The Lost Keys to the Scriptures
Part 1
by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, PH.D.
For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. -St. Paul.
The likelihood of a favorable acceptance of the astounding revelation to be made in this essay will be considerably heightened if the epochal disclosure is preceded by sufficient prefatory exegesis to present it in its proper "frame of reference." So incredible is the true esoteric elucidation of the lost meaning of the Scriptures of Christianity that the immediate reaction will generate the demand to know what historical circumstances or developments could have led in the first place to so fateful a loss of vital knowledge once possessed. It will therefore be judicious to begin the exposition by presenting certain items of the historical background as necessary and highly enlightening introductory matter.
This explanatory material must begin with the broad blunt statement that what is commonly believed about the Bible as a book, its date, authorship and "inspiration," is all quite erroneous. Let us be explicit in this: the solid bulk of common belief about this book is totally untrue! There is scarcely a single item of the common man's presuppositions about the Christian Scriptures,--who wrote its books, when it was written, how the composition was "dictated" or "inspired," what its message really means, in what language it was written, what is its assumed historical reference, how and why these particular books were selected out of hundreds to become "the Bible," and other subsidiary questions by the score--that comes within the proverbial mile of the actual truth concerning this mysterious document that for centuries has held the minds of millions under the prodigious obsession of its inviolable sanctity. The grim and sober truth must now be stated, that all general ideas about this volume, disseminated among the masses by the priests of the religions and never corrected by them, are totally, grossly, tragically false to fact.
If this drastic assertion seems to upset the whole apple-cart of conventional ideas on the subject of Bible authorship, the reader will need to brace himself to absorb the next shocking declaration, which undoubtedly will shatter all preconceived notions of the general mind. This jarring blow comes in the blunt statement that, in the common and accepted meaning of the words, the Bible books were never "written" at all! This, it will be said, is self-evident nonsense and folly! A book can't be a book unless it has been written. The retort still is that the statement is sober truth! In the sense in which the word "written" is used today, in reference to a book's authorship, these Bible books never were written. How can this be so? Simply enough, when it is known, as now it is, that this collection of documents was in existence for ages and held in the minds of priests and initiates in the ancient Mystery brotherhoods for thousands of years without ever having been committed to writing. They were preserved in memory only. They constituted the body of what is known as the great "oral tradition," a set of ritual formulas, ceremonial rites, allegorical depictions of truth, number graphs and pictorial representations of the realities and phenomena of man's spiritual history, that had been transmitted from generation to generation of the hierophants of the ancient religions in unwritten form. Finally here and there, for one reason or another, chiefly lest they be lost or forgotten or too badly corrupted by change, they were set down on paper, and so at last came to the later ages as books, presumably "written" by somebody. And once written, they became subject to the human proclivities of tampering, altering and religious skulduggery of many sorts. That they met with this treatment is not only admitted by the historians of Christianity in its early stages, but is even boasted of by the scribes and some of the Church Fathers, who thus initiated the moral justification of a resort to unholy means for the achievement of "holy" ends. Summing up volumes of history in a sentence, it can be said that the extent to which the flagrant practice of literary forgery was carried in the days of apostolic fervor is well past the belief of those who have not read the massed evidence.
So the books of the Bible were never "written" at all, in the modern understanding of literary authorship. They were not the original lucubrated creation of individual minds producing a written document that had not been in existence before such authorship. They were in large part the final deposit on paper of the sets of ritualistic formulas, dramatic scenarios, allegorical depictions, all representing the aspects of cosmic reality and spiritual truth; and they were often just the transcripts of the lines to be recited by the actors in the great Mystery plays of the ancient religion. Prominent among the material were the choral odes and runes to be chanted in accompaniment to the symbolic religious dances that imitated the rhythms of the universe.
Such has become the "set" of orthodox Christian thinking on such matters that when the statement is made that Scriptural material is not history in the modern sense, but is spiritual allegory and drama of cosmic verities, the reaction is inevitably one of mental let-down in evaluation of the importance of the Holy Word. This is a wrong attitude and must be corrected before another word is put down. Whether the reader is prepared to give credit to the truth of the statement or not, it must be said categorically that not only does the acceptance of the Bible contents as allegory instead of history not diminish their value, but it is the only device that will open the door to any appreciation of their true value. In short it is to be said that the Bible becomes infinitely more significant when taken as allegory than when read as ostensible history. (Unquestionably some history was interpolated at a later time, so that it is hard in places to determine where allegory stops and history begins.)
The high value of the allegory inheres in the fact that it faithfully portrays to discerning minds the inner core of the meaning of all history, for it depicts the one thing that is of central importance to all humans,--the spiritual or evolutionary history of the Sons of God, who are our own souls incarnated in mortal bodies here on earth. The Bible is a collection of archaic dramas and allegories pictorializing the experience and meaning of this mundane life of ours. Compared with these divinely produced representations of the structure, plan and import of man's earthly life, what has all along passed for the "history" of a minor tribe of herdsmen in one particular land less than twenty-five hundred years ago falls into comparative triviality and inconsequence. What was known of old, has been forgotten for centuries and must now be learned again, is that the religious myths of ancient times, formulated by near-divine genius, are infinitely truer than history.
All this will sound to the general orthodox reader like veritable heresy against consecrated tradition and opinion. But it is a poetic truism that "truth crushed to earth shall rise again." And in this matter the suppressed truth is rapidly rising to dissolve incrusted error.
LOST KEYS RECOVERED.
If the Bible is a collection of dramas and allegories of the soul's life in body, the point of next importance concerns their interpretation. Everything of value ultimately hinges on this. And because it was ever of pivotal importance, it was right here that ineptitude, unintelligence and chicanery crept in to ruin the operation of the entire scheme of instruction divinely instituted for human benefit. The loss of the symbolic codes and the consequent failure to grasp the proper interpretation sent the entire structure of ancient sagacity crashing down in tragic wreckage.
The trap that caught ignorance in its snares and led to the fatal decline of intelligence necessary for a true interpretation of Scriptural lore is not hard to locate. It was the strange device that ancient genius employed to release truth to the intelligent and the initiated, while hiding it from the base and vulgar mind. For the Bibles were written in a language the very existence of which has hardly been known since the days of its ancient usage--the language of symbolism.
The glyphs and characters of this ancient language have been undeciphered for twenty centuries or more. Only recently have the first steps been taken toward its recovery and restoration. But already it is seen that through its light the interior true meaning of the Bible and theology leaps into glorious significance and luminous intelligibility, so that the whole volume of divine revelation embodied in the Holy Scriptures is at once redeemed from arrant nonsense to sublime import and value. If this is true in any measurable degree, the announcement becomes the epochal event in two thousand years of Christian history. That it is wholly true there is no longer any sound reason to doubt.
THREE FATEFUL WORDS.
The rehabilitation of the lost meaning of the sacred books of old properly begins with the revelation of the cryptic connotation of three words in the Bible whose true interpretation will in a flash work a miracle of re-enlightenment in all minds and will in one vivid moment of new realization transform the entire structure of religion and theology. The whole rationale of religious conception, so far as it is based on the authority of Bible literature, will undergo a complete and astonishing reorientation when the great light released by the proper esoteric sense of these three words is turned upon the mystifying problem of sane exegesis. The discovery of this meaning, hidden for twenty centuries, will inaugurate a new era in all world religion.
And what are these three words that carry such vital significance? They are "the dead," "death," and "to die." In essence they are the one word--"death."
It will fall with a stroke of amazement and incredulity upon minds of limited intelligence to be told that these words can possibly have, or could for twenty-five centuries have had, any other meaning in the Scriptures than the one commonly attached to them. What, it will be asked, can "death" possibly mean other than the demise of the physical person which ensues when the impalpable life energy, or soul, detaches itself from the vehicle of flesh? Who else can be the "dead" but those who have lived in body and are now gone across the great divide? What can "to die" mean if not to undergo the separation of the body and the spirit? Surely there can be concealed no mystery here, no hidden sense that could conceivably elude general intelligence.
Yet it is our obligation to announce, in the face of this universal supposition, that these simple words have all the time borne a connotation different from the one commonly supposed to be their standard and established acceptation. And it becomes our privilege, on the strength of tested scholarship, to proclaim that they bear a meaning not only different from the one generally conceived, but one precisely opposite to that universally attributed to them. Incredible as it may seem, when used in their theological reference, these words bear a meaning that at one stroke turns the picture of all exegetical significance almost completely upside down! For "to die" means, for the soul, to live here on earth; "death" means the soul's life here in the flesh; and "the dead" is a term denoting those alive here in the mortal body! Could any assertion appear to be more preposterous? Evidence for these assertions, and plenty of it, the reader will be demanding. As to that, the quantity of evidence available to demonstrate the correctness of the pronouncement is almost limitless.
RIGHTLY DIVIDING THE WORD.
It is only necessary to take a few brief texts from the Bible and consider dialectically for a moment the words "die" and "death" as there used, to be made aware in a flash that the common meaning of the words does not and can not apply, and to realize thence that they must carry some hitherto unsuspected connotation. Let reflection dwell for a moment on this passage: "The soul that sinneth, it shall die." This has been read millions of times and almost certainly never without the belief that it stands as a warning pronounced against sinners, holding the threat of a catastrophic end of life in some dismal way as the consequence of evil-doing. Yet so little is the logical genius of the human mind brought into use in connection with Biblical utterances, being lured astray by pious doctrinal persuasions or lulled to desuetude by indoctrinated hypnotizations, that apparently no one has ever paused a second to reflect on the obvious meaninglessness and emptiness of the passage if the word "die" is here taken in its usual acceptance. No one in all the Christian centuries, it would appear, has stopped long enough to register the immediately obvious reflection that the soul that does not sin will die too, since all, both the righteous and the ungodly, alike go down to physical death. It is therefore inane and pointless, in fact quite an outright delusion, to warn the sinners that they shall die, when they well know they shall meet the same fate even if they turn to righteousness. What good is a warning to sinners if it can offer no advantage to sinless life? The sentence of sinners to death is utterly nonsensical if "die" is given its common meaning, and no one has known any other meaning to ascribe to it. As a deterrent against sin it carries no moral force whatever, since an instant's thought sabotages the assumed direful punitive character of the judgment. Sinlessness saves no man from death.
Another Biblical citation runs to the same effect: "The wages of sin is death." Similar reasoning process here yields the same nugatory result. The wages of righteousness and virtue is death also. Godliness gains no advantage over sin. The meaning assumed to lie in these verses turns around on itself, so to say, and destroys whatever logical cogency they are taken to possess. Unless "die" and "death" have some other undiscovered reference, these passages are so much pious froth.
But, if the esoteric claim that the Bible conveys beneath the literal sense of its language a profound recondite meaning is to be sustained,--and only on such grounds can it be saved from ridiculous irrelevance in hundreds of items--then it must be concluded that these statements employ the two words "die" and "death" in some other meaning than the decease of life from mortal body. The release of this meaning from the thraldom of ignorance must rank as a cultural event of the sublimest import.
The great revelation throws in our faces the blunt fact that these significant words carried a cryptic meaning having nothing to do with the demise of fleshly body at the end of a life. They bore a secret meaning which becomes veritably the true "key to the Scriptures." When once that profounder sense is recaptured and read back into hundreds of passages in the Bible, the lost light of sound theological understanding will glow again in the human mind after centuries of obscuration.
The basic ground for discovery and comprehension of the crucial meaning of these words is found in the Greek Platonic, Pythagorean, Orphic and Neo-Platonic philosophies, and behind these the more ancient wisdom-knowledge of the Egyptians, who bore the bright torch of religious light in times remote beyond common supposition. Long study and profound reflection upon these primeval systems, framed obviously by the great demigod Seers and Sages of antiquity, are an indispensable requisite to the recapture in full of the mighty strategic import of these key words. It is not asserted here that the true cryptic sense of the words has not at any time in centuries been known, or that the pronouncement here made as to their theological meaning is the first revelation of that meaning. Such as assertion would flout the truth in flagrant fashion. Many students have delved into these early systems of philosophy and have been made familiar enough with the recondite sense in which they are used in the systems mentioned.
What, then, constitutes the momentous revelation proclaimed herein? It is the discovery that this cryptic sense of the words holds and must be applied in a vast field of world thought in which no one ever dreamed that it carried its significance and wielded its crucial import. And this vast field of cultural effort is the religion and theology of Christianity. Apparently not one of the many scholars who since early days have been conversant with the ancient philosophical connotation of these words ever gained a flash of intelligence that would have shown him the absolute necessity of carrying their Egyptian and Greek meanings over into the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures! That the esoteric sense of the words does apply there as the veritable keystone of the arch structure of Christian theological systematism constitutes the epochal modern discovery, perhaps the most momentous made in religion in ages.
True and basic meaning was lost from the three words when Christian theology failed to maintain the sharp distinction made by Greek thought between the two elements of the duality in man's nature, the physical body, or the natural man, on the lower side, and the divine soul, or the Christ-in-us, on the higher level. Had this vital and pivotal distinction been keenly held in its system, Christian exegesis would never have made the capital blunder of associating the words "death," "to die" and "the dead" with the body of man, but would have kept them, as did the Greeks, in constant reference to the divine soul that comes down out of "heaven" to dwell for seventy years in the flesh of mortal body. On this basis it would have been seen all along that "death" was in their conception that comparative and relative "death" which the soul underwent when it made its descent from higher realms of consciousness and took residence in earthly forms. In brief, they would have known that the "death" spoken of was of the soul and not of the body! The soul, coming here from its own glorious home "above," gave its life that the body might have it. It endured the cross of flesh and matter and suffered "death" that the body might live.
THE BODY IS THE TOMB.
If the body was the home of the soul in its condition of "death," then it was the grave, the tomb, the sarcophagus, the sepulcher, the mummy-case of the soul. And so one finds the Sages referring to the physical corpus of man as the prison, the underground dungeon, the pit, the cave and finally the tomb of the soul. This life, they said, was the soul's "death," as, conversely, the soul's free life in the higher worlds was the body's death.
But the modern mind knows no meaning applicable to the word "death" that does not connote actual extinction of life or being. So it is puzzled to understand how the sagacious prophets of old could attribute life to the bodily part of man, that actually does die, while representing as "dead" the spiritual part that never can die. It was this paradoxical dilemma which prevented Christian theology from catching the true import of the Scriptures it took over from antecedent Pagan sources and caused it to pervert their underlying significance into unconscionable literal nonsense.
But life itself is the greatest of all mysteries, even to the creatures enjoying it, and the method that ancient sagacity and understanding took to represent to human thought this aspect of the mystery seemed to reverse the principia of common knowledge. Nearly always does profounder plumbing into the depths of thought upset the structures of common presupposition. So the general mind of Christendom, adjusted by centuries of teaching to the bodily reference of the word "death," will be inclined to think that if such is the position of Greek philosophy, it must be a very illogical philosophy indeed. Counter to this natural reaction we would assert that, so far from being illogical and untrue, it is the only rational view that meets the factuality of the situation involving soul and body in living relationship and that yields correct understanding to the mind. It therefore becomes the primary key to the Scriptures.
What, then, is the nature of this "death" that underlies what we call the very opposite thing--life? The answer is found buried deeply under the abstruse signification of another great item of theology, that of the Christ giving his life for the salvation of man. If a living entity gives up its life so that other being may have it, naturally it loses that which it gives away. It can not both give it and retain it at the same time. And to lose life is to suffer "death." The Son was sent into the world that the men of the world might through his oblation have life more abundantly. He is pictured as the sacrificial lamb, offering his life to creatures of a lower rank who were linked with the realm of mortality. The Son's giving his life as "a ransom for many" entailed his losing it for himself. Hence came his "death." And this "death" was on the cross, not of wood, but of flesh. For the Logos, of which the Christos was a ray, became flesh and dwelt among us. And at last the true meaning of "death on the cross" comes to light. The incarnation of soul in mortal body is all that this phrase means or ever could mean.
The transaction "on Calvary brow" some nineteen centuries ago is a dramatic representation of purely theological meaning. The Christ-soul is on the cross--of flesh and matter--whenever it is linked to body in incarnation. The ghastly conception of the human race's salvation through the shedding of, shall it be said, two pints of blood from "the wounded side" of a physical man two millennia ago, is resolvable into plain intelligible common sense only when it is understood that the Sons of God, taken collectively as the Son of God, transmitted the dynamic energies of their living essence, symbolized as blood (since the blood in all creatures holds the life principle) to the entities of animal-human stature, that they, thus partaking of more exalted being, might have more abundant life.
THE SOUL IS DIVINE SEED.
A clearer view may perhaps be gained if the exposition is conducted through the avenue of the analogy of the planted seed. The seed is in fact one of the most fruitful bases of theological apprehension at every turn. It is so because it is the means which life evolves to carry the potentialities of renewing itself in a new cycle across the gulf of non-existence following the dissolution of its living embodiment. The Son is therefore the divine seed of the Father's life, which, like any seed, must fall into the ground, go to decay and lose its life for the very purpose of regaining it. The seed loses its life in the ground in order that it may have a resurrection in the young sprout.
It is precisely true to say that in the descent of his Sons (or his Son) into earthly existence, God plants the seed of his own life in the personal lives of his human children. This, be it stated, is all that is implied in theology by God's condemning his Sons (Son) to "death" on the cross for the sins of the world.
John has put the solid basis of this theological conception in succinct allegorical form when, using the seed as analogy, he says: "Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Paul, too, asserts that the seeds of divine life sown for the world must first die. He says that the seed we sow is "bare grain . . . but God giveth it a body." This "bare grain" is divinity potential, which has to be planted in the garden of the world, die and be born again to give God himself--since we are cells in his body--a new cycle of conscious existence in this portion of his being.
But, contemplating evolution from the standpoint of the soul's divine origin rather than from that of its earthly situation, Greek philosophy regarded the soul's life here in body as in a very real, though always in a relative sense, a veritable "death." In coming to earth the divine spirit exchanged a very high and blessed potential life for a very poor actual one. It suffered the loss of a whole superior dimension of consciousness. In the realms of disembodiment, consciousness, free of the trammels of the flesh, functions at a level one full degree higher than that which it can experience through the comparatively sluggish instrumentality of the brain. Developed consciousness at that higher level operates with instantaneous rapidity and lucid clarity and vividness.
From this enchanted state it is torn away, "divulsed," as the Greeks put it, from "real being" and sent out into that "far country" of the Prodigal Son allegory. And no minister or theologian has ever told us with authority that that "far country" was this earth of ours. The soul down here is far from its true home in the sense that it is separated from it by a great gap in the scale of vibration rates of consciousness! If gods, angels, men and beasts live in different worlds, even though locally contiguous on the same plane, it is because the grades of consciousness which they severally express are separated from each other as one radio station is separated from another, by differences in frequencies and wave-lengths. This, we now know, is the basis of differentiation between the many gradations of conscious life and being. Life ever manifests as or through vibration, and the differences in vibrational character mark the essential diversifications of the numberless forms in life's gradient.
BREAKING THE BREAD OF LIFE.
Nowhere do we get the systematic rationale of the situation involving the soul's exchange of heavenly for earthly life so well delineated as in the Greek Orphic and Platonic systems of philosophy. There it is clearly pictured how the soul, when thus "direpted" from her more blissful celestial estate, is carried away into every sort of enfeeblement and diminution of her pristine powers and faculties, the sharp discernment of which can be expressed by English words beginning with "dis-", a prefix that always carries the idea of a scattering of a thing from central unity out into multiplicity, or the dissolution of a thing into its component elements. The soul, which by virtue of its possession of higher fourth dimensional consciousness sees things in the spiritual world as units, becomes on its descent to earth blinded to that more complete and perfect vision, a veil being drawn over its "eyes," and, to use the Greek terms, it suffers the dismemberment or dismantling of its unitary sight, or its power to see things as wholes. It suffers violent distraction of its focus of consciousness through the distribution or dissemination of its elements, the dispersion of its energies in many directions, the distortion or disturbance of the clarity of its images, the disunion and disjunction and finally the discord and disharmony of its whole being attendant upon the loss of its Paradise of loftier consciousness, which then through sorrow, toil and mingled pain and pleasure it must proceed to regain.
This profoundly true and rational basis of Greek philosophy must be restored to its vital place in the edifice of modern theology. The great doctrine of the dismemberment and disfigurement of the unitary being of deific powers on the upper planes when the Sons of God move outward from center to carry the emanations of divine force forth to material creation, must be reintroduced into the exegetical system, for without these primary principles of knowledge all sound interpretation is impossible. The doctrine has been lost because it appertains to the involutionary arc of the cycle of manifestation, which has been wholly dropped out of consideration through the purblindness that laid all stress upon the evolutionary arc. As St. Paul asks, how can it be that souls have ascended unless they had first descended into the bowels of the earth? If there is to be a resurrection from the "dead," the entity to be resurrected must first have gone down into a grave or tomb of "death."
A philosophy that seeks to rationalize the problems and phenomena of life will hobble along lamely on one foot if it attempts to find solutions by studying evolution while leaving entirely out of view the antecedent process of involution. This observation well enough delineates the prime deficiency of modern scientific rationale in philosophy. Modernity has never once thought to ask--and apply to theology--the simple question: how can you expect a flower stalk in your garden to grow up unless you have first planted its seed there? The whole body of Scriptural truth will continue to grope blindly toward the light of true meaning as long as the antecedent movement of involution is not restored to its place in the dialectical structure of understanding.
All this is extremely pertinent to the present essay because this word "death" is the key word of focal import that carries the whole Biblical reference to the involutionary side of the theological construct. This "death" is precisely what the divine soul suffers upon and through its descent into the human body. It is the comprehensive word used to cover the whole range of the soul's loss of its divine nature or being as it plunges downward on the Jacob's ladder between heaven and earth. It is the Bible testimony and confirmation of the lost doctrine of involution as both a dialectically and a factually necessary precedent of evolution.
If any of the hundreds of students of Greek, Chaldean and Oriental religions who have been conversant with the characterization of the soul's life in body as its "death," has ever caught the idea that possibly the conception could or should be applied to the elucidation of Christian Biblical material, the inkling has never got beyond the recesses of private thought. If at any time the idea generated a hint in this direction, the movement of suggestion that might have gone on to momentous discovery has been discouraged, deterred and thwarted by the instinctive perception of the absolutely shattering and subversive implications which the doctrine held for traditional Christian theology. For the full reach of these involvements embraces the necessary transferal of the "death" of the Son of God from a physical and historical basis and reference to a majestic symbolic depiction of a purely spiritual or anthropological transaction, and that not in the case of one man, but of all men. Christianity is brought face to face with the challenge of an invincible logical thesis, that if the Greek philosophical meaning of "to die" and "the dead" is the true intended meaning of these words in the Christian Bible, then the "death" of Christ on the cross can by no legitimate means be circumscribed within the limits of one man's corporeal experience on a wooden cross, but must have its meaning in the experience of the soul on its cross of matter and limitation in every human life.
It would need no elaborated dissertation to limn in all intelligent minds the picture of the inevitable muddle of erroneous meanings that has been produced by the mistaking of the word "death" as referring to the demise of physical bodies instead of the deadened condition of the soul while incarnated in such bodies. So arrant a blunder would not only miss the high meaning intended, but would precipitate the sense over into every kind of anomalous and ludicrous predicament. Precisely this is what it has done in many instances, and it has at all times drawn the minds of millions off the path of true instruction and knowledge and out into a thicket of weird and egregious theological beliefs that have come nigh to unsettling the reason of Occidental nations. The default of knowledge of this one item alone has caused the miscarriage of all religious effort from the sheer fact that because of the mislocation of the realm of "death" the world has been deprived of the good that would have flowed from the realization that all the manifold experiences it has been taught to expect to encounter in the spirit world after bodily decease are its experiences now being undergone on earth. Readily it can be seen that, while looking in the wrong world for the Biblical characterizations of "death," and waiting for this life to terminate before the land of "death" will be entered, Western man has totally missed the vital reference and the gist of all Scriptural meaning that was intended to bear directly upon the crucial significance of the experience he was living through in this land of the soul's "death." The confusion consequent upon the theological displacement of the soul's "death" by the body's demise has perpetuated untold and endless befuddlement in all the labors of Christian theology for sixteen centuries.
THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE.
Heraclitus, the first philosopher generally mentioned in histories of philosophy, gives expression to a conception which is quite basic for the intelligent approach to this ancient view of the soul's life in body. He speaks of the several elements formed by the gradations of atomic composition of matter at different levels and says that a lower one "lives the death" of a higher one, as a higher one dies under the life of a lower one. "Water lives the death of air," he says, as "air lives the death of fire." This is to say that the seed of a higher life must give its vital essence over to a sort of static "death" when it projects its energies outward and downward and incorporates them in organisms existing on the plane below its own status, thus to become the inspiriting, ensouling life-giving principle in those organisms. To give its energic life to a kingdom or entity below it in rank, it must die away or die out to the full conscious expression of being on its own plane. It must in this fashion lose its own life in order to give life to a being below it, which otherwise could not be lifted up to higher kingdom. So it must "die" to redeem the life of the creature below it! Here is the first truly scientific statement of the theological structure underlying Christianity. And it is this purely dialectical principle of understanding that has been grossly travestied into the asserted historical sacrifice of a man on a wooden cross!
If a spark of the divine fire is to enter upon the career of another living expression in renewed cycles, it must, like the vegetable oak, suffer its seed to be planted in the soil of the kingdom immediately below it in the scale. Its descent in seed form to lie buried deep in the soil of the lower stratum of organic growth, is for it obviously to suffer "death,"--"until the time appointed" for the recovery of its growth, or its "resurrection." Thus it becomes incontrovertibly clear that the incarnation of life in seed form in the body of a lower kingdom carried with it in ancient philosophical reflection the connotation of a "death." It is equally firmly established, also, that while the soul's condition in this state fully warranted the designation of "death," nevertheless it was to be understood in a relative sense, not as in any way an extinction or annihilation or total end of being for the entity so buried in matter.
Hence it was a "living death" that soul endured in body, or a "death" from which, at the turn round the nadir point of the cycle, there would be inevitably a resurrection. Also it was a "death" which, instead of actual loss, brought immeasurable gain. It was itself the inescapable pathway to higher life. The life that would increase itself in potency and glory must first lose itself. In the light of this enunciation can now be understood the perfectly natural and beneficent meaning of this "hard saying" that has heretofore cast its darksome shadow of apprehension and dread across the pathway to Christian glory.
So we find St. Paul exulting in the sage philosophical asseveration that "for me to die is gain." The Son of God willingly approached the cross of "death" in material embodiment to win heightened glory in the celestial realms, since the generation of brighter glory there is the fruit of the soul's strivings in the life on earth. For "it must needs be that Christ should suffer and enter into his glory." Through the gateway of sin and "death" came also the resurrection from the "dead," as Paul says.
The exposition of this epochal disclosure will be the more solidly grounded if it is introduced with the presentation of a modest selection of excerpts from ancient, particularly Greek, philosophy, to put beyond cavil the use of these cardinal words in the sense, not surely of the body's demise, but of the soul's incarnation. To have mistaken the "death" of the soul in body for the decease of the physical life of the body itself, will thus be seen to have been the fatal blunder that wrecked Christian theology.
THE VOICE OF ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY.
The conception in its fulness is most frankly expressed in The Gorgias of Plato, when Socrates says to Cebes: "For indeed, as you also say, life is a grievous thing. For I should not wonder if Euripides spoke the truth when he says: 'Who knows whether to live is not to die, and to die is not to live?' And perhaps we are in reality dead. For I have heard from one of the wise that we are now dead; and that the body is our sepulcher; but that the part of the soul in which the desires are contained is of such a nature that it can be persuaded and hurled upward and downward."
The intimation here clearly is that Socrates was expounding the position of the conscious entity, the soul or psyche in man, which, standing midway between physical body below and divine spirit above, is capable of being drawn either downward into "death" under the dominance of sensual appetites or upward into heavenly life by the attractions of the beauty of virtue. For Paul tells us that "the interests of the flesh meant death, the interests of the soul meant life and peace."
In the Enneads (I, lviii) of the great Plotinus, third century Neo-Platonist, there is found a straight presentment of the conception: "When the soul has descended into generation (from this first divine condition) she partakes of evil and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in it . . . and death to her is, while baptized or immersed in the present body, to descend into matter and be wholly subjected to it. This is what is meant by the falling asleep in Hades of those who have come there."
Attention should be called in passing to Plotinus' use of the word "baptized" to describe or refer to incarnation. To incarnate was to be plunged into the water of the physical body! This is the true meaning of the baptism in ancient theology. Paul accentuates this idea also most directly when, speaking of Christ, he says that "we suffer death with him in his baptism," thus identifying death and baptism as the same one experience, and both meaning the incarnation.
To this may be added an excerpt from Pythagoras, who is claimed by many to have been the Greek progenitor of the whole Platonic system: "Whatever we see when awake is death; and when asleep a dream." It is a strange thought that, as Socrates expresses it to Cebes, the life we are presumably living here may, from the standpoint of more extended consciousness and the reduced dimensionality and reality of the experience, be a form of veritable "death," as compared with the vividness of a life we could live in a world where we would be disencumbered of body and free of its circumscriptions. That we are blindly groping about down here in a wonderland of vague dreams in a state of semi-sleep, missing the grander reality of life and more glorious and blissful vision of true being in supernal states, is not only not a new and bizarre conception limited to the Greek philosophers, but is indeed widely current in reflective poetry and in fact is the presumptive claim of nearly all religions. That heaven is the true home of the soul, and that the latter is astray here in a mournful exile far from its Father's celestial house, is a commonplace idea finding expression in the Prodigal Son allegory and in Christian literature everywhere. It was one of the higher conceptions drawn by early Christianity from the fountains of Greek philosophy.
Perhaps the most discerning and competent of all expositors of Greek philosophy is Thomas Taylor, whose splendid translations and commentaries have been passed over by the academic world in a preference for the far less revealing translations of Jowett. In a dissertation on the Mysteries Taylor writes that the Greeks "believed that human souls were confined in the body as in a prison, a condition which was denominated genesis or generation; from which Dionysus would liberate them. This generation, which linked the soul to body, was supposed to be a kind of death to the higher form of life. Evil is inherent to this condition, the soul dwelling in the body as in a prison or a grave . . . The earthly life is a dream rather than a reality . . . The soul is purified and separated from the evils of this condition by knowledge."
This is so typical a presentation of the ground bases of Greek philosophy that it deserves comment. Evil as a cosmic principle has been genetically derived in Greek thought from spirit's association with matter. To spirit dissociated from matter all highest good is attributed. On its own high plane it is altogether pure. It is only through its contact with, imprisonment in and subjection to matter that it is cast down into evil conditions. The segment of Christianity that derived from Gnosticism and Greek sources through Paul carried this strain of thought into all its later theology. It became the root source of the egregious ascetic movement and practices of later centuries of Christian Europe. In the shadow of this view it was accounted as degradation for the soul to be tied to mortal body, and any inclination to let the appetencies and passions of the flesh dominate the immortal spirit was looked upon as horrendous. To subdue and mortify the flesh and seat spirit on the throne of the individual life was the motive of the asceticism that swept early Medieval Christianity like a plague.
For soul to be driven out of heaven and sent down to earth to be "cribbed, cabined and confined" in a vesture of mortal decay was for it a cosmic abasement grievous enough to be theologized as its descent into hell. All Hindu philosophy centered on the soul's struggling to divest itself at the earliest possible moment of its incubus of the body. The soul's life down here was held to be a veritable imprisonment, her wings clipped by the sad diminution of her powers and the limitations imposed on her freedom by the inhibiting sluggishness and inertia of her physical instruments of cognition. To incarnate in fleshly body was for her to suffer the agonies of virtual "death." Only the knowledge of profoundest philosophy, embracing the true science of the soul, would provide men with understanding adequate to orient the mind to endure the carnal nature with equanimity and imperturbability (the ataraxia of the Stoics) and to liberate the consciousness from the painful distractions of the sensuous life to the placid contemplation of the more real verities of the spirit.
SPIRITS IN PRISON.
Plato himself said that "men are placed in the body as in a prison." He even considered the body as the sepulcher of the soul, an idea that carried one step farther the ancient Egyptian representation of the body, personalized in the Goddess Hathor, as the "bird-cage of the soul." That this imprisonment was equated with the idea of "death" to the soul is clearly expressed by Taylor who, in commenting on the writings of Macrobius, writes: "The soul in the present life may be said to die, as far as it is possible for a soul to die; occultly intimating that the death of the soul was nothing more than a profound union with the ruinous bonds of the body." To impart to the body its life by linking to it the soul's more dynamic voltage, nature extracted from the higher principle the plenary quantum of its life to be offered as an oblation for the benefit of the lower order. So the body lived the "death" of soul, and soul died unto the life of the body, as Heraclitus would have put it.
All this is explicitly set forth in apt phraseology by Taylor who, in his Select Works of Porphyry says: "What is here said by Plato is beautifully unfolded by Olympiodorus in his MS Commentary on the Gorgias, as follows: 'Euripides (in Phryxo) says that to live is to die, and to die is to live. For the soul, coming hither, as she imparts life to the body, so she partakes through this of a certain privation of life; but this is an evil. When separated, therefore, from the body, she lives in reality; for she dies here, through participating in privation of life, because the body becomes the source of evils. And hence it is necessary to subdue the body.'"
The logic of all this is at least on the face of it unquestionable, unarguable. If the soul is called upon in incarnation to give away its life to the lower organism it certainly can not retain possession of it for itself. Here we have the ground foundation of the great central arch in the temple of religion known as the sacrificial oblation of the Son of God, who gave his life for the world of men. He threw his energic powers into the bodies of mortals so that they might have this connection with a battery of higher dynamism, by drawing upon which they might rise to a higher and more abundant life than as natural creatures they could ever gain without such condescension of the gods. The Sons of God had to give their life and die on the cross of matter, that lower orders might have a visible link with divinity.
So general was this conception among the intelligent in the Greek sphere of culture that the soul's entry into body at the latter's birth was called its burial. The Egyptians called it its mummification. In this connection it is likely that the reference of Jesus to his disciples' anointing him for his "burial" can find its true and more meaningful explication in taking his "burial" in its Greek sense as his incarnation in the flesh. We have noted Plotinus's statement that death, to the soul, was to descend under the power of matter and to be subjected to its torpid influences. No less a figure than the great Roman poet Virgil adds his assent to this view: "For souls are deadened by earthly forms and members subject to death."
One needs but recur to the Epistles of St. Paul to find evidence of the great Apostle's accord with this element of Greek philosophy. He speaks of the "law of death" "which is in my members." Flesh and body are at war with soul and spirit. The clamor of the sensuous desires long overwhelms the still small voice of the spirit. A hasty and too simple deduction from all this seemed to dictate the drastic subjugation of the fleshly appetencies and the crucifixion of the body. A doleful chapter of Christian and indeed all other religious history transpired in the wake of this uncritical conclusion.
Again Plato likened the soul's bondage in corporeal existence to the condition of an oyster bound in its shell.
One must note, too, Milton's expression of Adam's surprise, in Paradise Lost, when, on being expelled from the Garden of Supernal Paradise for "disobedience" to God's command, with the penalty of "death" pronounced against him for his transgression, he stands, as it were, awaiting the fall of the axe that would terminate his life. But no axe falls; he does not die as he expected. He lives on. If this is the "death" God had threatened for his sin, it turned out to be a living "death." So a new significance flashes into the commonplace Scriptural citation: "In the midst of life we are in death."
It will be indeed a strange and awesome reflection that must accrue from long acquaintance with the lost Greek philosophy that in truth and in fact we are now in the deepest "death" we shall ever experience henceforth in our evolution. We have been in deeper wells and hells of material embodiment in past cycles, no doubt. But as from the present, the bodily life we now lead holds us as deeply in the underworld of physical coarseness as the necessities of our education require, and the future will reward past and present rectitude with better conditions in each ensuing life on earth. This happy assurance is one of those liberating influences by which intelligence frees the soul from the "evils" of residence in body.
As the study of the illuminating Greek philosophy proceeded there was no failure to apprehend the significant role which this singular feature of Hellenic esotericism played in ancient religious systematism. Hundreds of scholars had grasped and familiarly handled the idea in many a work. But always it was treated as a somewhat unique and distinctly characteristic Greek conception. That it might be found to extend its influence beyond the Greek area of speculation and indeed stand in pivotal strategic relation to Western Christian theology and its source-spring, the Christian Bible, was apparently never caught even on the farthest horizons of Occidental reflection. The staggering discovery that the Greek sense of the words did indeed apply to the Bible and theology and that this revelation would transform the house of world religion, illuminating it with a new resplendence, was to come at a later stage of the study.
THE BOOK OF THE DEAD.
The hints that prodded speculation on toward the momentous discovery were caught in a field laying outside the area of Greek thought,--the Egyptian. Books of the eminent academic Egyptologists were scanned first, and an introduction was gained into the mysteries of the prodigious lore of the land of Khem. But the orthodox scholastic treatment of the Egyptian books left the mind still shrouded in fog, doing little to dispel the mist from the mystery. Out of much desultory reading in this alcove there came only one sharp suggestion in the direction of the denouement that was to come. This was in connection with the Egyptian name of the so-called Egyptian "Bible," the great Book of the Dead.
Here was "death" again, and in the very title of the selected compilation of the greatest of the documents found in the Nile valley. The question arose: Did the Egyptians write a Bible to be used only by the spirits of the dead in the after life; a book to be disregarded by living mortals on earth and only to be consulted for guidance in the heaven world following bodily demise? Of what use to mortals could be a book which was written, as Budge had affirmed, "for the use of the dead in all periods of Egyptian history"? To simple reason it seemed illogical that a Bible of a great nation should be written, not for the living, but for the dead (in the ordinary physical sense). It appeared more than chimerical to assume that the overlords and semi-divine guardians of early humanity would indite books of proven wisdom and put them in the hands of the living inhabitants of earth, if the instruction therein was not to be profited by and applied to the present life in which the books were read, but was to be held in abeyance, so to say, until death took the individuals over into another realm of being, where the precepts were to be put into practice. Surely mortals have use for Bibles here, rather than in spirit life. Could a deceased person take his Book of the Dead with him and use it as manual for his conduct in the land of spirits! Indubitably a Bible must be meant to appertain to the life of that world in which it was produced and in which it could be read, and to edify the life lived therein.
The Egyptian name of the compilation of fragments called (first by Lepsius) The Book of the Dead was pert em heru, the translation of which was given as "the Day of Manifestation," or "the Coming Forth by Day." Here was food for thought. This sounded more suggestive of the resurrection than of death. And, sure enough, the very first chapter of the collection dealt with the resurrection. The puzzle deepened. But it was not to find its amazing resolution until some time later.
Good fortune led to the reading of Egyptian lore through the works of the one scholar who, scorned by the scholastics as Thomas Taylor has been, came measurably close to solving the Sphinx riddle of the mighty Egyptian wisdom,--Gerald Massey. His six ponderous tomes were devoured with avidity, as new light shone forth from every page. He missed by very little what all the other investigators had missed in toto. He is the only Egyptologist who has come close to descrying what the sage Egyptians were actually talking about under their astute hieroglyphic forms of representation. The others have missed it utterly and tragically.
In the first volume of his Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, at about page 180, Massey, dissertating upon the Platonic doctrine of the soul's regaining its memory lost in its descent into earthly body, or the Doctrine of Reminiscence, asserted that Plato, drawing the teaching from ancient Egypt, "had misapplied it to the past lives and pre-existence of human being dwelling on the earth," when according to Massey, it should properly apply to the soul's memory in heaven of its past earth life following the demise of the body. The soul in heaven, he claimed, would regain the full memory of its (one) life on earth.
To a mind then fresh from the impact of the magnificent conceptions of the Greek systemology and soul science, it was obvious that in this assertion, not Plato, but Massey, had "misapplied" the doctrine. One knew that the great Plato had not blundered in his basic formulations. As the elements of this clash of interpretative ideas were sharply arrayed in the mind, as by some magical light of intuition, there flashed into recognition with blinding splendor a discernment that not only resolved the Massey-Plato conflict in clear outlines, but opened up in one stupendous revelation the whole vision of lost meaning of all ancient religion. The great light spread out to illumine every single doctrine of primal Christianity in its true bearing, for it proved to be the long-lost key to all the Scriptures of the archaic world. It was the open sesame to all constructions, to all exegesis, to all meaning in the Scriptures of antiquity.
It also held the explication of why the Egyptian Bible was called The Book of the Dead. For those whom they dubbed "the dead" are ourselves, the living humans. The antique tome of supernal wisdom and transcendent knowledge was after all not, as Budge and all the other beguiled scholastics thought, "written for the benefit of the dead (in their sense) in all periods of Egyptian history," but written, as common logic had insisted they should be, for the benefit of living mortals, whom, however, they regarded philosophically as "the dead." It was seen that there was no clash between Massey and Plato save that Plato was using the word "death" in its esoteric philosophical sense, and Massey was using it in its common reference to bodily decease.
And what was that flash of illumination that came at that one moment of clear insight to unlock the meaning of thousands of volumes hitherto read in befuddlement and confusion of ideas? It was the astounding realization that indeed and in truth, beyond all cavil and controversy, the three pivotal words, "death," "the dead," and "to die" bore the same cryptic meaning and reference in the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures, creeds and theologies as they did in Greek and Egyptian books of old! The lost light of ancient Egypt had been rekindled.
The rush of clarifications of scores of texts, the flood of new and more luminous meaning in every dialectical situation in the theological purview, was an experience never to be forgotten. The light of new comprehension was almost blinding. In its permeating radiance the entire structure of all ancient sagacity stood revealed in all the grandeur of its divine harmony and beauty. Items and features that in the gloom of imperfect understanding had stood athwart the vision mystifying and unrelated to the whole, now were seen in their almost incredible relevance and symmetry. The entire structure, bathed for the first time in a clear light that revealed its full form and majesty, was awesome in its wonder and glory. Hidden in the darkness of the Middle Ages for sixteen hundred years, the temple of ancient wisdom now stood forth flooded with the aura of knowledge that restored its supernal loveliness once more.
Continue to The Lost Key to the Scriptures Part 2