The Lost Light

An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Chapters 5 and 6

Chapter V

LOOSING THE SEVEN SEALS

If the mythologies of the early nations have been a source of perplexity and bafflement to students, no less so has been the Christian Bible itself. Not even the most rabid Christian partisan could claim that the book has throughout a clear message, clearly to be apprehended. Outside of much simple homiletic truth which has yielded comfort to troubled hearts, the Bible is as yet practically a sealed book. Its meaning is not known at the present day. Nothing but the thinnest shadow of the truth that the book portrays has yet fallen across the threshold of modern understanding. No suspicion of the grand completeness of its message has yet dawned upon us. Nineteen hundred years of theological digging has not unearthed the treasure buried under its allegorical profundities. And this failure has been due to our stubborn refusal to reject the Bible as history, and to accept it as cryptic typology. From beginning to end the Bible is nothing but a series of spiritual allegories traduced to history or interwoven with some history.

A further startling discovery along this line is that the series of myths deals not with a wide variety of spiritual or cosmical situations, but only with the same one situation in endless repetition! There is but one story to religion and its Bibles, only one basic event from which spring all the motivations of loyalty and morality that stir the human heart. The myth-makers had but one narrative to relate, one fundamental mystery of life to dilate upon. All phases of spiritual life arise out of the elements of the one cosmic and racial situation in which the human group is involved; and all scriptural allegory has reference to this basic datum, and meaning only in relation to it. The myths are all designed to keep mankind apprised of this central predicament. It is the key to the Bible. And it is the loss of this key situation that has caused the Book to be sealed against the age-long assaults of our curious prying and delving. The restoration of this key to our hands will be seen at once to open the doors to a vision of clear meaning, where now stalks dark incomprehensibility. Cosmology has been almost wholly discarded from religion since Milton’s day, yet a cosmical situation provides the ground for all adequate interpretation of Bible representation. The one central theme is the incarnation.

Beside esotericism and allegorism the Bible composers had recourse to another method which is less readily demonstrable and which has caused the confusion incident to mistaking myth for history to be far worse confounded. It was the method of uranography. The uranograph was the chart of the heavens with the constellated pictography. From remote times the ancients dealt with a celestial chart or map, on which their earliest teachers had essayed to depict the features of the soul’s experience in the scenes which their enlightened imaginations had traced about the star clusters. The stellar zodiacs left at Denderah, Pylae and elsewhere are impressive reminders of the influence of this heavenly scenograph. The discovery in quite recent years of the Somerset zodiac in England, a giant zodiac wrought, it is calculated, 2700 B.C. in the natural features of the countryside covering one hundred square miles, with the figure of Leo, the Lion, four miles from nose to tail-tip, is another most authentic attestation to the basic significance which symbolical astrology has held in ancient religious formulations. Present students have as yet little conception of how generally this graph was employed in spiritual ideography and how pervasively it colored the composition of the scriptural writings. It is next to impossible to grasp subtle references in the Bible and other archaic literature without a knowledge of the features of this planisphere. Bibles are in fact, in a broad general sense, just the literary extension and amplification of the symbology of the zodiac! The sages had first written the history of the human soul upon the starry skies.

If we hold them guilty of having thus perpetrated what seems to us pure whimsicality, we are convicted of ignorance on another count. They were depicting history in that sphere where it had first occurred, before it began with man on earth. Spiritual history had been enacted on a cosmic scale in the heavens, in higher ranges of cosmic life, before it was repeated and copied in the human drama on this globe. The heavenly man, in whose image and likeness earthly man is made, and in whose body the suns and planets are but cells and organs, was the prototype of man himself. And so it comes that humanity was in primordial times instructed to build its life "after the pattern of things in the heavens." The planisphere was the historical and anatomical graph of the Divine Cosmical Man, and it became at once a secret glyph for the behoof of mundane humanity.

In the spirit of this understanding the religious teachers of yore ever sought to write into human, racial, national and individual history the reflection or pattern of the uranograph. This effort was the secret motif back of all national epics! The epic was an attempt to fashion national history in the similitude of the structural unity of the divine plan for macrocosmic, and by reflection, microcosmic, man. This is in general the theme of such an esoteric work as the Jewish Kabalah.

The distinctive features of the cosmograph are in evidence in every case. In every religious epic there is first and centrally a Holy City, a "Jerusalem," residence of the king and the eventual home of all the elect. There is next an Upper and Lower Land, typifying the dual segmentation of heaven and earth, or spirit and body, in man’s nature, which was in all systems held to be the union of a divine with an animal principle. The two sections were always connected by a river, rising in the higher mountainous sources in the Upper Kingdom and flowing thence, carrying its blessings of fertility, down into the Lower Kingdom, which is thus nourished by the living water from above. Then there was always a bordering sea, symbolical in every case of the stormy ephermeral scene of the mortal life. No less was there a smaller water, a lake, Sea of Galilee, Dead Sea, Black Sea, Red Sea, Jordan River, Styx River, or the marshes or fens, which were to be crossed by the voyaging soul to reach the more blessed isles, or farther shore of spiritual bliss. Strangely enough there, was a further division of the land into seven tribal provinces, a heptarchy or heptanomis, as in Egypt, Judea, England and elsewhere. This division was representative of the seven kingdoms of nature, the seven stages of unfoldment through which life must pass in the completion of every cycle. At other times the division was a decad, after the pattern of the Sephirothal Tree of the Kabbalah, but eventually redistributed in twelve sections, as in the case of the Hebrews, Athens, Afghanistan and some others, reflecting the twelvefold segmentation of the zodiac, which in turn typified the twelve levels of man’s evolutionary attainment, or "twelve manner of fruits" on the branches of the Tree of Life, the twelve divine elements of man’s perfected being. Likewise there was always a definite locality designated as the birthplace of the god, which was in many instances also his place of death and burial and following resurrection. Other centers marked the scene of his initiations, temptations, baptisms, trials, crucifixion and transfiguration, every stage of his evolutionary experience, in fact. Then there were cities dedicated to the special cult of the sun, the moon, and even such stars as Orion, the stellar symbol of the Christos; or of Sirius, the great Dog-Star, symbol of the advent. The four cardinal points were featured, as emblematic of the four pillars of man’s constitution, his physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies and natures. A warfare between the Upper and Lower Lands and their kings was generally a part of the "history," ending in the conquest of the Lower by the Higher and the union of the two under the crown of dual sovereignty. This drama was enacted so often in the "history" of so many kings of Egypt that even a scholar of the eminence of the late William H. Breasted, in his History of Egypt, expresses his puzzlement over the fact that nearly every Pharaoh of the dynasties had to conquer Lower Egypt afresh and unite the two halves of the country under a common hegemony! In all likelihood the physiography and organic structure of the heavenly man was to some extent copied in the distribution and construction of pyramids, tombs, temples and other sanctuaries, and the pyramids themselves were quite obviously astronomical graphs with ceremonial design and conformations. There was a mountain or holy hill of the Lord, and there were points of entrance and exit from and to the lower world of Amenta.

The celestial typology having been engrafted on the topography of the country itself, the next measure was to weave the dramatic features into the national history. Egypt and the Hebrew tribes are perhaps the most outstanding examples of the operation of this methodology on an extensive scale, how extensive the general student of the present age is unprepared to believe. Thus the names associated for ages with cosmic and spiritual typism were spread out over the maps of the different lands; and the national kings, heroes, warriors, sages became titular characters in the immemorial heavenly drama. In the light of this custom we are in a position to reach a conclusion of the very greatest importance for research, affecting the entire view of scripture as history. For we are confronted with the inexpugnable fact that the names and events in religious scripts were for the greater part not the products of objective history in the first place, but on the contrary the names and events in assumed history were a deposit from the religious books! The names of kings, heroes, cities, lakes, rivers and mountains were on the uranograph long before they appeared on national maps! They were transferred from the uranograph to the maps! The occurrences of Bible "history" had been enacted annually or nightly among the stars of the sky long before they became incorporated in the epics of religion. And they had been in the epics before they became assigned to actual localities and personages. Heavenly regions and spiritual transactions were finally brought to earth and given a local habitation on land and in history. In short, the naming of geographical features was done by the sacerdotal castes in each country, in which task they simply sought to pattern their country and its history after the scheme of the uranograph! Their map and their history were cast as far as could be done in the mold of the cosmic chart. Each nation designed to make its configuration and history reflect and fulfill the heavenly model!

A partial exemplification of the same tendency can be seen even in our own American history, where the priestly class gave religious names to the earliest settlements and geographical features. The practice is attested by such names as Salem, Providence, New Haven, Newark, New Canaan, Bethlehem, Nazareth (Pennsylvania), Sante Fe, Sacramento, Corpus Christi, Los Angeles, Vera Cruz, San Salvador, San Domingo and a list of saints’ names and holy appellations. The Puritans from England and Holland emigrated to New England actuated powerfully by the assurance that they were going to fulfill in the new continent the ancient Covenant between Jehovah and the Israelites. The Mayflower was part of the religious epic. The Anglo-Israel movement of the present day manifests largely the same tendencies.

The theory here advanced is not without support from other authorities. The following brings the weight of a very venerable document to the endorsement of the idea:

"It has already been suggested that the mapping out of localities was celestial before the chart was geographically applied and that all common naming on earth came from one common naming of the heavens, commencing with the Great Bear and the Dog. The mapping out of Egyptian localities according to the celestial Nomes and scenery is described in the inscription of Khnum-hept, who is said to have ‘established the landmark of the south, and sculptured the northern--like the heaven. He stretched the Great Bear on its back. He made the district in its two parts, setting up their landmarks, like the heaven.’" (Records of the Past, XII, 68.)

An evident additional corroboration of the theory is contained in the injunction given to Moses in the Bible:

"See that thou make all things after the pattern shown thee in the Mount . . . the pattern of the heavens."

"Jerusalem, the Mount of Peace, the Nabhi-Yoni of the Earth, was one of these sacred cities that were mapped out according to the Kamite model in the heavens."1

"The pattern of things in the Mount," "the pattern of the heavens," has not hitherto been seen to be the Biblical analogue and symbol of Plato’s ideal forms. The Mount, the heavens, are of course the heights of divine ideation, whereon God projected his new world in thought forms before he impressed them upon matter. The heavens are the uplands of consciousness, or spheres of being, not physical localities. God formed his mental models on the Mount of Vision and Imagination before he cast them into concretion.

So far from grasping the uranographic art as the key to the historical problem in all scriptures, late writers vent their skepticism on this point in passages such as this:

"What proof is there--we ask once more--that the people, the mystics even, of two thousand or more years ago, read all this into the heavens; that they regarded the various divisions and towns, and the river and name of Galilee, as mystical and earthly reflexes of these celestial phenomena!"2

There is proof enough in the very fact that the ancient seers were poets and allegorists, and not historians. Practically conclusive evidence that Bible names are not objective or historical (in the first place) is to be found in the fact that there are in the Bible some scores of allusions to such local names as Egypt, Jerusalem, Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, Sidon, Gilead, Assyria, Galilee, Ethiopia and others which, if taken in the earthly geographical sense, yield no intelligible meaning whatever. Further evidence is to be found in the notable fact that the divisions and localities on mundane maps do in the main largely match the celestial features. Charts of the "Holy Land of Canaan" have been found extant in early Egypt as much as three hundred years before the alleged Israelite exodus, whence it is to be presumed that this promised land of peace and plenty was allegorical before it was historical. Massey states that an entablature on the wall of an Egyptian temple bore a list of some hundred and twenty place names afterwards localized in Palestine, at a date at least one hundred and fifty years before there could possibly have been an exodus of Israelites from Egypt. It requires little "proof" to ascertain that "Egypt" as used throughout the Bible has the meaning of the lower self or animal-human personality, indeed the physical body of man itself. Jerusalem means the "holy city" or the heavenly realms, which are in consciousness, not on the map.

"The picture of this paradise in the Hebrew writings, the Psalms, the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Revelation, were pre-extant long ages earlier as Egyptian. What the so-called ‘prophets’ of the Jews did was to make sublunary the vision of the good time in another life. There were always two Jerusalems from the time when Judea and Palestine were appendages of Egypt. Two Jerusalems were recognized by Paul, one terrestrial, one celestial. The name of Jerusalem we read as the Aarru-salem or fields of peace in the heaven of the never-setting stars. The burden of Jewish prophecy, which turned out so terribly misleading for those who were ignorant of the secret wisdom, is that the vision of this glorious future should be attained on earth; whereas it never had that meaning. . . . Thus Jerusalem on earth was to take the place of Jerusalem above and the Aarru-hetep became Jerusalem simply as a mundane locality."3

From numberless texts in the Bible itself which point to the correctness of the uranographic interpretation of names we take one alone, which by itself is enough to substantiate the claim made in this connection. In Revelation (II: 8), speaking of the two witnesses whom it is said the dragon will rise up and slay, the apocalyptic writers says:

"And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified."

There is enough in this verse to confound the entire schematism of Christian theology as historically based. It implies a clear refutation of the whole Passion Week and Good Friday ritual, as commemorative of "history." Jesus, so it says, was not crucified in an earthly Jerusalem, but only in a spiritual one, the name of which is indifferently Sodom or Egypt, the latter not even the name of an earthly city, but of a country! Jesus crucified in Egypt! And what becomes of the Gospel "history"? It is left to take its only true place, which is among the sacred myths! The crucifixion was, on the authority of the Bible itself, a spiritual and not a historical transaction.

T. J. Thorburn, author of a work aiming to invalidate the mythical nature of the Gospels, reveals the perplexity as well as the ineptitude of orthodox scholars in the face of the ancient trick of uranography and allegory:

"And if their statements are not to be taken in their natural and historical sense, then we must hold that in ancient literature it is more than doubtful whether writers ever mean precisely what they say."4

They surely never dreamed that an age would come, so far lost to the mythical intent of their writings as to suppose they ever meant literally what they said. They could not know that the wisest savants of a distant epoch would be so blinded by the forces of obscurantism as not to realize that the old books spoke only in the terms of those earthly forms that adumbrate spiritual realities. The old masters of religious science were not in the habit of speaking "precisely"; they spoke under the forms of figure always. They could not suspect that their indirect poetical method would so outrageously befuddle modern "intelligence."

Ancient philosophy was intensely responsive to the conception that all things mundane were a lower copy of things empyrean. On the theory that all forms of life were typical of the one basic nature of all life everywhere, the sages read into earthly things the reflection of things celestial. Jesus said he could not tell the disciples of heavenly things unless they had first believed in earthly things. The sea of earth life reflected heavenly life in its bosom. The seers who knew that nature was a dramatization of cosmic archai, sought for the evidence of the archetypal design in every phenomenon on earth. With what remarkable nicety they traced higher truth in the mirror of nature we shall see clearly as the story unfolds. So, in the end, in their religious life they labored to represent their history as conforming to the primordial type. To this end they resorted to a measure which has caught and deceived purblind scholarship since that time.

From the general thesis that their national history reflected God’s plan for the world, it was an easy step to the more explicit assumption that their national life embodied the divine plan. They threw about themselves the aureole of divinely constituted agency to fulfill the cosmic plan. They therefore arrogated to themselves the title of "God’s chosen people," and took the names allotted only to the spiritualized humans, the men evolved to divinity! This tack will not appear either unlikely or outlandish when we ponder the disposition of nations in our own day to put forth blatant claims to be the chosen agents of Providence for the cultural rulership of the world.

Even if there seems to be veridical history in the Bible, it can be viewed properly as a setting for the spiritual dramatization, or as the clothing in which the drama was garbled. At times, perhaps, the writers appear to have utilized the data of actual history to stage the symbolic figurations. To this task the religious poets dedicated their ingenuity.

It becomes evident on this thesis that the historical element of the scriptures is of far less significance than has been supposed. It is the philosophy of history and not the data of history that is of foremost concern. As exhibiting providential design in world life it becomes of epic moment. The Hebrew race has exploited this phase of the old methodology to its highest possibility, only, however, as Egypt had done before it; and has been so successful that it has left the impression of a unique and exalted hierarchical status for the Jewish race. The outcome of our correction of vision will be that we shall for the first time properly regard the Old Testament books as, in the main, the universal drama of the spiritual life masquerading in the disguise of Hebrew history subtly woven into the great cosmic epic! The Biblical title Israelites is a spiritual designation purely, and is wrongly taken in the sense of the name of an ethnic group. "My people of Israel" or "the children of Israel" of the Hebrew deity are just the divinized humans, mortals who have put on the immortal spiritual nature, men graduated into Christhood, a spiritual group in the early Mysteries. Gentiles were those who were not yet spiritually reborn. The word comes from the Latin and Greek roots, "gen," "gent," meaning simply "to be born." They were those born as the first or natural man, but not yet reborn as the spiritual Christ. It can be given no ethnic reference. The name "Israelite" is obviously compounded of "Is," abbreviation of Isis, or Eve’s original name, Issa (See Josephus); "Ra," the great Egyptian solar god, male and spiritual; and the Hebrew "El," God. It would then read, Father-Mother-God, making his "children" the sons of God, i.e., Christs. Likewise the name "Hebrews" means "those beyond" (the merely human state), and therefore is practically identical with "Israelites." Finally the term "Jews" (from the plural of the Egyptian IU--Latin JU) refers to the "male-female divinities," a title given in the Mysteries to men made gods and thus restored to androgyne, or male-female, condition. The national Jews thus adopted for their historical name all three of the exalted spiritual designations conferred in the Mysteries on the Epoptae or completely divinized candidates.

It was hardly expected that any positive documentary evidence could be found in support of the evident fact that these names had simply been appropriated by the race using them as illustrious titles abstracted from the uranograph. But a direct statement to that precise effect was found in the Hebrew Grammar of Gesenius, a learned German scholar, (on p. 6):

"Of the names Hebrews . . . and Israelites . . . the latter was more a national name of honor and was applied by the people to themselves with a patriotic reference to their descent from illustrious ancestors; . . ."

This is of vast significance as affecting the historical view of the Bible, with possible extremely severe repercussions on world history of the present.

The fourth consideration found essential to a grasp of archaic meaning is the knowledge that religion was an outgrowth from a specific situation involving the human race at its beginning. Religion is commonly assigned to a category under the head of psychology. It is a matter of mind and emotion.

But the roots of religion are found to go deeper than any mere inclination of the psyche. Eventually religion took psychological forms of expression, but it was originally not mere psychology. It was an outgrowth of anthropology. It took its rise out of the racial or evolutionary beginnings and bore an immediate relation thereto. Every feature of it was engendered out of the interrelation of the several elements entering into the compound of man’s constitution.

Human nature was composed of more than one element. There were the physical, the emotional, the mental and the spiritual. More compactly viewed, there are the human-animal and the divine. Religion is just the play of the factors of the interrelationship subsisting between these several natures in man. Or it is the relation between man and his god, the latter being universally existent primarily within him, secondarily without. It details the history of the soul or divine spark of spirit in its cyclical incorporation in human bodies. Its central fact is the incarnation, the relation of soul to body, God to man, man to God.

According to Plato’s Timaeus and other archaic documents a group of twelve legions of "junior gods," who were sparks of the eternal Flame of cosmic mind, were ordered, as their assignment in the cooperative work of creation with Deity, to descend to earth and elevate the races of the highest animal development by linking their own mental capacity with the organisms thus far developed by the evolution of form. They were to lift the animals across the gulf between the summit of instinct and the beginnings of reason. These angels were devas, "bright" or "shining" emanations of divine intelligence, but were not exempt from the "cycle of necessity," or periodical immersion in forms of physical embodiment on a planet for purposes of their own further self-evolution. It subserved both the interests of their own progress and that of the animals they were to uplift, that the two races, the one germinally conscious and immortal, the other dumbly brutish and mortal, should be periodically joined together, the higher to be the king and ruler of the lower. The procedure thus adopted by life gave to the animal the possibility of evolving a mind through association with a mental nature, and to the intelligent spirits the physical bodies that were their particular requirement for contacting the type of experience they were destined to undergo. If this seems bizarre, it must be remembered that all living entities are the result of the linkage of a spiritual nucleus with a material organism. No creature lives but what is compounded of "soul" and body.

In conformity with evolutionary law these legions of devas or angels, we are told, descended to earth, took lodgment in the bodies of higher animals and began their career of redeeming the lower creatures to mental status. In the Timaeus these "junior gods" are addressed by the Demiurgus (the creative Logos, Jupiter) and are told to descend and "convert yourselves according to your natures to the fabrication of animals," the gist of their mission being summed up in the command to "weave together mortal and immortal natures." This is one of the most important utterances of ancient scripture, because it announces the character of our constitution and sets forth plainly our evolutionary commission. It tells us that we are both animal-human and divine at once, animal as to our bodies, divine as to our intellects. For Plato says: "According to body it is an animal, but according to intellect a god." Our earthly task, according to St. Paul, is to link together the two natures in "one new man," bringing to an end in a final "reconciliation" "the battle of Armageddon," the aeonial warfare between the "carnal mind" of the animal and the spiritual mind of the god. This warfare is also Plato’s strife between noësis, the spiritual intelligence, and doxa, the motions of the sense nature. The soul is here in body to discipline the latter by the inculcation of habits of rectitude until the animal learns to use the powers of mind. Tutoring the animal, the soul at the same time achieved its own higher schooling in deific unfoldment. This interlocking of the two grades of life in one organism must be constantly kept in view if the proper study of religion is to be made. No organic evolution can proceed from one kingdom to another without the deploying of the mental resources of a superior kingdom in aid of the level below it. And each kingdom profits by the act of brotherhood. The god achieves his own further apotheosis by reaching down to raise the animal to human estate.

It must be noted that when the intelligence of the god is joined to the life of the animal, it communicates but a fragment of its power to the organism, remaining for the larger part of its conscious being hidden on its own spiritual plane. It thus becomes an invisible guardian, or what the ancients called the "daimon." Lurking in the background of consciousness, it is what modern psychology has lately discovered and named the "collective unconscious." From behind the curtain, as it were, it directs the animal with only a tentacle of its power. It can not incorporate in the animal a greater measure of its capacity than the latter can suitably accommodate and carry. It will push down into expression more and more of itself as the refinement of the coarse body goes on apace. Like a radio, the mechanism must be tuned up higher to register finer vibrations. In the Greek theosophy it is stated that "the gods distribute divinity" to the grades of beings below them, which "participate according to their capacity."

In briefest summary (to be amplified to greater elaboration in the sequel) this is the basic cosmological and racial datum of every old religion. Together with its implications it is the basis of every religious interpretation ever made or to be made. Every problem of ethics, devotion, discipline and intellect receives its full complement of value and meaning only in reference to this fundamentum. Religion is far more than a posture of mystic feeling; it was in origin a series of codes, principles and practices given by the demi-gods to early mankind to awaken the torpid genius of our actual divinity. In a true sense it was designed to wield a semi-magical influence to transform animal man into the divinized human! Its rites were formulated with a view to bestirring man’s memory of his essential deific character. It was in no sense merely worship. It was the most intensely practical and utilitarian culture the world has ever known. It was designed to prevent the utter loss of purpose and failure of effort in the cosmical task to which man, as a celestial intelligent spirit, had pledged himself under the Old Testament covenant and "the broad oaths fast sealed" of Greek theology. In coming to earth to help turn the tide of evolution past one of its most critical passages, he bound himself to do the work and return without sinking into the mire of animal sensuality. We must henceforth approach religion with the realization that it is the psychic instrumentality designed for the use of humanity in charting its way through the shoals of the particular racial and evolutionary crisis in which it was involved. All the stupendous knowledge relating to the entire cosmic chapter was once available, given by the gods to the sages. We have nearly lost it beyond recovery because the ignorance of an early age closed the Academies and crushed every attempt to revive the teaching. The prodigious folly of the modern essay to vitalize religion through piety alone will be more fully seen as the ancient picture takes form in the delineation. Our present business is to struggle to regain that lost paradise of intelligence. We must work again to the recognition of our high cosmic mission, and revivify the decadent forms of a once potent religious practique, based on knowledge. For spiritual cultism was once vitally related to our evolutionary security, which stands jeopardized by present religious desuetude.

The nature of the material to be presented in volume will enforce by the sheer illuminative power of the interpretation itself the necessity for this extended introduction. It was quite impossible to undertake the exegesis of recondite scriptures long misinterpreted or never interpreted at all, without providing a rationale of ancient literary methodology and setting up a background of philosophical light. The erection of this background was made all the more necessary by the inveterate recalcitrancy of modern scholarship to recognize the applicability of the methods and principles outlined. Their validation by the substance and meaning of the larger presentment now to be made involves nothing less than the complete revision of all our interpretative norms in religious study.

Chapter VI

THE DESCENT TO AVERNUS

The rectification of misguided rendering of holy writ in its entirety is a work of great magnitude and will tax severely the capacity of a single book. Particularly in regard to the traditional dogmas of theology, where misconception has become embedded in set habitudes of mind, the reinterpretation can be established only by the presentation of material in overwhelming quantity. The bare statement of the main theses of the venerable philosophy would be met with contempt or arrogant rejection. The claims must therefore be buttressed by a mass of irrefutable data. This material has not been marshaled for this use before in anything like organic array.

The story most properly begins with what is called in theology "the descent of the gods." Traditional lore is replete with legends of the "expulsion of the angels," "the fall of Lucifer and his hosts," "the fall from heaven," and the more philosophical "descent of the soul." These phrase-titles relate to the first step in the series of pre-historical and even pre-mundane episodes which culminated in the establishment of humanity on earth and the fabrication of human nature combining both a natural and a supernatural element. The substrate datum in religion is that man is an animal and a god in union. There were animals on earth and angels in heaven; and the counsels of cosmic intelligence decreed that the angels should join forces with the animals and be their gods. The conjunctive experience would educate both parties. The effort to overcome matter’s inertia and the sense urge of the flesh would develop more dynamic spiritual initiative for the gods. They would be forced to deploy more of their potential and as yet static divine power to gain mastery over the elementary forces of the physical world.

Hints are not wanting in the old scripts to show that their obligation to leave their home of blissful rest in dreamy sub-consciousness in the ethereal spheres and suffer the hardships of earth life in gross animal bodies was in some part at least a measure of karmic retribution for past dereliction elsewhere. Pride and insolence are ascribed to them by Greek theology. Violated oaths and "Moira’s bounds transgressed" are alluded to by the philosophic poets. As evolution links penalty with readjustment and forward progress, it is not difficult to admit the play of both retributive and normal procedure in the enforced descent of minor deities to our globe. It is the expulsion of Satan and his hosts from heaven in Paradise Lost and Revelation. So presented, it has been taken either as a mythical unreality or an inscrutable chapter of celestial history, and discarded from serious consideration in religious systematism. It is, however, the central situation and must be restored to its pivotal place of consequence in the picture. The doctrine of the "descent" is crucial for the interpretation. True or false, it is what the scriptures are building their narratives upon.

Of the original twelve legions of deities, ten have plunged into the stream of incarnation and are now passing through the experiences incident thereto. At the conclusion of the venture, after many incarnations for each individual member, they will return to their celestial abodes, transfigured and further divinized. The allegory of the Prodigal Son is a short glyph or graph of this evolutionary descent and return. There is hardly a religious book of any ancient nation that does not deal more or less directly with that event.

To see the "descent" as an integral function of cosmic process and not as a calamitous "fall," it is quite necessary to expound a portion of Orphic-Platonic cosmogony.

The beginning must be made where creation itself begins. It starts from Unity. All things proceed from what was aboriginally and ever ultimately is, the One Life. The pagan name for the Supreme Power was commonly The One. All things ultimately resolve into the primordial One, since they emanate from that One in the beginning. Before manifestation takes place, Being is homogeneous, undifferentiated. It is uniform similitude and excludes dissimilitude. It is all One Essence, alike in every part, if parts there are.

But in such state it is unmanifest, and from our point of view unconscious, asleep, inert. The Hindu term is Pralaya. And out of Pralaya it must awake, for it sleeps only in alternate turn with waking activity, as do all its creatures made in its likeness. It passes, like them from death to life and back again, in eternal routine.

To awake and come into being it must by force of logic perform an operation upon its own nature which is the first ground of manifestation. It can not create a universe in which to live and suffer experience without breaking its Unity apart into duality. For it must become Consciousness on the one side, in order to know what and how to create, and Matter on the other, if it is to have material with which to create! So it must split its primal Oneness into a dualism which however is still subsumed under the unity. It becomes two in one or the One in two. The One has not become Two, but a twoness.

It virtually can not create without throwing itself into the condition of being at a tension between two aspects of itself, on the strength of which tension it can exert its inchoate energies. It must therefore manifest itself as the two ends of a polarity, positive and negative. It must become polarized in relation to itself; and so it takes on the double-aspected characterization of spirit and matter, male and female, consciousness and vehicle, function and instrument, attraction and repulsion, visible and invisible, real and actual. Positively, like the proton of the atom, it must stand stably in the center, governing, holding, regulating the cyclical whirl of negative force about its eternal rock of durability. Negatively, like the electrons, it must revolve in the periodic swing of active life. It must provide the dual grounds for living existence, a conscious nucleus presiding at the heart of moving, changing embodiments. It must become, out of itself, subject, knowing, and object, to be known. Its entire purpose is obviously to arise out of unconscious slumber and become ever more awake and more concretely conscious. Since there is nothing of which it can be conscious save itself, the aim of Life is thus ever to become more Self-conscious! Therefore it must, so to speak, set itself as object over against itself as subject, and down the ages and the cycles ever thus contemplate itself. It is the seeing eye and the thing seen, as all profound esoteric philosophy asserts.

As Genesis puts it, God effected his creation, gazed upon it with gratification and pronounced it good. To see his creation he had to objectify, hypostasize, reify his thoughts, the radiations of his subjective aspect. For he creates by thoughts. He must see his ideas form inconcretion before him, take on material body and come to visible manifestation for himself and his creatures.

So his expression proceeds from unity to duality, and from duality it runs further onward to infinite multiplicity. Multiple manifestation is achieved by the operation of a principle which is easily comprehended. As life has split into spirit and matter, the one mobile, the other inert, the unity of the mobile is broken up into multitude as it moves against the immobile. The lighter essence, spirit, is broken and divided as it moves outward against the resistance of matter. A suggestive illustration is the infinite division of a body of water dropped as one unit from a height as it falls against the resistance of the air. Its sheer motion and speed throws it apart. The circulation of the blood from the central heart, dividing endlessly till it reaches the periphery in numberless streamlets, is a similar reflection of the universal law. Outward bound, it divides; on the return it reunites! Life descends, "falls," from the summit of its primal unity down into the arms of matter, dividing as it goes. Division is a logical necessity if it is to multiply itself, for unity can not multiply out of itself without first dividing itself. And it can not divide itself unless it falls or descends against resistance. The importance of this determination for clear grasp of basic theology can not be overstressed. Angels "fall" by divine ordinance, and not by literal folly of rebellion against deity. Evolutionary gravity brings them down from heaven to earth.

The wind does not commonly blow a steady gale, but comes in rhythmic puffs. Creative impulse acts similarly. Every cycle of energization of the universe finishes its work in seven waves or impulses, and the sub-cycles have also seven waves. Life projects its formative energies outward, or matterward, in surge after surge. Each one carries the impulse as far as it will go under its original force, or until the wave is brought to a dead standstill by the inertia of matter, the carrying and resisting medium. Each propulsion of power comes to a stop, locked in the embrace of matter. In this embrace the capacities of the two nodes of being interplay, fecundate each other, generate a growth of new life, and build up what is termed a plane or level or kingdom of nature, with creatures embodying the type of life there engendered. Thus there are terrestrial and celestial worlds (as Paul says), noumenal and phenomenal realms, physical and ethereal planes, material and spiritual bodies, heavens, fairy-lands, underworlds, hells, limbos, Isles of the Blessed, Elysian Fields, the meadows of Aarru-Hetep and homes on high. And the beings on the ranges from high divinity down to man are the gods of ancient mythology.

The capacities of life on each level are expressed and given play by the organic beings built up thereon. Thus each kingdom has its own specific nature and determinations. But life is not static; it is generative, reproductive, forward-moving. It creates anew, in its turn, at its level, and passes the stream of creative force on down the line. Thus the succession of waves of projection runs down the scale, each one carrying the formative force one surge farther out. On and on it goes, establishing the kingdoms of nature and the living citizens on them. The contiguous planes form a link of connection from top to bottom of the series, and this is the golden chain of life. And each level bears a definite relation to its neighbor on either side.

The explication of this relationship involves a law that is basic for all evolution. Its statement will render understandable the constitution of man. It tells why he is a soul and a body linked together. It may be called the great Law of Incubation.

Under its terms each plane is mother to the life on the plane above it and father to that of the plane below it. It receives from above the seed germs of higher life and harbors them in the womb of its soil, or matter, gestates them and eventually gives them their new birth. This is the function of motherhood. And matter (Latin mater, mother) is the universal mother. But, having received from above, it also gives the impulse to the order below; and as giver it is active, aggressive, generative--the father function. Feminine to life above, masculine to life beneath, it is the link and bridge between two worlds.

But at each step of transmission the primal impulse suffers a diminution of its impetus, a weakening of its force, and in consequence a further and further fragmentation. The matter of each plane on the downward or involutionary track being more dense in atomic structure than that of its superior, the living bodies it provides can not bear as heavy a life charge as the beings above can support, and the voltage of power must be stepped down if it is to be incorporated fittingly in the less capacious bodies of a lower kingdom. To effect this reduction in dynamism the bodies carrying the life of each plane act as electric transformers, changing a high current into numerous lesser currents to be accommodated to the lower carrying capabilities of bodies on the plane beneath. Hence the unit charge received from the plane above by each life structure on any place must, in falling one step further downward, be again broken up into a large number of fragments, each of which will become the energizing soul of a lower body. The Greek philosophers say in this connection that "the gods distribute divinity," scattering its higher units abroad from plane to plane, the units multiplying in number, but diminishing in power, as the stream flows on. This is what ancient theology connotes by "the river of life." The Orphic system speaks of "rivers of vivification," which, they say, "proceed from on high as far as to the last of things," or to the lowest stratum of the mineral kingdom. And as the gods distribute divinity, the secondary ranks in each case are said to "participate according to their capacity." The gods pour out their life for the vivifying of all lower beings, and the latter partake of this bounty or "grace" to the measure of their receptivity. Nothing other than this is meant by the "shed blood" of the gods, given for the life of the worlds. All old theologies aver that the blood of the gods, or of God, mixed with the clay of earth, makes the "red earth" which is given as the etymological signification of Adam in Hebrew, i.e., man. Man is compounded of the red life-blood of deity and the dust of the ground, which in Hebrew is Adamah, purely the feminine or material aspect of Adam, spirit, itself. Deity mixed together spirit and matter to make man.

One more step in the analysis yields the final phase of the Law of Incubation. If life is to be propagated in eternal renewal, in multiplied individualization, it becomes necessary for any living creature on each plane to produce a multiple progeny of the seeds of its own life and "plant" or bury them in the soil of the kingdom immediately below it. There they go first to their "death," after which they are reborn or resurrected in the sprouting of the seeds and their growth back to maturity. Each generation lives anew in its regeneration, but multiplied by as many times itself as the number of seeds it produced and successfully germinated in the plane below.

The vegetable buries its seeds in the soil of the kingdom beneath it, the mineral. The animal’s life is embodied in a corpus built up of vegetable material taken in each day as food. The human is rooted in an animal body. And now comes the pivotal fact in theology. The lowest ranks of gods, in their position just above humanity, must, by the Law of Incubation, send down their seeds, plant (incarnate) them in the bodies of humans, and win their next cyclical generation of divine life in that ground! Centuries of theological maundering have not told the millions of hungry sheep this plain truth as to why man nurtures a winged spirit of intelligence--a soul--in his physical body. The soul of man is in his body as a seed of divinity planted, buried, gone to its "death" in the soil of the human kingdom, and bears the same relation to that soil as does any seed to its bed. The greatest truth that can be told to mortals is that their bodies are each the gestating womb of a god. As said St. Paul, the Christ is being "formed within" each mortal body. Man has a soul because his physical human self is the nursery or breeding ground of the seeds of divinity. And man’s divinity is, or begins as, a seed. His duty is to cultivate the growth of that deific embryo. It is gestating in the womb of his physical body, and he must, as said Socrates, become a philosophic "midwife" and aid in its birth. Plato reports the Demiurgus in the notable speech to the legions of devas in the Timaeus as saying that "whatever is immortal and divine" in the human makeup, "of that I will furnish the seed and the beginning. It is your business to do the rest; to weave together mortal and immortal natures." The upper plane furnishes the seeds of godhood, the lower furnishes the soil or garden. Divinity is planted in "the garden of the world." It is the seminal soul of divine mind, destined to germinate and eventually blossom in the ground of humanity.

If, in sum, God is to multiply himself, his tree of life must reproduce on its branches a numerous progeny, each child bearing the potentiality of renewing the parent life in its fullness, and of carrying its eternal unfoldment one step ahead. As no living thing can subsist save as a result of a linking together of spirit and matter, a germinal unit of spirit must be incubated as the god in a body of material structure. This divine economy gives every creature its soul, which is its god. In the long chain of linked lives, from God down to mineral crystal, no being is deprived of its possibility of immediate communion with deity, up to the border of its capacity. But the "arm of the Lord" that is potent to bless and to save is within, not without. It is Emanuel, God with us, the hope of our glory. God is everywhere, within and without; but his son, the Christos, is only within. If he is not sought there, he will not be found. His inner presence is the provision of life that no entity should be bereft of instant contact with its parent god, who dwells on the plane just over its head, though rooted in its very body. Man’s deity is not a personage in a distant land and time, but, as an Eastern saga puts it, "closer is he than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." No man can fail of touching his divinity, but failure of his knowledge that his deity is in himself may palsy his effort to arouse its latent faculties.

A legend of India tells of a council of the gods at which it was purposed to invest man with deity. A debate arose as to how it might be entrusted to him without his misusing it. One suggested that it be buried in the depths of the sea, so that he would not easily find and abuse it. Another advised placing it on the most inaccessible mountain top. Finally the supreme head of the assembly declared he had thought of a place where no man would ever think of looking for it,--in the deepmost chambers of man’s own heart!

The basal truth that every living thing is a union of spirit and matter, soul and body, was put in a graph by the Egyptians. It is perhaps the oldest and most meaningful of signs. The great symbol carried in the hands of the gods was the Ankh, or crux ansata (ansated cross), a "T" topped with the circle. The circle is the female symbol, the boundless infinite matter, the mother of all things in endless round. The vertical line is the male symbol, a ray of intelligence that goes out from the heart of the universe to impregnate the worlds. The horizontal line is the line of division between the two, at the point where they are joined. It is the cross-line between them. The word Ankh means three most significant things: love, life and tie. It is a formula of all life, signifying that life is the resultant of a tying together of two things, spirit and matter, by the force of an attraction, which is love.

The great doctrine of the "descent" or "fall" can now be clearly envisaged. Deity, in the form of its seed potency, must descend from its own plane into the soil of the plane below it and be incubated there. It must leave its own home, its father’s house, and go out into another country, where it will be an exile and a stranger. And like the youth going out from home into a rough world to make a fight of it under temptation and gross influences, he must undergo a long toilsome trial and testing and crucifixion to become an eventual victor and return with laurels. Said Jesus: "I came forth from the Father and am come into the world."

Additional elucidation of basic meaning flows from the consideration of the great doctrine of the Trinity in theology. One is not too bold in asserting that this formula of ancient truth is not comprehended in its clear and profound significance by the Church which still blindly offers it. Once a year the pew occupants listen to a sermon on the Trinity, but go away unenlightened. Yet it is the heart of the mystery of life, the base of theology, and--easily comprehensible.

Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist of the third century, who gave the doctrine to Christianity through Augustine, has given us an analogy with a natural phenomenon by which it is possible, with the additional link of a finding of modern science, to see the simple meaning of a doctrine that has baffled comprehension for sixteen centuries. He said that we can understand how one deity can have three aspects if we think of the sun, its light and its active energy. The sun in heaven is comparable to the Father of the Trinity. It is a glowing globe of fire. The fire of the sun does not go forth into the ends of space, but abides at home. Like a match which you strike in a dark room, the fire stays on the match; it does not leave it. The fire stays’ but it generates and sends forth its son,--the light. This is the second aspect or "person." It is of the same essence with the Father, yet not he. And the Psalmist sings: "Send out thy light"!

Now a flood of clear light is released on the problem by following the implications as to the identity of the third "person," the Holy Spirit. But here it is necessary to adduce some pertinent data which is given to us by modern physical science to round out our analogy. We are told that a ray of the sun’s light out in the void of space (not near a planet) is inert. It is both cold and dark. If one could reduce one’s body to the size of a pin-point, one would be in total darkness and the intensest cold, though the sun be glaring overhead. The ray is impotent, inactive, uncreative and can generate no life until--and here is the nub of all philosophy--it falls upon a surface of a material body, a globe or planet! Only by incidence upon its opposite pole, matter, can the light of spirit come to its creative function. There is required the interplay of its rays with a resistant surface to bring out its own powers from latency to potency. Matter is, as already shown, the "mother" of life, while spirit (God) is its father. And, as everywhere, father spirit can not become creative until it unites with and fecundates mother matter! His ray of power, his son, is in a sense the phallic emanation of his seed, and the seed must become coefficient with the unfructified egg of life in matter’s bosom to bring a new birth to pass. Almost it might be said,--here is all truth in a nutshell. The light of God would remain uncreative unless it entered the body or womb of mother life and aroused the slumbering potentialities therein. And here is the solution of a riddle of mythology which has baffled and horrified Christian moralists no end. The fables of the gods represent the son of deity as turning about and creating upon his own mother. Horus is called "the Bull of his Mother"--Isis. The sons of God marry their own mothers! Horrible! Detestable! shout the offended Church Fathers. Yet the son of present life marries and impregnates his own mother every time an acorn or grain of wheat falls into the ground and germinates! It is discernible at last why the letter H comes a second time into the form of the sacred tetragrammaton, or four-letter name of Jehovah, the Ineffable Name of ancient Kabalism--JHVH. "J" is the Father God, the line that comes down from on high, goes deep into the heart of matter and then turns upward to return to deity. The H represents by its two vertical lines life divided into its two aspects, spirit and matter, joined by the cross line, and so brings its activity into the realm of the mother, matter. The V is their son, who goes down in his turn into matter and returns. Now, why does the mother H come into the formula of creation a second time? The J H V would be a formula covering one--the first--generation of life. It would take it through one cycle. But that would not be a glyph that would represent life as perpetuating itself through endless cycles of renewal. It would end there. The graph must carry it on. As, then, the son must take up the line and become father in his turn, he must unite his productive fecundation with his old mother, matter. And so the H, or mother, must be brought into the picture once more. And the holy name becomes thus a descriptive form for all creation. For spirit is creatively helpless, like the sunlight, without the co-operation of its opposite, matter, which is dramatized as its wife and sister. Hence every mythological deity was linked with his shakti or spouse, his creative potency, without whom he would remain forever ungenerative. The implications of this determination are tremendous, for if spirit can not give birth to its archetypal conceptions without the implementation of matter in actual creation, neither can it function apart from matter in philosophy! And a thousand fantastic "spiritual" cult systems that have deluded uncritical minds in every age by a denial of the utility of matter, are at one stroke given the coup de grâce as illogical fallacies.

Reverting to the Trinity, it is desirable to go further with the Greek elaborators of the Orphic wisdom in delineating the aspects of divine activity.

Of the Father they assert that he "abides." A Hindu script has the passage in which Lord Krishna says: "Having impregnated the universe with a portion of myself, I yet remain." He remains on his own plane. He is the unmoved Mover and the uncaused Cause. He is without experience himself, delegating the function of acquiring it to his Son. He is unaffected, undivided, unchanging and undiminished.

Of the Son they say that he "proceeds." He bears the Father’s potentialities out into all the universe. He is the radiating arm of his Father’s power. He goes out to do the will of his parent and become his vicegerent in the worlds. He becomes God’s spoken Word. He conveys the Logoic ideas out upon the bosom of his Father’s emanations to stamp them upon plastic matter. And proceeding from the bosom of the Father, he goes forth into every condition which is precisely the opposite of that of the Father. He will become subject to experience and suffer all things, while the Father abides unmoved. He will be affected, divided, changed and be sadly diminished, suffering the loss of all that he enjoyed with the Father. He will endure all experience in every kingdom, will be fragmented into "partial natures," will enter a moving stream of endless change, and will be reduced to a minimum of his glory on the cross of suffering.

Of the Holy Spirit they say that it "converts" matter to its own likeness; "is converted" by matter to its next higher estate; and finally "returns."

What, then, is the Holy Spirit, the Third Person? It is the first Ray of divine life, undergoing its final conversion into active creative agency. It is latent power of God’s mind, transformed into working efficacy. It is static divinity become kinetic. It is God’s Logos, or Word, carrying the command of his creative Voice, now converted into an energy that moves matter and builds worlds. It is, finally, God’s spirit at work; no longer static, or merely potential, but released upon matter in moving force--kinesis.

It may be helpful to present a diagrammatic sketch of this formulation, as it is a brief but complete graph of the entire rationale of all incarnation, or involution of life in matter, and its evolution back to spirit. It is thus a concise formula comprehending all that ancient scriptures have been designed to elucidate.

SUN .............. FATHER .......... ABIDES.

LIGHT .......... SON ................. PROCEEDS.

{{CONVERTS (Matter).

{{IS CONVERTED (By Matter).

EARTH ......... HOLY SPIRIT ..{

{

{ RETURNS

All "history" takes place at the point where the light, or latent radiation of divine force, comes in contact with matter, earth, the mother. For there involution is brought to a halt and, spirit being implanted within the heart of matter and awakening its slumbering potencies, there is begun at that point a new growth of life, actuated by the union of intelligence with sheer energy. And this new growth begins the evolutionary stage, or the return unto the father, or parent, status.

When Trinities are given as Father, Mother and Son, the aspect here characterized as the Holy Spirit is the "Son," the product of the union of Father and Mother. When given as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Mother is implicit, being the material element necessary at all times.

The Son’s, or the ray’s, impregnation of Mother matter begins a new process of growth from seed to adulthood, which through a cycle of "conversion" and "being converted" lifts up the new form of Sonship of deity to the stage which the Father had reached in its last previous cycle. The cycle is completed with the "return"; but after aeonial rest life gets ready to make its next rhythmic movement outward to unite again with the Mother.

Having set forth in the most compact form the outline of the structure of ancient evolutionary knowledge, it is incumbent on us now to trace the origin and fix the place of every single doctrine of theology in the draft. It is requisite also that sufficient space be granted to present as much as is permissible of the vast body of data supporting each phase of the exegesis. The "descent" is the first feature of the chart that relates heavenly creation to earthly life, and is logically the first aspect of divine activity to be taken up. Its groundwork and presuppositions having been laid down, its presence in ancient religion must be demonstrated with sufficient fullness.

NOTES

CHAPTER V

1. Massey: The Natural Genesis, I, p. 168.

2. The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, T. J. Thorburn, p. 108.

3. Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 539.

4. The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels, p. 109.

CHAPTER VI

None.