It was the board
whereon were served the mortuary meals. This unmistakable connection of the
Eucharist with the burial, which is only the passing of the god into the mummy
or incarnate form, speaks volubly as to the hidden relation of the two symbolic
operations. For the god, about to be buried in body, was to be eaten by
the mortal nature.
Ancient tribes indulged in the rite
of a symbolic feeding upon the body of their god. At times when spiritual
symbology had passed into the literalism of ignorance and barbarity, a living
victim was cut to pieces and actually eaten by the celebrants. In very early
periods of the matriarchate, when the mother was the only known giver and fount
of life, a living mother was dedicated to the office of hostia or
victim, and her body cut up and eaten as a token of the distribution of her
fecund life. "The primordial Eucharist was eating the Mother’s flesh and
drinking her blood!6 A converted phase of this custom exhibits the idea of the
"disrobing" combined with the Eucharistic rite:
"A young girl called (significantly)
the Meriah, was stripped stark naked and bound with cords to a maypole crowned
with flowers, and ultimately put to death . . . torn to pieces and partly
eaten."7
Human sacrifices were later commuted
to animal offerings. And when crude natural instincts were softened by humane
ideals, bread and wine were substituted. Thus one can see how an original
spiritual conception, passing from hand to hand in the lapse of time and
changing mores, reverts at one time to a brutal literalism amongst
untamed
237
peoples and again rises to symbolism
in more cultured races. Through all stages, however, can be seen the lineaments
of the germinal high spiritual idea back of each rite.
One of the Egyptian texts reads:
"Shesmu cuts them in pieces and cooks them in his fiery cauldrons."
Another line runs: "O, Osiris-Pepi, the Sma-Bull is brought to thee cut in
pieces."
Expressing a phallic significance to
the ritual, it is of interest to note that in very remote tribal celebrations
of the Eucharist the female participants invited the fecundating offices of the
males. The two sisters, or wife and sister, of Horus plead with the still
recumbent god to arise and come and embrace them. There are two women in the
Biblical resurrection scene. And when Isis and Nephthys invite the young lord
to come to them, Isis says: "Thou comest to us from thy retreat to . . . distribute
the bread of thy being, that the gods may live and men also." This is
of transcendent importance as pointing to the verification of the basic thesis
of our study, that the dip into incarnation is an avenue of evolutionary
advance for both the god and the animal-human in their linked lives. It is
striking that in this context both Jesus and Horus are themselves raised up
from death, and both raise up in turn those below. Two far separate streams of
evolution are confluent in man, and both are going onward as the result of
their co-operative life in one body. The Manes pleads:
"May I go in and come out
without repulse at the pylons of the lords of the underworld; may there be
given unto me loaves of bread in the house of coolness, and offerings of food
in Annu (Heliopolis) and a homestead forever in Sekhet-Aarru (paradise), with
wheat and barley therefor."8
And the Rubric to this chapter
recites that if the chapter be known by the Manes he shall come forth in
Sekhet-Aarru, "and he shall eat of that wheat and barley and his limbs
shall be nourished therewith, and his body shall be like unto the bodies of the
gods." Here is perfect matching of Egyptian script with Paul’s statement
that Christ shall "change our vile body into the likeness of his glorious
body."
Holy Thursday was especially
consecrated by the Roman Church to a commemoration of the Last Supper, and the
institution of the Eucharistic meal was fixed, at which the corpus of the
Christ, already dead, was laid out to be eaten sacramentally. In the Gospels
the Last
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Supper, with Jesus present, is eaten
before the crucifixion has occurred. There is obviously confusion of
ancient ritualistic practice here, yet strangely enough no grave violence is
done to the inner significance either way, since the Christ was
"dead" in the one sense, and alive in the other. The whole of
incarnation is the "crucifixion, death and burial" of the Lord.
After the raising of Osiris Taht
says: "I have celebrated the festival of Eve’s provender," or the
meal which came to be called the Last Supper. The raising of Lazarus is
likewise commemorated by a supper. "So they made him a supper there"
(John 12:2).
In the Greek Mystery play the
candidate for initiation underwent the taurobolium or bull’s-blood bath.
He stood under a grating and received upon his naked body the dripping blood of
the sacrificial bull, in token that his nature was being suffused with the shed
blood of the god emblemed by the astrological sign of Taurus, as in Christian
practice it was the blood of the ram or lamb, the zodiacal Aries. The sign of
the sun in the spring equinox determined the zodiacal type under which the Christos
was figured. Elsewhere animal blood was actually drunk as a more literal
partaking of the emblem of divine life.
In the Ritual the evening
meal depicted the absorption of the higher nature into and by the lower, and
the occasion was called the "Night of Laying Provision on the Altar."
Not in a given moment of time, but in the total course of the cycle, each
physical body was to be transubstantiated into spirit. The whole round of human
incarnations was provided to this end. As the physical was converted into
sublimated essence, we have an explanation of the strange disappearance of the
physical body in all resurrection scenes. In one of the texts cited by Birch
concerning the burial of Osiris at Abydos, it is said that the sepulchral
chamber was searched, but the body was not found. "The ‘Shade’ it was
found."9 In Marcion’s account of the resurrection no body is found in the
tomb; only the phantom or shade was visible there. So in the Johannine version
(Ch. 20:17) the body of Jesus is missing; the "Shade" is present in
the tomb. But this was of a texture which forbade it being touched.
The night of the evening meal was
called also "the night of hiding him who is supreme of
attributes" (Rit., Ch. 18). We have seen that
239
the descent into the tomb of body
was considered a hiding, and the period of incarnation was called the night of
the soul.
The Eucharistic emblems are many and
varied. The deceased in the Ritual prays: "Grant unto me ale, and
let me cleanse myself by means of the haunch and by the offerings of
cakes." In Chapter 65 cakes of white grain and ale of red grain are
mentioned. The juxtaposition of the statements in the following citation is
noteworthy, as identifying the emblems with their non-material references:
"Thou descendest under protection; are given unto thee breed, wine and
cakes . . . thou art endowed with a soul, with power and with will."
"he hungers not, for he eats bread-cakes made of fine flour . . . He lives
on the daily bread which comes in this season"--of incarnation. "He
shall have offered wine and cakes and roasted fowl for the journey . . ."
The bird was a universal symbol of the soul, and its descent into the lower
fires of earth and hell provided the basis of the allegory of
"roasting." In Chapter 106 the Manes says: "Give me bread and
beer. Let me be made pure by the sacrificial joint, together with white
bread." Horus is both the bread of life and the divine corn (Rit. Ch.
83). In I Corinthians (37:38) Paul has a remarkable imagery of divine
food:
"And that which thou sowest,
thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of
wheat, or of some other grain. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him,
and to every seed his own body."
The remarkable passage from the
Apocryphal Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans, already quoted should be
recalled at this point, as it definitely states that the soul comes to be food
to the wild beasts, by whom it will attain its new godhood. The figure of the
soul as wheat, ground between the teeth of the wild animals to be made the pure
bread of Christ, is a most pungent typograph,--of the incarnation. And this
passage prepares the ground for understanding the relevance of the manger
symbolism in the Nativity scene. The Christ, at birth, was laid in a manger,
the place where animals eat! He came to be eaten by the lower, animal nature.
In the Ritual the soul
entreats: "Give thou bread to this Pepi, give thou beer to him, of the
bread of eternity, and of the beer of everlastingness." "This bread
which can not go mouldy is brought to Pepi,
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and this wine which can not go
sour." What sublime imagery for states of spiritual immortality, and
natures that change not!
A special feature in connection with
the Eucharistic bread is seen in several passages from the Ritual, which
are of great weight in stabilizing the general position of the purely
figurative nature of the symbols. It is found in the chapter "of not
eating filth in the underworld.":
"Let food come unto me from
the place whither thou wilt bring food, and let me live upon the seven loaves
of bread, which shall be brought as food before Horus, and upon bread which is
brought before Thoth . . . Let me not eat filth and let me not trip up and fall
in the underworld."
Again in the "chapter of not
letting a man perform a journey being hungry" we read:
"Let me live upon the seven cakes
which shall be brought unto me, four cakes before Horus, and three cakes before
Thoth."
Four is the number of the lower
physical world of the body, three the number of the soul as the triad of mind,
soul, spirit. Horus was the soul in matter, Thoth the cosmic spirit.
Massey writes that a three-days fast
was ended by the feeding of the multitude on what the Ritual terms
"celestial diet," i.e., the "seven loaves" of heavenly
bread that were supplied as sustenance for the risen dead in Annu, "the
place of multiplying bread." In this phrase descriptive of Annu (Anu),
one of the cities named as both the place of death and resurrection of the
sun-god, we find the open sesame to the New Testament "miracle"
of Jesus feeding the multitude. But in the Gospel "miracle," instead
of the seven loaves we have the five loaves and the two small fishes, the
latter being introduced evidently to bring in the Piscean house along with
Virgo, the house of bread.
Hebrew symbology closely matches
Egyptian. In Exodus (29) one reads that
"With the former lamb you must
offer about seven pints of fine flour mixed with nearly three pints of
beaten oil, and nearly three pints of wine as a libation . . . This is to be a
regular burnt-offering made, age after age, at the entrance of the
Trysting-Tent before the Eternal, where I meet you and speak to you."
If it was known that this
Trysting-Tent is the human body, where alone God can meet man and speak to him,
and that the three pints of
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oil and wine stand for the three
elements of divine consciousness that are to be mixed with the seven elementary
powers of nature or physis, the brotherhood of man might not so
fearfully have miscarried. The human body is the place where the two lovers,
spirit and matter, or body and soul, make their tryst, and that they are to
make their libation to the Eternal before the entrance to the tent indicates
that the higher and lower partners to the coming marriage compound their
elements as they enter into incarnation. One stroke of symbolism tells us more
than volumes of theology.
Divine food is called sometimes
simply "meat." "Thou hast in great abundance in the Fields of
the Gods the meat and drink which the gods live upon therein."
Even butter comes in as a type of
representation, and coming from a female source, indicates the material
foundation of life. The seven cows of Hathor produce the divine butter. As the
formation of primal matter out of the primeval undifferentiated essence was
pictured as a kind of curdling, the butter symbolism has a profound cosmical
significance.
The Manes’ life is fed upon divine
food throughout its sojourn in Amenta; Horus and Jesus, Jonah and Ioannes of
Babylonia, all came as the zodiacal Pisces, or the Fish, offering themselves as
food for man while he is immersed in the sea of generation! The
Egyptians saw in the tortoise, which lived half in water and half on land, the
sign of Libra, the Balance, and took it as another type of divine nourishment,
when the two natures, divine and human, are in equilibration in the body.
When the Manes have sufficiently
cultivated the fields of Aarru, Ra says to them: "Your own possessions,
gods, and your own domains, elect, are yours. Now eat. Ra . . . appoints you
your food." They have labored at cultivation and at last they collect
their harvest of corn. Their seeds are warmed into germination by the sunlight
of Ra at his appearance. The radiance of the god in human life causes the
divine seed buried in us to sprout and grow as the sun fructifies plants in any
earthly garden. The elect, enveloped in light, are fed mysteriously with food
from heaven. Milk is one of the types used and is called "the white liquor
which the glorified ones love," and it was supplied by the seven cows, of
course, providers of plenty in the meadows of Aarru. The seven cows, of course,
emblem the seven modifications of cosmic en-
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ergy which create and sustain the
worlds of life, the appropriate counterparts of which irradiate man’s being and
formulate his basic constitution. The uplifted Manes says: "I eat of the
food of Sekhet-Hetep and I go onward to the domain of the starry gods."
The zodiacal twelve supply food to the gods and the elect in two groups, seven
reapers and five collectors of corn (Book of Hades). The spiritualized
Manes live on the food of Ra, "and the meats belong to the inhabitants of
Amenta," a possible reference to the animal bodies on earth. The divine
food is apparently repeated in the quails and manna that were sent from heaven
in the Biblical account. The Osiris-Nu asserts: "I am the divine soul of
Ra proceeding from the god Nu; that divine soul which is God. I am the creator
of the divine food . . . which is not corrupted in my name of Soul." This
soul "comes to him and brings him abundance of celestial food, and what
the god lives on he also lives on, and he partakes of the food and drink and
offerings of the god." At another place we are told that the Manes
"maketh his purificatory substances with figs and wine from the vineyard
of the god."
As the living rivers flow forth out
of the heart of eternal matter, the womb of all life, the godly nutriment is
again proffered to man streaming from the breast of the Mother Isis or Hathor.
"She giveth him her breast and he suckleth thereat." Paul (I
Corinthians 10:1, 2) writes that all those in Christ have eaten "the
same supernatural food and all drank the same supernatural drink (drinking from
the supernatural Rock which accompanied them--and that Rock was Christ)." Revelation
(2:17) enlightens us with the following: "To him that overcometh, to
him will I give of the hidden manna." When the deceased is making his way
through Amenta, Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, goddess of Love, emerges from the
trees and offers him a drink of fruit juice, which she prepared to woo him
with. By accepting this gift he is bound to remain the guest of the goddess and
return no more to the world of the living, unless by her permission. This fruit
is not that which is sent down gratuitously from heaven, but the fruit of the
soul’s living experience on earth, yet it is the same thing in the end. For it
is sent down as seed, and bears its fruit on the ends of the branches of the
Tree of Life and Knowledge, of the taste of good and evil here on earth. And
this is the same tree which in the last chapter in the Bible is declared
to bear twelve fruits upon its branches. These
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twelve fruits are the completed
unfoldment of the twelve original types of Kumeric infant deity that will be
brought to their maturity by cultivation on this planet. The bread of Seb
becomes metamorphosed eventually into the divine food. Eve and Hathor are
identical figures. They offer to virgin spiritual units and to animal man the
opportunity to live, grow and create, out of which cycle they will emerge as
gods, through knowledge of good and evil. And the temptation is baited with the
promise, "yet shall not surely die." The fruit of earthly life is
divinization. Says Massey:
"Hathor was the goddess draped
in golden vesture, who drew men with the cords of a love that was
irresistible."
"Instead of being damned
eternally through eating the fruit of the tree, the Manes in Amenta are
divinized piecemeal as the result of eating it." (Rit., Ch. 82).10
Again pause must be made to reflect
that had these two items of theology been known in clear light, as here
presented, whole centuries of human bigotry and hate might have been painted in
brighter colors.
Red as the color of blood, and
white, the color of milk, emblem the two natures of man, his bodily birth
through the mother’s blood, and his later nourishment through her milk. Red is
connected closely with the first Adam, whose name means in one interpretation,
Red Earth, that is, physical matter mixed with red blood. In this character he
would be the answer to the Bible’s query, "Who is this that comes from
Edom, with his garments crimson in Bozrah?" Edom was this man Adam,
red earth, mortal clay mixed with the life essence of divinity typed by the
blood, in which the Old Testament affirms several times the life of the
soul is to be found. And he who comes out of Edom may be taken as the Christ,
the Son of Man. For the first Adam is to give birth to the second Adam. Blood
here types the divine part of man, as contrasted with earth or with water.
Jesus emblems the two births as those of "water and the blood." But
when the blood is used to typify the lower natural man then it is contrasted
with the white essence, the mother’s milk, a higher nutriment than her blood,
or with the father’s seminal essence. White universally types that which is
spiritually highest, up to the shining white raiment of the redeemed.
Perfection being the synthesis of all lower or divided natures in original
unity, white represents that perfection, as it is the synthesis of the
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colors. Ra says to the god:
"Light the earth up bright! My benefits are for you who are in the
light." The food he promised them is itself of the nature of intellectual
light. "The immortal liquor is the Solar Light."11 No utterance
surpasses this for sublime import. A Chaldean Oracle asserts that
"the Intelligible is food to that which understands." And the solar
light is intelligence, shining abroad.
Looking now at wine, many phases of
meaning not commonly considered are brought to view. The grape and the vine
share in the symbolism. There is first the significant detail, brought out by
Massey, that the Egyptian Garden of Aarru, or Allu (the Islamic Garden of
Allah!) has in the Ritual the same essence as the substance of that
celestial life itself in the Paradise above. The wine offered by the gods for
man’s uplift is their celestial nature.
Horus came as the lord of wine and
is said to be "full of wine" at the Uaka festival. The old
"festival of intoxication" is the prototype of all later communal
rites that celebrate the outpouring of lofty deity. The form of this festival
has become universally popular, but as usual its interior meaning has been
lost. The Christian Agape and Eucharist are moderate demonstrations of the same
old effort to commemorate the perpetual gift of divine afflatus to mankind.
Horus achieved the sub-title of "the Jocund" when he rose up
"full of wine," and was astrologically typed as Orion, with the
constellation of the Crater or bowl for his cup. The fable said that this cup
held seven thousand gallons of intoxicating drink and that Horus brought the
grapes to make the wine. "Thou didst put grapes in the water that cometh
forth from Edfu." The seven thousand had no explicit numerical significance
beyond the number seven itself, the thousands only adding the idea of multiple
division and diffusion. Horus came to distribute to the thousands of mortals
the divine essence in its seven-fold expression in the full gamut of its
nature. Who shall prove that the Jesus of the canonical Gospels, who gained
notoriety as a wine-bibber and came eating and drinking, is not a frayed copy
of this Kamite original? For Greece in her Bacchus repeated the same type.
Christ came to intoxicate man with the divine wine.
In the Assyrian account of the
Deluge those who came out of the ark poured out a libation of seven jugs
of wine. And they built an
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altar on the peak of the mountain,
or set up contact between man and god at the summit of man’s spiritual being. Likewise
after the Deluge Noah planted the vine and became intoxicated. This vine may be
seen in the decans of Virgo, where the star Vindemeatrix denotes the time of
the vintage in Egypt, a symbol of the infusion of the higher nature into the
lower.
The Christ treading the grapes in
the winepress is all very like the portrait of Har-Tema (Horus), the mighty
avenger of his despoiled father, and he came at the end and the re-beginning of
the cycle of incarnation, which is called the year of redemption. Careful
research discloses that Edom is another name for Esau, the Red; he had asked to
be fed with pottage, translated in one text "red." Edom, not
identical with Eden, seems to refer to earth as the "red land." In
all its Biblical usages Edom refers to the lower kingdom of human nature, not
the celestial sphere in any case. Edom was heavily punished by the Eternal,
David put garrisons in it and reduced its people to servants, and they later
revolted. It refused passage to the Israelites, as the lower nature refused
entry to the godly part. In Obadiah (I:6) we read: "But what a
ransacking of Edom! What a rifling of her treasures!" Edmonites were
Esau’s descendants. The avenging god’s anger (dramatization merely, of course)
is apparently vented upon the lower propensities of human nature, which are the
foes of his incarnating enterprise, the obstructors of his path and mutilators
of his father Osiris. The figure of treading the winevat is a noble one and
definitely points to the earth as the great winepress wherein the essence of
the mortal nature is crushed and trampled by deity into a liquor to reinforce
the god’s dying life. That the god trod the winepress alone is evidence of the
loneliness of his mission. Jesus’ loneliness is accentuated in the Gospel
drama. That the god comes from the underworld stained with the blood of his
foes is an allegorical way of saying that he had not kept himself entirely
"unspotted from the world" in his wrestling with the flesh. Greek
philosophy asserts that his garments were badly stained by terrene contacts.
Plutarch tells us that the Egyptian
priests conceived vines to have sprung from the blood of those fallen deities
mixed with the earth. A Babylonian legend sets forth that the blood of the god
Belus was mixed with the earth in the same way. Man is compounded of the mud
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of earth for his body, and the blood
of the gods for his animating soul. He is Adam, red earth.
Hathor, the great mother of the
living in Egyptian mythology, pours out the heavenly drink made from the fruit
of the sycamore-fig tree, a most prominent ancient form of the tree of life.
Hathor was the Shekhem, or shrine of the child, figured as the bearing tree,
the genetrix, the womb, bird-cage and significantly the tomb, not that of final
death, but of buried life about to germinate. The word Shekhem, hidden shrine,
is from sekh, "liquid," "drink." Teka means
"to supply with drink." The fig, like the pomegranate, is an emblem
of the womb. The Persea fruit is the fruit of the sycamore-fig tree. Sycamore
is from sykos (sukos), the Greek for the fig-tree, from the fruit
of which a powerful beverage was made. The root means latent power unfolded, as
by fermentation; to fill with aeriform spirit force, as by the bubbles of air
in fermentation. It becomes possible now to sense the meaning of Jesus’
pronouncement (Luke 17:6):
"If ye have faith as a grain of
mustard seed ye would say unto this sycamore tree [Moffatt: ‘mulberry’], Be
thou rooted up and be thou planted in the sea; and it would have obeyed
you."
As Revelation and the Book
of the Dead both describe the entry of divine fire into the
"sea," causing a fermentation in it to spiritualize or
divinize it, the sycamore’s removal into the sea to lodge inspiriting power in
it at last comes to clear significance. To have faith as a grain of mustard
seed, so tiny, is for the soul, buried in the deep soil of the mortal self, to
have an instinctive assurance that, like the life in any seed, it will rise out
of death to live again.
Who can fail to trace the Genesis
story in the following legend preserved among the Hottentots? The deity,
Heitsi Eibib, tells his son Urisip, the whitish one, not to eat of the raisin
trees in the valley. Heitsi Eibib in his travels came to a valley (the earth)
in which the raisin trees were ripe. There he was attacked by a severe illness.
Then his young second wife (Eve is often called Adam’s second wife, Lilith
being the first) said: "This brave one is taken ill on account of these
raisins; death is here at the place." The old man told his son: "I shall
not live, I feel it." And he spoke further: "This is the thing which
I order you not to do: Of the raisin trees of this valley ye shall not eat, for
if ye eat of them I shall infect you; and ye shall surely die in a
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similar way." So he died. When they
moved to another place, they heard always from the side whence they had come a
noise as of people eating raisins and singing. The song ran:
"I, father of Urisip,
Father of this unclean one;
I, who had to eat these raisins and
died,
And, dying, live."
The raisin tree gave dysentery, and
this natural detail was used to prefigure the sickness, swooning, distress and
intoxication that came over the gods upon their plunge into this life, or their
eating of the fruit of the tree whose juice made them drunk with a mixture of
spiritous and sensuous ingredients. This is, in short, to type the effect of
incarnation upon the god as a bewildering, befuddling, stupefying drunkenness,
as from a semi-poison injected into his blood; and such indeed the Platonists
have ever described it.
"Heaven is pregnant with
wine" is an Egyptian fragment.
In the Book of Judges (Ch. 6)
Gideon, the son of Joash, is found beating out some wheat inside the
winepress to save it from Midian, when the angel of the Lord comes down to
entrust him with the commission to redeem Israel. What appears here like a
mixed metaphor is perhaps only a close mingling of several customary symbols.
Beating out the chaff was a kindred figure with that of stamping out the wine.
Greek philosophy, rising sphinxlike
out of the Orphic Mysteries, proclaims a hidden meaning of the grapes in the
winepress. Thomas Taylor says that the pressing of grapes is as evident a
symbol of the dispersion of divine energy into humanity as could well be
devised.12 The grape was for this reason consecrated to Bacchus, who
personalized empyreal intelligence flowing out in divided streams. Previous to
its pressing it aptly represented that which is collected into one; when
pressed into juice it aptly represented the diffusion of the same. Hence
wine-pressing symbols the crushing and division of unity to flow into
multiplicity and spiritize divided creatural life. What is most singular is
that Taylor likens this process to another oft-used typology, that of fleece,
stating that the Greek word for "wool," lenos, is practically
identical with that for a "winepress," lenôs. The tearing and
carding of wool matches the liquidation of the grape for purposes of typism.
Should it be deemed
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strange, then, that Gideon, found
threshing wheat in the winepress, should immediately ask the Eternal to
authenticate his commission to him by the test of the dew on the fleece? It
need hardly be pointed out what strength these symbols of wine and fleece,
along with flour, bring to the theory of dismemberment. And there is also the
obvious suggestion of the fruitful rendering of the symbolism of the
mythological Golden Fleece (Aries of the zodiac), as typing the Christ avatar
who came under that sign. Fleece, says Taylor, is the symbol of laceration or
distribution of intellect, or Dionysus, into matter; and he adds that Isidorus
traces lana (Latin: "wool") from laniando, "tearing,"
as vellus (Latin: "fleece") from vellendo, also
"tearing." "Delano," "to tear asunder," he
uses "in relation to Bacchic discerption." So succinctly and
integrally is the history of ideas preserved in the amber of words.
Massey explains:
"The typical tree of life in an
Egyptian-Greek planisphere is the grapevine. This is the tree still represented
by the female vine-dresser and the male grape-gatherer in the decans of Virgo
[W. H. Higgins, Arabic Names of the Stars]. Orion rose up when the
grapes were ripe to represent the deliverer who was coming ‘full of
wine.’"13
The birthplace of the grapes was
figured in or near the sign of Virgo, the mother of the child who was to rise
up out of death to bring salvation to lower man under the symbol of the vine.
He was also typed as the rising Nile, bringing a new birth to the parched land
of Egypt. And the grape ripened with the rising inundation! In ways that
astonish us with the fidelity of the parallelism, both natural and astronomical
phenomena reflect man’s inner history.
The vine and sycamore tree were two
types of producing life in the Kamite Paradise. In the Papyrus of Nu the
Manes prays that he may sit under his own vine and also beneath the refreshing
foliage of the sycamore-fig tree of Hathor. The Garden of Aarru is the garden
of the grape, and the god Osiris is sometimes seated in a Naos, under the vine,
from which branches of grapes are hanging. Moreover Osiris was charactered as
the vine and his son Horus the unbu or Branch. Need we pause to point
out the identity of this with the Biblical sentence (I Kings 4:25):
"And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his
fig-tree"?
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Jesus was the true vine of the Logos
and we are his branches, destined to bear the fruit. Horus bore the same
representative character in Egypt. The American Indians have traditions of
tribes climbing to safety across the Mississippi, or up out of the interior of
mother earth to the land of light, by means of trees with overhanging branches
and grapevines. (Schoolcraft: VI, 14). Jack climbing the bean stalk to overcome
the ogre is a variant of the aboriginal type-legend.
The Eucharist easily lends itself to
characterization as a festival of intoxication if it is viewed in the light of
the following lines from the Ritual: "Are not all hearts drunk
through love of thee, O Un-Nefer (Osiris), triumphant?" The entire body of
mystic testimony from St. Augustine to St. Francis of Assizi and on through to
the modern revivalist, is to the effect of the spiritual intoxication of the
supreme love frenzy or mania, as Plato terms it. It needs no descanting to
enhance it further. There is every warrant for the ancient imagery. Only it
must be seen as working at both ends of the gamut. The meaning covered by
intoxication, a swooning and giddy stupefaction after his entry into mortal
body; while mortal man undergoes a more positive intoxication, an exaltation
and marvelous giddy expansion of his faculties when he becomes filled with the
power of divine intellect and begins to feel its influence expanding the whole
range and vividness of his consciousness. The one is to be thought of as a
scattering of wits, the other as an overpowering afflatus. Yet incarnation is
the open door to both god and animal for the advance into higher life, and
their opposite elements finally so merge in the new expansion that the
intoxication is the same for both in the end. The god, drunk with animal
sensual enjoyment, and the animal mind, intoxicated with undreamed-of delirium,
reel onward together in the dance of life, and who shall sharply distinguish
where intoxication ends and ecstasy begins? All this is germane to the understanding
of the symbolism and the irrefragible factuality behind it.
The Delaware Indians put into effect
an outward demonstration of the intoxicating imagery when in one of their
festivals an old man threw handfuls of tobacco on heated stones in a tent, and
the sitters, narcotized by the fumes, were carried in a swoon. The ceremony
typed the inhalation of spirit, producing a delirious rapture. Vapor has ever
been a mode of representing spirit, and the smoke of the Indian’s
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pipe was suggestive of allaying the
fierce nature of rude forest children to mildness and peace.
The Egyptian typology placed a Lake
of Sa in the northern heavens. Sa was the name of a sort of ichor that
circulated in the veins of the gods and perfected mortals. This they could
communicate to men on earth and give them health, vigor and new life. This
datum will be of significance when we come to study the Egyptian spirit body,
the Sahu.
Honey, as symbol, shared place with
the Greek nectar served at the tables of the Olympian gods. Its plain
suggestion is of the sweetness of the divine life as sustenance for starving
mortals, and as bestowing immortality. Some of its relevance of course can be
traced to its origin from the bee. There is a tradition that bees alone of all
animals descended from Paradise. Virgil (Georgics IV) celebrates the
never-dying bee that ascends alive into heaven. The faithful diligent insect is
thus an image of the immortal soul, or the god. Egyptian typology makes the
Abait, or bird-fly, the guide of the souls of the dead on their way to the
fields of Aarru, the land of celestial honey. The "beeline"
directness of travel betokens the unerring sense of the soul, lost afar in
Amenta’s fields, to go straight home. This Aarru is, of course, "Jerusalem
the Golden, with milk and honey blest" of the Christian hymn. The "ba"
name of the astral or ethereal body of man in Egypt may be related to
"bee." For ba is also a word for "honey." Honey was
used in embalming. It is suggestively entwined with the imagery of the
"meads of amaranth." The soul is as the bee gathering sweet honey of
immortality from the flowers of life experience on earth. Also the bee
reproduces the new life in plants by acting as the intermediator between male
and female flower elements; and the divine soul likewise links male spirit and
female body and marries them in man.
The myth represents the sun, eternal
type of divine generative source, as "letting water fall from his eyes; it
is changed into working bees; they work in the flowers of each kind, and honey
and wax are produced instead of water." Shu and Tefnut give honey to the
living members. Divine emanations, falling as tear drops, diffuse their power
of blessing over the earth, like Shakespeare’s "gentle rain from
heaven."
The Samson story in Judges bears
on the meaning of honey. "Out
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of the strong came forth
honey." The honey was found by the solar god (Samson means
"solar") in the decaying carcass of the lion upon his return. The
return types evolution, as the outward journey, involution. The god, as the
lion, is "slain" on the outward arc or descent, overcome by matter.
But in evolution, the bees (the soul) have built their nest of sweet honey in
the very midst of the old decay, in the very body of corruption. In the Persian
myth we see the lion depicted with a bee in his mouth.
There are, however, intimations of
involved astrological reference in the linking together of the bee and the
lion. Massey thinks that the bee typifies the sweet refreshing waters of the
inundation in Egypt, which came to its fullest outpouring in the month of July,
the sign of the lion. His elaboration of the point is lengthy and the reader is
referred to his Lecture on Luniolatry. The lion, or lioness, he claims,
types the fiery solar heat (Cf. the lioness in heat) and the bee the cooling
influence of the waters. For the hero, Samson, fairly immersed in symbols of
the number thirty, obviously is a soli-lunar character, and the full moon in
the lion sign rose in conjunction with the sign of Aquarius, the Waterman. The
moon brought the cool waters that conquered the solar heat. The application of
the typism may hint at the god’s bringing the force of cool intellectual
judgment to allay the fierce heat of sensual passion of the lower self. The
types of divinity in the summer season are the reverse of those appropriate to
the winter. Salvation comes to man in the heat of summer in the form of shade,
coolness and water. Earth and water type the lower self and the evil side under
winter’s symbolism. But they spell salvation under reversed conditions. The
duality and reversibility of the symbols must be constantly borne in mind.
The most meaningful aspect of the
wine symbolism is perhaps that of fermentation. This arises from the
development in the liquid of a potent energy at first latent. Hidden and
buried, silent and inert, the dynamic fiery spirit rises to activity and exerts
an influence that yields to mortals a semblance of divine inspiration and
glorious liberty. As a symbol it is far-reaching and vivid. The "spirit"
in wine and the spirit in man are not inaptly related even as a pun. The Greeks
indulged in such puns, as in the Cratylus of Plato, and yet have covered
the most majestic significations under these light touches. The
"spirit" in wine is a graphic figure of the other spirit. Wine is
water that has
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in it the fire of spirit, and in
American pioneer days it was often called "fire-water." Fire
universally typed spirit. Grape juice is just water of earth that has had
injected in it a power engendered by the sun, again the type of spirit, as it
passed through the length of the vine to be deposited in the berry at the end.
The sun, like the Christ it symboled in his "miracle" at Cana, turns
water into wine in any vineyard!
The Egyptian goddess who represented
the "spirit" of alcoholic fermentation was Sekhet, and her pictures
show her carrying the sun-disk on the head of a lioness. Her name is also, says
Massey, the name for the Bee. As a goddess Sekhet is the fiery energy of Mother
Nature, which engenders the ferment out of which comes the soul, the bee. For
she is also the goddess of sweetness or pleasure, literally "goddess of
the honeymoon." She is designated the "force or energy of the gods,
astonisher of mankind." (Birch, Gallery, p. 17.) She was the
inspirer of the male, his Sakti, or creative force. The Egyptian sakh means
"to inflame," "to inspire," and Sekhet is the double force
personified as female. This sakh brings us close again to the syc- of
the sycamore fig, whose juice bred spirit intoxication, and the Greek psyche
hovers close in the background of this etymology. The soul is, or causes,
the divine ferment in the body of life, developed there, as in the vine, by the
sun of man’s spiritual self. Drink and divinity are thus found under one name,
as were fleece and grape, seven and peace, star and soul.
Isis, whose original variant names
were Hes, Hesit, Sesit, Sesh, etc., also carries this element of Sekhet’s
function. Sesh means primarily "breath," which is the inspirer
(Latin: spiro, I breathe) in the sense of imparting the gift of higher
life of spirit to a creature "dead" in matter. Man was not finished
until God had breathed into him divine breath. Ses, Sesh is "breath,"
"flame," "combustion"; also "the spirit of wine."
From it Massey traces the "svas" from which we have the
Swastika, the sign of vivifying fire,--"tika" meaning
"cross."
Another root yields meaning along
the same line. Kep means "to light," "kindle,"
"heat," "cause a ferment." And from it Massey derives the
Greek fire-forger of the gods, Vulcan or Hephaestus, who is Kep and the
Greek root of the Latin aestas, summer heat. He forges for the gods
whatever needs to be shaped by fire. Vapor produced from water by heat was the
primitive illustration for breath which gave a creature its soul. It was a
natural marvel, this emergence of a principle of fiery
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energy in vapor form, so likely a
type of soul engendered in man out of the mixture of his lower earth and water
elements.
Horus and Jesus, both turning water
into wine, represented this transforming power of the god, maturing the inert
elements of sense and feeling into spiritual character. Horus put grapes into
the water, and "the water of Teta is as wine even as that of Ra." The
Jewish Feast of the Tent or Tabernacle was a ceremony embodying the turning of
water into wine.
There are many instances of rivers
and seas being turned into blood, Revelation reports that at the sound
of the angel’s trumpet a mountain, around which lightning played (symbol of the
divine emanations, Jove’s thunderbolts), went down into the sea and changed its
waters into blood. As the first forms of life were generated in sea water,
their initial body plasms were just that water. In eras of evolution this
primitive life fluid was gradually transmuted, by the operation upon it of even
higher voltages of life force, into that which eventually in man became human
blood! Sea water has been turned into blood in man’s constitution! Blood is the
fluid containing the living dynamic, and the Bible states that the soul dwells
in the blood. Now, astonishingly, chemical analysis reveals that sea water and
human blood are identical in elementary composition. It has remained for science
and ancient symbolism to combine in this latter day to tell us the hidden
meaning of one of the greatest spiritual allegories that theology failed to
interpret for eighteen centuries.
Blood is the last of the Eucharistic
signs to be dealt with. Few Christians can tell capably why it was that the
human race had to be redeemed by the blood of an innocent victim poured out for
its guilt. There is so glaring an inference of vicariousness here that common
sense has halted long before giving credence to this dogma. It seems to
contravene all natural justice and leaves an unstudied laity incredulous and
unconvinced. There could be found no ground of fitness in the necessity that
made a being of a higher rank, a god, come down and suffer gratuitously for
sins of ours. With its linkage to evolution and anthropology cut totally away
from it, there was no way to connect the doctrine with elucidative reference.
Even Massey revolts in horror from the Biblical verse, in the words of the Son:
"My father! This day shalt thou refresh thyself in blood." The
picture of a blood-lustful deity terrifies us. But such revulsion is
gratuitous. The primal
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implications hold nothing to cause
us horror. The Son is only reminding the Father that the descent of his
germinal essence into the blood of this human body would give him his next
cycle of rebirth and renewal. "Day" is one of the glyphs for cycle,
aeon, round of incarnation, as in Genesis with its seven
"days" of creation. The god finds fresh experience and new conquest
in each life; he renews himself like the phoenix or the eagle, when bathed in
new blood-bodies in incarnation. In our cycle he does this in the blood of man.
But what might well cause Massey and the whole world abhorrence is that blood
as symbol should have been taken for blood as substance, and that a whole
millennium and a half of alleged civilized history has been deluded with the
picture of a human personage buying unearned redemption for a race by the
gruesome act of pouring out the blood of his physical body on a wooden cross!
Rational reaction from religion is largely, if not overwhelmingly, justified.
To a degree distressing to contemplate religion has befogged the mind of the
world by converting the forms of ancient tropism into a sense repugnant even to
the intelligence of children.
The entire theological theme of
blood sacrifice, so literalized in the Old Testament rites, reduces
itself to the one simple meaning of divine life poured out to circulate vitally
through the mental and spiritual veins of man on earth. Mortal man underwent a
transfusion of deific "blood." Divine energies of consciousness
course and thrill through our life. This higher infusion regenerates us, makes
us new. The lamb slain on the altar was but the ceremonial token of this
meaning. The bull-bath of Mithraic rites was the washing away of sin in the
blood of the Tauric emanation of deity. On the other side, however, the
consuming of the animal on the altar by fire that flashed down from heaven was
the token of the transfiguration of the animal nature in man into immortal
purity by the aeonial "burning" of the godly fire in life after life.
Man was nourished in the substance of animal life, as the candle flame feeds
upon the animal tallow below it, converting it from gross substance into divine
flame. That a race of people could for centuries believe that God demanded the
killing and burning of actual animals on actual altars for his sensuous delight
of sniffing the odors of roasting flesh--a sweat savor unto his nostrils--well
nigh destroys faith in human intelligence. The imputation of gory sensualism to
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supreme deity, the unconscionable
assumption that he would delight in the slaughter of billions of his own
creatures, and that he would discharge man’s sins by accepting the suffering of
a lower order of his creatures as yet incapable of sin, form a list of
theological aberrations that have gone far to throw the general mind into
nearly barbarian besottedness.
The cleansing power of the blood was
in part at least borrowed from the fact of the menstrual process. The ancient
allegorists did not hesitate to employ the generative functions in the way of
cosmic analogues. It is outwardly easy to fasten the charge of phallicism on
the symbolic religion of the past. But man’s creative processes are typical
of all creative process, and the sages did not scruple to use the known
functionism to depict the unknown cosmic procedures. There is no taint of ill
in this until sordid sensuality invades the realm of pure depiction. Each
incarnation in earthly bodies subjected the soul to a sort of menstrual
purification, working, so to say, a lot of bad blood out of the system of
god-man. It linked him with a body of flesh which came "under the
law" of periodicity and purgation. Books on primeval religious customs
tell of men dressing as women and laboring to manifest the menstrualia, in
token of the entry of the god into his feminine phase, becoming a child of
Mother Nature. In Egypt Tefnut (the Greek Daphne) was a name formed from the
root tefn, tebn, "to shed, drip, drop." The same root means
also to "rise up, spread, illumine," as the dawn. The dawn of
womanhood came with the cleansing by blood.
However theology might like to
disown the connection, this background looms as essential for our interpretation
of the Gospel "bloody sweat" of the savior in the Garden of
Gethsemane. The menstrual purification of the god in Egypt was in Smen! Legends
of Tem, Atum and Ra portray them as shedding drops of their blood, under male
symbolism, to fall on the earth and create mankind, or man and woman, Shu and
Tefnut, Hu and Sa. The relation of Smen to the essence of the male blood is
obvious. The gods poured out their vital life to fecundate matter, their mother
and sister, to give creation a new birth. This general typism is all that could
ever have been hinted at under the figure of the bloody sweat. The emission of
life-fluid is accompanied by sweating. The male and female aspects of the
meaning enter side by side. Smen, says Massey, was the place appointed for the
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purging, purifying and cleansing of
souls. It is the place of pain and torment, the birthplace of the new moon,
symbol of the infant birth of solar light in humanity. Hesmen is the
Egyptian name for the rhythmic purgation. It is the voice of matter, the woman,
saying in the Ritual: "I am the woman, the orb in the darkness; I
have brought my orb to darkness where it is changed to light." The bloody
sweat of the god in Smen is described as "the flux emanating from
Osiris," when Osiris is the god in his feminine or material
expression. It is the divine "shedding of blood," without which
humanity would have no cosmic opportunity to escape the eternal weight of
karmic "sin."
Where the outpouring of deific power
was not as yet linked with Mother Nature’s body, was not yet implemented by its
proper Shakti, or force in matter, the god was figured as
"masturbating." Kheper-Ra was the Egyptian deity fulfilling this
function. His type was the beetle or scarabaeus, which, according to Egyptian
belief, created its young by itself alone, without the female. There was hidden
in this symbolism the truth that would have settled the famous "filioque"
dispute that split the early Church into Greek and Roman Catholicism.
Chapter 17 of the Ritual runs:
"O ye gods who are in the
presence of Osiris, grant me your arms, for I am the god who shall come into
being among you. Who then are these? They are the drops of blood which came
forth from the phallus of Ra when he went forth to perform mutilation upon
himself. They sprang into being as the gods Hu and Sa." [In another legend
Shu and Tefnut.]
The Ritual states that
"the sun mutilates himself, and from the streams of blood all things come
into existence." Here is so-called phallicism, yet with sublimity.
Matching the Assyrian and Egyptian
jugs of wine and pitchers of mixed drink, the Hebrews (Leviticus 4) were
ordered to sprinkle some blood seven times before the Eternal in front of the
curtain of the inner sanctuary. This was for a sweet savor and soothing
fragrance to deity. In their sacrifices they were instructed never to consume
the blood of any animal: "The soul of any creature lies in its blood . . .
blood expiates by reason of the soul in it."
Esau was called "red"
because he sucked his mother’s blood before his birth. He is said to have sold
his birthright for a mess of "red." Tradition shows him to have been
a divinity imaged by the solar
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hawk, which symbolized blood
"because they say that this bird does not drink water but blood, by which
the soul is nourished" (Hor-Apollo, Bk. I, 6). The soul lives on natural
forces, its Mother’s blood, before it is born into Christhood in man.
One of the marvels in Exodus that
were to persuade the reluctant Egyptians to let the Israelites go was the
turning into blood some water that Moses poured on the ground. The pouring it on
the ground would point to the necessity of making the transformation on
earth. A Mexican legend sets forth the vivification of the dead remains of
former races by the blood of the gods.
As the sun of spirit descending into
the darkness of matter, in the evening or autumn, the god was suggestively
depicted as the woman, suffering, becoming ill, wasting her substance
unproductively. The god linked with Mother Nature was as a woman not yet impregnated
by spirit. It required the passage of "virtue" from the Christ to
stop her wastage.
A further aspect of the
red-and-white symbolism comes to view here. If the red types the mother’s blood
giving generation, the white types the seminal life of spirit. The union of the
white of divinity with the red of nature produces the new birth. Nor did the
sages overlook the meaningful fact that it is the white creative essence of the
father’s blood that releases the stream of the mother’s white nourishment for
the new child. So the first or natural man, born of the blood, the first Adam
or "red earth," is raised to his status of spiritual new birth by
"the white liquor which the glorified ones love." And both the
mother’s and the father’s condensation of white creative and sustaining essence
is distilled out of the natural red blood. Our divinization turns us from
red to white. Under Christmas tropism, the red stands for the divine; the
green--universal color of nature--for the physical.
The red color of the evening sun,
sinking into his feminine phase, and the red color of the morning sun, when for
a brief space of his infancy he is still close to his Mother Earth, like the
human child tied through the first years to his mother, again beautifully
adumbrate the feminine connotation of red; while the white blaze of the sun
throughout the day suggests the male or spiritual power.
In the Ritual (Ch. 37A) the
Speaker is told he shall make four troughs of clay and shall "fill them
with milk of a white cow." The four containers of the divine ichor are the
physical, etheric, emotional
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and concrete mental natures in man’s
lower self. An instructive picturing of the human creation is given in this
Kamite description: the basis of the oblation in the Egyptian sacrifice is
"the blood of beings that have been destroyed."
"Said by the majesty of the
god, Let them begin with Elephantine and bring to me the fruits in quantity.
And when the fruits had been brought they were given . . . (Lacuna).
"The Sekti (miller) of Annu was
grinding the fruits, while the priestesses poured the juices into vases; and
those fruits were put into vessels with the blood of the beings, and
there were seven thousand pitchers of drink.
"And there came the majesty of
the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the gods, to see the drink after he had
ordered the goddess to destroy the beings in three days of navigation."
The Assyrian seven jugs and the
Egyptian seven thousand pitchers of drink are brewed from the blood of the
massacred beings (the dismembered incarnating gods) mingled with the juice of
the fruits of earth. This is vastly significant. Massey comments instructively:
"Blood and the fruit of earth
were the two primitive forms of the offering, and these are blended together in
a deluge of intoxicating drink."14
The plain inference here is that the
mingling in one drink of the juices of the fruits of earth and the blood of the
"beings," is a type of the blending in one composite nature of the
life of the gods and that of animal-man--the base of all religion.
An exactly similar depiction is
found in the Berosan account of the Babylonian creation. The deity Belus cut
off his own head; whereupon the other gods mixed the blood as it gushed out
with the earth, and from the mixture men were formed. "On this account it
is that men are rational and partake of divine knowledge."
The Beast in Revelation is to
be overcome by the blood of the Lamb. The lower sense creature in us is to be
raised up by the infusion of godlike quality from above.
We are now in possession of much of
the multifarious data which will enable proper judgment to be exercised in
interpreting the central significance of the Eucharistic meal. We commemorate
our partaking of the Lord’s body and blood to remind our sluggish sense that
there dwells in us a god, whose nature is compounded with that of a beast.
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In the drama the Lord assigned
immediately a pointed reason for his institution of the rite. And in this
reason we come upon one of the pivotal elements of the Platonic philosophy, the
loss of which out of Christian theology has contributed to our generally
palsied grasp of fundamental truth. Little is it dreamed that the Lord himself
announced the great Platonic doctrine of "reminiscence" in the midst
of his ordination of the Eucharist. The world’s astutest students have been
puzzled and perplexed over the great Academician’s principle of regained memory
for the soul, and they have labeled it a philosophical fantasy, a finely spun
poetization. That it bears direct relation to our earthly history has not been
discerned by scholars.
When the Christos concluded
his injunction to eat the broken fragments of his body and to drink the flowing
stream of his life-blood with the command: "Do this in memory of me,"
he set Plato’s great doctrine at the very heart of Christianity. But
Christianity could not catch the relevance of the statement because it did not
have the correlative tenets of the dismemberment and disfigurement. The
restoration of memory can have understanding only in relation to a previous
loss of it. Paradise regained must follow Paradise lost. So
"rememberment" is the repairing of the dismemberment. Reminiscence is
the recuperation of shattered memory. Death must have its resurrection. Divine
intellect, dispersed into all forms of divulsion and enfeeblement, torn into
fragments, with the links of connection lost, condemned to wander blindly in
murks and shadows, must be reintegrated in the end. "My reason returned
unto me," says the reconstituted Nebuchadnezzar. The Prodigal Son remembered
his forgotten Father’s house on high. Away off in that "far
country," the Vale of Lethe and Land of Oblivion, the exiled soul begins
to recover from its amnesia, and the divine nostalgia sets in to lead it back
home.
A Chaldean Oracle states that
the "paternal principle" of higher intellect "will not receive
the will of the soul till she has departed from oblivion; and has spoken
the word, assuming the memory of her paternal sacred impression."
Immersed in scattered and partial images of reality, the soul can not regain
her former unity of vision until she has restored some semblance of her former
integrity of intellection. She must weave the tangled strands of mental fleece
again into a garment with pattern matching archetypal ideals.
The figures of both Jesus and Jonah,
fast asleep in the holds of their
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respective ships in the storm are
variant types of this oblivion of the god in his mundane journey. In a similar
episode in the career of Horus, "there was deep slumber within the
ship."
Iamblichus paints a beautiful
picture of the gods gathering up the loose shreds of memory and weaving them
again into the design of original loveliness, to escape their dire condition of
forgetfulness:
"Neither is it proper to say
that the soul primarily consists of harmony and rhythm. For thus enthusiasm
would be adapted to the soul alone. It is better . . . to assert that the soul,
before she gave herself to body, was the auditor of divine harmony; and that
hence, when she proceeded into body and heard melodies of such a kind as
especially preserve the divine vestiges of memory, she embraced these, from
them recollected divine harmony, and tends and is allied to it, and as much as
possible participates of it."15
Amid her distraction the soul
catches faint and feeble glimpses of former felicity and these stir her latent
recollection of harmonies known before. Through them she strives to integrate
her former bliss and grandeur. And this states the whole office of ritual
religion!
Plato’s esoteric principle, grounded
in segments of recondite anthropology lost out of modern consideration, is one
vital to all theory and practique of education. Subtle principles of cultural
technique are involved in the incarnational situation which make learning not
at all the acquiring of something new and alien to the soul, but the
remembering or recollecting of scattered fragments of things inherently
kin to consciousness itself. Culture is reintegration, not the acquiring of a
collection.
Of the nine Muses of classical
mythology Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory, and memory is thus indicated as
one of the nine paths by which we return to our divinity. Mercury also shared
the function of rehabilitating the memory. A note by Thomas Taylor reads:
"Hermes disperses the sleep and
oblivion with which the different herds of souls are oppressed. He is likewise
the supplier of recollection, the end of which is a genuine intellectual
apprehension of divine natures."16
As man is a rational soul thrust
into an irrational life, the province of Mercury is to impress upon the mind,
distracted by the shifting flux of this world’s dream images, the beauty of the
stable principles
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of Universal Mind that were visioned
by the soul in her own world. Chapter 90 of the Ritual gives a prayer in
these words:
"O thou who restorest memory in
the mouth of the dead through the words of power which they possess, let my
mouth be opened through the words of power which I possess."
The title of Chapter 25 is itself
convincing: "The chapter of making a man possess memory in the
underworld." This again is the whole office of religion. Of what, be it
asked, could a man on earth be expected to have memory, if not of a former life
which he had forgotten?
If religion is to be animated and
inspired by its most forceful significance, it must be practiced with a view to
awakening in earthbound souls lost divine memories. This is the import of all
its song, its ritual, its rhythms and prayers. A powerful reinforcement of
spiritual unction and dynamic life would well up out of its decadent forms if
this motif were revived. Salvation, the aim of religion, is by way of rekindled
memory of slumbering divinity.
In an address to Pepi it is written
that the god "setteth his remembrance upon men and his love before the
gods." Indeed the Ritual records the fact that the deceased in
Amenta was shown his Ka (higher soul body) and assured that it accompanied him
through the lower earth in order that he might not utterly forget his divine
moorings, or as he says, "that he might not suffer loss of identity by
forgetting his name." Man is on earth like one stricken with amnesia.
Showing him his Ka bestirs the Manes to recall his divine name and nature. Also
the passage of Osiris through the underworld is effected only by means of his preserving
all the mystical names in memory. Ra has 75 names, Osiris 153. As the
"name" stood for one of the higher spiritual principles, to call upon
the name of the Lord, or to know the deity’s name, was to have come en
rapport with his higher nature. This presupposed the restoration of all the
soul’s higher metaphysical faculties. This is given elsewhere as knowing the
names of all the gates and their god keepers, past whom the voyaging soul had
to go.
In the Orphic Mysteries of Greece
the phrase occurs more than once: "I am a child of earth and the starry
sky, but my race is of heaven alone." The "dead" man is
instructed to address these words to the guardian of the Lake of Memory, while
he asks for a drink of water from the lake. In our highest flights toward divine
consciousness we
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drink from that Lake of Memory and
regale ourselves anew with aboriginal harmonies. If it holds true to its prime
purpose the persistent vogue of religion in human society is abundantly
warranted.
Max Müller gives an important link
of philology when he derives the Sanskrit word Smara, "love,"
from Smar, "to recollect"!17 He states that the German Schmerz,
"pain," and the English "smart," come from this root.
Love, then, like learning, is only the memory of former transports and ecstasies
of the glory the soul once had with the Father before the worlds.
When, therefore, Jesus breaks the
bread and sips the wine in token of his death till he come--his discerption and
dismantling--he is dramatizing the necessity of their "remembering"
his scattered selfhood in their lives. The Ritual of Egypt assigns a
name to the ship of Horus as it passes across the sea of this lower life, which
name shows the archaic origin of the sage philosophy of Greece: "Collector
of souls is the name of my barque"! Recollection is the soul’s office on
earth. We are to gather up in the boat of our life the twelve baskets of
scattered fragments and restore the broken body of our Lord "whole and
entire."
Out of the dissertation on divine
food here elaborated there should accrue to the modern mind a new and grander
sense of the Christ’s ordinance: "Do this in memory of me." And an
elevated consciousness arising from the double sense of the word
"remember" should lift humanity once more to an awareness of its
mission, which is to bind up the broken and dismembered body of the Lord of
Hosts, by welding together the nations in the spirit of a lofty fraternity. In
the light of restored sublimity to the doctrine, every individual will know
that the appeal to remember his deity comes not from an isolated figure in
ancient Judea, but from the living god within, begging all to drink the cup of
communion with him and thus hasten to forge that recollection of him which
alone will effect his release from the dreary grave of the body.
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Chapter XIII
EARTH,
WATER, AIR, FIRE
The possibility of making an
effective interpretation of arcane scriptures will be seen to be closely
interwoven with the part played in symbolic structure by the four elements,
earth, water, air and fire. Grasp of the ideas hidden under the use of these
four emblems comes close to putting one in possession of the key to most of the
mystery. The revelation of the full force of their application will prove
astonishing.
Much absurdity has found expression
in common belief as to their significance. It has everywhere been asserted that
the ancients conceived all substances to be composed of these four primary and
irreducible constituents, instead of the ninety-two mineral elements of modern
chemistry. This is folly. What they were dealing with is a vastly different
formula. They were not asserting man’s physical body, with all other things,
was compounded of only four elements. They held man’s total constitution to be
compounded of four distinct grades or modifications of original essence, each
of which gave him a body, by virtue of which his life effected its conscious
expression in four different worlds at the same time. Each of the bodies was
charactered and symboled by one of the four elements, and the more sublimated
ones interpenetrated the coarser, localizing the functionism of all four in the
lower one, man’s physical body, symboled by the earth; an emotional body, of
which water was the suggestive emblem; a mental body, with air as its sign; and
a spiritual body, typed by fire or the sun. A fifth, not yet evolved to
function in humanity and beyond the ken of mortal knowledge, was predicated as
the development of a distant future. It was called a body of aether, the fifth
element, called by Aristotle a term equivalent to "quintessence." It
yet lies latent and undifferentiated in the inner core of the element of fire.
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The Bibles of antiquity can not be
understood unless this basic predication be made, that man lives not alone on
one plane of nature, but on four, and that he makes contact with the realities
of each of them by means of a body composed of the matter indigenous to that
realm. His focus of consciousness may pass from one to the other of the four
bodies under pressure of the swing of his interests. When we grandiloquently
speak of living within the whole range of our being, we are unwittingly
repeating a conception of ancient theory, the literal truth of which we have
lost the data to comprehend.
Of an eventual septenary
constitution man has as yet progressed only so far as to have deployed into
function the lower quaternary of powers. Plato in the Timaeus says that
"three genera of mortals yet await to be created." Each emanation of
energic force brings to manifestation one of the bodies of our composite
mechanism, as it does one of the planes of nature. We are now in the fourth of
such rounds or cycles, and have therefore developed four of the ultimate seven
bodies of our equipment for contacting the reality of all worlds. And these
four bodies are typed by earth, water, air and fire, symbolically.
The matter of the contemporary
existence of these four (or five) bodies within the single space of the
physical may occasion some incredulity as to the ancient theory. But modern
science has itself opened the door of explanation here. It is a matter of the
fineness of molecular particles and interstitial spaces. Certain rays can be
passed through "solid" substances, because their electrons swing in
minute orbits amid vaster ones. It is declared esoterically that the atomic
matter of which each of man’s four bodies is composed is in structural essence
a sevenfold attenuation or sublimation of the one which it interpenetrates.
Each one interpenetrates its coarser neighbor, and at the same time is
interpenetrated by its next finer associate. So the four dwell together,
occupying the same three-dimensional area, yet with a "great gulf"
fixed between each pair, the abyss of difference of electronic vibration, wave
length, frequency and radial orbit. This is the great gulf that divides each
world from all others. It is not a chasm of spacial distance, but a hiatus
between vibrational frequencies, wave length and other forms of potency. To
bridge the abyss and step from one world to another, it is requisite that man should
be able to tune up, or down, the mathematical "pitch" of his
consciousness, as exemplified by the "tuning in" process of the
radio. Two discordant tones of consciousness
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are not on the same plane, or in the
same world. Their failure to harmonize puts them into different areas of the
field of life.
The five planes were represented by
the five geometric figures, the cube for earth, the sphere for water, the
triangle for fire, the crescent for air, and the candle-flame tip for aether.
Certain significations of the figure-symbols will be presented in the sequel,
but it is doubtful if anyone at present knows authoritatively the full range of
meaning attached to them. In some drawings of the series, air, the third, and
fire, the fourth, are reversed in position. Their relative place in the order
is doubtless of vital importance, but for the ends of religious symbolism, it
seems not to be a question of critical value. After examination of many
applications of the typing it has been found advantageous to make a more
condensed grouping of the four under the two heads of fire and water, as these
two appear to do double duty in carrying the burden of the symbolism.
This reduces the fourfold nature of
man to the broad generality of the dualism, or the compound of two elements,
the divine and the earthly, in one body.
This will be found to serve the
readiest purposes of interpreting the many myths, for there appears to be a
vast preponderance of the dual representation in the scriptures and folk-lore
of the world, under the wide imagery of fire and water.
The two most distinctive symbols,
then, are fire and water, and their proper interpretation almost alone gives a
key to the religious texts. Let fire be taken to refer undeviatingly to our
higher or divine segment, and water to our lower or animal-human portion; or
fire to connote the god from heaven, and water the earthly man, the first Adam.
In an even more condensed form, fire may type the soul and water the body.
Classifications so general are not to be taken as scientifically precise; but
they will be seen to be systematically applicable, without loss of explicit
meaning. The fifth element, aether, may profitably be ignored, as it stands for
the innermost essence of all manifest life, and humanity is not in conscious
relation to its high mode of activity.
Oddly enough, by one of those
inversions to which the imagery is susceptible, the serpent has become a symbol
of both the fire and the water elements, and hence types both our divine and
our sensual natures. "When above it was the serpent of air and fire, and
when below the serpent of water and earth."1 There was the fiery serpent
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that Moses lifted up, and the water
dragon of Revelation, of the Aeneid and other classical works.
There is the Good Serpent, Agathodaemon, and the Evil Serpent, Kakodaemon,
symbol of Satan. Water, too, became a dual sign, with a higher and lower
translation. As the first it was an emblem of the outpourings of divinity, the
water of life that Jesus promised to the woman at the well; as the second, it
typed the fluctuating, restless, sensual nature in which the divine fire was so
nearly drowned out. Even fire shares the dual meaning, for it symbols the
celestial life, the fire of Prometheus, Jove’s thunderbolt, as well as the
fires of the torture and hell of earthly existence. The Ritual speaks of
our baptism on earth "in the Pool of the Double Fire." This is easily
comprehensible because of the shifting of the divine beings from the empyrean
to the mundane sphere of activity. In heaven it was a pure and clear flame; on
earth it was fed with damp, coarse fuel, and became lurid in hue and charged
with noxious, sulphurous gases, and turned to steam and smoke. A large part of
the whole significance of the incarnation can be seen reflected in the imagery
of fire introduced into a semi-watery condition. Our work will be wasted effort
if it does not succeed in imprinting on every imagination the indelible
suggestion that our earthly history is adumbrated by the picture of an
imperishable and unquenchable spark of divine fire struggling to live and
expand its power in a moist environment. Our inmost essence is as a central
nucleus of fire striving valiantly to light a mass of damp green wood--the
animal nature. The resultant smoke and smudge is the perfect type of our life
here, intellectually and spiritually. These were the very symbols of our
terrene existence employed in Greek philosophy.
This peculiar duality of the
symbols, discerned throughout, is itself a reflection of the twofold movement,
or double status, of the soul in incarnation. For that which began as heavenly
passed into earthly embodiment, and the pertinence of the symbols had to change
with the change of milieu. All the heavenly symbols became inwrought with
earthly reference and imperfection, and thus picked up the implication of evil.
On earth, then, we may expect to find the celestial symbols with meanings
almost completely reversed, or with their purity besmirched, so to say. It is
not surprising that the wise Egyptians should have given us a picture of this
very reversal in one of their typical vignettes. For, says Massey:
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"The god advancing in a
reversed position is the sun [the god, soul] in the underworld. The image
accords exactly with an Egyptian scene of the sun passing through the Hades,
where we see the twelve gods of the earth, or the lower domain of night,
marching towards a mountain turned upside down, and two typical personages are
also turned upside down. This is an illustration of the passage of the sun
through the underworld. The reversed (people) on the same monument are the
dead. Thus the Osirified deceased who had attained the second life, in the Ritual
says exultingly, ‘I do not walk on my head.’ The dead, as the Akhu, are the
spirits, and the Atua is a spirit who comes walking upside down." (Book
of Hades.)2
One of the rites of the resurrection
was the "erecting of the Tat," or setting the Tat cross or the mummy
upright on its feet. In addition to the imagery of death in all its forms to
type our spiritually defunct condition here, there was employed also the idea
of an entire reversal of position to portray the true state of the soul in its
untoward predicament. We are heavenly spirits turned upside down on earth!
Earth reverses heavenly lines of motion. It reflects the pattern of things in
the mount, but inverted. The highest symbols of heaven therefore fall at the
very bottom of earthly tracing. And the very spirit of the god who came to
earth, renouncing his bliss on high to bring immortal gifts to man, was himself
later inverted into the personification of evil! We have, then, the angels of
light turned into demons, the bright flame of divinity metamorphosed into the
lurid fire of hell, the waters of life becoming the raging seas that engulfed
the boats of Jonah and Jesus, the serpent of wisdom becoming the dragon of
evil.
With the four basic elements now
established, it is interesting to note the curious typical results obtained
when any two are brought together, as the fact of incarnation does bring all
four together in man. Some remarkable and surprising combinations are produced,
both in symbol and in actuality.
Man’s lower nature, as seen in any
diagram, is composed of the elements of earth and water, his higher nature of
fire and air. Any time either of the two upper is crossed with either of the
two lower, there is a rough symbol of incarnation, or combination of the divine
with the human. But the two that together comprise either our lower or higher
nature may also be found in correlation. This is admirably seen in the two
lower, where the mixture of earth and water produces, as any child can tell,
mud or mire. At once we have a key to translate
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the significance of the papyrus
swamps of Egyptian legends, the "miry clay" of Plato and the Bible,
and the celebrated Reed (not Red) Sea of Exodus (see Moffatt
Translation). The marshes of Lower Egypt in which Horus and Jesus and Sargon
were all secreted can be taken now as the glyphs of the human physical body,
compounded of earth and water. The body is itself about seven-eighths water and
the remainder earth. The lotus, papyrus or reed has a number of meanings, but
in the main they typify the new life springing up out of the mud and water, to
flower out in the air and the fire of the sun. The risen Horus is figured
seated on a lotus pad above the water.
Mud, as the type of matter (and
matter, mud, and mother all come from the same linguistic root), is
dialectically analyzed in the Greek philosophy:
"Matter," says Simplicius
in his commentary on the first book of Aristotle’s Physics, "is
nothing else then mutation of sensibles, with respect to intelligibles,
deviating from thence and carried down to non-being. These things, indeed,
which are the properties of sensibles are irrational, corporeal, distributed
into parts, and passing into bulk and divulsion through an ultimate progression
into generation, viz., into matter; for matter is always truly the last
sediment. Hence also the Egyptians call the dregs of the first (or highest)
life, which they symbolically denominate water, matter, being, as it were, a
certain mire."
What Simplicius is quaintly telling
us in terms of reasoned analysis of the elements of being which are quite
"Greek" to us moderns, is that matter is to be thought of as a kind
of sediment deposited on the lowest levels of inert life by the crystallization
of ethereal forces, precisely as snow is the sedimentary deposit of vaporous
states of water, subjected to a reduction of temperature. Nature furnishes a
perfect analogy for every truth.
A common ancient symbolic term for
our life here is the "sea of generation." Iamblichus joins Heraclitus
in likening generation to a water symbol, that of a river, as being always in
flux. It is the river of Lethe, flowing through the dark meadows of Ate, as
Empedocles says. It represents in its swirling currents the voracity of matter
and the light-hating world, as the gods say, and the winding streams under
which many are drawn down, as the Chaldean Oracles assert. The fitness
of the meadow to stand for this life is seen in its lying always
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in a low marshy place contiguous to
a stream. It tells of land and water in juxtaposition and therefore matches
mire in its suggestiveness.
Plotinus in a passage already quoted
has called our descent a fall into dark mire. The Hebrew Psalmist, in the words
of the incarnated deity, cries:
"Save me, O God! for the waters
are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no
standing. I am come in unto deep waters where the floods overwhelm me."
Without the skill of the Greeks in
dealing with abstruse facts of cosmology under symbolic typism we are hardly
prepared to catch the aptness of the figure of water for the creeping inroads
of sensual impulse upon the divine purity. But the god cries that the waters of
animal passion have come in to inundate his soul. Again he prays:
"Deliver me out of the mire,
and let me not sink. Let me be delivered from them that hate me. Let not
the water-floods overwhelm me, neither let the deep swallow me up."
His gratitude for eventual
deliverance takes the form (Ps. 40):
"He brought me up also out of
an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and
established my goings."
Yet--"he hath founded the earth
upon the waters and established it upon the floods" (Ps. 24),
because out of the water and the mud of mortal life was to come the new
generation, the son, Jesus or Horus, as the young shoot of the papyrus reed of
divine life.
The mire and filth of the Augean
stables cleansed by Hercules is another form of this imagery, for the solar
hero turns into them the waters of two rivers. The two streams represent those
of spirit and matter, generally, and only out of the interworking of the two
does eventual purgation come.
A vivid light can now be thrown on
such a fiction as this: Horus was mutilated and his members cast into the
water. To find them Isis invoked the aid of Sebek, or Sevekh, the
crocodile-god, an ancient solar deity, who, having examined the banks of the
swamps with his claws, took his net and fished out the pieces. Sebek then
reconstituted the god whole and entire. The significance of Sebek’s
participation is in his name, which means "seven," intimating that a
septenary development
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was entailed in the perfective
process. Man is perfected always in a cycle of seven stages.
Water and earth yield another
deposit than that of mud or mire, a very curious one. Water, depositing
particles of mineral earth, petrifies a piece of wood, a combination of water,
earth and air. Not even such a symbol is irrelevant, since it speaks in loudest
tones of the hardening influence of the lower nature upon the higher, and
images the Gorgon shield, turning all softer natures to stone.
Air and water in conjunction provide
much matter for symbology. In the first place there is air in water, and it
needs only the application of the still more energic element fire to beget life
and engender most of the other forms of living symbolism. In ice or cold water
the energies of life remain inert; let fire be applied and the resultant
energization gives us a faint suggestion of the whole meaning of the entry of
the gods into the province of less active substances. Fire plunged into water
most pointedly dramatizes the basic import of the whole incarnation procedure.
The soul, a fiery nucleus of noetic intelligence, is plunged into the watery
habitat of the fleshly body. The moral fight is a combat between the fire of
spirit and the water of emotion and desire; and fire must win the victory by
eventually drying up and converting into steam the heavy humid nature of
animal-man. Fire must dry out a path across the sea of generation, so that it
may cross this Reed (Red) Sea out of Egypt, as also the Jordan River, into the
Holy Land, without wetting its feet! Fire enters the watery realm of body,
already permeated by air in hidden form. Heat raises the water into vapor,
which, being an airy form of water, suggests the birth of mind out of emotion.
We read in the Ritual (Ch. 164): "Oh, the Being dormant within his
body, making his burning in flame, glowing within the sea by his vapor. Come,
give the fire, transport [perhaps better, "transform"] the vapor of
the Being." The vapor was a type of the breath of life, air containing
moisture, symbol of the soul that was linked with emotion. It was a plea for
the god to come and sublimate the emotional element of the lower self, water, by
unifying it with air, mind. Each higher element is able to raise the potential
of the one below it and refine it. So earth (sense) is raised and purified by
water (emotion); water (emotion) by air (mind); and air (mind) by fire
(spirit). This gives us the key table of values. By their simple
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application in various combinations
a hundred intimate meanings of ancient scriptures may be resolved into
comprehensible reading.
A common form of air and water mixed
is foam or bubbles. Froth arises when air becomes violently active in water.
Fire, spirit, quickens and intensifies the process. We have here the ground for
the solution of that riddle of Greek mythology which makes Venus to be born
from the sea-foam, produced by the energy of the great God Jupiter striding through
the sea. It is a beautiful allegory, hinting that the goddess of Love is born
in the evolutionary process when air, mind, is injected into the field of the
animal impulses and passions. This came when the god, descending, brought air
and fire to energize the elements in the sea water (of the body). Froth would
intimate the elevation of emotion to the plane of thought, or the thorough
mixing of thought with emotion,--perhaps also the emotionalizing of thought.
Bubbles rising to the surface suggest the evolution of thought out of the very
depths of the physical and emotional departments of man. The Egyptian image of
the water-cow indicated life emanating from the primordial waters. And the
rising of Aphrodite into breathing life and beauty out of the foam marks this
idea as Egyptian in origin. Nu-ti, "froth," is the same word
as Neith, who was one of the early Kamite personifications of the first life
rising from the waters. Neith is Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, the mother of
life, twofold in character as liquid and aeriform. Her celestial representative
was Ursa Major, the Great Bear (or Bearer, suggests Massey), the great dipper
in which the water of life was held, and from which, as it turned around the
pole, it was periodically poured out and again dipped up! In early times its
orbit dipped down into the sub-horizonal sea. So this great sidereal directory
of the heavens became the greatest of astronomical symbols to the ancients,
dramatizing the seven great elementary mother powers of nature that periodically
arose out of the waters of life. Operated by its handle of three stars, typing
the solar triad of mind, soul and spirit, it caught up the living waters in its
four-starred cup, the fourfold physical basis of all things.
The Egyptian male-female pair of Shu
and Tefnut personify the dual subsistence of breath and moisture. "These
in one form may be the breath of life and its dew, as Tef is to drip or
drop."3 Air and moisture are combined in the breath of mortals. The
creative breath of mortal life is emaned and drips its moisture upon the earth
in rain,
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fog or dew. The spirit of God
outbreathed as air or breath, from which was precipitated the water of life on
earth. Rain is distilled out of the bosom of the air. In the form of vapor,
visible or invisible, the upper heaven holds the celestial water, the type of
divine life embosomed in air--emotions germinally latent in thoughts. And when
this water has fallen to earth, it takes the action of fiery spirit to convert
it back again to heavenly state, and this can only be done by the superior
energy transmuting its nature from liquid to vapor or "spirit" form.
The deceased, awaiting his
resurrection, cries to Nu: "Give me water and the breath of life!"
The reply comes: "I bring thee the vase containing the abundant water for
rejoicing the heart by its effusion, that thou mayest breathe the breath of
life resulting from it." Water, though not in its liquid form, is the
first aspect of matter in all the oldest mythologies and cosmologies. It is
indeed the primal substance of the universal mother. In the Berosan account of
creation the primal mother is called Thallath, which is the Greek thallassa,
"the sea." Tiamat and Typhon are equivalent to Tefnut (Greek
Daphne), the Great Depth, or Tepht (also Tophet). Basically, mother,
matter and water are one. Plato speaks of water as "the liquid of the
whole vivification." Again he alludes to it mystically as "a certain
fountain."
The interpenetration of the gross
bodies by the subtler ones in man may perhaps be realistically depicted by the
relations subsisting between the four elements in the outer world. Living
physical bodies of earthly constituency hold water, the water embosoms air, and
in the air is the hidden potency of fire. The elements consistently interpenetrate
each other, the finer in the coarse. We have already traced the vivid symbolism
of fermentation, or the generation of air in water, type of the enkindling of
spirit. At the baptism of Jesus by John, according to Justin Martyr, "a
fire was kindled in the waters of the Jordan." This matches the Egyptian
"a burning within the sea." Spirit sets its ferment and its blaze
a-going amid the watery elements of the body.
Seeking in the heights and depths of
the natural creation for symbols of truth, the mythographers could not miss so
patent a type as that of the fish leaping out of the water. It was a vivid
suggestion of the soul in matter leaping in aspiration for short breaths of air
in the kingdom above it. Whether it be seeking a moment’s breath of a diviner air
in the kingdom above, or only a fly as food, it projects itself from the
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lower to a higher plane, prefiguring
the sallies of the human soul--often otherwise represented by ichthys, the
fish--from its mortal habitat into the purer realms of spirit. The soul, like
the fish, must occasionally clutch at a morsel of more heavenly food. The fish
stood for the immortal soul as breather in the water of mundane existence.
A Norse myth tells of the division
of a single primal world into two halves, or the separation of the two waters
of the firmament, as in Genesis. The one was a world of water, the other
of air, and the beings in the lower water ascend by night to breathe the pure
air of the upper half; and it is said the sun consumes them like vapor. This would
restate the Assumption of the Virgin, the festival of the old astronomical
phenomenon of August and early September, when the sun absorbs the
constellation of the Virgin, emblematic of the dissolution of all physical
worlds in the bosom of the Absolute. It might be said that after every day and
every incarnation man ascends to inhale refreshing draughts of spiritual air on
an upper plane. Without this frequent release and relief he could not support
prolonged existence in the denser world below.
The "secret of Horus in
An" is the mystery of how his mother caught him in the water. Neith, given
by Massey as equivalent to "net," fished him out. Cosmically he
typified the first life emanating from the water; humanly the god coming to
birth in the water of the body. Many of the symbols can be worked on two or
even more planes of explanation. Every cosmic process has its reflection in the
natural world, again in the spiritual life of man, and lastly in the very
physiology of the body. Nature is meaningless nowhere.
The perch on the head of Neith or
Hathor is a badge of the birth from water. Neith also carries the shuttle or
knitter for her net, wherewith she becomes a catcher of men out of the waters,
and draws them up into the world of air and spirit.
The East has always portrayed true
being as an escape from the waters of life. Hence the widespread use of the
fisherman’s net as an emblem of salvation. Jesus did not startle his disciples
with a new metaphor when he called them to be "fishers of men." Two Ritual
chapters furnish suggestion here. Chapter 153A is entitled "of coming
forth from the net," and 153B "of coming forth from the Catcher of
Fish." Water so obviously presented a menace to life by drowning that it
becomes the focus of ideas emphasizing an escape from evil. As
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such it is not the water of life,
but the water of death. It signified the lower life of generation, or life in
"death." Water stops our breathing and perils the air-sustained life
of deity. An oyster that could keep shut up and safe under water was one of the
figures of spiritual security.
Nun in the Chaldean is the Great
Fish; Nuna in Syriac is the constellation Cetus, the Whale. Nun of the Hebrew
alphabet is the fish, as Mem is water. The picture of a great fish
"breathing out" water caused it to be personified as the mother
heaven that poured forth water and the breath of life. The Egyptians also made
the lotus, ascending from the water, a symbol of breath, and the Egyptian Seshin
for "lotus" is from ses, "breath."
The close philosophical relation of
water and air is shown in a number of languages by the identical derivation of
the words "to swim" and "to be born." Birth and swimming in
or on water are practically synonymous. It is best seen in the Latin. The same
root, na, means both "to be born" and "to swim."
Being born of water, avers Massey, is but to be borne upon it. As man was not
able to live under water, life was pictured as a coming out of it or a floating
upon it. To be born into life, therefore, was to escape from the water, and
come up where breath was obtainable. The very first act of the babe new-born
out of the water of the womb is to catch its first breath! Immersed in the
waters of generation, of sense and desire, man can not come to his real life,
or second birth, until he can rise out of the "water" to breathe the
more vivifying air of the heaven of mind and spirit. The power of the sun (god)
to stimulate life and growth could not reach him effectively in the kingdom of
water (nature); he had first to lift his head out of the water into the kingdom
of air (mind) before the rays of the god could breed spiritually within him.
From the na stem we trace
both "naval" and "navel," relating birth and sailing. Nef,
says Massey, means in Egyptian both "sailor" and "to
breathe." The navel was one of the earliest doorways between the two
worlds (of water and air), and as such it maintained its symbolic value. The
navel was an image of breath in the waters of the womb. It was the channel by
which the breath of life passed into the soul in the water. The god, through
whom we partake of the breath of life from a higher plane, is spiritually our
navel, located at the very center of our being.
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In the ideography the female came to
be regarded as the furnisher of water, and the male as the supplier of breath,
the combination yielding life. These were Tefnut and Shu. He became the
inspirer of soul, she the former of flesh. It was the god, masculine, who
breathed the breath of life into the nostrils. In the Ritual the
Speaker, coming to his new life, says he has been "snatched from the
waters of his Mother" and "emaned from the nostrils of his Father
Osiris." The Chinese matched this with their Ying and Yin, the male and
female, or breath and water sources.
The water and the lotus were both
female emblems at first. The papyrus-scepter of Uat is the express sign of the
feminine nature of Uati, who represented the features of both wet and heat,
water and breath, or body and soul, heat being necessary to turn water into
vapor or breath.
A simple yet strong ideograph of the
unified action of water and air is a ship driven by the wind. The wind
(intellect) imparts motion to that which navigates the waters. The body is
driven by the mind! Mind and wind, both unseen, energize the visible.
Very suggestive is the request in
the Ritual (Ch. 55): "May air be given unto these young divine
beings," a reference to the Kumaras or Innocents when first plunged into
their material baptism. And even more directly pertinent is the chapter title
(56): "Of sniffing air in the waters of the underworld." And another
title (Ch. 54) is: "Of giving air to the overseer of the palace . . . Nu,
triumphant, in the underworld." And again Chapter 57 is that "of
breathing the air and having dominion over the waters of the underworld."
When Horus rises he is exultingly welcomed as escaping from the dark lower
region, "without water and without air," as the condition of soul in
matter.
In Africa and Central America the
god Houragan (Hurricane) was the personification of the mingled power of water
and air. Hurakan in Quiché means a stream of water that pours straight
down. In the hieroglyphics Hura is heaven (Greek: oura-nos),
"over," "above." Khan is a watery tempest. Typhon,
the abyss of primordial heaven, is identical with typhoon. Mixcohuatl, the
"cloud serpent," the chief of the Mexican gods, bears the name of the
tropical whirlwind.
The flying fish came in for its
share of appropriate suggestiveness, and another bird, the hissing widgeon,
which issued from the waters
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to fly along the surface, became a
symbol of the soaring free soul, which was nearly always pictured as winged or
feathered.
Naturally all species of
aero-aquatic birds came under the scope of this typology. The bird that could
rise off the water and soar away was inescapably a type of the rising soul. But
the ancients joined the two kinds of life in one creature which became one of
the most universal of all symbols, the winged serpent or feathered snake.
Recent researches in Central America have brought to light the wide prevalence
of this emblem in the Mayan and other civilizations on the American continent.
And since it was general in Asia and Africa in remote times, the question of
intercommunication or separate origin is once more pertinently raised. The
snake that could fly is the incontrovertible evidence of ancient knowledge of
the union of divinity and earthiness in man’s organic life. Man that is born of
water and the spirit (air) should once again become wise as to his dual origin.
And modern man should cease to belittle the mythopoetic genius of his ancestors
who endeavored, with almost incredible sagacity, to embody important knowledge
of cosmic facts in imperishable glyphs. In the terms of evolutionary biology
the swan is the feathered snake, and Hansa, the bird of primordial life
and intelligence that floats above the waters of the abyss, is the eternal
emblem of that spiritual life that has stepped into our fluctuating sea of
natural impulse to bring order, harmony and beauty into the realm of nescience
and chaos.
The Akhekh gryphon is a dragon with
wings. Wings and feathers supply the type of air and fire in the later Bird of
the Sun. The bird symbolized the swift-darting and lofty-soaring motion of
divine intelligence. The French Swan-Dragon unites the bird’s head with the
serpent’s tail. An ancient Greek work makes the first godly nature a serpent
which later transmuted into a hawk. One form of the gryphon was the body of a
beast, the tail of a serpent and the head of a peacock. This is the mythical
cockatrice. It was so named because of its origin from the egg of a cock
hatched by a serpent. The divine is hatched and nurtured in the body of nature.
Earth with water yielded mire, or
sensuousness; water with air suggested mingled emotion and dawning thought;
spiritous wine hinted at a fiery element in water, or "fire-water."
Beside Isis, whose name derives from stems meaning to breathe and ferment,
there is the goddess Uati, a name congenital perhaps with our "wet"
and "heat," if not the
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basis of "water" itself.
She was the genetrix, and signified wet and heat in conjunction; and her
function suggests the conversion of water into breathing life by the mother in
heat, or gestating! Unleavened bread would represent the natural man unspiritualized
by the ferment of divine efficacies. It would show the first Adam, the man
unregenerate, born of water, the natural body, but not of the spirit. Leavened
bread was "spiritualized" bread. And oddly enough the little leaven
that leaveneth the whole lump does indeed generate by its ferment a sort of
breathing in the dough, for the latter becomes permeated with air bubbles which
work to the surface. Bring the god of fire into matter and the latter begins to
manifest the breath of life. Fire rises, and is the ultimate type of evolution,
in which life sparks ascend to the empyrean. Water falls, and is the type of
involution, or life descending to incubate in matter. But water below, acted
upon by fire, is transformed into a sublimated state in which it can effect its
return to the empyrean. The gist of the story of religion is here. Fire had to
be brought down from heaven to convert fallen water into spiritous vapor, to
enable it to rise again.
Physical nature presents a notable
exemplification of the fourfold elemental typology in the phenomenon of a
thunderstorm. Our universal mother has set the advertising sign of her modes
and configurations all about us, but only the ancients heeded her message or
read her language. The upper air, or heaven, surcharged with electricity,
discharges its pent energies above the earth in flashes of fire. The mighty
potency performs a sort of electrolysis upon the constituent elements of the
air, dismembering, so to say, the unit mass of embosomed moisture held in
suspension in the atmosphere and sending it in fragments to the earth to
nourish the life of man and beast. Not an item or detail of the theological
typism is lacking in the phenomenon. As the fire emanation from heaven operated
to precipitate its latent forces in the broken globules of water to the earth
to fructify its life, so the fiery nature of deity came potentially to earth in
fragments to liberate its powers in new growth. The celestial energy of pure
spirit runs down the gamut of fire, air, water and earth. In man likewise a
flash of the fire of spirit darts out of the surcharged bosom of the upper
aether of consciousness, agitates the elements of the plane of mind next below
it, these in turn release emotions on the plane below, and they deposit a final
influence upon the very material of the earthy
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body. Each plane in succession
receives the effects of the outrush of life from above. A breeze ruffling the
surface of a pond is a vivid symbol of a thought stirring the emotions, the
type of which is water. And the waves washing the shores portray in a measure
the emotional wear and tear on the body. "Let nature be your
teacher," says Wordsworth.
But a still more eloquent symbol
comes to view to edify the mind of man at the end of the shower: the rainbow!
In its sevenfold coloration we read again the septenary design of all natural
constitution, including the life of man. The one divine essence of white light,
shining out through the descending waters, is broken into its seven constituent
rays. All manifest form must therefore be septenary in structure. Every cycle
runs its course and comes to its perfection in seven sub-cycles. Hence the
Eternal placed the rainbow in the heavens, at the end of the rain, in
token that "never again will he destroy mankind." For man, at the end
of his sojourn in the watery habitat of body, will have completed his
perfection in seven stages and will not need further immersion in the sea of
generation. As the rainbow disappears with the last rain, the sun reigns alone
again in its one white light.
A unitary ray of light, passed
through a three-faced glass prism and breaking into its seven colors, is a
memorable certification of cosmic creational method. Man actually presents a
three-faced transparent medium for the first light in the upper levels of his
nature to provide the requisite condition for this phenomenon in his life. The
immortal unit of spirit itself has segmented already into a triad which hovers
in the upper sphere of consciousness. It is the great solar triad of
Mind-Soul-Spirit, the reflection in human make-up of the cosmic Trinity of
Will-Wisdom-Activity. It is man’s triangle of conscious faculty and it is of
bright essence. Through it shines the one unbroken ray of Intelligence from the
primal fount of light to be reflected on the physical screen of human life on
earth, in a final sevenfold differentiation.
Still another phase of portrayal
meets us in nature when we consider the change from a watery beginning to a
fiery heyday in the progress of each day’s summer sun. The dewy freshness of
dawn (water) and the burning heat of mid-day (fire) are personalized in Egypt
by the goddesses Tefnut and Sekhet respectively. Tef(n) connotes the
meaning of "dew" and "moisture" from its primary
signification of "to drip, or drop." Then the watery phase of the
goddess is superseded by
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the fiery one, and Tefnut becomes
Sekhet, the heat principle which engenders ferment and new life. This is the
transformation of Daphne (Tefnut) dawn, into the laurel or wood of fire, in the
Greek poetization.
Another Ritual title (Ch.
163) is deeply suggestive: "Of not allowing the body of a man to molder
away in the underworld." (The spiritual body is meant here, as the
physical body does molder away.) The Manes is addressed:
"Hail, thou who art lying
prostrate within thy body, whose flame cometh into being from out of the fire
that blazeth within the sea (or water) in such wise that the sea (or water) is
raised up on high out of the fire thereof."
If there are still any who dispute
the mythical nature of ancient constructions, let them demonstrate how a fire
blazing in the midst of a sea could be spoken of otherwise than allegorically.
But when one knows that a universal code of symbol language made fire represent
spiritual mind, and water flesh and carnality, then it can be seen how the
poets speak rationally of a fire blazing in the sea and trying to raise it up
again in vapor or spirit.
Another strong confirmation of the
analysis is found in the Ritual (Ch. 176). In comment on it Budge
writes: "As fire and boiling water existed in the underworld, he hastened
to protect himself from burns and scalds by the use of chapters 63A and
63B." For the titles of these two chapters are: "Of drinking water
and not being burnt by fire in the underworld," and "Of not being
scalded with water." How squarely this is matched in the Bible (Is. 43):
"When thou passest through the
waters I shall be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow
thee; when thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned; neither
shall the flame kindle on thee."
The underworld, then, is the place
where fire and water are joined in affective relation; and where could this
conjunction take place other than in the physical body?
And what pithy moral corollaries are
discerned in the analogies if they are carried into particulars! The god (fire)
stood in danger, as the Greeks clearly intimate, of suffering from the
exhalations arising from its contact with the humors of the carnal body. It
must be seen
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that the god’s entry into the body
of an inferior being would result in the injection of an increased voltage, as
it were, in the activities of all its forces. Animality would be more keenly
energized as the transforming ferment began its work. The god stood in danger
of being "burned," "scalded" by the "steam"
engendered by the heightening of all lower psycho-chemical powers. The enhanced
potential of the sense and emotion functionism provided by his own alliance
with them, might overpower him.
One of the phallic renderings of the
rainbow symbolism is curiously interesting. It is made to allegorize the
prohibition of the male from union with the female during menstruation.
Erymanthus, the son of Apollo, was said to have been struck blind because he
looked on Venus when she was bathing. Acteon, seeing Diana at her bath, was
turned into a stag. David was punished for his relations with Bathsheba, whom
he saw bathing. What is the significance of the punishment of all these solar
heroes for contacting the woman during her period? It is but one of the forms
of cryptic typology under which ancient sagacity limned in outline the
"fall" of the god when he linked his life with the feminine or
material powers in a cycle of manifestation. He is dramatized as contaminating
himself by his union with the wasting expenditure of natural force. He looks
upon mother nature when she is shedding her life-blood fruitlessly. The glance
of his eye, the sun, through her shower fixes the sevenfold division of
physical nature in the sky. But the rainbow comes at the end of the rainstorm,
and union of spirit with matter at the end of its outpouring is the time
propitious for fecundation and the new birth. At any rate the punishment
allotted to deity for intercourse with the flowing stream of the natural
physical order, typed as feminine, is his being reduced to imprisonment in the
animal body of man! Like the rainbow, this is sevenfold in organization. The
sun, peeking out and beholding nature dripping, projects the sign of his
intercourse with matter upon the opposite side of heaven in his septenary
dismemberment. The sevenfold fission of his primal unity shows the disruption
of his integrity in the sight of all the earth!
This is not empty imagery. It has
had historical actualization in a strange way. It is related in Genesis (6)
and in other racial epics that the sons of God had untimely intercourse with
the females of the more advanced animal species, breeding the races of
half-human, half-animal
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types. Early connection with the
female animals instituted the miscegenation that so nearly thwarted the cosmic
plan. As a result of the unleashing of powerful procreative forces in the
animal world there ensued an unnatural production of hybrid monsters and
prodigies of lust, which, the books hint, had to be expunged from evolution by
the sinking of continents. One of the backgrounds of the "deluge" is
thus erected. Procreation in the Golden Age or Edenic state was by kriyashakti,
exercised by the will and the mind. This was possible because incarnation
had not yet been fully achieved, and the forms of flesh were of ethereal
tenuity. But miscegenation began prematurely and bred misshapen monsters. The
enhancing of the keen powers of sense by the entry of the gods intensified the
carnal mind, and a more or less promiscuous generation ran riot. This is the
meaning of the harlotry or whoredom against which the Eternal vents his
displeasure so vehemently throughout the prophetic books of the Old
Testament. It is also allegorized by the various tempests on the sea into
which the solar heroes must be cast, after being awakened, to still the raging
waters of animal lust. This is the meaning of Jonah’s being cast into the
waters after the casting of lots showing him responsible for the tempest. As
the belly is the seat of the sexual and animal nature, the solar god is
appropriately placed in the fish’s belly. And that neither Jonah’s venture nor
Jesus’ burial is historical is indicated by the fact that both were held captive
in this cavern of death for three days!
In the Eternal’s promise to Noah
that the rainbow after every storm would remind him of his compact not to bring
further destruction on the earth, he concludes with: "and the waters shall
never again become a deluge to destroy every creature." The structure of
this sentence is enlightening; for it is to be noted that the Eternal does not
say that there shall be no waters to cover the earth, but that the waters of
living force released for evolutionary purposes shall not again get out of hand
and "become a deluge."
Of great value in this connection is
the latter part of an Egyptian inscription called the Destruction of Mankind,
dealing with the rebellion and fall of the angels. It ends similarly to that of
Noah:
"When the deluge of blood is
over, it is stated by the majesty of Ra: ‘I shall now protect men on this
account. I raise my hand (in token) that I shall not again destroy men.’"
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Here it is distinctly called a
deluge of blood, not of water, signifying that the fiery nature of deity was
drowned in the blood of incarnation. This points clearly to the racial
biological nature of the deluge and away from any historical imputation
whatever. Cosmology, biology, racial origin and individual spiritual history are
all woven together in the skein of both the rainbow and the deluge symbolism.
The thread that is missing is objective history!
The four elemental symbols are found
to suggest these interesting correlations when two or more are seen in
interplay. But there is almost no end of allusions to each of them separately
in the tomes of the old wisdom. Much of this material is too valuable to be
passed by. We begin with earth at the bottom.
This element need not be dealt with
at great length. It is readily seen for what it truly is, the nethermost
stratum of matter to which intelligence descends to manifest. The mineral
kingdom of earth, the physical base of man’s body, marks the nadir of the
downward sweep and the turning point or pivot. On its descending arc life undergoes
a subjection of its finer forces to sluggish inert matter, on the analogy of a
fire being reduced in burning potency. The earth is thus the opposite pole to
heaven, as matter is the opposite node to spirit. And forever between these two
extremes of positive and negative being plies the tireless shuttle of life.
From spirit to matter and back again is the schedule of life’s endless journey.
The ultimate significance of this is the profound mystery of all being. But
Life is; and one of its activities is the cyclical periodicity of its
creative function, its circulation around the wheel of birth, growth and death.
It rhythmically institutes a progressive order, runs its course, perfects its
products and then annihilates these products (to outward sense), leaving their
seeds of new life, however, to flower in the next cycle.
Archaic wisdom expounds more
intricate cosmic and evolutionary data than modern science has yet picked up.
It asserts that the stars and planets are living beings, like humans. If a
mortal-immortal man has four distinct bodies appertaining to his entire being,
so does a planet. The ancient science says that each globe physically
discernible is but one of a chain of seven bodies existing, like man’s
vestures, in four types of matter symboled, again like man’s bodies, by earth,
water, air and fire. A life wave emanating from the Father darts outward and
courses around this chain of seven globes, organizing them in fact,
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and creating a kingdom of kindred
matter on each plane. The direction is downward or matterward for the first
four globes, after which it turns again spiritward and sweeps upward through
the last three. That is, the life wave builds a planetary spirit body on the
plane of spirit (fire), a more material body on the plane of mind (air), a
still more dense one on the plane of emotion (water), and finally an entirely
material globe on the plane of mineral earth. Then it turns upward in its
swing, rebuilding new globe bodies on the subtler planes through which it
descended till it rests at last in the glorious new spirit body on the plane of
the empyreal fire. On the fourth or lowest plane it builds up, lives and then
retires from, the dense physical globe which is the earth.
The earth is thus the place of
critical interest in the whole cycle. The life wave is sent forth to return
with a harvest of more abundant life. Now it is only as spirit contacts and
overcomes the inertia of matter that it brings its own potentialities to birth.
Abiding eternally on its own plane, as Platonic philosophy says, it remains
non-productive. It must go forth, seek adventure, meet with opposition, wrestle
with the powers that would choke it, and achieve its new cyclical victory in a
world of adversity. As Plotinus writes, "It is not enough for the soul
merely to exist; she must show what she is capable of begetting." Here is
the model and the genius of all romance, all drama. And the earth is the scene
of this conflict between the embryonic immortal and the titanic mortal forces.
And where the earth stands in the chain of planetary bodies, the physical body
of man stands in the chain of vehicles or vestures which compose each
individual. The human body is the seat and arena of the great conflict of
personal destiny. Without dwelling in and mastering the body of flesh, the
individual soul, as says Plotinus, would never know her powers. She would be
spiritual, as she was from the start; but she would dream her existence away
without ever becoming consciously aware of her latent creative capabilities, if
she did not incarnate. Incarnation is evolution’s method of setting the seal of
reality upon conscious life. This is the office of earth-life in the cycle and
of incarnation for the individual soul. And it is the crucial point in all
philosophy, as it is the critical point in individual destiny. As for the soul
her pathway to heaven runs through the earth, and on it she goes to her
"death" to be born anew.
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In the Ritual (Ch. 19) the
chapter of the Crown of Triumph shows the meaning of placing a floral wreath or
crown upon the mummy in the sheta or coffin. It was to depict that the
"garland of earth in the nether world becomes the crown of triumph for
eternal wear." The crown of life was given to those who had suffered on
earth. Earth and the body were the double arena in which the soul wrought out
its perfection. Untried, untested in the fires of bodily experience, its
faculties could not have been forged into strength, power and beauty. The soul
comes into the underworld of darkness to win the immortal crown of light and
glory, for only by victory over the powers of darkness can the light be brought
to shining.
The Ritual makes it clear
that the underworld of the earth is the realm to which the father Osiris, or
Amen-Ra, or other deity pictured as aged, comes to regain his youth. "The
old man (Amen-Ra) shineth in the form of one that is young"; "the old
man that maketh himself young again"; "the unknown one who hideth
himself from that which cometh forth from him"; and finally the one who is
"deified in the underworld." In the Book of Breathings the
Manes is told:
"Then doth thy soul breathe
forever and ever, and thy form is made anew with thy life upon earth; thou
art made divine along with the souls of the gods, thy heart is the heart of Ra,
and thy members are the members of the great god."
Again:
"And the god Ap-uat (i.e., the
Opener of the Ways) hath opened up for thee a prosperous path."
The Manes cries to Ra, his divinity:
"Make thou thy roads glad for
me; and make broad for me thy paths when I shall set out from earth for the
life in the celestial regions."
Saying that the divine speech of Ra
is in his ears in the Tuat (underworld) the Manes prays that "no defects of
my mother be imputed to me." This is to say: let no stains from my
contacts with mother earth adhere to me. Yet to the unit of undivinized spirit
it is told: "Through Keb (Seb) thou dost become a spirit." Apotheosis
is on earth. The swamps of earth are the miry path to the Aarru-Hetep at the
summit of the mount.
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We meet in the Ritual the
statement that "Earth opens to Ra! Earth closes to Apap!" It is the
story of the Reed (Red) Sea over again. The physical domain opens as the soul
learns the keys of magic power that part the waters. These keys are virtue,
discipline, wisdom. But earth closes to block the way to Apap, or evil and
ignorance. Earth provides the conditions that induce every quality of spirit to
burgeon in beauty; but it brings to nought the counsels of the ungodly through
karmic law. To live in the lower, sensual, grasping nature is to plunge into
the waters and be overwhelmed; to aspire after fervent righteousness is to find
that dry land between the parted waters.
The next element is water, and this
is a more pertinent symbol of the lower self in man even than earth. It stands
in two senses, first, for the primordial essence of all substance, the water of
the abyss, the mother principle of all things; secondly for the higher water of
life. The first is called in Egypt the water of the Nun, or of Nu (Nnu, equated
with Noah by Massey). The Greek Nux (Nyx), Latin Nox, perhaps
matches this goddess of the infinite void, in whom there is nothing but the
sheer potentiality of life. As this is the primal darkness and the void, Nu,
Nun, Nyx, is apparently the linguistic original of all things negative in
speech, as "no," "none," "not,"
"nought," "never," "negative," German
"nichts." But out of it flashed the first ray of light. It was the
water of source, and life is born out of water.
But the primal abyss splits into two
firmaments, and there is the water above to match the water below. So secondly
there is the water of life, the higher firmament. This is practically
equivalent to spirit and is another but less used form of the fire symbol
itself. The rain that falls from the skies, and not the flowing water below,
would be its type.
Closer to man, however, there is a
third application of the water symbol. The element is made to stand for the
second of his constituent principles, the emotional nature, which is so closely
inwrought with his physical body as generally to include the latter in its
reference. This is the most suggestive and fruitful use of water as symbol. It
is the water of earth, of sense, of generation, that holds the threat of
drowning the god. It is the water in which he has to learn to walk without
sinking! It is the water that he has to transmute into wine as spirit. Water is
the aptest symbol of the lower life because of its fluid nature and its
constant motion and fluctuation, picturing sense and emotion.
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Life cast amid the senses and the
feelings is in unceasing flux, as Heraclitus said. Like the restless throb of
ocean, it is never still. No figure could better portray the dual sense-emotion
life of mortals than the heaving bosom of the sea, or the moving current of a
river or brook.
Nature indeed holds before us a
marvelous textual illustration of the whole cyclical life process in her
water-circulation system. We have the ocean as the source of all rising water
emanations. The sun elevates great masses of moisture into the skies by its
power; and a reduction of temperature causes this water vapor to condense and
fall upon the land. From remote highlands it trickles into the brooks, streams,
rivers and bays, and finally rejoins its primal sea of source. The circuit
bristles with analogies to the life cycle at every turn. The sun’s function in
lifting masses of vapor invisibly to heaven types the spirit’s power to refine
the unseen elements of consciousness and elevate the substance of life. The
reduction in temperature symbolizes a procedure in evolution which leads souls
back to earth. The condensation of the vapor mass into individual drops symbols
the dismemberment of deity. The fall to earth matches the descent of the gods.
The beneficent agency of the rain in uplifting natural growth is evident as a
parallel with the work of the god in uplifting the human. Without water from
heaven humanity would be equally sterile, spiritually, as are the animals. The
return to primal unity in the sea is manifest in the conversion of individual
selfishness back to social and spiritual solidarity. Then comes a step in the
cycle that yields the utmost of instruction for thought. Every phase of the
round is visible except that in which the water is lifted from the sea again
into heaven. The entire cycle is perceptible except the one arc in which matter
is returned to spirit (vapor) form. In every visible round of life process
there is always the one stage that is invisible!
This observation holds a pointed
moral for science and truth-seeking generally. It has been the unwillingness to
recognize the reality of the process of life in its invisible stages that has
kept science from discerning full truth. For human life runs a similar cycle,
issuing from the subjective or spirit world into the objective palpable life of
body, and retiring again. But, like the vapor rising from the ocean, its return
to heaven and its positive existence there is unseen. Science stands on its
firm denial of the soul’s subsistence after death on the sheer ground of
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its disappearance. Nature’s typology
intimates that, like the vapor that has risen to the skies, it will return
again to earth, and that it must therefore be subsistent in the interim. As the
water cycle is complete in spite of one invisible segment, so the natural cycle
of life is complete, with no arc missing. The apparently missing link is found
in the unseen world. But is not science itself finding that the most vital and
dynamic realities are in the unseen world?
The sally of the gods into nature’s
realm is imaged as a welling forth of water from a living rock or secret
source. Ihuh (Jehovah), the Lord, is described in Egypt as "the fountain
of living waters" (Psalms, 29:10). Revelation speaks
similarly (Ch. 22:1): "And he showed me a river of water of life brought
as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God." And in Isaiah when
it is said that the dumb shall break forth into singing, it is added:
"Waters are to well forth in the wilderness, streams in the desert."
Jesus cried:
"If any man thirst, let him
come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said,
out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." (John 7:37).
In the Ritual the god says:
"I flood the land with water." There were various pools and lakes
which the Manes was to cross on his journey through the underworld. Pepi, the
soul, is called "the efflux of the celestial water, and he appeared when
Nu came into being." For the Manes the promise is made: "He shall
quaff water at the fountain head." In an Irish myth seven streams flowed
forth from "Counla’s Well" into the River Shannon. All cosmic
effluence is in seven rays or streams. The Egyptian text says of the Manes:
"He gulpeth down seven cubits of the great waters." The Rig-Veda (10:8,
3) gives us a similar hint, though it has several loftier interpretations:
"When the sun flew up, the (seven) Arushis refreshed their bodies in the
water." The disappearance by day of the seven stars of the Great Bear,
which always typed these seven creative emanations, is probably the natural
basis of this poetization. The water issuing from the base of a rock is typical
of godly life emanating from the eternal rock of being. In the Ritual we
meet with the hero who, like Moses, causes water to gush from the rock. He
says: "I make the water to issue forth." Of this water the children
of light "drink abundantly." The water of dawn, the dew, symbolizing
the first outpouring, is called "the water of
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Tefnut," twin sister of Shu,
god of life by air. And it is notable that in the Hebrew version the first to
make the water come forth by miracle for the people to drink is Miriam, whose
relation to Moses is identical with that of Tefnut to Shu. This Shu, as the son
of Nun, the firmamental water, is the life in breath; and almost unquestionably
furnishes the prototypal character of Joshua, the son of Nun in the
Hebrew book. And Joshua is identical by name with Jesus. The text pictures the
goddess Nut standing beneath her sycamore tree, from which she pours out the
water of life, as Hathor offers her fruit juice from the tree.
The Hawaiian mythoi have a
rock that yields water on being struck with a rod.
Heaven as the source of celestial
water is indicated in the derivation of the Greek Ouranos, "heaven,"
from the Egyptian Urnas, which is the celestial water (probably giving
the root of our "urn"). It is the blood of Ouranos that gives
birth to Aphrodite.
Neptune is traced to the Egyptian nef,
"sailor," and this god was the sun over the waters, the god who
completed the circuit round or over the waters.
Water was the first creation, and up
out of its depths came the emanating gods to get the breath of life. Could one
find a more astonishing replica of this cosmic situation than that furnished by
the modus of human birth? Every child who in this life is to travel from nature
to God issues into life out of a sack of water, and the first thing done by the
attendant is to stimulate the latent breathing power. "Tefnut bears him,
Shu gives him life."
The gods who brought the water of
life down to mortals had thereafter to endure the drenching by this same
element in its earthly form. Says Daniel: "He shall be drenched
with the dews of heaven." As the original cosmic water was the Nun, or the
negation of all positive life, so the earthly shadow of water, that is, matter,
is similarly a type of the negation of life. It is inert. The Egyptian
ideograph of privation, negation, is a wave of water! And many Indian languages
have a similar term for "he dies" and "water." This
indicates the idea of death by drowning, the paraphrase of incarnation. The
gods descend to drink of the waters of carnal life at the peril of their immortal
souls. The dead beneath the waters, says Massey, are the Manes in Amenta, where
the waters are an image of the lower Nun, the
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water not above, but below, the
horizon. Isis sought her drowned son Horus in the waters of the underworld,
from which he was fished out by Sevekh. Bacchus, lord of the humid nature, in
being raised again, ascends from the water, enters the air and comes then as
the Fanman or Winnower, the purifier by air (mind). (Plutarch: De Iside et
Osiride) This marks once more the evolution of natural man over into the
kingdom of spirit, the transition from water to air, or from emotion to mind,
from Tefnut to Sekhet, or from Tefnut to Shu. Jonah, the personification of the
god in matter, cried from "the belly of death":
"For thou didst cast me into
the depth, in the heart of the seas, and the flood was round about me; all thy
waves and thy billows passed over me . . . The waters compassed me about, even
to the soul. The deep was round about me; the weeds were wrapped about my
head."
Job (26) cries that "the dead tremble
beneath the waves . . . He stilleth the sea by his power," as did Jonah
and Jesus, Horus and Tammuz and others. "He turneth back the waterflood
which is over the thigh of the goddess Nut . . ." The Manes in dread of
the deluge prays to "have power over the water and not be drowned" (Rit.,
Ch. 57). Glimpsing his coming earthly victory, he cries: "I am the
being who is never overwhelmed in the waters."
Herod in attempting to kill Jesus by
a slaughter of the innocents is paralleled by the Pharaoh. He attempted to blot
out the menace of the Israelites by ordering the Hebrew midwives to kill all
the male children at the time of birth by drowning (Exod. I:22).
This is a depiction of the general danger menacing the god during his
incarnation in the watery realm of the body. The Psalms express it
indirectly (74): "Thou breakest the heads of the dragons in the
waters." The gods had to break the power of the elementary lives
engendered in the lower or water kingdoms. Sargon says that his mother gave him
to the river, "which drowned me not."
"He drew me out of great
waters," sings the Psalmist. Moses is water-born. Josephus explains the
name as signifying "one who was taken out of the water." Moffatt
translates it as "removed" (from the water). Pharaoh’s daughter
called the name of the child Mosheh, and said "because I drew him out of
the water." (Exod. II:10). Maui, of New Zealand legend, like Moses
and Sargon, was drawn out of the
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water at birth. And the floating ark
was the coffin. The Speaker says: "I am coffined in an ark like Horus, to
whom his cradle is brought." This cradle is often represented as a nest of
papyrus reeds, equated thus with the ark of bulrushes. Thor in the Norse
mythos had to wade through the waters, there being no bridge for him, as
he fares to the Doomstead under the Ygdrasil. The root of this great Norse tree
of life was beneath the water, its stem and branches above, like the lotus. The
Ygdrasil ash stands in the well of the Urdar fountain. The Egyptian Pool of
Persea nourished the roots of "the two divine sycamore trees of earth and
heaven." In Revelation the tree of life is planted on both sides of
the river of waters.
It was in the storm on the sea that
the distressed sailors in the gray light of dawn saw Jesus walking upon the troubled
waters, drawing nigh to them. In quieting the storm he played the part of Horus
in the Ritual, of whom it is written: "He hath destroyed the
water-flood of his mother"--nature. In another form this stands: "He
hath dispersed the power of the raging rain-storm." And again: "He
hath dispersed for thee the rain-storm, he hath driven away for thee the
water-flood, he hath broken for thee the tempests." All this prefigures
the stilling of the strong restless power of the natural elements in man’s
lower life, the mother-material nature, symboled by water. The god descending
into the sphere of "water" was imaged by the duck, goose or swan; who
all dive for food under the water. In a beautiful myth of the island of
Celebes, seven celestial nymphs descend from the sky to bathe. They
are seen by Kasimbaha, who stole the robes of one of them named Utahagi. These
robes gave her the power of flying, and without them she was caught. She became
his wife and bore him a son. Here we find ignorant primitives, according to
scholastic rating, preserving a definite legend of the highest spiritual truth.
For the robe stolen by the man on earth was her divine vesture, the immortal
spiritual body.
The Ritual speaks eloquently
again in one of its chapter titles: "Of drinking water in the
underworld." And in this chapter the Manes prays: "May there be
granted to me mastery over the water courses as over the members of Set
(Sut)."
One of the Chinese Trinity of gods
"showed the people how to cultivate the ground which had been reclaimed
from the waters" (Shu-King).
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We have in this imagery the meaning
of "casting bread upon the waters." It is the going out into
incarnation of that "bread" which cometh down out of heaven for the
life of the world. As the life in generation is distressful for the god, one of
the promises pertaining to final release from the ordeal emphasizes that
"there shall be no more night, no more sea" in the blessed
homeland of the father. But the bread cast out is multiplied and returns a
sevenfold increase.
The zodiacal sign of Aquarius is the
Waterman pouring from an urn the water of life in a double stream. The sacred
literature is filled with references to the two waters, or the water of the
double source. In many myths there are two streams, two springs, two wells, two
lakes. Cosmically the two indicate the original fission of God’s being into the
two poles of positive and negative life, or spirit and matter. This was the
divine life that emanated in two streams to fructify creation. In the lower
world it is reflected in the division between the water of the air above and on
the earth below, vapor and liquid, cloud on high and stream on the ground.
Sometimes the goddesses representing primal fecundity are cut in two, as
Tiamat, Isis, Neith, Hathor, Apt, Rerit. Thus Nut was the goddess of celestial
water and Apt of the terrestrial; Isis of the heavenly, Nephthys of the
earthly. These were pictured as the two cows or two groups of seven cows (as in
Pharaoh’s dream) or a cow of two colors, fore and hind. The cow, as productive
source of life-food, was paired into the water-cow of earth and the milch-cow
of heaven. The water-cow symboled Mother Nature alone, before the advent of
divine spirit, the masculine bull, into creation--matter unfructified by
intelligence. The seven cows betoken the seven creative Elohim, the living
energies of matter. The two living streams of water were put in the uranograph
in the form of a water-course with two branches, one of which was the Iarutana
(Egy.), Eridanus (Greek), Jordan (Hebrew); and the other the milk stream, the
Milky Way, Via Lactea. The Eridanus, or earth water, was the stream that had to
be passed over in incarnation; the Milky Way was the water course by which the
soul ascended again into the heavens of spirit. The cow of earth was
constellated in the seven stars of the Great Bear, the Milch-cow of heaven in
Cassiopeia.
The Hindu Aditi, as the Great Mother
of the Gods, becomes twain. She yields milk for the gods, and is identical with
the heaven cow in Egypt. Aditi was the primal form of Dyaus (Zeus), the sky
divinity.
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She alternates with Diti as mother
of the embryo that was divided into seven parts, the seven Elohim. As Aditi she
was the undivided Absolute; as Diti she was the divided one, mother of the two
streams of outpoured life.
Of Ra it is written: "Thou
bringest the milk of Isis to him and the water-flood of Nephthys." Or
again: "Thou hast brought the milk of Isis to Teta, and the water of the
celestial stream of Nephthys."
The Egyptians figured the two waters
in the Nile, with its two arms, the Blue Nile and the White Nile. In the
planispheres the south was Upper Egypt (by elevation); so the heavenly chart
depicts the celestial Nile or Eridanus (Jordan) as pouring forth its divine
stream from the southern sky, rising from the star Achernar in Eridanus
constellation, and traveling northward to Orion’s foot, or where Orion rises up
as Horus, the lord of the fertilizing inundation. Horus’ representative in the
planisphere is Orion. In the celestial chart Orion is found standing, club in
hand, the mighty hunter, with one foot on the water of the River Eridanus. By
this it is depicted that the young solar god, our divinity, rises up where the
stream of natural evolution ends and stands over it invested with the majesty
and power of the lord of the lower waters of sense and emotion. Also in the
case of the Nile there were two sources of its water, one earthly, the Lake
Nyanza, the other celestial, or the rain and snow from heaven in the highlands
of source.
The Persian Bundahish details
the two waters of origin as female and male seed. "All milk arises from
the seed of the males and the blood is that of the females." The two
waters, or blood and milk, were both typed as feminine at first, to represent
nature as productive without spiritual fecundation. To symbol the latter, the
one was afterwards made masculine. The first pair was the mother’s blood and
milk; the second, blood and seminally-engendered milk, or milk treated as of
male generation.
As in the cosmos, matter, the virgin
mother of life, was evolving her forms without the visible presence of
animating divine intelligence, that is, before a creature embodying
intelligence had been evolved, so in human racial history the body of man was
built up by nature without the ensouling presence of mind. Matter and its
inherent force, the feminine aspect of life, alone occupied the field.
Marvelously this phase is paralleled not only in some aspects of biology but in
early racial
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history itself. Following upon
Totemic social organization there was the Matriarchate, when the woman was head
and ruler, because she was the only known producer of life. The function of
fatherhood was obscurely known. The mother and later the daughter, or the
mother and her sister, were the only known bonds of blood relation for the
children. As in the cosmos, so in human society, the male element, while
operative, was hidden out of sight and knowledge. A child was related only
through two women, mother and daughter, or mother and aunt. Massey asserts in a
hundred pages that these two are the archetypal forms of the two wives, or two
women who are dramatis personae in nearly every religious myth of
origin. Adam, Abraham, Jacob, Laban, David, Moses, Samson had two wives, and
the Old Testament is replete with stories of two women, who are sisters,
as Aholah and Aholibah, in Ezekiel. Two Meris figure in the story of
Osiris, and the two Maries in that of Jesus.
Two pools were pictured in the Ritual,
the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt. Also the Pool of the North and the
Pool of the South.
The male or seminal element,
then, marked the introduction of spiritual vivification into the natural order.
A new birth ensued for nature,
new powers were released for her creatures, and they sprang forward to attain a
new status in conscious being. The element injected into nature to produce this
generation was typified, both by the Gnostics and by Jesus, as "the salt
of the earth" and the "light of the world." The sowing of the
spiritual seed, or the potentiality of the god, was the earnest of man’s
redemption from animal status. The effort to fix the character of our
"salvation" without knowing specifically the nature of our
"fall"--without definite knowledge of what we were to be saved
from--has held the human mind for centuries captive to a vague dread, a bogie
apprehension, that has been a vast discredit to theology. Salt is the figure of
preservation. As in the case of the mummy unguents, salt was to preserve the
lower nature of man from decay.
Curiously the two Pools are
elsewhere called the Pool of the Moon and the Pool of the Sun. In the Pool of
Natron, or Hesmen, or Smen, the bloody sweat of menstruation, we have the
feminine, that is, material aspect of life, for which the moon ever stands, in
opposition to the sun, which is masculine, life-generative and vivifying. The
moon in its phase unlighted by the sun represented the woman, nature, in
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her unproductive stage. She was in her
virgin state, unwedded to male spirit, unfecundated by mind. Impregnation by
Intelligence would make her productive and take her out from under her
subjection "to the law" of periodicity and matter.
And this alone is the meaning of the
"miracle" in which Jesus heals the woman with an issue of blood from
her youth, who touched the hem of his robe and received the perceptible
discharge of his power. The incident is just one of the old mythic depictions,
using the sexual procreative functionism as a weather-vane of spiritual
meaning. When matter, the virgin mother, received the impregnation of spirit,
the periodic course of nature was interrupted and a miraculous new birth of
life was inaugurated. The stoppage of her issue of blood was but the sign of
the entrance of deity into humanity. For the ceasing of the natural flow is the
sure index of the ensuing advent of a higher birth. Nature, running to waste
without fruitage, was healed by divine impregnation or vivification.
Christianity has been content to take from this incident the meager wealth of a
physical "cure"; ancient poetic genius deposited in it a mine of
inexhaustible cosmic suggestiveness, a source of great moral enrichment for
all.
That antique document, the Book
of Enoch, comments directly upon the point under discussion (80:7-10):
"The water which is above shall
be the agent (male) and the water which is under the earth shall be the
recipient, and all shall be destroyed."
Jesus said that he was from above
and natural man from beneath. It is found in the Ritual that in the Pool
of Natron and the Pool of Salt the sun was reborn each day and the moon each
night. The circuit of experience each day, or each life, for both the divine
man (sun) and the animal man (moon) amounted to a rebaptism and renewal of
life. "I grow young each day," exults the soul in the Ritual.
The constellation of the Great Bear
was called "The Well of the Seven Stars." The Hebrew Beer-Sheba
(Sheba meaning obviously "seven") was an early form of the primordial
water. Beer-Sheba in the Septuagint is given as "Phrear
Horkou" (Greek), meaning: "The well of the oath." What can
this strange name connote, save that it is a subtle designation for this life
in watery body, to which the soul descended under the karmic
"command" or covenant, or oath, which binds it to return to this
living well of life?
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The twin pools were located in Anu,
the white water being southward, the red northward. In the Ritual one
name for it is the "Well of Sem-Sem." Sem-Sem denotes regenesis. The Ritual
says: "Inexplicable is the Sem-Sem, which is the greatest of all
secrets." It was the place where sun and moon were renewed. In consequence
it was a place where the deceased seeks the waters of regeneration, or fount of
youth. He says (Ch. 97): "I wash in the Pool of Peace. I draw water from
the Divine Pool under the two Sycamores of heaven and earth. All justification
is redoubled on my behalf." "Osiris is pure by the Well of the South
and the North."
In plain language all this
metaphorization means simply that man, a biune being, strides forward in his
evolution by dipping in the experiences of both the carnal embodiment, the Pool
of Natron, the "Nature" Pool, and in the god’s divine essence, the
Pool of Salt, the "Spirit" Pool.
The water of life is sometimes said
to be concealed between two lofty mountains which stand close together. But for
two or three minutes each day they move apart, and the seeker of the healing
and vivifying water must be ready on the instant to dart through, fill his two
flasks and instantly rush back. Zechariah (14:4) hints at this:
"And the Mount of Olives shall
cleave in the midst thereof towards the East and towards the West, and half of
the mountain shall remove toward the North and half toward the South."
"Day" is a glyph for a
cycle of any length, here an incarnation. The period of openness between the
two mountains is just the time between birth and death in this life, during
which brief moment, the soul must fall speedily to work to wrest all it can
from this opportunity for contact between the two natures, animal and divine.
It must strive quickly to fill its cup of experience from the flowing waters.
The night cometh when no man can work. For this is the only time in its
evolution when it can drink from the double spring, the two pools. The two or
three minutes coincide with the two (or three) days in the tomb.
And by the shifting of the earth’s
axis the east-west relation was supplanted by the north-south one, as referred
to by Zechariah.
The Egyptian god Hapi, being of both
sexes, denotes the eunuch in whom the two were united. He is the epicene
personification, androgyne. From the mouth of Hapi issues the one stream which
enters
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two other figures from whose two
mouths it is emaned in a double stream. This is the one water dividing into two
in the mythology. In the astrograph this is Aquarius.
In Egyptian and Hebrew traditions
the deity is represented as shedding two creative tears, a poetic version of
the two waters.
In the Hindu picture of Mahadeva and
Parvati the waters of Soma are seen issuing from the head of the male deity and
from the mouth of the cow, the feminine emblem. Siva is the mouth of the male
source and Parvati, the Great Mother, is that of the feminine source. "He
who knows the golden reed standing in the midst of the waters is the mysterious
Prajapati, the generator."
Milk from the body signified the
female water, while Soma juice figured the male element, the wine that went to
the head!
The ancient mother source was
portrayed as twofold, a breathing land-animal in front, a water-animal behind,
typing the elements of water and air. This is seen in the zodiacal Capricorn,
the sea-goat, land-goat in front, sea animal in the rear. The Hindu goddess
Maya hovers over the waters, and presses her two breasts with both hands,
ejecting the twofold stream of living nutriment. The Hermaean Zodiac shows the
Great Bear with streaming breasts, and the zodiacal Virgin is represented by
the Bear as unproductive in Virgo, but the "bearer" in the sign of
Pisces, where she is half fish and half human. Ishtar, another personification
of the genetrix, was dual. One of her names was Semiramis, the daughter of
Atergatis. The latter has the tail of a fish, but the daughter was wholly
human. The fish denoted water, and the dove on Ishtar’s head signified air,
again throwing sense and soul into relation.
Since the Eridanus is the Jordan,
the word merits closer attention. It came from the Egyptian Iarutana. Eri, later
Uri, was an Egyptian name for the inundation, meaning "great,
mighty," whilst tun or tana signified "that which rises
up and bursts and bonds." In Eritanu, or Iarutana, we then
have the mighty river rising to overflow its banks. Astrologically it was
placed in the heavenly chart as issuing from the mouth of the constellation of
the Southern Fish, type of life source, and flowing north to the foot of Orion.
It is of note that in Joshua (22)
it is said the Eternal made the Jordan the boundary between the main body of
the Israelites and the Reubenites and Gadites, who had not been permitted to
cross into
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the Promised Land because, as it is
put, "you have no share in the Eternal." Naturally this stream of
life force sweeping mankind onward marks the boundary between the animal and the
spiritual kingdoms. Animal man can not cross it until he has been bathed in its
waters and been purified and transformed. We are crossing this boundary line
between our lower and higher natures.
There is plentiful use of the water
symbol under the special form of the sea. "The angel descended until he
reached the sea of the earth, and he stood with his right foot upon
it." This matches Horus-Orion in the starry chart standing with his foot
upon the end of the Jordan River. The Dragon poured forth the water flood to
overwhelm the Woman cast out of heaven. This points to the release of the
surging forces of the carnal nature upon the soul after incarnation. But the
earth opened to swallow up the released waters and helped the Woman, at which
the Beast waxed more wroth; "and he waged war against them upon the
borders of the sea which encompassed the earth." This is Paul’s war of
the carnal mind against the spirit on the rim or boundary between earth and
sea, our two natures!
The watery field of life is pictured
as a "crystal sea wherein the fire was reflected, and upon it there
stood those who had overcome the influence of the Beast, who had not worshipped
his image nor borne upon them the mark of his number."
Ra brings to Teta "the power to
journey over the Great Green Sea." The Manes (Teta) "goes round about
the Lake and on the flood of the Great Green Sea." Again: "Thou
sailest over the Lake of Kha, in the north of heaven, like a star passing over
the Great Green Sea . . . as far as the place where is the star Seh
(Orion)." This matches the location of the Eridanus. Hawaiian tradition
says that the voyaging souls "waded safely through the sea."
One of the most specific
corroborations of the meaning of the water symbol is found in Revelation in
the expression that when the books of life were opened, "the sea gave up
its dead, for Death and Hades found no more any place, because they were judged
and cast down." Orthodox typology present two varying symbols of what
takes place "when the dead are raised." One says the graves were
opened; the other that the sea gave up its dead. Here is a land and
water conflict, only resolvable by symbolism, which may use many figures to
picture one truth. But literal history falls meaningless between two varying
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statements of fact. The grave and
the sea both refer to mortal life, which under any figure yields up its living
"dead" at the end of the accomplished cycle. Then the seer
"beheld the fashioning of the earth anew; for the sea out of which the
Beast had risen was now no more." "There shall be . . . no more
sea."
It is necessary to give some space
to the symbolism of the fish, for it carries part of the imputation of the
water element. For practical purposes it is possible to equate the four terms,
fish, sea, matter and mother, in significance. The fish denotes, first, life in
submergence, or the god in matter, who yet does not die, who can still breathe
under the elements. But more specifically it intimates the source of life
flowing outward toward matter. It is the outrance, not the entrance, of life.
The whale spouting out its water stream is suggestive. The Eridanus poured
forth from the mouth of the Southern Fish. The os tincae, or tench’s
mouth, was one of the religious symbols of frequent occurrence. Watching a
fish, one notes an apparent expulsion of water from the mouth with the
semblance of chewing. It is the door of life’s emanation, and it is the denizen
of the waters out of which life streams. The zodiacal Pisces is the sign of the
birth of saviors. Jesus, Horus, Ioannes and others came as Ichthys (Ichthus),
"fish" in Greek. And we have the fish-avatar of Vishnu. The door of
life is figured in the shape of a fish-mouth at the western or feminine end of
a church. The Pope’s miter is the mouth of a fish. The soul of life comes by
way of the water.
The Vesica Piscis or fish’s
bladder denoted the presence of air in the water, and the bubbles rising from
the fish’s mouth double this hint as to the presence of mind in matter. The
fish was a lower symbol than the swan or duck, for it must swim in the
water; the other can float on the surface. In this sense it types the god
caught, trapped in water; also likely to be caught in a net. It is said that
cynocephali, who lay in wait to seize fish, "were allowed to catch them
because of their ignorance." It is the soul’s lack of full knowledge that
causes it to be caught again and again in the meshes of carnality.
The fish zodiacally stands for the
feet of the man. The mermaid with tail of fish represented the body as
partaking in its nether half of the lower forces of life. Man’s feet are in the
water of life. Ishtar-Semiramis was given the tail of a fish. The tail also
portrays the, as yet, non-dual character of life, creative power not yet
bifrond. It shows
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the non-division of the legs. The
mummied Christ figure in the Catacombs, with legs bound helplessly together,
depicts the god strapped in the bonds of the natural elements, not yet having
manifested the duality. He can not use his two legs and walk, like a god. He is
only the first, natural man, not man and god conjoined.
Semiramis’ brother was Ichthys in
the statue at Ascalon. Ichthys was a title of Bacchus. In the Hermaean Zodiac
Pisces is named Ichthon, and the fish is the female goddess who brought forth
the young sun-god as her Piscean offspring, whether called Horus in Egypt,
Jesus in Palestine and Rome, or Marduk, the fish of Hea, in Assyria. Christ was
Ichthys the Fish from 255 B.C. unto about 1900 A.D., or for the period of the
Piscean era in the precession. Previous to that he was Aries, the Lamb of God.
Who will figure him now as the Waterman?
An old Egyptian story, the tale of
Setnau, written by Taht himself, and alleged to be so potent that two pages of
it, when recited, would open the secrets of nature and unlock all mysteries,
says: "The divine power will raise fishes to the surface of the
water." Metaphorically this refers to the power of the god to lift the
natural man, immersed in the sea of material life, to mastery over his lower
self, and bring him to the top or surface of his fleshly nature from out of the
depths of it.
The Ritual reports the god as
declaring: "I am the great and mighty Fish which is in the city of
Qem-Ur." This is the god in matter. But it is promised that Ra "shall
be separated from the Egg and from the Abtu Fish." Abtu is a form of
Abydos, the place of burial of the god. Ra shall be freed from the fish or
submerged state. Two chapter titles tell of "coming forth from the
net" and from "the catcher of the fish." The swampy region from
which Sevekh, solar deity, recovered the mutilated limbs of Horus, was called
Ta-Remu, "the land of the Fish," a name given it by Ra.
Gathering up some scattered
fragments of the water emblem, we note Homer describing the river Titaresius
flowing from the Styx as pure and unmixed with the taint of death and gliding
like oil over the surface of the water by which the gods made their covenant.
Oil on troubled waters may be seen to be a profounder symbolism than was
conceived before. For the god, oil is no chance symbol, as it was regularly
employed in the anointing to type celestial radiance, the sheen of the divine
glory. To pour oil on the waters is indeed to quiet
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the storms of raging animality by
the calm of reason and the gentleness of love.
In the Hebrew the water of life
flows from the rock Tser till the time of Miriam’s passing away. This
represents the female source. The change to the masculine phase occurs when the
water gushes forth for the first time from the rock Seba (Beer-Sheba) by the
command of Moses. This was the water of Meribah, and in the Egyptian Meri is
water, and Bah is the male.
In Judges (30) God split the
rock as sign of the dual nature, and water flowed forth to quench Samson’s
thirst, as in the case of Moses.
The throne on which Osiris is seated
is sometimes placed, in the vignettes to the Ritual, on water, still or
running. This is to say that the god is seated above the unstable foundation of
the changing earth life. But life is to be established through its experience
here, and so "he hath established it upon the floods."
When the god had been transformed he
is said to "have gained power over fresh water." As salt typed the
saving grace of divinity, the fresh water would point to the new and as yet
unsaved natural creature. "Moisture," says the Chaldean Oracles, "is
a symbol of life, and hence both Plato and, prior to Plato, the gods call the
soul at one time a drop from the whole of vivification; and at another time a
certain fountain of it."
The chapter can be brought to a
close with a few intimations of the air symbolism. It is much less general than
those of water and fire. The Sanskrit "Asu," meaning
"vital breath" is of great importance because it is the base of Asura
(Persian: Ahura, surname of Ahura-Mazda), one of the specific names
of the hosts of incarnating gods.
Both Horus and Jesus came forth with
a fan in their hands, as the Winnower. This emblem is a clear glyph for
the principle of mind. Intellect is to sweep out the chaff of sensuality and
free the golden grain. Those initiated into the Greater Mysteries were washed
with water and then breathed upon, fanned and winnowed by the purifying spirit.
This was the dual baptism of water and the spirit, or fire. One of the two
great symbols held in the hands of the Gods in Egypt was a fan called the Khi,
the sign of air, breath and spirit. The other was the Hek, or Aut-crook, which
denoted laying hold, in the downward direction, of matter by spirit; in the
reversed direction, of spirit by the lower personality.
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Lack of air, or smothering, was a
twin type with drowning for the limitations of incarnation. A phrase of the Ritual
indicates this: "whose throat stinketh for lack of air." In
descending to seek her lost brother and husband Osiris, Isis is claimed to have
"made light appear from her feathers; she made air to come into being by
means of her two wings,"--another personation of the fanner or winnower.
The god fans the mortal to keep him from being suffocated for lack of air,
mind. The god brings us intellect, which indeed keeps us from being smothered
by the intolerable life of sense. The cogency of leaven as a symbol lies in its
generating air within the material mass. The raising of dough is synonymous
with the resurrection of mortality. In the Ritual there is a
"chapter of giving air to the soul in the underworld." Mind came as
our savior.
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Chapter XIV
FIRE
ON HEAVEN’S HEARTH
The way is now cleared for the
majestic sweep of the fire symbolism. It rises above the other elements in
grandeur and impressiveness. The full implication of its meaning lifts the mind
into reaches of luminous suggestiveness as to the splendor of the experience
awaiting us in nobility, and even as a mere figure it has a certain power to
stir dim intimations of the magnificence of that reality which it hints at.
There is in nature hardly a phenomenon more wonderful than the eating away of a
stick of wood by a flame. The mystery of all life is back of that energic
display. And the mystery becomes awesome when we realize that our own life is
more than analogous to fire; it is of kindred nature with it. The soul within
us is a spark of divine flame.
The origin of the word is of
interest. It goes back to the Greek pur(pyr). Massey traces the
word "pyramid" from the stem, plus the Egyptian met, meaning
"ten" or "a measure," giving us pyramet. He asserts
that it stands thus for the ten original measures or arcs traced by the god of
fire, the sun, through the zodiacal circuit. As the great pyramid at Gizeh, and
others, seem to have been intimately related to sidereal measurements, this
theory of origin is plausible. The word would then mean "a ten-form
measure of fire," a figure for manifest life.
But the Greek pur itself
traces back to the Chaldean ur, primitive word for "fire." To
this the Egyptians added their article "the" as prefix, in the form
of p-, making the word p-ur or pur. The first emanation,
Abraham, came out from ur, the primal fire of creation.
The Sanskrit Agni, god of
fire, is traced by Massey to the general root, ag, meaning "to move
quickly," as in the Latin ago, "to go," agile (Lat.),
"active," our "agitate" and others. As this derivation
links it closely to the Greek theos, "god," who by etymology
is the "swift runner," "the swift goer," Agni, god of fire,
may well be connected
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with the theos, the god whose
symbol everywhere is the swift-darting shaft of fire, whether in the heavens or
in the uplands of reason and intelligence. The "flash of
intelligence" is the exact sign and token of the swift activity of the god
within us.
That the soul is a spark from the
celestial fire is attested by the words of the Speaker in the Ritual (Ch.
97): "Lo I come from the lake of flame, from the lake of fire, and from
the field of flame, and I live."
In the Vision of Scipio Cicero
has preserved some of the ancient doctrine concerning the derivation of souls
from the empyrean. The spirit of Africanus tells his son that souls were
supplied to men from the eternal fires, which are constellations and stars.
Virgil says that in souls there is a potency like fire. In the Hymn to
Minerva of Proclus, souls originate
"From the great father’s fount,
supremely bright,
Like fire resounding, leaping into
light."
One of the Chaldean Oracles runs
as follows:
"The soul being a splendid
fire, through the power of the Father remains immortal, is the mistress of life
. . . the soul extends vital illumination to body."
And again most succinctly:
"All things are the progeny of
one fire."
The first Oracle of Zoroaster tells
of a ladder which reached from Tartarus to the first or highest fire. This was
the gamut of stages between the lowest levels of material life and the highest
spiritual. The principle of soul, says the Oracle, is the operator and giver of
life-bearing fire. It fills the vivific bosom of Hecate (the lower nature) and
pours on the linked natures of matter and spirit the fertile strength of a fire
endured with mighty power. Concerning divine Love the Oracle speaks:
"Who first leaped forth from
intellect, clothing fire bound together with fire, that he might govern the
fiery cratera (bowls), restraining the flower of his own fire."
When Ceres delivered up the
government to Proserpina, her daughter (intellect to soul), she instructed her
to have conjugal relation
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with Apollo, the sun-god, as thus
the god would beget "famed offspring, with faces glowing with refulgent
fire."
The upper fire, the Oracles affirm,
did not shut up its power in matter, nor in works, but in intellect. "For
the artificer of the fiery world is an intellect of intellect." Saturn,
who in the Oracles is the first fountain, the strong spirit which is
beyond the fiery poles, endues all the lower principles with his essence.
These, through his pervading might, "become refulgent with the furrows of
inflexible and implacable fire." They "are the intellectual
conceptions from the paternal fountain, plucking abundantly the flower of the
fire of ceaseless time." And that our progress upward is a return to a
fiery nature is shown by these excerpts:
"A fire-heated conception has
the first order. For the mortal who approaches to fire will receive a light
from divinity; . . ."
"A singular fire extends itself
by leaps through the waves of air; or an infigured fire, whence a voice runs
before; or a light beheld near, every way splendid, resounding and convolved.
But also behold a horse full of refulgent light; or a boy carried on a swift
horse--a boy fiery or clothed with gold."
"Rivers being mingled, perfect
the works of incorruptible fire."
It was the statement of Greek
philosophy that "from the exhalations arising from the burning bodies of
the Titans, mankind were produced."1
An echo of this abstrusity of
esoteric lore is heard in the accounts of the Wiradthuri tribe of Western
Australia. One of their initiations is apparently the analogue of the whole
basic structure of religion, represented in a fire drama. In the puberty
initiations the lads were frightened by a large fire lighted near them, being
told that the Dhur-Moolan was about to burn them. This god was supposed to take
them into the bush and instruct them in all the traditional customs. So he went
through a pretended killing of the boys, cutting them up and burning the
pieces to ashes, after which he molded the ashes into human shape and restored
them to life as new beings.2 Primitive ignorance may be the nursery of
superstition, but much alleged primitive ignorance is old wisdom surviving in
ruinous grandeur by the implacable power of tradition.
In the Clementine Homilies (8:18)
the offspring of the unnatural
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and untimely union between the sons
of God and the daughters of men described in Genesis are declared to be
"bastards, begotten of the fire of angels and the blood of
women." The gods are rebuked for polluting themselves with women, "as
the sons of men do," and for creating a hybrid and unworthy progeny whose
destruction they would in the future lament. (Enoch 12)
Many tribes held the fire-fly, which
thrives in moist grasses, to be a typical emblem of our divinity. Its
periodical flashing in the dark is suggestive.
The Logia and Revelation both
yield data on the theme of fire. At the first angel’s trumpet message there
ascended on the earth a hail of fire which was scattered from the Altar of Fire
before the throne. "And the hail of fire was mingled with the blood of the
Lamb; these were cast upon earth to consume away its evil." Horus had said
that he came to put an end to evil. At the second angel’s blast lightning
flashed forth and went down into the sea, which it changed into blood.
We have seen that a hail of stars or sparks over the earth was the typical
figuration of the descent of the bright deities. The Egyptian ceremony of
flinging a blazing cross into the Nile conveys the same connotation. The deities
in incarnation were styled by the Greeks water-nymphs. A cross on fire thrust
into water carried the purport of the sacrificial act of incarnation. A fiery
serpent on the cross is a kindred emblem. The Targum commands: "Make thee
a burning." In India the swastika cross was a special emblem of fire, the
god Agni. In the early Church the cross of fire was adorned on a Friday, when a
lighted cross was suspended from the dome of St. Peter’s, the cross being
covered with lamps in a fire-traced figure. Dante describes the souls in
Paradise as praying inside a cross of fire, which is their world. The hawk is a
symbol of solar fire, and Horus arose hawk-headed or divinized with fire.
When Lucifer fell upon the earth and
with his key unlocked the pit of the abyss, there issued from it clouds of
smoke like that which proceeds from a great furnace, and it obscured the light
of the sun! That is to say, the mingled steam and exhalation from electrolyzed
"water" and ‘burning flesh," or the carnal nature vivified by
currents of deific potency, rose all around the god and well nigh obscured his
inner glow. And out of the smoke came forth locusts and scorpions, having power
to sting and poison. And these went forth to torment all the
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dwellers on earth; only they could not
harm those who had not the mark of the Beast on them. The army of horsemen that
came forth to battle these forms of evil coming out of the smoke appeared as if
"emitting fire." This fire scorched those who love to do wickedness,
and drove them back into the pit. This denotes the burning out of those strong
animal propensities in the fiery furnace of human experience. Proclus in his Timaeus
(Lib. V) observes concerning the telestic art that "it obliterates
through divine fire all the stains produced by generation." This is the
true and only meaning of purgatory.
Another angel descended with a
rainbow on his head, his face was as the sun for brightness and his feet were
resting upon pillars of fire. This lower fire searched the lives of all on
earth and filled with pain those who bore the mark of the Beast.
In the Book of Overthrowing Apap this
arch-fiend and his associates, the Sami and the Sebau (minions of Seb), are
burnt up by the flames of the sun-god. In the Book of Am-Tuat the
bodies, souls, shadows and heads of the enemies of Ra are burnt and consumed
daily in pits of fire. In the eighth section of the Book of Gates a
picture is drawn of a monster speckled serpent called "Kheti," with
seven folds, in each one of which stands a god. The open mouth of the serpent
belches a stream of fire into the faces of the enemies of Ra, whose arms are
tied behind their backs in agonized helplessness. Horus stands by, urging the
reptile to consume the enemies of his father. In the Book of Am-Tuat there
is also a group of twelve serpents, whose work was to pour fire from their
bodies "which was to light the dead sun-god on his way." The soul of
the god, typed often as "the Eye of Ra," is described as "the
flame which followeth after Osiris to burn up the souls of his enemies."
"Uatchet, the Lady of Flames, is the Eye of Ra." Ra is addressed as
"Thou who givest blasts of fire from thy mouth, (who makest the two lands
bright with thy radiance)." The Manes who come out of Amenta pure
"shall have burnt incense before Ra."
The inner idea of burning animal
flesh on a physical altar was the consuming by divine fire of the dross that
emanated from the carnal segment in man. The god came into the natural man to
transfigure him. To achieve this aeonial labor his fire had to burn out slowly
the grosser elements, earthy and moist, by spiritual alchemy and replace them
by subtle and pure essence akin to its own diviner substance. A Buddhist
phrase, "the gross purgations of the celestial fire," attests the
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nature of the chemistry that must
take place. The burning up of dross to refine pure metal is a glib poetic
shibboleth in philosophy, but few know that it is a description of an actual
bio-chemical process taking place in human life. All our lower emotionalism and
heavier sensualism is as fuel for the burning. The lurid flare of such a
combustion is only turned to pure clear flame by pain and defeat. Animal
sacrifice on an altar was only to dramatize the conversion of lower man to
higher under the action of fiery spiritual energies. And it is significant that
the ancients swore, not by the altar, but by the fire which was on the altar.
One would not swear by the impermanent part of his nature, but by the stable
and abiding. This was the fire of soul and conscience. The inner fire, imprisoned
in body, strives to burn its way into flame. But its fuel is moist and
damp--green wood--and it must first slowly dry out the resistant mass. The
grossly misunderstood phrase, "the wrath of God," is just this steady
consuming of obstructing material.
Says the Eternal, then, in Deuteronomy
(32), when he notes that his sons have sacrificed to "demons, to
no-gods, to gods who are utter strangers, to new-comers of gods""
"For a self-willed race are
they,
Children devoid of loyalty.
My wrath has flared up,
flaming to the nether world itself,
burning up earth and all it bears,
setting the roots of the hills
ablaze.
.
. . . .
From Sinai came the Eternal,
from Seir he dawned on us;
from Paran’s range he rayed out,
blazing in fire from the south.
It is given in the Ritual (Ch.
108) that "the Osiris, triumphant, knoweth the name of this serpent. . . .
‘Dweller in his fire’ is his name."
The Manes "opens the doors of
heaven by the flames which are about the abode of the gods; he advances through
the fire which is about the home of the gods, who make a way for him, to make
him pass onwards, for he is Horus."
According to another text,
"Horus led the deceased through the abode of the gods situated among the
flames of fire."
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Sut and Horus are the representatives
of the dual life of man, and are the divine twins, the first of whom, Sut,
brings the water of the inundation to submerge the fire of deity in the sea of
generation; and the second, Horus, brings the rebirth of the fire within the
very borders of the sea of life. Both were astrologically united in the star
Sut-Canopus. In an Australian myth the hawk brought the fire to the aborigines.
A typical mythical account of the
war in heaven and descent of the fire-devas to earth is found in another Australian
legend of the bandicoot who had a firebrand, but refused to share it. This was
the rebellion. The hawk and the pigeon were deputed to get it. The pigeon made
a lunge for it, whereupon the bandicoot desperately hurled it toward the water
to put it out. But the hawk deflected it into the grass over the sea, which
caught fire. The hawk and pigeon (dove) are birds of soul-fire, the bandicoot
the bird of darkness, a type of the water that put out the solar fire.
All through the world’s Märchen one
finds that fire is often dual, the first being the natural fire, as of
lightning, flint-fire and other forms; the second is a fire that is human in
origin, requiring mind to achieve it.
Sut and Horus, as the human duality,
are typed in the two phases, light and dark, of the moon. Sut is the black
vulture (which lives on blood) and Horus the golden hawk. The lunar ibis, bird
of Ptah, is black and white, and portrays the two natures in one creature.
There is a legend of a black raven that once was white. In a Thlinker tradition
the white bird is represented as becoming black in passing up the flue of
Kanukh’s fire-place. This is a form of the phoenix which transforms from
black to white (or into the golden hawk) and from white to black in its passage
to and from the underworld, which is called Kanukh’s flue.
A prayer in the Ritual (Ch.
163) begs the god to "grant that the flame may leave the fire, wherever it
may be, to raise up the hands of Osiris," which were bandaged to the sides
of his inert body in the mummy case. Osiris is himself appealed to, as the
Governor of Amenta, to "grant light and fire to the happy soul which is in
Sutenkhenen (Heracleopolis)," the underworld. Samson’s bound arms were
freed by the burning away of his flaxen bonds. The soul (in Ch. 63B) says that
Ra has "lifted up the moist emanations of Osiris from the
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Lake of Fire and he was not
burned." "A fire was kindled for thee in the hands of the goddess
Rerit [the hippopotamus goddess of the Nile, i.e., the virgin mother]; she
performeth acts of protection for thee every day." The Manes is exhorted
to "kindle the fire in order that the flame may rise up; and throw incense
upon it in order that the smell of incense may rise up." A chapter (137A)
deals with the four blazing flames which are made for the Khu or spirit. The
flame riseth, it is said, in Abru (Abydos) and it cometh to the Eye of Horus.
It is set in order on the brow of Osiris and on his breast, and is fixed within
his shrine. The Rubric specifies that this chapter shall be recited over the
four fires made of anointed atma3 cloth, and the fires shall be placed
in the hands of four men who shall have the names of the four pillars of Horus
written on their shoulders. It is promised that the soul that undertakes to
perform the offices of this chapter of the Four Blazing Fires each day shall
find release from every hall in the underworld and from the seven halls of
Osiris. The four men are the four guardians of the cardinal points, upholding
man at the four corners of his being, or in his four bodies.
The Manes says again: "I am the
Great One, son of the Great One; I am Fire, son of Fire, to whom was given his
head after it was cut off." The descent was symbolized as a cutting off of
the head, since intellect was lost.
The genetrix of the seven stars is
called the keeper of fire, the spark-holder.
Sut signifies
"Fire-stone," according to Massey. Oddly enough, lightning was
anciently regarded as the dart of a fiery stone, and it has the name of the
fire-stone widely attached to it among many peoples. So we have Jesus saying,
"I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." But the name likely
has also a reference to the flint-stone fire, as potential fire locked up in
stone. Indeed flint was a frequent symbol of the buried deific potency. One of the
Mexican legends reports the Mother-Creatrix as having given birth to a flint
knife, which fell on earth and became the origin of men. The flint is a graphic
symbol of the presence of hidden fire in the physical world. In the same
fashion a god (fire) is buried invisibly within the body of physical humanity.
Flint nurses the potentiality of the birth of fire within it! "When the
Serpent-lightning darted out of the cloud it buried itself in the earth,
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leaving its stone-head in the
aerolith of smelted sand." It was called the Thunder-hatchet. (Records
of the Past.)
The element of fire was regarded as
latent in both wood and stone, needing effort, force, a blow or heat to bring
it forth. Fire, with its eternal intimation of spirit, was regarded as the divine
inner essence of these materials, a conception now endorsed by late science.
When the Mystery candidate came
forth from the examination he was asked what the judges have awarded him and he
replies: "A flame of fire and a pillar of crystal." (Ch. 125.)
The Quiché name for lightning is
Cak-ul-ha, that is, "fire coming from water"; and the serpent of fire
and the serpent of water are one, ultimately. The winged serpent signified
winged lightning.
The Old Testament (Exod. 24:12)
declares that the glory of the Lord was in appearance like a devouring fire on
top of the mount. The Psalms (18) say that he "thundered in the
heavens. He made darkness his secret place; a smoke issued from his nostrils
and devouring fire out of his mouth . . . and he hurtled stones and coals of
fire." He is called the "Lightning-sender." In Exodus (20)
the Eternal descended in fire upon a cloud. Here is the mingling of fire and
water again. "Smoke rose like steam from a kiln, till the people all
trembled terribly." The lightning only flashed on the third day, a
significant fact explained later.
In most of these illustrations the
fire alluded to is that of upper intelligence flashing forth to enlighten the
natural order. But this fire, in its contact with the watery and earthly elements
of the carnal self, stirs up steam, sulphurous exhalations, fumes, noxious
gases and dust, and in this transformation it becomes truly a fire of Tophet
and Hades! Nevertheless it is still the purifying fire. As washing by water was
an emblem of purgation, so fumigation was a companion type. Says Massey:
"Amenta was the land of
precious metals and the furnace of solar fire. Hence Ptah, the miner, became
the blacksmith of the gods, the Kamite Vulcan."4
If, then, the earth is the furnace
of fire, there can be no quibbling about the meaning of the vivid narrative of
Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the three who were cast into the fiery furnace,
in Daniel. It is only another allegory of the solar triadic god, in his
three prin-
311
ciples of mind-soul-spirit, embodied
in the sphere of flesh, typed now as a fiery furnace. The Manes, who is spirit in
this furnace, is shown his Ka, his pure higher soul, as a means of aiding
him to remember his name in the great house, "in the crucible of the
great house of flame." One of the chapters is designed to be read so
that its magical potency may enable the Manes to "escape from every
fire." In another the soul prays (Ch. 17) to be "delivered from the
god who liveth upon the damned, whose face is that of a hound, but whose
skin is that of a man," "at the angle of the pool of
fire." Here is the man and animal combined, another of the oft-recurring
glyphs of our duality. And where the man and the animal are united, where they
meet, is the pool of fire!
In the Psalms it is said,
"They go through fire and through water" and are "brought out
into a place of abundance." "So," says Edward Carpenter,
"was the Greek Hercules, who overcame death though his body was consumed
in the burning garment of mortality out of which he rose to
heaven."5
The Book of Judges (6)
recounts how at the sacrifices for the Eternal, the meat and the unleavened
bread which the angel had commanded Gideon to "put on the rock
yonder," were touched by the tip of the wand in the angel’s hand, at which
"fire spurted out of the rock and burned up the meat and the cakes. So
Gideon realized it was an angel of the Eternal."
In Exodus (12) the directions
from the Eternal to the Israelites were that the meat of the sacrificial
offering was "not to be eaten raw or boiled in water, but roasted in fire,
head and legs and all." The true food for man to consume is not that
immersed in his lower watery nature, but that transformed into suitable
spiritual nourishment by the fire of spirit alone. It is to be recalled that
the Titans first boiled the members of Bacchus in water and afterwards roasted
them in fire. The fiery force of deity had caused the lower elements to seethe
and boil; when the moisture (carnality) was all dried out, the remainder of the
process was a "roasting."
The immolation of Jephthah’s
daughter as a burnt sacrifice appears to be another figuration of the
divinization of the mortal (feminine) nature after two and a fraction aeons.
For she asked permission to bewail her unfruitfulness for two months in the
hills. Hill or hills is a frequent glyph for earth. To burn her up was not to
destroy her, so we
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can save our tears. It was to set
her on fire with a brighter purer flame.
Gideon’s routing of the Midianites
"in the valley below" by the smashing of the clay pitchers in which
were lighted torches, is of extremely apt relevance in the terms of the
symbology of fire and water. A pitcher is a water container, but these were
empty. The water had been dried up, and the fire burned unquenched. The water of
sense burned out, the only remaining task for the spirit, to consummate its
full release from its prison, was to rend asunder the veil of flesh, the body.
This was achieved in the shattering of the clay pitchers. The Midianites are
the multitude of lower impulses, ever the adversaries, the enemies. They flee
and vanish the moment they see the divine fire glow forth in its full release
of hidden power!
The story of Samson, a typical solar
hero, provides splendid exemplification of the fire symbology. When he was
delivered over to the Philistines (the lower propensities again) he was bound
with two new ropes. But when the Philistines were about to punish him,
"the spirit of the Eternal inspired him mightily, the ropes around his
arms became like flax that has caught fire, the bonds melted off his
hands." The god within burned away his bonds. A whole chapter of
exposition could not add force to the sublime meaning here pictured.
It is appropriate to consider the
beautiful emblemism of the "pillar of cloud by day and of fire by
night," whereby the Eternal manifested his guiding presence with his
children on their mundane journey. In the full glare of the blinding light of
divinity, some watery veil is necessary to intervene between us and the
overpowering glory. The Eternal put his hand over Moses’ eyes while his glory
passed by. Man’s face must be veiled in the presence of deity. God interposes
the veil of matter between us and his hidden spirit. This is the cloud by day.
But in the evolutionary night time, when the soul is deeply submerged in
material darkness, there is needed the shining of the pillar of fire. It is the
moon by night. In the Elysian or paradisical realms the angels are represented
as refreshing themselves in bowers of shade or cloud. Shade is grateful in the
summer. But on earth the buried god needs light. The gross physical sense of
the moving pillars is impossible. A marching column of some two million people,
and some twenty miles long, would need to rest at night, whereas the literal
translation would presuppose their needing a light to guide their nocturnal
march.
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Then there is that other great
religious usage, the significance of which no mind can fail to sense in all its
dynamic admonition for humanity. Many nations felt it incumbent, under the
strength of the most powerful obligations, to maintain a fire perpetually
burning on the central hearth of the nation. In Rome a class of virgins, chosen
for physical and spiritual purity, were put in charge of the Vestal Fire, and
death was the penalty for letting it die out. Likewise, as is not so generally
known, death by burial alive was the penalty for sexual intercourse, inflicted
remorselessly upon these maidens. This, too, was regarded as a letting of the
spiritual fire on the hearth of life go out. The ancients knew that if once the
spark of empyreal fire kindled in the moist nature of the earthy man was
permitted to die out, it was the second and irretrievable death of the soul.
That portion or fragment of deity that was sent into the flesh could be
divulsed entirely from its linkage to heaven--the silver cord could be cut--and
the soul lost, for the rest of the aeonial cycle. The 64th chapter of the Ritual
is to be recited in order that the person may not die a second time,
"but may come forth and escape from the fire." To escape the second
death the Manes had to keep the sacred fire aglow.
In the elaborate ceremony conducted
over the mummy, there was one act which stands out in the sharp forcefulness of
its meaning. The Rubric to the 137th chapter says that the figure of the mummy
was to be smeared with bitumen (the same substance was used to caulk the wicker
boat in which Moses and Sargon floated among the reeds) and set fire to. This
was to figure the lower nature being lighted up by the fire of the higher. The
life of the god, says Budge naively, "sometimes takes the form of a flame
of fire." Budge adds: "These ceremonies are said to be ‘an
exceedingly great mystery of Amenta and a type of the hidden things of the
other world.’"6 Again we see the scholar’s mind stultified by want of that
one key to ancient books: that this world is Amenta. For the mystery
pertains to the hidden things of no other world than this one we know. But it
is, of course, a type of the mysteries of all other cosmic worlds.
Then there is the "burning
bush" of Moses. "When he looked there was the thorn-bush ablaze with
fire, yet not consumed" (Ex. 2). "The angel of the Eternal
appeared to him in a flame of fire rising out of the thorn-bush." To be
sure, the fire rises out of the natural order, sym-
314
boled by a bush. The figure of the
burning bush seems to offer no more significance than the "golden
bough" of classical lore, or the branch of the sycamore-fig that burns
with fire but is not consumed. Horus indeed was typed as the "golden unbu"
(branch) from his mother’s tree. No fact in nature lends itself with more
felicity to the idea of new life from old than that of the bright new shoot (as
of the pine) at the end of last season’s more darkly colored growth. Its
lighter color is significant of new glory. As Jesus was the shoot of the vine
(also Horus), his Egyptian mythical designation would have been the
"golden unbu." In the texts the unbu is the symbol of
the son reborn from the dead father. There is a figure of the disk of light
raying all ablaze from the summit of the sycamore-fig, which thus appears to
burn with fire, but is not burned. The Manes approaches the holy emblem without
shoes, salutes the tree and addresses the god in the solar fire: "Shine on
me, O unknown soul. I draw near to the god whose words were heard by me in
the lower earth" (Ch. 64). One is now prepared to sense the meaning of
the bright-spangled star that tops our Christmas pine tree. And by the same
token one can know the cryptic meaning of the Star of Bethlehem. Need it be
added that the burning bush is just the symbol of nature’s "green"
product, the first Adam, being divinized to golden splendor by the touch of the
god’s spiritual fire? Any green tree or stalk or stem, tipped at its summit by
the bright-hued flower, furnishes the same moral. Human life is to flower out
at its summit in radiant colors. And we set fire to the Yule log.
An old English legend identifies the
golden bough of Horus with the bush that flowered at Christmas, the Glastonbury
thorn. The flowering at Christmas depicts the birth of the solar god at the
solstice, the application of which to individual spiritual history will be
examined later. Says Horus (Ch. 42): "I am Unbu, who proceedeth from Nu,
and my mother is Nut." Again: "I am Unbu of An-ar-ef, the flower in
the abode of occultation," or in the fleshly world of hiding. Possession
of the golden bough in classical mythology was the passport of release from the
underworld.
There is, also, the flaming
two-edged sword of the angel set to guard the tree of life in the garden.
Origen says that the Gnostic diagram of this symbol was as follows: "The
flaming sword was depicted as the diameter of a flaming circle, and as if
mounting guard over
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the tree of knowledge and of
life." There is doubtless much mystical, astrological and other occult
symbolism in the sign; but in relation to the human situation its meaning seems
to be simpler. Man’s life here is cast between the two fires of heaven and
earth, the bright fire of celestial splendor and the lurid one of earth. They
are of course two aspects or modifications of the same one fire. Hence his life
is cut by the fire that catches him on both sides, upper and lower. The fire of
life consumes in both directions. It lights and it also burns. It glows in
beauteous glory; it painfully consumes the lower self. Heaven is fiery; so is
hell. As the waters were sundered, so was the divine fire. The flaming sword is
the eternal reminder of the two-edgedness of our nature. The doubleness of the
fire that has come to deify us is announced in the line in the Ritual: "Pepi
is the country (or the god) Setit, the conqueror of the Two Lands, whose
flame receives its two portions." We are bathed in "the Pool of the
Double Fire." The Two Lands are the two areas or fields of our dual
selfhood. Man is to conquer the twoness of his being, merging the two portions
into one new creation. The Ritual says that "he cultivates the Two
Lands, he pacifies the Two Lands, he unites the Two Lands." It says also
that "he cultivates the crops on both sides of the horizon."
John Baptist’s statement in the New
Testament is a mighty affirmation of the truth of what is here presented.
He represented the lower man, antecedent and preparatory to the spiritual self.
He bears the symbolism of water (if not of earth), as Jesus does that of fire
and air. For his statement yet rings down the centuries of Christian theology:
"I indeed baptize you with water, but he that cometh after me shall
baptize you with the Holy Spirit [Latin: spiritus, "air"!] and
with fire." The man born of the natural or maternal order (man born of
woman) alone, preceded him that was born of the Father’s divine spirit. Again
our thesis is dramatically vindicated by "scripture."
Iamblichus tells us that the three
golden apples of Hesperides are: (1), Illumination; (2), A communion of
operation; and, (3), A perfect plenitude of Divine Fire.7
A mass of testimony could be drawn
from the Bible to stress the prominence of the fire typology. Isaiah strongly
enjoins us (50, 11): "Behold all ye that kindle a fire, that compass
yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks
that ye have kindled." Job admonishes evildoers (18:5): "Yea, the
light of the
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wicked shall be put out and the
spark of his fire shall not shine. The light shall be dark in his tabernacle,
and his candle shall be put out with him." Paul says that if we awake
"from the dead," "Christ will shine upon" us. Isaiah says
that we wait for the light, and exhorts us to "arise, shine, for thy light
is come." John says that "light is come into the world"
and "that was the true light" when the Christos arrived. He
declares that the only condemnation was the world’s rejection of the light when
it came. The Psalmist says that the Lord is his light and his salvation and
that "light is sown for the righteous." "In thy light shall we
see light." Jesus said: "When I am in the world I am the light of the
world." He assured the righteous that they were the light of the world,
that indeed they needed no other light to lighten their path, as they had light
in themselves. The Lord made his ministers a flame of fire. "The Lord God is
a sun and a shield"--the pillar and the cloud, the meaning of which,
clear at last, is simply spirit and matter. When there was darkness over the
land of Egypt, "the Israelites had light in their dwellings." And
this is not speaking of rush lights in Egyptian huts, but spiritual light in
physical bodies. Jesus was "the sun of righteousness" and at
the end of human evolution "the righteous shall shine like the
sun." And if there is needed a pointblank utterance from the Bible to
cover our claim, it might be found in the line from the Psalms: "Our
God is a living fire." For a long series of generations Christendom has
set fire to the Yule log and lighted candles on the Christmas tree. Yet there
is hardly a child in the West that could give a reason for these rites that
would convey a modicum of the truth. For the venerable teaching that nature put
forth on its topmost bough a bright effulgence of deity, a bright flower at the
top of the green stem, a shining god at the summit of elemental creation, has
long been lost. Yet the Christ has come, bringing and distributing "that
light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world."
The fire emblem has become involved
in a host of combinations with other types, and its play in all mythology is
extensive. Many of these references to it carry valuable implications.
The ancient Apt, mother of the
world, is called "the kindler of sparks," the "kindler of light
for the deceased in the dark of death" (Rit., Ch. 137: Vign: Papyrus
of Nebseni). Thus the old first bringer of rebirth is the kindler of light
in the sepulcher--of earth. Mary Mag-
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dalene who is her counterpart in the
Gospel version, comes to the tomb "early, while it is yet dark," and
finds the stone moved away and light kindled at the tomb sufficient to see by.
Chapter 137B is entitled: "Of kindling a flame by Nebseni, the scribe in the
temple of Ptah."
The great classical fable of
Prometheus bears relations to the fire sign. The myth is not entirely unique.
There is, for instance, the Hindu tale of the monster (Titan) Rahu, who
smuggled himself into the presence of the Gods of light and drank the
Amrit-juice of immortality. He was cut in two, but could not be
destroyed, by Indra, and the two halves were set as signs in the heavens at the
places of the lunar eclipses.
That the Promethean myth is not
entirely to be dissociated from the story of the Galilean savior is shown by
the fact that, according to Carpenter, "Prometheus, the greatest and
earliest benefactor of the human race, was nailed by hands and feet, and with
arms extended, to the rocks of Mt. Caucasus."8 When one knows that this
figure fastened to a cross or rock is but the outward dramatization of the
truth of the god’s impalement on the stake of matter, all historical realism
connected with it becomes revolting.
The Titans were styled in the
Mysteries "Thyrsus-bearers, and Prometheus concealed fire in a thyrsus or
reed; after which he was considered as bringing celestial light into generation
or leading soul into body, or calling forth the divine illumination."9 The
natural order harbors in it the seeds of spiritual growth.
Massey quite plausibly allocates to
the word "Teitan" the "number of the Beast" given in Revelation
as 666. He argues that the triple "S" on the Gnostic stones,
represents this number, "S" equaling 6. SSS then equals 666. It was a
sign of the six elementary creations that prepare the way for the seventh. He
traces the value of the letters as follows:
T ............... 300
E ............... 5
I ............... 10
T ............... 300
A ............... 50
N ............... 1
____
666
The statement that the Beast lost
one of its heads, which was afterwards restored and healed (Cf. a similar case
in the Egyptian mythos) is interpreted by him to mean that the descent
of the Titanic hosts was the figurative equivalent of the loss of the head or
intellect to be regained in the evolutionary sequel. The sevenfold corpus of
deity,
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minus one of its heads, was thus
numerically reduced from seven to six. Man, then, is to be regarded as a
sevenfold being suffering the temporary loss of his (divine) intellect, or head,
which he is striving to restore or heal. We must round out the Beast in us by
giving him a head of intelligence. There is still more to this typology of
seven minus one. The fabled Mt. Meru "is also described as being
intersected by six parallel ranges running east and west. Six is typed by the
hexagon or space in six directions"--a symbol of our life in this
three-dimensional world, where the cube of six sides is the typical shape of
any existential object. The six parallel ranges are the six planes beneath the
topmost level, where the "heart of Bacchus" was preserved when the
mental body was dismembered. Says Proclus in the Timaeus: "The
Framer made the heavens six in number, and for the seventh he cast into the
midst the fire of the sun." This was the crowning of nature’s six
elementary kingdoms with the element of mind, or the first injection of
intellect into the evolutionary creation in and through the person of man,
Atum-Ra, the first god-born race. Nature struggles upward through six degrees of
material coarseness, till her product, animal-man, is sufficiently sensitized
to be made the vehicle of Manas, or Mind.
Job (5:19) relates six and seven mysteriously in
a remarkable statement: "He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in
seven, there shall no evil touch thee." Trouble is associated with six and
deliverance from it with seven. Life is captive and harassed during its long
peregrinations upward through the three sub-atomic "elemental
kingdoms" in the invisible world, the preliminary stages in the formation
of matter out of empty space, and the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms in
the visible atomic world; and intelligence comes in the seventh kingdom to
release it from its sub-conscious captivity. Life is in "Egyptian"
bondage to nature through six aeons. The seventh--and seven times seven--brings
the glorious "year of jubilee," when all captives and prisoners are
set free. In Numbers a Hebrew slave was to serve six years and go free
in the seventh without paying a ransom. The fields were to be cultivated for
six years and to lie fallow the seventh. But when the Messiah came--and his
Egyptian name Iu-em-hetep means "he who comes seventh"--he was
allegorized as coming under the dominance of the six lower forces; and so the
number seven later took on in the texts the evil implications of the number six
and is the nu-
319
merical type of servitude. Jacob is
made to serve seven years for Leah and an added seven for Rachel. In some old
texts the ten plagues of Egypt were originally seven.
The profounder significance of the
first "miracle" of Jesus in turning water into wine at the marriage
feast of Cana hinges upon the fact, hardly ever commented on, that the servants
set out for the transformation six pots of water in earthen vessels!
Jesus, embodying the seventh or transmuting power, came to convert that nature
that had been constituted by the first six outpourings of primal life into
higher spiritual status. The Christ has the task of transfiguring six lower
elemental powers into divinity. And in the Gospel story he went up into the
mount for the transfiguration "after six days"! Spiritual
"wine" was to be made out of the six types of elemental
"water" in man’s constitution. And man, physically, comes close to being
six-sevenths water in composition!
The "year of the Lord" was
divided into six (double) signs of the zodiac. The sun passes annually through
these six signs, and man’s soul, his sun, also passes through six levels
of being in attaining self-conscious freedom. It makes the round of the
elements of earth, water, air and fire in twelve subdivisions. These elements
being embodied in his own constitution, the sun-soul in man passes through them
to achieve its mastery of all life. His victory in the seventh kingdom regains
for him all that was lost in the beginning. The Christ adds the seventh head to
the decapitated natural order. The seventh and "lost" Pleiad will be
recaptured by Orion, the mighty hunter, Egypt’s astrological figure for Horus.
The Christ will restore the lost light.
The Titans, of whom Prometheus was
one, appear in a dual and somewhat confusing character in the mythology. They
are both man’s good angel and his devil. The solution of this enigma of
theology will be fully expounded in the next chapter. But, briefly, it can be
said that the Titans of mythology match the Lucifer character of theology.
"Hesiod says the Father called
the Revolters by an opprobrious name, Teitans, when he cursed them. And they
were cast down into Tartarus and bound in chains and darkness in the abyss."
(Theogony I, 207; II, 717).
The god, the Titan, Prometheus,
Lucifer, who brought us our divine fire from the empyrean, was in part
converted into the Beast when his
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Titanic intellect was linked with
the six elementary forces. He mingled his life-blood with theirs, and the
contagion of elementary impulse went to his head! Certain of the myths tend to
align the Titans with the six elementary powers; and this is a natural
confusion since the higher mentality did commingle with the lower instincts. The
god who was angelic, because untested, in heaven, became demoniacal on earth,
and the coloring of every attribute is altered as he indeed "suffers a sea
change" in plunging into the lower waters.
The myth of the Greek Saturn, who
was overthrown and despoiled by the Titans in that heavenly warfare, is read as
planetary cosmology by Massey and others. The meaning is that each lower grade
of life organized in the progressive outpourings "steals" away the
higher creative force to use on its own plane. The functions and the glory of
Saturn were alleged to have been transferred to the sun, who became the new
lord of the six. Saturn is identical with the Egyptian Sebek (Sevekh) whose
name is "seven," and in the early mythos he was the deity who
crowned the six elementary forces with completion, as their ruler and governor.
Says Massey:
"The sun and Saturn both became
the lord of the seventh day, the Sabbath, the day of rest and peace, which is
Hept, [Hetep] the name of No. 7. But in the cult of Sebek . . . the original of
the solar Sabazius, son of . . . Kubele, the sun and Saturn were combined as
Sabat, Sabaoth, or Sapt, which, read as Sebti, shows the dual form of Seb, for
the sun and Saturn . . . Sabazius was reported to have been torn into seven
parts by the Titans, corresponding to the seven days of the week and the seven
planets to which they were dedicated."10
That is to say, our number
"seven" (Latin: septem) is derived from Saturn and the sun
combined in their two names of Seb and Hept, compounded into sept. Seb,
as we have seen, covers the dual meaning of "star" and
"soul," both suggesting fire. As the coming of the god of intellect
and reason, the seventh element, crowned the long elemental warfare of cosmic
creation with the peace and rest of intellectual control, order and harmony, so
the deific principle gives its name to the day of peace that follows the
hurly-burly of the six secular days. In general we devote six days to bodily
interests; the seventh should go to the interests of the soul. Ancient discernment
of primary
321
creational verities gave us our week
of seven days, to stand as an eternal reminder of the sevenfold cosmic order,
of which our own basic constitution is itself a reflection and a miniature. And
old Egypt gives us the philosophical demonstration of all this in the dual
meaning of the word Hept, which is both "seven" and
"peace." The seventh element is that noetic intellect which stills
the storm on the passional waters and brings peace to chaotic nature, based on
its six lower mindless energies. Iu-em-hetep (Imhotep of the Greeks) is he who
comes to bring peace as number seven.
In Exodus (23) it is written:
"The radiance of the Eternal
rested on the mountain of Sinai; for six days the cloud covered it, and on the
seventh day he called from the cloud to Moses (the Eternal’s radiance looked to
the Israelites like blazing fire on the top of the mountain.)"
It is in a verse from this same
chapter that a very noteworthy statement is made:
"For six years you may sow your
land and gather in your crops, but every seventh year you must let the land
alone, so the poor people may pick up something; anything they leave the wild
animals can eat, for if you worship their gods it will endanger you."
There is ample warrant for a
moment’s digression from the main theme of the chapter to follow out several
implications of this astonishing passage. The injunction not to cultivate the
fields every seventh year, so that the "poor" might have some
"pickings," is on the face of it impossible physically. For if the
land was left alone, there would be no planting and hence no picking. How could
the earthly poor profit from unplanted fields?
The command has nothing to do with
agriculture or charity, except that which is cosmic and spiritual. It is one of
those ingenious "parables" by which ancient sagacity embodied great
evolutionary truth in pictorial representation. It concerns in this case a most
recondite fact of esoteric knowledge. Bizarre as it may sound to modern ears,
it was the teaching of the abstruse biological science of old that at the
dissolution of the several component principles of the multiple human
constitution at the completion of the cycle (the seventh day), one of these
bodies of etheric material (of types now predicated by science),
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the "astral," called the
"chhaya" in India, floated free as an independent entity, possessing
both sufficient vitality to preserve it from disintegration, and a semblance of
mental automatism. In this condition it was utilized by nature for a particular
purpose. It was made the matrix or mold about which was aggregated coarser
matter, as a magnetic field organizes iron filings, which matter gave it a body
and localized it on earth as a living creature. Both the Bible and other
esoteric writings have mysterious sayings about the lower orders of life
feeding upon the lees or dregs of the orders above them, even in some cases
excrementitious matter. The meaning is approached along the line of a peculiar
emblemism. Man’s discarded "astral" shells, so the doctrine teaches,
serve as the models and the animating principles of lower forms of life. Our
"astral" leavings, cast-off clothing, are made to serve as the
feeling souls of inferior creatures. The animal picks up our emotion body and
builds his physical body over it as a model. Man’s part in creative evolution
is far more direct than he imagines. Every phase or grade of life is creative,
to its degree. If this item seems strange, it assuredly is no more so than many
of the almost unbelievable phenomena of physical biology in general in animal
and insect life. Nature has a bigger bag of tricks than we realize. She employs
a vast range of unsuspected and startling methods in the endless repertoire of
her ingenuity. At any rate the fact was so taught in the arcane schools of
occultism, and here in Exodus is a passage directly pointing to it,
since the text can mean nothing intelligible in its literal sense. The seventh
round in all cycles of life in nature is always the epoch at which soul
consummates its work in an organism and retires to its proper level above,
leaving the physical bases of life to stand without further cultivation until
the beginning of the next series of seven rounds. During the retirement the
lower animal self, the "poor," reaps the harvest of its previous
attachment to the higher entity. The ethereal vestures survive, for they are
enduring in proportion to their atomic fineness. We have already equated
"the poor" and also "the people" with the Gentiles, who
were the "sons of men" in contrast to the "Sons of God";
the humans in whom the Christ principle has not yet been made consciously the
ruler.
And the second startling item of
this excerpt asserts that what those "poor" semi-humans leave may be
picked up, in a third order of gradation, by the wild animals. This is
informative indeed. The process
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of divination begins with the
highest God and is relayed, in ever diminishing power, from rank to rank, down
to the animal. Only by living on the lees of the superior order can each
kingdom link itself to its appropriate measure of divine vivification.
By such occult analysis is it
possible to see the meaning of the final hint of danger expressed by the line:
"for if you worship their gods it will endanger you." This work has
already set forth the peril involved for the heavenly visitant in taking
residence in animal forms, if it permitted itself to "worship their
gods" of sensuality and beastliness. A number of passages of scripture
admonish the children of light to "make no compact" with the
"natives" of that realm to which they were sent, nor to marry their
"women"!
The sum of this material which shows
the world to be figuratively "at sixes and sevens" is that conscious
life was in servitude and bondage to blind unintelligent elemental forces for
six aeons, three in the invisible and three in the visible worlds, and was only
lifted up to the liberty of sons of God when the spiritual fire of the
spiritual sun, the second Adam or the Christ, was set in the heavens of man’s
conscious being as the ruler of the six sub-mental powers. In Galatians (4)
Paul clearly states that when we were children in evolution "we were in
bondage to them that by nature are no gods." We were in slavery to the
elementals of the earth and of the air, as he distinctly says! He warns his
brethren not to come under the power of these elementals, as it would endanger
their spiritual integrity.
Stars are closely intermingled with
the fire symbolism. They are themselves fiery in constitution, blazing suns or
their planets. Stars were considered the children of Ra, the great lord of the
spiritual sun, who emaned them like tears from his eyes. Souls were his
offspring, centrally nucleated by his solar fire. He was the parent of the
Kumaras. Stars were held to be a race of higher beings, having souls of the
essence of light coming from the sun. "I have shed my seed (of light)
abroad for you," he says to his sons.11 In the Book of Adam and Eve, translated
from the Ethiopic by Malan, God says: "I made thee of the light, and I
wished to bring out children of the light from three." The sun’s children
were called Ruti, or men of excellence. Under the name of Khabsu the stars are
synonymous with souls, as also in the name of Seb. Souls in Amenta were
represented by stars. As the souls arose in their resurrection they appeared
above the horizon on the eastern
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side of heaven. This is why the
rising star of the solar deity born in mankind was seen "in the east"
in the Gospel story. It dies in the west, like the sun, and has its new birth
in the house of bread (Bethlehem) in the east. The god Shu-Anhur was called the
"lifter up of the sky," together with its inhabitants, the stars. Ra
addresses Shu: "Be the guardian of the multitudes that live in the
nocturnal sky," or sky of the Lower Egypt of Amenta. "Put them on thy
head and be their fosterer," or sustainer. Spiritually this betokens the
elevation of our elemental nature by the shifting of the center of intellectual
and spiritual gravity above the horizon in the heaven of consciousness. The
stars were in fact the bodies of gods, and the lucent fragment of deity in man
is his star.
The Great Bear of seven stars drew
the first circle or cycle of time in the abyss of chaos, and gave definite law,
order and periodicity to the primary creation. From primal elemental disorder,
nature settled down to rhythmic regularity as the beginning of stable order in
her worlds. From blind erratic struggle the elements fell into order in a
septenary mechanism. This was imaged first in the Great Bear, the mother of the
first cycle of regular time and fixed revolutions. This primary cluster in the
sky should never cease to speak to our imagination of the heptarchy of forces
in nature, which are the bases of our lives as well. This mighty fact of
creation was in the mind of the sage who wrote that at the dawn of creation all
the sons of the Elohim shouted for joy and "the Morning Stars sang
together" (Job 38). The music of the spheres began with the first
swing into symmetrical order and balanced harmony between centripetal and centrifugal
energies that had been jangling in confusion and dissonance before the seventh
element, the sun or spirit, gave the six a king. But Plato strangely tells us
that "with the sixth creation ended the order of song." (Philebus,
66.) Coincident with this we are also told that the sixth pole star in
succession passed from the constellation of Lyra, the Harp, to that of
Hercules, the man-god. All these veiled hints have tremendous meaning, for this
would seem to indicate that the soul comes into the order of nature bringing a
power of independent will, which may contravene the mechanical automatism of
nature, break into the rhythm and mar the music--until it learns of itself anew
to fix the measure to a higher harmony. Man’s free agency does inject
either a reasoned or an unreasoned self-initiative into that which was
automatically rhythmic
325
before. In a former reference we
have heard the great Lord himself complain of the spirits who had broken in
upon his celestial music and marred the harmony, for which he threw them down
into incarnation.
The Rubric to chapter 129 of the Ritual
says of the Manes: "And he shall be established as a star face to face
with Septet [Sirius, Sothis, the Dog-Star] and his corruptible body shall be as
a god . . . forever." To deify the human is to make a star of him. The
Manes himself prays (Ch. 102): "Let me be among the stars that never
rest." It is promised (Ch. 164) that "he shall become a star of
heaven." Has orthodoxy held out to its votaries any such thrilling cosmic view
of their future? The Osiris-Nu pleads (Ch. 188): "May I enter into the
house of his body, which, behold, hath become one of the starry gods!"
This would be the higher spiritual body, not the corporeal. It is said to the
soul: "Thou art purified with the libation of the stars. The stars that
never set bear thee up; thou enterest in the place where thy father is, where
Keb [Seb] is . . . thou becomest a soul therein." The soul (Pepi) pleads:
"Make thou this Pepi to be an imperishable star before thee." The
acme of directness is attained in the next statement: "Pepi is a
star." To Teta, the soul, it is said: "Thou seizest the hands of the
imperishable stars . . . for behold thou art one of the gods." "The
imperishable stars follow and minister unto thee." Pepi is addressed:
"Thou art the Great Star; Orion beareth thee on his shoulder. Thou
traversest heaven with Orion, thou sailest through the Tuat with Osiris."
Again: "Pepi takes his seat among you, O ye star gods of the Tuat."
And finally in grand simplicity stands the categorical pronouncement :
"Thy soul is a living star at the head of his brethren." For the six
elementary powers were his natural brothers, of whom he, like Joseph and like
Jesus, was made the chief or head. From brethren they were reduced to children
when the god principle took charge and synthesized their functions. The fiery
soul of intellect became king of the lower six elementary powers in man’s
make-up. The Christos came as the Prince of Peace to rise to kingship
over nature’s six divisions of force. "Unto you a king is given . . . and
his name shall be called . . . the Prince of Peace."
But the soul is specifically typed
by that great and brilliant emblem of our divinity, the Morning Star. The Titan
who came hurtling to earth still clinging to his stolen possession, the
spiritual fire, was Lucifer, "the bright and morning star."
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The significance of this emblem is
in its heralding the approach of day. "The day star is rising." It is
the harbinger of the coming of the great Lord of Day. As the announcer it
becomes identical in function with Anup, the fiery ape in Egypt, Mercury in
Greek mythology, and John Baptist in Christianity. Anup is the way-opener for
the advent of Horus, who, though coming after him, was before him in stature
and authority (Rit., Ch. 44). Anup abode in the dark and empty reaches
of the desert of Amenta until the day of his manifestation in the heliacal
rising of the star Sothis (Sirius), the morning star of the year in Egypt,
which heralded the birth of Horus, as the opening of the year. John dwelt in
the wilderness until the time of his theophany or "showing forth in
Israel" (Luke I:80). The soul was held out in the wilderness of the
six elemental energies until the arrival of the Christ. Anup was only a star
god, but as such he was the precursor of the greater solar light. As the sun in
its splendor far outshines the total galaxy of the stars, so the deity whose
association with man was presaged by the star-god, was far to surpass in glory
any product of the natural series. And this is made clear by the Gospel
statement that the least in the kingdom of the god is greater than the highest
of those born of woman, that is, nature.
The stars typed one of the
elementary creations, of which there seem to have been three, the first being
cosmic and universal, offering a sevenfold differentiation in primal substance;
the second stellar and planetary; the third racial and individual in mankind.
Much of the endless confusion in the interpretation of creation legends has
arisen because of failure to distinguish which of these creations was being
dealt with. What is fundamental, however, to all understanding is that all of
nature’s cyclic processes are typical of each other. So that cosmogenesis
adumbrates the planetary formation, which in turn is an enlarged picture of the
anthropogenesis. As man was formed in the image and likeness of the Elohim, the
seven-rayed creative Logoi, the septenary constitution pictured in the first
and second creations appertains to him by reflection. All ancient philosophy
referable to man was built upon the human constitution as a septenate of
powers. We see the first creation in the hebdomadal formation of all physical
creation; the second in the septenary solar systems; the third in the human
formed of seven principles or natures. Of the first the Mother alone, the
Virgin, Achamoth, Typhon, Apt, Nut, Neith, Isis, Hathor, Rerit,
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Ishtar, Tiamat, Semiramis, Cybele
and other primary feminine deities become the bearer and producer. Of the
second Sevekh (Sebek, Seb), Saturn, and the Sun, as the leader of the seven
Rishis, Archangels, Elohim, Kabiri, were the progenitors. Of the third the
twelve legions of Asuras, Kumaras, Titans, Deva-Angels, Rudras, Adityas, who
came collectively as Prometheus and Lucifer, individually as sons of the solar
radiance, sons of Ra, or sparks of the divine fire, were the chief agents. They
still supervise their continuing creation from their citadel deep within the
shrine of man’s life. In one form or another, solar light, essence, power is
centered in every manifestation. In the innermost sanctuary of life dwells the
spark, the ray, the flame of solar glory. The sun is the central type and
embodiment of the highest divinity. The Christs were all sun-gods.
In the Kabalah the vital statement
is found that in each solar system the soul in its aeonial round dwells
successively on six planes and spends its seventh aeon on the sun of that
system. This is after the analogy of the soul in the human body, for there it
successively energizes, from lowest to highest, the six elemental physical
ranges of power, and six sub-spiritual psychic centers, before it ascends into
the supreme flowering of the solar fire in the head.
Sirius, otherwise Sothis and Septet,
being the morning star in the mythos, etymologically supplies another
significant link in the story. Septet is another form of the word
"seven." The six natural forces were completed and synthesized by the
coming of the seventh. The morning star heralded the perfection of the
sevenfold creation as it announced the coming of the crowning glory. This
Sirius, the Dog-Star, was the type of Anup, the dog or jackal god, as the guide
of souls in the dark of night, or incarnation. "The star Sept (Sothis)
with long strides leads on the celestial path of Ra each day, and the blessed
one rises as a star." The star precedes Ra, the sun in man. Of Pepi it is
written: "His sister is Sept (Sothis), he is born as the Morning Star
(Venus)." And again: "His sister, the star Sept (Sothis), his guide,
the Morning Star, takes him by the hand to Sekhet-Hetep." Usually women,
in the mythology, are the guides, protectors and watchers of the sun-god in the
mythology, as they are the natural bearers, rearers and watchers of the human
infant, until his own divinity arises. As the feminine always types the natural
as distinct from the spiritual, the religious myth depicts the youthful solar god
as being born of woman,
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cradled, watched and nourished by
women, type of the elementary forces. The god comes to be born, nursed and
nurtured in the lap of Mother Nature. But he must leave her at twelve!
In one place the text of the Ritual
says, as to Pepi: "The Morning Star giveth birth to him." In
another it says: "Pepi giveth birth to the Morning Star." The
apparent contradiction is a matter of viewpoint, or a matter like the priority
of hen or egg. Did John the Baptist bring Jesus, or Jesus John? John himself
solves the riddle by saying: "He who cometh after me is preferred before
me." The star brings the dawn, but the dawn also brings the star. Of the
coming god, as of the Christ, the Ritual says: "His light appeareth
in the sky like that of a great star, the Morning Star." And again:
"Thou revolvest about Ra, near the Morning Star." The Manes is
instructed: "Command thou that he is to sit by thee, on the shoulders of
the Morning Star on the horizon." Following the statement that heaven is
pregnant with wine, it is said that "Nut maketh herself to give birth to
her daughter, the Morning Star." And immediately follows the exhortation
to the soul: "Rise up thou, then, O Pepi, thou third Septet (Sothis),
whose seats are purified." Calling Pepi the "third Septet" bears
out fully what has just been expounded as to the three creations, each
sevenfold in organization, the last being that of septenary man. That the god
in his coming was to enter the waters of incarnation and the mires of earth is
betokened by the following: "He places thee like the Morning Star in the
fields of Reeds (Sekhet-Aarru)."
Numbers (24:17) predicts that "there shall come
a star out of Jacob." As the Gnostic Jesus of Revelation (22:16)
himself declares: "I am the root and offspring of David, and the bright
and Morning Star." And the angel promises in Revelation (2:28), to
him that overcometh "I will give the Morning Star." This comes as the
seventh of a series of promises "to him that overcometh."
The frequent use of the censer in Revelation
is to be noticed. Seven angels had given to them seven censers, containing
the fire from the altar of God within the innermost place, which the seven were
to cast upon the earth! Here is the basic allegory again in small compass. In
the Logia these details are preceded by the announcement: "And I
beheld yet another sign in the heavens, which was marvelous in its
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meaning and great in its
issues!" Surely; for it was the story of the deification of the human
race. The burning of incense, a very general custom in religious observance in
the world, runs parallel in meaning to keeping alive the Vestal Fire. In the Old
Testament all cereal was to be mixed with oil and sprinkled with incense--a
double seal of divinity. The Manes is addressed in the Ritual: "Thou
art pure with the incense of Horus." Again we read" "Incense is
presented unto thee, thou becomest God." One becomes a god only by the
gift of that higher fire that purges the lower nature and refines it to true
gold. And this gold is the immortal solar light. The words for gold, light and
deity all derive from the same original root, "ar," "aur,"
"or."
Lightning, a great sacred symbol of
the outflashing of the power of God on earth, was often pictured as
seven-barbed. This usage establishes it definitely as a figure for the
seven-forked emanation that engendered the creation. It is the type of a fiery
power resident in latent form in the air and water elements. So the god is
latent in the water of physical nature. The swift power of the fiery dart was
typical of the "swift-running" power of deity, for the Greek word for
god, theos, means the "swift-darter." In Assyria Tiamat,
mother of "seven sons of the abyss," wielded a seven-speared
thunderbolt, typifying her children, as powers. The highest of the seven is
lightning by name. In Africa some tribes have a word for divinity which
translates "lightning." Many peoples had thunder-gods, and the Bible
is full of allusions to thunder. The fiery dart of Intelligence into the bosom
of the worlds produces or carries the Voice of the Logos out into nature, in
seven primary tones. The Hebrew male god of thunder, Kak, or Iach, probably
equates with the Hindu Vach, the Word. As the forerunner and prophet of rain,
the thunder held the office of Mercury and Anup, the announcers of divine
advent.
Even embers and sparks are not
slighted in the typism. We have the ancient Egyptian tale of Cinderella, the
"sitter in the ashes," embers or cinders. Sitting in her lonely hutch
on earth by the dead embers of the fire, she is the soul come to desolation on
earth, stripped of her fire. But she surpasses her sisters and fits herself to
be dight with radiance again. The flame that ramifies out in seven tongues is
the original figure of the seven-branched candlestick. Deity comes to earth to
manifest himself in seven flaming aspects of his being. And still stand the
great ancient pyramids, the word by etymology reading "a
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measure of (creative) fire,"
with square base and triangular upper faces, the four and the three united to
constitute the sevenfold physical structure of the worlds and man, and
multiplied to constitute the twelve deific powers to be unfolded by spiritual
humanity.
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Chapter XV
NOXIOUS
FUMES AND LURID FLARES
It has been necessary to anticipate
the substance of this chapter in one or two places in the preceding one,
because many important statements so closely link the two fires, the supernal
and the infernal, that it was impossible to present the one in entire
disseverance from the other. The background for the clarification of this
aspect of the interpretation has therefore already been set up. Yet the whole
doctrine of "hell-fire" has fallen so infinitely remote from even the
outskirts of true understanding that it must be grappled with in good earnest.
The deplorable state of modern exegesis in this segment of theology impels one
to a vehement expression of that disgust at the harrowing grotesquerie of
rendering which a comparison of ancient esoteric meaning with current
superstition so readily excites. But this situation must be evident by now as a
general matter, and should need but little reinforcement beyond the continued
revelation of gaping chasms of difference between the old and the present
readings. Yet this theology of a hell of fiery torment has suffered such an
unconscionable distortion from its primary bearing, and has afflicted the mind
of mankind with so outrageous a delusion, that every consideration points to
the necessity of a vigorous handling in the interests of sanity and social benefit.
The perversion of original teaching regarding the lower fire has cast over the
collective mind of the Western world the foulest hypnotic obsession which it
has ever suffered. The strangling tentacles of this theological devil-fish have
spread over the whole of Christendom and have compressed the spiritual genius
of that segment of mankind into the coldest and most inhuman bigotry known to
history. For ages the doctrine in its misconceived form has deprived the
Christianized world of its reason, and opened doors to the entry of every
superstition. It has snuffed out the native spark of human brotherhood and
brought between man and man the lurid glare of its own devilish mischief.
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For the fiercest fires of
persecution and fiendish cruelty ever lighted upon earth flared out under the
impulsion of the fantastic theological teaching that the acts of one’s brother
may be the impious machination of "the devil." It is too gruesome and
ghoulish a chapter of horrors to linger upon; yet the same philosophical benightedness
out of which this atrocious monster of diabolism and demonism has emerged has
never to this day been dispelled by the light of wisdom. A more sensitive
humanity of the present, sickened by the ghastly spectacle of past tortures and
holocausts inspired by fiendish zeal, has tried to drop the subject as far as
possible out of sight, and has imposed a taboo upon its exploitation in
religious quarters. But the darkness has not been dissipated, and the monster
is still capable, on provocation, of glaring fiercely out of the murks. The
light that would have enabled the Christian world to descry the Beast in his
true outlines and character has never been rekindled since it was extinguished
about the third century. Had that light been available it would have revealed
that the fiery dragon of the pit was none other than the god himself, his face
begrimed with smoke, his features distorted by the grimaces of the Beast
through whose eyes he looked out upon this strange world, and his countenance
luridly alight with the smudgy flare of the earthly furnace. Milton’s lakes of
seething fire in Paradise Lost are a travesty of truth, unless taken
purely as the symbology they are. For Satan is the god himself--on earth! This
broad assertion is incontestable. It is proven by the very name. The descending
god was the Light-bringer, Lucifer, the bright and morning star, which is
precisely the character assumed by the Jesus of the Biblical Revelation! The
Christian devil, the hated serpent of evil, Satan, is Lucifer, the god of light
on earth, Prometheus, the "benefactor of mankind,"--"the
god" himself.
Indoctrinated orthodoxy may rise to
protest the identification. Some ghastly mistake will be alleged in the
philology. It will be in vain. Erudite theology has at times perhaps known the
truth, but has kept an advised silence. The general mind has lost the key to
the mystery. By dropping the name Lucifer and clinging to that of Satan alone,
the mischief has been bred and perpetuated. That Satan and Jesus are identical
is as true as that Sut and Horus in Egypt are twins! The god and devil are
kindred. They are full brothers. Their mother is one. They are the two aspects
or manifestations of the same force. It may be said that the evil character is
the good seen in reversed reflec-
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tion on earth. For an ancient
esoteric adage in Latin ran: DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS, "the devil is the
god turned upside down." Satan is the god in incarnation; or he is the god
as he appears after his nature has been diffracted in its passage through the
blurred medium of earth life. The devil is the god transformed into a being of
reduced power, blunted moral sense, befogged intellect and forgotten glory. He
is the god bemired with the slime of carnal generation, beset with the strong
sensuous and sexual urge of the brute. In short, he is the divine soul
entangled in the bestial nature and himself lending more fiery intensity to the
impulses of the body by his vitalizing presence!
The genesis of what is called
"evil" may perhaps be dialectically derivable from the fundamental
premises of thought. But the origin of evil in reference to man’s specific
cosmic situation is a particular problem, only to be determined by full
knowledge of this situation. As the world does not possess such knowledge in full
measure, the great problem is enveloped in some obscurity.
But the sages of the early dawn
vouchsafed a portion of this knowledge deemed sufficient to yield to reflection
an intelligent comprehension of the issues involved and a philosophic attitude
toward them. The rank of the gods sent to earth, their endowments and
capabilities, their attitude toward their mission, their obligation in relation
to past dereliction, and the implications of their tenanting the animal bodies
assigned to them, were broadly revealed to the initiates and theodidaktoi of
an early period. With all these interests and relations the connotations of the
term "evil" are intimately concatenated. This knowledge, elaborated
to much detail, was the treasure of the Mystery Societies and Brotherhoods, and
formed the esoteric motivation of their regimes of discipline, instruction and
consecration. The modern revival of interest in this mine of truth has not yet
recovered all that has slipped away. The uncertainty about some of the major premises
is supplemented by the additional difficulty of determining which of the two
phases of the representative figures, Satan, Lucifer, Apap, Sut, Typhon, the
serpent, the dragon, the beast, is being emphasized in the numberless myths and
legends. And there is the ever-present doubleness of the meaning of the
symbols, making it difficult to know whether the higher or the lower aspect is
meant. But enough hints are provided usually to enable scholarship to work with
intelligence upon the material.
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The origin of evil is indeed the
mystery of our life. It is inwrought with the key situation of humanity. The
arising of evil in a system of total and absolute good is indeed a riddle that
taxes the best effort of brain and heart. The difficulty, however, has been
made by the mistaken common assumption that Good is absolute, that is, good as
conceived in human ideation, good in its specific human relevance. The Supreme
God has been called the Good, and this has been misleading. Good can only be
absolute if evil is also absolute, and this can not be, since there can not be
two different and opposing absolutes. The absolute is beyond good and evil
alike. There is an abstract and detached conception of good which the mind can
predicate of the entire scheme of things, to posit which, however, would
require our saying that that which is beyond both good and evil is the good.
Yet such a declaration is dialectically impossible, because that which we would
characterize as good is beyond all character. Descriptive statements about it
are empty sound. It is not within the scope of any predication whatever. The
ultimate is neutral to us always.
It only becomes either good or bad
to us when it ceases to be absolute and relates itself to itself as spirit and
matter, positive and negative, male and female, light and dark. And, be it
proclaimed in clarion tones, the whole matter of the theological bogie of the
devil, or incarnate evil, arose solely from the miscarriage of the dramatic
necessity of ascribing an adverse, opposing and relatively evil
character to the negative or material pole of life force! The bifurcation of
the Unmanifest into the two nodes of being to become manifest threw both poles
in contrariety and opposition to each other. The spiritual, or active and
conscious end came to be represented as the "good" and the inert and
negative material end carried the dramatic imputation of the "evil."
The two can never step out of their poised interrelation with each other, since
they have existence only in the terms of such relation. They are only and
always relative to each other. Good and evil have no human meaning outside the
terms of a counterpoise with each other. Each gets its characterization by
virtue of its being not what the other is, being its diametric opposite. Each
gains what it possesses of substantiality and character from being the reflex
of the other. Good is Not-evil and evil is the Not-good.
Manifestation of life comes only
through the tension between the
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two modalities, because it requires
just such a stress to awaken latent consciousness to open awareness. Actuality
comes to birth only at the central point of contact between the subjective and
the objective worlds. If life does not establish the countervalence between its
two opposite aspects, it remains unconscious. The friction between spirit and
matter is the ground of life’s ultimate or at least increased
self-consciousness. So the soul comes to this earth to partake of the fruit of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Evil is therefore one of its
two essential conditions for normal growth and expansion. A sagacious view of
philosophical archai, therefore, perceives "evil" in its true
light, and once and forever lifts from off its imputed entifications in
religion all stigma and bad odor. At the same time it apprehends its role in
the drama, in which it plays the part of the "adversary," "the
opposer," of the active building power of life. This is the role that has
all to easily become misunderstood for one of absolute evil, when it should
have been judiciously envisaged as but relative, and as conducive to the
awakening of the positive energies of life itself. For without the necessity of
exerting itself and deploying its as yet unawakened powers to overcome the
opponent’s resistance and inertia, the divine seed would continue to slumber on
in unconscious ignorance of its own capabilities. It awakes its dormant giant
potentialities by "overcoming the adversary."
This is the heavy role of the villain
in every play. He is the foil. He acts as the stepping-stone over which the
hero strides to victory. His dark designs make the hero’s virtue shine out the
brighter by contrast. He furnishes the dark background against which the
conqueror’s exploits stand out in relief.
Hence that which in human and
worldly affairs wears all the outward appearance of evil--defeat, disaster,
loss, crime, treachery--is to be seen only as good under a disguise. It
subserves a karmic purpose,--the challenging of some hidden power to come awake
and rouse itself to function. Later on, its hidden beneficence is seen, and we
say: Now I know why that happened; without it I would never have gained what I
now possess. So "evil" is good under a mask. The villain is our other
self in masquerade. If we could at the moment tear off his false face, we would
see him as the lovely fairy, ready to transform us into something nobler.
It is the antithesis of good and
evil, our experience with both wings
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of the bird of life, and the
resultant deposit of wisdom in our own interior vehicle of consciousness, that
gives us ultimately our cognition of values. And in the finale this valuation
overleaps mere characterization as either good or bad. We are balanced between
the two in order to transcend them both. The child unites characteristics of
both its parents and carries life forward one step higher.
The gist of the matter is that
value--which should not be thought of as good in contradistinction to evil, but
as evolutionary gain--can not be brought to birth unless good is opposed by
evil; and evil is just this opposition. It is in every sense except that of
immediate human estimate of it entirely necessary, salutary and beneficent. But
no one can calculate the untold volume of wretchedness that has been heaped up
in world history by the frightful miscarriage of this basic understanding. For
the mass mind was overridden by the assignment to "evil" of a
positive character, reifying it into a living bogie, and was in the last stage
of gross literalization devastated by its personification in an actual
"devil." The transmogrification of this dramatic personage into the
realistic bogieman to harass millions of earth’s simple-minded children by
Christendom is perhaps the crowning disservice which a distorted theology has
rendered its unenlightened devotees.
Our sense of evil only arises
because of our imperfect vision. As Paul said, we now see life in part and
through a glass darkly. If we could see it whole, we would see all things in
their proper place in the large picture, and hence in their beneficence. More
piercing vision would penetrate the mask of evil and reveal it as good. But our
sense of evil, and our reactions to it, are part of the cost of our growth.
They are the terms and conditions under which we advance to larger
appreciations. The apparent evil is part of the path we must tread to reach
values beyond. Evil may be said to be episodical, an incident along the way, as
life marches on. Seen out of proportion and relation it assumes its grim aspect.
And what is sin? Again has a baleful
theology terrorized the minds of millions with an apparition that is as
unsubstantial as the bugaboo of evil. Again it is a normal and natural phase of
the evolutionary situation which has been wrested from its balanced meaning in
the dramatic typology and turned into a thing of psychological terrorism. Sin
is in brief nothing but the "lust for life" itself, and the appetency
and zest of the higher soul for the life of flesh and sense, through
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which alone it can become creative
in new generations. Sin is the entangling of the entified spirits in the laws
and nature and motivations of the flesh, not to add the world and "the
devil," and its free indulgence in the play of its creative powers through
and upon these elementary forces. Sin is the spirit’s subjection of itself to
the dominance of these proclivities to an inordinate or disproportionate
degree. The Cycle of Necessity draws it down into their domain and makes it for
a time and in a measure subject to their sway. Whether duly or unduly
influenced by them, its submergence under their power is what the ancient drama
pictured as sin.
At least one philosopher has kept
his vision of this portrayal true and steady. Plotinus declares that if the
soul keeps her eye fixed steadily on the star of her higher self, "she
need not regret having become acquainted with evil or knowing the nature of
vice," and having had the opportunity of manifesting her creative
faculties through her conjunction with the body. This is grandly refreshing
amid the welter of corrupted philosophies berating and belaboring the life of
sense with the stigma of evil and the curse. The latter have grown up in the
wake of a morbid religionism turned ascetic when the lighter play of drama was
burdened with the lugubrious weight of misconceived ideas of sin and the devil.
A portion or degree of cosmic divine
spirit was to become creative in man, and was sent here to try its intellectual
powers upon a formative work. It had thence to show its lordship over the
elements and the matter with which creative intelligence had to work. It had to
be thrown in strategic relation to the world of matter at its appropriate place
and station. Like both Jesus and Jonah, it had to be thrown into the
"sea," to subdue its ungoverned raging. It had then to take charge of
the seven lower furies and range them under its higher command. The unregulated
play of these subordinate and irrational forces of sense in the field of life,
once the god had plunged into their milieu, is sin. It is powerful at first and
for a long time, until the soul gradually rises to assert its kingship over the
seven heads of the Beast. It is only admissibly evil--and then still in a
relative sense--when it usurps the prerogatives of the lord, unhinges the
balance between the two forces, and becomes grossly immoderate and libertine.
Only when the soul, still not wide awake and vigilantly in control, permits the
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lower animality to rule
inordinately, is it sin in the mawkish theological sense of shame and
remorsefulness.
To help a world lift itself out from
under the darksome shadow of gloomy moroseness, induced by twisted theologies,
into the brighter day of clearer comprehension, it may be said that the general
mind must grasp once again the basic deific motif in creation, to begin with.
As set forth just now, "sin" has its rise in the desire of life to
become parent of each new cycle of recurrent creation. Spirit and matter must
woo, win and wed each other; and their copulation, envisaged through the medium
of a diseased human view of sexual relation, became tinged with the stains of
moral baseness. This is the psychological genesis of the interpretation so long
foisted upon the "fall" of Adam and Eve "into carnal sin."
Physical parenthood has long borne the stigma of some remote spiritual
transgression, and still the shadow of social and universal shame clings to it.
A great modern cult, and some of its offshoots, have expressly stressed the
possibility of regaining the Edenic spiritual creation of human beings without
resort to the physical mode of procreation. And of course the Immaculate
Conception and Virgin Birth doctrines have been haloed about with intimations
of the same sort. This is all, however, the result of incomprehension turning
charming and luminously suggestive typology into crass realism.
Why does God create? Why is he not
content to enjoy his exalted position in endless contemplation of his own
perfection? As far as human cognition can rise to conceive of it, God’s motive
in creation announced in the old books, is Lila, translated "the
sport of the gods," "the delight of God." The highest joy and
sweetest preoccupation of work. As man reflects deity, it may be known from
this datum that God’s highest pleasure comes from his creative labors.
He creates for the sport and the joy of it. He first thinks out (in Plato’s
"archetypal ideas") what sort of universe he will build, and then
proceeds to reap the delight of seeing it grow under his hands. "The sea
is his for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land." His reveling in
creation does not stop at his ideal conception of prospective worlds; like the
true artisan, he must realize the satisfaction of seeing them take form in the
concrete. Plastic matter, susceptible to every breath of creative impulse, is
his potter’s clay. God comes out of his noumenal world
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to enjoy a period of activity in the
realm of sense. Having thought long enough of his projected creation, he now
wills to emerge onto the field of physical activity and bring it into
substantial reality. He longs to feel the play of elemental energies through
his vast physical frame. Any man yearning to rise from sedentary occupation and
brain work to experience the "feel" of muscular activity outdoors, is
a sufficient analogue. The opposition, tension and zest for the game are
provided by the playing forces on the two teams of matter and spirit. The game
or battle will yield him adequate thrills, since in it he will find coming to
function still unevolved latencies of his own measureless being. Each act will
enhance his sense of power and glory. That he may live again and enjoy a new
joust with matter he must plunge his nucleated units of consciousness into a
state of "death" and burial in material inertia. Paul asks if this is
evil; and his own answer, overlooked and never understood, must become the
keynote of a new world attitude to life: "Never! The law was holy, just
and altogether righteous."
There is evidence that the word
"sin" has derivations and connections of the most momentous import.
Some of these are astonishing. In the first place "Sin" was a name
for "the mount of the moon." Arcane books speak of the incarnating
souls as having fallen into the moon, and earth is still called the
"sublunary sphere." This has immediate links with pertinent meaning,
since the lower aspects of man’s nature, his two lower bodies, the
"astral" and physical, have been built up over the "astral"
molds left by the retreating race of men on the moon chain of evolution. Since
the spirit plunges into the lower man, the belly of death, it may aptly
be said to fall into the mount of the moon. The soul fell into "Sin"
or landed on "Mt. Sin."
But another etymology falls in here
with unexpected force. The lower physical and emotional half of man’s constitution
is, in its relation to physical nature, typed in ancient tomes by "the
woman." The lower nature, that holds the soul in material bondage, is
specifically dramatized by the character of Hagar, the concubine of Abraham,
significantly dubbed "the bond-woman." To "her" we are in
bondage. There is very definite connection between this name Hagar and the
Agar, or Akar, or Aker, which was the name for the tunnel of the underworld
through which incarnating souls had to pass from the rear (material) end of the
Sphinx forward to the front (spiritual) end or
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head. The materials are now ready
for St. Paul to use in making for us a startling weaving of the several
etymological strands into a thread of great strength. For in Galatians (4:24
ff) he makes a positive identification of Mt. Sinai with Hagar (Agar): "Which
things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the
mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is
mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in
bondage with her children." To call a woman a mountain, and that localized
in a specific country on the map, for once clearly shatters all possible
literalism or historicism in the verse. But beyond that it throws into relation,
likely that of identity, the two mountains Sin and Sin-ai. Sinai is derived (by
Massey) from the Egyptian senai, sheni, meaning "point of turning
and returning," and almost surely refers to that point where life strikes
a balance between the forces of involution and evolution in the cosmic
"solstice." In its descent spirit reaches the nadir point in the
depths of matter, is held in a state of exact equilibrium with it--the
"pool of equipoise" of the Egyptians--experiences its new birth of
life from this relation, and then turns to return to the Father above. The name
Sinai, then, is most revelatory. All communication with deity, all revelation
of deity to man, must occur on this Mount Sinai, when the feet of the woman
clothed with the sun rest upon the moon, or lower part of man’s organic
structure. So Moses (man) ascends into the mount to receive the commandments of
the law and the dicta of the Lord. And Jesus ascends into the same Mount to
deliver his sermon unto mortal men. This whole situation is of strategic
importance for the entire theme and must be unfolded at length in later
connections.
Evil and sin must be cleared of
their theological accretions of gruesomeness and morbid sentimentalism. They
were involvements of the evolutionary predicament which, under the ruses and
resources of dramatic representation, became tinged with darksome psychological
hues and inspired a volume of unnatural effort to mortify the human part of our
nature. Whole generations of children, taught by literal-minded parents and tutors,
imbibed the idea that in the universe there was a deity, dividing power equally
with God, who was wholly bent on defeating the good, and who must be resisted,
if life is to be "saved." Back of this miscarriage, as back of all
absurd popular religious notions, lurks the great truth, that Life has divided
its powers between
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spirit and matter, and that all
growth is the outcome of the "war" between these two energies.
Clearly apprehended in a philosophical view, this is knowledge of high verity,
knowledge that stabilizes the mind with a grasp on the ultimate beneficence of
the scheme. On the other hand the popular distortion of it is a horrendous
fallacy, devastating to faith in the salutary operation of cosmic law. Between
the two there is the whole vast gulf of the difference between sanity and
composure and the practical certainty of a monstrous dementia.
The devil is just the god on earth;
and how the radiant son of the morning, bright angelic Lucifer, became
transmogrified into the dour person of Satan is a matter of deepest concern for
religion and for humanity. This problem could have been solved readily enough
if the Western mind had not lost the data for thinking. Logic can not proceed
when the due premises are wanting. These lie buried in forgotten books dealing
with cosmology and anthropology. To supply them again to modern reflection is a
major purpose of this work.
The basic item is the duality of man
as the result of the incarnation. Evil arises from the union in one organism of
brute and god. When the god stepped in, the potentiality of evil was
engendered. Evil could not arise from animal alone; paradoxically, it awaited
the coming of the god. The animal is unmoral, incapable of either morality or
immorality. He has no sense of good and evil. He has not eaten of the fruit of
the tree of good and evil. The "god" in man is the first being in
evolution who steps out from under the law of natural automatism and periodical
regularity, and assumes his training in the art of balancing consciously
discerned forces of evil and good. He came into the flesh for the very purpose
of opening his eyes (Cf.: "and their eyes were opened" in Genesis)
and seeing consciously how to weigh his action in the balance between the two
poles of life. He came to eat of the fruit of the tree. While the beast was
unmoral, the god was morally capable, but innocent. He had to learn grace by
contacting guilt. He had to win his right to the enjoyment of good by
overcoming evil. "To him that overcometh shall all things be given,"
but not to divine souls that would rather dream away their existence in
mystical bliss in the empyrean. Without warfare with evil the soul would never
come into cognition of its own capacities. As Plotinus affirms, "she would
not know what she possesses," and her faculties would never receive their
development. Nature could not become productive until it had
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thrown its opposing forces into the
duality of spirit and matter, positive and negative, and provided thus the
basis for experience. Consciousness can not come to self-consciousness unless
the subjective aspect is confronted with the objective. Spirit and matter are
helpless, or rather, as Plotinus adds, are really non-existent, until they
interact in "opposition." It is this "opposition" that
stabilizes them in relation to each other. Monism is a true philosophy
applicable only before and after the worlds are! It takes both Nux and Lux
to make life conscious. And virtue can not be won except as the laurel
wreath for victory over vice.
The opening of the eyes in the
creation allegory is the dramatic typing of man’s awakening to his first
glimpse of self-consciousness. It marks the distinguishing insignium of man’s
superior position above the beast. It marks the line of his evolutionary
passover. At this point man stepped over the greatest boundary line in all the
universe of life. He passed out of the sway of the unconscious mindless
energies of nature, the "sub-conscious mind" of cosmic deity, and
became, albeit at the lowest level, a sharer with God in his conscious creative
intelligence. He stepped across the line from the kingdom of bondage to the
natural mindless forces into potential rulership of them. He ceased being the son
of Hagar, the bond-woman, and became the son of Sarah, the free-woman. He
became, collectively, children of the promise and of the adoption, sons and
heirs of the Father. He stepped from bondage under the law to the possible
"liberty of the sons of God." Liberty! The animal can not sin; man
can. He has this freedom! He may choose--good or evil. But he must face the
consequences. These are the terms of his evolutionary education. The good or
evil consequences would instruct him. Choose he well or badly, karmic
compensation would advise. But his new freedom was his highest prerogative, his
badge of incipient divinity. That he was prone, of necessity, to make many bad
choices until his karmic education had sobered and enlightened him is indicated
from a most significant passage from Plotinus:
"They began to revel in free
will; they indulged in their own movement; they took the wrong path. Then it
was that they lost the knowledge that they sprang from that divine order. They
no longer had a true vision of the Supreme or of themselves. Smitten with
longing for the lower, rapt in
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love of it, they grew to depend upon
it; so they broke away as far as they were able."
This tells the whole story of
whatever there is intrinsic in the perverted idea of the "fall." It
was just the fall of the child learning to walk! It was nothing but the
floundering of ignorant innocence before it has grown wise through trial and
error. It was inherent in the very conditions of the evolutionary situation. It
was more or less inevitable. And its "evil" consequences were to be
absorbed in the vicissitudes of later experience, as the follies of youth are
ironed out in subsequent larger vision and more steady conduct.
The god brought the possibility of
"evil" with him on his arrival. He came to suffer many things,
because his coming threw a stable and orderly evolution temporarily into an
unstable one. The animal was bound to a fixed order in nature, whose unvarying
laws left him no choice, no freedom to deviate. The god came to get practice in
the use of freedom to break through this order and win independent creative
facility for himself. And he was incidentally to impart to the animal in whose
body he lived that part of his new found knowledge that he managed to make
habitual, or transferred by the force of repetition over to the sub-conscious,
which is the animal’s highest conscious self. For he was, along with his
own education, to help the animal bridge the gulf between its kingdom and the
human.
But he threw a disturbance into a
condition that had previously been equilibrated and stable. He introduced free
choice and variant procedure into the hitherto inerrant course of the animal’s
behavior. He could break natural routine, initiate new tentative and note the
result. A god who could not do evil is a marionette, not a god. There is no
merit in compulsory good. Reward must come with victory. Trial and error was to
result in knowledge, which therefore could not be its antecedent or concomitant
at the start.
Wisdom is a resultant, a deposit, a
crystallization of fluid elements. Freedom began with ignorance in order to end
in wisdom. Freedom and blunder were means to an end. The smooth harmony of
natural law was bound to be thrown, for a time, into discord. This is the
meaning behind the rebel angels’ breaking in upon the harmony of the great
God’s festival song with raucous shouts, which may be seen
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possibly as their riotous exultation
at the prospect of a new freedom never enjoyed before, like schoolboys let out
for a holiday, as Plotinus paints it.
While the god was thus to be buried
in the very belly of the great Abtu fish, his immunity from complete drowning
and loss of his deific life was provided for. It is hinted at in various
typographs. He was to be protected, as Plato says, like an oyster in its shell.
He was as the fish in the water, that would be able to breathe even under the
water. Again he was shown as learning to walk on the water without sinking into
its depths. The Ritual of Egypt speaks of his being immersed in the
water of the underworld, but hovering over, the water; or in it as to his body,
but aloof from it as to his soul. The latter is especially prominent in the Ritual
for the "dead." More than one passage repeats that while "my
dead body lies in the grave, my soul is in heaven." "Thy material
body liveth in Tattu and in Nif-urtet, and thy soul liveth in heaven each
day." "Heaven holdeth thy soul, O Osiris Auf-ankh, and earth holdeth
thy form" (Ch. 163). "Thy soul is in heaven, and thy body is under
ground" (Ch. 169). "Ra grasps his hands, a spirit in heaven, a body
on earth." "Thy water is in heaven; thy solid parts are on the
earth." "The Sun-god," writes Massey, "whether as Atum-Iu
or Osiris-Ra, is a mummy in Amenta and a soul in heaven."
These passages are of great value.
Particularly should the one be noted which says that "thy material body liveth
in Tattu" while the soul lives in heaven. This forestalls, the likely
argument that these passages refer to the ordinarily deceased person, whose
body is in the ground (if not cremated) while his soul has gone to heaven. The
deeper meaning here is that man actually inhabits two worlds at once. He is in
heaven by virtue of his divine consciousness; he is on earth through his
physical body.
All this situation was part of a larger
divine plan. The god was to touch the tip of the head or inchoate mental
faculty of the animal with the flame of his intellect, but not further embrace
the animal’s life. He was to light the wick of intelligence for the lower
being. He was to kindle a fire in the body, but not be burned thereby. But it
is said that the waywardness of the gods pretty badly marred the progress of
the work. As a group they had bound themselves under a covenant to do the work
promptly and return. But earth currents overwhelmed
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them, swept them into forgetfulness,
and they truly lost their divine heads and were carried down into sensuous life
and sexual procreation. The passage from Plotinus tells why the first essay of
Phaëthon to drive the chariot of the Sun resulted in a wild orgy of
uncontrolled movement. The seven charges drawing the chariot proved
unmanageable for the untested powers of the young god. He gave himself to the
delight of a wild revel in the sensual enjoyment of life, and the thrill of
adventure tingled through his blood as he indulged his fancy in free creational
direction of energies. His drive was outward, and he threw himself into the
interests of the lower vehicle. And here lurks the rationale of his changed
character from Lucifer to Satan. In drama he was pictured as in part the author
of evil when he lent his own superior forces and faculties to the virile
energies of the beast. He threw the added power of his own dynamism into the
life of animal man. This is the evil aspect of his kindling a fire on earth, or
in the sea around the earth. He in fact kindled a fiercer fire under the
caldron containing the water of life and the animal ingredients of the lower
human constitution, and raised the potentials of all the elemental appetencies.
Into the hellish brew went the qualities of the creatures of earth, of the
water and of night--the bat, the owl, the toad, the lizard, the newt, the
snake; of herbs gathered under the light of waning moon; of every noxious and
venomous thing; and under it all burned the fire of the god! Around flitted the
three witches, the masquerading earthly forms, feminine and material, of the
three divine principles of mind-soul-spirit, the solar triad, poking the fire.
And as they revel around the eerie scene, the fire burns and the caldron
bubbles, brewing the double toil and trouble for god and man; but all the while
the broth is being transformed into its spiritual sublimation, so that it
returns to heaven as vapor, in the midst of which the geni can be seen taking
form. So the animal ingredients are transformed and lifted up in the burning
lake.
In mutual interplay god and animal
accentuate each other’s potential energies. In a sense the god makes a worse
hell of this nether pit of Tophet, for he plays a part in the degradation of
the beast. An excerpt from the Codex Nazareus seems to confirm this
delineation:
"He himself will captivate the
sons of men by the allurements of cunning delusions and will imbue them with
blood and monthly pollution."
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Yet both parties find an enhancement
of their range and powers of consciousness through the struggle. But
traditional figures of the Satanic personage have taken form and clung to
popular fancy out of the allegorical depictions of the cosmic scene. The god,
plunged into the hell of body, was painted as plying his fierce labor in
mingling his higher fire with the lower elementary fury, stoking the furnace
with the fuel of his pride, rebellion and lust for sense, and enjoying with the
animal the mutual exchange of their polarized forces. Fantasy sets up the
portrait--his body reeking with sweat (Cf. the bloody sweat of Gethsemane), his
countenance grimy and lurid in the glare of the fire made murky with the
commingled smoke, steam, ashes and soot (Sut) arising from his effort to "burn"
the damp green material. This is the ancient picture drawn by high poetic
fancy to convey the recondite philosophical principles actually involved; and
the failure of heavy ignorant zealotry to catch its fanciful import has cost a
crass civilization centuries of woe. The Logia speak in no uncertain
terms of this tradition:
"There was one who reigned over
them all, even the Star of the Morning, which had fallen upon the earth,
Lucifer, but they named him Abaddon, for he was the Destroyer."
Here was in fact proud Lucifer,
rebel against the too long protracted passivity of life in the higher worlds,
come to earth, baptized in the waters of the Jordan River on the boundary
between the two kingdoms, kindling a fire in the water itself, throwing his
reed or rod into the Nile of earth and turning it into blood, injecting his own
fiery energies into the sluggish life of the beast, himself torn and
distracted, abased and crucified, disfigured out of all semblance of his
divinity. Let us recall here Isaiah’s account: "How was his visage marred,
more than any man!" The figure of intoxication used by the mythicists to
betoken this phase of the god’s condition is by no means inapt. This was indeed
the "riotous living" in which the Prodigal Son spent his substance.
And St. Paul helps us understand the depth of degradation into which the
innocent souls fell by his statement that the sweep of lower motivation caused
them to change "the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like
to corruptible man, and to birds and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own
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hearts, to dishonor their own bodies
between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and
served the creature more than the Creator . . ." This is also the story of
Ichabod, from whom "the glory" had departed.
With its roots winding deeply into
the heart of this theological depiction, there has sprung up the growth of a
gigantic excrescence on the psychological life of mankind that has found no
explanation, and can find none, outside the purview of the background just
presented. Here lies the key to one of the most inexplicable and redoubtable
phenomena in the domain of sociology, for which sociological science can
provide no material for a formula of understanding,--the sense of shame
appertaining to the sexual organs and functions. From instantaneous creation in
the noumenal world by projection of thought energies, the god found himself
thrust into lowly physical bodies and reduced to the sensuous procedure of
sexual progenation. Swooning into the "deep sleep" that attended his
descent from the higher planes, he awoke on the plane of earth to find himself
forced to procreate physically like the animals. From deep within his most real
self sprang that sense of revulsion at the change, the shadow of which has
clung to his consciousness in spite of all rationalization or sophistication.
The soul sensed its degradation. Ancient scriptures reflected this feeling in their
naming the physical body, as the agent of this debasement, "the garment of
shame." In the Pistis Sophia Jesus tells Salome, in answer to her
question, that his kingdom shall come "when you shall have trampled
underfoot the garment of shame" and returned from the divided life of sex
to androgyneity.
If the sense of shame was not
inherent in the anthropological situation at the beginning, it was developed
and strengthened by the wild license or "Harlotry" in which the first
groups of the Sons of God indulged with the females of the higher animal
species after reaching earth. There seems to have been a long period of sexual
miscegenation, the experience of which would have imprinted the reaction of
shame lastingly upon the sub-conscious psyche of early humanity. This is
perhaps the "evil concupiscence" against which Paul crusades in his
Epistles. And it is significant that in a later passage in the first chapter of
Romans, in which Paul states that God gave them up to a reprobate mind
to do the things "which are not convenient," he adds as their final
description that they were "covenant-breakers." We protest that
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this takes his preachment out of the
rank of mere pious homiletics and makes it referable to the racial predicament
we are dealing with. Greek philosophy speaks of the violation of "broad
oaths fast sealed."
Reverting for a moment to the
philosophic analysis of evil, it is highly desirable that the view of Platonic
systematism should be gleaned from a few pointed excerpts. Near the end of his
two great volumes on the theology of Plato Proclus dilates at length upon the
nature of evil in grand fashion. There is not such a thing, he says, as
"unmixed evil or evil itself,
or an eternal idea, form and essence of evil; but moral evil is mixed with
good, and so far as it is good, it subsists from divinity; but so far as
it is evil, it is derived from another cause which is impotent. For evil is
nothing else than a greater or less declination, departure, defect and
privation from the good itself . . . in the same manner as darkness from (want
of) the sun. It is debility and absence of power. And that which is evil to
partial natures, is not evil to the universe."
Christian aberrancy from high philosophy
can be seen in the erection of evil into a positive, active force and
personifying it in a semi-deity.
Evil is only a by-product of the
good on its march to full development. Proclus has further enlightenment for
us, which should not be missed:
"Evil in souls is a debility of
not always and uniformly adhering to better natures and to the good. Hence
arises their descent to things subordinate, their oblivion, their malefic
inclination to things conversant with body, and their dischord with reason. According
to some, matter is that which is primarily evil, and is evil itself, and the
debility of souls arises from their lapse into matter."
But we owe to Thomas Taylor a
reminder that it is error to impute evil gratuitously to matter:
"This Proclus denies and says
that both body and matter originate from deity and that both are the progeny of
divinity. He adds . . . that souls sinned before they were thrust into matter;
that there are not two principles (matter and deity); and that matter is
neither good nor evil, but a thing necessary, and distant in the last degree
from the good itself."
Here is balance and sanity, so
sorely needed in an age overrun with cults of the "spiritual" raving
against the "evil" nature of matter,
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making it a theological "devil."
This declaration should be advanced to prominence in the philosophic treatment
of the place and function of matter in evolution and systematic thought. Modern
spiritual cultism needs to be enlightened with the assurance that matter is in
itself neither good nor evil, but neutral. It has no moral quality in itself,
but receives such from the good or evil use made of it, as any mechanical
invention. It is to become the implementation of the good, and is therefore
vitally necessary, as Proclus declares. Cult diatribes against matter as evil
are at last seen to be beyond the mark, and the orthodox hypostasization and
personification of evil is discovered to be equally inane.
Whatever seems evil exists indeed
for the sake of the good:
"To divinity, therefore,
nothing is evil, not even of the things which are called evil. For he uses
these also to a good purpose . . . For he [the demiurgus] concealed evil in the
use of good." Evil "consists in the privation of symmetry between
form and matter."
The last statement is a detail which
is doubtless most relevant. The god and the animal being conjoined in one
organism, evil arose from the want of harmony between them. This is at the base
of those Platonic discussions on harmony and symmetrical allotment of function in
the Greek thought. Two widely diverse and in a sense antagonistic elements were
thrust into a marriage in one body. A conflict was inevitable. Paul’s war of
the flesh against the soul was on. The animal could no longer drift in his
course of unintelligent natural instinct; and on his part the god was erratic
in his incipient lordship over lower forces. What measure of human
wretchedness, instability and recklessness does not flow from these factors
operative in the situation?
Hence Lucifer became transformed
into Satan. Without his intrusion the animal would have known no evil, no
aberrancy, no contravention of cyclic order, with consequent pain and distress.
But he would have purchased the continuance of his halcyon blissfulness at the
cost of--remaining an animal! He could not step across the gap between beast
and sentient man without awakening the knowledge of good and evil. The god
stepped into the beast’s own province and brought that disturbing influence
that began the harrowing process, for both, of learning through suffering. By
the god’s stripes we are healed, and both he and his pupil suffer many an
anguish before the
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healing is effected. Fittingly the Logia
are found saying: "The Beast that was, that is, and that is soon to be
cast down into the bottomless pit, is the mystery of iniquity by whose power
the world hath been made full of sorrow."
The Beast that was chained in prison
or cast down into the lake of fire that burned with brimstone is to be found,
along with the lake, in the Ritual (Ch. 17). He is called Baba, the
eternal devourer, whose dwelling is in the lake of fire, the red lake, the pool
of the damned, in the fiery pit of the recess or "bight" of Amenta.
It is to be pointed out that this Baba, called "the lord of gore,"
extracts the hearts and viscera from the corpses doomed to be consumed at his
banquet and "eats the livers of the princes." This personation is
identical with that of the Beast in Revelation (10) who makes war on the
"Logos of God," but is defeated and cast into the lake that blazes
with brimstone. The angel invites all the "birds that fly in mid-heaven to
gather for the great banquet of God," at which "the flesh of
kings" was devoured. In the Promethean myth the bird, vulture or eagle,
comes daily to consume the liver of the king of heaven, bound helpless to the
rock, or the cross. The bird typifying generally the soul, coming to devour the
liver of the god, unquestionably has some reference to the purificatory offices
of the spiritual nature in the evolutionary process, though a more subtle
knowledge of the function of the liver in vital economy would probably enable
us to read further astonishing significance in the symbology. The myth may
perhaps simply signify the soul’s periodical visitation to earth to pluck the fruits
of the purgative and purificatory experience, by which through bodily suffering
evil is transmuted into good, as the liver cleanses impurities of the body.
Paul in Ephesians (2) and
elsewhere sets forth the forces in conflict in the arena of the human breast:
"You were dead in the
trespasses and sins in which you moved as you followed the course of this world
. . . when we obeyed the passions of our flesh, carrying the dictates of the
flesh and its impulses, when we were objects of God’s anger like the rest of
men."
Again this use of the word
"anger," often elsewhere "ire" or "wrath," must
be carefully delimited in meaning, since it refers to nothing like human
vindictiveness, but just the "fire" of deity working its natural
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efficacy in and upon the elements of
the body. "Ire" is "fire" with the Greek diagamma dropped
off, and "wrath" is the original fire of creative force.
Paul’s admonition was to
"abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul." He speaks of
the deadly enmity between the two natures, as does Plato, and pleads with the
disciples to strive for the victory of the spiritual man over the carnal. He
puts sexual vice at the head of a list of corrupt practices, and sexual
continence at the head of a list of virtues.
Through the diversion of dramatic
meaning into false channels, the god, then, became regarded as the instigator
of all evil in the moral situation. It is noteworthy that in the Jonah legend,
the god, asleep in the hold of the storm-tossed vessel, is found, by casting lots,
to be responsible for the storm. Two features here deserve elucidation. He was
asleep. The god, who should have been awake and alert to control the sweeping
urges of sensual thought (water agitated by air, mind, symbolically) was
asleep. While he lay inert the storm of air and water raged. He was thus
responsible, for he was sent to be the master of these very elements. He waked
in time and his destiny demanded that he be thrown into the midst of the
waters, to take charge and still them. The storm then quieted.
Next, he lay in the hold. This was
called Akar (Agar, Hagar), a region of Amenta. It types the lower self, the
lower part of the organism, the natural, carnal man. He had been captivated and
his divine genius and memory were narcotized by the oblivion-producing
influences of incarnation. He lay in a torpor in the hold of the ship, the
belly of the mortal man.
So the god, rendered at first
sluggish, beastly, brutalized, became the evil one. And the alteration of
character from benefactor to demon, has wrought ghastly mischief in religious
machination. Spurred on by the imaginary hypostatization of an Evil Spirit in
the world, men have by the very force and contagion of a fixed obsession wrought
themselves into the likeness of this malignant demon and dramatized in actual
history their conception of his diabolical role. Swept on by the inculcated
theory of his presence in personal form in the world, bigots everywhere found
in the assumption a ready subterfuge for persecution and cruelty. Since
embodiment had to be found for the Evil
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Spirit, every unacceptable act or
idea of one’s brother or one’s enemy could be charged to demoniac possession.
Thus there was provided an easy channel for a terrible outpouring of man’s
inhumanity to man, and there was let loose an orgy of vicious despotism in
religion that has stained the record of Christianity almost past repair.
Nothing but philosophical understanding of the real issues involved will clarify
the error in religious attitude on this matter. Nothing but the realization
that Satan was and is himself the angel of light, our heavenly benefactor, will
restore sober sanity to a race rendered next to demonical by an infernal
theology.
There is documentary evidence to
indicate that this figure was not at first regarded as the evil genius of man
at all, but was rated as the Agathodaemon, or Guardian Spirit. On
Massey’s authority it may be stated that "the Serpent in Egypt, Chaldea,
India, America and Europe is the Good Serpent generally, the Agathodaemon."
The Ritual (Ch. 83) affirms that "The Great One shining with
his body as a God is Sut." Sut was strictly not the evil one. He was the
seven-headed serpent or dragon. And the seven Uraei, or serpent-headed gods,
are typical not of death, but of life. Another voice concurs in this estimate.
"Like Satan himself, even as
the Rev. Dunbar Heath has shown (The Fallen Angels), the serpent had
not, indeed, a wholly evil character among the early Hebrews."1
The same authority (p. 57) goes
further:
"Whatever may be the
explanation of the fact, it is understood that, notwithstanding the hatred with
which he was afterwards regarded, this god Seth, or Set, was at one time highly
venerated in Egypt. Bunsen says that up to the thirteenth century before
Christ, Set ‘was a great god universally adored throughout Egypt, who confers
on the sovereigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties the symbols of
life and power.’ He adds: ‘But subsequently, in the course of the twentieth
dynasty he is suddenly treated as an evil demon, inasmuch as his effigies and
name are obliterated on all the monuments and inscriptions that could be
reached.’ Moreover, according to Bunsen, Seth ‘appears gradually among the
Semites as the background of their religious consciousness’; and not merely was
he ‘the primitive god of Northern Egypt and Palestine,’ but his genealogy as
‘the Seth of Genesis, the father of Enoch (the man), must be considered
as originally running parallel with that derived from the Elohim, Adam’s
father.’"
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This is effective corroboration of the claim advanced herein that the father of intelligent man was the Titanic host, typified by the fiery serpent. Once revered by infant humanity as the bestower of light and life, this collective being later suffered a transformation of imputed character and became thought of as the father of all ill. Some of the dramatic implications worked over into popular belief, and the dramatic character of the Adversary overbore the true understanding of the hidden beneficence of the son