When one begins even faintly to gain some sound intellectual comprehension of the deep import of the Easter festival, the challenge to express its message of consummative exaltation for the human spirit must strike the mind with dismay. Marvelous as words are to embody concepts of the mind, they here fail signally to carry to the inner level of consciousness the reality of the experience which the Easter halleluiahs and hosannas are designed to celebrate. It may even be said truly that the meaning of the great festival of the vernal equinox is to be registered not at all in the domain of mental concepts, even when these yield full cognitive understanding, but is to be realized in the sphere of transcendental recognitions that belong more to feeling than to thought.

Yet, even when the experience is allocated to the realm of feeling, it is feeling elevated to the seventh degree above what the word commonly connotes in human psychology. It is a feeling that may be said to overpass the mind and soar into the heaven of mystical ravishment of the soul in supernal delights. Yet it is feeling that is generated by the mind itself, the child of pure cognition, so clear in its insights that they lift the soul into the very ecstasy of lucid discernment of exalted blessedness. Even at its highest peak of realization for mortals at the present human stage the grade and dynamic force of sentiency which the Easter message can adumbrate is only a faint morning glow of the full sun of divine glory which the future evolution of man's consciousness is destined to bring to reality. The best that our minds can give us now of our eventual divinization is only by the faintest analogy seen as a foretaste of rapture that will greet us at the summit of our mount of attainment. The mind can formulate a fairly true and correct construction of the issues and elements combining to bring us to the shining Hill of the Lord, can even see in what fashion the powers of deific unfoldment will open out for us a grander vision of beatitude. Yet this is only an outline, a diagram. The signs and symbols of its overpowering reality of being can not by sheer mental genius be transformed into conscious immediacy of experience until the human shall find himself transfigured by the inner radiance of his own final Easter morn.

In venturing upon the attempt to portray the significance of the Easter event one is moved to repeat as an invocation the lines of Tennyson inspired by his observation of the waves breaking eternally on the ocean strand:

Break, break, break on thy cold gray stones, O sea!

And would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

If language, employing the very remarkable psychic witchery of words, falls short of expressing the wonder of our apotheosization, the one remaining mode of expressing the profundity and the majesty of our uplift is song. The best that mortals can do, standing thus in prospect of their destined home of glory, is to throw all the unction of their mind and soul into rapturous contemplation of the delights of an imperishable Eden and pour it out in the measures and rhythms of joyous song. Human throats should well nigh burst with strains of praise as human hearts rise in anticipation of that glory which shall be theirs. Surely the least that men can do is to raise to the heavens their anthems, their chorals, their oratorios to hail in annual memorial their divinization to be.

For, be it said at the outset, Easter celebrates an event that is yet to be, not an event that is past. To the inevitable extent that past events lose their cogency for deep impressiveness and become shadowy and unrealized memories, the mighty power of the Easter occasion loses its pungent goad to conscious recognitions in proportion as its celebration is taken to be the commemoration of an event that has long ago happened and passed into history. It will therefore amaze most readers to be shown that no less an authority than St. Paul (in 2 Timothy 2:16-18) emphasizes this very consideration when he warns the brethren: "But shun profane and vain babblings; for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; who, concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some." As, according to all scholarly datings of St. Paul's Epistles, this admonition to Timothy would have been penned near the year 60 A. D., i.e., within two or three decades after the resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem, its reminder to the brethren that the resurrection was a concept of doctrinal import, the reality of which was to be actualized by man in his exaltation yet to be must be received as a message of totally unrealized import for all future Christianity.

EASTER OUR FUTURE GOAL

The great religion of the Western world suffered a fatal loss when from about the third century down to the present the cryptic sense of a purely dramatic representation of man's still unattained burgeoning into godhood on the bright morn of his evolutionary Easter was buried and forgotten under the ignorant misconception of the event as the physical arising of one man's human body from its rocky hillside tomb on a given first Easter dawn. If that is what, under Christian persuasion, we are to believe happened two thousand years ago and that is what we are asked to assume that the great equinoctial memorial celebrates, then the ceremony of halleluiah merely embellishes the memory of an event long gone, whose cosmically heralded universal deification of human life is in fact to be searched for in vain in the record of history since it occurred. Christian history records not a trace of the fulfilment of that human glorification which the epochal event was proclaimed as promising. Every choral in the intervening centuries rang with the exultant cry that "Death is swallowed up in victory. The grave has lost its sting. Man no more shall die. Christ's resurrection gave man his immortality." Yet death has seized every man born since that day and the cemetery graves still hold their dead.

It is as St. Paul has said: the majesty, the beauty and the true exultation that alone can lift the human soul to the heights on every recurring Easter morning inheres in the certain knowledge that the Easter glory is still the goal of our progressive march up the hill of being. Our shining goal still gleams afar in the distant horizon of our vision, an undimmed star of our radiant future.

Easter is the ceremonial that crowns all the other religious festivals of the year with its springtime halo of resurrected life. It is to dramatize the final end in victory of man's long struggle through the inferior kingdoms of matter and bodily incarnation in grades of fleshly existence. Other festivals around the year memorialize the various stages of this slow progress through the recurring round of the cycles of manifestation. Easter commemorates the end in triumph, all lower obstacles overcome, all "enemies" conquered, all darkness of ignorance vanquished, all fruits and the golden harvest of developed powers garnered in the eternal barn of an inner holy of holies of consciousness, all battles won, peace with aeonial victory assured at last.

The fight is o'er, the battle done,

The victory of life is won!

The song of triumph hath begun,--

Halleluiah!

The Greek word for the resurrection is anastasis, the "standing up," "the up-arising." It has little if at all been noted that this anastasis is only by a little prefix distinguished from "ecstasis," our "ecstasy." With ec- (ex) meaning "out," the etymology here brings us face to face with an item of unrecognized moment, that our final dissociation of soul from body at the end of our last incarnation will bring us an experience of ecstasy. Human life, a dour struggle, will be measurably buoyed up in spirit if the peregrinating soul knows that at the long terminal his release will come with rapture beyond thought. If, as much religious philosophy has it, man enters into this world of objective existence in tears, his first utterance a cry, he will be strengthened throughout its long and toilsome way by the assurance that he will make his final exit from his "tomb" of the flesh in transports of Edenic bliss. His "up-standing" is also his "outstanding" from his grave of body. For the sage Greeks used the same term, with but a change of the vowel to mark the distinction, for both the body and the tomb; for body was soma and tomb was sema. In the esoteric philosophy of this knowing race the human body was the living tomb, grave, sepulcher and mummy-case in which the divine soul, in incarnation, lay in "death" until resurrected by the sun of divine light and truth in the springtime turn of the cycle following the winter of sleep. It may be said here that until this sense of the terms "death" and "resurrection" is restored to Biblical interpretation no true envisagement of the purport of the Easter festival is at all possible.

Using solar symbolism and analogues in depicting the divine soul's peregrinations round the cycles of existence, the little sun of radiant spirit in man being the perfect parallel of the sun in the heavens, and exactly copying its movements, the ancient Sages marked the four cardinal "turns" of its progress round the zodiacal year as epochal stages in soul evolution. As all life starts with conception in mind, later to be extruded into physical manifestation, so the soul that is to be the god of a human being is conceived in the divine mind at the station in the zodiac marking the date of June 21. This is at the "top" of the celestial arc, where mind is most completely detached from matter, meditating in all its "purity."

Then the swing of the movement begins to draw it "downward" to give it the satisfaction of its inherent yearning for the Maya of experience which alone can bring its latent capabilities for the evolution of consciousness to manifestation. Descending then from June it reaches on September 21 the point where its direction becomes straight downward and it there crosses the line of separation between spirit and matter, the great Egyptian symbolic line of the "horizon," and becomes incarnated in material body. Conceived in the aura of Infinite Mind in June, it enters the realm of mortal flesh in September. It is born then as the soul of a human; but at first and for a long period it lies like a seed in the ground before germination, inert, unawakened, dormant, in the relative sense of the word, "dead." This is the young god lying in the manger, asleep in his cradle of the body, or as in the Jonah-fish allegory and the story of Jesus in the boat in the storm on the lake, asleep in the "hold" of the "ship" of life, with the tempest of the body's elemental passions raging all about him. He must be awakened, arise, exert himself and use his divine powers to still the storm, for the elements in the end will obey his mighty will.

Once in the body, the soul power is weighed in the scales of the balance, for the line of the border of the sign of Libra, the Scales, runs across the September equinoctial station. For soul is now equilibrated with body and out of this balance come all the manifestations of the powers and faculties of consciousness. It is soul's immersion in body and its equilibration with it that brings consciousness to function.

Then on past September, like any seed sown in the soil, the soul entity sinks its roots deeper and deeper into matter, for at its later stages of growth it must be able to utilize the energy of matter's atomic force to effectuate its ends for its own spiritual aggrandizement. It is itself to be lifted up to heights of cosmic consciousness, but no more than an oak can exalt its majestic form to highest reaches without the dynamic energization received from the earth at its feet can soul rise up above body without drawing forth the strength of body's dynamo of power. Down, down it descends then through the October, November and December path of the sun, until it stands at the nadir of its descent on December 21.

Here it has reached the turning-point, at which the energies that were stored potentially in it in seed form will feel the first touch of quickening power and will begin to stir into activity. At the winter solstice of the cycle the process of involution of spirit into matter comes to a stand-still--just what the solstice means in relation to the sun--and while apparently stationary in its deep lodgment in matter, like moving water locked up in winter's ice, it is slowly making the turn as on a pivot from outward and downward direction to movement first tangential, then more directly upward to its high point in spirit home.

So the winter solstice signalizes the end of "death" and the rebirth of life in a new generation. It therefore was inevitably named as the time of the "birth of the Divine Sun" in man; the Christ-mas, the birthday of the Messianic child of spirit. The incipient resurgence of the new growth, now based on and fructified by roots struck deep in matter, begins at this "turn of the year," as the Old Testament phrases it, and goes on with increasing vigor as, like the lengthening days of late winter, the sun-power of the spiritual light bestirs into activity the latent capabilities of life and consciousness, and the hidden beauty of the spirit breaks through the confining soil of body and stands out in the fulness of its divine expression on the morn of March 21. This brings the soul in a burst of glorious light out of the tomb of fleshly "death," giving it verily its "resurrection from the dead." It then has consummated its cycle's work by bursting through the gates of death and of hell, and marches in triumph upward to become a lord of life in higher spheres of the cosmos. No longer is it to be a denizen of lower worlds, a prisoner chained in body's dungeon pit, a soul nailed on matter's cross. It has conquered mortal decay and rises on wings of ecstasy into the freedom of eternal life. Its trysting with earthly clay is forever ended, as aloft it sweeps like a lark storming heaven's gate, with "hymns of victory" pouring from its exuberant throat. From mortality it has passed the bright portals into immortality. From man it has become god. No more shall it enter the grim underworld of "death."

We've quaffed the soma bright

And are immortal grown;

We've entered into light

And all the gods have known.

Easter, then, is the climactic festival of all the year, since it, signalizes the consummation of all man's life in triumph and bliss transcending present knowing. It is set in the calendar to intimate to the feeble human intellect the wonder of the transfiguration of our earthly life from periodical decay and death into immortal grandeur of being. At his Easter man leaves forever the kingdom of mortality, of his attachment to the elements of the world, and steps across the golden threshold into the Paradise of a conscious bliss that indeed is not too extravagantly poetized as a home of crystal radiance and bright seraphic beatitude sweetened by transporting music.

At the point symbolized by September 21 in his cyclical evolution the divine soul is born into humanity, making its descent from the realms of the Father's kingdom of noumenal being. If, as says Shakespeare of man, "my mind to me a kingdom is," so the Father's brooding mind is the mental kingdom of the universe, that substrate of conscious purpose which permeates, in fact structuralizes, the whole animate creation, as its constituent urge and driving force. It is that energy of the Eternal Will which, as primary Cause, stamps its form and nature upon the movement of all conscious life, first manifesting as unconscious, or subconscious, directive toward the achievement of its ends, then becoming gradually more clearly conscious of its own purpose and effort, as creatural experience aligns developing mind with the Logos of the cosmos.

Unseen as yet by general religion, it was necessary for God's sons, who must start as mortals to gain immortality, to descend into matter and be long subjected to its sluggish dominance. Ignorantly and mistakingly has conventional religion, in its hasty, superficial and erratic interpretation of Biblical material, assumed that this ostracism of his children by God himself to lower worlds remote from the Father's benignant presence, was somehow a sad consequence of the children's wayward errancy and an untoward and disastrous misadventure of primal mankind. The truth envisages no such direful miscarriage of the plans of Eternal Mind. God's mental progeny could well be entrusted to the tutelary custodianship of nature, indeed injected into her maternal womb, since nature was from the first and eternally ensouled by the Father's energic mind power, and all nature's processes exhibited the divine design at work in open manifestation. God could safely consign his youthful offspring to the educative guardianship of the "old nurse," Mother Nature. For as a pedagogue Mother Nature could never misteach her divine pupils, herself being the preceptress, the living examplar and expression of the cosmic mind.

SOUL IN NATURE'S WOMB

At the September point the soul enters what the ancients called its "feminine phase," as it was in its youth and under the care of its maternal, or material, parent. It became the infant prince of a future kingship, being for its tutelage and education in its childhood stage, and, as St. Paul says (4 Galatians), "under tutors and guardians until the time appointed of the Father," at which time it would have developed its capacity for kingly rule of the lower elements of its dominion over man's life. Thus the apostle says that though it is (potentially) Lord of all, it is at this stage in servitude to the elements (or elementals) of the lower worlds until the day of its enthronement. In this bondage to the laws of physis, the powers of matter, which is strictly for its education, it is the unawakened soul in an animal body. As Plato puts it, it is through its body an animal, while through its mind it is a god. It is then what St. Paul distinguishes as the "first" or "natural" man, the man of animal propensities, obeying the lusts of the flesh and the urges of the "carnal mind," these being the instincts of the body in which it is ensconced.

So one might say that at September the soul is born "from above,"--the Bible phrase--into animality; at December it is awakened enough to be born at the next higher stage, humanity; and at Easter in March it is reborn into the still higher kingdom of the immortal gods. If September is the birthday of man the human who is potentially divine, March is the birthday of man as a god. Easter is the birthday of the gods. Says the hoary Book of the Dead, designating the soul by one of its several specific titles, Pepi: "Pepi saileth with Ra to the eastern side of heaven, where the gods are born."

We, as souls, go to our "death" in matter at the equinox; at the winter solstice we cease "dying" to matter and are quickened to incipient renewal of life; at the spring equinox we rise to supernal life in exuberance of blessedness. Only when the soul has traversed this aeonial path round the numberless cycles of existence can it know the full reality of its Easter deification.

By apt and striking symbols the Sages of old sought to impress dull mortal thought with imagery suggestive of new birth. They pointed to the chick pecking its way out of its shell; the snake shedding its old skin and coming forth sleek and shining; the locust bursting out of its old body and winging its way up into the light and air; the beetle emerging out of the earth; the butterfly from the cocoon; the hibernating bear awaking from his sleep in the hollow tree; the emergence of all life from the egg. Hence the egg became the basic symbol of the festival, as the young god breaks finally the shell of his human body to effect his delivery from the flesh and be released into the absolute freedom of the spirit. The rabbit was brought in as concomitant symbol because, like the pomegranate in the vegetable kingdom, its exuberant fecundity made it an apt emblem of the boundless productivity of life. For God's children, under the Biblical designation of Israelites, or children of Israel, were destined to be as numberless as the stars of heaven or the seashore sands.

The Book of the Dead (so called by the German scholar Lepsius) has for its Egyptian title the hieroglyph Pert em Heru, the translation of which is given variously as "The Day of Manifestation," or, more exactly, "The Coming Forth by Day," referring to the emergence of Horus, the Egyptian Christ, from the dark underworld of Amenta into the upper kingdom of light. Light here, as universally in both Scripture and poetry, must be taken in its apt reference to spiritual illumination or the expanded powers of consciousness. Like Jesus, Horus had been overpowered by the darkness of the underworld and Sut its Overlord, which are just the life of nature. In the person of his Father Osiris, he had been crucified, dead and buried. Now in the enchanting wizardry of the spring of a cycle of conscious growth, he had risen from the tomb of bodily "death." He had rent the veil of the temple of his mortal flesh and stood out arrayed in new garments of shining radiance. He had thrown off his grave clothes, the cerements of "death", and walked out of the sepulcher of clay clothed in the imperishable robes of solar light.

The day of resurrection,

Earth tell it out abroad

The Passover of gladness,

The Passover of God.

From death to life eternal,

From earth unto the sky,

Our Christ hath brought us over

With hymns of victory.

But alas, and again alas, the consummative festival that was in its origin and in its deep esoteric conception designed to impress annually, in the thrilling springtime rebirth of earth's vegetation, the recognition of the apocalyptic glorification of humanity at its eventual evolutionary Easter day, and therefore was intended to serve as a potent psychological agency of moving power in the race's own push to divinity, has almost totally missed its high objective, because from about the degenerate third century of the Christian era the dull mind of Western humanity has mistaken the festival's message as having meaning only in reference to the alleged resurrection of one single man in remote history. That which was formulated to bring cogent realization to all men of their ultimate apotheosization in glory has sunk to the dimensions of the anniversary celebration of one single event in past history,--which even St. Paul warns us is not past. All the fervor of majestic significance and all the instigation to nobility of life that were designed to grip all hearts and minds when celebrated under the almost magical mental spur of the vernal transformation of nature, has been run out into the drain and emerged as a mere sentimental celebration of a past event in one man's shadowy life. And when the "celebration" each year is over, the "event" is quickly forgotten, as is similarly and for the same reason the case with Christmas. Never will these two great symbolic festivals exert their truly divine potential for human uplift until, instead of being staged as memorials of past events in the life of a Galilean peasant of two thousand years ago, they are sensed as dramatizing, the one, the incipient "birth" of a Christly consciousness, the other, the ultimate exaltation of that consciousness in the interior life of all humanity. Never were they supposed to be taken as memorials of objective history; they are eternally living memorials of our subjective history, in the past, now and in the future.

The judgment here expressed that the perversion, yea the transmogrification of the meaning of the Scriptural dramas and allegories into ostensible objective history allegedly localized in Judea in the first Christian century (and Old Testament history antecedent to that time) has been courageously endorsed by no less an authority in modern thought than the most eminent psychologist, Carl G. Jung, who sums up the gist of the position here advanced in the following paragraphs:

"The Imitatio Christi will forever have this disadvantage: we worship a man as a divine model, embodying the deepest meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make real the profound meaning present in ourselves.

"If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the other hand, that God is a mighty activity within my own soul, at once I must concern myself with him."

In a later work (Psychology and Alchemy, p. 7) Jung has elaborated this trenchant expression in greater specification. These pronouncements from the great psychologist stand out in modern study as judgments of the most arresting momentousness. They stand as a forthright challenge to the system of Christianity in its ground-claims as the religion wielding the highest moral-spiritual influence in the sphere of psychology. This Imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) embodied the faith's supreme mode of the manifestation of its beneficent power to exalt the life of its votaries. Yet this, its mightiest arm of unction and its sharpest sword of the spirit, Jung asserts is the feeblest of its psychological instruments, a very vacuum indeed where real power should be at work. The Church of Christ is certain that it has fulfilled the highest demand, the ultimate proof of the incontestable efficacy of its code of doctrinal affirmations, when it asserts to the world that in the force of its followers' sincere and consecrated effort to imitate the divine model in Christ Jesus, the man, it has presented the most direct and dynamic power of uplift in all the range of religious ideals. What, it has asked a thousand times, can compare for downright practical efficacy with the earnest effort of good people to imitate the paragon of Christliness, the Christ-man himself? Jung is not unaware of the pregnancy of the question; he surely has canvassed it from all quarters. Yet he reiterates his asseveration that it is this very objective, and all the more decisively because of the very assiduity and conscientiousness of its pursuit, that creates the spiritual vacuum in the inner life of the devotee and defeats the one sole and final aim of any true religion, which is the spiritualization of the individual worshipper in the inner core of his soul's being. Since the psychologist's position is controversial and seems highly paradoxical, it is well to cite the basic statement that he has made.

"I am speaking, therefor, not of the deepest and best understanding of Christianity, but of the superficialities and disastrous misunderstandings that are plain for all to see. The demand made by the Imitatio Christi--that we should follow the ideal and seek to become like it--ought logically to have the result of developing and exalting the inner man. In actual fact, however, the ideal has been turned by superficial and formalistically-minded believers into an external object of worship, and it is precisely this veneration for the object that prevents it from reaching down into the depths of the soul and transforming it into a wholeness in keeping with the ideal. Accordingly the divine mediator stands outside as an image, while meaning remains fragmentary and untouched in the deepest part of him."

The sincere effort to emulate the Son of God, the psychologist affirms, should edify, spiritualize and exalt the individual Christian. But, and not too strangely, he says it does not work out to this result. And it fails to do so precisely in proportion to the intensity of the effort exerted to push the imitative enterprise outward and focus it upon the external historical model. To achieve true efficacy in religious worship, he implies, the intensity of effort must be directed to stirring to life a power resident within. The cause of failure is the outward direction of the devotion. The very act of imitation of an external model turns the edifying force away from its proper objective, the inner man. The worship of an outer god leaves the divinity within untouched, unknown and unawakened. To adore the exterior paragon, by so much leaves unrealized the potential perfectibility of the soul itself.

While it can be contended--and Jung concedes the point--that in sincere emulation of the divine man some at least of his virtue and transforming power must rub off onto the imitator, it is nevertheless an irrefutable deduction that the psychologist here makes from the premises: if the devoted religionist focuses the potency of his psychological consecration upon an external exemplar, he misses the benefaction of developing his own inner deity. In proportion as one exalts and looks to the imaged perfection without, he lets his own soul lie fallow. It is not a distant historical Christ's soul that he needs to exalt; it is his own that cries for attention, recognition and adoration. Like the knight who roamed afar to find the Holy Grail, he will return from his quest to uplift the historical Jesus, only to discover the real Christ pleading for his devotion deep down in his own soul.

IF CHRIST BE NOT RISEN . . . .

A thousand times has Christianity proclaimed that if the Christ-man, Jesus of Nazareth, has not consummated his conquest of physical death, and returned to physical life following bodily decease, "then is our faith vain." We have cited the very man--Paul--who promulgated this crucial averment, as himself saying that the resurrection is certainly not a past event. How precarious the whole edifice of the Christian faith is can be envisaged if we look also at the fact that for some of the most learned, conscientious and eminent theologians of the faith the veracity of the Gospel's account of the resurrection of Jesus has come to stand in the gravest possible doubt. We face here the staggering recognition of the collapse of this central arch of the whole Christian structure, as it is undermined by the conclusions of leading Church spokesmen and scholars, to the effect that it is questionable whether the Gospel Jesus character was really a man of flesh. One of the most capable, conscientious and eminent of exegetists in the Christian camp, Johannes Weiss, goes so far as to say that nobody really believes that the deceased body of Jesus was reanimated, arose, cast off its burial wrappings and walked out of its sealed hillside tomb on that "first" Easter morn two thousand years ago. For its amazing frankness and its devastating implications his statement is quite worth citation (The History of Primitive Christianity):

"But for ourselves we must admit that we can no longer think in such terms. To be exact, the majority of Christians at the present time do not really believe in a resurrection of the flesh on the last day."

And hence they do not believe it happened in the case of Jesus in year 33 A.D.

Weiss, whom many rate as the greatest of modern theological critics and exegetists, indeed cuts through the restraints of orthodox caution and boldly asserts that--referring to Jesus--

"Not only did he not 'rise again' in the real sense, i.e. to take up his earthly life once more, nor did this take place either 'on the third day' or 'after three days.' Where did it [the three-day period] originate? Since everything took place according to the Scriptures, as St. Paul says, it is to the Scriptures that we must turn."

And he then cites the verses in Hosea 6:I ff, as the origin of the tradition. The second verse runs: "After two days will he revive us; in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight." Even with this (and other similar verses in Old Testament "prophecy") as legendary background of claimed divine forecast of the Christian dispensation in history, one must ask by what justification the literary fulfillers of prophecy twisted the divine promise of a resurrection clearly stated to be the happy destiny of all of "us," into the objectivized history of one single human. Debate may rage until doomsday, but there is only one answer to this challenge, the only one that will measure up to the demands of truth: a background of spiritual tradition, which clearly dramatized the apotheosization of all humanity, was by ignorant men converted into the quasi-history of the life of a hero of ancient ritual, who himself was but a type-figure of our inchoate divinity in its full flower.

In other works we have incontestably shown that so-called Bible "prophecy" is not permissibly taken as prophecy in the sense of foretelling future objective event. The word itself is composed of pro, the prefix meaning "forth," and the phe stem of the Greek word phemi, meaning "to speak." the word therefore simply carries the signification of "speaking forth," "uttering," in fact "preaching." There is evidence to show that it did not originally in Scriptural literature carry the connotation of predicting future events, at any rate not events of objective history. Of course, in the broad sense of viewing the course of human history and the evolution of man in the large, the Scriptures teem with forecasts of the "coming of Messiah." It was almost the dominant theme of ancient religious literature. In fact the passages giving the promise of inspired writing to this effect are just those portions of Scripture that have erroneously been taken to refer to the objective event of a divine child's birth on a given day and in a given locale. It is the old story of mistaking exalted allegory for literal history.

The author of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament is in the book's very title called "The Preacher." In ancient Egyptian religious books which dramatized the forms and stages of the divinization of man, there was a character always called "The Speaker." He it was who played the part of the Christ-soul in the representations and in this exalted capacity uttered or pronounced the divine "sermon" preached on the "mount of earth," meaning here in our world. He spoke the words of the Christos in his sermon to the men of earth. The "Sermon on the Mount" is just the preachment of the heavenly soul in our nature to the human counterpart.

As showing the auspicious drift of modern exegetists toward a sane and rational reading of the Scriptures, what Weiss adds on the resurrection is much too valuable to be skipped. Referring again to Jesus, and citing the disposition of the orthodox to think that his resurrection must be differentiated from what ours is to be, and thus warranting a treatment on different and special grounds, he says:

"Had we no other evidence of his victory over death than that of our own departed, the whole thing would fall into uncertainty. This objection really touches the essential point. If his immortality is no different from ours, it can scarcely be used any longer as proof of our hope for the life to come."

This view, continues the theologian, flunks the hope and faith of steadfast believers, who therefore cling tenaciously to the old view that the Gospel narratives still provide adequate grounds for their indoctrinated belief that Jesus was physically restored to life. But the exegetist goes on:

"Unfortunately it is to be feared that this support will never again appear as firm and immovable as it did to our forefathers. In some form or other, even among the most ardent believers, doubt has begun to undermine the narrative of the Gospels. And when we are admonished that we must 'believe' these narratives, the admonition lacks sense and meaning today. The word 'believe' is misused in such a connection. It is simply misapplied to a fact in the past. [How amazingly this statement corroborates St. Paul's asseveration that the resurrection is not to be considered a past event!] Either a fact is established beyond all doubt--in which case there is no need to 'believe' it; or else it is uncertain--in which case to believe it, that is, to suppress and silence doubt, would be dishonorable . . . Alas, how easily the structure may collapse and how frail it really is, even for many who think they hold the true faith. Our belief in life to come, [which is not, however, the specific Christian doctrine of the resurrection] if it is to have permanence, must have other foundation than some narrative of events full of contradictions and impossibilities. But even were the Gospel narratives far less contradictory and far more reliable than they are, our faith could not be based on such a foundation. For in so serious a question as this, one can decide and believe only on the basis of his own experience and conviction, not upon that of the strange and--as far as we are concerned--unexaminable experience of others long ago."

What the learned German scholar is courageously expressing in all his critique of the resurrection doctrine is the conviction, to which his penetrating discernment forced him, that the Gospel narrative of the Easter mystery is strictly not narrative at all in the sense of literary record of outward physical event, but is dramatic or poetic figurism of the consummative exaltation which all humanity is destined to achieve at the cycle's end. The Christ's ritualistic arising out of "death" is literary type-graph of our aeonial Easter beatification. That and nothing more. But--let it be said here--not just that in the slighting sense of only that. We must think of that as the ineffable transporting deification of our mortal existence. And when it is finally seen in all the majesty and splendor of its true significance as portraying the climactic attainment of all human experience, as the lifting of lowly mortal life "from earth unto the sky," it will be sensed at last that in this meaning the drama of the resurrection immeasurably outshines in mystic beauty and dynamic motivation to nobility of life any sentiment or inspiration that can be generated by the alleged "miracle" of Jesus' physical resurrection. This will still be obdurately denied, no doubt. But its truth must be recognized if the general mind is to be liberated from groundless religious hypnotizations, no matter how firmly pietistic inculcation has fixed them in the subconscious.

The effort to confirm the position that the true original significance of the Easter memorial can not be made to derive from a literal or physical interpretation of the resurrection "event" has carried the essay afield from the main elucidation of the essential meaning of Easter. But it was imperative that it be shown conclusively how the import of the observance has deplorably miscarried into a melange of false beliefs. It can be stated concisely that the whole devastating debacle of sense and truth ensued from the egregious blunder--always imminent when esoteric truths are given openly to the uninitiated masses--in reading the substance of the Mystery plays, the spiritual allegories, myths and other dramatizations of lofty truth conceptions, as the objectified and historicized experience of one man, the central Christ figure. After nineteen centuries of obscuration this catastrophic imbecility now emerges in clear light.

The resurrection had not come. But the human mind needed the psychological spur and goad, or the allure of an enchanting vision of its high calling in the perfection of its Christly nature, to inspire it to the life of righteousness that alone would consummate it. Hence the death and resurrection drama was formulated--and not by any means solely in Christian circles, but universally in the world of old--to typify in beautiful imagery, in story and in the dynamic magic of the histrionic art, the glory of the experience awaiting all humans on their morn of deification. It was to impress on all minds, in forms of moving beauty and power, the "death" and resurrection of that divine unit of soul essence which for our physical life here had enwombed itself in the "grave" or "tomb" of flesh. Mortals were to be kept in memory of the cardinal truth that the body, though itself subject to decay, gives birth to the soul's innate potentialities, as was represented in the Samson allegory of the bees (always typical of the soul) building a nest of honey in the decaying carcass of the slain lion.

But this incarnational "death" of soul in body became horribly distorted into the physical death of Jesus' quivering flesh on a wooden cross. The wood of the alleged cross on Golgotha stands as quite an apt symbol of the woodenness of the crass misinterpretation of the Fundamentalists. Likewise another beautiful poetic symbol, the three hours of darkness over the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour, i.e., figuratively from the aeonial Christmas birth to Easter resurrection (the three dark months of winter), has generated in the minds of misled "believers" the actual darkness of the Western theological understanding. This darkness has brought, not three hours, but many centuries of what the historians have been constrained to dub the "Dark Ages" of Christian Europe. The Biblical prophecy that "darkness shall cover the earth and gross darkness the people has been all too realistically and tragically fulfilled, at least for the Western world, by this staggering miscarriage of recondite symbolism into implausible and impossible "history."

For that which "died" on the cross of matter was no single individual man, but the divine nucleus of soul apportioned out among all men. It was sent forth by the heavenly Father to be the spiritual grain of wheat planted in the ground of human flesh, therein to lie long in inertness and "death," until resurrected by the rebirth of its dormant powers in the springtime turn of the cycle. And this distortion of the message of the Good Friday and the Easter rituals into the commemoration of the crucifixion and resuscitation of one human body has destroyed--as Jung so forthrightly insists--the enlightening and impelling power of the dramatized reality.