The Two Mothers of Christ

It is beyond question that the great ancient design of the zodiac is a wondrously conceived graph aimed to depict the structure of the Logos, the pattern or creative evolution, the essential constitution of the universe and the course of the current of life in the cosmos, and by analogy in man the microcosmic replica of the macrocosm. Almost infinite nuances of significance have been adumbrated in those twelve signs or houses of the zodiac and the thirty-six other constellations,

THE TWO MOTHERS OF THE CHRISTS

The exposition must begin with the perplexing and hitherto unexplained item of ancient religious myth that the Christs, the Sun-Gods, the Messiahs were generally allegorized as having had two mothers! 

This dual maternal parentage of the Messianic characters should not have appeared so outlandish and bizarre, seeing that the Gospel Jesus himself, dramatic figure of the divine principle in man, categorically announced this very feature in declaring to Nicodemus that "you must be born again." The startled Nicodemus asks if this means that he must enter a second time into his mother’s womb and experience a second birth in the natural manner. Jesus, implying that this idea would be preposterous, replies that you "must be born of water and the spirit." It must be noted here that the Latin word spiritus, translated "spirit" in many passages, means also "air," "breath" or "wind." Taken in connection with the great basic usage in Scriptural symbolism of the four primary elements, earth, water, air and fire, this "air" symbol at once assumes a position of the deepest revelatory moment.

The body of the physical, natural first man, of the earth, earthy, was symbolically conceived as being composed of the two lower, or coarser of these four elements, earth and water; while air and fire, representing mind and spirit, commingled to constitute the higher, or spiritual man, the second Adam, or the Christ. Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus could then as meaningfully have been phrased "born of water and air." Thus we can see a new signification in the statement of John the Baptist, in which he uses three of the four elements to symbolize his meaning when he said that he, the forerunner of the greater Christ, baptizes us with the two lower elements, water and earth (but omitting earth, which should have gone with it); but that the mightier power of spirit that is to supervene after his preparatory work has been accomplished, will baptize us "with the Holy Spiritus (air) and with fire."

Jesus thus affirms that we have two births, necessitating two mothers, and John adds the corroborating datum that we have two baptisms.

Since man’s spirit-soul is an indestructible fragment of God’s own eternal spirit, truly a tiny spark of that cosmic Intelligence and Love which we call the Mind of God, the ancient symbologists typified the divine element in man by fire, and in contrast, emblemed the lower human elements by water. The fiery essence of soul is housed in a tenement of flesh and matter, which is seven-eighths water by actual composition. The crossing of rivers and seas and the immersion of solar heroes in water in the olden mythologies, and the rite of baptism in organic religion signified nothing beyond the fact of the soul’s immersion in a physical body of watery composition in its successive incarnations.

Says Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." Describing man, Plato wrote: "Through body it is an animal; through intellect it is a God." 

Man is, then, a natural creature and a god in combination. Our natural part administers to our spiritual part the rite of baptism by water; our nascent spiritual self is to give us the later baptism by (air and) fire. We are born first as the natural man; then as the spiritual, the latter crowning the former. Or we are born first by water, then by fire. Of vital significance at this point are two statements by St. Paul: "That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural"; and "First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual." Again he says: "For the natural man comprehendeth not the things of the spirit; neither can he." Of course he can not; for he is not yet at that higher mount of evolution, and he must be transformed, transfigured, lifted up into a superior world of conscious dimension before he can cognize spiritual things. Evolution will thus transform him, and nothing else will.

Utilizing astrological ground facts for the depiction of cosmic truths, the ancient astrologers 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’s progeny. The first was the Virgo (Virgin) Mother, the primeval symbol of the "Virgin Mary" thousands of years before Christ. 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," or in the sign of the Fishes, and was denominated the "Fish-Mother." The Virgin Mothers are all identified with water as symbol, and their various names, such as Meri, Mary, Myra, Myrrha, Miriam, Moira, Venus (born of the sea-foam stirred up between the knees of Jupiter as he waded through the seas), Tiamat and Thallath (Greek for "sea.") are designations for water or the sea. On the other side there are the Fish Avatars of Vishnu, such as the Babylonian Ioannes, or Dagon ("fish" in Hebrew is dag); and the goddesses Atergatis and Semiramis were actually called "fish-Mothers." Virgo stood as the mother of birth by water, or the birth of man the first, earthy, in a watery body. Pisces stood as the mother of birth by the spirit, or by fire, or the birth of man the second, described by St. Paul as "the Lord from heaven." Man’s physical body is the high product of a biological evolution that actually started in the ocean water! And the blood in man’s veins is still identical in chemical composition with sea water. Virgo was poetized as the Water Mother of the natural man; Pisces as the Fish Mother of the spiritual man. So Virgo was the first of the two mothers of the god-to-be in the life of mankind; Pisces was the second.

 CONCEIVED IN HEAVEN--BORN ON EARTH

In spite of the presence of these significant data standing for all to read in mythology and the Scriptures, any profound grasp of the interior intimations was missed because the true relevance of the symbolic sense of both water and the fish had never been glimpsed. Prominent as the fish symbol has been in Christian literature of the inceptive period, no one has seemed to divine its enlightening cryptic import. It is of astonishing revelatory character. Water is the type of natural birth because all natural birth proceeds in and from water. All first life on our globe originated in sea water, and all vegetation must have water to maintain its life. The fish is a birth in and from water, and it therefore stands patently as the generic type of organic life issuing out of the inorganic! The fish typifies life embodied in a physical organic structure, subsisting in a sea of inorganic matter. Organic life is born out of the inorganic just as the fish is born out of the water. It is the child of the water-as-mother. And if organic life (the "Fish") is in its turn to become mother, its child will be mind and spiritual consciousness, son of the Fish Mother. Water is thus the mother of natural physical life, and organic physical body becomes the mother of later evolving divine mind.

Water is Air (Oxygen) entombed by Matter (Hydrogen)

Hydrogen gas was first artificially produced in the early 16th century by the reaction of acids on metals. In 1766–81, Henry Cavendish was the first to recognize that hydrogen gas was a discrete substance,^[9] and that it produces water when burned, the property for which it was later named: in Greek, hydrogen means "water-former".

Now, strangely enough, water is the type of another essence, which is even more than water a universal mother of life, namely matter. Matter is the virginal mother of all life in the aboriginal genesis. All things are generated in the womb of primordial matter, the "first old genetrix" of the Egyptians, Apt, Hathor, Meri, Isis. And it is by a consideration of the nature of matter and its evolution that we are enabled at last to arrive at a true comprehension of the double motherhood of the god nature. For this universal matter-mother is now known to exist in two vastly different states, at each of which, at two different levels, it generates its child. 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 "matter" is "water!" And matter organized and structuralized over patterns of divine conception is the second mother, genetrix of spiritual mind.

In the sagacious dramatism of arcane writing the two mothers were always presented in pairs. They were designated the "two mothers," or sometimes the "two divine sisters" of the god character. Or they were the wife and sister of the central deity, as Juno was wife and sister of Jupiter, and Isis was wife and sister of Osiris. Others were Venus, Ishtar, Cybele, Mylitta. In ancient Egypt they were first Apt and Neith, later Isis and Nephthys. Gerald Massey relates Neith to "net," the device to catch fish! Clues to their function are found in the great Egyptian Book of the Dead, and there it was that the mystery of this double motherhood of life was solved. For here it is revealed that the function of motherhood was, so to say, bisected into two phases, so that, of the two mothers, Isis and Nephthys, each was seen to have performed but one-half of the function of motherhood of the infant god, thus requiring the two of them to consummate the birth. For the text reads: "Isis conceived him; Nephthys gave him birth." Again, with a shift of the suggestive symbolism, it is said: "Isis bore him; Nephthys suckled him." Even with these elucidative data the full sweep of the true import was not caught until a further clarification was found in another verse, which ran: "Heaven conceived him; the Tuat brought him forth." With this came the brilliant flash of clear insight into the mystery. For "heaven" is precisely the place, or the state of the first matter-mother, the "firmament" of empty space, and in the bosom of this first mother form the unit potential of the seed of divine mind-to-be is conceived. All later potency of a godly mind is latent in the depths of sub-atomic matter. "The shape of things to come" in the evolution of universal life is archetypically conceived at the arc of the cycle when spirit and matter, as yet undifferentiated, are identical and homogeneous. Spirit yet slumbers in dreamless unconsciousness, and matter exists only as what the Hindus call Mulaprakriti, the "root of matter." All things are initially conceived in the innermost heart of primordial Being, where spirit as Father and matter as Mother are yet One. Being is then Father-Mother, not Father and Mother.

This is mirrored in the Egyptian statement that Isis conceived Horus, the Christ-to-be. Matter was the womb of the first conception, and Nephthys was to give birth to what Isis conceived. Isis is therefore the true Virgin of the world, because she is matter in its virginal state, matter still subsistent, and not yet existent, unable to be paired off as the opposite pole of spirit and hence unwed. As virgin, she has not yet given birth to the Christ. That role will be performed by Nephthys, matter impregnated by spirit. Cosmically and evolutionarily speaking, Isis is the young girl who can not marry and bear the Christ; Nephthys is that same young girl grown to womanhood and able to produce her child. In the same sense in which we say that the child is father of the man it can be said that Isis is the mother of Nephthys. And we shall see that this legend of the two mothers, the second being the daughter of the first, is found intact in the New Testament Gospel story.

Mary has to go to Elizabeth’s house to conceive. If Zechariah was Jupiter, it would appear that the female spirit star procreated with the male spirit planet. Planets are “fallen stars”.

The Tuat = the Duat = Two.

If heaven, in the sense of virginal matter, conceived the divine consciousness principle, what is the "Tuat" that brought it forth? It must be equivalent to Nephthys. This locality is the Egyptian designation for earth, or matter in its substantial evolved form which can finally bring spiritual consciousness to manifest expression. It is matter in its physical form. Isis was matter subsistent in the form of "empty space;" Nephthys was atomic matter, existent as visible structural form, or the "fish." The fish is seen to be the type of organic matter floating in the sea of inorganic first matter, the "waters of the firmament." We see the physical worlds floating about in the sea of empty space like fish in the water. The physical universe is that Great Fish in the sea of infinite Being which contains the germ of the Jonah consciousness (for Jonah is another figure of the Jesus or Christ consciousness) and which will transport it across the sea of evolving life and spew it out on the farther shore of higher Mind. This great universe is the second form of matter and hence is the second mother, Nephthys. It is the developed bodies of organic matter that give birth to the Logos in the macrocosm and to the Christos, a seed unit of that same Logos, in man the microcosm. Man’s physical body, with brain and nervous system organized to give expression to that grade of mind denominated the Christ consciousness, is the divine Fish of the mythologic tradition of early Christianity. One needs only to refer to the Greek designation of the Christos of the precessional period of Pisces as Ichthys the Fish to be amazed at the play of the symbolism in the ancient day precisely when Christianity was being formulated. For the sun had entered the sign of the Fishes about 255 B.C.

So under the conception of the divided function of motherhood it can be said that man’s future Christhood is conceived in the womb of Isis and brought to birth from the womb of Nephthys, the second mother, the immediate incubator and gestator of the Christly power in the world. One might analogize the situation by thinking of a human child as first conceived in the minds, or in the love of its parents and later born from the womb of its physical mother. For this life has two births and must have a mother for each. It is conceived by the mother and born by the daughter. Life is spiritually conceived and physically born. Man is born first as man, by water, the sea of primordial matter, in whose depths he is conceived; then he is reborn later as god, by the fire of spirit, emerging with biological life out of the womb of the sea, the Water-Mother.

Father spirit mates with mother matter. Mother matter was Seth’s wife. Would that mean that man’s first birth was his mother being raped by father matter? The Merovingians declare so. Rape by Leviathan – Hydra. 

The two mothers can be sharply distinguished as these two forms of matter in the following delineation: the first or virgin mother is matter in its first creative form; invisible, inorganic, unsubstantial (in our sense) and subatomic. The second mother is matter in its later evolved form as visible, organic, substantial and atomic. The first mother, virgin though she is, generated her child, organic matter, who by virtue of her "immaculate conception" was confusedly still called "virgin." And this daughter, grown to adulthood by evolution, became the second, or "Fish Mother," and in her turn produced, not now a daughter, but her Son, the masculinity indicating a spiritual and not a further physical progeny, the birth of Mind from matter.

For he is to be called John

As hinted a moment ago, this genealogy or divine lineage is found in the New Testament of Christianity. The first mother, corresponding to Isis is Anna, and the second mother is her daughter Mary, who bears the Christos, Jesus. Anna and Mary are the Isis and Nephthys of the Christian dispensation. And it is a question whether the Christian Anna and the Hebrew Hannah are not immediate derivatives from the Egyptian An, Ani, Anu. An was an alphabetical glyph for existent being. Ani was the name of the human entity evolving to deity in the Book of the Dead. Anu will come to astonishing significance a little farther on.

In Anna 

THE HOUSE OF BREAKING BREAD

The first, or virgin birth was depicted as taking place on the western side of the zodiac, in the house or womb of the Virgin Mother, Virgo. This allocation was due to the fact that it is in the west that the sun, universal symbol and embodiment of the fire of spirit, descends each evening into the earth and water that represented the body in which the soul incarnated, (The dying Sun conceives a Son) this body itself being composed of those two elements, earth and water. So man is, zodiacally, born in the water, as natural man, on the western side; and is to be reborn, or regenerated, as spiritual man, at the end of the cycle, on the eastern side. Spirit’s descent into water (of the body) on the west makes it man physical; its later resurrection on the east makes it man spiritual, man deified. The Fall (Down) and the Spring (ahead) Says the text of old Egypt: "Pepi saileth with Ra to the eastern side of heaven, where the gods are born." This is the death and resurrection of the god, the basic theme in all religions. It is simply incarnation and return to heaven. It is the descent of Messiah into "Egypt" and his exodus back to spirit, historicized in the Scriptures as "Canaan." Canaan = Canis (Major)

Further browsing in the ancient tomes brings to light links of connection between the zodiacal pictorialization and 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 in the astrological portraiture Virgo was the house of Bread. This is indicated by several items of the 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, brilliant heavenly symbol of the divinity in man. Precisely at midnight of December 24 this bright sun stood on the meridian line running from the zenith to the south. At the same moment there was rising on the eastern horizon the constellation of the Virgin, bearing in her left arm the Christ child, symbol of the Christhood coming to function in man; and in her right hand she clasped the great star Spica (Latin: a head or "spike" of wheat), symbol of that same deity coming as the celestial food for man. It must be remembered that the Gospel Christ told us that, if we would have eternal life, we must virtually eat his body as our divine food, and drink his blood. Hence typism represented him as coming in the form and nature of man, the human babe; and coming as spiritual food emblemed by wheat. The Gospel Christos describes the supernal gift of the spirit in the words: "This is that bread which came down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall hunger no more." Jesus took the same symbol, a loaf, and, breaking it into fragments, gave a morsel to each of his disciples, saying it was his (spiritual) body, broken for them. 

We now have Virgo established as the House of Bread and Pisces as the House of the Fishes. The characterization of the two houses can now be brought along to a more specific evolutionary reference. Just what are these "houses"? What do they represent? As already set forth, they are poetic graphs for the two states of matter. But now they are to be shown to stand for something in immediate relation to man’s life. It should not appear too extravagant a declaration if the evidence warrants our assertion that in the ultimate resolution of their meaning, they are in the allegory to be considered as the human body itself! For these physical bodies of ours consist of matter in both its visible and invisible forms. As St. Paul tells us, we have a natural and a spiritual body. Man’s body itself houses the two mothers. The human body is this double house of Bread and of Fish.

The next link is seen when it is considered that the 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 and in which it suffers a more or less complete obscuration of its powers in the darkness of its tomb of matter. It is the house in which for an initial period it lies in a state of relative "death," 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, alluding to the Horus (Christ) principle: "Who cometh forth from the dusk and whose birth is in the house of death." This applies to the incarnating soul. In the recondite esoteric sense of the archaic Scriptures the soul "dies" on entering the body in incarnation, but has a resurrection from this "death" and its rebirth, or the tomb of the crucified Christ and the womb of his second birth.

The Father dies for the conception of the Son, the Son being the Father as the Son to later become the Father once again

As we could expect, the Egyptians had a name for the body as the locus of these evolutionary transactions, which carry the central meaning of all theology. This name now rises out of the dim mists of ancient Egyptian religious lore to enlighten all modern Biblical studentship. This city of the body, wherein the sun of soul sank to its death on the cross of matter to re-arise in a new generation, was called the city of the sun, which in Greek became Heliopolis, but was in the Egyptian Anu. The name was, of course, given to an actual Egyptian town, where the rites of the death, burial and resurrection of Osiris, or Horus, were yearly enacted. But the name bore a theological significance before it designated a geographical city,--as indeed did most Biblical names of localities.

The significant name is obviously composed of Nu, the name for the Mother-Heaven, or empty space, or the abyss of nothingness out of the bosom of which creation emanates. The A (alpha privative) means, as it does in thousands of words, "not." It is prefixed to a host of words to negate an affirmative meaning, as a-theistic, a-moral, a-symmetrical, a-mnesia. A-nu would then mean literally "not-nothingness," or a world of concrete actuality. The negation of a negative posits an affirmative. It refers thus to our world of physical manifestation. Precisely such a world it is in which units of virginal consciousness go to their "death" and again rise out of it. Says God in the Old Testament: "I cast down to death and I raise up again." Anu is then the physical body of mortals on earth. The soul descends out of the waters of the abyss, or the Nun, which is simply space in its primordial undifferentiation. So Nu (neuter), Nun (masculine), Nut (feminine) is the cosmic negative, the name and sign of all non-being. When life is reintegrated at the end of each cycle of out-going and return in the completeness of its restored unity, it is negative. It is the Nun. When it is undifferentiated as spirit and matter, it is neuter. To manifest its potential life it must disintegrate its unity, segregate itself into the duality of spirit and matter, establish positive-negative tension and from that split up into infinite multiplicity. 

Here we are brought face to face with the important Biblical sense of the word "multiply." To exhibit its infinite creative resources, life must multiply itself endlessly. The unitary life of deity must break itself up into infinite fragments if it is to fill empty space with a multitude of worlds and beings of diversified natures. The primal sea, or Mother must engender a multitudinous progeny, to spawn the limitless schools of organic "fish-worlds." This is the meaning of the promise given to Abraham that his seed should "multiply" until it filled the earth with offspring countless as the sands and the stars. And if the life divine was symbolized by bread as the type of the first birth, and by fish as the type of the second, then we might expect to find in old religious typology the allegory of a Christ personage multiplying loaves and fishes to feed a multitude! Should we be astonished then, when we do find that the Gospel Jesus does this very thing? The leads to the significance of the two numbers woven into the story are not too clear. But since the bread symbol pertains to Virgo, mother of the natural man, the five loaves may have been intended to refer to man’s five senses, while the two fishes could have represented the two natures unified by the second birth.

Five loaves and two fishes… ? Pisces is two fishes swimming in different driections yet staying together, but the five loaves? Perhaps a Venus reference?

This is astonishing enough in all conscience. But even it yields in wonder to the next item of comparative religion data, which came to our notice as a further tie between the Bible and antecedent Egyptian mythology. Who can adequately estimate the seriousness of the challenge which this finding of scholarship throws down to Gospel historicity? For a thrilling discovery indeed it was which brought to notice a passage in the Book of the Dead that referred to Anu as "the place of multiplying bread!"

Here, then, 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. In the light of this correlation of material it is seen that a new and enlightening meaning must be read into this New Testament episode. The revelation indeed makes it necessary to lift the incident quite out of the realm of history and orient it into that of allegory. For at last we are given a lens of proper focus through which to read aright, for the first time in centuries, the hidden sense of the Gospel narrative. We see that Anu, as the physical body, is the place wherein the unity of the Christly power is broken into an infinite number of fragments, which are distributed out among a multitude of God’s children enhungered after a three-days fast. This latter detail can readily be taken as referring to the deprivation of spiritual food suffered by souls in their sojourn in the three elemental kingdoms, mineral, vegetable and animal, before attaining to the plane of mind. St. Paul lends authority to this rendering in saying that before we develop the Christ-mind, we are in bondage to the elements (in several passages the "elementals") of the world, meaning the powers of nature as yet unillumined by mind.

Here are all the components 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 conscious units struggling on the road to divinization, there were gathered up twelve baskets of fragments. For in the synthesis of all powers to be evolved in the process of deification, the twelve aspects of the Christ consciousness are finally reintegrated, or "gathered up" in one climactic unity.

One must ask what it can mean to the future of Christianity to realize now that this episode of the ostensible life of Jesus is found to be the Judean republication of an antique Egyptian allegory, completely unhistorical in character.

THE HOUSE OF FISH

But new involvements arise and take us on into still more startling disclosures. The Hebrews fell heir to the Egyptian wisdom 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 led to their adding to the name Anu their word for "house," which is beth. This yields us Beth-Anu. It is a fact of common philological knowledge that when the ancient Greek and Egyptian "u" in a word is transferred into English, it is invariably rendered as "y." For instance, the Greek word for "water" is hudor. In all English words it becomes hydro. Shifting the "u" of Anu to the "y", Anu becomes Any, so that Beth-Anu now stands before us as Bethany of the Gospels! Bethany, then, is just the sign of Virgo, as "the House of Bread," the home of the great star Spica, the head of wheat!

Any is an affirmation – the use of the term any denotes existence.

But let us say "House of Bread" in ordinary Hebrew. What further amazement strikes us here as we find this reads Beth-lehem. For "bread" in Hebrew is lehem. The Christ had the first of his two births in Bethany, or Bethlehem, the astrological "House of Bread,"--the human body! And this, be it noted at last, is the only place where it can be of any benefit to humanity.

 He had to be born in Bethany (Matter) or he would have been non-existent.

Later it seems that the two signs, Virgo and Pisces, and their symbols, bread and fish, were almost interchangeably confused or commingled in symbolic imagery. This was likely, in fact almost inevitable, since the two signs represented the same human body as the two houses in which soul died and was reborn, and the two processes are just the two phases of the one operation.

If Pisces is, then, the "house" in which the Christ in man comes to his birth, it is altogether pertinent to ask if there are evidences in the Bible or Christianity that Jesus was represented under any of the characteristics of the fish typology. Here we encounter material enough to provide another nine-days wonder. For Jesus is decorated and haloed by the Piscean symbolism on every hand. His twelve disciples were "fishermen!" In earlier Egyptian depiction the twelve were at one time or another carpenters, reapers, harvesters, fruit gatherers, sailors, rowers, builders, masons, potters or keepers of the twelve treasures of light. Jesus instructed Peter to find the gold in the fish’s mouth; his last "miracle" was the net-breaking draught of fishes; he declared that he would make them "fishers of men." Also astrological ingenuity had delineated the River Eridanus (Jordan) as issuing from the mouth of the constellation of the Southern Fish and flowing north to the very feet of Orion, starry symbol of the Christ, intimating that the stream of life issues forth from the organic physical life of man and runs right up to the foot of divinity. The Bishop’s mitre in Christianity is in the shape of the mouth of a fish. In the catacombs under Rome the symbol of the two fishes crossed in the "X" form was displayed on the forehead of the Christ image, at its feet, or on a plate on the alter before it. And the Romans for several centuries dubbed the early Christians Pisciculi, "Little Fishes," members of the "Fish-Cult." Augustine and Tertullian both likened the Christian laity to "little fishes" in the sea, Christ being the Great Fish, or Whale. And perhaps the crowning datum in all this piscatorial Christianity is the fact that the Greeks denominated the Jesus Avatar figure as Ichthys, the Fish. What about the fish that swallowed Osiris’ penis? They would doubtless have alluded to any claimant at that time for the mantle of Messianic messengership under the title of Ichthys, even if the Christian movement had not thrust on the world the Gospel character of Jesus as humanized Savior. For ancient arcane science, resorting ever to subtle types of representation, and all grounded on the circle of the zodiac, attached to the Messianic figure the name, title and features of the zodiacal house in which the sun stood at the time, its sojourn in each sign being two thousand one hundred and sixty years. When the sun was entering Pisces ancient astrological observance would in any event have saluted the embodiment of the coming god-power as Ichthys.

Still other startling correlations come to view. As has been here delineated, the Christ is the offspring or creation of Divine Mind, first in the innermost bosom of Spirit-Matter, then entified in organic bodily structure. Primeval space, as has been seen, was in Egyptian terms the Nun, the "waters of the Nun." What Bible student does not know of "Joshua, son of Nun"? But so far has ignorance and obscurantism gone with its deadly work in Biblical literalism that hardly any one knows with definiteness that Joshua is just a variant (one of some ten or twelve) form of "Jesus." The phrase has actually been found written in ancient texts as "Jesus, son of Nun." At any rate there is no question and there can be none, that Joshua is Jesus, no less. This asserts that both names in various versions of the Messianic legend stood for the one same typal figure representing man’s coming deity. 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 astounding things, "fish." Jesus, then, is son of Pisces, the Fish-sign; as indeed he is in the Gospels themselves.

 Mem-ory – Fiery water?

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, intimating that he was not dead but only sleeping. Anu, as has been seen, became Bethany of the Gospels; and it was at Bethany that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead! And we run into another amazing link when, through Egyptian sources, we are enabled to establish the identity of Lazarus. This is close to the greatest of all the marvels in this chain of comparative data. For we find that the ancient designation of Osiris was Asar. Now the Egyptians consistently expressed reverence for deity by prefixing the definite masculine article, "the," to the name of the chief of their gods. This was Osiris. Just as the Christians say, or should say, the Christ, they said the Osiris. And there applies here another point of language usage not discovered by scholars, but pertinent to our elucidation. It is that the definite masculine article, "the," connoted deity in ancient writing. Our definite article, "the," is the root of the Greek word for God, the-os, to which the Greeks prefixed their masculine article, ho theos. 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."

So when the Hebrews took up the Egyptian names and titles they converted the name of "the Osiris," or "Lord Osiris," directly into their own vernacular, with the result emerging as "El-Asar." Then in turn the later Romans, speaking Latin, took up the same material that had come to them through Hebrew hands and to "El-Asar" they added the common Latin termination of the second declension masculine nouns in which most Roman 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 from the dead at Bethany! So the allegorical raising of the Egyptian Osiris from death by his son, the Christ of Egypt at the Egyptian Anu became the raising from death of the Hebrew Lazarus by the Palestinian Christ at the Judean Bethany, and what was sublime spiritual dramatism became incredible "history."

On Earth as in Heaven... Bethany is Virgo, and Horus is Sirius... who is Osiris? Orion.

To support the contention that this derivation is not a fanciful invention or sheer coincidence, we find the Egyptian "Azar" reappearing in the names of two of the Hebrew Priests in the Old Testament, Azar-iah and El(e)azar. The -iah (or -jah) appended to deific names substantially equated the prefixed El in Hebrew usage. But a further and far more authoritative confirmation of the linkage was found in one place in Renan’s famous Life of Jesus (page 308). The French theologian displayed an extraordinary knowledge of Judean history, geography, sociology and religion, and in connection with the elucidation here presented this citation from his great book confronts the Christian exegesis with a challenge which it may be difficult to fend off. We quote the passage as follows: 

"The village of Bethany, in particular, situated at the summit of the hill upon the incline which commands the Dead Sea and the Jordan, at a journey of an hour and a half from Jerusalem, was the place especially beloved by Jesus."

Following this a numeral directs us to the note appended at the bottom of the page, in which the reference is to Bethany:

"Now El-Azerie (from El-Azir, the Arabic name of Lazarus) in the Christian texts of the Middle Ages, Lazarium." 

On the next page (309), speaking of Mary he states:

"Her brother Eleazar, or Lazarus, was as much beloved by Jesus."

Here is indisputable evidence that the Egyptian connection with the name of Bethany clung to the town up to the Middle Ages. Since it is agreed widely that John’s Gospel is far more mystical and spiritual and less historical than the other three, it is quite apparent that this reprint of an ancient Egyptian allegory would be more likely to be included in John’s Gospel and omitted from the three synoptic ones. What can it mean to Christian theology that the story of the raising of Lazarus was extant in Egyptian papyri possibly 5000 years B.C.?

Nor was Osiris, masquerading under the name of Lazarus, the only Egyptian personage present at the scene of this supposed Christian "miracle." Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, under her ancient designation of Meri, was present also. As the feminine counterpart of the male deity was dualized to match the doubling of Horus as Horus the Elder (otherwise Osiris) and Horus the Younger, so the Meri name was sometimes pluralized, becoming Merti. In Latin feminine form this became Mertae. But in Hebrew it resolved into what in English was rendered as Martha. So even in the ancient Egyptian transaction there were present the two Maries, or Mary and Martha, the sisters of "Lazarus."

A SIGNIFICANT SIX MONTHS

All this sets the stage for the crowning item in the correspondence. In the Gospel drama John the Baptist enacts the role of the first-born or natural man, coming first to prepare the physical ground of evolution for the advent of the second Adam, or Christ. He would therefore stand in the allegory 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, which stands as that station in the zodiac. On the other side of the cycle of descent, "death" and resurrection, would stand Jesus, the Christos, son of the Fish Mother, born in his mother’s house of the Fishes. These houses are six months apart on the zodiacal chart! 

Hence the whole edifice of Gospel historicity trembles under the impact of the strange dramatic circumstance, given in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel, that the Annunciation to Mary of her conception of the coming Christ by the Holy Spirit came in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist. So we can see what the myth-makers devised for discerning intelligence in the allegory in Luke. The natural man, having covered the zodiacal "six months" between his conception and the date of his quickening into spiritual status in his evolution, was dramatized as being "quickened" at a point exactly opposite from the point of the beginning of his life. Six months on the chart would mark the end of an epoch begun opposite it. Six months, speaking purely zodiacally, would terminate the period of mortal life and bring the natural man to the place of his deification. At that point he would be represented as being quickened from natural to spiritual life. So then, according to the Lukan account, when the mother of the true spiritual Christ, who had just been impregnated by the Holy Ghost, came into the presence of the first mother, carrying her child at the figurative completion of his cycle of physical evolution, and awaiting only the advent of the spiritual Lord to be quickened into a new order of exalted being, he was dramatized as manifesting this reawakening by the statement that "he leaped in his mother’s womb." The Luke narration makes it clear that the conception of Jesus had just taken place when Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth and found her at the six months stage of her pregnancy. Mary’s coming into the presence of Elizabeth is made the occasion of the natural man’s leaping in his mother’s womb. When the Christos comes to the natural man the latter leaps into the higher kingdom of spirit.

Leaped from Elizabeth to Mary 

It is but a simple matter of arithmetic to note that the last three months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John coincided with the first three of Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus, bringing the birth of Jesus just six months after that of John! So Luke has it. But it was in the zodiacal chart some thousands of years before it could have "happened" in Judea. It had occurred zodiacally long before it could have occurred historically. And the implication is overmastering that the supposed historical occurrence is but a presumption of ignorance based on the zodiacal when that became circulated as history among the unintelligent masses.

The final link of significant data, now to be presented is by no means a minor one. St. Paul declares that we come to birth spiritually only as we die carnally, meaning that the quantum or quality of divine character in us grows in proportion as the quantum of raw nature decreases. We increase deifically as we decrease humanly; the god gains in power as the animal dies. So the structure of the allegory depicted the spiritual man, Jesus, son of Nun, the "Fish," as increasing, while John, son of Virgo, the Water Mother, decreases in stature. Astrologically, as a star or constellation sinks below the horizon in the west, its opposite star or constellation would be rising in the east. As John, type of the first, the natural man, went down (having completed his mission of preparing the way for his greater successor), Jesus, type of the spiritual birth, rose on the world. So the narrative has John saying: "I must decrease, but he must increase." In the descent of soul into the body spiritual power decreases as physical life increases. But on the reverse arc of the cycle, or evolution, the physical (John) decreases as the Christ power increases in its new round of growth.

 THE CHALLENGE TO CHRISTIANITY

No intelligent reader can peruse this assemblage of semantic data without being profoundly impressed by at least two considerations of the most momentous gravity. He will see first that the great principles of theology were presented, rather are concealed, it would be permissible to say, under the cryptographic forms of astrological symbolism. Then he will be impressed beyond measure by the incontestable evidence of the fact that Biblical events he had assumed were historical occurrences in the first century A.D., were already written in time-worn books of the ancient Egyptians thousands of years before, and that they were there not as objective history but as spiritual allegory. And in the train of reflection that would follow upon these recognitions, how could he avoid asking of his intelligence the question fraught with critical moment for the Christian faith: were then the Gospels and Epistles of the Christian New Testament compositions originally written between the years 40 to 80 of that first Christian century? In the face of the evidence here assembled, can there be much doubt that these Gospels and Epistles were republications of old Egyptian religious scripts, revamped and redacted doubtless by Judean influences, in the first century of our era? Does Christian history make any authoritative pronouncement that would throw light on the question? In spite of fanatical zeal to obliterate all trace of the derivation of its literary heritage from antecedent Pagan sources, there has been permitted to survive for us a statement made by the man who himself was chiefly instrumental in founding the Christian ecclesiastical system, the Christian historian and bishop, Eusebius. In his famous Ecclesiastical History, chapter 17 of Book II, treating of the Essenes, called Therapeutae in northern Egypt, he wrote:

 "These ancient Therapeutae were Christians and their writings are our Gospels and Epistles."

As if to corroborate this declaration of the fourth-century Christian protagonist the Dead Sea scrolls now rise out of the mists of pre-Christian time to certify beyond cavil that the New Testament documents were products of the antecedent Pagan religions.

If Eusebius’s statement and the evidence of the scrolls (and much other data) point to the ancient origin of the Scriptures, there would then arise the further crucial question: for what reason were ancient Egyptian documents of secret esoteric and occult spiritual lore, embodying the innermost teachings of the Magian and Sabean astrological science, brought forth from their age-long sacred custodianship of the heirophants of the Mysteries and spread broadcast to the world in that first Christian century? The answer to this query is many-sided and complicated. But among other influences there was one certainly that can be traced with considerable distinctness. This was the work of a philosopher too little credited with importance. Philo Judaeus was born at or about the year 1 A.D. He labored in the early and middle portions of the first century to effect a syncretism of Greek Platonism, Egyptian Hermeticism and Mosaic Hebraism on occult theosophical bases. His work could have given a powerful stimulus to the cultism of mystico-spiritual science throughout the mid-Eastern countries, as it apparently did lay the foundations for the great Alexandrian philosophical center which, under the headship first of Pantanus, then Clement and Origin, introduced these elements into Christianity. In the conjunction of his effort with the currents of spiritual force emanating from such groups as the Essenes and the Gnostics, we are as near to a correct answer as we perhaps ever shall be to the question of the origin of Christianity and the publication in the first century of documents long in existence, but never disseminated beyond secret guardianship in the occult societies until that time.

It therefore seems certainly to be within the bounds of distinct plausibility, indeed of imminent probability, that the rise of Christianity is to be explained on the truly human and rational grounds of a movement that was galvanized into momentum as the result of the first wide republication of the secret and sacred books of the hierarchy of very ancient Egypt. Many astute investigators of the provenance of the Gospels have been driven to the conclusion that the four included in the New Testament canon were traceable to and based upon what they are pleased to call a "common document," which obviously must antedate those building upon it. Almost to a certainty this hypothesis points in the direction of a true solution of the problem of Gospel origins. Irenaeus, first Christian Bishop of Gaul (France) in the second century, states that there was a multitude of Gospels afloat in his day. It would be in accord with some positive data and many other well-grounded assumptions if one were to posit the thesis that the four Gospels of the canon were based not necessarily on any one "common document," but on the collective esoteric tradition coming down from old Egypt and found extant in Irenaeus’ "multitude of Gospels.

Here was supernal truth of the cosmic being, stated in the terms of natural obviousness which no man, be he never so artful in sophistry, might gainsay. Before truth could be “spiritual” to man’s higher sensitivities it had first, as St. Paul says, to be “natural”. In humanity’s child-mind nature could stand in no manner of hostile relation to the intrinsic total interest of earth’s children. Only with the rank exuberance of growth of conscious intelligence in the adolescence of the race; with the subtlety of self-interest driven to eternal prying, came the conception of nature’s enmity to human welfare. Nature’s influence was held as beneficent, never malignant. Matter bore no stigma of evil, nor were the powers of the total creative effort relegated to conditionless and timeless being, as Eastern thought so insistently asserted, but were accepted as indigenous and local in all visible processes. The power of life is fathered in the heavens, but only in the bosom of earth, in the womb of Mother Nature, can it be nurtured into the beauty and glory of a new miracle of life.

            Strangely, ancient mythology proclaimed the divine soul unit in man to be the progeny of two mothers, named in Egypt Isis and Nephthys. Isis generated the Christ-child in the womb of conception; Nephthys gave him physical birth. The first was indeed the “virgin mother”, matter in its inchoate, inorganic form; matter ethereal, subatomic, invisible — pure essence and not yet substance. The second mother was matter in its matured development when it could be impregnated by the solar ray of the God-mind and in the fullness of time bring forth the solar Son, or Sun.

            In circling the twelve “houses”, the upper six of which represented the heaven world, or disembodied existence, the lower six the cycles of immersion of soul-units in physical forms, the spiritual soul of man came in its lowest point of descent to the nethermost house of the Zodiac, Capricorn. The Zodiac prefigured the total cycle of the soul’s evolutionary journey, starting with its spiritual conception in June at the summit of its heavenly ascent; the September equinox represented its actual impregnation of matter; and the December solstice marked its point of deepest immersion in body-matter. The descent from June to December could be called its period of incubation, and in terms of cosmic operation its involutionary phase. At the nadir of its descent it would swing about the pivot of the solstice and begin its return to the empyrean and the “Father’s palace” out of which it had sallied forth in the beginning, this being its evolutionary phase or arc. The solstice, then, was the point of turning about from the darkness of inert matter to return to the light of spirit.

            So evident was this that the solstice itself was named cardo solis, the hinge of the sun. As depicted in the Zodiac the winter solstice was the hinge or pivot at which the solar power, sunk to its lowest grade of inertness, slowly swung around in the sluggish sea of dense matter and having finally swiveled about, began its climb back to the heavens of spirit.

            It is of staggering significance that in the Hebrew religious heritage coming down from Ancient Egypt, this solstitial point of pivoting from involution to evolution was named Mount Sinai. (From the Egyptian seni (sheni), senai, which Massey translates as “point of turning to return”.

            A brilliant new light by which to examine the Hebrew Old Testament is thus available to us. The Mount Sinai on which God descended to meet and commune with man is discerned to mean the earth itself. The December solstice of the cosmic cycle was poetized as the dark night and the cold winter of soul’s evolutionary journey. The Christ Son (sun) was thus born at the winter solstice in all ancient religions. Christianity, in swinging away from the allegorical to the literal-historical rendering of scriptures missed the esoteric significance of the earlier typification, or confused it with the final birth of the soul out of its body-tomb, which is its “resurrection from the dead” at Easter.

            The birth of the Son of God, then, was on March 25. But in the year 345 A.D., a decree of Pope Julian II ordered that the Christians might be in harmony with the followers of Mithras and of Bacchus, who commemorated the rebirth of the Divine Sun at the winter solstice.

Above is not accurate: conception occured nine months before birth

            Another indication of the allegorical association of the divine birth with the solstice is the item of Christ’s nativity in a stable. This symbol is a most apt illustration of the subtlety of ancient poetic allegorism. It might be thought of in relation to the adjective “stable”, especially when considering the proportion of light to darkness in the period of a day. Born in Stasis? Though light is at its shortest diurnal duration and feeblest strength, and darkness is at its longest stretch, nevertheless, for the extent of some ten days of the solstice the two are completely “stabilized” relative to each other. They are locked, as it were, in the grip of a power by which their two forces can interchange influences, fructify each other’s life and generate out of the union the newborn Son of Light. At any rate, the germ of divine consciousness, slumbering in the matrix of the body, is quickened out of its condition of inertness, virtual “deadness”, at the solstice, and awakened to the exertion necessary to effect deliverance from matter’s womb and to begin a new cycle of growth that will eventuate in the summit of spiritual glory at Easter morn.

            So the Christ-Messiah is reborn at the solstice of winter in the “stable” relation between his two parents, spirit and matter. A chapter in the apocryphal Protevangelion, a gospel ascribed to James, depicts the allegorism focused on the night of December 24, on which Joseph goes forth from the village of Bethlehem to find a midwife for Mary. It is dramatized as a time when birds in the air stopped in the midst of their flight; men seated around a table suddenly ceased eating, holding their forks with food before their mouths, their lips opened to receive food but they put nothing in”; a shepherd poised to smite his sheep but his hand was immovable above his head; kids putting their mouths to the water of a river, but not drinking. With this flourish of allegorism so openly flaunted in the book’s thirteenth chapter, it is not difficult to determine why the Protevangelion was not voted into the canon of the Christian New Testament. Its obvious representation of the Nativity as a poetization of solstitial motionlessness being all too glaring evidence of the nonhistoricity of the birth event.

            What is recorded as the oldest known Christmas carol, dated in the fifth century A.D., sings — in Latin — of the Christ, the Virgin’s Son, a solis natus cardine, “born from the hinge of the sun”. The solstice, as the Sinai, the turntable in the roundhouse of evolution, the pivot on which nuclearized soul-divinity swings around the lower terminus of its involutionary descent, is here delineated as the place at which the interlocking of the powers of spirit and body give birth to the Son of God.

            Now, precisely at the solstice stands the house of Capricorn, the “Goat’s Horn”. The Zodiac itself seems to be a fathomless fount of amazing significances. The selection of the goat as beast-figure for the solstice period can be found to yield certain points of appositeness in fairly suggestive ways. Contrary to the superficial knowledge of most present-day astrologers, the animal here depicted was not the domestic goat, but the sea-goat. It was either an animal now extinct or perhaps altogether chimerical, though there appears to be a small sea animal meeting the traditional description. At any rate its sea character in time was forgotten and the animal symbol that came to be so largely featured in Saturnalian, Bacchic and other ritualistic ceremonialism was definitely the farm animal, the common goat.

            Most, if not all the Zodiacal signs have a dual character or symbolical significance. It may be then, that the figure of the sea-goat was chosen as appropriate to represent the first life of spirit units sunken deep in the element of water, out of which they would later in development emerge for continued evolution in the air and on land. This would indeed depict the actuality of the progression of life upward through the biological stream from initial inception in sea water to transition at some period to land and air environment. It is astonishing to note how exactly the human foetus, recapitulating this order in its briefer cycle of birth and growth, is born out of a sac of water into the air. So the ancient analogists said that man, or the seed of consciousness ensconced within him, begins to unfold at the level of sense and emotion, typified respectively by earth and water. Later, he graduates into the kingdom of mind and spirit, whose respective types are air and fire.

            These type-elements, it must be realized, are not merely abstract symbols, but were themselves quite literal analogues of the conscious powers they were used to adumbrate; sense arising through an earth-body basically compounded of earth elements; emotion showing itself as unstable as water and fluctuating as readily; thought as invisible and tenuous as air; and spirit being a fiery potency able to build or destroy its habitations.

GREEK RATIONALIZATION—EGYPTIAN SYMBOLISM

Greece veered somewhat away from the purely subjective method and systematized the powers and functions of consciousness on the basis of a dialectical and logical harmony with the laws of the living creative process. Discovering, or being taught, that the world was a systematic development of a logoic design, in which every phenomenon bore its communal relation to the wellbeing of the whole, Greek thought steered away in general from mystical experience toward a rational effort to synthesize all the elements of knowledge into a grand unity of vision and understanding. Every phase of her knowledge was made to fit into the intellectual structure of the whole. If the average unschooled American thinks that either of these, the Hindu or the Greek, lacked profundity and organic complexity of the most amazing sort, he does but register his uncouth ignorance of what any student shortly finds out. If he could muster the acumen to comprehend what he can read in such a volume as The Six Books of Proclus on the Theology of Plato, or Aristotle’s Metaphysics or De Anima (Concerning the Soul) or Iamblichus’ Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, he would become aware that the "ancient" envisagement of the problems of consciousness and religion embraced a range of scientific knowledge that by comparison reduces the profoundest of modern spiritual enterprise to veritable childishness.

EGYPT'S WAYWARD OFFSPRING

A better religious perspective might be gained if it were understood how both Judaism and Christianity developed as the product of two movements stemming from Egypt's heritage. It is not adequately realized that the central axis of religious ideology is the Messianic concept. This was an allegorization of the gradual coming to expression in human consciousness of the mind-soul-spirit of Christliness. But when it was travestied into the coming of a divine cosmic man-Christ in the flesh of one human body it became the nucleus for a complex theological superstructure. At this point, it is above all desirable to look at the two lines of divergence, which were taken, first by the Jews and later by the Christians, from the pristine concept of Messiah as the spiritual evolution of man.

Departing from the principles drawn from Egypt's basic lore, and cultivated for some time among the Hebrews by the Kabalists, Jewish theology veered away from the conception of Messianism as the advent of Christliness in all humanity. It interpreted the doctrine instead as a special manifestation of the destined rulership of the world by and through God's dealings with one particular group of people expressly chosen for such agency, this group being the Jews themselves, who had arrogated to themselves this function by dint of having identified themselves with the "Israelites" of the Old Testament. As outlined in the Mosaic books, the divine drama was to be consummated by the appearance of the long-prophesied and long-expected offshoot of the rod of Jesse and the "star out of David" foretold by Amos, Micah, and Isaiah. In the language of the Messianic allegory, this exalted personage, when he appeared, was to lead Israel in the fulfilment of God's marvelous design for the spiritualization of the nations through the Jewish people. The concept in this form necessarily carried the implication of the coming of divine influence into the world, but it stressed primarily the appearance in human form of that shoot from the rod of Jesse, that "branch from the tree of Eden" which was to redeem humanity from the Adamic curse. So it is true that the Jewish conception humanized and personalized the Messiah, as did the later Christian.

The Christian diverged from the Jewish conception in deleting entirely its reference to the Jews as the chosen instrument of God's purpose. In the Christian form of the concept, the Messiah was personalized at the human level and his whole function was focused in his person. He was at the same time to come as the full and final embodiment of God's own nature, which the Father thus projected into the world for the salvation of the people. He was to be the sole bearer of the Messianic power and glory.

Presenting many facets in its entire scope of meaning, this analysis outlines sharply the basic distinction between the two schematic views. Had the Christian included the exaltation of Judaism along with the birth of the Galilean Son of Man, there would have been little to distinguish it from the Judean ideal. Christianity also preached the coming of the Messiah as fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecy. Possibly at the start there was no definite design to exclude the Jewish world from participation in the drama of world salvation. But it was inevitable that the Jews would refuse to accept the extension of the tradition to universal mankind, and the delimitation of Messianic function to a single personality, thus ignoring the role of the Israelites. These differences created the breach between the two positions which was destined to inundate Western history with rivers of blood. The Christian move stripped Judaism to abrogate its historical birthright as God's chosen people. This was an insufferable humiliation, a dismantling of Israel's national and racial epos. To have accepted the Christian concept would have destroyed the structure of Judaism itself.

Any scholar who examines the evidence can readily determine that the name Israel, in its first connotation and usage, never carried any reference to any nation, tribe or race. It was a term, one among many, used to designate the heaven-born sons of God, the pure offspring of God's creative mind and spirit. Had the formulators of the Jewish religion ever looked at corresponding terms in Hindu religion--Manasaputras and Agnishwatta Pitris--they would have been warned away from the error of limiting the reference to their own little Palestinian tribe. In the sense in which Minerva is said to have sprung full-grown from the forehead of Jove, men can be conceived as generated from the cosmic power of mind. The term applied to no earthly beings, but when these spiritual monads of divine consciousness descended to earth to fulfill their mission, they thus became citizens of our mundane world. The evolution of their seed divinity could not be consummated save through union with the force locked up in the atom of matter, which they could utilize in the prosecution of their work in cooperation with the demiurgic oversoul of the universe. Thus arose the need for their incorporation in physical bodies. Their real birth out of spiritual potentiality into conscious power could come only through the intercourse of their spiritual fatherhood with the material motherhood, called by the Greeks physis or nature.

The heroes of ancient myth were all born of the union of a spiritual, heavenly or divine father and an earthly mother. The force of this typology carried over even to the legendary birth of such exalted mortals as Pythagoras or Plato. The latter was acclaimed as the son of Apollo. Hence the name attached to the monads, in the reconstruction of the archaic heritage by those sages who from remote Egyptian sources formulated the religion for the Palestinian tribes, was "Israelites" or children of Israel. Some eminent scholars have lent their dictum to the derivation of this name from the Hebrew verb Azor, to help, and El, God, declaring it to mean "God is my help." But no scholar is in a position to pronounce an apodictic judgment on the philology of this word. This etymology seems strained, and there is no warrant in the lettering for the introduction of the "my" in the rendition. It appears far move probable that the word is a compound of three units, Is - Ra - and El. Is could well be an abbreviation or shortened form of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood. Even the Hebrew word for "woman" is isha (issa). The Ra comes direct from the great Egyptian father of spirit, Ra; and El is the Hebrew singular word for God. It would then read "Mother-Father-God," precisely what its generic character would make appropriate. The Hebrew heritage was drawn from Egypt, and in that land the name of the Divine Father-principle not associated with Ra was Osiris; significantly enough the original name of this deity was Asar (Azar). The Hebrews carried this very name forward in the title of their High Priest, who stood for the spiritual fatherhood, EL(e)azar and again Azariah. (It was the Greeks who made Azar into Osiris.) The spiritual progeny of this God were called the children of Azar, and with the addition of the Hebrew El, God, as "Azar-el-ites." This derivation may be speculative, but it is worthy of consideration.

Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar was a text previously in popular use in the academic world. Gesenius states that the Jews appropriated unto themselves both the terms Hebrews and Israelites in their token of their claimed descent from an illustrious ancestry. Virgil wrote The Aeneid to glorify the Caesar dynasty in Rome and to immortalize the glory of Rome itself by tracing the line of descent back to the goddess Venus. Most national epics were inspired by a similar intent to represent history as embodying the fulfilment of divine purpose.

But it remained for the Jews to interpret literally and to apply to themselves historically not only the three principal esoteric designations of the twelve celestial orders--Israelites, Hebrews, Jews--but to go to the extreme of identifying their own small ethnic group with these Israelite children of God. They took a name, in fact three names, originally designed to apply universally to collective humanity, endowed with the spark of the divine fatherhood. No tribe, group, nation or race of mortals could justly appropriate any of these names to itself exclusively.

Such an attempt at self-glorification brought upon them the inevitable opprobrium of the rest of mankind.

Having committed themselves to the notion that they were in fact those Israelites of Genesis and Exodus, having poured their intense national spirit into the mold of this conception, they paid the grievous penalty of having their national and racial consciousness imprisoned in the narrow sphere of a character and a destiny fixed by the explicit delimitations of the scriptural role. The Israelites were God's "chosen people," the special objects of his concern, his care, his favor. Just as they had stumbled over the meaning of the word "Israel," likewise they blundered in their reading of the word "chosen." The idea that God, the all-righteous ruler, would look out over the hosts of earth and select one small tribe of Palestinian herdsmen from among all mankind for special concern and favor, should have appeared unconscionable from the start. The inner implications of the word should have told them that this "choosing" of God was not made among ethnic groups on earth. It was his selection and deputation of twelve legions of angelry in heaven! Their divine assignment was to migrate to earth and there fulfil a commission appropriate to them in God's plan of creation as it touched his progeny at a given contingency in the process. They were chosen to come to earth to be humanity.

More than one ancient people had attempted to intertwine the divine allegory with their own history and geography. This impulse arose from the reflection that history in the small epitomizes history in the large, and that the career of a nation (as also the career of an individual) may closely follow the outline of general evolution. If lofty intelligence governed the undertaking, the result would be an epic of Homeric order, but if ignorance and self-righteousness prevailed, and the allegorical intent was replaced by credulous belief, the result would be a disastrous falsification of history. This blunder did occur, and as a result most biblical "history" is misinterpreted allegory and myth. The name "Israel" applied to no ethnic group. Its reference was wholly to the divine spiritual origin of humanity, said to be twelve legions of "angels" sent to earth bearing the seed germ of potential divinity, which, when planted, grown and fructified by evolution, would make

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mankind the legitimate heirs of God's patrimony.

In a purely spiritual sense, all humanity is potentially Israel. Charles Guignebert, the outstanding modern exegete, in his work, Jesus, quotes Philo of Alexandria as saying that any man who forsakes the worship of idols for the true God is a member of the true Israel, which is not to be confused with "Israel of the flesh." St. Paul declares that merely being born in a Jewish family does not make one an Israelite. The criterion is spiritual unfoldment; an Israelite is one who is bringing his spiritual potential to birth, and he may be of any race.

Christian apologetics has found it dialectically necessary to accredit the distinctive claims of a divine status for Jewry, assumed to be the "Israel" of the Bible, in order to vindicate its claims for the divinity of its own Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, born to fulfil the Old Testament prophecy. In the Christian theological view, there would have been no gulf between the two religions had the Jews recognized Jesus as the Messiah, born of their own divinely commissioned race. But by denying him they forfeited the glory of having produced him for humanity. We find a typical expression of Christian support of the Jewish "Israelite" status in a work entitled Introducing the Old Testament, by a Catholic writer, Frederick L. Moriarty. Expounding the biblical-rabbinic view, he states that Israel is not a "natural" nation; it is not like other nations; it rates a "supernatural" status, having been called into being by God to serve his special cosmic purpose. God made a special covenant with Israel, first through Abraham as the progenitor of the race, then with the entire community of Israel at Mount Sinai. Only by God's gratuitous and gracious election of this race to a special place in his divine favor does Israel play its part in the scheme of world destiny; apart from this covenanted relation to God, Israel would be as nothing. The Catholic writer does not repudiate this Jewish evaluation of Jewish election and destiny, because it strengthens Christian claims as to the divinity of Jesus.

We have, then, these two streams, each diverging from the original connotation of "Israel." The Christians cher-

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ished a misconception of the word "Messiah," which in later years drove them to the contradiction of believing that the love of the humanized Christ-child could sanctify the slaughter of non-believers. The Jews cherished the misconception of the words "Israel" and "chosen," which drove them to self-isolation and sequestration from other peoples. Never in human history could it be said that so great a tragedy eventuated from so seemingly trivial a cause as the misreading of a term in sacred literature. Yet the phenomenon is understandable if one considers that when a nation or culture takes a single book as the determining source and monitor of its entire psychic life, every chapter, every letter becomes crucial, and its misinterpretation can hold countless minds in bondage.

It is a significant fact of history that when Alexander the Great swept the near-East world with the besom of his Macedonian phalanx, it was Jewish Palestine that alone stubbornly resisted absorption into the Hellenic culture that followed in the wake of his conquest. The fact that Philip of Macedon engaged the philosopher, Aristotle, as tutor of the young Alexander is evidence that he dreamed of spreading Greek philosophical culture over the known world. Had the conqueror lived to age seventy and given his life to cultivation of the Greek influence in the area he had overrun, the course of ensuing history might have perpetuated "the glory that was Greece" for the blessing of mankind. Greek philosophy did spread its benign influence over much of the terrain of Alexander's conquest, but it fought a losing battle on the soil of Palestine, because the Jewish consciousness was sealed against any system that rested on pure rationalism. When every aspect of a nation's life is imbued with the conviction that it is inspired by God for the accomplishment of his divine will, all philosophy must be shaped to fit this conception.

Instead of melting into the broad universality of the Hellenic wisdom, therefore, the Hebrew theology remained unmodified and retained those elements which ultimately conduced to the eruption of Christianity. Had Judea been more receptive to the Greek influence, Judaism would have been so modified that the misconceptions as to the nature and

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significance of the Messianic advent could never have taken form to derationalize the Hebrew consciousness. Hellenism looked for the glorification of the human spirit in a general and collective apotheosis of humanity, and it would have effectually debarred any concept of a personalized Avatar or Sun-God from displacing the spiritual and evolutionary interpretation.

Finally, the world would not have suffered the loss of any true religious motivation had Judaism not personalized the Messianic entity as a son of David, and had Christianity not existed at all. For its only excuse for divergence from Judaism was likewise its still more literal personalization of the Messiah.

It is a degradation of the human spirit to believe that one is subject to the impact of forces over which he has no control, to which in dire distress one is driven to implore help or mercy. Turning from the God-seed within to a man-God without, Christianity drove the humanity it touched to the status of beggary. The ultimate criterion of a religious value is incontestably the degree to which the human being comes into a conscious recognition of the nature and value of his own activity. Is he a creature under the control of forces external to himself, or is he, and to what degree, master of his own life?

 in the Judaic religion the concept had advanced a half-step away from philosophical abstraction toward human entification, the Messiah being conceived as the spirit of Jehovah animating the "Israelites," and destined to be embodied in a man-born son of David who should sit on the throne of Jerusalem and be God's vice-regent, for the execution of the divine will over the nations. in Christianity the concept of Messiah came to be identified with the form of one babe, divinely endowed but born in a lowly stable among animals, representing the polar opposition of spirit and matter, the tension out of which the Christ-consciousness is born.

In summary, Hellenism preserved the Messianic concept in its purely noumenal and abstract form; Hebraism kept it half-spiritual, half personalized; Christianity completely personalized it.

Christian theology known to the present author has noted that the number forty occupies this place of prominence in symbolism because it signalizes the period of the incarnation of the spirit in matter: e.g., rain fell for forty days in the story of the flood; Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness for forty days; Lent was ordained for forty days; the Israelites wandered for forty days in the desert of Sinai; Hallowe'en and All Souls' Day fall forty days after the autumn equinox. To the theologian this is just a bit of odd coincidence, as it has to be if the Scriptures are to be taken as actual history. Yet the recurrence of this number forty in such diverse contexts strongly suggests an allegorical rather than a factual meaning. The fact that the dates of Christmas and Easter are clearly determined by winter solstice and vernal equinox--the more so because Easter is not even a fixed date, but shifts each year--should long ago have shaken faith in the purely historical view.

it was proclaimed that only in the Christian Jesus could the world contact the living and miraculously saving power of God.

Yet Judaism had for centuries before that day proclaimed with equal fervor that only through the unction of the power of God's covenant with the children of Israel, and the promises of God to Moses on Sinai, could the sanctification of the race be achieved.

The Christian construction of the salvation "scheme," (as it has been called) has a certain appeal--as is testified by the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the Western world. Yet, over the centuries the transforming power of the Son of Man has lost its efficacy, as Jung has pointed out. Christianity believed fervently that in Jesus, the living archetype, divine unction had been released to the world for the first time, so that whosoever would lift his mind and heart to contemplation of this ideal would be blessed with soul-regenerating force. Had not Elijah demonstrated on Mount Carmel the superiority of the living power of God and the utter defeat of the Baalim?

So the expectation of the coming of the Messiah was a deeply felt impulse in the religion of the age. The pagan world believed in the periodical appearance of Avatars. According to the Sibyls and in conformity with the pagan conception of the hierarchical governance of the world, such divine emissaries were expected at stated intervals, the cycles being determined by astronomical periodicities, mainly of the sun and moon and such great stars as Sirius and Spica. One of the chief of these cycles was called the Cycle of Neros, of six hundred or six hundred and eight years. However variously the cycle's significance may have been interpreted, it was inevitable that some would look for its fulfilment in the form and person of a Messiah. Once this aspect of the historical situation in the near-East during the first centuries of the Christian era is fully appreciated, we have, under our eyes, the most potent cause of the origin of the Christian movement.

The hope of the imminent coming of a Messiah was certainly widespread at that time.

It is probably true that the Messianic concept was in one way or another integral to all these expressions. The more perceptive groups viewed it as the spiritual regeneration of mankind. Others, less metaphysically minded, translated the concept into the person of a Savior to appear in human form. The fate of half the world for the ensuing two thousand years hinged on the issue as to which of these two interpretations would prevail and win acceptance. The victory went to man-God conception over that of the God-in-man.

Many characters were revived after three days of "death," languished in prison, wandered in darkness, or toiled in slavery for six days or years, being released on the seventh; many Old Testament kings or judges ruled forty years, or were forty years old when their reigns began; many heroes crossed a sea, lake or river either dry-shod or with the aid of a great fish, to find happiness on the farther shore; many infant deities were suckled and saved by shepherds, herdsmen or by animals, and lived to found kingdoms; many were born in a cave, slew a lion or dragon, descended into a dark underworld to release a captive maiden watched by a three-headed monster; many heroes were accompanied by twelve followers; many god-figures had their bodies cut into twelve or fourteen pieces and asked their followers to re-member them. Added together, these accounts become too many for us to single out one as uniquely authentic and historical. The perspective thus gained, however, was lost during the early Christian centuries when scholarship, during the Dark Ages, was at its lowest ebb.

In his discerning work, Why Jesus Died, Pierre Van Paassen recounts the consternation with which he and his fellow students heard the learned Abbé, Alfred Loisy, who was among the most distinguished of modern exegetes, solemnly announce at the end of a lecture in the College de France that he had been forced to the sad conclusion that "The Sermon on the Mount" had never been preached by Jesus in any sense of an original construction formulated by him, but that it was a collection of Hellenistic maxims and aphorisms. The impact of this statement was such, Van Paassen writes, that one student burst into tears and others left the room in silence.

Van Paassen has also made the sweeping statement that there is no ground for the belief that Jesus ever lived at all. He bases this assertion on the fact that, in the records which have come down to us from Jesus' time, there is no reference to him or his works. The Dutch scholar goes so far as to affirm that the New Testament documents are not contemporary with the life of Jesus and cannot be accepted as history, being rather a form of poetic legend. In support of this statement he mentions that, although historians of the time know a great deal about Herod's evil actions, they make no mention of the so-called Massacre of the Innocents, for the good reason that Herod had been in his grave at least four years before the supposed birth of Jesus, or in 4 B.C.

Pythagoras was not alone in holding that God built the universe on number: the Gnostics, Kabalists and Hermeticists also expounded this theory. In both Greek and Hebrew, every letter of the alphabet had a numerical value, so that the words and sentences not only carried a message through their words, but also framed a pattern of meaning over mathematical design and proportion.

At the marriage feast in Cana, for example, the servants set out six pots of water to be turned into wine, signifying the six days of creation of the natural world which generate a birth of "spirit" in the crowning seventh. Jesus tarried here or there for seven days (as indeed, so did the Buddha and many another great religious character). Kings reigned forty years. Twelve stones were set up by Joshua in the dry bed of the Jordan River at his crossing; twelve baskets of fragments of bread and fish were gathered up after the multitude had been miraculously fed on five small loaves and two small fishes. Circumcision was performed on the eighth day. The very name of Hecate, Greek goddess of the moon, means six. The Israelite world was nearly split in twain over the question whether the Passover fell on the fourteenth or fifteenth day of Nisan, the fourteenth being implied by lunar, the fifteenth by solar symbolism. The seventh day of the tenth month had special sanctity. More events than Jesus' resurrection--notably Jonah's voyage in his piscatorial ark--were consummated "after three days." Atergatis and Semiramis and other goddesses were named "the Goddess Fifteen."

Another belief inherent in the tradition was that the divine Child should be born on the day of the destruction of the temple. If one uses Paul's vivid figure of the body as the temple of the living God, this implies that when the weaknesses of the flesh (which are epitomized in the concept of original sin) have been overcome, transmuted or "destroyed," the Christ-spirit, ever present but until then submerged, will flower into full life. The spiritual man, the Christ, will be born when the natural man dies.

Then again, the legend asserted that Messiah was to come up out of the sea. What does this mean? From the physiological point of view, it is true that every human babe is born out of sea water--the amniotic fluid. In another sense, all living matter is symbolized by water, from which and by which all life proceeds. Life on our earth began in and came out upon land from the sea. Greek myth recounts that Venus (Love) was born out of the sea-foam that was stirred up around the knees of Zeus as he waded through the waters. As life started in water, then emerged into the air, so man is said to be born first of water, the psyche, and then of the spirit. Since the element Water has long been held to represent the animal or psychic nature, the Christ, representing the spiritual soul, would be seen as arising out of that water element, the sea, into the free air of the spiritual life.

Integral in the Messiah legend was the notion that the child had to be spirited away immediately after his birth to escape destruction--often by a dragon. In the Egyptian tradition, the name for the symbolic serpent typifying the lower nature of man, along with Apap and the Hydra or water dragon, was the Herut reptile. A Syrian form was likewise Herutt. Mythology is full of stories of the God-child who must be hidden from the danger of destruction by a serpent, which the Egyptian myths represented as lurking in the bight of Amenta (this physical world) to devour young souls. So, also, Hercules had to strangle two great serpents in his cradle. Can there be a connection between the danger to the divine Child from the snake "Herut" and that from the tyrant "Herod?"

Another story is connected with a figure named Taxo or Taxon in the Apocalypse of Moses. It is said that Taxo and his seven sons hid themselves in a cave in order to pray for the people, but also to be able to live in accordance with the people's strict interpretation of the law. The cave is a companion symbol to the stable as the birthplace of the Savior in the legends. If ever theology could recognize that this "strict law" is not Jewish legalistic religion, but that which is characterized by geburah, the unbending immutability of natural law, it might perceive therein a hint that the divine soul, when it comes to dwell in mortal body, would conform its life to the law governing its house of flesh, while it "prayed" for the elevation of its host.

He would be the ruler of the world, to be sure, but only as the embodiment of world hegemony promised by Jehovah to Abraham and his progeny of Israel. To Abraham, the Israelite father, the Lord had promised that in him should all the nations of the world be blessed. That promise has enchanted the mind of every son of Jewry for some three thousand years.

It was a fateful day for the Hebrews when they came to the point of identifying themselves, as a tribal or a racial group, with those "children of Israel" whose history occupies so large a place in the Old Testament. The date of this event is lost in the dim past, but at some moment in remote Palestinian history they laid hold of three names used in the Mysteries to designate the highest grades of initiates, and applied them to their ethnic group. These three names, Israelites, Hebrews and Jews, each originally designated a grade of attainment in the religious life. In much the same way, the religious elite of India appropriated to themselves the title of Brahmins, signifying their status as embodiments of Brahman, the universal Creator. Similarly, the Greeks called themselves Hellenes, "the bright and shining ones," and referred to the rest of the world as barbarians. So the Palestinians adopted for themselves these three names which had connotations of the highest spirituality, and called the rest of the nations the "Gentiles," which means "born"--thus not "Reborn" in a spiritual sense.

Additional confirmation of the fact that the term "Israelites" was not intended to refer to the Jews as a race or nation is to be found in the Introduction to the New Testament by Theodor Zahn. In Part II of this work, when analyzing the Epistle of James, Zahn discusses the apostle's motive for addressing the readers of his letter, and the identity and religious status of those to whom it was ostensibly addressed: "the Twelve Tribes in the Diaspora." This term, "the diaspora," refers to the Jews who did not live in Palestine, but were scattered among the population of other lands. "The Jews of the dispersion" is an equivalent term. From the way James writes to these dispersed twelve tribes, Zahn finds it a matter of some question as to precisely what groups are meant--whether those thus designated as in the diaspora were the scattered Jews generally, or explicitly Jews who had become Christians, or Christians generally, either former Jews or Gentiles of various nationalities. His remarks confirm our contention as to the meaning and reference of the key-name "Israelites":

The object of this redemption is not the Jewish people, but nevertheless a people of God to whom the titles of Israel are applied. . . . At that time no one could say that the Jewish nation as such was living in diaspora, either as regards its condition or its location, nor is any such statement made. No matter how largely the Jews were living outside of Palestine, and no matter how widely they were scattered, the nation retained its fatherland. One is still at a loss to understand why he, James, makes Christians his readers also, and how he could have omitted to indicate by a word the religious condition which distinguished his readers from Israel as a whole.

And besides, this construction stands in absolute contradiction to the idea of the "Twelve Tribes" which indicates specifically the Jewish people, with special emphasis on their entirety. Here the contrast is not between individual Jews or single tribes of Israel and the remaining Jews or tribes, but between the "Twelve Tribes" which live in the diaspora, so constitute a homeless diaspora, and another "Twelve Tribes" of which this is not true. This phrase is replaced by one which, while on the one hand retaining the comparison with the Jewish people, on the other brings the object which it describes into sharp contrast with the Jewish people. Unlike the Twelve Tribes which have Palestine for their native land, Jerusalem for their capital and the temple as a center of their religious worship, the Twelve Tribes addressed in his letter have no earthly fatherland, nor any capital upon earth, but always, no matter where they have been settled, live scattered in a strange world, like the Jewish exiles in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It is no new doctrine concerning a twofold Israel which James develops here. The expression, "the Twelve Tribes in the diaspora" may mean either the entire body of Christians living at the time . . . or it may mean the Believing Israel, the entire body of the Jewish Christians.

Jesus spoke of this future fellowship as of another ethnos in contrast with the Jewish people led by the High Priests and the rabbis. There is, of course, no need for proof to show that he meant . . not some other particular nation, the Greek, e.g. . . . but rather the same people of God whom he elsewhere called his Church and represented as a house to be built by him (Matt. 16:18) The thought that the Christian Church, composed of men of various nationalities and based not on birth at all, but on faith in Jesus, was a new people of God, the true race of Abraham, or a spiritual Israel, was consequently implanted in his Church from the beginning, and was developed by it in manifold directions. True followers of Christ would become Israelites by being grafted on to this spiritual Israel. The thought that the Christian Church, in contrast to the Jewish people, is the spiritual Israel is so usual with Paul that he only tacitly presupposes it and quite incidentally calls Jewish people with their culture "Israel according to the flesh" (I Cor. 10:18). This spiritual Israel also has its metropolis, which likewise can be termed Jerusalem. It lies, however, not in Palestine, but in heaven, where the ascended King of the spiritual Israel is enthroned (Gal 4:26; Heb. 12:22). There the members of the true Israel are enrolled even while still living on earth (Phil 4:3; Luke 10:20) There is the proper seat of the Commonwealth of which they are descendants even here. (Phil 3:20) Paul likens their condition in the world to that of those Jews who were scattered abroad far from their native land. Hermas (Similitudes 9:17) in a manner quite characteristic of him and yet often misunderstood, applies the figure of the Twelve Tribes to all mankind as the field of mission work and the source of the materials for the building of the Church. Hermas represents the Church as the true Israel. If a Jew believes in Christ he becomes an Israelite. (Romans 4:11 ff.)

Zahn thus corroborates our contention that the racial group known for over two thousand years as Israelites, Hebrews or Jews does not constitute the "Israelites" of the Bible. They are not the sons of the Father in any more special sense than that of all humans. St. Paul himself said that no one becomes an Israelite by virtue of birth in a Hebrew family or nationality, but by the birth within him of the Christ spirit. Bluntly stated, the Jewish appropriation of the term "Israelites" to themselves as an ethnic group, regarding themselves therefore as having been divinely chosen and set apart from all other groups for a special purpose, was as much a misconception as the Christian belief that Messiahship could be embodied in one single man, Jesus.

In Bellamy's translation of Justin Martyr's work (Apol. 2) we find Celsus, the Jew with whom Origen waged his famous debate, saying that "the Christian religion contains nothing but what Christians hold in common with the heathen; nothing new." Thus confronted, the Christians fell back on the "argument from diabolism" stated as follows:

It having reached the devil's ears that the prophets had foretold that Christ would come . . . he [the devil] set the heathen poets to bring forward a great many who should be called sons of Jove [that is, the sons of God]; the devil laying his scheme in this to get men to imagine that the true history of Christ was of the same character as the prodigious fables and poetic stories, . . . .

Justin Martyr was the most outstanding exponent of Christianity in the second century, (along with Irenaeus); this citation registers his confession that the alleged "true history of Christ" was almost the same in character and content as the stories of the many mythical saviors and solar deities. Christianity must take serious cognizance of the studies in comparative religion which demonstrate that the Gospel narrative represents a fresh statement of the universal myth of the birth, baptism, temptation, life, trial, condemnation, death, burial, resurrection and ascension of the Christos-Messiah, whether under the "vegetation myth" of the autumn death and vernal resurrection of the god or goddess of grain, or the death and resurrection of the pilgrim soul in the Mystery dramas. There is almost no limit to the body of data which establishes the presence of numberless features of the Sun-God myth in the context of the Christian structure. In the earliest Christian community, prayers were even addressed to "Our Lord, the Sun."

The Christian festivals were all originally dated in relation to the solstices and equinoxes. In 345 A.D. an encyclical issued by Pope Julian II decreed the shifting of the date of Christmas from March 25 to December 25, with the express statement that it was done in order to align the Christian celebration of the birth of the Savior with the custom of the followers of Bacchus and of Mithra, "who commemorate the birth of the Deity at the winter solstice." The tradition of Christianity, in short, is shot through and through with features of the Sun-God myths of antiquity. Some dozen ancient pagan Sun-God saviors, including Mithra, Osiris, Bacchus, Adonis and Attis, were also born on December 25.

Another apposite paragraph is from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (vol. III, p. 163):

It is to be confessed that the ministers of the Catholic Church imitated the profane model which they were impotent to destroy. The most respectable bishops had persuaded themselves that the ignorant rustics would more cheerfully renounce the superstitions of Paganism if they found some resemblance, some compensation in the bosom of Christianity. The religion of Constantine achieved in less than a century the final conquest of the Roman Empire; but the victors themselves were insensibly subdued by the arts of their vanquished rivals.

Rome had conquered Greece, but there is hardly a historian who has not said that it was Greece that conquered Rome.

The danger in which orthodoxy stands can be illustrated by comparing the situation with that of the Old Testament. To take one example, it is now impossible to deny that the words "Red Sea" do not belong in the Bible, whether Hebrew or Christian. The Moffatt translation indeed renders the Hebrew words "Iam suph" as what they indeed mean: Reed Sea, and not Red Sea. The Red Sea, geographically and symbolically has disappeared from the Bible, and, ergo, the Israelites fleeing Pharaoh's wrath, did not cross it, as indeed, no other document in existence ever said they did. If the Israelites did not cross this sea, what becomes of the story? It vanishes as history and can retain its significance only as allegory. With the whole of that central portion of the Exodus narrative disqualified as history, the rest is also fatally weakened as history.

in the spiritual reference of that Crossing--that the soul of man can pass over the ocean of life safely with the aid of the divine power which never fails to guide us if we rely upon it--there is enlightenment, reassurance and courage to face life's struggle.

John's Gospel is the only one which relates the raising of Lazarus by Jesus. How could the three synoptists have omitted such an important event as this if it actually occurred? Again, many scholars have questioned the incident wherein Jesus wrathfully drove the moneychangers from the outer precincts of the temple, where, as a matter of fact, they had a right to be, under the regulations governing the sale of doves for sacrifice. Such questionable occurrences abound in the narrative.

Instead of one figure clearly referred to as Jesus in the Talmudic literature, there are three or four names with which an effort has been made to identify him. Three of the most prominent are Jeshu ben Stada, Jeshu ben Perachia, and Jehoshua ben Pandera, along with another probable one, Pappus ben Yehuda.

The figure with whom Jesus has been chiefly identified is Jehoshua ben Pandera. In brief, he was a Jew who went to Egypt, became proficient in the magical arts of the Egyptians, returned to Judea, went about healing many people and incurred the hostility of the Sanhedrin. He was stoned to death at Lud (or Lod), and his body was "hanged on a tree."

Klausner reviews this body of literature in his Jesus of Nazareth, his treatment being doubtless as authoritative as that of any other writer. He asks how the Tanaim could assert that "Jesus" was crucified in Lod if he had been crucified in Jerusalem. (The eighth verse of the eleventh chapter of Revelation says that "our Lord was crucified" in a city "spiritually called Sodom and Egypt.") So Jesus could not have been ben Stada, whom Klausner calls the "Egyptian pretender to Christhood," and who, he says, was a madman and a "beguiler" and "led the people to the wilderness." (The latter apparently was one of the many such "pretenders" who continually appear, gathered a knot of credulous followers, and were summarily executed by the authorities as dangerous political agitators.) Klausner disqualifies the statements that seek to identify ben Stada with ben Pandera. He comments on the unreliability of the Amoraim as witness to the identity of ben Stada with Jesus, describing the ways in which they confuse Pappus ben Yehuda with the father of Jesus, and Miriam (Mary), the mother of Jesus with M'gadd'la N'shaya (the women's hairdresser), and even makes the name Stada a pseudonym of Miriam. He gives Stada as derived from S'tath'da, meaning "she went astray," that is, proved faithless to her husband.

However, the mystery deepens when we find that the Jewish scribes also confused this ben Stada with both Jesus and ben Pandera. A couple who are mentioned as Pappus ben Yehuda and his wife, Miriam M'gadd'la N'shaya were confused with Joseph, the father and Miriam, the mother of Jesus. (And the connection of this Miriam's name with Mary Magdalene is not to be overlooked.) But, avers Klausner, neither this Pappus nor Miriam M'gadd'la have any connection with Jesus. And only the Amoraim made this connection between ben Stada and Jesus.

There is another passage in a Baraita (section of the Talmud) which Klausner holds to be of greater value. It runs as follows:

On the eve of Passover they hanged Yeshu (of Nazareth) and the herald went before him for forty days, saying "(Yeshu of Nazareth) is going forth to be stoned in that he hath practiced sorcery and beguiled and led astray Israel. Let anyone knowing aught in his defence come and plead for him." But they found naught in his defense and hanged him on the eve of Passover.

Following this Baraita comes a comment of the Amora 'Ulla:

'Ulla said: "And do you suppose that for (Yeshu of Nazareth) there was any right of appeal? He was a beguiler, and the Merciful One hath said: Thou shalt not spare, neither shalt thou conceal him." It was otherwise with Yeshu, for he was near to the civil authorities.

Material related to the other figure, Yehoshua ben Pandera, seems of somewhat more credibility in its connection with the Jesus of the Gospels. It can be introduced by quoting a notation by Origen, greatest of the Christian theologians of the third and early fourth centuries. In his book, Contra Celsum (Against Celsus) he mentions a story Celsus said he had heard, to the effect that Miriam was divorced from her husband, a carpenter by trade, after it had been proved that she was an adulteress. Discarded by her husband and wandering about, she bore her son in secret, the father being a certain soldier Pantheras. To refute this tale, Origen himself says that James, the father of Jesus' father, Joseph, was called ben Pandera, or "ben Pantere" by the Jews, after the name of his grandfather.

Klausner speculates on this version of Jewish tradition along these lines: This part of the story of Jesus' ancestry may have resulted from the popular corruption of a deeper element of the Messianic allegorism; it is impossible for us to assume that there really was a Roman soldier by the name of Pandera, or Pantheras, who became the father of Jesus, since this entire canard of Jesus' birth had come from popular perversion of the legendary conviction of the Christians, from the time of St. Paul, that Jesus was born without a natural father. Klausner holds that we must seek elsewhere for the source of this name, Panthera, and he quickly finds a hint in a suggestion picked up from two scholars, Nietsch and Beck, to the effect that Pantheras is a corruption, exactly such as the common people were likely to make, of the Greek word for the "Virgin," Parthenos (Parthena feminized). The Jews constantly heard the Christians call Jesus "Son of the Virgin." If there was in Jewish social life of the time half as much propensity as there is in our day to catch at every opening for a clever and insidious remark, it is not at all unlikely that someone could have seen a chance for irreligious mockery of the much-disliked Christians, and made the leap from the sacred Parthena to the ribald Panthera. Klausner's solution of this conundrum, therefore, is by no means an unreasonable assumption.

Pan Thera: PtAh n hera:

There was, however, another story that Jesus was the son of Miriam and a Greek sailor, who bore the name ben Pandera, his father, Cleopas, having picked up the nickname of "Panther." Yehoshua ben Pandera means "Jesus son of the Panther." In certain of the mythologies, the Christos principle, being evolved out of man's animal nature, was called the lion's whelp, son of the wolf, saved and suckled by a wolf or lynx or other animal; in Egypt he was in one aspect Anup, symbolized as the dog, wolf or jackal. Thus there is a plausible source of the story of the Christ's descent from an animal. Through popular debasement, this allegory could have tempted anyone inimical to the Christian movement to modify Jesus, son of the Virgin, to Jehoshua, son of the Panther, by the mere shifting of a letter. Pandera is not a Jewish name, and as a pure caricature it was assigned to a Roman soldier.

Klausner also cites a pointed similarity between the legendary flight of Jesus with his parents to Egypt from a cruel king, Herod, and the escape of this Yeshu with his master to Egypt because of a cruel king, Jannaeus. Another striking similarity is established between the two Jesus figures in that both were accused and condemned on the same charge, practicing sorcery, beguiling and leading Israel astray.

But what appears to be the portion of Jewish literature that comes closest to being a shadow of the Gospel construction, is found in the document entitled Tol'doth Yeshu, or the Generations of Yeshu. It will tend to clarify this discussion if the actual substance of the document is before us. Klausner's version is as follows:

A certain Yochanan, JOHN / Kohen who was learned in the Law and who feared God, of the House of David (according to some versions it is Pappus ben Yahudah, following the Talmud) espoused to himself in Bethlehem, Miriam, the daughter of his widowed neighbor, a respectable and humble virgin. But Miriam attracted a handsome villain named Joseph Pandera (or Ben Pandera) who betrayed her at the close of a certain Sabbath. Miriam supposed that it was her espoused, Yochanan, and, submitting only against her will, marvelled at the act of her pious betrothed; and when he himself came, she mentioned her astonishment. He suspected Pandera and told his suspicions to Rabban Shimeon ben Shetah. When Miriam was with child and Yochanan knew that it was not by him, but that he could not prove who was the guilty party, he fled to Babylon. Miriam brought forth her son and called him Yehoshua after the name of her mother's brother, and his name was corrupted to Yeshu. The child learnt much Torah from an able teacher and distinguished scholar, but he proved "an impudent child" and on one occasion he passed in front of the Sages with uncovered head (and according to another version delivered an offensive exposition about Moses and Jethro), whereupon the Sages said that he was a bastard and a "son of uncleanness." Miriam confessed to this and Shimeon ben Shetah recalled what his disciple Yochanan had told him.

Yeshu then fled to Jerusalem and in the temple learnt the "Ineffable Name." In order that the brazen dogs who stood by the gate of the place of sacrifice and barked at all who learned the Name, and so made them forget the Name [this resembles the legend of the lions of Solomon's throne told in the "Second Targum"] --in order that they should not make him forget the Name, Yeshu wrote it on a piece of leather and sewed it in the flesh of his thigh. He gathered around him in Bethlehem a group of young Jews and proclaimed himself the Messiah and Son of God; and as a retort to those who rejected his claim he said that "they sought their own greatness and were minded to rule in Israel"; while to confirm his claims he healed a lame man and a leper by the power of the "Ineffable Name." He was brought before Queen Helena, the ruler of Israel, and she found him guilty of acts of sorcery and beguilement.

But Yeshu restored a dead man to life and the queen in her alarm began to believe on him. He went next to Upper Galilee where he continued his miracles and drew many people after him. The Sages of Israel then saw that it was essential that one of their number Yehuda Iskarioto, (some versions give R. Yehuda the Pious), should learn the "Ineffable Name" just as Yeshu did, and so rival him in signs and wonders.

Yehuda and Yeshu came before the queen. Yeshu flew in the air, but Yehuda flew higher and defiled him so that he fell to earth. The queen condemned Yeshu to death and delivered him up to the Sages of Israel.

They took him to Tiberias and imprisoned him there. But he had instilled into his disciples the belief that whatever happened to him had been prepared for the Messiah, the Son of God, from the day of Creation and that the Prophets had prophecied it all. So the disciples of Yeshu fought against the Sages of Israel, rescued Yeshu and fled with him to Antioch.

From Antioch Yeshu went to Egypt to fetch spells [as is recorded in the Talmud of Ben Stada], but Yehuda (Iskarioto the "Pious") had mingled among his disciples and robbed him in the meantime of the "Name." Yeshu then went a second time to Jerusalem to learn the "Name." Yehuda reported this intended visit to the Sages of Israel in Jerusalem, and told them that when Yeshu should come to the Temple he, Yehuda, would bow before him and thus the Sages of Israel would be able to distinguish between Yeshu and his disciples all dressed in garments "of one color" (or, according to another version, because all his disciples had sworn never to say to him "This is he.")

And so it came to pass that the Sages of Israel recognized him and arrested him. They took and hanged him on the eve of Passover (as recorded in several of the Talmudic versions) on a cabbage stem--for no other tree would bear him, because Yeshu during his lifetime had adjured all trees by the "Ineffable Name" not to receive his body when he was hanged; but he failed so to adjure the cabbage stem, since this does not count as a tree. The body was taken down while it was yet the even of the Sabbath, (in order not to violate the prohibition: "His body shall not remain there for the night") and at once buried. But Yehuda the gardener removed the body from the tomb and cast it into a water-channel in the garden, and let the water flow over it as usual.

When the disciples came and did not find the body in the tomb they announced to the queen that Yeshu had been restored to life. The queen believed this and was minded to put to death the Sages of Israel for having laid their hands on the Lord's Anointed. All the Jews mourned and wept and fasted because of this dire decree, until at last R. Tanchum [who lived four hundred years after Jesus!] found the corpse in Yehuda's garden by the help of the Holy Spirit. The Sages of Israel removed it, tied it to the tail of a horse and brought it before the queen in order that she might see how she had been deceived.

We are next told how the disciples of Yeshu fled and mingled among the nations. Among these disciples were the twelve apostles who sorely distressed the Jews. One of the Sages of Israel, Shimeon Kepha [Petros, Peter, rock in Greek, of which the Aramaic equivalent is Kepha,] thereupon undertook to separate the disciples of Yeshu from the Jews and give them religious laws of their own, so that they might no longer affect the Jews. After he had acted in such a way as to feign belief in Yeshu he went and lived by himself in a tower built in his honor [a reference to the Church of St. Peter in Rome] where he composed hymns and psalms full of devotion and piety which he sent to all scattered communities of Israel, by whom they are sung in the Synagogues to this day.

There is ample justification for the republication of this bizarre document. The reader will doubtless have registered his own reflections in a wide variety of reactions. He will have been struck by the undeniable similarity with much in Gospel "history," and at the same time with the glaring differences. He will have been shocked at the scurrility which turned the virgin birth into a social scandal, and he must have realized how easy this conversion must have been to crude yokels and "rough fellows." If he chanced to be a student in this field, he would have recognized at once the purely allegorical nature of eight or ten items, while being willing to accredit about as many to possible history. On the side of allegory he would place certainly such items as the barking of the brazen dogs, the sewing of the Name in the thigh, the restoration of a dead man to life, the personal air flights, the cabbage stem. As possible history, but more likely allegory, he might list the caricature of the virgin birth, the self-proclamation of Messiahship, the miracles of healing by the "Ineffable Name," the predestined events of Yeshu's career, the dispersion among the nations, Peter's treachery, the empty tomb, the opposition and betrayal by "Iskarioto," and he would see Yeshu's "Impertinence" and flouting of the Sages as matching Jesus' defiance of the Sanhedrin.

It is obvious that the whole passage is a weird admixture of allegorical elements with a modicum of history, focused upon the life of one of the numerous hallucinated, or sincerely self-deceived, claimants to Messiahship, who appeared in numbers around that period. Klausner's comment that the account is a melange of bits of the universal legend of the Messianic tradition, inspired by Jewish desire to caricature the Christian pretensions as to the virgin birth, may well be the case.

A further observation is that the shrewd policy of Christian zealots has dictated a program of concealment of all such material, and suppression of all that immense body of religious literature subsumed under the two terms, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. The first term suggests "hidden from;" and the second, "falsely written." Had the Gospels all along been studied in a wider context which included these two elements of religious writing, the consequences would have been a saner and more balanced interpretation of the Scriptures.

One other fragment of apocryphal material may be referred to here, because it shows the obvious allegorical character of the ancient Scripture. This is an entire chapter from the Protevangelium or so-called Gospel of James. It dramatizes the winter solstice as the stasis in evolution when ascending organic development from the physical world below meets the descending spirituality from above. The relation is so analogous to the stasis of light and darkness at the solstice that it had to be kept out of the Scriptural canon. The passage poetically expresses the cessation of movement in either direction when the two forces in man's nature, the human and the divine, are locked in polar equilibrium. Scripture was the loser by the exclusion of this fragment from the Bible. Here it is:

1. And leaving her [Mary] and his sons in the cave, Joseph went forth to seek a Hebrew midwife in the village of Bethlehem.

2. But as I was going (said Joseph) I looked up into the air and I saw clouds astonished, and the fowls of the air stopping in the midst of their flight.

3. And I looked down toward the earth and I saw a table spread, and working people sitting around it, but their hands were upon the table and they did not move to eat.

4. They that had meat in their mouths did not eat.

5. They who had lifted their hands up to their heads did not draw them back.

6. And they who lifted them up to their mouths did not put anything in.

7. But all their faces were fixed upwards.

8. And I beheld the sheep dispersed, and yet the sheep stood still.

9. And the shepherd lifted up his hand to smite them, and his hand continued up.

10. And I looked into a river and saw the kids with their mouths close to the water and touching it, but they did not drink.

This passage forcibly reminds us that if there be historical factuality at the basis of Scripture, it has been presented in the guise of beautiful allegory.

Some time ago, the New York Times carried an article announcing the discovery of a letter, found two years before, in a monastery of Mar Saba, twelve miles southeast of Jerusalem, by a Columbia University professor, Dr. Morton Smith. This letter, which was addressed to an unknown "Theodore," was attributed to the great Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, since it definitely appears to be in his well-known style. It seems to be a reply to a letter addressed to Clement by this "Theodore," who had written of the sect of Carpocratians and set forth his opposition to them, in respect to their knowledge of a "secret Gospel." Clement admonished Theodore on the necessity of keeping secret the knowledge of the gospel, which included the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead by Jesus, which evidently Clement had found in a second Gospel attributed to Mark. The Alexandrian Father, speaking of this new document which he thinks is of Mark's authorship, says that Mark brought to Alexandria from Rome the notes of Peter, and from them incorporated in his first Gospel what he thought essential for progress toward knowledge. But Mark, he writes, did not include "the things which are not to be uttered," that is, "the hierophantic teaching of the Lord," but added to his Gospel other stories and sayings which, when interpreted, would "lead the hearers into the innermost sanctuary of that truth which is hidden behind seven veils." This composition was left by Mark with the Church of Alexandria, and kept carefully guarded, "being read only to those who are being initiated into the great mysteries." The document adds a new witness, Salome, to the raising of Lazarus. Clement further states that Mark, while in Rome with Peter, had written "an account of the Lord's doings," but had not narrated all of them, nor "had he even hinted at the ones pertaining to the mysteries."

But as IU it stands as one of the most basic of all divine name-forms. IU was in fact the shortest and commonest of Egyptian verbs, and meant to come. Because the divine nature was considered an element of consciousness that was in course of its evolutionary coming to deify mankind, the Messiah doctrine connoted the idea of the slow, gradual and continuous coming of the deific mind in the world. In fact a common name in Egypt for the Messianic character was "the Comer." "Iu is he who comes regularly and continually," periodically. Hence IU is the primal Egyptian name of deity. As such it formed the first element of the great compound Egyptian name of the Christ-Messiah, Iu-em-hetep, which was shortened by the Greeks into Imhotep. In full translation this would read: Iu (he who comes) -em (with) -hetep (peace, also seven); "he who comes with peace as number seven." This name comprehends in itself another great sermon like the A N K H--symbol, referring to the occult fact that in any cycle of creation the principle of divine consciousness that will unfold to bring peace to the chaotic subconscious elements (the so-called six elementary powers, the potencies in the atom) comes to full outward expression in the seventh and last round of the cycle. Christhood is always a seventh unfoldment. Our own word seven comes from hetep, as this shortened to hept, and directly became the Latin sept-em, by the interchange of h with s, as occurs in very many instances, as in Asura becoming Ahura. H and s are also closely related through the Hebrew letter shin, which is either S or sh in sound. S is really only a sharper h.

It is impossible to pass by this item of the turning of the I into the J (the two are essentially the same letter still in Latin) without calling attention to the astonishing significance of the fact in relation to one of the key words in the Biblical allegory of the soul's descent and return. In the Hebrew-Mosaic allegory in the Old Testament the place where God descended in a cloud to meet and commune with his children (Israel) was Mount Sinai. This name then must mean the lowest point to which the spirit-soul descends to meet matter, the pivot point round which it swings to begin its return to the heavens. This is diagrammed by the lower turn of the J. What must be our astonishment, then, to discover that this key name Sinai derives from the Egyptian word seni (senai), meaning "point of turning to return!" And where, in concrete reality, is that point located? Nowhere else than in the physical body of man! The physical body of man is the Mount Sinai of the Bible. And where else could God and man meet than in the body of his human child? An obscure point in scholarship has at last come forth to enlighten us on one of the most important features of our sacred Scriptures.

Greek mythology gives us Jason, a divine figure. In the Old Testament we have Jacob, Jabez, Jared, Jakin and perhaps others; James in the New; Jacques, Jack, a folk-lore character of the deity in man; Janus, definitely a Christ-figure in Roman mythology. The JE-form gives Jesus, Jesse, Jeshua, Jeshu, Jezebel, Jeremiah, Jerusalem, Jehu, Jethro, Jehosophat, Jehovah, Jephthah, and others. In passing it seems quite worth while to analyze the true context of the name Jesus. It is the JE combined with the Egyptian SU, meaning son, heir, prince, successor to the king; and the final masculine terminal letter, which was F in Egyptian, but became S (US) in Latin: JE-SU-S. It would then mean the coming masculine-divine son (of God the Father) as "prince of peace."

The JU-form yields Judah, Judas, Judea, Jubilee, Judith, Julia, along with significant common noun derivatives such as judge, jury, justice. But Latin mythic usage exalted the JU to the very highest pinnacle of divine dignity in naming its supreme deity after the Egyptian JU, adding the word for father, pater (piter), to it to form the great name of the king of the gods, JU-PITER. Even the god's wife and sister partook of the glorious title--JUNO. The great Caesar boasted of his fabled derivation from deity in his cognomen Julius. The Juniper tree carries this connection with divine source. Latin juventus, our "youth," conveys the idea that the gods are ever young. (The I, the J and Y are all forms of the same letter-sound.) From this we have our junior, the German has jung, meaning and pronounced as our young. The ju--that begins the Latin jungo (iungo), to join, indicates that spirit and matter are joined together anew to generate fresh life. This IU (JU) stem is much more significant than has ever been seen before. In the form of YU--it enters into the great world signifying the birth of deity--Yule.

Plato has the famous "myth of Er," a divine character. The Greek has Er- with the masculine singular ending -os, giving the great God of divine love, Eros.

UR reveals a grand list of shining names. It was in itself the greatest and most likely the original word for fire. The Egyptians, wishing to name it the fire, added the divine article, the, which in their language was the hieroglyph for the letter P. This addition made it p-ur, pur, the Greek word for fire to this day. From this comes pure, purge, purgatory, as also pyre, pyrotechnic and empyrean, the Greek U changing to Y in English, as in hundreds of words. Ur (a variant of aur, or) was the name of that state of the primordial spiritual "fire" from which the first divine ray, Ab-ra-ham, proceeded as first father of spiritual Israel (not the historical Hebrews). In the same category it was the name of the universal Egyptian symbol of creative fire, the uraeus, "a serpent of fire," which was sevenfold as typifying the seven archangels that created the universe. It is therefore another representation of the dragon or beast with seven heads. Is it strange that our modern discovery of the creative fire of the universe in the atom has brought into prominence as the most fiery of the elements those two whose names incorporate both the title of the Sun-god and the Uraeus, RAdium and URanium? The German language has some hundreds of words prefixing UR, as Ursprung, Urquelle, Ursache, all meaning original source-spring of being. All life came out of UR, the primordial fount of cosmic fire. A verse in the Chaldean Oracles says that "all things are the product of one primordial fire, every way resplendent." How resplendent it is our modern nuclear physics is now revealing! The Hebrew word for father being ab, Ab-ra-m is "Father Ra," as clearly as Hebrew can say it. Ram would be this creative fire immersed in water, matter.

Braham is Taurus, Ram is Aries

The list so far traced becomes more than doubled through the prefixing onto these root-forms the Hebrew article, the, which is just the letter H. The feminine names Helen, Helena (with the H intensified into S becoming the name of the moon, Selene), are assumed to derive from it also. The Greeks adopted unto themselves the divine name Hellenes, signifying "bright and shining ones," dubbing the rest of humanity "barbarians." (They did this in the same fashion and with the same motive as the Jews adopted for themselves the divine name Israelites, dubbing the rest of mankind "Gentiles.")

HIR appears perhaps in the German for shepherd, and in Hiram.

As H comes out often in the roughened form of CH (KH), and also exchanges often with S, the H-basis of hundreds of words, all in one way or another intimating deific reference, the derivative field is vastly extended, embracing such words as chalice, charity, care, cure, cross, cheer, choir, chorus, Christos, charm, cherish, cherubim, Serapis, seraphim, sir, sire, seer, ser (Egyptian for chief, elder, sire), kherufu (Egyptian for the two lion-gods on the horizon).

It can indeed be said that the one sure and inerrant key to the Bibles is the simple concept of fire plunging into water, the fire being spiritual mind-power and water being the constituent element of physical bodies,--as well as the symbol of matter. Soul (spirit) as fire, plunged down into body, as water, and therein had its baptism. Hence soul's incarnation on earth was endlessly depicted and dramatized as its crossing a body of water, a Jordan River, Styx River, Red Sea, Reed Sea. Since the water element of human bodies is the "sea" which the soul of fire has to cross in its successive incarnations, and it is red in color, the "Red Sea" of ancient Scriptures is just the human body blood. When the red fire of spirit-soul was gradually introduced into and permeated the original sea-water which was the bodily essence of earliest living creatures on earth, it changed colorless salt water into its own color, red. The "Red Sea" never could have meant anything other than the human blood. The Scriptures reiterate that "fire descended from heaven and turned the sea into blood." This transformation of course took place in man's body, not in the world oceans. This is a clarification that alone can reillumine all old Scriptures with a flashing new and enlightening orientation of meaning. Egypt said that souls came down to "kindle a fire in the sea," to "create a burning within the sea," verily to set the ocean on fire. This has actually been done, but in man's veins and in his passions, not in the seven seas.

Every letter of the Hebrew alphabet, beside carrying a number value, also has attached to it a symbolic monograph: B is beth and means house; G is gimel and means camel; D is daleth and means door; H is he and means window, etc. When we come to M, we find it is named mem and means--water! N is called nun and means that which is the animal life in water,--fish! This is in the Hebrew. But amazingly, when we turn to the old Egyptian, we find that N has the name of nun likewise, but means and is the hieroglyph of--water! Its character letter is simply a short line indented to indicate seven waves, as our English script m is a succession of three waves. M therefore in the Hebrew, and in the English as well, marks the nadir of soul's decent into water, and N, at the same level and therefore also signifying water (or as fish the organic life in water), marks the turning-point for return, the Mount Sinai of evolution. Its reference is undoubtedly to this earth, which true symbolic insight discovers is itself--and not any hill on its surface--the "mount" or "hill of the Lord," on which God meets man in a cloud of fire, and on which all sermons are preached by his inner deity to man, and all temptations, crucifixions, spiritual initiations and final transfigurations take place.

It seems unquestioned that the Scriptural names of Samson, Saul, Samuel, Samael, Simon, Solomon were based on this semesh stem. For all the divine figures in ancient spiritual dramas were essentially sun-god characters, typifying the spiritual aspect of the solar effluence in man. Samson's loss of power through the betrayal of Delilah fairly closely parallels Jesus' loss of life and his helplessness on the cross through his betrayal by Judas. Jesus, like Samson, was shorn of his aureole of glory which was replaced by the black crown of thorns, as Samson's loss of hair--always typical of solar rays--reduced him to impotency. And the etymology of Delilah is most significant as fulfilling her part in the allegory. In the case of Jesus' crucifixion "darkness was over the earth" during the agony. The name Delilah is compounded of the Hebrew word for night, lilah (lailah), with the fourth Hebrew letter, D, prefixed. Now the tribe of Dan was in astrological tropism allocated to the autumn sign of Scorpio, when the sun is entering the winter-time of darkness and solar feebleness. So Scorpio was called the gate or door of the dark "underworld," which in the Egyptian was named the Tuat, now tending to be spelled also with a D, as Duat, Duad. When we turn to the Hebrew alphabet and see that D, daleth, means door, we have the name D-lilah reading definitely "the door of the dark underworld of night." This may

seem far-fetched to those not habituated to the nature of ancient allegorical composition of spiritual myths. When the name of a paramour of a sun-god figure works out to mean the "door of the dark night" of incarnation, the fitness of the construction is most astonishingly convincing and clearly reflects a designed conception.

Another most significant combination of the divine SH with the earthly M-N comes to view in the Hebrew word for oil, shemen. Here the fire-symbol, SH, is united with both the water letters. As the fuel for fire and the substance used in the divine anointing, which is itself the dramatization of the divinizing of man, oil is one of the most frequent symbols of the deific power in the Scriptures and mythology. The great divine names Christ and Messiah both mean "the Anointed One."

Jesus stated I thirst: unquenchable fire, or a call for him to be enfleshed again? Vinegar and gall - both posthumous fluids unlike water unable to sustain life.

But deeper research reveals that it was to be carried out in the form of an actual pilgrimage, setting out from home, journeying outward for three and a half days, crossing a river or water boundary between two kingdoms, (and always crossing at that point,) and then the return. It was to be an actual march out, an exodus of three and a half days, and the nostos, or return journey of equal length. The tradition of its meaning, preserved better in Mohammedan ideology than in Christian or Hebrew, was the origin of the Islamic pilgrimage, the great hegira to Mecca; for that matter the origin of all religious pilgrimaging.

Jesus refused to go to Lazarus'aid until after the third day had ended

When we turn to the Scriptural Book of Revelation--and other places--we are there faced with the recurrence of this specific number, three and one-half (the half of seven!), three times in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the last book in the Bible.

It seems so clear as to be beyond cavil that this definite form was used in symbolism to dramatize the outgoing or descent of the soul into incarnation through three and a half root stages of matter, from ethereal to solid, its experience there in a body of (seven-eighths) water, and its evolutionary return through the same three and a half levels, reaping on its return its harvest of rich experience. Yet this, the open sesame to all the baffling mystery of Holy Writ, has eluded the sagacity of the Scriptural pundits for centuries. Most lucidly it allegorizes the soul's pilgrimage out or down to body, and its return. Most astonishing is the item that at the outward terminus of the three and a half "days" journey was a river or water body on the boundary between two kingdoms. This the soul had to cross to begin its return. If sufficient poetic imagination is used to see that this Red Sea--Jordan River--Styx River of the allegories is actually the red blood of our human bodies, the Scriptures begin at once to become like an opaque glass suddenly made transparent.

September 21, then, marks the date at which in the significance of zodiacal language the unit of fiery spiritual essence, an emanation of creative Mind from the supreme Deity which is to be the divine soul of man, descending from the heights of noumenal activity toward manifestation in matter, crosses the line from pure mind force into union with a grade of matter that, being attuned to its vibration, it can mold into an instrument of expression of its potential capabilities of life and consciousness. In more concise form of statement it there enters embodiment in physical forms; it incarnates. The fundamental import of a great religious ceremonial set for the autumn of the year would be involved in the meaning that goes with the core doctrine of the Incarnation. Hallowe'en is par excellence the ritualization of the Incarnation.

September 21 is the date of John's conception

But, it will be remonstrated, Hallowe'en does not fall on September 21 or reasonably near it. It comes forty days after that date. How can it be relevant to the import of September 21? The interval of the forty days between the fall equinox and October 31 holds the answer to the question.

The number forty is, as any Bible reader will know, almost omnipresent in the Scriptures. It occurs sixty-four times in the Old Testament. Along with seven, ten and twelve, it is one of the basic numerological keys to the recondite meaning and the cryptic methodology of Bible writing. From certain fundamental data in the realm of nature it had come in the ancient days, in the esoteric language of symbolism, to connote the period of time that the egg, or seed of life, was immersed or incubated in matter before "hatching" or germinating to make the start of a new cycle. A seed has to go into the ground and "die" in order to generate a new living organism for a new cycle of life. Forty days were calculated as the time the wheat grains sown in the waters standing over the fields at the inundation of the Nile River would take to germinate. The human embryo is gestated in mother body in forty weeks. Forty was therefore the number symbol of the interval of "death" of the germ of new life when incubated in matter. It was the symbol of the dark interval preceding the dawn of a new life cycle.

Was this 40 days period the time of Horus' hiding in the celestial Nile?

 The ancient genius for festival ordination succeeded in introducing at least four periods of forty days into the round of the year. Taking the interval between September 21 and October 31 as the first of these, a second one is the period between Christmas on December 25 and February 2, the ancient Candlemas Day, or the festival of the Purification of the Virgin from the corruption of a mortal birth. The third dates from forty days before Easter to Easter morn, the Christian Lent. A fourth runs from Easter, taken as the spring equinox date of March 21, to the first of May, which latter date was of great prominence throughout all ancient traditional ritualism. It is probable that several other periods running from the first of a month to the tenth of the next month were taken as festival epochs.

The "Holy Night" or "Hallowed Even" was therefore set for the fortieth day following the autumn equinox, with the signification that the soul entered incarnation (Latin carno means "flesh") on September 21, ran its cycle of evolution over its forty days of "incubation" or embodiment in the soil of human life and on October 31 culminated its progress at the end in its final glorification in the hallowed state of incipient godhood. It entered the cycle as the soul of a mortal human being and emerged at the end in the blessed ranks of the gods. The forty days typified the entire cycle. The thirty-first of October virtually symbolizes, therefore, in a smaller cycle the same meaning that Easter dramatizes in a cycle of six months, starting at September 21, or what Easter symbolizes at the end of Lent. The soul in both cycles comes to its beatification at the forty days' end.

October 1 = All Hallow’s Day: April 1^st = All Fool’s Day – 6 months apart, and each falling 40 days after their equinoxes

This function of the "fool" character is more boldly presented in the personage of the medieval castle fool or jester. It seems indubitable that the custom of maintaining this odd actor in the social scheme arose out of the milieu of ancient representative typism of the religious drama. As in the duality of the human constitution there were the two forces of the universal polarity, the natural and the spiritual, the bodily and the divinely intellectual, the human and the celestial, and the higher unable to evolve its capacities apart from polarized attachment to the lower, it seems clear that the idea was carried into the system of society in the institution of the castle fool. He was a person of acknowledged privilege, even in his folly. He was, in deeper sense, placed there to serve as the foil, the goading force, the thorn in the flesh, the tempter and the prodder of the Lord of the castle. He was to be the latter's alter ego, his human counterpart and secondary self, to keep the Lord under stress and pressure to maintain his true place of headship. It does not strain the imagery unduly to put it that the jester was kept in the medieval household to make a "fool" out of the baron, who of course in the type-drama represented the higher soul self. The court fool went with the Lord as the body with its animal instincts goes with the soul.

Astonishing material confirming the elucidation is brought to light in data encountered in research. We discover that the typical ancient ritual features two principal characters, a hero and a buffoon. These two share many adventures together and live on terms of the greatest familiarity, -- quite naturally, since they live together in the same body! Here we have the soundest reason for the special privilege accorded the fool to jest at the expense of the castle baron. For the god and the irresponsible joker were made bed-fellows in the same hostelry. And to crown it all, we read that "fools were considered sacred on the seventh day." One is driven to conjecture as to what infinite tragedy has afflicted human life in the large as the result of the ingrained religious infatuation that only the soul of man is "sacred," while the body is held as foul, as base and worthy only of being crucified in the interests of the spirit. The animal "fool" at any rate comes into the recognition of his sacred function on his "seventh day."

Still another designation for Hallowe'en was in old English history Nutcracker Night. The symbolic relevance embodied in the term would not seem to be too difficult to resolve. It has already been elucidated that the soul enters body at the September date of the year's cycle, and it can enter it only as seed of its future growth. The commonest form of seed in the vegetable kingdom is the nut. Once planted in the soil of human life, the evolutionary task of the divine potential is to crack open the shell and bring out the kernel for the purposes of new growth. Hence the figure of nut-cracking.

And what amazing and enlightening significance lives for our dull intellection in the analogy of the vegetable seed with the soul-seed! We plant the hard nut of a walnut or a hickory tree in the ground. To open out a way for the life-germ in the kernel to burst forth, nature must crack open, or rot away the outer shell. This outer covering, the ark which houses it during the dissolution of its parent tree, must die away. And as it dies, the life innate in the kernel begins to increase. So it is with the divine soul encased in the womb of man's outer physical "shell." St. Paul says that as we die unto the old first Adamic nature and all its bodily instincts, we begin to live all anew in the higher nature of the second Adam, the Christly consciousness. So, like the snake in the springtime, we must slough off the texture of the physical body, or let it "rot away," so that the divine life of a Christly being may rend the veil of the mortal temple and begin to take root for its new growth in beauty. Nature's instruction is infallible.

Related in the general context of the autumn memorials to Hallowe'en is the name given to the September equinoctial date, -- Michaelmas. Four of the seven "Angels of the Presence," the primordial archangels, were allotted to the four cardinal stations of the cross in the zodiac: Gabriel, Raphael, Michael and Uriel. The station of Michael was at the autumn equinox. Hallowe'en then fell forty days after Michaelmas. Gerald Massey, the greatest of all Egyptologists, traces the name Michael to the Egyptian Makhu, the god holding the balance on the zodiacal horizon line, and the Hebrew word for God, El, or Makhu-el, the Lord of the Balance, one of the titles given to the Christ deity holding the balance between soul and body in man's constitution.

The prime datum, of course, is the sheer fact that the ceremonial celebrates the entry of our units of soul into their animal bodies here on earth. It is the festival of the "in-fleshing" of units of spiritual essence, the incarnation. The Latin carno is "flesh." The divine emanations of cosmic mind, uttered by the "voice of God," are what St. John calls the Word, the Logos, and this Logos becomes "fleshed," that is, the active ensouling and creative principle is embodied in fleshly forms. Massey with great insistence asserts that the Egyptian word for the mummy, which, as type of that which lives forever even in its "death" in matter, is Karast, is undoubtedly the origin of the Greek Christos and the English Christ. Perhaps this cannot be categorically established as correct. Yet it would meet every demand of symbolic consistency if its claims to this honor were exhaustively examined.

A most interesting and suggestive word that derives from carno, flesh, contributes grist to our mill of elucidation. This is the word "carnival." The dictionary states that it originally sprang from the "putting away of meat" in Roman Catholic countries, Italy being especially mentioned, and the season extended from Epiphany to Ash Wednesday. Its period of actual observance were the last few days before Lent, with its chief focus of celebratory rites on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent. This day was marked by the confession of sins before a priest, after which there was a free indulgence in rollicking and merrymaking. The note of rejoicing was no doubt the expression of happiness over the consciousness of absolution from sin. Also perhaps it was inspired by the sombre reflection that six weeks of austerity, privation even to fasting, were about to begin. This motive might have been expressed by the shibboleth, "Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we enter gloom."

The gist of the meaning of "carnival" at any rate is the note of revelry carried to wild excess, and as the dictionary has it, "merrymaking, especially of an indecorous character." But the axial idea embodied in the word must definitely be the giving of free rein to the instincts and impulses of the "flesh," the indulgence in carnality. The second part of the word is given as deriving from the Latin levare, "to lift, to elevate." So that instead of connoting originally the "putting away of meat," it might with more directness have been intended to signify the "exhaltation of the flesh." For this in effect is precisely what the celebration became. It was carnality given vent in "carnivality."

A few Scriptural references to the animal nature of man may profitably be introduced. The allegory of Daniel thrown into the lion's den can at once be seen as the soul's imprisonment in animal body, for in incarnation the spark of divinity is "cribbed, cabined and confined" in the "den of the animal. In Marks' Gospel (I:13) one verse condenses the entire story of the Temptation. Prefacing that Jesus was led by the spirit into the wilderness forty days to be tempted of Satan, the narrative covers in six words the entire content of the experience, after which "angels ministered unto him." And what are these six words? "And was with the wild beasts." Here is conclusive evidence that the Temptation was just a poetic graph for the incarnation. All the temptation that soul ever meets arises from the side of the body in which it has taken up its lifetime habitation.

From the apocryphal Epistle to the Romans of Ignatius we take a most revealing verse. The dramatized Christ is speaking, and says: "For I am the wheat of God, and I shall be ground between the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ." The Christ has said that we must eat his very body, to become immortal. And we, the human entities, are those wild beasts between whose teeth the divine essence within us is being constantly ground. Yet that divine essence is the bread of life on which we feed.

In the Book of Ezekiel, speaking to the souls he is about to dispatch to this nether world, God says: "I will fill the wild beasts of the earth with thee." "The underworld awaits thy coming," he declared elsewhere. And before his soul-children migrated to earth, there were none but animals here to receive such royal visitants.

A Chinese legend says that the infant prince, son of the king, was thrown out into the pig-yard and left to the mercy of the swine, which, however, saved him. The library of mythology abounds in legends of heroes who were cast out in the wilds but were nurtured by animals. Jesus was himself born in a stable among the animals. In the basic myth of Rome's founding, we find the twins Romulus and Remus thrown out and suckled by the she-wolf, the fratricide of Remus and the saving of Romulus to build the city. A volume could be filled with similar myths and constructions in ancient lore. Sometimes the animal is charactered as a giant, ogre, sea monster or dragon.

But the material that most cogently connects the incarnation with the Hallowe'en motif of rough and sportive animal behavior is found in the fourth chapter of the Book of Daniel. Interpreting the dream of Nebuchadnezzar, the prophet of the Lord revealed that the king (always typing the divine soul) should be driven out from among men, his dwelling should be with the beasts of the field, he should eat grass like cattle, he should be drenched with the dews of heaven (indicating nighttime, the universal glyph for incarnation), until "seven years" passed over him (the glyph for a completed cycle) and he learned that the Most High ruled over the kingdom of men. A later verse tells of the fulfilment of the dream: the king was driven out from among men, and did eat grass like oxen, his body was wet with the dews of heaven, his hair grew like eagles' feathers and his nails like the claws of a bird. As sanity forbids our taking this as veridical personal history of the man Nebuchadnezzar--and certainly there is no evidence of its having happened to this king--we have here one of the most positive proofs of the allegorical character of Biblical literature. But the most pointed item in this allegory is the statement that "an animal's mind shall be given unto him," which is latter followed by the statement that "his mind became like the mind of an animal." It was to take the transforming experience of the whole cycle (of seven years) to enable the king, the soul, to do just what Plato asserts it must do to recover the memory of its lost intellectual Paradise. For the Daniel paralogue states that when the experience was over, the king announced that "my reason returned unto me." We lose the paradisical consciousness when our souls leave heaven for earth. We live in an animal's body (Isaiah says: "We live in darkness like the dead.") and in the early stages of this lower world existence we exercise an animal's grade of mind. We will regain Paradise at the end, when our "reason" returns unto us.

Here indeed is found the Hallowe'en motif and spirit. Our souls have taken lodgment in the bodies of animals, and in the first stages they have no other awareness or knowledge than that they are just the animal creatures with the animal mind. Our behavior in this long inceptive period of the incubation ordeal is purely that of ourselves acting like animals. Our real divine nature at that epoch is shrouded in oblivion,--Plato's great doctrine of the "loss of divine memory." It lies deeply submerged under the animal grade of mind which occupies the open field of consciousness. Only later, and only completely at the end of the cycle, will it have been awakened and developed its latent powers to full spiritual rulership of the life. Hallowe'en is designed to commemorate our sensual activity, our grade of animal-mindedness which in this earthly existence foreruns the birth of the spirit. That is the core of the festival's recondite meaning.

No passage that has been encountered in much study seems to picture with adequate clarity and vividness the basic evolutionary situation as does a citation from the works of the great Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus. Commenting on the mental metamorphosis superinduced by the soul's migration from heaven to earth, he writes:

"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 love of it, they grew to depend upon it; so they broke away as far as they were able."

Forgetting that they were princelings of the heavenly kingdom, now enwrapped in the coats of animal skin, their divine potential reduced if not smothered by the deadening blanket of the body's sensuous life, they took themselves to be the physical creatures they outwardly were. And as outer form shapes itself over the likeness of the inward soul that pours itself out through it, it was not long until animal propensity transformed the environing body into the animal semblance. St. Paul so forcibly expresses this idea when he says that "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." That phase of the incarnation is just what the Hallowe'en carousal is designed to portray.

Now the animal, the dragon, again the divine infant, gains the upper hand. The child Hercules is pictured as grappling with the two great serpents that come up out of the sea and seek to strangle him in his cradle. David, the youth, slays his Goliath by implanting a stone, universal ancient arcane symbol of the divine unit of mind, in the center of the giant's forehead. Evolution slays the old first Adam, the sense nature, by developing the power of mind. For the ancients pictured mind as the serpent-charmer, the magician that puts the dragon to sleep and lets the imprisoned maiden of soul escape from his vile cave.

OUR SATURNALIA

It is perhaps permissible to say that our Hallowe'en is the modern vestigial survival of the great ancient Roman festival of the Saturnalia. The date of the modern celebration does not match that of the Roman holiday, which came on December 17. But in general character the two bear close resemblance to each other. In the Roman version there was riot and revelry, masks, license, even to the union of the sexes, and buffoonery. A quotation given by the Christian historian Epiphanius (regarded as a very unreliable purveyor of the truth) from the Codex Marcianus, states that Christ was born on the sixth of January, thirteen days after the winter solstice, which, the passage affirms, the Greeks--whom he calls Idolaters--celebrate on the twenty-fifth day of December with a festival which is called Saturnalia by the Romans, Kronia by the Egyptians and Kikellia by the Alexandrians. The passage dates the twenty-fifth as the day when the "division takes place which is the solstice," and that the Christ, born then, was "incarnated among men" on January sixth, thirteen days thereafter. The thirteen days were ordained, it is stated, in the cosmic plan from the fact that "it needs must have been that this should be a figure of our Lord Jesus Christ himself and of his twelve disciples, who made up the number of the thirteen days of the increase of light." It seems pertinent to say here that what "needs must have been" is just the product of folly and a travesty of truth that result whenever structures of symbolism and allegory are put into the hopper of credulous literalism and are ground out into the pan of alleged history.

If standard reference books date the Saturnalia on December 17, and churchly documents like this Codex Marcianus place it on December 25, it seems evident that, since most festivals of ancient provenance were holidays covering periods of days, three, seven or ten predominantly, there is the greatest likelihood that the Saturnalia was a seven-day festival matching very closely the structure of the Christian Passion Week. That is to say, it was set to bring seven days (really eight) before a date that would bring its climactic significance to a final head on a day that was itself the date of axial movement. The date in the case was December 25, and that was fixed to fall three days after the true day of the winter solstice, December 22, by the insertion of the three symbolic days so often added to the central date to typify the period of incubation of spirit in matter before new birth. (Fuller elucidation of this methodology is to be found in the author's major works.) In esoteric purview a seven-day festival graphed most aptly the whole form-structure of creation "in seven days." And it was customary to date the beginning of the festal seven days ahead of what would be the climactic day that would appropriately crown the whole week with a glorious finale.

So then a seven-day period that would be crowned in its final spiritual significance with an azaret, or eighth day, and ordained to terminate on December 25 would have to be set to begin on December 17. There otherwise seems to be no astrological schematism that would make December 17 a day of direct significance per se, unless it be that so many festal occasions in the old Jewish dispensation fell on the seventh day of the tenth month, giving sheer numerical importance to the number seventeen.

It was a common feature of the Roman Saturnalia that masters exchanged places with their slaves, even appointing one of them to reign as king, in full actual authority, for the duration of the holiday. Further

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study reveals that many celebrations of New Year's Day in many lands were featured by the exchange of positions between king and a subject, marked even by exchange of attire, the king donning the slave's habiliments and the latter being royally outfitted and crowned. All this, appropriate to the import of New Year's Day, when ends an old period and begins a new, rings out an old regime to ring in a new, has its reflection still in Hallowe'en in the exchange between the god in the human castle and the castle fool. The god permits the fool to reign and revel for the night. And the man dons and disports himself in the fool's attire.

But the matter of the exchange of clothing is preserved in a slightly varied form in our celebration through the arrangement of the wearing of suits of two different colors, divided down the middle. Here is another item of basic reference. It typifies the very relevant fact that man's nature is dually compounded and dually divided, soul and body, god and animal. He is two elements, two grades of conscious being, and the divided suit denotes this duality. That is, he is such when his soul is in the period of incarnation, and it is not to be forgotten that Hallowe'en is the festival of the incarnation. A most pertinent background of this aspect of the celebration is found in the philosophy which Plato expounded in the Symposium, where he elaborates the theory that the soul of man, as itself dual, splits as it were into two halves, one embodied in a male, the other in a female body, so that the affinity drives the two to seek and unite with each other in earthly life. It proclaimed the philosophy of twin souls, or affinities.

But a sententious statement, from which indeed the Greek philosopher almost certainly inherited the idea, is found in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, virtually proclaiming the same theory, in the sentence: "The soul makes its journey through Amenta in the two halves of sex." (Amenta is the Egyptian "underworld," which, however, is no dark limbo lying below our earth, but that good earth itself, "under" as lying below the heaven world.) There is little ground of authority in all ancient philosophy for crediting the thesis that a soul is or can be itself split in two, with one part masculine and the other feminine. What is back of Plato's romantic spiritual rhapsodizing and what is the real sense of the Egyptian statement is doubtless the truth that original primordial essence out of which all things emerge to manifest in the dual expression of spirit and matter splits apart (as the first verse of Genesis affirms) into the polarity, so that a unit of soul, which must itself be indivisible--as attested by its character as "individual"--must naturally seek and aim to unite itself with its congenial material organism, which it indeed "marries" by entering its very womb and impregnating it for fecundity. Often the body is spoken of as the "wife" of the soul. And every god in the Hindu pantheon was united with his sakti, or material force through which alone he could exercise his creative function. Always it seems necessary to revise the aberrations of popular misunderstanding of basic elements in traditional inheritances and restore lost primal meaning to empty forms.

The eventual union of the two selves, or two natures in man was undoubtedly prominent in the mental context of the significance of the Saturnalia. For the human

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action that would directly dramatize this union was indeed all too prominently in evidence in the ancient carnival in honor of the god Saturn. Indeed the celebration tended always to run to sexual excess. Sheer and sublime cosmic principle, which became a fundamentally true conception in the philosophical abstract, all too readily became the plausible motivation to carry it out in physical actuality. Especially when in incarnation the body was for long the king over the soul, the motive to give free rein to the body's instincts ran strongly toward expressing itself in sexual union. One statement concerning the Saturnalia tells us that "copulations did much abound." The same tendency was found running to gross excess in the early centuries in the celebration of the Christian festival of love, called the Agape. This word is the Greek name for the love that is not of the flesh, but in its fullest sense divine or spiritual love. Yet in the meetings of the early Christian sectaries, held at one time mostly in the cemeteries at night, the excesses ran to such proportions that the Church heads were constrained finally to interdict the gatherings altogether.

Perhaps it is the fainter reflection of this realistic dramatization of the love-and-union motive that is still to be noted in the form and spirit of liberty and license which does prevail strongly in the Hallowe'en carnival. The mask, affording anonymity, provides an added incentive to personal approach and suggestive familiarity. And such familiarity is less resented. The bars are definitely let down. Much ancient tradition held that this was the night that Satan and his hosts were free and on the prowl, so that the occasion is colored a bit darkly

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with the suggestion that evil is in the air and has license to work its deviltry.

But how much of the profounder theological esotericism was basic in determining the form which the ceremonial took it is difficult to say. One finds without exception in diligent research that all these ordinances of old time sprang from, and embodied in symbolic or dramatic form the most recondite and abstruse conceptions which the highest genius of mankind held as to the reality and the meaning of life and the world. We can turn to St. Paul's Epistles and find that he unequivocally set forth the thesis that the soul, resident in the spiritual spheres before incarnation, was not "under the law," and was untainted by sin. But when the "command" came home to it and brought it down to earth, there it came under the law of the flesh and the seductions of carnality, and from the side of the body "sin sprang to life" (Romans 7) and lured the deity down to his spiritual "death." He directly states that the cosmic command (improperly translated "commandment") that transferred him from the dreamy bliss of heaven to the open life in body meant spiritual "death" to him. This agrees, too, with Plotinus' statement that the young deities ran amuck in wild libertinism when given control of the body, and had not yet learned to ride and tame this spirited steed. How clearly this facet of a true theology is mirrored in the hilarity of our Hallowe'en!

In ancient times it was Hecate who was the queen of the Saturnalian revels. She is the most conspicuous and dominant of the several goddess of the moon. The lunar deities, always feminine, were represented as triform, or with three faces. Or the lunar power was apportioned to three goddesses, Diana-Hecate-Lucina. In one mode of interpretation the triplicity was based on the fact that each member of the spiritual triad of spirit-soul-mind that was to be incorporated in humanity would have to be mated with his "wife," or sakti.

One might say that six thus becomes the numerical symbol of the incarnation of deity in matter. We have seen it equate inerrantly the material world, the feminine, night, and we shall see its relation to water. Next we shall see its surprising connection with sex. This is what we should expect, since it is only when the soul is buried down in body (which is seven eighths water!) that the full polarity of sex is manifest. "In heaven there is neither marriage nor given in marriage." The

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soul there is described as sexless, more or less androgynous, epicene. It is only when incarnation has completely segregated the opposite ends of the polarity in separate physical embodiments that the magic potency of the sex attraction is generated. So six brings the divine unit down into the region of sex. The surprise that awaits us is that the word "sex" is virtually the word "six." Some one has wittily said that it has struck sex o'clock in the world. (A magazine rack would seem to indicate it.) He spoke doubtless more aptly than he suspected. How insistently does St. Paul exhort us to be on guard against what seems in his estimation to be the most injurious, most flagrant of sins against the spirit--concupiscence! "Abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul," he admonishes us. In theology the onus of the "original sin" so disastrously perpetrated by our "first parents" is proclaimed to have been their first indulgence in sexual relations. By sex man lost his Paradise, is the obsession of pious spiritual religionism. By spirit he must regain it, is the general theological presupposition. The first Adam was carnal, of the earth, earthy, and of the flesh, fleshy. The Christ, second Adam, is of the spirit, spiritual.

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THE WITCHING HOUR

With hex being the Greek word for "six," and six being virtually synonymous with sex, the witch being the noetic or mind principle masquerading in its "feminine phase," one may be prepared to learn without too great astonishment that the German word for "witch" is Hex, and for "witchcraft" Hexerei. It does not inordinately stretch the fitness of sense if one were to say that when the soul is "sixed" it is "sexed" and "hexed," i.e., bewitched, using a word in colloquial vogue. For the Greek "six" is the German "witch," Hex. It is so often in the lost roots of language that the true links of ideas that cryptically connect elements in the meaningful constructions of ancient semantic art are to be found. Even our dictionaries in many instances fail to trace words to their real sources. In this case they do not tell us that the root of hex (and probably of sex, as "h" and "s" interchange thousands of times) is the ancient hieroglyphic Egyptian word for "magician," hekau.

But there is much more that concerns us with Hecate, the moon goddess whose name is "six." And general mythicism itself has hardly in any lucid manner told us of the interrelated connotations of the moon and its pale witching light, much less why specifically the moon is so prominent a hieroglyph of Hallowe'en. And here shines forth from the dark night of human unintelligence the moon ray of hidden wisdom indeed, for those who will not obdurately persist in scorning the conceptual genius of ancient sages. Instruction, those wise ones knew, gleamed forth for the brain of man from every object and phenomenon in nature. So it was from nature, which can not utter an untrue syllable, that the per-

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spicacious minds of the theurgists of old time drew their logoi, their noetic principles of truth. And how oracularly did the wan light of the moon bespeak to them the sermon of that other and brighter light, now reduced to but a faint dim glow by its burial under the cover of the body, which our divine souls from a world of sun-radiance above would bring into our lives!

As one studies the positions and aspects of sun and moon over the period of a lunar revolution of twenty-eight days, it becomes almost a conviction that God structuralized the scenic effects to poetize in beautiful form the analogous relation of the sunlight of our inner spiritual divinity to our lower and purely human "moonlight" grade of intelligence. Genesis says that God fixed two lights in the firmament to illumine the earth, the great light to rule by day, the lesser light by night. When one grasps the chief figure under which ancient sapiency depicted the soul's time of incarnation, not as its daytime, but its nighttime--it being then submerged in the darkness of a body of earth and water, poetized as a dungeon, cave or dark underworld--one will for the first time sense the beauty of the poetic,

In a remarkable little allegorical graph found in the Book of Exodus God informs us that as his glory comes close to us he will place his hand over our eyes, so that we will not be blinded by its overpowering strength, and when he shall have passed, we will be able to gaze safely upon his hinder part. If the frontal aspect of God is blazing glory of spirit, then the hinder side is matter. And in all arcane science the sun symbolized spirit and the moon matter. So it is matter that shields our feeble vision from the ineffable and unbearable splendor of spiritual light. Are we surprised, then, to find that our Scriptures tell us that "the Lord God is a sun and a shield"? And again how marvelously nature follows the poetism here! For we can not gaze into the light of the sun by day, but may safely look into the face of the moon at night!

Hecate is closely connected with Hermes as conductor of the dead through the darkness of the underworld.

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She is accompanied by the souls of the dead, who are not ghosts, but souls deadened, as Virgil puts it, by mortal bodies and members subject to death. She held the keys of death and hell and the pit of the abyss. In this office she was called Kleidophorus, Bearer of the Key, and a Festival of the Key was dedicated to her, in which she was prayerfully entreated to open the gates of the pit to let the "dead"--the living on earth in "death" of soul--return to life above.

But she was again the triform deity; goddess of the moon in heaven; goddess of souls in the dark underworld of death and hell; and goddess of the sea. This accounts for her being pictured as a goddess with three faces. She aided Zeus in his battle with the giants, which was won on the sixth day. Beside the three heads, she is given six arms and feet. Her daughter Scylla by Apollo (union of sun and moon!) had six heads. Hecate's day, the sixth, was considered unfavorable for plants, but good for the birth of males, not of girls. She was the patroness of those who go to sea and of those who fish. Fish were offered in her worship on Friday, the sixth day. Personifications of her in other goddesses, such particularly as Atergatis and Semiramis, were actually dubbed "Fish-Mothers." She is goddess of the sea by virtue of the fact that as she rules over the lower or moon element in human life, she must have power over the body, which is itself-seven-eighths water.

A scholiast in Euripides says that the moon of three days is called Selene; of six days Artemis (Diana); of fifteen days Hecate. This determines Hecate as the goddess of the full moon, as this came on the fifteenth lunar day. However, her function embraced as well the features that were adumbrated by the three dark days of the

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moon. The fact of her union with the great solar deity Apollo unmistakeably identifies her as the moon at the full, for then sun and moon are "married" in glory, although they are considered as being married again at the dark day of the lunar cycle, and their conjunction then is taken as their copulation.

The son of God has descended in the fullness of time to catch up and bear aloft on his capable wings the sleeping psyche of animal man. He comes down, like April sun, to set the captives free, to open the eyes of the blind, to release the prisoners from their dungeons, to lead them forth out of this darksome land of "Egypt" across the "Red Sea" of bodily blood through the wilderness and the desert into the Promised Land. As crude flesh and blood can not inherit that diviner estate, he must first transform them "into

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the likeness of his own glorious body" of ethereal sun-essence before they can become eligible for celestial glories. So they ascend with him into the mount of transfiguration and there they are changed, their faces shining like the sun and their vestures glowing white as the light.

A great release of meaning for intelligence here is that the woman, Mother Nature, left to herself, is the "barren woman." She, like Hannah, Sarah, Elizabeth and others, was childless until her old age. The Christ must come to fructify the as yet abortive creation. The fruitless unproductive wastage of the woman over twelve years was instantly stopped the moment "virtue" from the Christ had passed into her. She was then to become the mother of the Christ genius.

To achieve the awakening of dormant godhood in man the animal, life provides the means of transplanting the seed of the divine potency into the earthly body, which is ruled only by the subconscious habitudes of nature. The divine seed is transplanted to earth and buried in the inmost being of the creature. This is the outside agency that comes to nature's aid when on her own resources she can go no farther. It is the coming of the gods to help the sons of earth. As the Christmas hymn (Hark! The Herald Angels Sing) words it, they were

Born to raise the sons of earth,

Born to give them second birth.

Man, human, waits for the coming of the Lord Christ, who, as Paul says, shall change our vile body into the likeness of his glorious body and end by converting us into gods.

All this depicts the incarnation. The Egyptians, in faithful accord with their addiction to nature symbolism, portrayed it to the imagination under the term "incubation." Like any seed, the seed of divine self-consciousness that would convert animal-human into divine-human, was said to be incubated in the soil of the human

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garden. There it first "died," but again germinated and shot into the growth of a new cycle.

CHRISTMAS ON MARCH 25.

In the first place there is the matter of the date, the year, month and day of the anniversary and the celebration. In all Christian understanding the assumption is that Christmas commemorates the birth of the infant Jesus at a given place and hour. It is perhaps well enough known that the exact time of this event is not a matter of historical record, and therefore the anniversary character of the celebration is hardly any longer considered. It is kept in the dark background of silence because to agitate it opens the door to scores of pertinent questions for which religionists have no authentic answers. The twenty-fifth day of December is accepted now as a token date of the birth, though few even pause to wonder any more what led to the selection of this date, if it is not to be held to be the actual birthday of the Galilean Messiah.

In the case of a festival of such importance and prominence as Christmas, it is a thing of no light insignificance that the Christian Church keeps from its people the simple and singular fact that the early Christians celebrated the birth of their Savior for over the first three and a half centuries on March 25. It is to be questioned whether its clergy are generally aware of this fact definitely and succinctly. It would involve the revelation of their faith's early kinship with Paganism. It is therefore kept from publicity. But the words of the decree issued by the Pope of Christendom, Julian II, in the year 345 A.D., are still to be read, and they inform us that in that year he decreed that henceforth it was fitting that the followers of the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, should unite with the followers of Mithra and of Bacchus in celebrating the rebirth of the deity under

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solar symbolism at the winter solstice! Here again it is historically established that even the day and date of the Christmas event was not an original Christian institution, but was an accommodation of Christian practice to Pagan observance. In this same decree it is logically established that the date is not set as an anniversary commemoration, since the only consideration governing its selection is astrological symbolism! No pretence is made that it is to be regarded as the natal day of the Son of God in human body.

Surely it is of first importance to inquire why, before Pope Julian's decree, Christian practice had set the celebration of the Savior's birth on March 25. Here, too, the dominant motives are found to be primarily astrological. March brings the vernal equinox, and the most moving dramatic rituals of the ancient Pagan religion were consummated on or about March 21, the date of the sun's crossing northward over the equatorial meridian. Annually at this epoch every allegorical representation of the aeonial cycle of soul's involvement in matter and body came to final stage and to victory with the sun's ascent out of the darkness of winter, typifying the soul's resurrection out from under the thraldom of "death" in mortal bodies. This was in fact the final and climactic act in the drama of the birth of the Son of God from out its material womb of flesh. Hence it came to be regarded in Pagan modes of pictorializing spiritual processes as the true birth of spirit, the conception having taken place back on September 21 and the "quickening" from "death" having occurred on December 21,--all in zodiacal symbolism.

As the advent of the human child from the mother's womb is as virtually a resurrection as any readily conceivable, so the resurrection symboled by the passing over the line of division between heaven (spirit) and

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earth (matter) by the sun on March 21 could just as permissibly be classified as a birth. Every birth is a resurrection, every resurrection a new birth. It requires no special genius to poetize the vernal equinox as the birthday of the sun of spring, and, following solar symbolism, the birthday of the spiritual or deific "sun" in the constitution of man. Hence on the pattern of nature symbolism March 21 was held to be the birthday of the Messiah. From the first the Christians had joined with the Pagans in commemorating at the equinox of spring a festival called Lady's Day, outwardly in honor of nature's rebirth from the universal Mother Earth, esoterically in token of the rebirth of "dead" spiritual consciousness according to the inner teachings of the Mysteries. The Christians thus celebrated it for almost three and a half centuries, an exceptional item of no slight historical significance. The statement to this effect is made by Clement of Alexandria and others of the early Christian writers. It is confirmed by the Julian decree. It can be affirmed, then, that the Christian celebration of the festival on December 25 dates from the year 345 A.D.

But why the twenty-fifth days of March and December, and not the twenty-first (or twenty-second)? Here is a question which, as far as general knowledge goes, has found no authoritative answer.

The reason is to be found, no doubt, in the peculiarity of ancient celebratory custom. It is in fact the same reason which prescribed the mythical "three days" in which the Son of God lay in the tomb between death and resurrection. "As Jonas was three days and nights in the belly of the whale, so must the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of the earth." These three "days" of the incarnational immersion of spirit in the three kingdoms of matter, mineral, vegetable and ani-

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mal, were held to be of such major significance in the ritualism of archaic religion that many of the more important festivals commemorating the soul's crucial experiences in the flesh were instituted as three-day ceremonies, the first day marking the entry of soul into matter's domain, and the third day consummating its rising out of that realm of "death." In Old Testament prophecies, it was again and again stated that we would rise out of the tomb of "death" in these physical bodies "on the third day." As Hosea (6:2) has it: "Come let us return unto the Lord: for he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight." After spending three "days and nights," or periods of incubation and release, in the three lower kingdoms of nature, spirit-soul would awaken from its aeonial submergence in the dark unconsciousness of matter and come to its birth into more expanded being in the mind and heart of mankind. So the Gospel allegory represented the Christ as emerging from the boat and walking forth on the water (the body is seven-eighths water!) to save his disciples from sinking in the sea "in the fourth watch of the night." Incarnation has always been symboled as the night-time and the winter-time of the soul, its light and life, like the sun's, going "dead" in the coldness and darkness of matter.

Hence at all the four cardinal points of the zodiac, June, September, December and March, the great ceremonial festivals were set at three days length, beginning on the twenty-first or twenty-second of the month, and culminating three days later on the twenty-fifth, or "after three days."

It has been indicated that the early Christians who commemorated the Savior's birth on March twenty-fifth

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were not in reality totally misconceiving the significance of the festival appropriate to that date. Even more cogently than Christmas, Easter is the birthday of the Christ grade of sentient being. The distinction between the commemorative values of the two dates is to be found in the allegorical picturing of the Christ's development at the two emblematic seasons. On December twenty-fifth the Christ is born as an infant. Not having been here before, he then makes his first appearance in the life of animal humanity, or has his first awakening in the womb of body. As a new-born power he is yet the undeveloped potential of Christliness, the babe in swaddling clothes, the princeling, the king-to-be. He is germinally, seminally, the King of Glory.

But in March he has become a full-grown deity, the king on his throne wielding all the fulness of his divine prerogative in the life of man. The Christ-child has matured into fulness of the stature of the nature of God, the infant deity has deployed into expression the total possibility of his deific genius. To summarize it tersely, he is in December the Christ awakened in the womb of matter; in March he is the Christ awakened out of the womb of matter. In one he is the babe; in the other the man-Christ, exercising complete lordship over the physical life of his body.

Indeed, in the true sense of a birth, Christmas is less the birth-time than it is the time of what was called the "quickening." St. Paul in particular uses this word to intimate the rise in consciousness of the dynamic potencies of the Christ nature. This was a natural form of typism drawn from the structure of zodiacal symbology that was universally used in the esoteric science of the ancient day. Likening the descent of the soul into matter to the falling direction and decreasing power of the sun from June to December, the symbologists of old

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figured the birth of the divine sun-of-soul at the December solstice, following upon its conception in the cosmic mind at the June solstice. Descending from the June point of generation in God-mind, it entered into matter at the September equinox, which would signalize its physical conception in Mother Nature's womb. From September 21 on to March it endured its embodiment in matter, its period of incubation or gestation preparatory to its ultimate birth at Easter. But from September on down to December it plunged deeper and deeper into the darkness of bodily "imprisonment." It lost daily to the powers of matter, growing more inert, the spiritual awareness sinking into a sleep or coma as it was progressively submerged under the dominance of the flesh. In this its deepest immersion in matter all ancient allegorism depicted the Christos as lying inert in "death." From this aeonial "death" its resurrection would come at Easter, its preliminary quickening at Christmas.

The significant item of this dramatism is that at the December solstice the sun-of-soul halts its descent and stands for a time balanced and equilibrated with the powers of matter. The inertia of matter, offering resistance to the energies of spirit, brings the downward movement of soul into matter to a full stop, and for the period of the solstice holds it immovable in its embrace. It is at this point and in this stabilized condition that the soul of the spiritual energy which has gone "dead" in matter is suddenly "quickened" out of its torpid state and feels the first touch of its awakening to birth for a new cycle of growth. Having "descended into hell," (as the creed has it) he now awakes to an incipient awareness of his position and the consciousness of his new-born strength. That which lay buried in the tomb of "death" is now quickened in its womb of new birth. And as a mother-to-be suddenly feels the stirring of the

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embryonic babe within her, so Mother Matter feels the same stirring of new-born mind and the Christly impulse within her domain. As St. Paul so strikingly puts it, "All the creation groans and travails in pain until now, waiting for the manifestation of the Sons of God."

Christmas at the winter solstice then memorializes this quickening of the foetal Christ within the heart, mind and soul of humanity. It stages a festival of rejoicing at the knowledge that in the circuit of alternate involution and evolution, the deific solar power of Christliness, making its round of descent into the body and return, has ended the long period of its lifeless insensibility as mere seed of divinity in the soil of mortal body, is now quickened out of its spell of "death" and awakened to the glorious conquest of life in a new cycle of growth. The season thus commemorates the birth to activity of the Christ-mind in the nature and body of mankind. It is to be remembered always that it is only the birth of that Christ-mind, the deific power in its infancy, in its first unsure reachings and gropings amidst the strong elemental surges of the irrational and passional nature of the flesh. But it is no longer lifeless, inert, speechless, dumb and blind, as ancient symbolism pictured it in this condition. It is awakened to catch the sense of events and the significance of experience. It is ready to respond in ever increasing intelligence to the impacts of environment and sensuous life, and drain out of them their moral value for its perfection.

This delineation is of crucial importance for general comprehension and for its psychological beneficence, because a very faulty conception of the "birth of Christ" and the "coming of Messiah" has widely ingrained the bland assumption that by the alleged historical event of Bethlehem birth the Christ influence has indeed been injected into the body and soul of human life. All

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ancient presupposition that centered upon the Messianic fulfilment contemplated the immediate spiritualization and transfiguration of the world's elan and morale upon this postulated advent of the only-born Son of God. This opinion has altered but little in the succeeding time to the present. Vague Christian belief credits this "birth of Christ" with bringing the first true light to shine in heathen darkness, and credulously propagates the legend that the world has been elevated to higher level of righteousness and spirituality as a result of this event of two thousand years ago.

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THE ADVENT AT THE SOLSTICE

A more competent envisagement of the symbolic intimations, however, accentuates the thesis that what is celebrated at Christmas is but the first awakening of that Christ power that slept within the confines of the mortal nature until the turn of the cycle at the solstitial point of evolution. In the first chapter of I Samuel it is said of Hannah, who, like Sarah and Elizabeth, was to bear the Christ-child in her old age, that "at the turn of the year she bore her son." Mother Nature gives birth to the Messianic consciousness at the turn of the cycle of the aeonial "year," where involution comes to a halt and after the period of solstitial motionlessness swings around as on a pivot and takes initial new direction upward toward evolution. But human fancy has not been sharp enough to preserve the subtle distinction between the occult sense of the soul's "quickening" out of its antecedent "death" and its "birth" as an active power in the world. What might be called a confusion of tropes has come in to befuddle common understanding. There are several senses in which the "quickening" may be conceived as the Christ's "birth." It is by no means inappropriate to think of the cosmic event signalized by the Christmas allegorism as the birth of the Christ, if one is schooled to moderate the conception with the knowledge that the Christ motivation is under Yuletide symbolism conceived as only at the inception of its objective kingship in history, and that only the lives of humans individually and collectively will set the Prince of Peace on the throne of human life in the world.

As said, all expectation of Messiah's coming in the ancient world envisaged the immediate transfiguration of humanity by divine grace and the near beatification of world history by the cosmic event. How egregiously

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fallacious and irrational this high anticipation has been can now be seen in historical retrospect from the present. Not only did the proclaimed birth of Christ by the Christian movement not make the slightest appreciable change in the tone and character of mundane history at the time (indeed it seems not even to have been heard of for close to two hundred years after its declared incidence), but the record of history for the two thousand years since the great divine oblation, and more particularly as manifested in and among the nations blessed with the message of that Redeemer, is one whose blackness and shocking inhumanity exceeds anything of the kind in all world annals of the past. History in effect enforces the conclusion that the coming of Messiah in the form of a historical birth, so far from inaugurating in the world an epoch of light, peace and charity among nations, has been followed by the long night of what the historians have seen fit to designate the "Dark Ages." If Messiah had truly come in the Bethlehem event and come in the commonly accepted sense, as having brought by his personal presence the benison of divine grace, light and truth to the world, his long-heralded, breathlessly-awaited and celestially-proclaimed advent has culminated as the world's supreme disappointment.

The Christian thesis of the Savior's historical birth in Judea assumedly in the year 1 A.D. is challenged and jeopardized by several considerations that are glaring enough to be crucial for the whole future of the faith of the West. When the Church Fathers settled upon the date of the Bethlehem birth as the year 1 of a new dispensation, and inaugurated a new calendar reckoning with that year, they were without benefit of certain historical data that have come to light from authentic historical record since that time.

Two facts stand out as proving the fixed date to be erroneous,--assuming that there was the birth of a di-

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vine personage about whose life the Gospels were elaborated. One is the discovered date of the death of Herod, Tetrarch of Galilee, in the year 4 B.C. The other is the recorded time of the rulership of "Cyrenius," governor in Syria when the Roman tax was levied which took Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, so that the divine birth, heralded in Scripture, might occur at that village to fulfil ancient prophecy. This time is found, on certified governmental record of Syrian history, to have been between the years 13 and 11 B.C. Herod and Cyrenius (found to be written Quirinus in the Roman records) were both mentioned (by Matthew) as reigning when Jesus was born. The date set for the birth is therefore found to be at least four years too late to have included Herod's effort to destroy the infant Christ by the (now generally admitted unhistorical) "Slaughter of the Innocents," and some twelve or thirteen years too late to have transpired "when Cyrenius was governor in Syria." It is notable that even a Catholic publicist, in an article in the Sunday American Weekly magazine early in 1947, conceded that the Bethlehem birth must be placed at least as early as 7 or 8 B.C.

With these two enforced corrections a host of other minor, though still important, conclusions and speculations that have become officially accepted as Christian history must perforce be thrown out, being confused by the two known dates. Indeed some of the disclaimers reach beyond minor items and put in jeopardy some of the basic claims on which the entire fabric of Christian historization rests. The frankness of Church leadership in facing the implications of these emendations has not been open and sincere. It is deemed best to let the disclosures pass with as little publicity as possible.

THE ANCIENT LINEAGE OF CHRISTMAS

The fundamental theses underlying the solstitial festival of deific rebirth trace back primarily to ancient Judaism, and back of that to the archaic Egyptian theurgical science. Ubiquitous in Egypt's religious systematism was the theme of the coming of Messiah. Horus, the central Christ figure in the texts, was described as "he who ever comes," "he who comes regularly and continuously," or who comes periodically. In some of the hymns he is hailed as "The Comer! The Comer!" Isis, the goddess mother and queen of heaven, entreats him to come and lift her out of her desolation.

What becomes indubitably clear from searching study of these old texts is that the Messianic "coming" they refer to is the advent into the evolving life of humanity on this earth plane of a form, grade or degree of consciousness which was not generable in the order of nature itself, but was the flowering to maturity of the conscious potential inherent in a seed of divine mind implanted in the natural order from above. As any mother has to receive the seminal essence of a new birth and mature it to its generation, so the maternal order of nature, the material world, had to be impregnated at a point of readiness in its evolution with the seed of a divine grade of mind, give it birth and rear it to its maturity. Its reception in utero would be signalized zodiacally at the September date, its birth at the December period and its rearing and growth completed at the March consummation. But in the salient features of the symbolism its birth would be allocated to the December solstice. Christmas would celebrate the emergence of the divine order of conscious mind in the human race, the inception of the human grade of being to crown the

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former pure animal level of subconscious and instinctive existence. It marked the entry of mind, reason, and the whole vast potential of the activity of thought into human motivation, installing the intellect as king over human action. The interior meaning of Christmas can never be realistically grasped until it is understood that it celebrates the coming of mind as King over the lower instincts, appetencies and passions of the primitive animal stage of biological evolution. The Christmas advent of the Prince of Peace would eventuate finally in the Easter crowning of the King of Love, for mind was to be glorified in the end by the sweet aura and radiant light of divine Love.

Of infinite significance it is to know that in all the antecedent and "prophetic" literature and religious ritual stemming into Judaism and Christianity from the venerable lore of old Egypt, the constructions dealing with the Messianic coming indubitably refer to this advent of the new higher dispensation that would supervene on earth from the birth of the thinking principle in human action, and just as indubitably can not be taken to refer to the physical birth of any personalized Christ or Messiah. Study of the ancient field of religious literature reveals no prevalence of the notion that Messiah would come on earth in the form of a human babe and man-Christ until about the second and third centuries of the Christian era, and then predominantly only in the region around the Eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea. Tersely, it can be stated as verifiable truth that the conception of the Christ-Messiah as a human being of flesh and blood had not been extant in the ancient world until it took form in the degenerate philosophical period of the early Christian centuries. From the heyday of Greek philosophical brilliance in Plato's age some five hundred years before this there had ensued a tragic de-

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cline and decay in spiritual wisdom, which Sir Gilbert Murray has famously characterized by his phrase "the failure of nerve" on the part of the Greek mind. And it was at the very lowest ebb of the philosophical spirit that a phenomenon occurred which cast the shadow of ignorance that deepened into the "Dark Ages" of Medieval Europe. It was at this epoch that the conception of Christos-Messiah as a principle of higher consciousness was transmogrified into the form of a man-God Savior, the Christ as principle turned into the Christ as a man. This was the supreme tragedy of human cultural history. It generated and released the frenzy that was to burn the Alexandrian library, murder Hypatia and Bruno, close up the Platonic Academies and end the benignant light of an archaic spiritual wisdom older than ancient Egypt.

Fully five thousand years before a Hebrew maid Mary nursed an infant of Nazareth the haloed Madonna and the Child were extant in Egypt as Isis holding her infant Horus. On the walls of the temple of Luxor, at a date as early as 1700 B.C. there were carved four scenes which have been reproduced in the Gospels as first-century Christian history. The first scene depicts a group of angels on a cloud making the annunciation of the coming of the Messiah King to a band of shepherds in the fields. The second represents a single angel announcing to a young maiden that she is to be the mother of this coming King. A third pictures the Nativity scene, with the two animals, the ox and the ass, present. And the fourth shows three noblemen kneeling before a babe and offering gifts. How we are expected to accept the thesis that ancient Egyptian dramatic and symbolic representation of man's evolutionary history turned into factual history in the year 1 A.D. has not been made clear to any reasoning mind. One must go deeply

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into the study of this remote background of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptural literature to be impressed with the pivotal significance of findings such as these, for they are multitudinous and staggering in their implications.

The setting of the sun or a star in the west had been for long centuries the symbol of the descent of soul into incarnation as similarly the alternate rising of sun or star in the east at morning had allegorized the resurrection or rebirth of soul out of its burial in the dark cave of fleshly body. The three stars in the hunter's belt in the constellation of Orion had been from remote times denominated the "Three Kings" who attended the birth of the coming Lord. The figure of the Christ born among animals, or exposed to be saved by animals in a stable or a cave, was common at a very early period. The symbolism of midnight, winter and the solstice was universally prevalent as depicting the period of the Christ-birth in the depth of the "dead" condition of soul buried down under bodily inertia. One is safe in saying that not a feature of the traditional forms of celebration of Christmas is missing in the ancient background of our religion. And as one canvasses these identities and correspondences between Gospel narrative and antecedent allegorism, there grows the conviction of the non-historicity and from that the ridiculousness of the Gospel accounts of the birth of the Christ when taken as assumed occurrence in objective history. The supremely beautiful scenario of the angelic heralding of the birth of Christ in Luke's Gospel becomes traduced into unacceptable reality if taken as history. The singular fact of ostensible "history" that Jesus was born just six months after his forerunner John the Baptist can be given rational--and most sensationally enlightening significance only in reference to the symbolism of the zodiacal chart. That Elizabeth, the mother of John, gave birth to her son in

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her old age, as did both Sarah and Hannah bear their sons Isaac and Samuel, carries a significance that has not been properly envisaged. The reference to the zodiacal sign of Aries, the Ram, in the items of the Christ featured as the "Lamb of God" and the shepherds with their flocks in Christmas pageantry, has been entirely overlooked, as have also the obvious Piscean implications of the Christ's twelve disciples chosen as "fishermen," and the Greek characterization of the early Christians as "little fishes" and the Christ figure himself as Ichthys, the Fish Avatar of deity. In the precession of the equinoxes the sun was entering the sign of Pisces, the Fishes, about the time of the founding of Christianity, and we are quite ignorant today as to the concern of ancient religious interest with both astrological and natural symbolic representation. To interpret ancient Scriptures solely from the historical point of reference and ignore the poetic, figurative and emblematic, will contort their cryptic esoteric significance into gross caricature of real meaning.

Then there is the item of the name of the location of the Gospel birth. One is now in position to say that if the divine babe's birthplace had been localized in Patagonia, Lapland, Alaska or Siberia, or London or New York, he would still have been truly born in "Bethlehem." Because it is as clear as anything well can be that the name, Bethlehem, carries no possible reference to the village of that name in Palestine. What then does Bethlehem mean? The Hebrew dictionary tells us that the word is made up of beth, meaning "house," and lehem meaning "bread." It therefore means "house of bread," and is a cryptic designation of the human body. Where else can the Christ consciousness be born but in the human body and its brain? As the "Red Sea" in both Old and New Testament symbolism is a glyph for

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the human body blood (since it is actually sea water and is red!), so the "Bethlehem" house of bread is a semantic veil for the human body. In the archaic zodiacal symbolism the sign of Virgo, the Virgin Mother, was poetized as the house of bread--from the fact that in it was the great star, Spica, the head of wheat, symbol of the divine bread coming down from heaven--while just six months across from it was the sign of Pisces, the Fishes. The Sages of antiquity portrayed Virgo as the mother of the first or natural man and Pisces as the Mother of the second Adam or the Christ. How astonishingly significant it must be, then, to note that in the "miracle" of the feeding of the five thousand the two foods given were the emblems of these two houses of the zodiac, Virgo and Pisces, the one the Mother of John, the forerunner, the other the mother of Jesus, just six months later! At least two of the ancient goddesses in religious dramatism were styled "Fish-mothers" of divinity, Atergatis and Semiramis. The semantic relevance of the mermaid in ancient mythology is connected with this area of reference.

Somewhat akin in significance to the red holly berry and the poinsettia was the red rose of Christmas symbolism. Pictured on the cross at the junction of the two arms, it emblemed the Christ-birth as the product of spirit and matter "crossed" in the life of man. Like the Glastonbury thornbush it, too, was legendarily asserted to bloom at midnight of Christmas Eve. As the "tree" of the cross on which the Christ was crucified was dramatized as the far-descended branch of the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, so the Christmas rose on the cross was supposed to have blossomed forth in December as a stem from Jesse's ancient rod of divinity.

BETHLEHEM AND BETHANY

Bethlehem itself is hardly to be taken geographically in connection with the event. Scholars have been unconscionably slow to derive any central significance from the etymology of the town name. Beth-lehem means, as any Hebrew knows, "the house of bread." This was an emblematic designation of the house of Virgo, the Virgin in the Zodiac. The wheat symbolized by the great star Spica in that house of the heavens emblemed the Christ coming as the divine bread to be eaten mystically by all souls. (See the author's The Lost Light for a full and revealing elaboration of this entire theme.) Indeed it could be affirmed that the ancient books would have proclaimed the Christ-birth as "occurring" in Bethlehem even if no such town had stood on the map; or rather they would have seen to it that a town appropriately located according to some semantic scheme would have been given the name of Bethlehem. (That the name of this particular town is to be accounted for in this way is indeed fairly probable, for this was the ancient religious custom.) For some thousands of years the venerable documents of Egypt allocated the Messianic birth to the town of Annu (Anu) in the Nile valley. In Annu, the books stated, Christ had gone to his "death" and there he would be born again. And it is a breath-taking discovery in Comparative Religion study that Anu is in one passage described as the "place of multiplying bread."

This Egyptian background can not be discounted as the genuine source of the "miracle" in which Jesus feeds the five thousand enhungered gathering by multiplying the loaves and fishes. The Greeks named Anu Heliopolis, the "city of the sun," the spiritual city where the

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sun of divine soul went to its "death" and had its resurrection. Anu in the Egyptian system was the place of increasing the divine bread of eternal life! And this "city" is finally the human body itself, where soul first goes to its "death," then has its glorious resurrection. Likewise this "city" is Beth-lehem, the house of bread, when the zodiacal symbolism is transferred from Egyptian to Hebrew name and type. Egypt had proclaimed the solstitial birth of the Son of God ages before it became the current legend in Hebrew hands.

What little there is to Christmas that can be claimed as distinctively Christian is itself marred by misguided comprehension of its relevance and quite erroneous application of its symbolism. It is almost a wholly Pagan festival that we celebrate. The dire tragedy is that we no longer have the perspicacity to discern in it the transcendent glory of the original Pagan significations. The gala-day of all human-divine history goes off as a mere anniversary celebration in the spirit of a worldly carnival. That few observe it in the exalted appreciation of its profound mystical values bespeaks the depths of our philosophical failure and the decay of our culture.

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YULE AND NOEL

It remains to build up the structure of the two familiar names attached closely to the Christmas gaiety. They are Yule and Noel. Nowhere has there been seen any scholar's derivation of Yule from its obvious philological sources. It almost incontestably springs from the ancient Egyptian name of Deity, IU, meaning "(the Deity) who comes," and the Hebrew EL, "God." Its total rendering would then read: "The Deity that comes as God," or, more simply, "the coming God." The Egyptians many times called Horus, or Iusa, "he who comes regularly and continually," and in hymns he is hailed and appealed to as "The Comer!" IU is the verb meaning "to come." In course of Nordic and Anglic transmission, the IU became YU and the EL more phonetically conjoined to it as LE, giving us in the end YULE. As the Divinity under zodiacal symbolism "came" at the winter solstice, the late December period became designated as the Yuletide and its festival "the Yule."

Hence the whole edifice of Gospel historicity trembles under the impact of the strange dramatic circumstance, given in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel, that the Annunciation to Mary of her conception of the coming Christ by the Holy Spirit came in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist. So we can see what the myth-makers devised for discerning intelligence in the allegory in Luke. The natural man, having covered the zodiacal "six months" between his conception and the date of his quickening into spiritual status in his evolution, was dramatized as being "quickened" at a point exactly opposite from the point of the beginning of his life. Six months on the chart would mark the end of an epoch begun opposite it. Six months, speaking purely zodiacally, would terminate the period of mortal life and bring the natural man to the place of his deification. At that point he would be represented as being quickened from natural to spiritual life. So then, according to the Lukan account, when the mother of the true spiritual Christ, who had just been impregnated by the Holy Ghost, came into the presence of the first mother, carrying her child at the figurative completion of his cycle of physical evolution, and awaiting only the advent of the spiritual Lord to be quickened into a new order of exalted being, he was dramatized as manifesting this reawakening by the statement that "he leaped in his mother’s womb." The Luke narration makes it clear that the conception of Jesus had just taken place when Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth and found her at the six months stage of her pregnancy. Mary’s coming

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into the presence of Elizabeth is made the occasion of the natural man’s leaping in his mother’s womb. When the Christos comes to the natural man the latter leaps into the higher kingdom of spirit.

It is but a simple matter of arithmetic to note that the last three months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John coincided with the first three of Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus, bringing the birth of Jesus just six months after that of John! So Luke has it. But it was in the zodiacal chart some thousands of years before it could have "happened" in Judea. It had occurred zodiacally long before it could have occurred historically. And the implication is overmastering that the supposed historical occurrence is but a presumption of ignorance based on the zodiacal when that became circulated as history among the unintelligent masses.

The final link of significant data, now to be presented is by no means a minor one. St. Paul declares that we come to birth spiritually only as we die carnally, meaning that the quantum or quality of divine character in us grows in proportion as the quantum of raw nature decreases. We increase deifically as we decrease humanly; the god gains in power as the animal dies. So the structure of the allegory depicted the spiritual man, Jesus, son of Nun, the "Fish," as increasing, while John, son of Virgo, the Water Mother, decreases in stature. Astrologically, as a star or constellation sinks below the horizon in the west, its opposite star or constellation would be rising in the east. As John, type of the first, the natural man, went down (having completed his mission of preparing the way for his greater successor), Jesus, type of the spiritual birth, rose on the world. So the narrative has John saying: "I must decrease, but he must increase." In the descent of soul into the body spiritual power decreases as physical life increases. But on the reverse arc of the cycle, or evolution, the physical (John) decreases as the Christ power increases in its new round of growth.

In the range of the symbolism of water and air, it was impossible that so conspicuous a natural thing as the existence of creatures like fish in the water could fail to be caught and elaborated for semantic figures. It is doubtless of great significance that in the arcane lore of the mythologists, all world

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saviors were represented as being born in one phase of zodiacal emblemism--in the sign of Pisces, the Fishes. The birth at Christmas, or the winter solstice was rather the quickening of that which had gone "dead" at the lowest point of fire’s immersion in matter. The final delivery of soul-fire out of the water was consummated at the end of Pisces, the spring equinox, when the sun crossed the line separating the underworld from the heavens. For here the soul graduated finally from its schooling in this underworld of matter and body into the kingdom of spirit. Symbolically this occurred at the end of Pisces, and is the base of all Eastern ritualism. In the understanding of the seers of old time, the first of the two mothers of the Messiah-Christs was matter in its inorganic, invisible, subatomic state; the second was matter organic, visible and atomic. Hence legend gives to the Savior-gods two mothers, Isis-Nephthys, Sarah-Hagar, Leah-Rachel, Aholah-Aholibah and Elizabeth and Mary, to bring the Sun-gods to birth. The first conceived them, the second gave him birth. And so, as Jesus said, the first birth is of water; the second is of spirit.