The Lost Light

An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Chapters 1 and 2

Chapter 1

TRAGEDY DIES IN LAUGHTER

Little could the ancient mythologists and sages have foreseen that the "fabulous narrations" which their genius devised to cloak high truth would end by plaguing the mind of the Western world with sixteen centuries of unconscionable stultification. They could not possibly imagine that their allegorical constructions to dramatize spiritual truth would so miscarry from their hidden intent as to cast the mental life of half the world for ages under the cloud of the most grotesque superstition known to history. Nor could they have dreamed that the gross blindness and obtuseness of later epochs would cite these same marvelously ingenious portrayals as the evidence of childish crudity on the part of their formulators. Who could have suspected that a body of the most signal instrumentalities for conveying and preserving deep knowledge ever devised by man would become the means of centuries of mental enslavement?

Nothing more clearly evidences the present age’s loss of fixed moorings in philosophical truth than the inconsistency of its attitudes toward the sacred scriptures of antiquity. The general mind, indoctrinated by priestcraft, regards them as infallible revelations and holds them as fetishes, which it were a sacrilege to challenge; while theological scholarship hedges from pious veneration of them over to outright skepticism of their divine origin, swinging more recently to a view which takes them to be the simple conceptions of men just emerging from cave and forest barbarism. The character of divine dictation and absolute wisdom assigned to them on the one thesis has yielded to that of ignorant speculation of primitive folk on the other. That there is a possible truer characterization of them lying midway between the extravagances of these two extreme views has not seemed to come through to intelligence at any time. It has not occurred to students of religion that ancient scripts are the work neither of Supreme Deity on the one side, nor of groping infantile humanity on the other, but that their production must be sought in a region intermediate between the two. They came neither from supernal Deity nor from common humanity, but from humanity divinized! They were the output of normal humans graduating to divine or near-divine status, St. Paul’s "just men made perfect." Their divinity is therefore not transcendent and exotic, and their humanity is not crude and doltish. They bear the marks, therefore, of human sagacity exalted to divine mastership.

When a student graduates creditably from a college he is presumed to have acquired a mastery over the field of knowledge covered in his course. Human life is a school, and why should not its graduates be presumed to have gained mastery over the range of knowledge which it covers, and to be able to write authoritatively upon it? Humans must at some time attain the goal, the prize of the high calling of God in Christly illumination, the crown of glorious intelligence. Life’s school issues no diploma of graduation without attainment, for the graduation is the attainment. We have here the ground for the only sane acceptance of the ancient scriptures as books of accredited wisdom. We are neither asked to believe them inscribed by the finger of omnipotent Deity, nor forced to attribute them to the undeveloped brains of primitives. They can be seen as the products of the sage wisdom garnered by generations of men who had finally risen to clear understanding. They are the literary heritage bequeathed by men grown to the stature of divinity. Their veneration by the world for long centuries, even carried to the extreme of outrageous sycophancy, attests an indestructible tradition of their origination from sources accredited as divine and infallible. Their successful hold on the popular mind for many ages bespeaks also the unshakeable foundations of their wisdom. They have withstood consistently the test of generations of human experience. Their wisdom holds against life; it rings true. And it is all the more precious to us because of its authorship by men of our own evolution, since thereby it does not miss immediate pertinence to our life.

Both the conventional views of Bible authorship have militated against the possible high service of the scriptures to mankind. The theory of their divine dictation to "holy men of old" has led to the abject surrender of the rational mind before their impregnable fortress of direct assertion, its hypnotization by a fetish, and the crippling of its native energies. The theory of their production by early crudity tends to the disparagement of the value and validity of their message. The other view here advanced preserves their venerated authority while it brings their authorship from alleged Cosmic Divinity back to men of earth. It saves us from the fatuous claim that "God" took time out to dictate a volume of absolute verity for the inhabitants of a minor planet amongst millions of trillions of such worlds. Relieving us of the necessity of asserting that Supreme Deity went into the book publishing business on this globe and took advantage of his commanding position to write the planet’s "best seller," it preserves mental integrity by enabling us to assign scriptural authorship to human agency, where alone it is acceptable. It is understandable that evolved men, with vision opened to knowledge of the laws of life, would indite sage tomes for the enlightenment of those less advanced. In any case the Bibles are here; they must be accounted for. The phenomenon of their existence among the nations, their hoary age, their escape from destruction through the centuries, the ineradicable tradition of their divine origin and authority, their almost universal veneration, must all find some factual ground of explanation. The theory offered in refutation of the two conventional ones seems the only one that provides such a rational and acceptable basis. And since the belief in their sacredness generally persists, it can not be regarded as less than momentous that the world should know of a surety that, while these revered relics are not the voice of the personified Cosmos, neither are they the mere speculative romancing of cavemen or scholastics. They are the sure word of perfected wisdom.

There was a time, then, in early human history, when enlightened men possessed true knowledge, the passport to wisdom. Clear and concise answers to the profoundest problems of philosophy were known. In so far as the human intellectual faculty is capable of it, an understanding of the mystery and riddle of life itself and the laws of its evolutionary unfolding, was achieved by men who, as Hermes says, had been "reborn in mind." Philosophy was no mere "speculative enterprise," or tilting at logical windmills; it was a statement of the fundamental archai, or basic principles, of the science of being. It formed the groundwork for the elevation of theology to its true place as the King of Sciences, or the Kingly Science. Together philosophy and theology held the throne in the mental life of mankind; and justly so, for a reason which modern thought would do well to consider: they must ever be the ultimate science because they motivate finally the use we make of all other sciences! They hold final answers to all life’s problems. They are the determination of all human action in the end. They alone can direct man finally to the path of good, for by no other means can he learn to know what constitutes the good. The sore need of the world today is the restoration of philosophy, to supply the proper motivation and end of action.

Though zealously guarded from the unworthy by its accredited custodians, knowledge was extant in the ancient day. Modern zeal for publicity finds it hard to understand why it was so sedulously kept esoteric. Briefly--for the full reason is a lengthy matter--a thing so precious, the distillation of ages of experience and the deposit of many lives of painful earning, could not be given out loosely to the undisciplined rabble to be violated and despoiled. Yet it was withheld from no worthy aspirant. No bars of bigotry or persecution interdicted its free culture. The Societies in which it was secretly pursued were honored by kings and the populace alike.

That halcyon age passed, that priceless legacy of knowledge was threatened with extinction, its pursuit was forbidden, its devotees assailed and exterminated; and for more than fifteen centuries the Occidental world has muddled through its age-to-age existence in nearly total ignorance of the fact that antiquity held, in its philosophy and theology, an adequate answer to the great interrogatory, the Sphinx riddle of human life.

The gift and then the loss of primal wisdom are the two most momentous events in human history. This age will be spectator to the third most significant event--the Renaissance of Ancient Culture. The plans of demi-gods and divine men, interrupted for fifteen centuries of the Dark Ages, will move forward again toward destined goals.

This age faces the denouement of a drama the like of which has not been unrolled in world history before and will hardly be repeated in aeons. Tragedy and comedy being copiously admixed in mortal existence, the astounding spectacle to which the world will shortly awake will exhibit untold calamity and the ludicrous conjoined in incredible fashion. We are destined soon to pass from a stunning sense of tragic loss to a world-echoing burst of laughter. The sting of our realization of our duo-millennial loss will melt away under the dawning recognition of our previous unbelievable stupidity. We are in a little time to be made acutely aware of a situation that will become the butt of hollow mirth for ages to come. Other egregious follies of history can be accepted or extenuated to the point of being condoned and forgotten. But this colossal ineptitude, prolonged over sixteen centuries, can not escape being laughed at for centuries more. A joke owes its character to the miscarriage of the intended sense into something ludicrously different. This denouement will stand as the historical joke of the ages. No less than this quantity of hilarity can balance the weight of the tragedy which loads the joke at the other end. For the ludicrously different direction in which the intended sense of the great mythical religions and dramatic rituals of the past took its perverted course entailed as a consequence the greatest of all historical tragedies,--the frightful chapter of religious bigotry and persecution. This worst of all forms of man’s inhumanity to man was bred out of the miscarriage of the concealed meaning of the ancient spiritual myth. The transaction carried the form of a joke, but it also carried the substance of the most appalling terrorism in history. And this most calamitous of all blunders was the mistaking of religious myth, drama and allegory for veridical history!

The promise of our coming awakening lies in the progress made and to be made in the study of Comparative Religion, Comparative Mythology and Comparative Philology. What they will ere long make clear to us beyond further dispute is the almost unthinkable fact that for sixteen centuries the best intelligence of the West took the ancient sages’ Books of Wisdom, which were in all cases the spiritual dramatizations of the experience of the human soul on earth, for objective historical narratives. The spectacle that will soon throw a world first into wonder, confusion and dismay, and then into clownish laughter, is that of a civilization covering one third of the globe, and boasting itself as the highest in culture in the historical period, all the while taking its moral and spiritual guidance for an aeon from a Book or Books, of the true content and meaning of which it never for a moment has had the slightest inkling.

The superior knowledge vouchsafed from early graduates in life’s school to disciplined pupils in the Mysteries of old was transmitted from generation to generation by oral teaching and preserved only in memory. But later, lest it be lost or corrupted, it was consigned to writing. Hence came the Sacred Books, Scriptures, Holy Writ, of antiquity. So highly were they held in the esteem of early men that when in later days their true origin and character had been forgotten, they were exalted to the position of veritable fetishes and assigned a quite preternatural source and rating. Regarded as books of superhuman intelligence, men have in face of them practically set in abeyance their human reason and bowed to them as the oracles of absolute Truth. This was natural and to a degree inevitable. But it spelled catastrophe to the general mental life of man by fixing upon him the basest hypnotization in all the annals of record, when a literal and historical, instead of a purely spiritual and typical interpretation of the books was broadcast to general acceptance. The evidence is mountain high that the taking of ancient ritual dramas and scriptural myths for objective history and the figures in them for human persons has been the fountain source of the most abject corruption of man’s mental forces since the race began.

In mechanical exploit this is an age of marvel, and credit for this type of achievement should not be withheld. In study of life and its objective powers it has labored with wondrous accomplishment. In psychological delving into deeper phases of consciousness it has begun a pursuit long neglected. But in religion and philosophy it is one of the blindest of ages. It is not overstating the case to say that in these areas of human enterprise the mind of this era still slumbers in a state of ineptitude and gross darkness at least a degree or two below that commonly termed barbaric. At this moment the common mentality of the day, led and fed by a compactly institutionalized ecclesiastical power, stands committed to ideas as to the origin, structure, meaning and destiny of life which have not been surpassed in crudity and chimerical absurdity by the tribes of the forest and the sea isles. Conceptions in theology having to do with basic realities of man’s relation to the universe are still presented in pulpits, Sunday Schools and Theological Seminaries which the uncorrupted native intelligence of children of eight and ten years shrinks from or accepts with startled dismay,--to the subsequent confusion of their whole mental integrity. A "scheme" of explanation of cosmic processes and world design, of human and angelic relations, of the plan and purport of life itself, is advanced for popular acceptance, yet is grotesque to common sense and fantastic to rational thought. Philosophy and religion are still propagated on the basis of a theology that is received without understanding by the "common people," entirely repudiated by the intelligentsia and brazenly dissembled by the very priesthood that lips its cantos and its oracles from Sunday to Sunday. In sum it can be said without the remotest possibility of successful dispute that the general grasp of the mind of this age on philosophical verity and the truth of life, as proffered by orthodox religionism, is still steeped in the crassest forms of dark superstition. And this has been due to the miscarriage of ancient symbolism.

History would seem to present a pattern of retrogressive current if it can be shown that this late epoch grovels in a mire of semi-barbaric philosophical grossness from which a former period was free. Degeneracy must have set in at some distant time and swept onward to this day. And such a phenomenon must have had its due cause. A great work of a learned author some years ago pointed to the approaching "decline of the West." What has not been seen, however, is that the West has long been in decline, is at a low stage of decay, and has not risen out of the murks of the Dark Ages. This has come in the wake of causes long operative in the world situation, which have been overlooked or failed of discovery through an egregious obscuration of the vision of scholars since the early centuries. And if this failure of insight is not to be attributed to stupidity that is in itself beyond understanding, then it becomes necessary for the historian of these things to posit for it another cause, one that casts the dark shadow of sinister motive over the whole course of that historical enterprise in which sinister motive is of all places most unpardonable. Corruption in politics or in economic or social life can be understood in relation to the imperfection of human nature, and in a measure pardoned. But designed corruption in religion is shattering to the very foundations of human aspiration. It shocks and paralyzes fundamental urges to sincerity. It weights the human spirit with the hopelessness of its effort to conquer imperfection. Dishonesty and insincerity in worldly dealings may entail disaster of greater or minor degree. In religion they are never less than fatal. There is one domain in which untruth is insupportable, that field of the human soul’s endeavor of which Truth is the very substance and being,--religion.

Whether stupidity or sinister design prove to have been the cause of the loss of true original meaning must be left to the historical sequel to disclose. And whether the cause of the perpetuation of rank superstition in the present day of alleged enlightenment is to be laid at the door of ignorance or knavery or a combination of both, must likewise be determined as time moves on. It is certain that both the primal and the present causes of nescience are kindred, if not identical.

It is the purpose of the present volume to set forth to the modern mind the extent of the wreckage which splendid ancient wisdom suffered at the hands of later incompetence. And it is designed to accomplish this by setting up the sharp contrast between the present disfigurement and the past glory of the structure. This purpose entails the task of revealing for the first time the hidden meaning of the body of archaic scriptures by means of a clear and lucid interpretation of their myths and allegories, fables and dramas, astrological pictographs and numerological outlines. It will be at once seen to be a labor of no mean proportions to convert the entire mass of antique mythology and legend, Biblical graph and cryptogram, from presumed childish nonsense into an organic corpus of transcendent scientific significance. It involves the reversal of that mental process which in the days of early Christianity operated to change myth and allegory in the first instance over to factual history. As third century ignorance converted mythical typology to objective history, the task is now to convert alleged objective history back to mythology, and then to interpret it as enlightened theology. The almost insuperable difficulty of the project will consist in demonstrating to an uncomprehending world, mistaught for centuries and now fixed in weird forms of fantastic belief, that the sacred scriptures of the world are a thousand times more precious as myths than as alleged history. It can only be done by showing that as myths they illumine and exalt the mind to unparalleled clarity, while as assumed history they are either nonsensical or inconsequential. But centuries of erroneous indoctrination have so warped and victimized the modern mind that the effort to restore the scriptures to their primal mythical status will be met with the objection that the transaction will wipe the Bible and other sacred literature out of the realm of value altogether. In the common mind this would be to rob them of worth and significance utterly. So wretchedly has the ancient usage of the religious myth been misunderstood that the cry, "the Bible only a myth!", will fall upon the popular ear with all the catastrophic force and finality of the tolling of a death knell. And no statement that words can phrase will stand as a more redoubtable testimony to the correctness of this estimate of the present stupefaction of modern intelligence concerning religious philosophy than just this reaction. Ridicule, contempt and flat rejection will be the greeting accorded the proclamation that Biblical myth is truer and more important than Biblical history. Our book aims at nothing less than the full proof of this contention. It flies directly in the face of the awaiting scorn of common opinion on the point at issue. Yet nothing is easier than to demonstrate that Bible material taken as history is the veriest nonsense. Anyone with an analytic mind and an imagination to convert its narratives into realism can make it a laughing-stock. The Voltaires, Paines, Ingersols and the freethinkers have done this successfully enough. But having disproved it as history, they have not redeemed it as spiritual mythology. The world awaits this work of interpretation, and only when it is supplied will the full force of the tragic humor of mistaking drama for history be grasped.

The loss or corruption of the philosophical interpretation of ancient scriptures precipitated the West into the Dark Ages, and a main factor in this disaster was a general obscuration of intelligence concerning the myth. Catastrophe was made the more readily possible because the rationale of the use of the myth in ancient hands passed from knowledge. When the recondite suggestiveness of the myth was lost, the inner essence of esoteric wisdom was dissipated away. Philosophy died out. And, bereft of its inner soul, the myth came to stand as the mere ghost of itself. With its hidden significance gone, it read nonsense and caricature. And so it has stood till this day. The word connotes in the popular mind of the present something about equivalent to fairy-tale, a fiction little removed from a "hoax." It is something that is sheer fanciful invention. To declare a narrative formerly believed to be true "only a myth" is to toss it out on the rubbish heap as a thing no longer of value. This attitude of mind toward the myth is itself the sign and seal of the decadence of this age. For ancient sagacity could hardly have assumed that any succeeding age would prove so obtuse as to take the outward form of its spiritual allegories for factual occurrence, or suppose that their formulators believed them to be true objectively.

To be sure, they are fanciful creations and entirely fictitious. They are fables of events which, as events, never happened. The aim was never at any time to deceive anybody. It was never imagined that anybody would ever "believe" them. Nevertheless the myth was designed to tell truth of the last importance. Its instrument was fancy, but its purpose was not falsehood, but sublime truth. Outwardly it was not true, but at the same time it portrayed full truth. It was not true for its "characters," but was true for all mankind. It was only a myth, but it was a myth of something. It used a false story to relate a true one. While it never happened, it is the type of all things that have happened and will happen. It is not objective history, but it embalms the import and substance, the heart’s core, of all human history. Such authors as Spengler and Lord Raglan have begun to see that the ancients regarded it of far less importance to catalogue the occurrences of objective history than to dramatize its inner "spirit." The outward actions of humans are in the main trivial, because they constitute in the end only a partial and ephemeral account of whole verity. Ancient literature aimed at something infinitely higher and more universal. It strove to depict in the myths and dramas the eternal norms of life experience, which would stand as truth for all men at any time in evolution. The myths were cryptographs of the great design and pattern of human history, limning in the large the truth that is only in fragmentary fashion brought to living enactment in any given set of historical circumstances. The myth is always truer than history! Only in aeons will history have caught up with the myth, when it will have unfolded the entire design of the original mythograph. Hegel indeed essayed to read the features of a grand cosmic design in the straggling line of actual events. But the myth already foreshadows the ultimate meaning of history.

Such being the portentous function of the myth in the early stages of the life of humanity, it becomes in some degree apparent what blindness must have fallen upon the mental eye of practically a whole world to have blotted out in little more than a single century the knowledge of a thing of such vast utility. No matter how conclusively the data may prove the fact, it will probably remain forever incomprehensible to unstudied folk that whole bodies of ancient mythology and spiritual typology, suddenly became metamorphosed into alleged history. And because it ensued through sheer gaucherie and clumsy loutish dumbness, it will, as predicted, rise on our horizon as the supreme folly of the ages. When it is realized that an early gift of divine wisdom, planned to aid the race fight through the exigencies of its historical evolution, totally miscarried into tragic nonsense through the simple mistake of taking spiritual allegory for literal history, a humiliated world will find difficulty in ridding its memory of this preposterous blunder.

Deprived thus of a legacy of transcendent knowledge vouchsafed for its instruction, Western humanity has wound a tortuous path through dangerous terrain that the lost wisdom would have enabled it to avoid. It has been a journey made without the guiding light that had been given to render the road more easily passable. Civilization has floundered in the shoals and quicksands of ignorance. And its contemporary phase presents the strangest of spectacles,--that of a modern culture boasting its superiority over any antecedent one, yet admittedly guided in its ethical life by a Book of which it is now possible to affirm that not the most rudimentary sense of its message has ever been apprehended. The declaration can be made and supported that the Bible is still a sealed book. This study will vindicate that declaration by setting forth the hidden meaning of ancient scripture for the first time. Gross misinterpretation cannot be seen as such until its product has been set down alongside a true rendering. The crudeness and baseness of a literal and historical translation of the sense will only be brought into glaring light by being held up against a background of the clarity and dignity of a true spiritual meaning.

The promised interpretation is not predicated upon the play of a genius superior to that of the accumulated scholarship and acumen of centuries of religious students and theologians in Christendom. It was made possible purely by the discovery of clues and "keys" to the old scriptures hidden deeply in the tomes of ancient literature, which had escaped the notice of the long line of exegetical inquirers. If wonder and skepticism arise over the difficulty of understanding why discovery was made at this epoch and not in so long a time before, the answer is most probably to be found in the fact that the thousands who failed approached the study of ancient treasure-tomes with an attitude of mind that made defeat inevitable, while success came finally through an attitude that, if it did not of itself guarantee victory, at least opened the door to it. This is of immense significance and carries a weighty moral connotation with it. With the scales fallen at last from the eyes of purblind prejudice, it can be patently enough seen that there was little chance of discovery of the cryptic burden of ancient books as long as scholars undertook their study with the ingrained and obstinate assurance that they were the products of primitive infantilism. Ever thus have the archaic volumes been approached by Orientalists and Western savants. It is next to unbelievable to discover in what a rigid posture of predetermined estimate the scrutiny of antique writings has been undertaken by Western Christian scholars. Even when the evidence of sage wisdom was present under the eye, the relentless force of the fixation could never rest content until it had read the imputation of simpleness and crudity into the text. If early literature did not manifestly read as folly, it had to be made to do so. The inviolable presupposition in the case was that by no possibility could it be admitted that the ancients knew a modicum of what we know today. If it was to be granted that the seers of yore knew life truly and profoundly, it would be gall to modern intellectual pride, and the very walls of boasted modern superiority would be breached. The content of old scripts, mysterious and haunting as it often appeared, had to be explained on the basis of primitive naïveté of mind. By no right were the supposed aborigines of remote times entitled to the presumption of high knowledge or a scientific envisagement of the world. No thesis found in modern view could account for the prevalence of developed culture in the early stages of the chart of progressive evolution as at present conceived. The assignment of puerile nescience to the civilizations of even three and four thousand years ago had to be vindicated at all costs. The rating of primitives for early men had to be maintained.

Little wonder, then, that a literature scanned with such a blighting spirit never yielded its buried light. Supercilious contempt blinded the eyes of inquiry and closed the mind to all discovery. Obdurately refusing to admit the possibility of the presence of knowledge, no amount of search would reveal it. All the surer was inquiry doomed to failure in this field, when the most exalted genius the world ever knew had been at pains to disguise the outward appearance of that knowledge. It was only when at last the arcane writings were inspected with the eager spirit of genuine seeking and the reverent assurance of their holding precious mines of instruction, that the open sesame unlocked a hoard of hidden wealth.

If it shatters current orthodoxy in science or philosophy to establish the fact that archaic man possessed supernal sapiency, then shattering there must be. The thing cannot be obviated. It is a fact that out of the night of antiquity looms the giant light of transcendent intelligence on the part of numerous sages. At a period remote enough to be con- temporary with the times incorrigibly marked as "primitive" by historians, the ancients possessed books of such exalted spiritual and intellectual content as to lie yet beyond the comprehension of vaunted modern intelligence! Modern pride must face the situation: "primitive" people already possessed books which by no possibility could have been produced by "primitive" mentality. Books which only sages could have written bespeak the presence of sages on the scene.

And sages there were. Popular academic theory must perforce revise its postulates in the case. It has stubbornly refused to admit the operation of a law of life in this situation which it sees at work everywhere else in the realm of genetic procedure. Universal observation yields the truth that infant life is everywhere parented. The period of helpless infancy is safeguarded by parental oversight. The elder generation is at hand to protect, nurture and instruct the young of every kind. Modern theory admits the prevalence of this rule everywhere--except strangely in the biological history of the human race as a unit. Granting the sway of the principle in the case of the individual, animal or human, it has refused to predicate its governance over the early life of humanity as an entity. But the presence of sapient writings, the evidence of great lost arts, and the remains of structures surpassing present achievement, attest incontrovertibly the uniform working of the law of parenthood here as elsewhere. The human race was parented. It was not left to struggle through its helpless infancy without guardianship. Ancient legend in the mass bears this out. Prehistoric lore teems with the stories of heroes and men of divine stature, demi-gods and sons of God who mingled with humanity, and who left codes of laws and manuals of civilization that manifest a mastery not possible of acquirement by primitives. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Zoroaster, Hammurabi, Manu, Buddha, Laotse, Moses, and even Plato and Pythagoras, hover in the dim light of remote legendary times as figures transcending normal human stature, and leaving behind writings that have been held up as the norm of perfect wisdom and conduct down the centuries. The Laws of Manu have stood for ages as the prototype of all legal and social codes since formulated. Hermes, Orpheus taught the nations agriculture, writing, astronomy, language, religion, philosophy and science, the saga runs.

Hence there is posited for the first time a natural and competent answer to the great and insistent question of the authorship of primeval books overpassing even present capability. The authorship of the sages removes these books at once from the category of merely human speculation and places them securely in the place of authority and authenticity. They were the products, not of early man’s groping tentatives to understand life, but of evolved men’s sagacious knowledge and matured experience. On no other ground can their perennial durability and universal power be accounted for. The early races obviously received and treasured these documents with the same high reverence with which the human child receives the codes and rules of conduct first handed down to it by its parents, who stand to it in loco Dei. If the primal world-reverence is found wanting in certain groups today, it is due not so much to the fact that the books have proven of unsound merit, but to the failure to know what they actually say. They are uninterpreted to this moment. They could not be scorned if their intrinsic meaning was known. The republication of that lost meaning will restore the bibles to universal veneration, but not as fetishes.

Incidentally all speculation of scholars as to the date of the personal authorship of the Bible books or other ancient documents of the kind must be declared to be pure and simple impertinence. Nobody knows or can know what hand first set these verses to paper, or at what epoch. The books are of unknown antiquity. They were extant thousands of years B.C. When they passed from oral impartation to written form none can say. Hundreds of volumes proclaim Moses to have been the writer of the Pentateuch. Yet the last of the five books describes Moses’ death and burial, and adds that not in a long cycle since his day (estimated by scholars at six hundred years at least) hath there been found one like unto him in wisdom and piety in all Israel! To ascribe any of the Bible books to any named writer is to trespass on the ground of folly. Indeed it is possible to assert that, in the common meaning of the term, they were never "written" at all. No man sat down and composed them out of his thought or his knowledge. They were the outlines of a great universal tradition formulated by the accumulated wisdom of those first "parents" or "guardians" of infant humanity, and, like the thousands of lines of the great Homeric poems, which had been held purely in the memory of the Hellenes for five hundred years, were finally committed by scribes to written form. Thus came those set formulations of systematic knowledge, cosmic data and moral codes, that have survived the test of time and still stand as sacred commitments. Their material presents the substantial truth of life, and not primitive man’s erratic guessings. And sixteen hundred years of the most consecrated effort to study them has left their meaning still unrevealed.

But the Western mind has begun to delve into the fathomless spiritual philosophies of the ancient East. The renaissance of Oriental thought, which was first quickened by Schopenhauer in Europe and by Emerson in America, is now sweeping Occidental religious consciousness to a new and lofty height of vision and uplift. The eminent psychologist, C. G. Jung, declares this movement to be the most significant taking place in the thought life of today. The philosophy that could give an expansive illumination to a brain like Emerson’s is proving a fount of light and incentive to millions more at present.

The mask of literary disguise is being slowly lifted from the face of ancient scripture, and what has been gratuitously assumed to be the product of primitive naïveté and ignorance is now seen to be the many-colored cloak of recondite wisdom. Even so apparently quixotic a construction as the body of Greek myths, which has gained for its originators the imputed status of moronism, bewildering and baffling the world for two millennia, is to be revealed as perhaps the most lucid presentment of philosophical truth ever given to the world. The light so long buried under a bushel of myths is beginning to shine through. Not only do they bear the impress of a genius able to portray mighty truth in fable and fiction, but they register an equal skill in artful concealment. Their employment of the craft of disguise has carried them so far beyond us that we have been gulled into taking the mask for the reality. The devisers of the myths were master dramatists and poets. With such deft touches did they weave the pattern of cosmic, mundane, spiritual and physical truth through their myriad narratives of gods and men, mermaids, harpies, satyrs, centaurs, stags and boars, labyrinths, rivers, trees and stars, that not the most outlandish detail of their fabrications can be ignored without the loss of some signal link of meaning. Generations of scholars, chained in the cave of orthodoxy with their backs to the light, have perennially scoffed at the idea that the myths might be fanciful portrayals of esoteric truth. And we have charged the most enlightened races in history, the Greeks, Chaldeans and Egyptians, with possessing the mentality of immature children.

We accused them of taking their three-headed dogs, their fire-breathing dragons, their griffins, naiads, Cyclops, Circes and Medusas for sure-enough actualities. We were sure we could afford to laugh at the simpleness of a people who ascribed the summer’s drought to Phaëthon’s losing control of the horses of Apollo’s sun-chariot. But modern presumption must brace itself for a rude jolt, when it shortly transpires that not one in a hundred of our population will be able to grasp the involved and profound signification of the Phaëthon myth even when it has been clearly set forth. Face to face with what we could not understand in ancient literature, we assumed that the unintelligibility was due to ancient unintelligence in the construction. That it might be due to our unintelligence in the comprehension was unthinkable. We could only hold our ground of supposed enlightenment by shifting our ignorance to the ancients. If the myths made no sense to us, it was proof that there was no sense in them. But history is soon to reverse judgment. The comics in the case will be found to be modern, not ancient. Not they, but we, will be adjudged the simple-minded children lacking insight. And we will see ourselves at last, clowns and buffoons, laughing and grimacing in hideous mockery of a treasure the value of which we cannot grasp.

Perhaps there will be wanting to us the powers of discernment needed to catch the grandeur of arcane systems of philosophy under their covering of allegory. Habits of thought and postures of mind hostile to the presuppositions of the archaic knowledge will not easily adjust themselves to new views. The attempt at a full revelation of buried meaning will come with a shock to current theological vanity, to the pride of present knowledge and to the complacency of the mechanistic cast of modern thought. But the release of the hidden significance of the world scriptures at this epoch may be destined to achieve our salvation from threatened social catastrophe. For the ancient wisdom held the prescription for both individual sanity and a righteous social order. Folly flourished only by grace of its despoliation.

The release of the enlightenment potentially held in the old books will challenge many traditional habitudes of mind and most of the lingering relics of theological inculcation. It will republish the postulates of ancient knowledge that have been lost or discredited and establish them once more as the principia of understanding for both the phenomena of life and the deep lore of the scriptures. Some of these, long without the pale of orthodox acceptance, will strangely have been found corroborated by late scientific discovery. The philosophical method was that of deduction, since it conceived life as unfolding in the outer order the pattern of things innately involved in its inner heart. The conclusion reached by evolutionists in present studies is that "evolution is centrifugal, developing outward from within the geneplasm, rather than centripetal, developing inward from without the geneplasm," in the words of Henry Fairfield Osborn. Another late finding is that "evolution is creational rather than variational. Variation of the species is the result of an original creative pattern within the geneplasm which is there from the very beginning." And a third pronouncement demolishes completely the theories of materialism, affirming that "evolution is prot-empirical rather than meta-empirical; the organs developing before there is any actual need for them rather than after the need for them arises." Nature already carries in her womb the embryo of that which will come to form. Life works ahead to an end premeditated in the beginning, so that Aristotle’s scheme of "entelechy" is a sound principle in philosophy. Plato told us twenty-four hundred years ago that life is weaving on the field of manifestation the design of the archetypal ideas in the Cosmic Mind. Modern science and the clear interpretation of the arcane philosophy of the past will together restore Plato to his seat on the throne of mind.

The debate on teleology has been long and acrimonious. Negative conclusions have been fostered and apparently affirmed by the shortness of our perspective. The immensely extended outline of evolution envisioned by the cosmology of old will enable the mind to see the working of design. Mr. Clarence Darrow asks skeptically if the Lisbon earthquake was designed. As well might a colony of ants ask if the destruction of their burrow as we spade our garden was designed. Neither to the citizens of Lisbon nor to the ants in the garden would the philosophy of design be comforting. But we know that the digging was designed, not to destroy the ant-city, but to prepare the garden. So we may equally well know that the processes of world building were designed, not to destroy Lisbon, but to adjust the earth’s crust properly about it. The designed activities progressing in two different worlds happened to clash, man being no more intelligent about the plans of cosmic beings than the ant about human intentions. And a man cannot change his larger designs always for the convenience of ants in certain situations, or indeed may not even be aware that his designs jeopardize their lives, so neither presumably can higher beings alter their operations for the temporary advantage of little man. Neither man nor nature has yet learned how to work on in evolution without the element of some sacrifice of life. It does not impugn design in the course and speed of an automobile that a child has been unfortunate enough to drift into its path.

Centuries of world life have been lived all awry because the philosophical insight into the structure of archetypal design has been dulled and obscured. The outlines of the pattern of evolution formulated in the beginning by Cosmic Mind were known of old, but lost in the long interim. The world being the crystallized projection of a divine thought-form and history the slow filling out of the lines of the pattern, what man can know of the structure of the original ideation, or the Great Plan, becomes of incontestable importance. This was the base and content of the Ancient Philosophy. It must be restored to knowledge. Fortunately it has never been lost beyond recovery, merely lost out of common thought. It was safe even while unknown, being preserved in the amber of a subtle cryptography. Ignorance came along and swept out of ken the esoteric purport; but at the same time it perpetuated the myths and allegories, believing them to be history. Deluded piety made a hash of the sense of the scriptures, yet all unwittingly saved them for the advantage of a wiser age.

On the one hand materialism has ignored the spiritual nature and motivation of the universe; on the other, ecclesiastical zealotry, blinded by stupid literalism, has rendered religion ridiculous. The truth must combat untruth on both these fronts, rebuffing a philosophy that denies the ideal frame of things, and rebuking an eccentric religionism that distorts early truth into revolting irrationality. To redeem religion from ignominy it is necessary to stigmatize its historical caricature, ecclesiasticism. War must be declared on its falsities to vindicate its truth. Medieval and modern incrustations, excrescences and abnormalities of a hundred types must be brushed away, if the brilliance of the splendid original creation of supernal genius is to shine forth again. Plato’s theology and "divine philosophy" must be vindicated.

Chapter II

ECCE HOMO--ECCE DEUS

The modern zeal to exploit "the practical" is about one part good philosophy and nine parts sheer fatuity. The whole matter has been involved in the utmost fog and mental haze. The groundlessness of current notions of what constitutes "the practical" is readily disclosed by asking the question: What does modern man do with the gains which his practical effort has brought to him--wealth, comfort, means, freedom, competence? They bring him certain satisfactions, no doubt, and the answer in part is there. But often the satisfactions turn to ashes in his hands, or melt away as he reaches out to grasp them, or prove hollow soon or late. Their inadequacy and shallowness attest their futility and give "practical" philosophy the lie.

The entire question rests on the determination of what constitutes ultimate values in life itself, and this is only fixed by an adequate philosophy. To be sure, a basic ingredient in philosophy is experience, and a philosophy is largely a digest of experience. But philosophy is finally and inexorably the mind’s grasp of a set of formulas of meanings which array the data of experience into a meaningful pattern, or structural design, which design must eventually match the outline of the archetypal noumenal thought form projected by Cosmic Mind for this area of creation. Harmony with this immanent pattern is the insistent demand, as well as the touchstone and seal of truth. The lower mind in man, being a fragment of cosmic intellect, is by nature keen to recognize and register, by an expansive pleasure, the concord of its ideas with the overshadowing form of truth. Some knowledge of the features of this living mosaic is essential to the final allocation of values, else there will be no criterion other than an unauthoritative sensual hedonism to determine whether an experience or a philosophy is good or detrimental. All actions and opinions rate a final appraisal on the ground of a deposit they leave in consciousness, according as they harmonize or disagree with the cosmic thought structure that is working to manifestation in the process. They accord, or not, with the elemental pattern of creation. Deep within is a sense that registers in the outer mind the thrill of that accord or disagreement. The acuteness of this barometer of values may be viciously blunted, so that its registering sense is sadly vitiated. Yet in the end it speaks in the stern language of pain and discord for violation of its principles, and positive pleasure for virtuous action. And the final definition of "the practical" is that which relates the life of man ever closer to the form and substance of the primordial pattern laid down for human evolution.

Early theology presented the general cast and outline of the great cosmic plan of creation, in the reflected light of which mortal mind could frame the more or less definite graph of the structure of this life on earth. The profound philosophy, then, that rested on this stratum of basic knowledge brought the offices of the enlightened intelligence to the aid of the outer and less reliable pragmatic criteria in the ego’s effort to direct the evolution of the organism. Philosophical understanding thus in large measure could be made to obviate the toilsome methodology of trial and error, and both conserve available force and save valuable time and much suffering. One of the deep principles of the Buddha’s system was that "right knowledge" must come to save the individual from pitiable suffering arising from ignorance. If, as he averred, it is a fundamental truth that ignorance is the cause of sorrow, then knowledge is its antidote. And all the great religions of antiquity make this assertion. Says Hermes: "The vice of a soul is ignorance; the virtue of a soul is knowledge." The Book of Proverbs in the Bible enjoins at length the prime necessity of getting wisdom, understanding, knowledge. Its preciousness is set above "all the things that thou canst desire." It is glorified as an ornament of grace and a crown of life unto its possessor. In this document it is not placed second to Love or Christly Charity. By an invincible dialectic Plato and Socrates work out in dialogue after dialogue the proposition that one cannot be good until one knows what the good thing is, and even what it is good for. According to Rhys Davids in his Hibbert Lectures of 1881 on The Origin and Growth of Religions: Buddhism (p. 208), "it is not by chance that the foundation of the higher life, the gate to the heaven that is to be reached on earth, is placed, not in emotion, not in feeling, but in knowledge, in the victory over delusions. The moral progress of the individual depends, according to Buddhism, upon his knowledge. Sin is folly. It is delusion that leads to crime." An editorial in the New York Times of June 20, 1938, well says that the hearts of such folks as the German persecutors of Jewry "are bitter only when their minds are dark," and cites Voltaire’s trenchant utterance that "men will continue to commit atrocities as long as they continue to believe absurdities." In so far as men act for reasons--instead of sheer brute impulse--the soundness or the imperfection of their "philosophy" in the case determines the good or evil quality of their deeds.

Knowledge has long been apostrophized as a beacon light, a lamp unto the feet. It seems to be an inexpugnable datum of history that fully enlightened sages of the past gave to infant humanity mighty formulations of cosmic truth, evolutionary schematism, wisdom of the last practical utility, and supernal knowledge of the worlds of men and of angels. They placed this torch in the hands of the early races for the advantage and behoof of all succeeding humanity. Precautions of the most extraordinary nature were taken to safeguard the deposit. But, miserabile dictu, the doltishness of historical groups at various times so far imperiled the gift that in a long period, roughly from the third century of Christianity until almost the present day, the open promulgation of the high teaching invited the bitterest persecution from the entrenched forces of cruder belief. Esoteric philosophy was forced to hide underground and make its way through the centuries by subterranean channels and covert devices. Barbarism threatened the utter extinction of previous light. Supervening ignorance swooped down upon and buried earlier knowledge. But in one of the resurgent waves of revival, the ancient light is breaking through the incrustation of ignorance once again. Wisdom is having its rebirth.

Obscuration enveloped brighter enlightenment because mankind seems unable to maintain its hold on the golden mean between extreme views. It is constantly following the swing of the pendulum from one movement to violent reaction in an opposite direction. Religious history is in the main a record of oscillation between arrant supernaturalism and soulless naturalism. The group mind bends far over to mystic or spiritistic faith on one side, and then sways equally far over to a dead materialism. It is either believing in angels, ghosts, spirits, saints, virgin births, elementals, divine interventions, miracles, transfigurations, salvations, vicarious atonements; or it is rebounding from these to blank mechanism which rates all such things as delusions. In his revulsion from eccentric mysticism man has sought always the wrong antidote--a barren naturalism. In his revulsion from the latter he has again always gone too far into uncritical mysticism. But there is a middle position that meets the essential truth between both attitudes. And the soul science of old set forth this median position. It presented mystic elements without irrationality, and advanced such knowledge of spiritual experience as to make the negation of such values impossible. Ancient theology was the science that dealt with the more sublimated essences and forces latent in the human endowment, exploiting them for the vast enrichment of the conscious life. It was the science of spiritual growth without mystic extravagance, the science of dynamically real elements in the psychic constitution of man, the very existence of which mechanistic science has disregarded. What the ancients called esoteric science is but the steady direct penetration of human intelligence into the deeper heart of nature, to manipulate creatively her hidden springs of power. It was based on a knowledge of the laws ruling the higher octaves in the diapason of consciousness. It was firmly grounded on premises which authenticated the existence of the soul as an entity. The soul has ever been the scarecrow in the garden of positive science. But modern science has itself re-established the ground for such a predication in its recent findings with regard to the more sublimated constitution of matter, making a way for the reification of bodies of sub-atomic or ethero-spiritual composition, in which a unit of soul might find subsistence when disengaged from a fully substantial body. Late physics has gone far toward hypostasizing St. Paul’s asserted "spiritual body," and his other statement that he knew a man "who was caught up into the third heaven." In the rarer forms of matter now hypothecated by our adventuring science will be found the rarefied physical implementation of whole octaves of "spiritual" phenomena catalogued by ancient psychic discernment, but looked at skeptically by positivism in our day. There is a spiritual evolution proceeding pari passu with the physical, and implemented by it. Our late science has only now come into view of nature’s sublimated matter of varying gradations of density, enabling it for the first time to give body to the beings of ancient hierarchies and to give veritude to the ancient affirmation of "spiritual bodies." In proportion as the redoubtable solidity of science’s basic stuff melts down into mere swirls of force, to that extent can the angels and demons of ancient systems stalk forth in something like veritable substantiality.

A penetrating view of the interior sublimation of matter opened to the eye of antiquity a fuller and more detailed charting of the basic components of man’s constitution. Human nature was seen as a compound of at least four segments or strata of being, possessing four bodies of differentiated substance ranging from dense physical coarseness through etheric and mental gradients to spiritual tenuity. In short man has a physical, an emotional, a mental and a spiritual body, each finer one interpenetrating successively its coarser substrate and being held in linkage to it by vital affinities. Hence the deep lore of old dealt with a keen analysis and formulation of the laws of interaction between the several "men" in us and catalogued the extensive schedule of reactions in consciousness in that amplified psychology to a degree that proves astonishing to students of our time. The psychology of past days has names for a host of sharply drawn segmentations of subjective activity that modern probing has never systematically distinguished. Their "gods" were the living energies of nature and of mind, realities of the cosmos, and by no means fanciful and fictitious nonentities. They were the personified rays and energies that our science is now discovering. The broad field of what is termed mystical experience was mapped, with every section of its area charted in relation to the economy of the whole. It was no realm of whimsical idiosyncrasy, of sheer feeling. The revelation that the ancient East had perfected the technique of an elaborate spirito-psychological science, surpassing anything yet adduced by modern genius, is a marked denouement of current history. The renaissance of this buried "science of the soul" is giving birth again to the knowledge that man may pass from unconscious drifting with the tide of evolution to a conscious self-directed mastery of his progress. He may step from the status of a victim of evolution’s forces, such as he is when without cognizance of its laws, into the ranks of those who work intelligently with its plan. Hence he can advance more smoothly and swiftly with the tide, as Shakespeare asserted, instead of being tossed about by cross and counter currents whose play he does not understand. The vitalizing item of ancient knowledge was the prime datum that man is himself, in his real being, a spark of divine fire struck off like the flint flash from the Eternal Rock of Being, and buried in the flesh of body to support its existence with an unquenchable radiant energy. On this indestructible fire the organism and its functions were "suspended," as the Orphic theology phrased it, and all their modes and activities were the expression of this ultimate divine principle of spiritual intelligence, energizing in matter. Philosophy so grounded was able to meet the exegetical demands of the "mind-body problem" by its hypothecation of states of rarefied matter mediating between immaterial spirit and gross body and linking them commodiously in one organism. How the gross body holds connection with sheer "anima"--how it holds on to its "ghost"--was readily understood in the terms of their knowledge of intermediate structures which bridge by several steps the wide gap between pure spirit and palpable matter.

At the summit, or in the interior heart, of man’s nature was the divine and immortal Atma or spirit; on the lower level there was the body, with its twofold equipment for sensation and emotion. Bridging the gap between the two was the principle of conscious mind called Manas. It could span the gap between "quickening spirit" and inert matter; because it stood between them and possessed affinities with both of them, which they lacked with each other. It could touch soul above and flesh beneath and pass the lofty motivations of the one across the gulf to the beneficiary below. Modern religious conception faces the absurd situation of envisaging man as obviously physical and animal by virtue of his body, and as obviously intellectual and spiritual through his soul, but with the ancient hierarchical grades of intermediacy torn out of the gap between the two. Early Christian revolt against esotericism threw down the ladder of linkage between man below and his soul above, and now has no resources to diagram the steps of his possible communion with his Emanuel. The gap left vacant had perforce to be filled in by theology with the single figure of the historical Jesus as mediator between man and his God. A historical personage was called in to implement a function that was originally assigned to one of the principles of man’s own constitution. This was one of those consequences which the little blunder of mistaking myth for history entailed for succeeding ages.

On the strength of the new data furnished by modern science, present thought must orient its attitude toward basic problems, since it must view life as the play of causal forces in consciousness more sublimated and potent than any of the energies so far discerned in matter. It will then be in position to take counsel again with the primeval divine revelation. It will be able to predicate again the human soul and the divine spirit in man. In the ultimate it has been its failure to posit the independent Atmic entity in our life that has blocked its every excursion toward a vital religious philosophy. It has made philosophy the dead speculation it now is and religion both a chimerical and a fruitless enterprise. When theology wisely guided the effort to relate the lower man to the god within, it was the central pursuit in the life of the world and stood at the apex of dignity and importance. But the loss of vital premises of understanding blinded following ages to the value of spiritual culture, and theology and philosophy now go abegging for recognition, bereft of their former kingly renown. And now their continued abeyance threatens civilization itself. No age calls so piteously for the certain knowledge of the science of the soul; since to soul alone can be attached the anchor for all shifting human values. Without the scientific grounding of an inner principle in man which is itself a portion of Eternal Durability, and which will carry the values built up in life to endless perpetuity, human philosophy must forever lack stability and prime utility.

Such a carrier and preserver of values was the Atmic spark, described by Heraclitus as "a portion of cosmic Fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." It was on earth to trace its line of progress through the ranges of the elements and the kingdoms, harvesting its varied experiences at the end of each cycle. It was described by Greek philosophy as "more ancient than the body," because it had run the cycle of incarnations in many bodies, donning and doffing them as garments of contact with lower worlds, so that it might treasure up the powers of all life garnered in experience in every form of it. The mutual relation of soul to body in each of its incarnate periods is the nub of the ancient philosophy, and the core of all Biblical meaning. As the Egyptian Book of the Dead most majestically phrases it, the soul, projecting itself into one physical embodiment after another, "steppeth onward through eternity." No more solid foundation for salutary philosophy can be laid than this rock of knowledge, and civilization will flounder in perilous misadventure until this datum of intellectual certitude is restored to common thought.

The practical service of philosophy is the proper direction of effort.

Its function is to furnish guiding intellectual light. Religion is the consecration of purpose to attain the goal indicated as blessed. But knowledge is the only guarantee of right effort. Misunderstanding leads the feet into morasses and quicksands. An errant philosophy is the poison of human endeavor at its source. Modern psychology loudly asserts that failure of the mind to know the answers to life’s riddles breaks down its integrity and racks even the body. Philosophy, reduced now to tedious and jejune speculation, is that very bread of life for which we starve. It was once a body of positive truth. To it the mind could anchor. Only intelligence can save motivation from rank exuberance of eccentricity. Despoiled of the early truth, later ages have been in the position of a person trying to think without true premises. It is the function of science and philosophy to furnish the mind true premises. As Gerald Massey says, thinking is in essence a process of "thinging," since thoughts must rest on the nature of things. And things are themselves God’s thoughts in material form.

The one grand premise for constructive thinking is that man is a god functioning in the body of a human animal, and that this situation is typical of all other existent life, and a key to the comprehension of all. Religion is that field of effort in which man strives to relate a divine element, transcending immeasurably his own natural powers, to a lower self in which it is tenanted. In this comparative sense, its true function is and always will be to deal with those three elements which it has so shockingly abused and misapplied, the supernatural, the miraculous and the magical. In any absolute sense, to be sure, these terms are misnomers and can become misleading. But relative to the viewpoint of the merely natural man, the work of the god in his nature is transcendent and is indeed fittingly termed supernatural. For it is the province of religion to transfigure the natural life of man with the irradiance of cosmic romance, magical potency and unearthly splendor. It is designed to refashion the natural man into the likeness of a glorious spiritual being, the cosmical man of the heavens. To lower orders of life the capabilities of beings of a superior kingdom of life are justifiably designated as supernatural. Our brain power is supernatural to the dog.

Even now Socrates’ "daimon" (daemon), that hovering presence which guided and warned him constantly throughout his life, is being entified as the "unconscious" mentor of present psychology. The restoration to Western thought of the divine monitorial guardianship of the individual will instigate the mightiest reformation in the history of Occidental religion. It will enforce a drastic alteration in theological dogma. For it will demand a discarding of the conventional form of the God idea and a return to that of learned antiquity.

It flouts current belief most flagrantly to assert that the Christian movement represented a descent from high pagan levels of knowledge and spiritual insight. Not a churchman but harbors the smug assurance that Christianity arose like a stately phoenix out of the ashes of a decadent paganism, to save a benighted world from sinking into a morass of degradation horrendous to contemplate. But current notions, however sanctified by pious belief, must yield before the influx of positive facts and the light of a proper interpretation of revered scriptures. This only means, however, that Christianity must cast off a heavy incrustation of exoteric literalism and reassert its own primal majestic message. No student conversant with the history of early Christianity will for a moment maintain that medieval or modern presentations of theology are identical with those held at the start. One of the most influential and admittedly the most learned of the Church Fathers, whose scholarship had been powerfully instrumental in formulating the early creedology, was excommunicated as a heretic within three hundred years after his death by a Church that had so quickly lost the light of its original inspiration.

"Origen, the pupil of St. Clement of Alexandria, and the best informed and most learned of the Church Fathers, who held the doctrine of rebirth and karma to be Christian, and against whom, 299 years after he was dead, excommunication was decreed by the exoteric Church on account of his beliefs, has said: ‘But that there should be certain doctrines not made known to the multitude, which are revealed after the exoteric ones have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone, but also of philosophical systems in which certain truths are exoteric and others esoteric.’"1

Both Origen’s statement and his posthumous discrediting at the hands of the Church Council make it clear that Christianity had been radically transmogrified within a few hundred years after its inception. And every individual or sect in the centuries following the third that endeavored to revive the pristine purity of the original formulations was acrimoniously hounded and persecuted. Paulinism itself, which represents perhaps the clearest stream of high spiritual teaching, was hard put to escape being torn out of the context of scripture or defeated in ecclesiastical controversy.

The issue must be faced and determined now if religion is to live and exalt the race. The crux of the entire problem is the conception of deity in a form perennially available for man in the heart of his own nature. This conception is the core of all religious theory, and loss of it has been the cause of doubt, confusion and despair. Light and truth long lost are once more at hand to illumine minds now groping in darkness. False notions of deity have nearly cost mankind the loss of its birthright of knowledge.

The boast of Christianity and Judaism is that they alone have presented to mankind its purest concept of deity in the form of the One God--Monotheism. The claim is by no means true as fact. They may more correctly be said to have been the first to present the One God without the ancient train of the subordinate gods. They boast of having abolished the magnified evils of polytheism. But to the ancient sages the task of handling the Supreme God without his pantheon of lesser divinities was much the same as trying to deal physiologically with a man without consideration of his arms, feet, head and several organs. The gods of primeval religion were the active manifest powers, faculties, organs of God himself. Nature was his body, elemental forces the agents of his operative economy, universal mind his thinking faculty and ultimate beneficence his spiritual heart. The ancient systems of wisdom thought it not blasphemy to delineate the organic structure of deity to explain to human grasp the cause and nature of the world. Reverence was not withheld from even the lowest instrumentalization of Godhood. And God organically apprehended was to be better adored than God as an abstract "nonity."

But some strange quirk of philosophical revulsion against the function and nature of matter militated later to cause theologians to deem it a blasphemy to give God a body, parts and divisions. The mind could only be saved from defiling his purity by keeping him an empty abstraction. Unknowable and Absolute, he was to be kept ineffable. He was not to be dragged into the purlieus of mortal description, degraded into the semblance of a creation of man’s low thought.

But the astute Greeks kept the one without foregoing the other. They reverenced the One as beyond the reach of thought, yet portray his emanations in the field of manifestation. And they ranked themselves as his sons. They deemed it not dishonoring to deity to recognize his being in all things. They saw him in nature, and not as abstracted from nature. And they studied nature as the living garment of God’s immanence.

Therefore, though the monotheistic concept has a place in man’s thought problem, it is nevertheless to be appraised in its final utility to religion as practically valueless. The human mind cannot think without the concept of First Cause, and God must stand in the thought problem to fill this need. It has this dialectic utility. But it must ever remain a contentless abstraction. As such it turns out that the chalice of divinity that the Church proffered to benighted nations as the supreme boon of religion, was well-nigh an empty cup. And engrossing the mass mind with a philosophical concept that is unassimilable and must forever remain meaningless, ecclesiasticism perpetrated the far worse crime of condemning to desuetude that more realistic conception of resident deity which alone is fraught with pregnant power to apotheosize human life. Holding out a supreme Ineffability to its followers, it withheld from them at the same time the knowledge of that deity that is lodged immediately within their own selfhood. Giving them a God who is utterly inaccessible, it blocked their approach to the god who was "closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet."

This is of surpassing importance. It is revolutionary. It is devastating to prevalent orthodoxies. It shocks traditional piety to hear that the concept of the One Supreme can never be of great practical utility to man. But apart from its offices in generating in us perpetual wonder and awe, our dealing with it ends when we have placed it in the thought problem where the mind demands the postulate of First Cause. Beyond that it has little service to render us. Give it form, substance, content, description, we cannot, without destroying its necessary being. Whatever good will flow from our knowing that the Unknowable is back of all phenomena is ours. We can hardly love or worship what we cannot know. The boundary of our reach is wonder and speculation. Our attempts to worship it are the fluttering of a moth about the light we dare not look at. Ancient religion was suspected of having left the monotheistic God out of its picture. It did not leave it out, but it had the discretion to leave it alone! The sage theologists reverenced it by a becoming silence! Communion has never been established between man and an Absolute God in the cosmic heavens. But the pagan world provided a contact with a god dwelling immediately within the human breast. No reaching after the moon of the Absolute diverted conscious purpose from actual touch with the god who stood at one’s elbow. The seers of old held it a sacrilege for mortals to worship any power outside themselves. And this implied no spirit of vaunting humanism or affront to deity. It was just the recognition of deity at the point where it was accessible. The real heresy and apostasy, the gross heathenism, is to miss deity where it is to be had in the blind effort to seek it where it is not available.

Deity for man is at home, not afield in distant skies. The kingdom of heaven and the hope of glory are within. They lurk within the unfathomed depths of consciousness. Divinity lies buried under the heavier motions of the sensual nature and the incessant scurrying of the superficial mind. It is the still small voice, drowned out mostly by the raucous clamor of fleshly, material and mental interests. It is a pure, mild Presence, awaiting the day when the outer man will give more heed to its quiet speech. The Supreme God is not available; but within the quietude of his own being every man may find a fragment of that same God, made personal in his own individuality. This is the burden of the lost wisdom of antiquity. Other than potentially, God in his wholeness is not present with man; but he has not left man without that measure of his grace that man can utilize. He has projected into our nature a portion, a ray, of his own life. He has apportioned amongst all his creatures that measure of his ineffable power which each is capable of receiving. Yet potentially he has lodged the whole of himself in every man, for the nucleus of his divinity that he has implanted in every creature is a seed of the whole of his being. In man the divine seed is the Christos, the son of the Almighty Father. It is no negative statement, but the glorious affirmation of all attainment, to assert that this germ of divinity within the heart is all of God that man can possibly absorb in the present cycle. The cosmic God is hardly an object of worship by humanity; but that segmented portion of infinite Being that is tabernacled within the flesh of mortals--that is the actual divinity assigned to receive the attention and homage of mankind, and sacrificially to be eaten.

The indwelling god is himself being brought to birth within the womb of humanity. Each individual is gestating a divinity within the deeps of his own nature. Christianity has fervently exhorted us to look into the empyrean to find the unapproachable God. All the while the infant deity slumbers unheeded within the heart. Christianity has largely nullified the force of St. Paul’s almost frantic cry to us: "Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is within you?"

The seers of old distinguished between the Unknowable God of the thought theorem and the actual Presence in the human constitution by denominating the former "God" and the latter "the god." Intermediate deities were called variously "the Gods" and "the gods." The object of most constant attention in philosophy was "the god," the personal daemon of the individual. On the plane of all practical living value, it was useless to look to higher evolutionary forms of deific expression unless and until that was brought from infancy to maturity of function, since its qualities had to be assimilated into human nature before anything higher could be received. It can be stated as a matter beyond controversy that the vital concern of ancient religion was with the god lodged within the human psyche. If man missed contact with deity there, he missed it utterly.

Christianity euhemerized the pagan conception of the germinal deity in us in the historical Jesus. But this has left the rest of mortals unsanctified. The personalized Christ cuts the commonalty of mankind off from its divinity. An "only-begotten son of God," made to carry all the values and meanings in his human person, robs mankind at large of its birthright. The mistranslation of the Greek "monogenes" as "only-begotten" was an error fraught with the most terrific consequences for Christendom. It properly means "born of the one parent alone" (the Father, Spirit), in contradistinction to the idea of being born of the union of Father and Mother, or spirit and matter. It was a reference in ancient theogony to the descent of the Logos (the cosmic counterpart of the Christos in man) from the spiritual side of God’s nature alone, as distinct from its progenation from the union of spirit with matter. The doctrine was primordial in the Egyptian conception of the god Kheper or Khepera, symboled by the scarab, which, the Egyptians asserted, produced its young through the male or father alone. If Jesus was the sole epiphany of deity on earth, then the promises of our universal sonship are made nugatory. We are assured again and again that we are all sons of God and sons of the Highest. Christianity not only thrust upon the man Jesus the divinity that was apportioned amongst us all, but also, in its confusion and ignorance, forced upon his mortal person the function, power and office of the Cosmic Logos, which in the carefully graded system of the hierarchies could not conceivably have been embodied in the constitution of a mere man on earth. How could the mighty power that organized and ensouled galaxies of solar systems be confined within the tiny limits of a physical brain and nervous system? The great Christian Fathers, Clement of Alexandria and Origen (and others) expressly repudiated the possibility of the Logos taking flesh in one person of merely human stature. Such a limitation blasphemed Deity.

What has not been recognized is that the solitary exaltation of the man Jesus has inevitably demeaned humanity. His lonely apotheosization has disinherited us. And the general revolt of the intellectualism of this age against the resultant debasement of human nature to the level of the worm of the dust through Augustinian and Calvinistic impositions should stoutly attest the falsity of the orthodox characterization.

The mythical as opposed to the historical interpretation of the Gospels has been presented with some clarity by such men as Dupuis, Drews, Robertson, Smith, Renan, Strauss, Massey, Higgins, Mead and others. The historical view of Jesus’ life is stubbornly maintained in spite of the evidence adduced by Comparative Religion and Mythology, which points with steady directness to the fact that the events of the Gospel narrative are matched with surprising fidelity by the antecedent careers of such world saviors as Dionysus, Osiris, Sabazius, Tammuz, Adonis, Atys, Orpheus, Mithras, Zoroaster, Krishna, Bala-Rama, Vyasa, Buddha, Hercules, Sargon, Serapis, Horus, Marduk, Izdubar, Witoba, Apollonius of Tyana, Yehoshua ben Pandira, and even Plato and Pythagoras. It is also held in the face of the consideration that the body of the material used in the ceremonial dramas performed by the hierophants in the early Mystery Religions for 1200 years B.C. constitute by and large the series of events narrated as the personal biography of the Galilean. It is worth impressing on all minds that the legend of the historicity of the Gospels is only to be held by ignoring the solid weight of such--and vastly more--significant testimony. Instead of permitting its adherents to move in the freedom of a spiritual interpretation, the ecclesiastical power is holding them rigidly to a doctrinal meaning that is badly vitiated by literalism. In exalting Jesus in unique magnificence, it lets the divinity in every man’s heart lie fallow. The deity that needs exaltation is that which is struggling within the breasts of the sons of earth. Theological dogmatism fails utterly to see the ultimate Pyrrhic nature of its victory. Jesus’ enthronement is the disinheritance of common man. Taught to look outside ourselves for the source of power and grace, we ignore the real presence within us that pleads for closer recognition. The historical Jesus blocks the way to the spiritual Christ in the chamber of the heart.

All Christian history would have been markedly different had not the historical Jesus been interpolated into the spiritual drama. By this diversion the aims of a true spiritual culture were sentimentally turned outward to the worship of an extraneous but romantic impersonation. The consecrated devotion of hundreds of millions of souls in Christendom for centuries, instead of being focused upon the effort to nurse to life a Christly spirit within the collective body of Western humanity, has been dissipated in almost total fruitlessness upon the figure of an historicized myth. The present demoralized state of civilization in countries most thoroughly saturated with Christian doctrinism confirms the sorry truth of this statement. And the earlier Christian history lends further corroboration in its record of bickering, heretical persecution, violent warfare and ghastly crucifixions that sicken the heart. And all this was perpetrated in the name of the personal Jesus! It could hardly have been done in the name of the spiritual Christos.

If it be advanced in rebuttal that the example of the historical Jesus has stood as a loadstone and beacon to inspire and attract the hearts of millions of devotees, and that the contemplation of his excellency will work a miracle of uplift in the believers’ nature, this but proves the efficacy of psychology and not a fact of history. Ecclesiastical propaganda has more than once produced psychological hysteria, as witness the Crusades and the Inquisition. And religious hysteria has ever produced its marvels--stigmata, speaking in tongues and healings. Every religious psychologization has run into phenomena and sums its lists of "demonstrations." It is folly to question the psychological power of an example such as the pictured Jesus. Humans are almost helpless in their tendency to ape some paragon. It was precisely because mankind needed to be inspired to idealism that the formulators of the dramas in the Mystery Rituals introduced the Messiah, the Sun-God, the Christos as the central character of the piece. But he was there as ensampler and by no means as substitute or scape-goat. Much as mankind needs to be confronted by the constant presence of a model of its own destined perfection, it needs far more the invincible knowledge that divinity is its own inner possession.

To hold his place in mass reverence, Jesus had to be made matchless, incomparable, unapproachable. No man dared stand beside him. But overpowering splendour only twits and chides mediocrity. It reminds us of our littleness. It leaves us gazing blankly, hopelessly. The higher the elevation of Jesus, the vaster the gulf fixed between the ideal and the adorer. It clips the wings of aspiration. The setting up of a figure of perfection outside is in part psychologically hazardous. To approach him, to match his purity, is to reduce his stature. He must be kept beyond compare, the ever-receding ideal.

Ancient psychology of religion worked on a different principle. The motive to zeal was an ever-present possibility of attainment. Numbers of the sages were men who had gained the sunlit summit. They thought it not robbery to be equal with the god, for he was sent to call them into the mount of fellowship.

To sense poignantly the degradation to which literal caricature of spiritual knowledge has reduced theology, one needs but to point to the picture of millions of votaries gazing into the physical heavens to find God, where Laplace said that no telescope had ever located him, and searching the map of Judea to localize the Christos, whose dwelling can be only in the heart and conscience. And the Prince of Peace still awaits to be crowned the King of Glory.

NOTES

CHAPTER I

None.

CHAPTER II

1. Quoted in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by W. Y. Evans-Wentz, in a note to p. 234, from Origen’s Contra Celsum, Book I, Ch. VIII.