The Lost Light

An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Chapters 9 and 10

Chapter IX

ALIVE IN DEATH

Such then was the archaic view of the origin of the soul from on high, its fall into the darkness and distractions of the body and its consequent submergence in carnal sense. And, drastic as is seen to be the necessary rehabilitation of all scripture on the basis of this revised understanding, it will be far overshadowed in theological importance by a still more radical reconstruction arising from the ancient use of the figure under which life in the body was mythically represented. For everywhere throughout antiquity earthly life was depicted as our death! It is of little avail that the portraiture be uproariously protested as not befitting such a condition of vivid life as is ours in the body. We may indignantly cast back upon ancient heads the obloquy of such an inappropriate metaphor. But our repudiation of their choice of figure falls entirely wide of the mark as affecting the meaning of ancient texts. The fact stands that they did call our life here death, and that when they spoke of "the dead" in sacred books, it is indubitable that they meant the living humans. The words "death" and "the dead" are used in the old scriptures to refer to living humanity in earthly embodiment. We scurrying mortals are "the dead" of the Bible and other sacred books, and the "death" spoken of there is our living existence here. We may reject the aptness of their symbolism, but it is past our prerogative to read a meaning into their books other than the one they intended; or to read out of them a meaning they consistently deposited therein. The astonishing point, of revolutionary significance for all religion, will receive textual treatment in the present chapter, and a later one will further vindicate the correctness of the thesis. It is perhaps the cardinal item of the whole theological corpus, the real "lost key" to a correct reading of subterranean meaning in esoteric literature. In ancient theology "death" means our life on earth.

Be the figure apt or be it considered unthinkable--as it will be at first by many--the texts of scripture will yield their cryptic meaning on no other terms. And the Bible is a sealed book mostly because these two words, "death" and "the dead," have not been read as covers of a far profounder sense than the superficial one.

To be sure, it is death in a sense to be understood as dramatic and relative only. And it pertains to the soul in man, not to the body. Life and death are ever as the two end seats on a "see-saw." As the one end goes to death the other rises to life. The death of the body releases the soul to a higher life; conversely, the "death" of the soul as it sinks in body opens the day of life to that body. The theological death of the soul in incarnation is a death that does not kill it in any final sense. It is a death from which it rises again at the cycle’s end into a grander rebirth. It is a death that ends in resurrection. And sixteen centuries of inane misconception of the resplendent glory of the greatest of all doctrines, the resurrection from the dead, will be resolved at long last into the bursting light of its true meaning when the dust of ignorance is brushed away.

For animal man the advent of the gods was propitious; indeed it was the very antithesis of death. The plunge into carnality that brought "death and all our woe" to the soul, brought life to the lower man. That was part of its purpose. The gods came to "die" that we mortals might "live." They came that both they and we might have life more abundantly, but at what cost to themselves--a long "walk through the valley of the shadow of death." Theirs was the death on the cross of flesh and matter.

The use of the term "death" must be in any case a comparative one, for there strictly is no death, in the form of total extinction of being, for any part of real being. All death, so called, is but a transition from state to state, a change of form, of that which is and can not cease to be. Life and death are eternally locked in each other’s arms, for as Thales says, "Air lives the death of water; fire lives the death of air," and so on. So body lives the death of the soul, and soul lives the death of the body. It thrives by virtue of that death. The germ and young shoot of any seed live the death of the body of the seed. The law of incubation brings high deities into their Hades, into Pluto’s dark kingdom. For the gods the cycle of incarnations was the descent into hell--their crucifixion, death and burial, in all archaic literature!

The material demonstrating this proposition must be of sufficient volume to obviate all doubt as to its validity. Upon its successful vindication hinges the final determination of meaning for hundreds of passages, and the ultimate interpretation of the main theses of all theologies. As will be shown later, it carries with it the purport of the resurrection doctrine, the cornerstone of religions. When we come to that climactic doctrine, it will be possible to locate with exactness what and where that tomb was whose gates and bars were rent asunder by the resurgent Lord. Modern theology little dreams, to this day, the truth back of its own mishandled, but still grandiose, symbols.

The incarnation, for the soul, was its death and burial. But it was a living death and a burial alive. It was an entombment that carried life on, but under conditions that could be poetically dramatized as "death." Our inability to comprehend any but a physical sense of the word "burial" has left us easy victims of ancient poetic fancy, and led to the foisting upon ourselves perhaps the most degraded interpretation of the crucifixion, death and resurrection of deity in mortal life ever to be held by any religious group. Not even woodland tribes have so wretchedly missed the true sense of the great doctrines. Literalism in this instance has debased the human mind more atrociously than fetishism or totemism.

The textual testimony supporting the thesis is so voluminous that practical considerations forbid its full amassing. Nothing less, however, than the serried marshaling of much material will avail to carry conviction to minds unalterably set to opposing views.

Proclus advises us that the incarnating Egos were forewarned that their venture into flesh would be successful on condition that they achieved it "without merging themselves with the darkness of body." They were to make a magnetic connection with the animal body by means of a linkage of their currents of higher life with the forces playing through the nervous system of the animal. They were thus to be in position to pour down streams of vital power into the body, but were not to sink their total quantum of divine intellection into the sense life of the beast. They were to hover over the physical life of the body, touch it with divine flame, but not be drawn down into it. To fall into this dereliction would be to sin, to lose a measure of their vivific life and eventually to die. For there were always two deaths spoken of in the books of the past. It was death, in the first place, for them to come under the heavy depression of fleshly existence. This was the first death. But to sink farther down and be lost in the murks of animal sensualism to a degree that made a return to their heavenly state next to impossible, was to suffer the "second death," of which the soul ever stood in fear and terror in the old texts. The first death was the incarnation; the second was failure to rise and "return unto the Father."

As Apuleius says, the soul, then, approached the "confines of death." And on her approach, and at the moment of her divulsion from her seat on high, there ensued an intermediate or preparatory stage, a partial loss of consciousness termed by the writers a "swoon." Corroboration of this experience is found in a very old document known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead (44):

"In the Bardo Thödol the deceased1 is represented as retrograding step by step into the lower and lower states of consciousness. Each step downward is preceded by a swooning into unconsciousness; and possibly that which constitutes his mentality on the lower levels of the Bardo is some mental element or compound of mental elements . . . separated during the swooning from higher and more spiritually enlightened elements. . . ."

This swooning on the downward path to earthly death is likened to a falling asleep. Jesus’ assertion that Lazarus was not dead but only sleeping, and needed only to be awakened, is a picturing of the same condition. Incidentally the same thing is said of the earth-bound Osiris in Egypt. "That is Osiris, who is not dead but sleeping in Annu, the place of his repose, awaiting the call that bids him come forth to day." Massey comments:

"Osiris in Annu, like Lazarus in Bethany, was not dead but sleeping. In the text of Har-Hetep (Rit., Ch. 99), the Speaker, who personates Horus, is he who comes to awaken Asar (Osiris) out of his sleep. Also in one of the earlier funeral texts it is said of the sleeping Asar: ‘The Great One waketh, the Great One riseth . . .’ The Manes in Amenta were not looked upon as dead, but sleeping, breathless of body, motionless of heart. Hence Horus comes to awaken the sleepers in their coffins."2

Horus says (Rit., Ch. 64): "I go to give movement to the Manes; I go to comfort him who is in a swoon,"--showing the perfect matching of Egyptian and Tibetan "necrological science.

The swoon attending each further step matterward deepens by degrees until it amounts to the full "sleep" or "dream" of mortal existence, introduced by the incubus of body upon spirits of light. It is the Oriental Maya. The vivid awareness of existence which we feel so indubitably is to the ancient sages only a dull slumber and stupor in comparison with that life of ecstatic realism from which we were divulsed by the decree of our Fate.

Thomas Taylor expounds Greek Platonism as holding that the soul "in the present life might be said to die, as far as it is possible for a soul to die." He asserts directly that the soul, until purified by "philosophy," "suffers death through this union with the body."

We have the whole idea most tersely expressed in the Gorgias of Plato:

"But indeed, as you say also, life is a grievous thing. For I should not wonder if Euripides spoke the truth when he says: ‘Who knows whether to live is not to die, and to die is not to live?’ And we perhaps are in reality dead. For I have heard from one of the wise that we are now dead; and that the body is our sepulchre; but that the part of the soul in which the desires are contained is of such a nature that it can be persuaded and hurled upward and downwards."

If incarnate life is the burden of this death, then release from it must presuppose a liberation from the thralling "dead weight." Our work aims to correct the misconceptions that have vitiated previous studies in eschatology. Reputed savants in the field give no evidence of having the remotest apprehension of textual meanings pertaining to this phase of theology. Even Massey and Taylor have fallen just short of that final step in comprehension which would have taken them into the temple of truth, the threshold of which they never quite crossed. They knew that the ancients styled this life "death," but they were unable, apparently, to apply the connotations to the Bible and theology. The obsessions of current thought were too strong for them, and overrode the logic of their own premises.

The great Plotinus (Enneads I, lviii) gives us a clear presentment of the Greek conception:

"When the soul had descended into generation (from this first divine condition) she partakes of evil and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in it . . . and death to her is, while baptized or immersed in the present body, to descend into matter and be wholly subjected to it. . . . This is what is meant by the falling asleep in Hades, of those who have come there."

It is worth noting that he uses the word "baptized" to describe incarnation. To incarnate was to be plunged into the watery condition of the body! This is the whole of the meaning of the baptism in ancient theology!

To the above may be added a supplement from Pythagoras, according to Clement, "that whatever we see when awake is death; and when asleep a dream."

It is sometimes true that archaic usage of the word "death" makes it cover the period following the occurrence of death in its common meaning, the demise of the body. Incarnation was regarded as a continuing experience, the periodical rhythm of release from the body no more breaking the sequence of lives than does our nightly sleep break the continuity of the experience of the days. But as our waking days are the important parts of our earthly activity, the nights being but interludes of repose and renewals of strength, so the positive incarnate periods of our larger lives are the primarily significant phases of our mundane history. The ancient seers both knew more about the subjective experiences of the soul when out of the body and were less concerned with them than modern Spiritualists. They regarded the phenomena of discarnate manifestation as but the more or less automatic reaction of the soul to the sum of its impressions in its last incarnation, a kind of reflex, threshing over the events of the life just closed. They would have regarded it as preposterous to use the vaporings of the spirits for the tenets of a religion. They were but the products of a mental automatism set up by the engrossments of the last life. The post mortem existence of the soul was only the hidden side of the life on earth, and regarded as comparatively inconsequential to the larger processes of conscious living. Theologically, "death" was the bodily life on earth, but comprising its two aspects of sleeping and waking, living and dying, in its comprehensive unity. Activity in the body during the waking phase of the "death" was alone determinative of destiny. By unfortunate diversion of the original cryptic sense, the unimportant portion of the experience, the interlude between lives, became the locale to which practically all religious values were shunted when esoteric knowledge was lost. The meaning of all religion has in consequence fled from earth, where it properly belongs and where alone its true value is realized, to heaven, where present focusing of meaning has little utility for man.

Taylor quotes the priests as testifying "that the soul is buried in body as in a sepulchre."3 Alexander Wilder, in a note to Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p. 31), comments:

"Hades . . . supposed by classical students to be the region or estate of departed souls, . . . is regarded by Mr. Taylor and other Platonists as the human body, which they consider to be the grave and place of punishment for the soul."

Virgil adds significant testimony. In the Aeneid, writing of that "interior spirit" which sustains the heavens and earth, men and beasts, "the vital souls of birds and the brutes," he continues:

"In whom all is a potency . . . and a celestial origin as the rudimentary principles, so far as they are not clogged by noxious bodies. They are deadened by earthly forms and members subject to death; hence they fear and desire, grieve and rejoice."

Plato’s able expounder Proclus, writing that the soul brings life to the body, says that

"she becomes herself situated in darkness; and by giving life to the body, destroys both herself and her own intellect (in as great a degree as these are capable of receiving destruction). For thus the mortal nature participates of intellect, but the intellectual part, of death, and the whole, as Plato observes in the Laws, becomes a prodigy composed of the mortal and the immortal, of the intellectual and that which is deprived of intellect. For this physical law which binds the soul to the body is the death of the immortal life, but vivifies the mortal body."

Wilder in his Introduction to Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries comments again:

"The soul was believed (by the Greeks) to be a composite nature, linked on the one side to the eternal world, emanating from God, and so partaking of Divinity. On the other hand, it was also allied to the phenomenal and external world, and so liable to be subjected to passion, lust and the bondage of evils. This condition is denominated generation; and is supposed to be a kind of death to the higher form of life. Evil is inherent in this condition; and the soul dwells in the body as in a prison or a grave."

It has been claimed in some quarters that the death here mentioned is simply Greek tropology for a state of spiritual decay into which mortal man sinks. But a proper view sees such degeneracy as the result of the incarnation, which was the occasion of it. The concrete and the moral situations do image each other; but it is a matter of vast importance which one is primary and casts the reflection. There was a descent in historical fact. From it flowed the moral delinquency.

Having seen the lucid presentation of the "death" philosophy in Greek systems, we turn to Egypt. Does the wisdom of this venerable nation support that of Greece? With such fullness and positiveness does it agree with Greek conception that dispute as to the legitimacy of the interpretation must henceforth be silenced forever. It is from these unfathomable wells of Kamite knowledge that we draw the water which nourishes our intellectual life. Again the volume of material is prodigious.

It must be prefaced that the Egyptian writings use more than one character to personate the incarnating god. We may find Osiris, or Ra himself, or Tum, Atum or Horus taking the role. Then there are the two characters which we meet most often, the "Speaker" and the Manes in the Ritual. These appear to be distinctly the human soul. Sometimes again it is represented as the "deceased," again as the "Osirified deceased." Besides, the names of four or more kings are used to stand for deity: Unas, Ani, Pepi and Teta, frequently with "the" prefixed.

It is definitely corroborative of the thesis here defended that the central god figure in Egyptian religion, Osiris, the Father, in distinction from Horus, the Son, is consistently assigned the functions, prerogatives and sovereignty of the "king of the dead." He is hailed in a hundred passages as the Ruler of the Underworld, or as Lord of Amenta (Amenti, Amentiu), the Egyptian Hades, the correct locating of which region in theology is one of the major aims of this work. He is assimilable to the Greek Pluto, ruler of Hades, the dark underworld. That this dismal limbo of theology is actually our earth is a fact which has never once dawned upon the intellectual horizon of any modern savant, however high his name. Osiris, the "Speaker," the "Manes," the incarnating deity, is indeed the king in the realm of the dead. For we are those dead, and the god within us came to rule this kingdom, according to the arcane meaning of every religion. For the Egyptians called the coffin "the chest of the living."4

A passage from Budge is of importance here:

"About the middle of the Ptolemaic period the attributes of Osiris were changed, and after his identification with Serapis, i.e., Pluto, the god of death, his power and influence declined rapidly, for he was no longer the god of life. In the final state of the cult of Osiris and Isis, the former was the symbol of death and the latter the symbol of life."5

This change does not betoken what Budge supposes, but quite the contrary. It hints at the fact that the Egyptian conception of the character of Osiris as Lord of the Underworld of death began to weaken in the later days, as foreign influences crept in, and the profound esoteric meaning of "death" became obscured. The god’s influence as Lord of Death declined rapidly at this epoch, not because of the ascription to him of a new and untrue character, but because of the decay of the true comprehension of his place and function in the pantheon. His influence in his perennial office decayed because knowledge of him in that role had decayed. With many such misapprehensions must the battle for a sane grasp of the ancient wisdom contend. The actual issue has been beclouded at almost every turn.

In confirmation of our claim that death in the ancient usage did not imply extinction, the Manes in the Ritual (Ch. 30 A) says: "After being buried on earth, I am not dead in Amenta." Horus knows that though he enters the realm of the dead, he does not suffer annihilation. He knows that he is that which survives all overthrow. Even though, as he adds, he is "buried in the deep, deep grave," he will not be destroyed there. He will rise out of the grave of the (living) body in his final resurrection.

Such a passage as the following carries in its natural sense the allocation of the term "dead" to living inhabitants on earth, not to the spirits of the deceased: "The peoples that have long been dead (?) come forth with cries of joy to see thy beauties every day."6 It pertains to the resurrection. Another text says: Tanenet is the burial-place of Osiris." Tanenet, along with Aukert, Shekhem, Abydos, Tattu, Amenta and half a dozen others, is a designation for the earth as the place of burial for the soul living in death.

Cognate with the idea of death is the presumption of burial in a tomb, grave, coffin or sepulcher. Evidence of the prominence of these terms in relation to the descent into earth life is not wanting in the old texts. The matter is not left in any state of doubt or confusion. A sentence from Cocker’s Greek Philosophy speaks in terms of unmistakable directness: "The soul is now dwelling in ‘the grave which we call the body.’"7 Here is indeed the undebatable clarification of that poetic imagery, the confusion of which with the natural fact of bodily decease has cost Christianity its heritage of wisdom.

In the Egyptian records we have Osiris as the god who "descended into Hades, was dead and buried" in Amenta. Massey’s succinct statement covering the point is: "The buried Osiris represented the god in matter,"--not in a hillside grave. The hillside grave, however, was the typograph used to designate the non-historical burial in the body. What could be more pointed and conclusive than Massey’s other declaration: "In the astronomical mythology the earth was the coffin of Osiris, the coffin of Amenta, which Sut, the power of darkness, closed upon his brother when he betrayed him to his death"?8 "The coffin of Osiris is the earth of Amenta," he says again.9 It is worthy of note that the shrine in the Egyptian temples, representing the vessel of salvation, was in the form of a funeral chest, the front side of which was removed so that the god might be seen. Chapter 39 of the Ritual contains a plea for the welfare of the incarnated soul: "Let not the Osiris-Ani, triumphant, lie down in death among those who lie down in Annu, the land wherein souls are joined unto their bodies." So that it is quite apparent that the land in which souls lie down in "death" is this old earth of ours. For nowhere else are souls joined unto their bodies! This is the only sphere in the range of cosmic activity where this transaction is possible, and this fact is sufficient warrant for focusing upon it all that mass of vague meaning for which theologians have been forced to seek a locale in various subterranean worlds whose place is found at last only in their own imaginations.

Horus says in one text: "I directed the ways of the god to his tomb in Peqar . . . and I caused gladness to be in the dwellers in Amentet when they saw the Beauty as it landed at Abydos."10 Abydos was claimed to be the place of entry to the lower world where the "dead" lived, but in this use it was another of those transfers of uranographic locality to a town on the map in some way appropriately symbolizing the spiritual idea involved. There was no actual entrance to an actual underworld at Abydos (or anywhere else), but to complete the astral typology a temple, tomb and deep well (of great symbolic value) had been constructed there to the god Osiris. It was mythically and poetically the door of entry to the lower world, or realm of death, Amenta. Budge does not realize that he is writing only of the historical adaptation of a spiritual allegory when he says:

"But about Osiris’ burial-place there is no doubt, for all tradition, both Egyptian and Greek, states that his grave was at Abydos (Abtu) in upper Egypt."11

He argues that Osiris must have been a living king, who was later deified. This is not likely, as there is little to indicate that the Egyptian gods were other than abstract personifications of the powers of nature and intelligence. The legend that his body was cut into fourteen pieces, scattered over the land and then reassembled for the resurrection could have no rational application to the life of an actual king. Myth has been taken for history on a vast scale.

Another text carries straightforward information of decided value: "In the text of Teta the dead king is thus addressed: ‘Hail! hail! thou Teta! Rise up, thou Teta! . . . thou art not a dead thing." 12 What can be the resolution of so evident a contradiction of terms--telling a dead king he is not dead--unless the new interpretation of "death" as herein advanced and supported be applicable?13 The souls as deities entered the realm of death, our world, but were not dead; philosophy dramatized them as such, however.

In a different symbolism the Eye of Horus, an emblem typifying his life and said to contain his soul, was stolen and carried off by Sut, the evil twin. Of this Budge says that "during the period when Horus’ Eye was in the hands of Sut, he was a dead god." His regaining possession of his Eye symbolized the recovery of his buried divinity and his restoration to his original godhood. Horus elsewhere (Rit., Ch. 85) says: "I come that I may overthrow my adversaries upon earth, though my dead body be buried." If such a declaration is not to be taken for a species of after-death spiritism, it can have logical meaning only in reference to the contention that the buried god is the soul in the fleshly body.

It is imperative to look next at the conceptions of the sphere of death that were expressed through the use of the term "underworld." This region of partial death in which the outcast angels were imprisoned was styled the dark "underworld." A variant name was "the nether earth." It is often actually pictured as a subterranean cavern. It may be asked if it has ever occurred to any scholar of our time that "the underworld" was but another figurative appellation for the condition of life in the human body. Again a mass of data is available.

All nations of antiquity show in their literature traces of a legend in which the soul makes a journey through a dark underworld. The vagueness of its location, however, has failed to give any scholar an illuminating suggestion as to its totally figurative and unreal character. Nobody has ever seriously presumed to locate this dreary region, in spite of the fact that it was childishly regarded as an actual place. It was hazily associated with the grave or assumed to lie in some dim region into which the soul passed after death, somehow, somewhere "under," but under what, it was not apparently ever determined. The cause of bafflement was the ineradicable assumption that its "underness" was to be oriented in relation to the earth! No one has caught the idea that its location was under the heavens, and hence that it was our own earth itself! The surface of the earth, man’s world, was assumed to be obviously not an "underworld." But the problem of locating another limbo beneath it baffled theological speculation through the ages. The outcome is that the locale of Pluto’s shadowy kingdom has been hung indeterminately between the surface of the ground and the dubious dim region of after-death spheres. All the while a thousand texts point to its location in the physical body!

Lewis Spence cautiously admits that the court of the Mayan underworld seems to have been conducted on the principles of a secret society with a definite form of initiation, and that the Mysteries of Eleusis and others in Greece were concerned with the life of an underworld, especially dramatized in the story of Demeter and Kore.14 He admits that the Greek deities were gods of the dead. But he mars his tentative approach to the truth by advancing the conjecture that the Book of the Dead may have been the work of prehistoric Neolithic savages! We refrain from caustic comment, save to aver that if the Egyptian Book of the Dead was the product of Neolithic savages, the status of modern mentality which is as yet totally incapable of understanding its high message, must by inference lie a stratum or two below that level.

The Mystery Rituals did dramatize the life of an underworld, but the gods, as kings of this nether realm, were not subterranean deities. The gnomes and other nature sprites were the only "deities" that were believed to subsist beneath the surface of the physical earth. The gods of the underworld were always the gods of the dead. And as the souls of deceased mortals were in all religions asserted to ascent to heaven and never to remain in the burial ground with the corpse, it was again impossible to place the underworld down with the gnomes. But it seems next to incredible that academic diligence should have missed the plain correlation which would have made the descent of spirits from heaven equate the descent of all the divine heroes and sun-gods into the dark underworld--of earth.

From the great Egyptian Ritual, which so cryptically allegorizes this earthly death, we learn that the mystery of the Sphinx originated with the conception of the earth as the place of passage, of burial and rebirth, for the humanized deities. An ancient Egyptian name for the Sphinx was Akar.15 This was also the name for the tunnel through the underworld. And it is said that the very bones of the deities quake as the stars go on their triumphant courses through the tunnels of Akar (Pyramid Texts: Teta, 319). As the stars were the descending deities, the metaphor of stars passing through the underworld tunnels is entirely clear in its implication. The riddle of the Sphinx is but the riddle of mankind on this earth. The terms of the riddle at least become clearly defined if we know that the mystery pertains to this our mortal life, above ground, and not to our existence in some unlocalized underworld of theological fiction.

The entrance to Amenta, with its twelve dungeons, consisted of a blind doorway which neither Manes nor mortal knew the secret of and none but the god could open. Hence the need of a deity who should come to unlock the portals and unbar the gates of hell, and be "the door" and "the way." The god came not only to unlock the door of divinity to human nature, but to be himself that door. The giving of the keys to bolt and unbolt the doors of the underworld was but the allegory of this evolutionary reinforcement of the human by the divine nature.

Descriptions of this dark realm of our present state are given in the texts. "It is a land without an exit, through which no passage has been made; from whose visitants, the dead, the light was shut out." "The light they beheld not; in darkness they dwell." Massey ventures the assertion that "the inferno, the purgatory and the paradise of Dante Alighieri are extant recognizably in the Book of the Dead as the domains of Amenta."16

The first chapter of the Book of the Dead was repeated in the Mystery festivals on the day when Osiris was buried. His entrance into the underworld as a Manes corresponds to that of Osiris the corpse in Amenta, who represents the god rendered lifeless by his suffocation in the body of matter. The dead Osiris is said to enter the place of his burial called the Kasu. In this low domain of the dead there was nought but darkness; the upper light had been shut out. But Horus, Ptah, Anup, Ra and others of the savior gods would come in due time to awaken the sleepers "in their sepulchres," open the gates and guide the souls out into the light of the upper regions once more. One of the sayings of the soul contemplating its plight in the underworld is: "I do not rot. I do not putrefy. I do not turn to worms. My flesh is firm; it shall not be destroyed; it shall not perish in the earth forever" (Ch. 154). Inasmuch as the flesh of the physical body most certainly will perish, rot, putrefy, and turn to food for worms in the only grave that Christian theology has been able to tell us of, the term "flesh" in the excerpt can not be taken as that of the human body. And that it is not to be so taken is obvious from other passages. It refers to the substance of another body which does not rot away.

The same sense may distinctly be caught in the term "body" as used in the prayer uttered by the soul in the body when it says: "May my body neither perish nor suffer corruption forever." Such a prayer directed to the physical body would be obviously irrelevant, expecting the impossible. Horus, on his way to earth to ransom the captives, says: "I pilot myself towards the darkness and the sufferings of the deceased ones of Osiris" (Ch. 78). Massey sums the discussion:

"The wilderness of the nether earth, being a land of graves, where the dead awaited the coming of Horus, Shu, Apuat (Anup), the guide, and Taht . . . as servants of Ra, the supreme one god, to wake them in their coffins and lead them forth from the land of darkness to the land of day."17

Analysis of other types of representation will disclose the fact that the Egyptians, in their lavish use of animals as symbols, filled the underworld with a menagerie of mythical monsters. Without trespassing on the ground of later discussion, it may be briefly said that a number of animals--dragons, serpents, crocodiles, dogs, lions, bears, etc.--lay in wait in the underworld to devour the luckless Manes. What is the significance of this? Patently it figures the menace to the soul of its subjection to the constant beat upon it of the animal propensities, since it had taken residence in the very bodies of the lower creatures. In a measure detached, it was yet not immune to being drawn down into ever deeper alliance with the carnal nature. Ever to be remembered is Daniel’s statement that "his mind was made like the mind of an animal."

Etymology supplies a sensational suggestion of the soundness of the present thesis in the similarity of the two words "tomb" and "womb," which Massey avers rise from the same root. At all events it is rigorously in accord with the Greek theory that the body, as the tomb of the soul, is at the same time the womb of its new birth. In the Egyptian Ritual the soul is addressed as he "who cometh forth from the dusk, and whose birth is in the house of death." This was Anu, Abydos, On (Heliopolis), or other uranographic center localized on the map, or the zodiacal signs of Virgo and Pisces. The Greek language bears striking testimony to the same kinship of the two words, as Plato points out in the Cratylus, in the practical identity of soma, body, and sema, tomb.

In the Christian Bible the textual evidence is multitudinous. A few excerpts only can be culled. First is St. Paul’s clarion cry to us ringing down through nineteen centuries: "Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon thee." Job, combining his death with its correlative resurrection, exclaims: "I laid me down in death and slept; I awaked, for the Lord sustaineth me." Paul cries in the anguish of the fleshly duress, "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" And it is an open question whether the final phrase might not as well have been rendered "this death in the body." And Jonah, correlative name with Jesus, cries from the allegorical whale’s belly: "Out of the belly of death have I cried unto thee, O God." Paul again pronounces us "dead" in our trespasses and sins, adding that "the wages of sin is death" and "to be carnally minded is death." It is sin that brings us back again and again into this "death" until we learn better. And the Apostle affirms that we are dead and that our life is hid with Christ in God. Our true life is as yet undeveloped, buried down in the depths of the latent capacities of being. The Psalms say that we "like sheep are laid in the grave," though "God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave." The death spoken of is at one place defined as "even the death of the cross," when spirit is bound to the cross of matter and the flesh. Isaiah declares that "we live in darkness like the dead." And Jesus broadcasts the promise that whosoever believeth on him, "though he were dead, yet shall he live." Assurance is given (Peter 4:6) that the Gospel is preached "to them that are dead." Would not such addresses to the dead, as noted in several of these passages, be absurd if not referable to the living on earth?

Then there is the ringing declaration of the Father God in the Prodigal Son allegory, rebuking the churlish jealousy of the obedient elder brother at the rejoicing over the wastrel’s return: "This my son was dead and is alive again." The thing described here as death was just the sojourn in that "far country"--earth.

A most direct and unequivocal declaration, however, is found in the first verse of chapter three of Revelation: "Ye have the name of being alive, but ye are dead." And this is at once followed by the adjuration to "Wake up; rally what is still left to you, though it is on the very point of death." This is again a strong hint of the danger that the soul might be so far submerged under sense as to fail to rise again, and sink down into the dreaded "second death."

But the most astonishing material corroborative of the thesis here propounded is found in St. Paul’s discussion of the problem of sin and death in the seventh chapter of Romans. The statements made can be rendered intelligible and enlightening only by reading the term "death" in the sense here analyzed. He says first that "the interests of the flesh meant death; the interests of the spirit meant life and peace." And then he says: "For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in our members to bring forth fruit unto death."

In this chapter Paul concatenates the steps of a dialectical process which has not been understood in its deep meaning for theology. It is concerned with the relation of the three things: the law, sin and death. He asks: "Is the Law equivalent to sin?" And he replies that sin developed in us "under the Law." What is this mysterious Law that the Apostle harps on with such frequency? Theology has not possessed the resources for a capable answer, beyond the mere statement that it is the power of the carnal nature in man. It is that, in part; but the profounder meaning could not be gained without the esoteric wisdom--which had been discarded. This Law--St. Paul’s bête noir--is that cosmic impulsion which draws all spiritual entities down from the heights into the coils of matter in incarnation. It is the ever-revolving Wheel of Birth and Death, the Cyclic Law, the Cycle of Necessity. As every cycle of embodiment runs through seven sub-cycles or stages, it is the seven-coiled serpent of Genesis that encircles man in its folds.

Now, says the Mystery initiate, by the Law came sin, and by sin came death. Here is the iron chain that binds man on the cross. The Law brings the soul to the place where it sins and sin condemns it to death. Death here must mean something other than the natural demise of the body, for that comes to all men be they pure or be they sinful. Reserving a more recondite elaboration of the doctrine of sin for a later place, it may be asserted here that the great theological bugaboo, sin, will be found to take its place close along the side of "death" as the natural involvement of the incarnation itself. Sin is just the soul’s condition of immersion or entanglement in the nature of the flesh. And happily much of its gruesome and morbid taint by the theological mind can be dismissed as a mistaken and needless gesture of ignorant pietism.

Neither as animal below our status nor as angel above it can man sin. For the animal is not spiritually conscious and hence not morally culpable. And the angel is under no temptation or motivation from the sensual nature, which alone urges to "sin." Only when the Law links the soul to animal flesh does sin become possible. Romans (7:7) expressly declares: "Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law . . . For without the law sin was dead." Paul even says that at one time he lived without the law himself; this was before "the command" came to him. And what was this command? Again theology has missed rational sense because it has lost ancient cosmologies and anthropologies. The "command" was the Demiurgus’ order to incarnate. It is found in the Timaeus of Plato and Proclus’ work on Plato’s theology. Then the Apostle states the entire case with such clarity that only purblind benightedness of mind could miss it: "When the command came home to me, sin sprang to life, and I died; . . ." He means to say that sin sprang to life as he died, i.e., incarnated. And then he adds the crowning utterance on this matter to be found in all sacred literature:

"the command that meant life proved death to me." He explains further: "The command gave an impulse to sin, sin beguiled me and used the command to kill me." And he proceeds to defend the entire procedure of nature and life against the unwarranted imputations of its being all an evil miscarriage of beneficence: "So the Law at any rate is holy, the command is holy, just and for our good. Then did what was meant for my good prove fatal to me? Never. It was sin; sin resulted in death for me to make use of this good thing."18

The clarifying and sanifying corollaries of this explication and St. Paul’s material are so expansive that pause should be made to consider them. In this light it may be seen that the whole of the negative and lugubrious posture of theology as to "sin," and "death" as its penalty, might be metamorphosed into an understanding of the natural and beneficent character of all such things in the drama. Ancient meaning has miscarried, with crushing weight upon the happy spirit of humanity; and rectification of such misconstruction is urgently needed.

In I Samuel (2:6) it is written: "The Eternal kills, the Eternal life bestows; he lowers to death and he lifts up." Job says: "I shall die in my nest, and I shall renew my youth like the eagle."

And a most significant verse from Isaiah (53) can be rescued from mutilation and sheer nonsense only by the application of the new meaning of "death." Speaking of the divinity, it says that "He hath made his grave with the wicked and the rich in his death." A marginal note is honest enough to tell us that the word "death" here used was in the plural number--"deaths"--in the original manuscripts. Here is invincible evidence that the word carries the connotation of "incarnations," for in no other possible sense can "death" be rationally considered in the plural number. In one incarnation the Christ soul is cast among the wicked; in another among the rich. This is a common affirmation of most Oriental religious texts. And his body is his grave.

St. Paul says some man will ask how the dead are raised and in what body do they come. And Christian theology has stultified the sanity of its millions of devotees by giving the answer in the words of the Creed: "The resurrection of the body"--leaving untutored minds to understand the physical body, or the corpse. The only comment provoked is to say that the picture of the cemetery graves being opened at the last trump, and the "dead" (cadavers) arising to array themselves in line before the tribunal of the judgment, has turned millions in disgust and revulsion away from the fold of orthodoxy. Paul states in the verses immediately following that the dead will rise in a spiritual body.

And then we face that climactic assurance that "the last enemy to be overcome is death." In lack of the covert intent of the word, Christian thought has ever believed that in some way this promise meant we should overcome the incidence of bodily decease, and live on in the physical vessel indefinitely. This would paralyze evolution. It would wreck the Cyclical Law. The Trinity is the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer. Without the periodic destruction of form there could be no renewal of life in higher and better forms. Life would be imprisoned forever in matter, and choked to its real death. Its charter of liberty is its periodical release from forms that while they enable, they also limit. What, then, means the passage? If death is the incarnation, the significance is found in the assurance that at the conclusion of the cycle, when the spirit has mastered all its mundane instruction, it will be made a "pillar in the house of God and shall go no more out." Its descents into the tombs of bodies will be at an end at last. "Death" will then be finally overcome.

In the Egyptian Ritual the soul rejoices in life, shouting, "He hath given me the beautiful Amenta, through which the living pass from death to life." Amenta is this world, and the soul is pictured as running through cycles of descent from life to "death" and back again. The same sequence is set forth in the first chapter of Revelation: "I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore!" The Law precipitates us from the life above to the "death" down here, but lifts us up again.

There is no sublimer chapter in the entire Bible than the fifteenth of I Corinthians. And perhaps this treatment could not possibly be more fittingly concluded than with some of St. Paul’s magnificent utterances therein. It may give us at last the thrilling realization of their grandeur when grasped in the majestic sense of their restored original meaning. Need we be reminded that these words of the Apostle will ring from our own throats in ecstatic jubilee, when, victorious at last over "death" and the "grave," we arise out of our final imprisonment in body and wing our flight like the skylark back to celestial mansions?

"So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory."

"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

. . . . . . .

We have drawn enough material from the ancient fund now to have bountifully supplied the demand for "evidence" that in archaic philosophy the field of our life here is depicted as the dark cavern, the pit, the abyss, the bleak desert, the wilderness, the grave, the tomb, the underworld and hell of a life that migrated here from the skies. "We are a colony of heaven." Our deific souls are at the very bottom of the arc of death, and can never be as dead again as they are now, and have been.

But stranger revelations await us still.

Chapter X

THE MUMMY IN AMENTA

We now approach a phase of the general theme, the correction of popular misconception about which will be attended with the most momentous consequences for the whole of world religion. Only one or two other items of our revision of current belief will prove to be of more sensational interest. The matter that promises so largely is the Egyptian mummy and the practice of mummification. When the true signification of this marvelous custom of a sage race begins to dawn in clear light, it will assuredly seem as if modern appreciation of a great deposit of ancient knowledge could hardly have suffered so utter a rout, so total a wreckage.

General opinion, expressed and shared by the most learned of the Egyptologists, holds that the Egyptians mummified their dead for the reason that, believing in reincarnation or forms of transmigration, they desired the physical body to be preserved intact for the reoccupancy of the Ego or soul upon its return to earth. Common belief asserts that they hoped by this provision to make reincarnation easier for the returning soul, inasmuch as he would find his former body ready for him, and would not have to build a new one or enter the body of some animal. The quantity of "explanation" of this sort that one reads in the works of reputed scholars is indeed enough to drive any astute reasoner ad nauseam. Nothing betrays the shallow insufficiency of our knowledge so flagrantly as does this matter.

It would seem as if it should be unnecessary to issue a denial of the correctness of the popular theories just indicated. The truth of the matter should be evident to anyone who can frame a syllogism. One fact alone should have been sufficient to forestall the arrant blunder in misconceiving the mummification motive. An act performed for the alleged purpose of preservation began with a gross mutilation! The viscera, the whole of the organs of the chest and abdominal cavity were first removed, and the entrails placed in the Canopic jars at the four corners of the coffin. One does not mutilate that which one wishes to preserve. If this be not conclusive, let us add that at times both the head and the feet were cut off! Could the returning soul profitably use this old shriveled, leathery and mutilated shell as its next living tenement? Our idea has been a tacit insult to Egyptian intelligence. Surely we might have credited them from the start with being no such fools. Because we believed, under the lashing of medieval theologians, that Christ rose in his flesh and that we should do likewise at the last trump, we assumed that the Egyptians indulged their credulity in the same weird fashion. We are yet as children essaying to frame an explanation of the most profoundly symbolic act of the most illumined race of history.

It is the declaration drawn from our studies and supported by the evidence to be submitted, that the practice of embalmment was nothing more than a mighty rite of symbolism! One immediate item of confirmation is the fact that it was performed for only a relatively few of Egypt’s deceased, notably kings and functionaries. It was costly, required a hundred days, and so was indulged in only in the case of those who could afford such an elaborate funeral ritual. If the motive for mummification had been one arising out of universal philosophy or accepted religious theory, it would have been practiced generally, with rich and poor alike. Not all Catholic Christians can afford elaborate masses. No enlightened nation would countenance for centuries a practice based on a theory which made the difference in worldly wealth critical for the whole future destiny of the great mass of its inhabitants. If the hope of future evolutionary welfare depended on this performance with the cadaver, then Egypt was guilty of a felonious neglect of her general population in favor of her overlords. And we know that early nations were, as we like to say, superstitious in the extreme about the punctilious observance of funeral rites. Virgil tells of the dread of the heroes of having their dead bodies lie unburied on the sand (inhumatus arena). Egypt could not have given the benefit of a vital ceremony to only a limited class.

The effort is here made for the first time in our day to set forth the inner spiritual significance of this great rite. Our development of the obsolete meaning of "death" in primal theology has led us right up to the threshold of the denouement. One further step will take us into the heart of the age-old mystery.

In the esoteric doctrine which regarded the present life as death, and the living body as the soul’s tomb, we have the necessary background for adequate elucidation of the matter. The body was mummified to serve as a powerful moving symbol of the death of the soul in matter, and the various features of the meaning of this mundane life! Nothing more. But this far transcended in graphic impressiveness and cathartic virtue any theoretic dramatization of the philosophy of life made by any people since the days of Egypt’s glory. The mummy was designed to point the whole moral of human life in a form of overwhelming psychological power. To a deeply philosophical people the lifeless body became at once the most impressive symbol of the entire import of life itself. The preserved corpse became the mute but grandiloquent reminder of life and death, mortality and immortality, in one mighty emblem.

The custom was an attempt to utilize the cadaver as the central object in a ritual designed to incorporate the essential features of their entire philosophy of life. The import of a ceremony based on the ostensible preservation of a thing which obviously could not be preserved for living purposes, was the enforcement upon all minds of the truth that the mortal part of man could be immortalized! Concomitant with this, the ritual bore the message that the divine part of man, the immortal soul, though in this body it has gone to its "death," is immortal still. It will defy death and corruption, as will the mummy.

The mummy was the cardinal object in a grandiose ritual precisely because it was a dead thing! It prefigured the nature of this life, which was, philosophically, death. The dead thing thus became the emblem of immortal life itself. The "dead" shall live forever. The mummy symboled life as death, and death as the gate to immortal life. And the preservation or immortalizing of the dead mortal by the infusion of spiritous oils, balsams, ichors, was to emblem the raising of this mortal to immortality through the adoption by the lower man of the spirit of eternal life from the injected Christ nature. By the infusion of the mind of Christ into the dead Adamic nature, born to sin, it could be raised to eternal life out of the realm of decay. To associate ritualistically the idea of undying existence with the defunct relic was to impress the lesson of the burial in matter of that divine fragment whose attribute is "life and everlastingness." Under the garb and swathings of death, its mission was to bring life and immortality to light.

The embalming was not the enactment of a vague spiritual ideal. Every detail of the process, as Budge testified, was a typical performance with specific relevance. The injection of preservatives was designed to do for the corpse symbolically what the putting on of the Christ spirit would do for "the body of this death."

An elaborate ritual was built up about the mummy. There were the mutilations and exsections, symbolizing the dismemberment or fragmentation of the divine intellect when cast into the distracting turmoil of sense life. The facial mask carried the implication of the "false" nature of the physical man, the personality, which was the mask (Latin: persona, a mask) the soul donned over its true self. The bound legs and arms symboled the limitation and motionlessness which matter ever imposes upon active spirit. The four Canopic jars at the corners of the coffin stood for the physical world, which is ever four-square as the base that upholds all higher life. The mummy case itself signified the body or earth, the physical house and habitat of the soul. The coffin lid served as the table for the mortuary meal, or the partaking of the "bread of Seb" or food of earth. The bandages were emblematic of the material vestures or bodies which enwrapped the soul, for one coming to earth it was "all meanly wrapped in swaddling clothes," the "coats of skin" that God gave to Adam and Eve in Genesis. Then there was the light, signifying of course the presence of the glowing power of deity within the fleshly house. When darkness was over the land of Egypt, "the Israelites had light in their dwellings." More meaningful still was the image of the hawk, or the hawk-headed Horus, which hovered over the mummy; for this was the figure of the resurrection, the soul as a bird leaving the body to return to the upper air of heaven. The ankh-cross, symbol of life when spirit and matter are tied together, the ankham-flower of immortality, the Tat cross, symbol of eternal stability, the level of Amentu, symbol of the balance of nature’s forces, the scarab, symbol of the resurrection, the vulture, the greenstone tablet of resin, all shadowed in one way or another the immortality of the spiritual principle lodged within the mortal vehicle. The spices and balsams were preservatives, sweet of savor. And the fluids that did so marvelously work their miracle of preservation upon the substance of decay, were as "the Amrit juice of immortality." In many countries a liquor called Soma (the Greek word, incidentally, for the "spiritual" body) was considered to bestow immortality. A tribal chant runs, in one verse:

"We’ve quaffed the soma bright

And are immortal grown

We’ve entered into light

And all the gods have known."

The lower man’s immediate relation to his soul permits him to drink of that immortalizing nectar, and as it was always Eve, or Hathor, or Ishtar, a goddess, a woman, who offers to man the tempting cup, the inference is that mundane experience with matter, the mother of life, is the brimming chalice for our deification.

The mummy thus stood for the soul buried in body, or sometimes perhaps for the body itself. By its descent the soul had become, as it were, the mummy. It became the Manes, or shade of a dead person, in the depiction.

Massey comes very close in one place to sensing that the mummy must be given a spiritual significance:

"Hence the chapter of ‘introducing the mummy into the Tuat [underworld] on the day of burial’ deals not with the earthly mummy, but the mummy of the dramatic mysteries as a figure of the living personality."1

This is the truth; but having seen the mummy in its true light for a moment, Massey still adheres to his precarious endeavor to read "the mummy in Amenta" into the life after (bodily) death, instead of allocating it to its relationship to earth, where only the living personality was in function. His phrase--"the mummy of the dramatic mysteries"--to all intents and purposes concedes the legitimacy of our thesis as to the mummy’s true function.

But this scholar’s study is so splendid in the main that we will be enlightened by looking at portions of his material:

"Amenta as the place of graves is frequently indicated in the Hebrew scriptures, as in the description of the great typical burial-place in the valley of Hamon-Gog. This was in the Egypt described in the Book of Revelation as the city of dead carcasses, where also their Lord was crucified as Ptah-Sekari or Osiris-Tat. Amenta had been converted into a cemetery by the death and burial of the solar god, who was represented as the mummy in the lower Egypt of the nether earth. The Manes were likewise imaged as mummies in their coffins. They also rose again in the mummy-likeness of their Lord, and went up out of Egypt in the constellation of the Mummy (Sahu-Orion), or in the coffin of Osiris that was imaged in the Great Bear."2

Can we miss the plain evidence here presented? The Manes were imaged as mummies in their coffins! Amenta (this earth) converted into a cemetery by the advent of the gods, our souls! We, the living on earth, figured unmistakably as mummies in our sarcophagi! Hence the grave and tomb of all ancient theology is the living physical body of man!

There will be profit in considering another Massey statement, since it reveals how he stumbled and fell at the very door of the truth:

"There is no possibility of the Manes coming back to earth for a new body or for a re-entry into the old mummy. As the Manes says, ‘his soul is not bound to his old body at the gates of Amenta’" (Chs. 26, 6).3

That the soul would not re-enter the old mummy is a vital point of truth, and Massey deserves all credit for discerning it. But that it would not return to enter a new body flies in the face of all ancient and universal belief in reincarnation. This is just the point of issue to be clarified. The soul returns from life to life to be re-clothed in new garments, since it assuredly does not take up life again in the mutilated and decomposed old hulk. The Manes positively states that he is not bound to the old body; but a score of times he says he will construct, or reappear in, a glorious new vesture. This of course is the spiritual body of the resurrection. But it is not built up in one brief life on earth. It is the product of many successive lives, each in a new physical body. There is no room for confusion or dispute on this matter.

Ptah, Atum and finally Osiris are described at different stages as the solar god in mummified form in Amenta.

"He was the buried life on earth, and hence the god in matter, imaged in the likeness of the mummy. . . . Such was the physical basis of the mythos of the mystery that is spiritual in the eschatology."4

And we find desirable explicitness in the following passages:

"In the Osirian mythos, when the sun-god enters the underworld, it is as a mummy or ‘coffined one’ upon his way to the great resting place."

"The mummy-Osiris in Amenta is the figure of the sleeping deity. He is the god inert in matter, the sleeping or resting divinity."5

Another most pertinent corroboration of our thesis that the mummy was but a ritualistic figure for the human soul "dead" in the body, is found in the following from Massey:6

"And just as Ra, the holy spirit, descends in Tattu on the mummy Osiris, and as Horus places his hands behind Osiris in the resurrection, so Iu7 comes to his body, the mummy in Amenta. Those who tow Ra along say, ‘The god comes to his body; the god is towed along toward his mummy.’ (Records, Vol. X, p. 132.) The sun-god, whether as Atum-Iu (Aiu or Aai) or Osiris-Ra, is a mummy in Amenta and a soul in heaven. Atum or Osiris, as the sun in Amenta, is the mummy buried down in Khebt,8 or lower Egypt."9

These passages conclusively indicate that the mummy was the type of the god in the body.

Conquest of the carnal nature and escape from it is in another place called the "overthrowal of your coffins." (Book of Hades, Fifth Division, Legend D.) Again, the earth is denominated "the coffin of Osiris, the coffin of Amenta."

In his descent to open the tombs for the release of the sleeping captives Horus says: "I am come as the mummified one," that is, in fleshly embodiment. It should be noted that this explicit statement of the god himself that he comes in the character of the mummy, taken with his other assurances that he comes to "those in their coffins," must be admitted to certify the truth of our contention throughout--that it is the god who comes to be buried in the matter of a lower kingdom, from which burial both he and the lower entity will be raised again to higher estate. When the sun-god entered "the ark of earth, which is called his coffin or sarcophagus," he was buried in obscurity and shorn of his power. In a sculptured sarcophagus of the fourth century the three Magi are offering gifts to the divine infant, a mummied child! Here the mummy is a figure of the divine nature circumscribed tightly by the garment of flesh. Need we remind the student that numberless images of the mummied Child-Jesus were found in Christian catacombs, tombs and chapels in the early centuries? At first view the linkage of the idea of death as suggested by the mummy, with the infant figure, rather than with the more appropriate stage of senility, seems an ineptitude. In early Christian and pre-Christian iconography Jesus was indeed often figured as an aged one, about to enter the grave. It only requires that we move the symbolic hint one short step forward to see the pertinence of the mummified child, called by the Egyptians the Khart. For the buried god was to have his rebirth in matter and to begin life anew as an infant. The deceased father god was to metamorphose into the new form of himself as his own child, as God the Son. While yet a baby-god, beginning his new career, he was cramped by the limitations of matter and the undeveloped stage of his own powers. He was the new god, who had not yet broken his bonds or risen from the limitations of his new incarnate situation.

It is evident that Hebraic development of archaic typology did not carry the figure of the mummy into Biblical literature. Yet a cognate symbolism is expressed through the word "flesh" mainly. Where the Kamite Ritual says: "My dead body shall not rot in the grave," the Hebrew Psalmist writes: "My flesh shall dwell in safety. For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol;10 neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption."

But occasionally an original Egyptian term has been retained in Hebrew transcription. Such a term is Sekhem, one of the names of the burial-place of the Osiris-mummy in the Ritual. The deceased is buried as a mummy in Sekhem. Also the well of Jacob near Sechem answers to the well of Osiris at Abydos, and the oak or terebinth in Sechem to the tree of life in the Pool of Persea. The fields of Sechem correspond to the Sekhet-Hetep or fields of peace and plenty in the Kamite original.

Also the incident of Joseph carrying Jacob’s coffin matches Horus’ carrying the Osiris-mummy.

The word mummy is perhaps derived from the Egyptian mum, to "initiate into the mysteries." This origin would suggest that the elaborate procedure of mummification was inaugurated to typify the whole broad meaning of the incarnation, as a submerging of high spirit in the dense state of mortal matter. For such a downward sweep through the world of material inertia was, as we shall see, the only, if fateful, path leading to the "initiation" of the spirits into the higher mysteries that lurk in the depths of life. The Sphinx riddle of life can be solved only by a living experience in all worlds from the lowest to the highest. Life’s own justification of its processes is the raison d’être of our mummification in gross earthly bodies, and the great Nilitic rite was designed to express nothing more.

Attention must now be given to the Egyptian word which was used to designate the mummy. It was usually marked upon the coffin lid. It may offer a connection of great potential fruitfulness for knowledge. It consisted of the consonants K R S with a suffix T, giving K R S T. The voweling is indeterminate, as it always was in ancient writing. Scholars have introduced an A before the R and another after it, making the word K A R A S T as generally written. There is probably no authoritative warrant for this spelling, but there has ever been a stout resistance to all suggestions that the alternative vowels, E, I, O or U be used in the form. Yet scholarship would be hard put to substantiate any objection to the spellings Karist, Karest, Kerast, Kerist or Krist. Indeed, as the root is very likely a cognate form with the Greek kreas, flesh, there would be more warrant for writing it Krast, Krest or Krist than the usual Karast. If we know how easily a "Kr" consonant metamorphoses into the Greek Chr, we can not dismiss the suggested closeness of the word to the Greek Chrestos or Christos as an absurd improbability. This may indeed be the Kamite origin of our name Christ, whatever be the outcry against such a conclusion.

There are presented some other extremely interesting possibilities in this etymological situation, for by the use of another vowel we stand very close to the Latin crux, cross, the Middle English cros (cross) and our own word crust. For indeed the ground meaning of the entire incarnation story might well be expressed in the grouping of these very terms: The Christ on the cross is the encrusting of the divinity with flesh (Greek kreas). Not far away also is our word crystal, which contains the root meaning of any process of incrustation, or the precipitation of spirit energies into forms of solidification around an actuating nucleus of force. The large idea behind all these forms that stand so closely related in spelling is just that of spirit crystallizing and forming a crust about a spiritual node of life. And then the Greek word chruseos, golden, points to the end of the process to be consummated by the spirit in matter, when, metaphorically speaking, all baser forms of the encrusted covering or mummy will be transmuted by the divinity’s glowing fire into the purest spiritual "gold." The "crystal sea" that is to receive all back into its depths links the two ends of the chemicalization, first downward, then upward, together in one coherence. Our kreas or mummy case, that becomes but the crust of our life here on the cross of flesh, kreas, will be translated into crystals of pure gold, chrysos, by undergoing the chrysalis transformation into full deification. Still within the circle of these meanings we have chrism, cruse (of ointment), chrisom, charism, an anointing oil (our cream--French cresme, with the "s" dropped out, being a derivative of this stem), and finally within the glow of its influence comes the bright outline of the meaning of the great sacrament of the Eucharist. If all this etymological flourish appears to be highly fanciful, let the reader be assured that not a single term of the interwoven ideas in this chain is missing from the ancient symbolism. If it is a delightful play of fancy, its poetic originators were the sages of old.

When, then, Osiris is called the Karast-mummy, the meaning is doubtless that of spirit "fleshed" or incarnate. The flesh was the crust crystallized about the soul and as such became not only the cross, but the cruet or cruse containing the golden liquor of life. The partaking of it was our Eucharist, and our final transfiguration will be the putting on of the golden hues of immortality, symboled by the insect chrysalis operation.11 "O thou who risest out of the golden" is an address to the soul in the Ritual.

Finally, then, we have Massey breaking through the philological defenses thrown up by the alarmed orthodox scholars and openly connecting the Egyptian Karast with the Greek Christos or Christ. He announces the derivation dogmatically:

"Say what you will or believe what you may, there is no other origin for Christ the Anointed than for Horus the karast or anointed son of God the Father. . . . Finally, then, the mystery of the mummy is the mystery of Christ. As Christian it is allowed to be forever inexplicable. As Osirian the mystery can be explained. It is one of the mysteries of Amenta, with a more primitive origin in the rites of Totemism."12

He adds that Osiris as the Karast-mummy was the prototypal Corpus Christi. As Osiris-Sekari he was the coffined one. Aseris, or the Osiris, represented the god in the anguish of his burial in the cerements of the mortal body, whose cries and ejaculations are to be heard ascending from Amenta in many a page of the Ritual, or from Sheol in the Hebrew scriptures. Massey states what has not been readily acceptable to Christian apologists hitherto when he writes:

"Indeed the total paraphernalia of the Christian mysteries had been made use of in Egyptian temples . . . Osiris in the monstrance should of itself suffice to show that the Egyptian Karast is the original Christ, and that the Egyptian mysteries were continued by the Gnostics and Christianized in Rome."13

Immediately connected with the Christos is the term Messiah, since both terms, the one Greek, the other Egypto-Hebraic, mean "the anointed." The word Messiah is traced to the Egyptian mes or mas, to steep, to anoint, as also to be born. Messu was the Egyptian word for "the anointed" initiate in the Mystery rites. The "-iah" was a quite significant suffix added by the Hebrews, meaning, like the ubiquitous suffix "el," deity or God. As "-iah" or "-jah," it occurs in many Hebrew sacred names, sometimes as a prefix, as in Jahweh, but mostly as a suffix, as in Elijah, Halleluiah, Messiah, Zechariah, Abijah, Nehemiah, Obediah, Isaiah, Hezekiah and a long list more. The name Messiah then denotes the "divinely anointed" one or the "born (reborn) deity." When the first or natural man was anointed with the chrism of Christly grace, he was reborn as the Christos.

An item of great importance in this ritual was its performance always previous to the burial. It was a rite preparatory to the interment. Said Jesus himself of Mary: "In that she poured this ointment upon my body, she did it to prepare me for my burial" (Matt. 26:12). She was symbolically enacting the Mystery rite of the chrism, and her performance quite definitely matched the previous practices of the Egyptians, from whom it was doubtless derived. But what does such an act denote in the larger interpretation here formulated? If the burial was the descent of the gods into bodily forms, then the anointing must have been enacted immediately antecedent to it or in direct conjunction with it. The etymology of the word sheds much light upon this whole confused matter. The "oint" portion of it is of course the French softening of the Latin "unct" stem; and this, whether philologists have yet discovered the connection or not, is derived from that mighty symbol of mingled divinity and humanity of ancient Egypt--the A N K H cross. The word Ankh, meaning love, life and tie, or life as the result of tying together by attraction or love the two nodes of life’s polarity, spirit and matter, suggests always and fundamentally the incarnation. For this is the "ankh-ing" of the two poles of being everywhere basic to life. The "unction" of the sacrament is really just the "junction" of the two life energies, with the "j" left off the word. Therefore the "anointing" is the pouring of the "oil of gladness," the spiritual nature, upon the mortal nature of living man. The "unguents" of the mummification were the types of the shining higher infusion, and they prepared the soul for, or were integrally a part of, its burial in the grave of mortality. And the Messiah was then crucified in the flesh. On this point Massey speaks clearly:

"In preparation of Osiris for his burial, the ointment or unguents were compounded and applied by Neith. It was these that were to preserve the mummy from decay and dissolution."14

Neith applies the preservatives in Egypt; Mary in the Gospels. And as the feminine figures emblem matter, we must take the ritual as dramatizing the anointing of divinity with materiality, rather than just the anointing of the physical man with divinity. The same situation is found in the baptism allegory, where the lower man, John the Baptist, anoints with his element, water, the very deity, Christ, himself. In that close conjunction and interrelation of the two natures which the great Ankh symbol connotes, each nature "anoints" the other, and it matters little for final outcomes of meaning which is considered. All ancient symbols denoting the two elements in life are not only dual in themselves, but may generally be interchanged without damage to the ground signification. This strange--and practically unknown--aspect of the science of typology merits a full chapter in itself; but perhaps it will be enough to point out its application in specific situations where it will clarify the exegesis. Since the soul’s burial in body is the cause and occasion of the release of its own higher potencies, its being anointed or baptized by matter (or "water") is thus both its active and its passive anointing. Let it be remembered, it both converts matter and is converted by matter. This is ever the basic formula. The anointing thus becomes kindred with the embalming. The chrismatic ceremony was the "ankh-ing" or tying together of soul and flesh for fuller outflow, giving in the outcome the Karast or Christ. In man the angel and the animal-human anoint each other.

As the climactic step in a series of benefits which Horus, the deliverer and reconstituter of his father Osiris, enumerates in an address to the latter, he likens the anointing to the gift of grace and spiritual unction:

"I have strengthened thine existence upon earth. I have given thee thy soul, thy strength, thy power. I have given thee thy victory. I have anointed thee with offerings of holy oil."15

The whole procedure of incarnation from its inception to the Prodigal’s return, is to be seen as an anointing, first of spirit with flesh, then of flesh with spirit. Massey says that anointing was the mode of showing the glory of the Father in the person of his Son, and that Horus was anointed when he transformed from Horus the mortal to Horus the divine man.

The usual material for anointing was oil, but at least one other comes in as symbol. We are familiar with Jesus’ mixing his spittle with a little earth to anoint the eyes of the blind man in the Gospels. A Hawaiian legend also has it that the first man was created from red earth (the meaning of "Adam") mixed with the spittle of the gods, and the triadic god then blew into his nose and bade him rise a living human being. Egyptian ideography pictures that the primeval god Tum conceived within himself, then spat, the spittle becoming the gods Shu and Tefnut, whose union as male and female produced the world. Another Kamite construction holds that the Eye of Ra (symbol of divine intelligence), being injured by the violent assault of Sut, was restored when anointed with spittle by Thoth.

In many more legends the gods are said to have mixed mortal clay with their blood, emblematic of their living power. The early myth-makers were adept at variation of the symbols. Horus, representing the god in man, says:

"He anointed my forehead as Lord of men, creating me as chief of mortals. He placed me in a palace as a youth, not yet come forth from my mother’s womb."

This is a reference to the god’s burial in matter, where life was a process of gestation for a new birth in spirit. The mortal man has not yet resurrected, not yet come forth from mother nature’s womb! The spirit entombed is like Joseph in "Egypt" and Daniel in "Babylon" before they rose from out their "prisons" to become the rulers of the kingdom. We are still to have our birth out of matter into spirit. Our incarnation is our birth into body; our resurrection is to be our second birth, this time out of body.

Isaiah (61: 1,2) emphasizes the anointing in a famous verse:

"The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the poor. He hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,16 to proclaim liberty to the captives. . . ."

The "poor," it is to be recalled, are equivalent to the Gentiles, the unregenerate natural man. They were the ones for whom the message of the Messiah was intended. The announcement from heaven to earth that a race of deities was about to descend to lift animal life into the kingdom of reason and articulate speech was verily "the good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people," the best news ever wafted to the denizens of the planet up to that period. "Thou hast anointed my head with oil, my cup runneth over," echoes the immortal Psalm (23). "Having had my flesh embalmed," says the Osirified deceased in the Ritual (Ch. 64), "my body does not decay." Hence flesh, inoculated with spirit, or the mummy embalmed, becomes immortal. And the Word was made flesh! And flesh will be immortalized!

But the Egyptians had a correlative phrase with "the Word made flesh." It was "the Word made Truth." The Logos or spirit made flesh produced the first birth, the natural man, the first Adam. This was not the true Word, for it was falsified by the admixture of the earthly, natural element, by which it voiced the animal note. As the boy’s voice at the age of manhood changes from a feminine to a masculine timbre, so the speech of the mortal had to swing away from the tones of its mother nature and issue as the voice of the spiritual Self. Figuratively at the human race’s age of twelve, always the number marking our spiritual perfecting, the Christ within us has to abandon the concerns of the maternal physical life and "be about his Father’s business,"--the spiritual life. The race must turn from Mother Nature to Father God at its spiritual puberty.

It is quite noteworthy in this connection that one of the most eminent of modern psychologists, C. G. Jung, has divided human life into two periods, which he calls the forenoon and afternoon of life, the boundary line being placed at the age of thirty-five. He says that in the forenoon mankind lives the life of "nature," but turns in the "afternoon" to a life of "culture." So that we find even the span of mortal life epitomizing the larger scheme, in that we begin the "day" of life by living under nature, and turn in the afternoon to the concerns of the spirit and the mind. "First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual," St. Paul has reminded us.

The world took form upon the model of divine ideas, Plato affirms. In us men a god is striving to stamp his lines of beauty and grace upon the features of an animal! The God-word was fleshed so that it could preserve and finally transfigure the mummy with its splendor. But--and let ultra-idealists be advised!--spirit had to have plastic matter upon which to imprint its form and comeliness, else it would have remained forever unknown. The visible manifestation of latent wisdom, power and love could be achieved only by the spirit’s encasement in a body. Matter, so derided by extreme "spiritual" theory, is the womb in which alone divine conceptions can be brought to birth. So that the fleshing of soul works the miracle of its own anointing. Flesh is the way and the means by which man, the divine thought, is christened with an ever fuller measure of the oil of beatification.

Carried some distance afield by certain involvements of the mummy discussion, we return to that aspect of it suggested by the mythical underworld. It has been already hinted that this nether world is our earth itself. But readers may not be fully aware that this assertion is here made directly in the face of all previous and present scholarship, and that it flouts all scholastic opinion. So open a challenge to world scholarship must summon additional proof to its support. The substantiation of the point is pivotal to the entire interpretation here advanced. The case wins or loses on the determination of this issue. Likewise the correct understanding of all theology hinges upon the outcome. As the many transactions involving the experience of the human soul in the body were enacted in Amenta, the underworld, the final meaning of the whole structure of theology is bound up with the correct location of this realm of gloomy shade. It is believed that the correction of the error under which the academic world has labored for centuries with regard to this region will necessitate the most sweeping alterations in religious and philosophical ideology, nothing short, in fact, of a total recasting of all meanings and values.

Amenta, the Egyptian term for this underworld, is given as a compound of the Egyptian "Amen," meaning "secret," "hidden"; and "ta," "earth" or "land." In this formation it becomes "the hidden earth" or "secret, hidden land." It is the land where the divine sons were hidden away in "Egypt" till the "wrath" of the Karmic Lords should be appeased. "Amen" was the "hidden deity," "the god in hiding." His hieroglyph pictures him as kneeling under a canopy. The "wrath" of

God, be it proclaimed at last, is no divine "anger," in any human sense of the word, but the universally burning, consuming, transforming, building and destroying energy of Life itself, always anciently characterized as a "fire." And the word seems derivative from "Ur-ath," the original fiery force in matter, as "Ur" is "fire" and "-ath" is the feminine, that is, material classification. It therefore connotes the cosmical transforming energies locked up in the bosom of matter! This is of consummate importance. And all this complex ancient indirection of description is just to carry the idea that the soul must be tied down in its linkage with the deeply hidden energies of matter and body until the fiery potencies burning at that level refine and purify its grosser elements. A Biblical text speaks of its being "thrice refined in the fire," and Egyptian scripts abound with statements of its purification "in the crucible of the great house of flame." Maintaining the revolutionary thesis that Amenta is this earth, and not some realm elsewhere into which men relapse after earthly demise, the exposition will establish the fact that all the typology referring to it pertains to our own world. In every ancient system of cosmology this globe is the lowest of all planetary spheres. There can be no other hell, Tartarus, Avernus or Orcus, Sheol or Tophet below it. It is that darksome limbo where the Styx, the Phlegethon, the river of Lethe and other murky streams run their sluggish courses through the life of mortals.

Very apt, then, is the story of Isis and Osiris. Their infant, Horus, was suckled by Isis in solitude. She reared him in secret, and his limbs grew strong in the hidden land. None knew the hiding place, but it was somewhere in the marshes of Amenta, the lower Egypt of the mythos. This is matched in toto by the story of the birth of the mythical Sargon of Assyria. Likewise it is the background of the "flight into Egypt" of Jesus in the Gospels. The divine child had to be taken down into "Egypt" until the Herut menace was passed and in order that the son of God might be brought up out of it. As the angel of the Lord says to Joseph, "Arise and take the young child and his mother and flee into Egypt," so at the birth of Horus the god Taht says to the mother, "Come, thou goddess Isis, hide thyself with thy child." She is bidden to take him down into the marshes of Lower Egypt, called Kheb or Khebt. But the Egyptian version gives us more ground for understanding the maneuver as a cosmographic symbol, because Taht tells Osiris that there "these things shall befall: his limbs will grow, he will wax entirely strong, he will attain the dignity of Prince . . . and sit upon the throne of his father." This is highly important, since it makes the hiding away a part of the cosmic process and not a mere incredible incident in Gospel "narrative." In the mutilated Gospel account the sojourn in Egypt is left as if it were a matter of brief duration, followed by the child’s return. In the fuller Egyptian record it is seen that the dip into Lower Egypt is that necessary incubation in matter that must continue until it has brought the infant potentialities to actualization and function. As the seed in the soil, so the god in the earthly body and the "child" in "Lower Egypt"--all are hidden away for the growth that only thus could be attained. The secreting of the child is no more than the planting on earth of the divine seed in its appropriate soil--humanity.

In the Ritual the Manes, or Osiris-Nu, says: "I am he whose stream is secret." Of Ptah it is also said: "Thy secret dwelling is in the depths (or the deep) of the secret waters and unknown" (Renouf: Hibbert Lectures, p. 321).

The presentation of the evidence supporting the mundane location of Amenta takes on from this point largely the semblance of a debate with Massey. If our study seems overburdened with his material, apology may be found in the explanation that, in the first place, he has fairly earned this amount of recognition, and secondly that his presentations focus the issues at stake with more definiteness than those of any other scholar. Though he missed the golden truth of this matter in the end, he still comes so close to it that he at times almost states it in spite of himself. The truth can hardly be better expounded than as the correction of his error, which proved so fatal at last to his work. No one has ever put more succinctly and clearly the nature of the experience of the soul or divine child in Amenta than he has done in the following excerpt:

"In the eschatology Horus, the child, is typical of the human soul which was incarnated in the blood of Isis, this immaculate virgin, to be made flesh, and to be born in mortal guise on earth as the son of Seb (god of earth) and to suffer all the afflictions of mortality. He descended to Amenta as the soul sinking in the dark of death. . . ."17

Everything in this passage points to the identity of Amenta with earth. Clearly as Massey saw through the thousand disguises of ancient method, he was tricked at last by the arcane ruse of presenting earth experience under the mask of a ritual for the dead. He could hardly bring himself to believe, sharp as was his break with orthodoxy, that the miscarriage of esoteric sense had gone so utterly awry as to misplace all religious values finally in a wrong world. The enormity of cleric aberrancy was already so shocking to him that he can be pardoned for failing to perceive that it was indeed still seven leagues worse.

He fought his way through by what seemed the only devise which would enable him to keep the judgment, hell, purgatory and the underworld in the after-death realm. He was forced to split the term "earth," so frequently used with Amenta, into two parts, distinguishing an "earth of time" from an "earth of eternity." He took Amenta to be this fancied "earth of eternity" beyond the grave or death. He located it vaguely in the post mortem state, and segregated it from the earth of time, or the earth we know. But a little reflection on his part would have told him that the term "earth" has no possible appropriateness to a non-physical existence in spiritual areas. The designations "land," "country," so often applied to the heavenly state of being, are used only by grace of euphemism or figure. Massey must have felt this, but it permitted him to use the word "earth" in reference to a purely celestial locale. This could not have been other than a bit disingenuous; and it cost him his place in renown and kept us an additional forty or fifty years in bondage to religious superstition.

He rightly insists that "not until we have mastered the wisdom of Egypt as recorded in Amenta shall we be enabled to read it on the surface of the earth." This is precisely what should be said, but where do we have access to "wisdom recorded in Amenta" (considered as his spirit world) if not on this earth, either in books or in experience? Can we go to (his) heaven and read records left there? He speaks of a first paradise as being celestial and a second one as "sub-terrestrial," and says that the latter is "the earthly paradise of legendary lore." But, as has been shown, a "sub-terrestrial" residence for man is meaningless verbiage, imagery without possible counterpart in actuality. The "sub-" was to be taken as subsolary and perhaps sublunary, at any rate sub-celestial, but never--really--sub-terrestrial. If it was used for poetic figure, there need be no quarrel. The ancients did use subterranean caverns as types of our life in Amenta, but only as types. Of a surety we shall not read old Egypt’s mighty wisdom aright until we read it on the surface of this earth, for the inexpugnable reason that the "wisdom recorded in Amenta" is the wisdom pertaining to this earth! Amenta and this earth are one and the same place. Religion must bring back to this earth the core of all those meanings which took their flight from this sphere on the wings of scholarship’s egregious mislocation of the mythical region of Amenta.

His mistake, as that of all other scholars, was occasioned by loss of the archaic signification of "death." Books of the dead, forsooth, must inescapably apply to deceased humans, and hence their rituals must be designed for the spirits of the departed on "that other shore." It was thus not possible for anyone under this persuasion to discern that the Biblical phrase "after death" could mean its precise antithesis, as commonly viewed; that is, after entry into this life. It could not be seen that the phrase "deceased in their graves" had already been appropriated by the sages of Egypt to type the living denizens here on the globe.

Nevertheless the identification of Amenta with a post mortem state should have been seen at one glance as inadmissible in the light of a single consideration. Amenta, Hades, Sheol are always portrayed as the land of gloom, darkness and misery. These terms are often translated "hell" in the Bible and elsewhere. They are the dismal underworld. In it souls are imprisoned, captive, cut to pieces, mutilated, buried. Exactly opposite in description in every religion is the state of life after decease! It matches the Amenta characterization in no particular, but is its exact opposite. In it the soul finds release from the dark, heavy, dreary, wretched conditions that are descriptive of Amenta. It is the land of light, bliss, surcease from distress, rest and peace! The two portraitures will not mix! The Amenta of misery and gloom can not be at the same time the Happy Isles, the Aarru-Hetep and the asphodel meads! If to enter the body is to undergo captivity, then to leave it is to regain freedom, not to enter Amenta. Surely in this confusion of two worlds of diametrically opposite classification our savants are convicted of the most amazing want of acumen in reaching conclusions preposterously out of line with the data of scholarship. Massey should have been enlightened by what he wrote in this passage:

"Except when lighted up by the sun of night, Amenta was the land of darkness and the valley of the shadow of death. It remained thus, as it was at first, to those who could not escape the custody of Seb, the god of earth, ‘the great annihilator who resideth in the valley.’"

If Amenta was the place where the god of earth detained souls in darkness, its localization on earth would seem to be incontrovertibly indicated. Or was not the god of earth on earth? We might expect a god to inhabit his own kingdom, the one over which he ruled.

Osiris, king of the land of the dead, is denominated "lord of the shrine which standeth at the center of the earth." (Rit., Ch. 64.) Massey speaks of "the human Horus"--and Horus was in Amenta. Humans exist only on the earth. The earth must be Amenta, then. He writes again that the drama "from which scenes are given in the Hebrew writings, as if these things occurred or would occur upon the earth, belongs to the mysteries of the Egyptian Amenta, and only as Egyptian could its characters ever be understood." The scenes in Hebrew scriptures are drawn largely from the early Egyptian Mysteries, which typified cosmic and racial history under the forms of dramatic ritual. But they were not events of either Egyptian or Hebrew objective history. They did not "occur" anywhere on earth, but they portrayed the interior meaning of all that did occur on earth. The events were not here, but their meaning was. They were not occurrence factually, but the key to all occurrence. Massey thought the myths must be veridically true in (his) Amenta, since they were not objectively true on earth. He caught half the truth only. The myths were only symbolic language telling human dullness of mind what life meant. The moment the myths are alleged to have taken place in heaven or anywhere else, that moment superstition begins to stalk into the counsels of religion. Nothing could occur in Amenta as a place distinct from this earth, since it was a mythopoetic name for earth itself.

But the sad part of Massey’s story and the reason it is important for us to scrutinize his mistake is that it is the story of a whole race’s deception for sixteen centuries! The localization of Amenta in heaven instead of on earth has defeated the whole purpose of religion for ages. And no pen or tongue will ever record the monstrous fatuity involved in the spectacle of a race looking into the wrong world and waiting with sanctified stupidity for the fulfillment of values that have slipped by them ungrasped all the while! When religion gave up its effort to realize values in the life here and fixed despairing eyes on heaven, it betokened the decay of primal human virtue and a sinking back into mystical fetishism. Came the Greek "loss of nerve" and the turning from earth to heaven for the realization of hopes ground to dust on earth. And this shift of philosophical view left the ground of culture lie fallow, and bred the rank growth that covered the whole terrain of the Dark Ages. There is needed no other warrant for the extension of the material of this chapter to some length. As things have turned out, it may well be that true location of the Egyptian Amenta, instead of being a mere point in academic scholarship, is the critical item in the life of culture today. The collapse of true religion is ever marked by its turning for its real experience from earth to mystical heavens.

Scholars have not sufficiently or capably reflected on the significant fact that ancient sacred books or Bibles have been largely Books of the Dead. The obvious glaring peculiarity of this fact has never seemed to occur to students. It should from the first have provoked wonder and curiosity that the sages of antiquity would have indited their great tomes of wisdom in such a form as to serve as manuals in the life to come, and not as guides for the life lived in the sphere in which the books were available! Only the heavy tradition that religion was a preparation for a life to come, instead of a way of life here, could have stifled this natural reaction to a situation that is odd enough in all conscience. It is no slight or inconsequential thing that Budge writes in one sentence of ". . . religious texts written for the benefit of the dead in all periods . . ." (of Egyptian history), without the least suspicion that he was penning an astonishing thing. It had been ponderously assumed by scholarship that the ancient sages were more concerned with the hereafter and the next world than with life down here. How the march of history would have swung into different highways had the world known that we living men were those "dead" for whom the sagas were inscribed by the masters of knowledge! And what must be the sobering realization for present reflection of the fact that the primeval revelation given to early races for the guidance and instruction of all humanity has missed entirely the world for which it was intended!

The scene of critical spiritual transactions is not "over there" in spirit land, but here in this inner arena of man’s consciousness. Life’s accounts do not remain suspended during our active experience on earth, to be closed and settled when the exertion is over. We are weaving the fabric and pattern of our creation of ourselves when we are awake on earth, not when we are at repose in ethereal heavens. The droning cry of lugubrious religionism for centuries has been to live life on earth merely as the preparation for heaven. But there is no logic in the idea of making preparation for rest! It is the other way around: rest is a preparation for more work. The positive expression of life is the exertion of effort to achieve progress. Rest is just the cessation of the effort, and needs no preparation. The character of our effort may, to be sure, determine the nature of our rest, yet one should say, rather, its completeness. Rest is in some degree correlative with the effort. Still the logic is indefeasible, that we work to achieve our purposes, and not to gain rest. The presumption that this life is of minor consequence and has value only as the stepping-stone to another where true being is alone achieved, is one facet of that enormous fatuity of which we are holding orthodox indoctrination guilty. It is the last mark of the miscarriage of primal truth in the scriptures that its meaning and application have been diverted from that world it was intended to instruct, and projected over into another where its code can have no utility whatever. The offices of religion have fled to heaven, and must be brought back to earth. This return can be effected only by the right interpretation of the term "the dead" and the true location of Amenta, the scene of the judgment, hell, purgatory and the resurrection, and the seat of all evolutionary experience.

Massey asserts that "the nether earth was the other half of this" and that the "Gospel history has been based upon that other earth of the Manes being mistaken for the earth of mortals." But he errs on both counts. For the "other half of this" life is lived in a sphere which all faiths have located above this one, and not nether to it. The spirit world can in no way be localized as under our world. His second statement misses truth through the fact that the events in the life of the Manes are not, as he supposes, actual transactions in the afterdeath life of the spirit, but are only allegorical depictions of the soul’s history in this life.

But he makes a point of great moment, worthy of transcription, when he states that the miracles of Jesus were not possible as objective events:

"They are historically impossible because they were pre-extant as mythical representations . . . in the drama of the Mysteries, that was as non-historical as the Christmas pantomime. The miracles ascribed to Jesus on earth had been previously assigned to Iusa, the divine healer, who was non-historical in the pre-Christian religion. Horus, whose other name is Jesus, is the performer of the ‘miracles’ which are repeated in the Gospels; and which were first performed as the mysteries in the divine nether-world. But if Horus or Iusa be made human on earth, as a Jew in Judea, we are suddenly hemmed in by the miraculous, at the center of a maze with nothing antecedent for a clue; no path that leads to the heart of the mystery, and no visible means of exit therefrom. With the introduction of the human personage on mundane ground, the mythical inevitably becomes the miraculous; thus the history was founded on the miracles, which are perversions of the mythology that was provably pre-extant."

It was in these discernments that Massey rose to heights of clear vision and made a contribution to the cause of religious sanity that can not be rated too highly. This passage is a clear and courageous declaration of the long-lost truth of the matter. He performed a great service in discrediting the myths as history; but by thrusting them over into a purely suppositious world as alleged realities in the "eschatology," he committed his costly blunder.

It was into Amenta that both Horus and Jesus descended to preach to the souls in prison. Horus’ object in making the descent was to utter the words of his father to the lifeless ones. So in the Pistis Sophia Jesus passed into Amenta as the teacher of the great mysteries. It is said in this Gnostic work: "Jesus spake these words unto his disciples in the midst of Amenta."18 Moreover a special title is assigned to Jesus in Amenta. He is called Aber-Amentho; "Jesus, that is to say, Aber-Amentho," is a formula several times repeated. Aber means lord or ruler; so that again Jesus and Horus are exactly matched in title.

If Jesus delivered his discourses to his disciples "in Amenta," all question of where this hidden land is located should be settled forever. For unless all Gospels are accounts of the doings of wraiths in a spectral underworld, as even Massey suggests, we are bound to suppose that their transactions, historical or mythical, transpired on earth.

The hazy character of current Egyptological scholarship is notably manifest in a passage from Budge dealing with the location of the Tuat. It is clearly given in the Ritual as the gate of entry to the underworld. But Budge gives it as "the name of a district or region, neither in heaven nor upon earth, where the dead dwelt and through which the sun passed during the night." Where else the Tuat might be, if neither in heaven nor on earth, deponent saith not. In another place (Egyptian Literature, Vol. I) he defines the Tuat once more. "Tuat is a very ancient name for the Other World, which was situated either parallel to Egypt, or across the celestial ocean which surrounded either world." This goes far to prove that the science of Egyptology has been but a blind groping amid ideas utterly uncomprehended by the "learned" men in the field. Indeed Budge himself has penned what may be called his own "confession" on this score. For its downright candor and its general importance, it is quite worthy of insertion:

"Is it true that the more the subject of Egyptian religion and mythology is studied the less is known about them? The question is, however, thoroughly justified and every honest worker will admit that there are at the present time scores of passages even in such a comparatively well-known compilation as the Book of the Dead which are inexplicable, and scores of allusions to a fundamentally important mythological character of which the meanings are still unknown." (Gods of the Egyptians, Vol. I.)

The sun passing through the Tuat depicted the divine soul as passing through its incarnation, which being in the darkness of the body was charactered as the "dark night of the soul." As it entered the gate of Amenta, called the Tuat, it crossed the horizon line dividing the region of spirit or heaven from earth or embodiment, and there it stood in the twilight. Budge says that "the Tuat was a duplicate of Egypt," laid out in nomes, with a river valley and other similar features. This should further identify it with our earth.

In Amenta the soul was said to receive a new heart shaped "by certain gods in the nether world according to the deeds done in the body whilst the person was living on earth." Here again is confusion and a missing of the intent. The award of a new heart is not made like that of a prize on graduation day. The larger meaning is that the whole long experience of many lives creates a new heart, which is the resultant of the transformation of nature that is gradually accomplished by the whole process. It is quite impossible to draw intelligible meaning from the scriptures if we limit our survey to a single span of earth life as a prelude to an infinite "eternity" in its wake. Reason forbids our conceding to the actions of a single life on earth sufficient moment to fix the destiny of a soul forever. Ancient theology rested on no such irrational presumption.

Many statements aver that the soul passes into Amenta at death. Massey felt sure that this clinched his location of Amenta in the ghost world. He did not dream that the "death" the ancients spoke of brought the soul here instead of taking it away. The soul’s statement that it came "to overthrow mine adversaries upon the earth" should have enlightened him. The soul descends here to battle the lower nature, the only adversary contemplated in the whole range of holy writ.

The attendants of the soul in its incarnational descent say to it (Ch. 128): "We put an end to thy ills through thy being smitten to earth"--"in death," Massey himself adds. But not even this brought discovery to his mind. The following is highly indicative also:

"From beginning to end of the Ritual we see that it is a being once human, man or woman, who is the traveler through the underworld. . . ."19

Even though the Ritual assigned to this underworld pilgrim all human characteristics, scholars still have missed the hint that he was the human. Later texts give to the Manes in Amenta all the traits and features of the earth mortal.

The solar god in Amenta is addressed as "thou who givest light to the earth." This again is definite localization on earth. It was the sun-god who "tunneled the mount of earth and hollowed out Amenta,"--mistaken for two operations when they are of course one and the same. The sun-god’s "boring through the earth" was one of the tropes.

Instruction is derived from noting how Massey’s erroneous idea entangled him in the following passage:

"The lower paradise of two is in the mount of earth, also called the funeral mount of Amenta. [Identification again.] The departed are not born immortals in that land; immortality is conditional. They have to fight and strive and wrestle with the powers of evil to compass it."20

His own exegesis convicts him of shallow thinking here. For he has stated repeatedly that the soul enters his spectral Amenta with character already formed by "the deeds done in the body." His Amenta could not be the arena of moral conflict or fight to win immortality.

He has indeed called it "the earth of eternity." It is too late to writhe and wrestle for moral victory when that "Amenta" is entered. The earth is the one and only theater of spiritual struggle. So he errs in reiterating:

"The world-to-be in the upper paradise was what they made it by hard labor and by purification in Amenta."21

Massey’s mistake, in common with that of much general religious opinion on these matters, lies in his affirming that after the termination of life in the body the soul first descends into Amenta, then later rises into Paradise. This flies in the face of all basic postulation of theology itself. The soul descends in coming to earth, and there is no lower region left into which it can further descend on quitting the body. Its incarnation in flesh drags it down, its release at decease lets it free to return upward. The false downward direction assigned to the soul on leaving earth is a perversion of true original conception due to the loss of the meaning of the term "death" in world religion. Profound philosophical insight corroborates the instinctive unconditioned idea which rises in connection with physical death, that the soul when released begins its ascent to celestial habitat. Only perverted theology inculcated the thought of further descent when the war between flesh and mind is over. The dissipation of that idea is ample justification for this chapter. Another sentence pictures his entanglement in the net:

"The sub-terrestrial paradise was mapped out for the Manes to work in, and work out their salvation from the ills of the flesh and the blemishes of the life on earth."

But how can he call this dark, murky, dismal underworld of sub-terrestrial life a "paradise"? In no religion is paradise pictured as a gloomy and forbidding place. This obsession of his, that the soul must first go down into a region of agony and bloody sweat and fiery torture after separation from the body and be purged of its earthly sins before it can rise into paradise, warrants all this dissertation upon it because it is the delusion of millions.

It is conceivable and admissible that the soul upon release from body may need a period of time to throw off some heavier portions of its clinging earthly mires, before it can return to the highest place of purity. But in all reason it must be contended that the locale of such a stage must be above, not below, the earth life. If the soul lingers a while on a level of purgation after life here, it is at least on a plane one step higher than this.

The general commitments of this whole discussion are of sufficient importance to excuse a general critique of the pious theory that life equalizes the balance of her forces by having us commit error in one world and do penance or make atonement in another. Almost universal as is the idea, there is little foundation for it in the great systems of early racial instruction. It is an excrescence on the body of saner teaching.

We must reap as we sow. "He that soweth to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption." Half the world has been hypnotized with the belief that mankind can atone in an ethereal world for "deeds done in the body." Perfect justice would obviously require that we return to the same world in which acts were committed to square the Karmic accounts engendered by them. To work out our salvation from the ills of the flesh, the soul must at least be where flesh is! If we are to erase the blemishes of earth life, we must return to those conditions which constituted the nature of the problem in the first instance. In spirit world the problem is no longer present; it has been dissolved with matter. If we break the dishes in the kitchen we can hardly atone by singing in the parlor. How it is presumed by an eccentric theology that we can work out concrete problems in a world where concreteness has been dissolved, is not at all easy to see. Those who plan to win the unfought battles of spiritual life from a bower in Paradise had better take counsel with the ancient wisdom. There is no heavenly "peace without victory," or a victory without St. Paul’s long fight. The arcane science tells modern ignorance why we are on earth. If there was some sufficient primal necessity for our coming to wrestle with flesh and sense in the first instance, then it must be essential that we continue to come until these forces and natures are overcome and raised. The wisdom of civilizations already hoary in Egypt’s time is back of that pronouncement, and it is back of no other. The static angelic immortality of the Christians, the "eternal spiritual progress in heaven" of the Christian Scientists, Spiritualists and other cultists, find their rebuke and their correction in the venerable knowledge of the ancient sages.

The divine word or the Logos "is to be made truth in the life lived on earth, so that the spirit when it entered the hall of judgment, was, as it were, its own book of life, written for the all-seeing eye." This is magnificent truth that Massey states; but how infinitely more meaningful it becomes when it is known that the hall of judgment entered by the spirit to reap the fruits of former action and amend its ways, is not a spirit plane after death, but this present "underworld," to which it will return, after a rest, to face the further issues involved in its evolution. Returning here again and again, the soul brings its own record book of life with it, written in its own character. Character can be built nowhere else than on earth. No religion has ever said that we would be judged for deeds done in the spirit world! We are asleep then and inactive, and making no Karma, as the East phrases it. As St. Paul says, sin is lying dormant until incarnation again brings the moral agent, the soul, into subjection to the body of sense, when "sin springs to life."

The title of one of the chapters of the Ritual is: "Of introducing the mummy into the Tuat on the day of burial." This becomes absurd if the mummy is the corpse and the Tuat a spectral realm of wraiths. No more than that a man can take his gold watch with him to heaven could a mummy be introduced into Massey’s and Budge’s Tuat! The burial is the advent of the "mummified" soul or Karast into its coffin-case of the physical body.

Elsewhere Massey equates "the pillar of earth" with "the Tat of Amenta" and still fails to see identification. In another connection he writes:

"Thus we can identify Eve or Chavvak, as Kefa or Kep, the Great Mother, with Adam or Atum in the Garden of Amenta."22

Were not Adam and Eve on earth?

A striking pronouncement in the Papyrus of Ani should have awakened true intelligence in his mind: "The soul, or Manes, makes the journey through Amenta in the two halves of sex." Where are there male and female sex distinctions save on earth? And one wonders how the scholar could have written the following and failed to see the basis of identity suggested:

"The mortal on earth was made up of seven constituent parts. The Osiris in Amenta had seven souls, which were collated, put together and unified to become the ever-living one."

But all students of ancient literature are aware that earth was the place where the collecting and unifying of the seven constituent souls of man were accomplished. Again a most direct hint of the truth was ignored by the savants. Also Greek metaphysical science asserts that the soul came down through nine stages "and became connected with the sublunary world and a terrene body, as the ninth and most abject gradation of her descent."23 Here is philosophical testimony that negates the existence of any hell or underworld below life in the body. Any observer of human life knows that it is possible for the soul to fall to the most abject baseness while in the body. We are in the lowest of the hells--Amenta.

Again and again the texts say that Amenta is the dwelling of Seb, the god of earth.

Massey states that in the resurrection "man ascended from the earth below, or from below the earth." The first point of departure is correctly placed; but the alternative, meant to be an appositive, is ruled out of court. Man was never below the earth.

In the Jewish scriptures twelve sons of Jacob go down into Egypt for corn; in the Book of Amenta twelve sons of Ra make a journey toward the entrance to Amenta, represented as a gorge between two mountains, heaven and earth, and they go down into the lower Egypt of the twelve sons of Ra make a journey toward the entrance to Amenta, represented as a gorge between two mountains, heaven and earth, and they go down into the lower Egypt of the mythos. All this is figurative for the descent of the twelve legions of angels of light (sons of Ra, the Light-God) upon this planet. These are the true prototypes of the twelve tribes of Israel, to whom the Eternal as recorded in one of the prophetic books of the Old Testament, before their descent, calls: "The underworld awaits you with eager joy. It watches with open jaws to receive you." (Moffatt Trans.) In the Egyptian this is matched by the statement that "the reptile, or dragon, ‘eternal devourer’ is his name (Ch. 17), lurks and watches in the ‘bight of Amenta’ for its prey." The "bight of Amenta" accurately matches the "recess of earth" in the Greek terminology. In another form of typology the twelve are called "the twelve reapers of the harvest on earth, which was reaped in Amenta by Horus and the twelve."24 If the spiritual harvest was reaped "on earth" and "in Amenta," earth and Amenta must be the same place.

Massey places the habitat of those "people that sat in darkness" and who saw a great light, in Amenta. When Horus descends to them to bring the divine light, he is declared to "descend from heaven to the darkness of Amenta as the Light of the World." How could he be the light of the world if he did not come to the world? It is our earth, surely, and this is once more equated with Amenta.

When Satan takes Jesus into a high mountain for his trial (against the powers of matter) it was a place whence "all the kingdoms of the earth could be seen."

Horus in his coming is said to kindle a light in the dark of death for the soul "or spiritual image in Amenta." But he came to earth to bring light. When he arrived at the outer door of Amenta in his rising Horus says: "I arrive at the confines of earth." Says Massey himself: "He was to be the light of the world in the mortal sphere." And when Horus comes to give the breath of life to the inert Manes in Amenta and delivers his message, it is declared in the Rubric (to Ch. 70): "If this scripture is known upon earth, he (the Osiris) will have power to come forth to day and walk upon the earth among the living."

An important link in the chain of evidence is the statement that the seven principles or vehicles that were integrated in one organism to form perfect man "were all believed to come into existence after death."25 But as the khat or physical body was one of them, and it was incontestably dropped from association with the others after death, the phrase "after death" must here be taken in the peculiar theological sense delineated in this analysis. For only after the death and burial in body could the god begin the work of wedding the seven principles into an aggregate harmony. We are now put in position to grasp the works that take place "after death." For in the light of the new-old meaning of "death" all the experiences dramatized as occurring after bodily demise can be seen as falling within, not outside of, the limits of earthly life. Physical birth here is the beginning of that "death" and the events of life thus come "after (the beginning of) death." Even that redoubtable verse in the Bible, "It is given unto man once to die, and after that the judgment," does not overrule the exegesis here advanced. The integration of the seven constituent principles in man can not be carried on without the khat in a spirit-Amenta.

In describing the judgment of Ani (the Manes-soul) in Amenta, Budge writes: "Ani is here depicted in human form and wearing garments and ornaments similar to those which he wore on earth." To explain this, to him, odd phenomenon, Budge weaves an intricate conjecture that

"the body which he has in this hall of judgment can not be the body with which he had been endowed on earth, and we can probably understand that it is his spiritual body, wearing the white robes of the beatified dead in the world beyond the grave, that we see."

But what more natural than that the hierophants should portray the personage in the drama representing the human in the likeness of the human? The scrolls of old Egypt depicted Ani in human form and dress because it was to him as a human being that the meaning of the drama applied. Budge (and all others) first allocates the trial of the deceased to the nondescript astral world and then wonders why the human character is represented as human! If the pundits will have it that the Amenta in which the judgment trial takes place is the realm of flitting specters, they will have to contrive as best they can to solve the perplexities of Egyptian procedure created by their own preconceptions. But if they will follow the indicated guidance of the symbology employed, they will find their difficulties obviated as if by a touch of magic. For if Amenta is our earth, then Ani may be expected to appear as the typical human, with flesh, complexion and ornaments to match, and a little clothing if needed!

The text says of Teta: "This Teta hath broken forever his sleep in his dwelling which is upon earth." This assures us that the Amenta sleep takes place upon our earth.

Using "day" in the sense of incarnation, another text reads: "Thou appearest upon the earth each day," under the figure of the rising sun, of course.

Another chapter title (132) in the Book of the Dead gives a clue that is inerrant: "The chapter of causing a man to come back to see his house upon earth." And in the Saitic Recension the "house" is said to be in the underworld. The two are then equated.

Another chapter (152) gives a quite illuminative title: "Of building a house upon the earth." As this "house" is the temple which Jesus said he would re-erect "in three days," and is the central structure of all Masonry, it is important to note that its erection takes place on earth.

"I died yesterday, but I come today," exclaims the Manes (Ch. 179).

"He sitteth as a living being in Amenta," affirms another verse. These do not sound like the expressions of the real defunct.

Budge tells us that the duty of supplying meat, drink and apparel to the "dead" was deputed to Anup, Keb and Osiris. Anup was the guide of souls in the underworld; Keb (Seb) was the god of earth; Osiris was the ruler of the kingdom of the dead. All three distinctly locate the region of death on this globe.

The following from Budge is noteworthy:26

"For the goddess (Taht-I-em-hetep) adds, Amenti is a place of stupor and darkness, and death calleth every one to him, gods and men, and great and little are all one to him; he seizeth the babe as well as the old man. Yet [Budge adds] the Egyptians did not27 live wantonly, as if this life were a preparation for a gloomy death. They lived in expectation of passing into a region of light and glory."

Here is powerful confirmation of the contention that the Egyptians could not have regarded the gloomy and darksome Amenta as the region of life after death, and that the soul ascended to realms of glory and brightness on leaving the body instead of descending into the scholars’ purgatory--Amenta. The Egyptians were taught in the Mysteries that this life was the Amenti of stupor and darkness, and out of it they would pass to rest and brighter scenes in the empyrean. Budge supposes the call of "death" to be from the earth to heaven, when it is from heaven to earth, on the thesis here established. The call of death was the summons to bright angelic spirits to enter the life in body. It was St. Paul’s "command." No wonder the noted Egyptologist has to register some incomprehension over the fact that the Egyptians were cheery in the face of passing at death into what he supposed was the fearsome Amenta. Pluto’s rape of Proserpine should have enlightened him. The Grim Reaper calls all souls, when ready for the human trial, into the kingdom of "death." The other Egyptian designation for death is notable: "‘Devourer of Millions of Years’ is his name." This would indicate the total cycle of incarnations to be of great duration, which indeed all esoteric teaching asserts it to be. And still more significant is another title given him: "His name is either Suti (Sut) or Smam-ur, the Earth-soul." There is no escaping the invincible evidence: to die is to live on earth.

There are not wanting forthright statements from the Egyptians themselves which should prove conclusive as to the point under discussion. Massey himself gives one of them:

"In the inscriptions on the sarcophagus of Seti the earth is used as equivalent to Amenti and opposed to heaven."28

Yet he did not see that this inscription was destructive of his own interpretation. He says further:

"Also the sun descending into the underworld is thus addressed: ‘Open the Earth! traverse the Hades and the Sky! Ra, come to us!"

If now mundane life be found to be the seat of all human experience and human meaning, what must be made of the Biblical adjuration not to lay up treasures on earth? If this life is the scene and theater of destiny, why should it be ignored and scorned?

A part of the answer is that, to be sure, values are not held here in permanency. Obviously they could not be, if the bodies through which they are implemented disappear. But neither are they enjoyed forever in the spiritual existence which the soul has in the interim between lives. But the great and momentous question then arises: if they abide in perpetuity neither on earth nor in heaven, where are they preserved? The answer is: in the inner spiritual entity of the man wherever he goes; it is his permanent possession and he takes it with him always. It is his, whether in or out of the body, as St. Paul says. But--and this is the item of final import for man--though the gains of evolving life are not held on earth in perpetuity, it is on earth that they are won! And this knowledge is the sum and substance of philosophy. The soul comes to earth to win its pearl of great price in the depths of what is called the great sea of mortal life.

The scholar’s thesis that religious texts were written for the benefit of the dead is the dire result of the complete reversal of the meaning of ancient typology. All the offices of poetry vindicate the claim that imagery uses the less real to depict the more real; a natural process to depict a spiritual one; a fairy tale to portray the deepest living realities. But a perverted theology used the real to depict the unreal. As to the mummy, current misconception holds that its preservation was to suggest an absolutely unreal future for the defunct body that could have no future and for the soul that as certainly could not return to it. On the contrary, the symbolism centering about the mummy, an entirely insignificant and unreal thing, was an elaborate device to impress on living humanity the far more real experience of the immortal self interred in the coffin of the fleshly body, but immortalized there.

The Books of the Dead should be pondered by the Western world with a new intensity. For with the new canon of interpretation laid down in the present work to guide our thinking, the title will yield a stunning realization of the catastrophic blunder of sixteen centuries of theological blindness. And flashing through awakened intelligence will dawn that benign understanding that religious scripts were meant for human guidance through this benighted land of the dead, the only Amenta, Sheol, Hades, Tophet or underworld ever contemplated by the original framers of the grand mythos. And not the less impressive will be that philosophical recognition, at last as at first, that man is himself the mummy, "dead" on earth, but preserved to immortality by the injection of the Amrit or Soma juice of the Christ nature.

NOTES

CHAPTER IX

1. Mistaken for the defunct human, but really the descending god.

2. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 846.

3. Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 7.

4. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 152.

5. Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 306.

6. Question mark is Budge’s--showing how much the scholar has been confused by his failure to apprehend the technical theological use of the term by the Egyptians. Passage from the Book of the Dead cited by Budge.

7. Quoted by Thomas Taylor, Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 91 ff.

8. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 706.

9. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 868.

10. Quoted by Budge: Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 8.

11. Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 67.

12. Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 69.

13. Cf. the raising of Lazarus.

14. Myths and Legends: Egypt, p. 121.

15. Later equated by Massey with Achor, the valley of Sheol, the Hebrew Hades.

16. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 415.

17. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 643-4.

18. Here would seem to be authentic rebuttal of the major premises of so

598

much Oriental philosophy which builds on the general thesis that the whole of life on earth is evil, "a calamity to be avoided at all costs." (Radhakrishnan: Indian Philosophy, Vol. I.)

CHAPTER X

1. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 416.

2. Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 644.

3. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 198.

4. Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 211.

5. Massey: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 416.

6. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 648.

7. Iu, a name of the Egyptian Messiah, equivalent to Jesus or Horus.

8. As we saw, equals the "cave" of the body.

9. Upper Egypt, by the uranographic transfer, denotes the spiritual man and his spiritual body, while Lower Egypt denotes the carnal man and his body of flesh.

10. Sheol may be taken as identical with the Egyptian Amenta.

11. So named because of the golden hues of the chrysalis.

12. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 219.

13. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 213.

14. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 883.

15. Ritual, Ch. 173 (Renouf and Naville).

16. The specific significance of this term will appear in the chapter on Dismemberment.

17. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 190.

18. Mead’s Translation, p. 394.

19. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 210.

20. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 374.

21. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 415.

22. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 455.

23. Taylor: Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 105.

24. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 709.

25. Budge: Introduction to the Book of the Dead, p. xc.

26. Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 144.

27. Italics are Budge’s.

28. The Natural Genesis, I, p. 525.