Christ's Three Days in Hell

Revelation of an Astounding Christian Fallacy

By Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D.

Part 2

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IS HADES UNDER THE EARTH?

Inevitably we will re reminded that in the Genesis account of creation and elsewhere in the Bible not only are two regions spoken of, but three are clearly distinguished. The story narrates that God created things in heaven, on earth and under the earth. MacCulloch quotes Hippolytus as saying that Christ was ordained Lord of things in heaven, on earth and under the earth (Greek kata chthonia). MacCulloch’s explanation of this is that Christ became man to live as and among men and thus transfigure manhood with divinity: that he ruled things under the earth in order that, as one who submitted to mortal death and thereby could preach to the dead of past time, he might overcome death by combating and defeating its dread power in its own realm. Here it can again be clearly seen that early theological thought equated death with life in the ancient representation. But here again literalism wrecks the proper sense of allegory. Any third locality apart from heaven and earth that is listed as pertaining to man in the old sacred books, is meaningless and non-existent. If it is postulated in the history of man it is a baseless figment of bad literary bungling. A region physically located "under the earth" in the sense of beneath the ground surface, can have no place in the field of man’s evolutionary activity. If man lives some eighty years on earth, then has to spend a period of comparatively vaster length in the bowels of the earth, physically considered, why has not the Christian theology given due accentuation to a feature of such startling character? Christian exegesis here has been caught by a Biblical phrase, wholly missing its real import and through the fallacy of a literal interpretation entangling itself in an illogical complex. Only the esoteric approach and methodology in Scriptural reading, which it rejects with fright at every turn, can rescue it from its own disordered creedology.

Man stands at a point which might be considered about midway in the scale and gamut of being between the natural energies below him and the spiritual grades of consciousness above him. He is thus balanced between heaven above him and the subordinate and preparatory orders of life below him. As his place in the cosmos was on earth, his life had to be lived in a subordinate relation to the life of higher beings in heaven above and in a superior relation to inferior creatures below his station. A comprehensive reference to his position would have to cover, so to say, the three stories of his place of residence in the universe, his own story, the earth, the next story above, and the kingdom immediately below, or "under the earth". This lower region would extend over the three kingdoms below man in the evolution of life, animal, vegetable and mineral, and presumably the sub-elemental, sub-atomic level of life which our wondrous modern science is now exploring. But as a physical locality in which any part of man’s redemptive process is alleged to take place, the region so vaguely, so indeterminately fancied to exist down under the earth in any physical sense, is again a fictional delusion of the theological brain, straining to make ends meet in carrying allegory over into literal realism.

Having seen in the Exodus passage that an Old Testament forerunner of the Jesus (Joshua) descent to the lower world, namely Moses, preceded the descent of the true divine Lord, we should register no surprise on finding that the early Christian commentaries similarly have John the Baptist preceding the descent of Jesus to the prison-house below. Must not, then, this place of descent of deity be one and the same place? As New Testament "history" is uncompromisingly held to be fulfillment of Old Testament "prophecy" is it not

entirely legitimate to assume that the locale in which the fulfillment takes place is the locale in which it did take place? Otherwise it would not be the fulfillment of the given prophecy. The great lost and stubbornly resisted truth of all this is, - mirabile dictu - that neither is the Old Testament to be taken as objective prophecy of future events believed to have been fulfilled in the first century A.D., nor is the New Testament a record of the fulfillment of such alleged prophecy. All these utterances in both books, as Gerald Massey indubitably demonstrates, are allegories of man’s experience in his line of march up the ladder of being, grossly mistaken in the Old Testament for prophecies and in the New for miracles. The world owes - but refuses ungraciously to requite - to Gerald Massey an incalculable debt for showing us that the same "miracles" that are enumerated in the Gospels as the demonstration of Jesus’ divinity, are found ages before his advent in old Egyptian books as spiritual apologues.

Clement of Alexandria is broad and liberal enough to include "righteous Pagans", as well as the sainted Patriarchs of the Old Testament among those dead in the underworld who are to be rescued by the Lord’s preaching in Hades. A chapter in his Miscellanies treats of a passage cited from The Shepherd of Hermas in which even the apostles preach and baptized in Hades. With even such a direct hint of the identity of Hades with earth under their eyes, the scholars still remained blind to the truth. Are we to take it that the apostles, as well as Jesus, descended to Hades and preached to the spirits in prison? And how could they have done so when they were still alive in body during the three days of Jesus’ visit to the underworld? And if not at that time, when in their lives did they make this extraordinary visit?

Clement does divide the righteous Jews and Pagans from the sinners in Hades. "Who in his senses," he asks, would charge Providence with injustice and suppose souls of the righteous and those of sinners to be under one condemnation?" MacCulloch suggests that Clement might logically have included even the sinners themselves as privileged to hear the crucial underworld sermonizing of Jesus, as they could hardly be expected to repent without some exhortation from divine power above them. Clement seems to have held rigidly to the applicability of the "chained" and "those in prison" to Jews and Gentiles. Christians of course were not in such lowly or precarious condition. It is not to be missed in passing how completely MacCulloch fails to see a slip of logic in Clement’s comment to the effect that righteous Jews were entitled to hear the precious preaching in Hades on the ground that they, too, needed the chance to repent. This is one of those numerous little traps of logic in which the inveterate prejudices now and again have caught Christian theorizers, involving them in bizarre situations. For how can it be logical to hold that a "righteous Jew" or Pagan should need to repent? When has righteousness become something that needs to be absolved by repentance? Is it not unrighteousness that calls for repentance? We are forced to the conclusion that in early Christian ideology righteousness absolved a Christian, but not a Jew. It seems that even MacCulloch’s statement carries the assumption that a righteous Jew is under condemnation and needs repentance, not for being righteous, but for being a Jew! If one is not correct in an analysis of this sort, one has to wonder whether logic has a place in religious thinking at all. And if righteousness does not count on a soul’s credit balance, one has to wonder what is the good of being righteous. But Christian mentality was caught in this anomaly because in truth Christian doctrine is loud in proclaiming that one’s best righteousness is as filthy rages in the sight of God. Not your righteousness, but only the mercy of God will save you. And in early Christian presumption, righteousness would certainly not have absolved one from the sin of being a Jew or a Pagan.

Clement quotes The Shepherd of Hermas document as saying that while Christ preached to the long-dead Jewish Patriarchs and "good" Jews in Hades, the apostles preached to the Gentiles who were ready for conversion. This Apocryphal book states that the apostles "went down with them into the water, and again came up." We have universally been told that Hades is a place where souls are tortured in the flames of an undying fire. What shibboleth in popular parlance is more common than "hot as hell?" Books on Christian theology combed the dictionary for terms adequate to picture the fierceness of hell’s igneous fury. From Dante’s Inferno to the modern cinema we have seen the troops of souls writhing in agony in the unquenchable fires of hell.

But how different the picture we find here! The apostles are said to have gone down to this same Hades to help Jesus save the hordes of the dead, but it was water into which they plunged, not fire! So here ancient semantic ingenuity, in typifying the lower level of life, switched from the symbolism of fire to that of water. Our learned author, MacCulloch appears to take no notice of this drastic shift in the symbolism. Shall we guess that it provoked a momentary puzzlement or impasse in his mind and that, with no solution at hand, he dodged the obligation to discuss it?

For owing to the theological position and attitudes of Christian systematism there is still wanting the capability of elucidating the semantic usages in Biblical writing. Nature does not limit her epiphany of truth to one objectification, one phenomenon. Emerson has said that God is present in all his parts in every moss, cobweb and blade of grass. Therefore more than one of her elements may serve to enlighten the human mind with an apt ideation of a given truth. Truly enough has the underworld into which the soul units of God’s fatherhood have descended for life’s benison of experience to evolve divine potential by overcoming the inertia of matter has been characterized in symbolic language by the Egyptians as the "crucible of the great house of flame," or the "fiery furnace" of Scriptural imagery. At the same time, but from another angle of poetization, this lower bodily habitat of incarnated souls is depicted as the place where souls are in imminent danger of drowning in its deep waters. For the physical bodies which souls inhabit in this underworld are composed of seven-eighths water and one-eighth earthy elements. This combination of earth and water gives the "certain mire" of Plato’s symbolic depiction and the "miry clay" of the Bible Psalmist, in which the soul finds itself bogged down here in body. The fire symbolism pertains to the spiritual energies and potencies of the soul, the water poetizes the coarser nature of matter and body. Soul’s incarnation in watery body bring the two elements into interaction and conflict; the water struggles to extinguish the fire, the fire endeavors to dry up the water. Raging sense can overwhelm soul as water quenches fire; spirit can overcome rampant sense as the sun’s fiery rays dry up the streams. For man this conflict, this battle of Armageddon, becomes more than poetry, for it is the actuality of every moment of his living experience in this life. It is the great aeonial battle that Genesis describes as being fought on the border of the salt marshes, or in the valley of Siddim (a paraphrase for Sodom), which it says is the salt sea. When it is seen that Sodom is a cover for sodium chloride, which is the chemical name for salt, and when to this astonishing datum is added the still more amazing fact that human body blood is identical in chemical composition with sea salt water - biological evolution of life having issued from the sea, with salt water in its veins, so to say - the mind of the Western world can at last open up to the understanding that the mighty battle between spirit and matter is fought right here in the valley of the salt marshes of the human body blood, which, being sea water and turned red by oxidation in the lungs, is the Red Sea which all

souls must cross by night, when spirit is immersed in the water and the darkness of corporeal existence on earth. Should we be surprised to find that it was while fleeing Sodom that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt? As "history" these narratives baffle and perturb the human mind; as allegories they vividly enlighten it.

Any one knows that when the higher energies of fire are brought in touch with water they cause it to boil. They throw it into agitation and separate the oxygen from the hydrogen. Spirit duplicates this action by stirring into vigorous motion the sensual elements of consciousness and separating the hydrogen (water) from the oxygen (air), or in the psychic field separating emotion (water) from mind (air). So this salt water of our body blood, when acted upon by the higher fires of the spirit, can veritably boil with the surging energies of lust, passion, elemental animal fury and frenzy. These - be it known at last - are the fires of Tophet and all the underground hells of Scripture. This knowledge will grant to Western man for the first time the inestimable boon of releasing him forever from the religiously inspired fear of future torment in hell’s fires, since he will understand that he is in those raging fires now and by wisdom he can turn them into their true power to refine the dross of his nature into the pure gold of spiritual light. (It is not strange that the words "light" and "gold" are identical or nearly so in many languages).

Clear to us also with this elucidation come the meanings of the Biblical "thrice refined in the fire" and the ordeal by water, or the baptism. Souls must both be baptized in the water of earthly body and thrice refined in the fires of that same life. So that the two symbols go hand in hand in semantic portrayal of our life here.

It is most interesting to note how symbolism becomes almost indiscriminately blended into seeming meaninglessness in a passage taken from Origen’s exegetical commentary on Luke. Here the tree, the way, the river, fire and water are jumbled together with no evident perception of their semantic implications. But his presentments so aptly accentuate the correctness of our dissertation on the duplex association of fire and water in the life and body of man that there is warrant for quoting them. He says that there is a fiery river through which all must pass on the way to the tree of life in Paradise. As souls pass over this river, says Origen, they receive a baptism of fire. Did not the tongue of flame mount on the head of Jesus at the end of his baptism in the Jordan? Missing the solid import of all this symbolism, MacCulloch says that this baptism of fire cannot harm the righteous, but all who pass through it without being harmed, pass on to Paradise. Here the obvious inference is that if you are not righteous, the fiery baptism will harm you, and you could use this experience in it to tell whether you were righteous or not. All this becomes silly when it is known that the test of the fiery baptism is indeed the temptation under which all souls must go, the ordeal of living in a body of water, which our fiery forces of feeling and will may heat up until, as was said in old Egypt, you are "scalded thereby." It is true enough to say that the fire can not harm the righteous, but all souls are something less than righteous before they develop the intelligence and self-control to stabilize their righteous character, and its various degrees of burning are themselves the elements and influences that shape human life to righteousness.

Origen, whose discernment in dealing with the symbols and allegories was usually keener than that of the other Church Fathers, took a more rigid stand, asserting that earth retained all those devoured in Hades.

DRAMA IN THE UNDERWORLD

God himself in the Old Testament says: "I send down to death and I raise up again." The sons of Israel go down to "Egypt" and later make their exodus. Abraham and Moses descend into "Egypt" and again come up. In the Gospels Jesus is secreted in "Egypt" and returns. Paul asserts that if the Christ is to ascend he must first have descended. Every seed, the divine as well as the vegetable, or the human sperm, must be buried in the body of mother matter if it is to have a resurrection and a new life. Water has been the universal ancient symbol of matter. As matter itself nurses within its deepest bosom (as we now so well know) the soul of fire, so water holds the electric potency of fire within its bosom, as any thunder-storm demonstrates. These two, fire and water, are the inseparable dual potencies in man’s combined association of body and soul, flesh and spirit. A chapter in the Egyptian Book of the Dead is entitled "Of boiling water in the underworld and not being scalded thereby." These venerable Scriptures also say that souls were sent down to earth to "cause a burning within the sea." So earth must be Hades.

In view of all this would it not be legitimate for us to paraphrase Clement’s rhetorical question and ask: "Who in his senses would presume to charge Providence with the idiotic scheme of providing no natural way for the progressive education of the souls of his own beloved children over millions of years and then suddenly decide to retrieve this lost time and sad neglect by sending one only of his sons, while his body lay inert in a rocky tomb in Judea on a Friday and Saturday of the year 33 A.D., down to a spooky Hades and through a few hours of his "preaching" redeeming a very uncertainly determined portion of hell’s dead (though somehow still living) population held there over thousands of years? Are we not warranted in wondering why Clement, or why MacCulloch or a thousand other Christian scholars have not asked, then answered, this and related questions?

An incidental detail brought out in many of the apocryphal scripts is that those dead in the underworld did not see the form of Jesus, but heard his voice. On the contrary, other aspects of the description assert that at his appearance his body shed a blazing light about him, illuminating the darkest recesses of the cavernous dungeons.

Not only was Jesus’ descent to earth’s bowels heralded by a forerunner, John the Baptist, but as his advent to earth was prophesied long in advance by the seers of the Old Testament, so would his redemptive sally into the domain of the lower powers be foretold by these same prophets. Those who proclaimed his coming to earth likewise announced it in Hades. Every place, Origin argued, had need of Christ, and therefore he needed his prophets in every world he visited. This most learned of the Church Fathers, whose discernment of the profounder sense of the symbols and allegories was far keener than that of the other early exegetists, took a more rigid stand as to those who were to be freed by the Christ’s preaching, asserting that the earth retained all those devoured in Hades. Language so loosely employed as this is virtually useless for definite meaning. How can souls be devoured by death or any other agency and still remain intact? Scholars have not discerned that many terms used in the ancient Scriptural language of symbolism can not carry their factual meaning into the world of abstract conception, and must be understood as the shadows of ideal things, the outward signs of inner and invisible truths. The Bible literalists have never caught the idea that the death which God declared

would be the penalty for first man’s eating the forbidden fruit was a death that did not kill its victim, but let him survive. So here the devouring of souls by death and hell must be seen as meaning simply that souls have been separated from their human bodies and are thereafter in Hade’s realm. In this intended sense it is figuratively true that death "devours" all humans.

And could any Christian tell us what specific location is meant by the "bowels of the earth" and the "lower parts of the earth?" It can hardly be taken other than literally, but so taken it can have no recognizable identity. This region is as fatuous a chimera of theological hallucination as would be the asserted location of heaven a few miles above the earth. Literalism in such things is deceptive because states of consciousness are incommensurable with physical dimensions. The dimensions in a physical world can be merely suggestive of spiritual dimensions. As Vergil located the door to the underworld near the Sibyl’s cave at Cumae in Italy, possibly Christian literalists will encourage us to believe that we may soon use space ships to locate heaven. According to all this Christian speculation of minds teased and buffeted by the legerdemain of ancient allegorism, Jesus must be presumed to have gone down somewhere in the earth’s physical underground to reach and preach to the captive spirits held there. Or are we to take it that he merely descended the six feet to grave level and flitted about over the cemeteries preaching and awakening the dead? If the Christian theologians cannot tell us with specificality where we are to place this prison-house of the dead that Jesus visited, they ought to cease bandying about the terms in loose fashion. They do but mystify and confuse. Celsus, in his argument which Origen recasts in Contra Celsum, makes his dramatic spokesman, the Jew, remind Origen that the fabled descent of many heroes, such as Orpheus, Hercules, Theseus, Aeneas, are "juggling impossibilities," and that the Christian dogma of Christ’s descent is just as hollow as the others. Origen rebuts this with the statement that Christ’s descent and resurrection were not mythical; they were indeed real and factual. Celsus ridicules the Christian assertion that Jesus went to Hades to convert those sequestered there, seeing he had signally failed to persuade the living on earth. If he could not win living men on earth, how is it to be supposed that he could, in forty-eight hours, redeem all unregenerate antiquity in Hades? This assignment would indeed call for some cosmic wizardry in the doing.

Origen expressed the opinion that St. Paul, too, was in Hades after his death. Being the apostle to the Gentiles, in particular, it would be supposed that Gentiles dead would need his preaching in Hades as well as Gentiles living above.

Those accepting Christ on his preaching are translated from Hades to Paradise. Origen curiously grades the order in which those in Hades will recognize and accept the descending Lord and ascend with him: those see him first who yearningly have looked for his coming; of non-Christian believers the prophets next respond; then all the other righteous ones; then the sinners in the Christian fold; then the outsiders, the Gentiles. The theorizing capabilities of the theological imagination are well demonstrated here.

A number of the ecclesiastical writers, notably Ephrem Syrus, recite dialogues between personified Death, Satan, Sin and Hades. Death upbraids Satan and Hades for thinking they could easily catch or trap and overcome Jesus as he entered their domain. He berates them for fleeing in panic at the sight of the Master entering the underworld, or cringing in fright as they see Jesus stealing away their captives. Much is made of the idea of Satan or Hell es-

saying to catch Jesus on a great hook which they throw at him. It turns out that the hook rebounds and impales its throwers instead. In anticipation these dark powers exult at seeing their prospective new prey approach their province and they eagerly await the moment of his capture as that of any other mortal. But they stand petrified with terror or are thrown back as his majesty confounds them. Death is heard expressing his amazement on seeing that his powers can not enthrall the Shining One. Christ came irresistibly on, plundered the storehouses and emptied the treasuries of Hades. Death was swallowed up by Life after Life seemingly had been devoured by Death.

The sublime apostrophe in the Psalms exhorting the everlasting gates to be lifted up and the King of Glory to come in, is definitely part of the underworld drama. Christ fought for three days and nights (wasn’t he supposed to be preaching?) in his battle to blast the powers of death, and when the victory is won the cry goes up for the lifting up the gates and the everlasting refrain: "O Grave, where is thy victory? O Death, where is thy sting?" The angels then inquire: "Who is this King of Glory?" And the Christ answers: "The Lord of Hosts, he is the King of Glory; the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle."

St. Augustine registers puzzlement as to the nature, location and grade, so to say, of the underworld of death. He can not regard the word inferus (lower) as used in any good sense. The good people should not go down. It seems absurd, he hints, to think that the ancient saints who believed in the future coming of Christ could have been retained in places far removed from the wicked, yet shared with the inferos, or "below" ones. Doubtless he was caught in the dilemma which is clearly discerned in Christ’s saying to the thief on one of the other crosses at the crucifixion: "this day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." If "this day" is considered one of the three (two) days Jesus was to be preaching and fighting in Hades, here is an overlap which involves Jesus’ presence in both Paradise and Hades at the same time. It would be resolved if Paradise and Hades could be regarded as being the same place. But this outlandishly flouts all Christian persuasion. MacCulloch elucidates Augustine’s belief that Paradise can be no part of heaven (sad news to piously expectant believers), since Christ, or at any rate his soul, went ad inferos. Paradise, he infers, is then that nether place into which Christ descended. He visited the prisoners in the darkest, lowest penal section, but not those in Abraham’s Bosom or in Paradise. Could otherwise capable minds be any worse entangled in skulduggery, hopelessly victimized by senseless literalism?

Augustine is greatly perplexed that Christ’s descent should have completely emptied hell’s purlieus. To free all the captives there would compromise God’s justice in his punishment of the vile sinners of the past and the wicked generally, would nullify its efficacy and rob it of its due power. If all the past wicked were to be freed into blessedness above, how could God’s just judgments be carried out in equity? Those evil transgressors whom God had to overwhelm in the flood, how could they be counted worthy of forgiveness and divine favor? On those terms hell could not be a place of everlasting damnation. Augustine denies that Abraham’s Bosom - much less Paradise - was an integral part of the infernal regions. Augustine stands confounded by these puzzles.

One gleam of at least partial light flashes on the saint’s mind when he speculates that the "spirits in prison" may be considered to be souls still resident in bodies, but enshrouded in the darkness of ignorance. And he guesses that perhaps the preaching to the dead need not refer to an oratorical present-

ment in Hades, but simply exhortation to those spiritual dead right here on earth. Having shared Plotinus’ studies under Ammonias Saccas, Augustine could not have been ignorant of the latent esoteric sense of Scripture. Could he here have been enunciating what he knew to be the occult truth of the matter under the slight disguise of poetic speculation?

Cyril of Jerusalem ventures so far into the allegory as to mention Jonah’s captivity in the whale as typical of Christ’s descent.

In a document called The Odes of Solomon the symbolic interrelation of the baptism doctrine with the descent to Hades is brought out. The "abyss" of darkness is closely associated with water as symbol. Dramatism depicted the waters, like the gate guardians in Hades, as being terrified at Jesus’ approach and their ensouling elemental beings fleeing in terror. Water of course is overcome by fire and vanishes away. But for fire to combat the water and extinguish it was the achievement of victory of spirit over matter. So the baptism meant "death", then resurrection from its thraldom. We see how clearly this relation of the soul’s "death" to incarnation in a watery body is shown in St. Paul’s statement, referring to Christ: "We suffer death with him in his baptism."

In a so-called Gospel of Peter, Docetic in character, there is described a scene that has suggestive semantic implications. Two men descend in the night from heaven and all radiant with light, enter the sepulcher. They emerge carrying a third body, and a cross follows them. The heads of the two men reach to heaven; that of the third even extends beyond. A voice out of heaven is heard asking: "Hast thou preached to them that slept?" And from the cross a voice is heard in reply: "Yea." What can all this mean but that the two powers of life, the radiant spirit and the equally radiant light of atomic matter, descend onto the field of lower creation, symboled as the tomb of death for the cosmic light, and in the end of the cycle emerge with their product and progeny the Christ consciousness, which is greater than they? If these ancient constructions are not to yield meaning that is related to reality, but otherwise have to be "explained" as miracles, what are they but worthless rubbish?

In another document, The Epistle of the Apostles, the Christ says: "I descended to the place of Lazarus and preached to the righteous and the prophets." Is the raising of "dead" Lazarus in John’s Gospel presumed, then, not to have been enacted in Judea, but down in the theological after-death underworld of Hades?

Another old book, The Ascension of Isaiah, tells how Isaiah is conducted by an angel through the seventh, or highest heaven, and, beholding the blessed righteous there, is told that although these are now in possession of their "garments of the upper world," they will not be given their crowns and thrones until the Christ descends into the world in the last days. He will not be recognized as divine, but taken as a man and crucified. When he has despoiled the powers of death he will ascend on the final day accompanied by many righteous, who will then receive their garments of glory. A feature notable in this is that it is a precise copy of the transactions allocated always elsewhere to Hades, but here clearly enacted on earth. It is another hint to those of open eye and mind that the allegorical Hades is earth itself.

MacCulloch reveals that baptism was known in the early Church as "illumination" (Greek photismos), and from this hint guesses that references in certain apocryphal documents to "enlightenment" may relate to baptism. The association of two things so elementally distinct as illumination, a purely spirit-

ual development, and baptism, a physical performance, has proved too bewildering for the theological acumen of centuries. Water extinguishes fire and its light. How, then, can it be a suggestive symbol of illumination? The challenge to our semantic sense should not be too overpowering. The sense is readily apprehended when one closely considers the elements entering into the problem. Baptism clearly connotes immersion of the soul’s fiery nature under the water of the body. Experience in that watery habitat eventuates in the soul’s spiritual illumination. As out of watery clouds flashes the lightning, so out of the watery baptism comes illumination. St. Paul (I Cor. 15:29) indeed refers to baptism "for the dead." Frequently in the old writings the effects of baptism have been equated with the experience of the descent. Baptism took place on Easter Eve, intimating that renewal of life which incarnation brings. Christ’s coming into Hades always shed a great light, and the advent, the entry of spirit into and under the water of body, is the baptism.

In The Ascension of Isaiah, this prophet hears the Father commission his son, the Christ, to descend to the firmament and to this world and to the angel in Sheol, but not to Haguel, which is a Hebrew variant for Gehenna itself. This could be very significant, seeming to say that the soul should go no lower than the earth. MacCulloch suggests that this Isaiah document may be a work of Gnostic influence. The Gnostics had not fallen into the trap of literalism, and this fact makes their writings taboo to the orthodox Christian scholar. But MacCulloch is frank enough to say that when one reads many of these texts "in the Gnostic sense," one gathers the impression that the word "Hades" would seem to mean this earth! Here for a moment the biased Christian mind caught the tail of the truth, but could not hold on to it. The light was rejected, and simply because it was - Gnostic. Having been pronounced heretics, the Gnostics must be disparaged at every turn. MacCulloch also admits that there may have been influence exerted upon these constructions from the side of mythology! How extensive this influence surely was he would be more than surprised to know. He states that Marcion could not have been a true Gnostic because he did not believe in a descensus ad inferos. It has never come to his discernment that true Gnostics certainly believed in the descent of deity into the underworld, but were sagacious enough to know that they were in it right here in this life and therefore did not look for it in some sub-terra region.

THE TREE AND THE CROSS

Origen’s poetic fancy that there is a river through which all must pass on the way to the tree of life in Paradise holds intimations of deep symbolic meaning for the discerning mind. The association of the tree with the river in the Scriptures is a common feature of naturographic literary art of the ancient day. The righteous, says the Psalms, shall be like a green bay tree, or a tree planted by a river of waters, and his leaf shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. Furthermore the simile enhances the analogical suggestiveness by having the tree planted on both sides of the river of waters. For the soul in the flesh draws the vigor of its life from both the matter side and the spirit side of the stream. The Christian Fathers were here dealing with Pagan symbolism whose esoteric and mystical significance completely eluded them.

In Genesis we have the river of life, which is a poetization of the

radiation of God’s creative energies, proceeding from the throne of the universe, where at the fountainhead of creation there stood the tree of life in the garden. There was the source-spring of all life and the tree of generation by the spring. The tree and the river are kindred symbols. If one takes the tracing of the branching arms of a river, such as the Mississippi, on the map, the design looks so like the branches of a tree as to be almost identical. Like a tree the stream of living creation issues in one primary conduit or channel, then divides and again sub-sub-subdivides precisely like the structure of a tree. The idea is simply that of a line of force emanating from one source through one mouth and then branching out into multiple streams. The Norse mythology represented the life-tree, Ygdrasil, first as rooted in heaven and extending its branches downward; then with its roots in matter below, growing upward and spreading its branches out in heaven. This is a true symbolic picturing, because the stream of creative life proceeds from heavenly source above and flows downward toward matter. Then, having rooted itself in matter, it begins an upward growth that will return it, bearing its ripened fruit, to its source in Paradise. What life sends out and plants as seed in the springtime of each cycle it will bear back to heavenly source a hundred-fold in the autumn.

Emphasizing the tree symbolism the ancient sages poetized that as it was the same river that bore life potential out at the start and returned it in manifold measure, so it was the same tree that grew up beside the head-spring of the stream which was to bear for man the end fruit of his evolution. Hence there are many allusions in the allegoric literature to the salvation of man through his partaking of the fruit of the same tree whose eating in the Genesis scenario was to plunge him into the throes of this underworld "death". Doubling up on the symbolism of man’s involvement in "sin" through his first progenitor’s eating of the "forbidden" fruit of the tree of natural life, and his being saved by a spiritual rebirth through the sacrifice of the second-man-Adam on the tree (cross) of Calvary, ancient semantic genius formulated the legend that the tree (cross) of Golgotha had sprung from a shoot of the primal tree of life in Paradise. As man fell through the agency of the tree, so he would be regenerated and saved by the same tree, when its seed had evolved to the point of producing its fruit. The symbolism is perfect; it is only the theologism of stupid literalists that has distorted and blurred the picture till the beauty of its design can not be seen. Poetic legend asserted that the wood of the cross on which the Christ was crucified was cut from the tree of life in the garden, or from one of its distant descendents. "Tree" is used for cross with great frequency, the two being interchangeable.

A close parallel to this figurism is that of Christ’s birth being a new and late budding from Jesse’s stem or rod, that put forth new shoots at Christmas, like the Glastonbury thorn at the Yule, in English tradition.

If this seems far-fetched, it is singularly attested as genuine by an odd fact in the Christian Bible itself. This Scripture both begins and ends with the tree of life. It is the heart of the Genesis account of creation, as all know. Not so well known, however, is the fact that the last chapter (22) of the Book of Revelation directly asserts the right of all to partake of the fruit of the tree of life, which, it declares most interestingly, shall bear twelve manner of fruits upon its branches, and that by eating of them, man may "enter in through the gates into the city" of heavenly felicity.

Through the counsels of folly generated in the theological mind by the twisting of Scriptural allegory into ostensible history, the true meaning of the cross, as well as that of the tree, has been flagrantly misconceived. In

fact the meaning as purveyed in ecclesiastical systematism stands as practically the reverse of its true significance, turned just about upside down. It has been made the symbol of death, whereas its connotation positively is life itself. The gruesome Christian imagery of the man-Christ dying in agony on the wooden cross, has stamped the emblem on all minds as the insignium of (physical) death for man, its bitter repulsiveness being little assuaged by the promise of resurrection glory soon to follow. To the Christian mind the crucifix carries the reminder of Jesus’ death, his paying the penalty, the ransom, for man’s sin. In eighteen centuries of Christian preaching there has not been one hint that this death of Christ on the cross was death in any other form or significance than the bodily demise of the man Jesus. So far from carrying the connotation of life, this was the death that put an end to life. Living hardship and final extinction of life is the suggestive emblemism of the cross in Christianity. The grim reaper had his victory and his ghoulish triumph.

It was not so understood in pre-Christian Egypt. Certainly one of the most ancient forms of the cross, if not the very most ancient, was the great ankh-cross, the crux ansata, of ancient Egypt. It was the plain capital T, capped by the circle of the sun. It was the upright straight line I and the circle O conjoined in the relationship of living polarity, the union of positive and negative, and as such it symbolized not death but life. The truth of this elucidation is irrefutable, for the ankh symbol is the old Egyptian hieroglyphic word for life. It is also the word for "love" and "tie," since life is generated only when positive and negative energies are tied together by a binding power, love.

The blunder which led to the Christian mistake of making the cross the sign of physical death instead of life is an amazing one and has not been clarified hitherto. As indicated in the early part of this essay, our life on earth was dramatized by ancient mystic semanticism as the "death" of the soul as it proceeded from on high and poured out its life-blood for the sake of the animal entities whose bodies it was to ensoul. Theologically, on the esoteric side, the soul’s descent into body entailed its initial "death" on the cross of matter, for the very purpose of giving life to the body. This "death" figurative and relative to be sure, but real in the esoteric sense, was to be ended "in the fullness of time" by the soul’s new cycle of growth and ultimate resurrection out of the body, bringing to an end the necessity of further incarnation in bodies of earthly type. It is all to be understood in simplest form by analogy with the grain of wheat which the farmer sows in the autumn and sends down to a winter of "death" in the soil. It lies there "dead," but in the turn of the cycle to spring it bursts out of its tomb and rises to new glory of life under the power of the sun. For the descending incarnating soul it is the same process. The twelve aspects of man’s potential divinity go down into matter in the embryonic form of seed. Old Testament symbolism denominated the material ground-level of life "Egypt," since this country lay just immediately south and west of Palestine, the two directions in which the sun moves from summer zenith to winter nadir. In the turn of the cycle from "death" to rebirth the twelvefold divinity makes its exodus out of "Egypt," crossing the "Red Sea" of the human body blood, and returns above.

The symbol of the cross has only the most incidental relation to death, its significance bearing solidly on life. It is the relative "death" of soul while entombed here in the flesh that led to the intimate association of the cross with death. It can be seen now that in the esoteric sense the cross does indeed symbolize death, but it is the relative "death" of one part of man’s being for the very purpose of giving life to another part which can have no

existence without it. Divinity must "die" that humanity may live in the flesh. Spirit must "die" if matter is to have organic being. Yes, the cross is the symbol of death, but it is a "death" that is the very core of life. Spiritual death and physical life play see-saw with each other, likewise spiritual life and physical death, the one rising as the other sinks in their interrelation. This has been expressed with singular clarity in the statement of John the Baptist in comparing his status and function with those of Jesus: "He must increase, but I must decrease." Thales, the first Greek philosopher, put it that the one component of life, spirit, "lived the death" of the other, matter, and vice versa. Does not all religion assert that spirit lives more abundantly when body dies? This side of the equation has survived in general thought; but long forgotten is the equally true dictum that body lives more abundantly as spirit pours out its life-blood to ensoul it. We die daily unto the body, says St. Paul, that we may live more fully in the spirit. "For me to die is gain," the apostle says.

It can now - at last - be seen that this failure to read "death" in its proper, but deeply esoteric connotation, pointing its reference to the soul instead of to the body is the factor that has involved Christian theology in the hopeless entanglement and irrationality of the ideas carried by the words crucifixion, cross, tree, grave, burial, and resurrection. The true inner meaning never had anything to do with a death by physical crucifixion on a wooden cross, and burial in and resurrection from a rocky hillside grave in Palestine or anywhere else. Its positive sole reference was always to the "death" of soul, and that "death" comparable analogically to the "death" of organic life when it subsists only in seed form. Life must start each new cycle afresh from seed, and in a seed the "soul" of the potential development lies, relatively, "dead". It will awake to the renewal of its life at the spring turn of the winter cycle. The soul in humans is precisely related to its body as the seed is to the soil; it lies inert, awaiting the new springtime, summer and autumn harvest time of its appointed course. The mistake of reading our bodily death for the soul’s seed-stage torpidity has been the single greatest and most tragically ruinous misconception in all the history of humanity’s religious culture.

Reverting a moment to the significant symbolism of the tree we are surprised to find this item of typology connected directly with another of the most general symbols of the divine element in man. This symbol is "oil," and this substance is the base of the great and exalted title given to the central figure in all the Mystery dramas, in Greek the Christos, in Hebrew-Egyptian the Messiah. Both words mean "the Anointed One." And oil was the substance for the anointing.

THE OIL OF GLADNESS

The occult appropriateness of oil as symbol of divinity seems not to have been recognized and certainly was never made generally known. To be anointed in Christhood was to have the spirit of love and truth lighted up in human consciousness in a benignant celestial glow. In the first place oil is, as it were, the inner essence of a vegetable, extracted by pressure under proper conditions. The spirit matches this in being the innermost holy of holies of man’s organism and it is also brought out to manifestation under the stresses and pressures of bodily experience. Again oil is the fuel for fire, and the anointing of the

head with it prefigures the lighting up of the fires of consciousness to burn with the clear flames of love and beauty. Lastly, oil when it lies thin on a flat surface, displays the seven colors of the spectroscope, the natural reflection of the glory of the Lord. With still other analogies to demonstrate its appropriateness, it would be hard to find another substance so aptly analogizing the idea of our radiant divinity.

Now it turns up that in the Gospel of Nicodemus in a section dealing with the Descensus to Hades, the allegory runs that Seth goes to Paradise to seek the oil of mercy from the tree of life. The story is said to have been taken from the Jewish Apocalypse of Moses. There are many references in archaic literature to the oil or ointment drawn from the tree of life. This was a commonplace symbolism in the old books. And MacCulloch tells us that the contrast of the tree of knowledge with the tree of the cross was frequent in early Catholic writings. The abstract conception behind all this emblemism is that as man became channel for and wielder of the living energies flowing out from the heart of God in the branching river-tree of his creative effort, he was to extract through karmic pressure the innermost and most dynamic power of life, the flaming fire of divine life and the God consciousness.

Oil extracted from the tree of life, equivalent symbolically to the juice of its fruit, the intoxicating "spirit" pressed out of the grape, honey gathered from the flower blossom, the exquisite color of petals distilled out of the sap of the green stem of the rose bush, all these and other natural processes that dramatize the generation of a unit of spirit’s conscious power in a long material evolution - like an ounce of radium distilled out of tons of coal - analogize the unfoldment of the Christ nature out of the first-man-Adam stage of physical evolution. First that which is natural, says the apostle Paul, then that which is spiritual, with the spiritual supervening upon the natural as its topmost product. To anoint man’s head with the "oil of gladness" is to enact in ritual the transfusion into his human nature of the higher and more luminous powers of deific consciousness. An object "anointed" with oil presents a shining appearance. Is it too much to expect that even modern concreteness of conception should see the relevance or catch the exactness of the analogue between making one’s head shine with the sleek sheen of oil and causing one’s mind to be enlightened with the brightness of God’s more beauteous spiritual radiation? The figure uses the outer physical shining of oil on the heard to adumbrate the head’s interior shining with the glow of divine consciousness. Are we such dull children that we must have some geni explain to us the semantic aptness of the simplest natural analogies?

In the Gospel of Nicodemus the drama represents Hades as asking Jesus as he appears in the underworld: "Who art thou that pourest thy divine light on those blinded by the darkness of sins?" One must be crass indeed not to see that such a question would apply with infinitely more aptness to mental darkness of souls right here on earth than to absence of sunlight in underground grottoes.

In dissertating on the story in the Gospel of Nicodemus MacCulloch says that Christ’s advent in Hades is a reduplication of his first coming on earth. Even this hint fails to enlighten closed minds. He commends the author of this "apocryphon" for cleverness in the use of literary artifice in a highly imaginative construction, crediting him with mastership of true dramatic power. He speculates as to how the book’s author gained knowledge of events in Hades. One would have to wonder about this. But no wonderment need have been felt had it been known that the spiritual poets of olden time gained knowledge of

Hades simply by observing the world under their eye, since this world is that Hades. MacCulloch even asserts that this author presents the descensus story in such concise and integrated form as to make it a treatise on the philosophy of history, with the Christ as the central figure, making the history understandable as the demonstration of Christian theological structure. But where would philosophy have a history, on earth or in Hades? Certainly not in Hades if that realm is somewhere below the earth. But it could have its history in both earth and Hades if they are the same one place. MacCulloch calls the author of the Gospel a writer of fiction, and says that he concocted his story out of the floating traditional material and the Bible to produce an original narrative, one, he asserts, that must have greatly influenced contemporary and later writers.

In expounding the doctrine of baptism as a part of Christ’s preaching and ministration in Hades, it is repeatedly affirmed that he not only baptized on earth, but did also in Hades. It is probably scurrilous to reflect that if he did much baptizing in the three days in Hades, he would have had little time left for preaching, and again vice versa. Also one might wonder where he would procure water for this rite in hell, where Christian ideology insists that the heat is a thousand times hotter than any on earth. Allegory can make folly of its literal counterpart indeed, and fools of its literal interpreters.

Also in the Gospel of Nicodemus a bit of symbolism is introduced that again has gone all unredeemed to intelligence. The light that Jesus’ advent shed through all Hades is said to have shone at midnight. In the New Testament allegory of the five wise and the five foolish virgins the cry announcing the bridegroom’s appearance arose "at midnight." Even the birth of Christ has been in hymn, carol and legend put at midnight. The sense back of this lurks in the natural poetry that symboled the period of soul’s immersion in the water of bodily life, or its "burial" in the earthy body (the first man is of the earth, earthy, says St. Paul) as its night time or its winter time. These are both times of darkness and therefore emblemize the period of the soul’s occlusion under the cover of the flesh. "When half spent was the night" is the poetic dating of the birth of the Christmas rose in old English caroling. It also happens that in the entire round of the soul’s cycle of incarnation and resurrection at the cycle’s end, the Christ nature comes to its birth in the middle of the lower arc of the round, or at midnight of the evolutionary day-night.

It is most interesting to note the play on the mind of an orthodox scholar like MacCulloch of the persuasions and biases engendered by conventional Christian indoctrination. He several times touches upon aspects of the Pagan esoteric philosophy, which in general furnished the true source and background of the many garbled, literalized and distorted Christian versions and variants of these representations. In the end, with the real lost light and the gold of truth right under his eye, he invariably rejects this stone which could be the head of the theological corner of the temple of religion discarding it as Pagan heresy. He says (p. 276) that the Jews of Alexandria, doubtless influenced by Greek views, believed that souls liberated from the bondage of the earthly body, went directly to a higher sphere which might be named "heaven." Souls at death had no need to go down to Hades, for they had been there all life long, and it was, on the contrary, the place from which they were liberated by the good evolutionary offices of death. They needed not to descend to some lower limbo as an intermediate place of waiting, as it was in body on earth that they had been waiting for release. All common religious sentiment in the world testifies to this conviction as being the natural view our minds must take. And by comparison with this innate and wholesome reaction of souls to the life

they consciously experienced here it becomes glaringly evident how corrupted, how weird and grotesque were the guessings and maunderings of the Christian misconceptions even down to the modern day.

Finally our author, MacCulloch, comes to grips with the question whether the idea, so prevalent in the early Christian literature, of the rescue of souls from Hades had its origin in the Pagan mythologies. He decides that it is not easy to find close parallels. A difficulty in the way of matching the Christian renditions with the myths, he reasons, is that in the latter it is only one character, as Eurydice, Alcestis, Tammuz or other, who is rescued and restored to the upper world, whereas in the Christly rescue mission all souls bound in the underworld - or at least all righteous ones - are liberated. This is a feeble, in fact a ridiculous, argument because in a myth the modus of writing makes one character representative and typical of a group, class or collective multiplicity. If the orthodox mind was open to the truth of the matter, the fact would be clearly discerned that their own Biblical Son of God is such a typal figure, one man in the allegory, but the type-figure of the sons of God collectively.

Secondly, he asserts that the descent of Pagan heroes is made by a living hero of the myth, and not by the soul of a human person deceased. This point can be dismissed as equally irrelevant and empty. Since when are we to think that a mythical hero is to be taken as a really living person? The very soul of a myth is its freedom to create both characters and incidents entirely mythical, yet typical of reality. Its hero is understood to be no living person. A living human could not be the hero of a myth, for the simple reason that he would not be mythical. If in the myth Orpheus goes down to rescue Eurydice, the sense intended is the very thing that MacCulloch asserts it fails to mean (and that he claims the Christian versions do mean), namely, that souls do descend to Hades, known, however, to the mythicists to be this world. The Pagan wise men did not take their myths literally; it is the Christians who have fallen into this trap.

MacCulloch contends that contemporary Judaism embodied no legends or doctrines of a Messiah who would preach to the dead, nor does it reveal any evidence of influence from the myth of Ishtar. Can it be possible that this modern writer has never suspected that the Esther and Mordecai characters in the Old Testament are actually Jewish modifications of the Babylonian goddess Ishtar (Astarte, Ashtaroth) and her consort Marduk? And is he oblivious of the fact that Solomon himself built a temple to Astarte, as well as his great edifice to Jehovah? Even without these two glaring rebuttals of his opinions, it is wholly unreasonable to suppose that the religion of any nation in ancient days could have developed in isolation from the influences of the universal Pagan religious modes and the literary media of the time. He several times rebuts the theory of "borrowing." To suggest that it is unlikely that the Jews borrowed Pagan ideas from Egypt, Chaldea, Greece is somewhat on a par with protesting that Californians did not borrow their use of the English language from Pennsylvanians. As California and Pennsylvania alike shared with all the other states a common heritage of English speech, so Jews, Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians and the other lands in that section of the world shared distributively the great heritage of a primeval revelation of truth and wisdom, which, it must be said in truth, Christianity appropriated and badly mangled. One nation or another in time twisted it out of its primal true sense, distorting it by dull incomprehension into fantastic untruth. And because the resultant deposits in different nations in the end failed to carry much of the original identity, a presumably learned scholar feels he stands on sure ground in concluding that some one religious group, hugging to its bosom its own distorted version, did

not "borrow" its system from any of its neighbors. Of course it did not borrow it; it merely clung to its own corrupted rendition, as its neighbors did to theirs, with perhaps slight accommodations resulting from association and interchange. But any astute mind, fortified now with the recovered lost keys to a universal esoteric-symbolic code of allegorism, can, with the display of a modicum of semantic or analogical genius, still reconstruct the dismantled bridges between all of the national systems of ancient religion, and reintegrate their original unity and continuity. For the scholarship of many dark centuries to have lost the primary recondite base of the ancient drama, that this earth is that dark gloomy underworld of "Egyptian bondage", and the human body that tome of "Death" into which the Christ-soul of divinity descended to "lose" its life that it might win it back more abundantly, at the same time raising on the cross of matter the serpent power of the natural energies to the next level of consciousness above them, has been in all conscience the most tragic of all errors in the area of man’s religious history.

THE GNOSTIC POSITION

MacCulloch does say that spontaneously in the order of human thought there arises the certitude of soul’s salvation from the doom of existence in a dark underworld. Instinctively, too, the human mind revolts against the inevitability of the conquest of life by a death that means extinction. He follows this admission by declaring that therefore the presence of the doctrine of deliverance from the underworld in Christianity need not be traced back to antecedent alien origins. But why insist on the isolation of either the Jews or the Christians from their natural and inevitable participation in the great universal religious heritage of their times? A sounder scholarship should now come forth, competent to demonstrate how the ideas shared by many nations do trace back to a common ancestry.

The odd excrescence from literalism in Christian doctrinal history known as Chiliasm should find mention here. The name is from the Greek word for "thousand", chilia, and designates the belief of Christians, based on the Biblical text, which says that Christ’s kingdom shall supervene on earth for a thousand years of halcyon blessedness. When this age of serenity comes on earth, it is expected that the dead saints will arise from their graves, or emerge from Hades, to exult in final release and exaltation to heaven.

The exigencies arising in the effort to harmonize the literal sense of many texts with canonized doctrinism bring up a point of much logical difficulty in connection with what is stated in Matt. 27:51-53. There it is set forth that the earthquake which occurred at Jesus’ death rocked open the tombs of the dead, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep arose and, emerging from their tombs after his resurrection, entered into the holy city and appeared to many. One must wonder what happened in the opened graves in the three days between Jesus’ death and his resurrection. One writer, Pfleiderer, thinks it irreverent to suggest that the reawakened dead should have resurrected two or three days ahead of their Lord. They would from courtesy to their master have had to be held in some suspended status until Easter morn.

How the difficult matter of the physical rehabilitation of those saints so long dead and certainly in a state of corruption was managed is intimated in a text from The Odes of Solomon (22): "Those who believed in Him God’s hand

chose from the graves, separated them from the dead, took dead bones and clad them with bodies." Ephrem Syrus thinks that the graves were shattered by Christ’s voice as it reverberated through Sheol (the Hebrew Hades), releasing the dead saints. This definitely puts the saints in hell. In popular creedology, this is an ill fate for sainthood.

Clement and some other writers appear to hold saner ground when they say that the risen dead appear not in earthly Jerusalem (the holy city), but in the heavenly Jerusalem." Jerome, Eusebius, Chrysostom, Epiphanius and Rufinus agree. They stand with St. Paul, who speaks of the "Jerusalem which is above" as being free. St. Ambrose solves complications by saying that of the resurrected dead some were led to heaven in spiritual bodies, while others rose in their physical bodies.

Bartholomew, ventures the suggestion that Jesus vanished from the cross during the darkness, descended to Hades, released the captives and returned to the cross. The apostle says that he saw him return, saw the dead arising to worship him, then returned into their sepulchres. In The Ascension of Isaiah the righteous dead are already found in the seventh heaven.

Giving a passing glance at a tradition that souls had been raised bodily from death, MacCulloch says that this was credited by some theologians, but that many treated it as allegory. Yet he must express the thought that to render these accounts in a mythical way is to register a gross miscomprehension of the real meaning!

And what is to be done with the predicament which so impiously disenchants the glamors of "miracle" belief, implicit in the question whether those who were resurrected to physical life died again later - or still live on. Of what good is a resurrection in physical body if one is to die shortly again?

In his chapter 18, MacCulloch examines the "Gnostic version" of the descent doctrine, as expressed in a "famous" Hymn of the Pearl in the Syriac version of The Acts of Thomas. Some have regarded this as a Gnostic allegory, with "Jesus" as the human soul descending from heaven to this gloomy world, vestured there with material and quasi-material bodies (coats of skin) and having through trial and suffering to regain his lost Paradise above. Our author even suggests that this has a certain attractiveness, but argues that if the precious Pearl is the Gnosis, or divine knowledge, why should it have fallen under the power of the serpent? What other answer is needed for this than the plain reminder that God sent his own Son (collectively Sons) out into the desert of this world to tread down the serpents and scorpions of man’s lower nature, a task which necessitated the seed implantation of the divine units in and under the life of the body and its elemental forces, the lower nature being typified as the serpent. Why did God permit his most righteous servant, Job, another type-figure of our divine nature, to be tortured by the lower powers? A philosophy is deficient that does not have a rational answer to the basic question, why man is in this dark underworld at all? The esoteric philosophy has answered this and the other fundamental questions, but Christianity has discarded and lost them. MacCulloch decides that the early Christian movement had harbored some reasonable elements of the otherwise insupportable Gnostic theology. Gnosticism, he affirms, carries some taint of Pagan ideology, while on the other side it has some orthodox Christian affinities. But when one speaks of the possibility of Gnosticism borrowing from Christianity, it is somewhat like saying that a father derives some salient characteristics from his son. If borrowing was done here, it would have had to be done by Christ-

ianity from the earlier Gnosticism.

MacCulloch refutes the contention of Bousset that the legend of Christ’s descent to Hades and breaking the hold of the underworld demons on the dead was the essence of a myth which had really nothing to do with the Gospel Christ, or Jesus. He backs this strong assertion by the statement that the Christians had the narrative of the descent in their own Scriptures and did not need to borrow it from outside Pagan sources. But does he ask us to believe that those "Christian Scriptures" themselves owed not a thing to antecedent Pagan springs? This assumption has been refuted - and the present discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls accentuates this truth - by scholarship generally. Bousset doubtless based his assertion on a consideration of this and other obvious data.

MacCulloch concludes that Gnosticism and its view of the descent story stood somewhere between Pagan mythology and Catholic Christianity. But its version lent strong testimony to the prevalence of the Christ-descent in the early Christian world. No one denies this. Only it is clear from wide study that the descent doctrine was more Pagan and Gnostic than Christian, as being much earlier. He then makes the fatal blunder of saying that the Gnostics took the theme from Christianity - a most unlikely thing - and converted it from the descent of Christ from earth to the Hades somewhere below into his descent from heaven to our earth. But this exactly reverses the direction of the actual historical conversion of the legend, for it was the Christians who took the original Gnostic-Pagan form of the story and transformed it into the literal-historical-personal descent of Jesus to some nether world beneath this earth. He asserts that the alleged Gnostic transmogrification of the story shows poverty of conception. The intellectual impecuniousness is, however, all on the Christian side.

Our scholar is bold enough to venture the statement that the Gnostics showed no theological concern about what happened to those living antecedent to the time of Christianity, which brought the first chance at salvation to humanity somewhere around 24 to 26 A.D. (the date of Christ’s birth and life now having been moved back by Catholic authority some five years). He thus insinuates that the Gnostics were less humanely responsive to the need to provide a way by which the world inhabitants since the advent of Christ might assuage their pity for the uncounted billions of souls lost in heathen darkness by having lived too soon, than were the Catholics, who, he declares, at least contrived a theological formula which made their ultimate salvation a possibility. But does this author not see that in the infinitely profounder Gnostic postulation of recurrent lives for souls on earth, no souls would have been left in the position of deprivation of endless opportunity to win all that life can offer its children? It was not Gnosticism or Paganism, but Christianity, that robbed the souls of antecedent humanity of their chance at salvation. Pagan philosophy had opened out the road to salvation for all mankind; it was Christianity that threw up on this highway to divinity the roadblock of no divinity to save humanity until 26 A.D.

In his final chapter MacCulloch climaxes his argument that the descent doctrine could trace no derivation from Pagan sources. He discounts heavily what he calls the passion with many writers to trace Christian formulations, doctrines, rites to Pagan myths. He accuses such writers of not being competent to make authentic comparison between Pagan and Christian data. This is to say that these writers "see" resemblances, correspondences, identities where none really exists. The shoe that this accusation fits is again on the other foot; it is the Christian comparative religionists who so consistently fail to see the endless similarities and identities that most assuredly do exist between

these two bodies of literary expression. If the scholars he is accusing see too much parallelism that is not there, the orthodox Christian party stands blind to the parallelism that is there to be seen by any who will look, - with unprejudiced vision. The similarities are not too easily caught by shallow reading, but their number and their significance increase as study probes deeper and deeper. Such profounder study is now veering to the verdict that Christianity drew practically everything it published to the world from antecedent Pagan sources. The blindness of Christian insight or disingenuousness of motive in ignoring or blanketing this immense testimony of comparative religion - along with comparative mythology - is coming to be seen as one of the most inexcusable, if not fully reprehensible of recalcitrant bigotry that cultural history records.

Then our author leaves us breathless with astonishment commingled with puzzlement when he declares that this class of writers have never seemed to consider that after all those Pagan myths may actually depict living truths. And, he speculates, what if the conceptions dramatized in the myths may have been really fulfilled in factual Christian history. With this one sudden volte face MacCulloch vindicates the very position of those whose stand he is attempting to refute. What an argument! What a wild flourish of logic! The Pagan myths represented a deific power as coming to save unregenerate humanity; Christianity declares that in Jesus this divine salvation did come, fulfilling all antecedent prophecy. Therefore, argues our debater, Paganism could indulge only in baseless mythology, whereas Christianity supplied, or at least built on, the living reality that became history in the person of Jesus. But does MacCulloch not see that, instead of disparaging, discrediting the myth, the Christian claims for Jesus actually vindicate the inner connotations of the myths? The very message that is sealed cryptically in the myths is just about what the Christians say has been fulfilled in its theses based on the Gospel narrative of the Jesus life. The difference is that the myths never presumed on the fulfillment of their structures of meaning in one given set of historical events such as those which the Gospels allegedly narrate, while Christian systematism builds on that very assumption. The myths outlined and dramatized the pattern and meaning of the historical process; Christianity alleged that the Gospel events fulfilled that pattern once for all time. If it is true, as more scholars are coming to think, that the Gospels are spiritual allegories, Mystery dramas, and in this sense non-historical, it suddenly becomes permissible to say that the Gospels, the foundation of all Christian historicity, are themselves true only as myths, and not true as history. So it comes out that if Pagan mythical formulations may have had their pattern of meaning fulfilled, as MacCulloch ventures to surmise, than all the endless narrow slighting and scurrilous disparagement that Christian writers have cast on Paganism, mythicism, Gnosticism and related systems of the esoteric presentation of truth has been an egregious miscarriage of intelligence and human brotherhood alike.

THE TRUTH OF MYTHOLOGY

The nub of this whole debate is the failure of modern scholarship to comprehend in full truth the nature and function of the myth. Through stolid inertia of mind and the process of insensible shifts of conception that in time twist the primal sense of words over into some secondary or subordinate aspect of relevance, the modern mind has come to read into this word "myth" the meaning of untruth, something imaginatively conceived, fantastic, bearing no relation

to reality. By myth a modern writer now means a story that is not true.

This meaning falls so far out of line with the true original connotation that it now stands as the exact opposite of the primal significance. The ancient myth was the truest of all stories. It always carried more truth than history. Modernity worships the barren record of objective history and derogates the myth; the sagacity of the ancient day worshipped the myth and derogated, in fact virtually ignored, the objective history. Being admittedly imaginative and fictional in outward form and content, it made no pretence to factual objectivity. The story, with actors, characters and incidents, never happened as narrated. And nobody was supposed to be so naïve, so stupid as to "believe" it. But into the story the genius of dramatism inwove the design of conceptual structure, the pattern of a truth, the plot of an ideogram, concocting situations that gave the mind a veritable picture of some aspect of truth that history in the large was telling or was destined to unroll. The myth wrapped up in a fiction the meaning, the structure of history that was, is and is to be. It was a brilliantly ingenious methodology of presenting in the frame of a human story the idea-forms which, as Plato shows us, were the grand bases of speculative philosophy in his day, as also in old Egypt, and which he demonstrated to be the thought-forms over the pattern of which the creative Mind of the Logos framed the universe. So the myth, it might be said, was a cosmic ideograph in fictional disguise. Apollo really did not let his son Phaeton drive the chariot of the sun across the sky and scorch the earth; but the conceptual structure dramatized by the story is a truth of vital import. Theseus did not penetrate Minos’ labyrinth, slay the great bull and follow Ariadne’s thread to find his way out. But, at the level of intellectual insight the story tells the great truth that man’s soul must enter an underworld full of devious intricacies, find and slay the fierce and doughty animal nature and by the thin light of a divine intuition make his way back to the light of an upper world. The day in which modern superciliousness bred by the presumption of superior knowledge can belittle and deride the majestic structures of classical mythology is fortunately close to its evening dusk. When we catch enough of the spirit of the ancient mythicists to begin to interpret aright the myths and release the glowing intelligence hidden in those recondite constructions, the world may at last emerge from its "Dark Ages" of religious superstition.

When MacCulloch, therefore, contends, as he persists in doing in face of a mountain of research data establishing the contrary thesis, that the descent narrative in early Christian literature is to be accounted for without admitting any derivation from prior Pagan mythology, he is both defying evidence and merely venting the force of an inveterate Christian or modernistic prejudice which has steadily dominated Christian scholarship over the centuries and still obsesses Christian psychology. The theme of the hero descending and freeing souls bound in an underworld limbo comes close to being the central and pivotal feature of ancient religious philosophy. The evidence back of this statement is voluminous and clear. But it has to be examined to be known. No doubt it has all seemed to Christian mentality so bizarre, so childishly grotesque, so unrelated to reality as to be dismissed with contempt. But this is because the Christian mind has been conditioned that all Pagan religion, with all its literature that ran so strongly to mythicism, was nothing better than puerile naïveté of mind, the wild conceptions of child-minded primitive peoples. The myths were condemned as fantastic nonsense and this attitude occluded the possibility of discerning their meaning and their importance.

Finally, that the descent tradition, couched in the language and forms of

mythology, was a structure that carried the meaning of not one single man’s descent from the cross of this earth life down into some nameless limbo called Hades, hell, Amenta, Sheol, Tophet, but the descent of hosts of divine soul units, sent out from heaven to be the child-deity that is cradled through infancy, roused or resurrected in his youth to conscious functioning of his divine genius and finally grown to the fulness of the stature of the nature of Christhood within the temple of every mortal’s heart and mind, is as clear to capable scholarship as any such abstrusity can be. It happens to be irrefutably, incontrovertibly true.

MacCulloch assumes to conclude his case with the statement that the Christian movement did not pick up the descent tradition from Pagan mythology; they could and presumably did devise their own myths. How devastatingly true that statement is our author could hardly have guessed or believed. The ancients devised their great myths, every feature of which betokened some facet of sublime truth. The Christians, in the form of their weird misinterpretation of these creations, or out of their own misguided conceptual efforts, also devised the "myths" that, parading in the false disguise of truth, have derationalized and enslaved the Western mind. The tragic word that has to be spoken in the summary of this theme is that these concretions of the Christian mind that constitute Christian theology are myths in the bad modern sense, things fantastically untrue. It has to be said that they do not dramatize truth, but wildly caricature it. The true myth has two aspects, literal falsity (that deceives nobody) and inner subjective truth. Paganism kept the two phases entirely distinct; but Christianity confused the two, mistaking the outer falsity for truth. Therefore its presentation of these ancient formulations has been untrue and harmfully deceptive. The affirmation of their literal-historical truth, which at once becomes untruth, practically kills the power of their inward verity. By obsessing the believer’s consciousness with such a story, for instance, as that of the bodily crucifixion of one man on a wooden cross, and offering this as the Creator’s device for the salvation of his earthly children, the Christian system of pious faith has so enfeebled the message of man’s true spiritual regeneration as to have reduced it almost to a moral and intellectual nullity. In persuading the West’s millions for centuries that thrice dousing the head with water, along with the recital of the names of the triune deity, will insure the individual’s sanctification in perpetuity, the Church of Christ again robs the devotee of the dynamic knowledge that the immersion of the unit of his soul power in the water of the body will give it the experience required to consummate a truly deific beatification. And by the inculcation in generation after generation of the belief that in partaking of the bread and wine in the physical celebration of the Eucharist, the member partakes magically of the actual body and blood of the man of Galilee, the psychological forces that might enrich the spirit are dissipated out in an empty fancy. Without exception every doctrine of this folly-ridden system has thus been distorted from truth and illuminating power into palsying falsity of alleged history.

Almost every traditional faith of peoples the world over rests on a central story of the son of a heavenly King going down into a dark lower world, there suffering, dying and rising again and returning to its native upper world. The failure of Christian intelligence to see that their basic theology is just a gross stolid literalization, and then the conjured historization of this universal legend in the hypostatized biography of just one of the many dramatic type-figures, who was no more a living man than some thirty to fifty others similarly delineated - and all antecedent to him in time - must be seen ere long in its true light, as the most colossal demonstration of intellectual ineptitude in all history. As has had so often to be said in the treatment of this chapter of religious development, it has held the mind of Western humanity

under the spell of a hallucination that has strewn the path of Occidental history with the sad wreckage of life and happiness. It is by no means an overstretching of the truth to assert that it has hypnotized the Western mentality.

It can almost certainly be said, and with truth, that no religion in the world has ever put forth the belief that the demise of the physical body has ended the existence of the soul that animated that body. Likewise no religion has ever taught or conceived - except in the grossest mental depravity - that the decaying cadaver of the deceased human is reassembled after corruption, reintegrated and restored to former physical existence. Therefore the Christian linking of the resurrection doctrine with the death and restoration of their hero’s physical body wrecked the doctrine utterly. The death that was overcome on Easter morn is soul’s "death" and that not of one man’s soul, but the souls of all men that live, which "he" typified.

And finally, that the traditional allegory of the Christ-soul’s descent from heaven into a dark nether region to awaken the hosts of the earth’s former dead could ever have been sanely made relevant to any other locality than our good earth itself, is again the incredible miscarriage of Western intelligence.

When this benighted condition can be ended by the dawn of understanding, when it is known in what we call the scientific manner that every intimation of the allegories has immediate pertinence to our own life in this dark underworld, and that the Scriptures are all sheer poetic dramatization of the deep ignorance we yet struggle through toward the day of our glorious transfiguration into sons of God, then will our sacred Scriptures become once again shining lamps lighting our path up the heights of wondrous being.

Then can the truth and the beauty of the resurrection ritual enlighten our reason and truly sanctify our spiritual minds as we hear the thrilling strains of the Easter choral.

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