The Lost Light

An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Chapters 13 and  14

Chapter XIII

EARTH, WATER, AIR, FIRE

The possibility of making an effective interpretation of arcane scriptures will be seen to be closely interwoven with the part played in symbolic structure by the four elements, earth, water, air and fire. Grasp of the ideas hidden under the use of these four emblems comes close to putting one in possession of the key to most of the mystery. The revelation of the full force of their application will prove astonishing.

Much absurdity has found expression in common belief as to their significance. It has everywhere been asserted that the ancients conceived all substances to be composed of these four primary and irreducible constituents, instead of the ninety-two mineral elements of modern chemistry. This is folly. What they were dealing with is a vastly different formula. They were not asserting man’s physical body, with all other things, was compounded of only four elements. They held man’s total constitution to be compounded of four distinct grades or modifications of original essence, each of which gave him a body, by virtue of which his life effected its conscious expression in four different worlds at the same time. Each of the bodies was charactered and symboled by one of the four elements, and the more sublimated ones interpenetrated the coarser, localizing the functionism of all four in the lower one, man’s physical body, symboled by the earth; an emotional body, of which water was the suggestive emblem; a mental body, with air as its sign; and a spiritual body, typed by fire or the sun. A fifth, not yet evolved to function in humanity and beyond the ken of mortal knowledge, was predicated as the development of a distant future. It was called a body of aether, the fifth element, called by Aristotle a term equivalent to "quintessence." It yet lies latent and undifferentiated in the inner core of the element of fire.

The Bibles of antiquity can not be understood unless this basic predication be made, that man lives not alone on one plane of nature, but on four, and that he makes contact with the realities of each of them by means of a body composed of the matter indigenous to that realm. His focus of consciousness may pass from one to the other of the four bodies under pressure of the swing of his interests. When we grandiloquently speak of living within the whole range of our being, we are unwittingly repeating a conception of ancient theory, the literal truth of which we have lost the data to comprehend.

Of an eventual septenary constitution man has as yet progressed only so far as to have deployed into function the lower quaternary of powers. Plato in the Timaeus says that "three genera of mortals yet await to be created." Each emanation of energic force brings to manifestation one of the bodies of our composite mechanism, as it does one of the planes of nature. We are now in the fourth of such rounds or cycles, and have therefore developed four of the ultimate seven bodies of our equipment for contacting the reality of all worlds. And these four bodies are typed by earth, water, air and fire, symbolically.

The matter of the contemporary existence of these four (or five) bodies within the single space of the physical may occasion some incredulity as to the ancient theory. But modern science has itself opened the door of explanation here. It is a matter of the fineness of molecular particles and interstitial spaces. Certain rays can be passed through "solid" substances, because their electrons swing in minute orbits amid vaster ones. It is declared esoterically that the atomic matter of which each of man’s four bodies is composed is in structural essence a sevenfold attenuation or sublimation of the one which it interpenetrates. Each one interpenetrates its coarser neighbor, and at the same time is interpenetrated by its next finer associate. So the four dwell together, occupying the same three-dimensional area, yet with a "great gulf" fixed between each pair, the abyss of difference of electronic vibration, wave length, frequency and radial orbit. This is the great gulf that divides each world from all others. It is not a chasm of spacial distance, but a hiatus between vibrational frequencies, wave length and other forms of potency. To bridge the abyss and step from one world to another, it is requisite that man should be able to tune up, or down, the mathematical "pitch" of his consciousness, as exemplified by the "tuning in" process of the radio. Two discordant tones of consciousness are not on the same plane, or in the same world. Their failure to harmonize puts them into different areas of the field of life.

The five planes were represented by the five geometric figures, the cube for earth, the sphere for water, the triangle for fire, the crescent for air, and the candle-flame tip for aether. Certain significations of the figure-symbols will be presented in the sequel, but it is doubtful if anyone at present knows authoritatively the full range of meaning attached to them. In some drawings of the series, air, the third, and fire, the fourth, are reversed in position. Their relative place in the order is doubtless of vital importance, but for the ends of religious symbolism, it seems not to be a question of critical value. After examination of many applications of the typing it has been found advantageous to make a more condensed grouping of the four under the two heads of fire and water, as these two appear to do double duty in carrying the burden of the symbolism.

This reduces the fourfold nature of man to the broad generality of the dualism, or the compound of two elements, the divine and the earthly, in one body.

This will be found to serve the readiest purposes of interpreting the many myths, for there appears to be a vast preponderance of the dual representation in the scriptures and folk-lore of the world, under the wide imagery of fire and water.

The two most distinctive symbols, then, are fire and water, and their proper interpretation almost alone gives a key to the religious texts. Let fire be taken to refer undeviatingly to our higher or divine segment, and water to our lower or animal-human portion; or fire to connote the god from heaven, and water the earthly man, the first Adam. In an even more condensed form, fire may type the soul and water the body. Classifications so general are not to be taken as scientifically precise; but they will be seen to be systematically applicable, without loss of explicit meaning. The fifth element, aether, may profitably be ignored, as it stands for the innermost essence of all manifest life, and humanity is not in conscious relation to its high mode of activity.

Oddly enough, by one of those inversions to which the imagery is susceptible, the serpent has become a symbol of both the fire and the water elements, and hence types both our divine and our sensual natures. "When above it was the serpent of air and fire, and when below the serpent of water and earth."1 There was the fiery serpent that Moses lifted up, and the water dragon of Revelation, of the Aeneid and other classical works. There is the Good Serpent, Agathodaemon, and the Evil Serpent, Kakodaemon, symbol of Satan. Water, too, became a dual sign, with a higher and lower translation. As the first it was an emblem of the outpourings of divinity, the water of life that Jesus promised to the woman at the well; as the second, it typed the fluctuating, restless, sensual nature in which the divine fire was so nearly drowned out. Even fire shares the dual meaning, for it symbols the celestial life, the fire of Prometheus, Jove’s thunderbolt, as well as the fires of the torture and hell of earthly existence. The Ritual speaks of our baptism on earth "in the Pool of the Double Fire." This is easily comprehensible because of the shifting of the divine beings from the empyrean to the mundane sphere of activity. In heaven it was a pure and clear flame; on earth it was fed with damp, coarse fuel, and became lurid in hue and charged with noxious, sulphurous gases, and turned to steam and smoke. A large part of the whole significance of the incarnation can be seen reflected in the imagery of fire introduced into a semi-watery condition. Our work will be wasted effort if it does not succeed in imprinting on every imagination the indelible suggestion that our earthly history is adumbrated by the picture of an imperishable and unquenchable spark of divine fire struggling to live and expand its power in a moist environment. Our inmost essence is as a central nucleus of fire striving valiantly to light a mass of damp green wood--the animal nature. The resultant smoke and smudge is the perfect type of our life here, intellectually and spiritually. These were the very symbols of our terrene existence employed in Greek philosophy.

This peculiar duality of the symbols, discerned throughout, is itself a reflection of the twofold movement, or double status, of the soul in incarnation. For that which began as heavenly passed into earthly embodiment, and the pertinence of the symbols had to change with the change of milieu. All the heavenly symbols became inwrought with earthly reference and imperfection, and thus picked up the implication of evil. On earth, then, we may expect to find the celestial symbols with meanings almost completely reversed, or with their purity besmirched, so to say. It is not surprising that the wise Egyptians should have given us a picture of this very reversal in one of their typical vignettes. For, says Massey:

"The god advancing in a reversed position is the sun [the god, soul] in the underworld. The image accords exactly with an Egyptian scene of the sun passing through the Hades, where we see the twelve gods of the earth, or the lower domain of night, marching towards a mountain turned upside down, and two typical personages are also turned upside down. This is an illustration of the passage of the sun through the underworld. The reversed (people) on the same monument are the dead. Thus the Osirified deceased who had attained the second life, in the Ritual says exultingly, ‘I do not walk on my head.’ The dead, as the Akhu, are the spirits, and the Atua is a spirit who comes walking upside down." (Book of Hades.)2

One of the rites of the resurrection was the "erecting of the Tat," or setting the Tat cross or the mummy upright on its feet. In addition to the imagery of death in all its forms to type our spiritually defunct condition here, there was employed also the idea of an entire reversal of position to portray the true state of the soul in its untoward predicament. We are heavenly spirits turned upside down on earth! Earth reverses heavenly lines of motion. It reflects the pattern of things in the mount, but inverted. The highest symbols of heaven therefore fall at the very bottom of earthly tracing. And the very spirit of the god who came to earth, renouncing his bliss on high to bring immortal gifts to man, was himself later inverted into the personification of evil! We have, then, the angels of light turned into demons, the bright flame of divinity metamorphosed into the lurid fire of hell, the waters of life becoming the raging seas that engulfed the boats of Jonah and Jesus, the serpent of wisdom becoming the dragon of evil.

With the four basic elements now established, it is interesting to note the curious typical results obtained when any two are brought together, as the fact of incarnation does bring all four together in man. Some remarkable and surprising combinations are produced, both in symbol and in actuality.

Man’s lower nature, as seen in any diagram, is composed of the elements of earth and water, his higher nature of fire and air. Any time either of the two upper is crossed with either of the two lower, there is a rough symbol of incarnation, or combination of the divine with the human. But the two that together comprise either our lower or higher nature may also be found in correlation. This is admirably seen in the two lower, where the mixture of earth and water produces, as any child can tell, mud or mire. At once we have a key to translate the significance of the papyrus swamps of Egyptian legends, the "miry clay" of Plato and the Bible, and the celebrated Reed (not Red) Sea of Exodus (see Moffatt Translation). The marshes of Lower Egypt in which Horus and Jesus and Sargon were all secreted can be taken now as the glyphs of the human physical body, compounded of earth and water. The body is itself about seven-eighths water and the remainder earth. The lotus, papyrus or reed has a number of meanings, but in the main they typify the new life springing up out of the mud and water, to flower out in the air and the fire of the sun. The risen Horus is figured seated on a lotus pad above the water.

Mud, as the type of matter (and matter, mud, and mother all come from the same linguistic root), is dialectically analyzed in the Greek philosophy:

"Matter," says Simplicius in his commentary on the first book of Aristotle’s Physics, "is nothing else then mutation of sensibles, with respect to intelligibles, deviating from thence and carried down to non-being. These things, indeed, which are the properties of sensibles are irrational, corporeal, distributed into parts, and passing into bulk and divulsion through an ultimate progression into generation, viz., into matter; for matter is always truly the last sediment. Hence also the Egyptians call the dregs of the first (or highest) life, which they symbolically denominate water, matter, being, as it were, a certain mire."

What Simplicius is quaintly telling us in terms of reasoned analysis of the elements of being which are quite "Greek" to us moderns, is that matter is to be thought of as a kind of sediment deposited on the lowest levels of inert life by the crystallization of ethereal forces, precisely as snow is the sedimentary deposit of vaporous states of water, subjected to a reduction of temperature. Nature furnishes a perfect analogy for every truth.

A common ancient symbolic term for our life here is the "sea of generation." Iamblichus joins Heraclitus in likening generation to a water symbol, that of a river, as being always in flux. It is the river of Lethe, flowing through the dark meadows of Ate, as Empedocles says. It represents in its swirling currents the voracity of matter and the light-hating world, as the gods say, and the winding streams under which many are drawn down, as the Chaldean Oracles assert. The fitness of the meadow to stand for this life is seen in its lying always in a low marshy place contiguous to a stream. It tells of land and water in juxtaposition and therefore matches mire in its suggestiveness.

Plotinus in a passage already quoted has called our descent a fall into dark mire. The Hebrew Psalmist, in the words of the incarnated deity, cries:

"Save me, O God! for the waters are come in unto my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing. I am come in unto deep waters where the floods overwhelm me."

Without the skill of the Greeks in dealing with abstruse facts of cosmology under symbolic typism we are hardly prepared to catch the aptness of the figure of water for the creeping inroads of sensual impulse upon the divine purity. But the god cries that the waters of animal passion have come in to inundate his soul. Again he prays:

"Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink. Let me be delivered from them that hate me. Let not the water-floods overwhelm me, neither let the deep swallow me up."

His gratitude for eventual deliverance takes the form (Ps. 40):

"He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings."

Yet--"he hath founded the earth upon the waters and established it upon the floods" (Ps. 24), because out of the water and the mud of mortal life was to come the new generation, the son, Jesus or Horus, as the young shoot of the papyrus reed of divine life.

The mire and filth of the Augean stables cleansed by Hercules is another form of this imagery, for the solar hero turns into them the waters of two rivers. The two streams represent those of spirit and matter, generally, and only out of the interworking of the two does eventual purgation come.

A vivid light can now be thrown on such a fiction as this: Horus was mutilated and his members cast into the water. To find them Isis invoked the aid of Sebek, or Sevekh, the crocodile-god, an ancient solar deity, who, having examined the banks of the swamps with his claws, took his net and fished out the pieces. Sebek then reconstituted the god whole and entire. The significance of Sebek’s participation is in his name, which means "seven," intimating that a septenary development was entailed in the perfective process. Man is perfected always in a cycle of seven stages.

Water and earth yield another deposit than that of mud or mire, a very curious one. Water, depositing particles of mineral earth, petrifies a piece of wood, a combination of water, earth and air. Not even such a symbol is irrelevant, since it speaks in loudest tones of the hardening influence of the lower nature upon the higher, and images the Gorgon shield, turning all softer natures to stone.

Air and water in conjunction provide much matter for symbology. In the first place there is air in water, and it needs only the application of the still more energic element fire to beget life and engender most of the other forms of living symbolism. In ice or cold water the energies of life remain inert; let fire be applied and the resultant energization gives us a faint suggestion of the whole meaning of the entry of the gods into the province of less active substances. Fire plunged into water most pointedly dramatizes the basic import of the whole incarnation procedure. The soul, a fiery nucleus of noetic intelligence, is plunged into the watery habitat of the fleshly body. The moral fight is a combat between the fire of spirit and the water of emotion and desire; and fire must win the victory by eventually drying up and converting into steam the heavy humid nature of animal-man. Fire must dry out a path across the sea of generation, so that it may cross this Reed (Red) Sea out of Egypt, as also the Jordan River, into the Holy Land, without wetting its feet! Fire enters the watery realm of body, already permeated by air in hidden form. Heat raises the water into vapor, which, being an airy form of water, suggests the birth of mind out of emotion. We read in the Ritual (Ch. 164): "Oh, the Being dormant within his body, making his burning in flame, glowing within the sea by his vapor. Come, give the fire, transport [perhaps better, "transform"] the vapor of the Being." The vapor was a type of the breath of life, air containing moisture, symbol of the soul that was linked with emotion. It was a plea for the god to come and sublimate the emotional element of the lower self, water, by unifying it with air, mind. Each higher element is able to raise the potential of the one below it and refine it. So earth (sense) is raised and purified by water (emotion); water (emotion) by air (mind); and air (mind) by fire (spirit). This gives us the key table of values. By their simple application in various combinations a hundred intimate meanings of ancient scriptures may be resolved into comprehensible reading.

A common form of air and water mixed is foam or bubbles. Froth arises when air becomes violently active in water. Fire, spirit, quickens and intensifies the process. We have here the ground for the solution of that riddle of Greek mythology which makes Venus to be born from the sea-foam, produced by the energy of the great God Jupiter striding through the sea. It is a beautiful allegory, hinting that the goddess of Love is born in the evolutionary process when air, mind, is injected into the field of the animal impulses and passions. This came when the god, descending, brought air and fire to energize the elements in the sea water (of the body). Froth would intimate the elevation of emotion to the plane of thought, or the thorough mixing of thought with emotion,--perhaps also the emotionalizing of thought. Bubbles rising to the surface suggest the evolution of thought out of the very depths of the physical and emotional departments of man. The Egyptian image of the water-cow indicated life emanating from the primordial waters. And the rising of Aphrodite into breathing life and beauty out of the foam marks this idea as Egyptian in origin. Nu-ti, "froth," is the same word as Neith, who was one of the early Kamite personifications of the first life rising from the waters. Neith is Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, the mother of life, twofold in character as liquid and aeriform. Her celestial representative was Ursa Major, the Great Bear (or Bearer, suggests Massey), the great dipper in which the water of life was held, and from which, as it turned around the pole, it was periodically poured out and again dipped up! In early times its orbit dipped down into the sub-horizonal sea. So this great sidereal directory of the heavens became the greatest of astronomical symbols to the ancients, dramatizing the seven great elementary mother powers of nature that periodically arose out of the waters of life. Operated by its handle of three stars, typing the solar triad of mind, soul and spirit, it caught up the living waters in its four-starred cup, the fourfold physical basis of all things.

The Egyptian male-female pair of Shu and Tefnut personify the dual subsistence of breath and moisture. "These in one form may be the breath of life and its dew, as Tef is to drip or drop."3 Air and moisture are combined in the breath of mortals. The creative breath of mortal life is emaned and drips its moisture upon the earth in rain, fog or dew. The spirit of God outbreathed as air or breath, from which was precipitated the water of life on earth. Rain is distilled out of the bosom of the air. In the form of vapor, visible or invisible, the upper heaven holds the celestial water, the type of divine life embosomed in air--emotions germinally latent in thoughts. And when this water has fallen to earth, it takes the action of fiery spirit to convert it back again to heavenly state, and this can only be done by the superior energy transmuting its nature from liquid to vapor or "spirit" form.

The deceased, awaiting his resurrection, cries to Nu: "Give me water and the breath of life!" The reply comes: "I bring thee the vase containing the abundant water for rejoicing the heart by its effusion, that thou mayest breathe the breath of life resulting from it." Water, though not in its liquid form, is the first aspect of matter in all the oldest mythologies and cosmologies. It is indeed the primal substance of the universal mother. In the Berosan account of creation the primal mother is called Thallath, which is the Greek thallassa, "the sea." Tiamat and Typhon are equivalent to Tefnut (Greek Daphne), the Great Depth, or Tepht (also Tophet). Basically, mother, matter and water are one. Plato speaks of water as "the liquid of the whole vivification." Again he alludes to it mystically as "a certain fountain."

The interpenetration of the gross bodies by the subtler ones in man may perhaps be realistically depicted by the relations subsisting between the four elements in the outer world. Living physical bodies of earthly constituency hold water, the water embosoms air, and in the air is the hidden potency of fire. The elements consistently interpenetrate each other, the finer in the coarse. We have already traced the vivid symbolism of fermentation, or the generation of air in water, type of the enkindling of spirit. At the baptism of Jesus by John, according to Justin Martyr, "a fire was kindled in the waters of the Jordan." This matches the Egyptian "a burning within the sea." Spirit sets its ferment and its blaze a-going amid the watery elements of the body.

Seeking in the heights and depths of the natural creation for symbols of truth, the mythographers could not miss so patent a type as that of the fish leaping out of the water. It was a vivid suggestion of the soul in matter leaping in aspiration for short breaths of air in the kingdom above it. Whether it be seeking a moment’s breath of a diviner air in the kingdom above, or only a fly as food, it projects itself from the lower to a higher plane, prefiguring the sallies of the human soul--often otherwise represented by ichthys, the fish--from its mortal habitat into the purer realms of spirit. The soul, like the fish, must occasionally clutch at a morsel of more heavenly food. The fish stood for the immortal soul as breather in the water of mundane existence.

A Norse myth tells of the division of a single primal world into two halves, or the separation of the two waters of the firmament, as in Genesis. The one was a world of water, the other of air, and the beings in the lower water ascend by night to breathe the pure air of the upper half; and it is said the sun consumes them like vapor. This would restate the Assumption of the Virgin, the festival of the old astronomical phenomenon of August and early September, when the sun absorbs the constellation of the Virgin, emblematic of the dissolution of all physical worlds in the bosom of the Absolute. It might be said that after every day and every incarnation man ascends to inhale refreshing draughts of spiritual air on an upper plane. Without this frequent release and relief he could not support prolonged existence in the denser world below.

The "secret of Horus in An" is the mystery of how his mother caught him in the water. Neith, given by Massey as equivalent to "net," fished him out. Cosmically he typified the first life emanating from the water; humanly the god coming to birth in the water of the body. Many of the symbols can be worked on two or even more planes of explanation. Every cosmic process has its reflection in the natural world, again in the spiritual life of man, and lastly in the very physiology of the body. Nature is meaningless nowhere.

The perch on the head of Neith or Hathor is a badge of the birth from water. Neith also carries the shuttle or knitter for her net, wherewith she becomes a catcher of men out of the waters, and draws them up into the world of air and spirit.

The East has always portrayed true being as an escape from the waters of life. Hence the widespread use of the fisherman’s net as an emblem of salvation. Jesus did not startle his disciples with a new metaphor when he called them to be "fishers of men." Two Ritual chapters furnish suggestion here. Chapter 153A is entitled "of coming forth from the net," and 153B "of coming forth from the Catcher of Fish." Water so obviously presented a menace to life by drowning that it becomes the focus of ideas emphasizing an escape from evil. As such it is not the water of life, but the water of death. It signified the lower life of generation, or life in "death." Water stops our breathing and perils the air-sustained life of deity. An oyster that could keep shut up and safe under water was one of the figures of spiritual security.

Nun in the Chaldean is the Great Fish; Nuna in Syriac is the constellation Cetus, the Whale. Nun of the Hebrew alphabet is the fish, as Mem is water. The picture of a great fish "breathing out" water caused it to be personified as the mother heaven that poured forth water and the breath of life. The Egyptians also made the lotus, ascending from the water, a symbol of breath, and the Egyptian Seshin for "lotus" is from ses, "breath."

The close philosophical relation of water and air is shown in a number of languages by the identical derivation of the words "to swim" and "to be born." Birth and swimming in or on water are practically synonymous. It is best seen in the Latin. The same root, na, means both "to be born" and "to swim." Being born of water, avers Massey, is but to be borne upon it. As man was not able to live under water, life was pictured as a coming out of it or a floating upon it. To be born into life, therefore, was to escape from the water, and come up where breath was obtainable. The very first act of the babe new-born out of the water of the womb is to catch its first breath! Immersed in the waters of generation, of sense and desire, man can not come to his real life, or second birth, until he can rise out of the "water" to breathe the more vivifying air of the heaven of mind and spirit. The power of the sun (god) to stimulate life and growth could not reach him effectively in the kingdom of water (nature); he had first to lift his head out of the water into the kingdom of air (mind) before the rays of the god could breed spiritually within him.

From the na stem we trace both "naval" and "navel," relating birth and sailing. Nef, says Massey, means in Egyptian both "sailor" and "to breathe." The navel was one of the earliest doorways between the two worlds (of water and air), and as such it maintained its symbolic value. The navel was an image of breath in the waters of the womb. It was the channel by which the breath of life passed into the soul in the water. The god, through whom we partake of the breath of life from a higher plane, is spiritually our navel, located at the very center of our being.

In the ideography the female came to be regarded as the furnisher of water, and the male as the supplier of breath, the combination yielding life. These were Tefnut and Shu. He became the inspirer of soul, she the former of flesh. It was the god, masculine, who breathed the breath of life into the nostrils. In the Ritual the Speaker, coming to his new life, says he has been "snatched from the waters of his Mother" and "emaned from the nostrils of his Father Osiris." The Chinese matched this with their Ying and Yin, the male and female, or breath and water sources.

The water and the lotus were both female emblems at first. The papyrus-scepter of Uat is the express sign of the feminine nature of Uati, who represented the features of both wet and heat, water and breath, or body and soul, heat being necessary to turn water into vapor or breath.

A simple yet strong ideograph of the unified action of water and air is a ship driven by the wind. The wind (intellect) imparts motion to that which navigates the waters. The body is driven by the mind! Mind and wind, both unseen, energize the visible.

Very suggestive is the request in the Ritual (Ch. 55): "May air be given unto these young divine beings," a reference to the Kumaras or Innocents when first plunged into their material baptism. And even more directly pertinent is the chapter title (56): "Of sniffing air in the waters of the underworld." And another title (Ch. 54) is: "Of giving air to the overseer of the palace . . . Nu, triumphant, in the underworld." And again Chapter 57 is that "of breathing the air and having dominion over the waters of the underworld." When Horus rises he is exultingly welcomed as escaping from the dark lower region, "without water and without air," as the condition of soul in matter.

In Africa and Central America the god Houragan (Hurricane) was the personification of the mingled power of water and air. Hurakan in Quiché means a stream of water that pours straight down. In the hieroglyphics Hura is heaven (Greek: oura-nos), "over," "above." Khan is a watery tempest. Typhon, the abyss of primordial heaven, is identical with typhoon. Mixcohuatl, the "cloud serpent," the chief of the Mexican gods, bears the name of the tropical whirlwind.

The flying fish came in for its share of appropriate suggestiveness, and another bird, the hissing widgeon, which issued from the waters to fly along the surface, became a symbol of the soaring free soul, which was nearly always pictured as winged or feathered.

Naturally all species of aero-aquatic birds came under the scope of this typology. The bird that could rise off the water and soar away was inescapably a type of the rising soul. But the ancients joined the two kinds of life in one creature which became one of the most universal of all symbols, the winged serpent or feathered snake. Recent researches in Central America have brought to light the wide prevalence of this emblem in the Mayan and other civilizations on the American continent. And since it was general in Asia and Africa in remote times, the question of intercommunication or separate origin is once more pertinently raised. The snake that could fly is the incontrovertible evidence of ancient knowledge of the union of divinity and earthiness in man’s organic life. Man that is born of water and the spirit (air) should once again become wise as to his dual origin. And modern man should cease to belittle the mythopoetic genius of his ancestors who endeavored, with almost incredible sagacity, to embody important knowledge of cosmic facts in imperishable glyphs. In the terms of evolutionary biology the swan is the feathered snake, and Hansa, the bird of primordial life and intelligence that floats above the waters of the abyss, is the eternal emblem of that spiritual life that has stepped into our fluctuating sea of natural impulse to bring order, harmony and beauty into the realm of nescience and chaos.

The Akhekh gryphon is a dragon with wings. Wings and feathers supply the type of air and fire in the later Bird of the Sun. The bird symbolized the swift-darting and lofty-soaring motion of divine intelligence. The French Swan-Dragon unites the bird’s head with the serpent’s tail. An ancient Greek work makes the first godly nature a serpent which later transmuted into a hawk. One form of the gryphon was the body of a beast, the tail of a serpent and the head of a peacock. This is the mythical cockatrice. It was so named because of its origin from the egg of a cock hatched by a serpent. The divine is hatched and nurtured in the body of nature.

Earth with water yielded mire, or sensuousness; water with air suggested mingled emotion and dawning thought; spiritous wine hinted at a fiery element in water, or "fire-water." Beside Isis, whose name derives from stems meaning to breathe and ferment, there is the goddess Uati, a name congenital perhaps with our "wet" and "heat," if not the basis of "water" itself. She was the genetrix, and signified wet and heat in conjunction; and her function suggests the conversion of water into breathing life by the mother in heat, or gestating! Unleavened bread would represent the natural man unspiritualized by the ferment of divine efficacies. It would show the first Adam, the man unregenerate, born of water, the natural body, but not of the spirit. Leavened bread was "spiritualized" bread. And oddly enough the little leaven that leaveneth the whole lump does indeed generate by its ferment a sort of breathing in the dough, for the latter becomes permeated with air bubbles which work to the surface. Bring the god of fire into matter and the latter begins to manifest the breath of life. Fire rises, and is the ultimate type of evolution, in which life sparks ascend to the empyrean. Water falls, and is the type of involution, or life descending to incubate in matter. But water below, acted upon by fire, is transformed into a sublimated state in which it can effect its return to the empyrean. The gist of the story of religion is here. Fire had to be brought down from heaven to convert fallen water into spiritous vapor, to enable it to rise again.

Physical nature presents a notable exemplification of the fourfold elemental typology in the phenomenon of a thunderstorm. Our universal mother has set the advertising sign of her modes and configurations all about us, but only the ancients heeded her message or read her language. The upper air, or heaven, surcharged with electricity, discharges its pent energies above the earth in flashes of fire. The mighty potency performs a sort of electrolysis upon the constituent elements of the air, dismembering, so to say, the unit mass of embosomed moisture held in suspension in the atmosphere and sending it in fragments to the earth to nourish the life of man and beast. Not an item or detail of the theological typism is lacking in the phenomenon. As the fire emanation from heaven operated to precipitate its latent forces in the broken globules of water to the earth to fructify its life, so the fiery nature of deity came potentially to earth in fragments to liberate its powers in new growth. The celestial energy of pure spirit runs down the gamut of fire, air, water and earth. In man likewise a flash of the fire of spirit darts out of the surcharged bosom of the upper aether of consciousness, agitates the elements of the plane of mind next below it, these in turn release emotions on the plane below, and they deposit a final influence upon the very material of the earthy body. Each plane in succession receives the effects of the outrush of life from above. A breeze ruffling the surface of a pond is a vivid symbol of a thought stirring the emotions, the type of which is water. And the waves washing the shores portray in a measure the emotional wear and tear on the body. "Let nature be your teacher," says Wordsworth.

But a still more eloquent symbol comes to view to edify the mind of man at the end of the shower: the rainbow! In its sevenfold coloration we read again the septenary design of all natural constitution, including the life of man. The one divine essence of white light, shining out through the descending waters, is broken into its seven constituent rays. All manifest form must therefore be septenary in structure. Every cycle runs its course and comes to its perfection in seven sub-cycles. Hence the Eternal placed the rainbow in the heavens, at the end of the rain, in token that "never again will he destroy mankind." For man, at the end of his sojourn in the watery habitat of body, will have completed his perfection in seven stages and will not need further immersion in the sea of generation. As the rainbow disappears with the last rain, the sun reigns alone again in its one white light.

A unitary ray of light, passed through a three-faced glass prism and breaking into its seven colors, is a memorable certification of cosmic creational method. Man actually presents a three-faced transparent medium for the first light in the upper levels of his nature to provide the requisite condition for this phenomenon in his life. The immortal unit of spirit itself has segmented already into a triad which hovers in the upper sphere of consciousness. It is the great solar triad of Mind-Soul-Spirit, the reflection in human make-up of the cosmic Trinity of Will-Wisdom-Activity. It is man’s triangle of conscious faculty and it is of bright essence. Through it shines the one unbroken ray of Intelligence from the primal fount of light to be reflected on the physical screen of human life on earth, in a final sevenfold differentiation.

Still another phase of portrayal meets us in nature when we consider the change from a watery beginning to a fiery heyday in the progress of each day’s summer sun. The dewy freshness of dawn (water) and the burning heat of mid-day (fire) are personalized in Egypt by the goddesses Tefnut and Sekhet respectively. Tef(n) connotes the meaning of "dew" and "moisture" from its primary signification of "to drip, or drop." Then the watery phase of the goddess is superseded by the fiery one, and Tefnut becomes Sekhet, the heat principle which engenders ferment and new life. This is the transformation of Daphne (Tefnut) dawn, into the laurel or wood of fire, in the Greek poetization.

Another Ritual title (Ch. 163) is deeply suggestive: "Of not allowing the body of a man to molder away in the underworld." (The spiritual body is meant here, as the physical body does molder away.) The Manes is addressed:

"Hail, thou who art lying prostrate within thy body, whose flame cometh into being from out of the fire that blazeth within the sea (or water) in such wise that the sea (or water) is raised up on high out of the fire thereof."

If there are still any who dispute the mythical nature of ancient constructions, let them demonstrate how a fire blazing in the midst of a sea could be spoken of otherwise than allegorically. But when one knows that a universal code of symbol language made fire represent spiritual mind, and water flesh and carnality, then it can be seen how the poets speak rationally of a fire blazing in the sea and trying to raise it up again in vapor or spirit.

Another strong confirmation of the analysis is found in the Ritual (Ch. 176). In comment on it Budge writes: "As fire and boiling water existed in the underworld, he hastened to protect himself from burns and scalds by the use of chapters 63A and 63B." For the titles of these two chapters are: "Of drinking water and not being burnt by fire in the underworld," and "Of not being scalded with water." How squarely this is matched in the Bible (Is. 43):

"When thou passest through the waters I shall be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle on thee."

The underworld, then, is the place where fire and water are joined in affective relation; and where could this conjunction take place other than in the physical body?

And what pithy moral corollaries are discerned in the analogies if they are carried into particulars! The god (fire) stood in danger, as the Greeks clearly intimate, of suffering from the exhalations arising from its contact with the humors of the carnal body. It must be seen that the god’s entry into the body of an inferior being would result in the injection of an increased voltage, as it were, in the activities of all its forces. Animality would be more keenly energized as the transforming ferment began its work. The god stood in danger of being "burned," "scalded" by the "steam" engendered by the heightening of all lower psycho-chemical powers. The enhanced potential of the sense and emotion functionism provided by his own alliance with them, might overpower him.

One of the phallic renderings of the rainbow symbolism is curiously interesting. It is made to allegorize the prohibition of the male from union with the female during menstruation. Erymanthus, the son of Apollo, was said to have been struck blind because he looked on Venus when she was bathing. Acteon, seeing Diana at her bath, was turned into a stag. David was punished for his relations with Bathsheba, whom he saw bathing. What is the significance of the punishment of all these solar heroes for contacting the woman during her period? It is but one of the forms of cryptic typology under which ancient sagacity limned in outline the "fall" of the god when he linked his life with the feminine or material powers in a cycle of manifestation. He is dramatized as contaminating himself by his union with the wasting expenditure of natural force. He looks upon mother nature when she is shedding her life-blood fruitlessly. The glance of his eye, the sun, through her shower fixes the sevenfold division of physical nature in the sky. But the rainbow comes at the end of the rainstorm, and union of spirit with matter at the end of its outpouring is the time propitious for fecundation and the new birth. At any rate the punishment allotted to deity for intercourse with the flowing stream of the natural physical order, typed as feminine, is his being reduced to imprisonment in the animal body of man! Like the rainbow, this is sevenfold in organization. The sun, peeking out and beholding nature dripping, projects the sign of his intercourse with matter upon the opposite side of heaven in his septenary dismemberment. The sevenfold fission of his primal unity shows the disruption of his integrity in the sight of all the earth!

This is not empty imagery. It has had historical actualization in a strange way. It is related in Genesis (6) and in other racial epics that the sons of God had untimely intercourse with the females of the more advanced animal species, breeding the races of half-human, half-animal types. Early connection with the female animals instituted the miscegenation that so nearly thwarted the cosmic plan. As a result of the unleashing of powerful procreative forces in the animal world there ensued an unnatural production of hybrid monsters and prodigies of lust, which, the books hint, had to be expunged from evolution by the sinking of continents. One of the backgrounds of the "deluge" is thus erected. Procreation in the Golden Age or Edenic state was by kriyashakti, exercised by the will and the mind. This was possible because incarnation had not yet been fully achieved, and the forms of flesh were of ethereal tenuity. But miscegenation began prematurely and bred misshapen monsters. The enhancing of the keen powers of sense by the entry of the gods intensified the carnal mind, and a more or less promiscuous generation ran riot. This is the meaning of the harlotry or whoredom against which the Eternal vents his displeasure so vehemently throughout the prophetic books of the Old Testament. It is also allegorized by the various tempests on the sea into which the solar heroes must be cast, after being awakened, to still the raging waters of animal lust. This is the meaning of Jonah’s being cast into the waters after the casting of lots showing him responsible for the tempest. As the belly is the seat of the sexual and animal nature, the solar god is appropriately placed in the fish’s belly. And that neither Jonah’s venture nor Jesus’ burial is historical is indicated by the fact that both were held captive in this cavern of death for three days!

In the Eternal’s promise to Noah that the rainbow after every storm would remind him of his compact not to bring further destruction on the earth, he concludes with: "and the waters shall never again become a deluge to destroy every creature." The structure of this sentence is enlightening; for it is to be noted that the Eternal does not say that there shall be no waters to cover the earth, but that the waters of living force released for evolutionary purposes shall not again get out of hand and "become a deluge."

Of great value in this connection is the latter part of an Egyptian inscription called the Destruction of Mankind, dealing with the rebellion and fall of the angels. It ends similarly to that of Noah:

"When the deluge of blood is over, it is stated by the majesty of Ra: ‘I shall now protect men on this account. I raise my hand (in token) that I shall not again destroy men.’"

Here it is distinctly called a deluge of blood, not of water, signifying that the fiery nature of deity was drowned in the blood of incarnation. This points clearly to the racial biological nature of the deluge and away from any historical imputation whatever. Cosmology, biology, racial origin and individual spiritual history are all woven together in the skein of both the rainbow and the deluge symbolism. The thread that is missing is objective history!

The four elemental symbols are found to suggest these interesting correlations when two or more are seen in interplay. But there is almost no end of allusions to each of them separately in the tomes of the old wisdom. Much of this material is too valuable to be passed by. We begin with earth at the bottom.

This element need not be dealt with at great length. It is readily seen for what it truly is, the nethermost stratum of matter to which intelligence descends to manifest. The mineral kingdom of earth, the physical base of man’s body, marks the nadir of the downward sweep and the turning point or pivot. On its descending arc life undergoes a subjection of its finer forces to sluggish inert matter, on the analogy of a fire being reduced in burning potency. The earth is thus the opposite pole to heaven, as matter is the opposite node to spirit. And forever between these two extremes of positive and negative being plies the tireless shuttle of life. From spirit to matter and back again is the schedule of life’s endless journey. The ultimate significance of this is the profound mystery of all being. But Life is; and one of its activities is the cyclical periodicity of its creative function, its circulation around the wheel of birth, growth and death. It rhythmically institutes a progressive order, runs its course, perfects its products and then annihilates these products (to outward sense), leaving their seeds of new life, however, to flower in the next cycle.

Archaic wisdom expounds more intricate cosmic and evolutionary data than modern science has yet picked up. It asserts that the stars and planets are living beings, like humans. If a mortal-immortal man has four distinct bodies appertaining to his entire being, so does a planet. The ancient science says that each globe physically discernible is but one of a chain of seven bodies existing, like man’s vestures, in four types of matter symboled, again like man’s bodies, by earth, water, air and fire. A life wave emanating from the Father darts outward and courses around this chain of seven globes, organizing them in fact,  and creating a kingdom of kindred matter on each plane. The direction is downward or matterward for the first four globes, after which it turns again spiritward and sweeps upward through the last three. That is, the life wave builds a planetary spirit body on the plane of spirit (fire), a more material body on the plane of mind (air), a still more dense one on the plane of emotion (water), and finally an entirely material globe on the plane of mineral earth. Then it turns upward in its swing, rebuilding new globe bodies on the subtler planes through which it descended till it rests at last in the glorious new spirit body on the plane of the empyreal fire. On the fourth or lowest plane it builds up, lives and then retires from, the dense physical globe which is the earth.

The earth is thus the place of critical interest in the whole cycle. The life wave is sent forth to return with a harvest of more abundant life. Now it is only as spirit contacts and overcomes the inertia of matter that it brings its own potentialities to birth. Abiding eternally on its own plane, as Platonic philosophy says, it remains non-productive. It must go forth, seek adventure, meet with opposition, wrestle with the powers that would choke it, and achieve its new cyclical victory in a world of adversity. As Plotinus writes, "It is not enough for the soul merely to exist; she must show what she is capable of begetting." Here is the model and the genius of all romance, all drama. And the earth is the scene of this conflict between the embryonic immortal and the titanic mortal forces. And where the earth stands in the chain of planetary bodies, the physical body of man stands in the chain of vehicles or vestures which compose each individual. The human body is the seat and arena of the great conflict of personal destiny. Without dwelling in and mastering the body of flesh, the individual soul, as says Plotinus, would never know her powers. She would be spiritual, as she was from the start; but she would dream her existence away without ever becoming consciously aware of her latent creative capabilities, if she did not incarnate. Incarnation is evolution’s method of setting the seal of reality upon conscious life. This is the office of earth-life in the cycle and of incarnation for the individual soul. And it is the crucial point in all philosophy, as it is the critical point in individual destiny. As for the soul her pathway to heaven runs through the earth, and on it she goes to her "death" to be born anew.

In the Ritual (Ch. 19) the chapter of the Crown of Triumph shows the meaning of placing a floral wreath or crown upon the mummy in the sheta or coffin. It was to depict that the "garland of earth in the nether world becomes the crown of triumph for eternal wear." The crown of life was given to those who had suffered on earth. Earth and the body were the double arena in which the soul wrought out its perfection. Untried, untested in the fires of bodily experience, its faculties could not have been forged into strength, power and beauty. The soul comes into the underworld of darkness to win the immortal crown of light and glory, for only by victory over the powers of darkness can the light be brought to shining.

The Ritual makes it clear that the underworld of the earth is the realm to which the father Osiris, or Amen-Ra, or other deity pictured as aged, comes to regain his youth. "The old man (Amen-Ra) shineth in the form of one that is young"; "the old man that maketh himself young again"; "the unknown one who hideth himself from that which cometh forth from him"; and finally the one who is "deified in the underworld." In the Book of Breathings the Manes is told:

"Then doth thy soul breathe forever and ever, and thy form is made anew with thy life upon earth; thou art made divine along with the souls of the gods, thy heart is the heart of Ra, and thy members are the members of the great god."

Again:

"And the god Ap-uat (i.e., the Opener of the Ways) hath opened up for thee a prosperous path."

The Manes cries to Ra, his divinity:

"Make thou thy roads glad for me; and make broad for me thy paths when I shall set out from earth for the life in the celestial regions."

Saying that the divine speech of Ra is in his ears in the Tuat (underworld) the Manes prays that "no defects of my mother be imputed to me." This is to say: let no stains from my contacts with mother earth adhere to me. Yet to the unit of undivinized spirit it is told: "Through Keb (Seb) thou dost become a spirit." Apotheosis is on earth. The swamps of earth are the miry path to the Aarru-Hetep at the summit of the mount.

We meet in the Ritual the statement that "Earth opens to Ra! Earth closes to Apap!" It is the story of the Reed (Red) Sea over again. The physical domain opens as the soul learns the keys of magic power that part the waters. These keys are virtue, discipline, wisdom. But earth closes to block the way to Apap, or evil and ignorance. Earth provides the conditions that induce every quality of spirit to burgeon in beauty; but it brings to nought the counsels of the ungodly through karmic law. To live in the lower, sensual, grasping nature is to plunge into the waters and be overwhelmed; to aspire after fervent righteousness is to find that dry land between the parted waters.

The next element is water, and this is a more pertinent symbol of the lower self in man even than earth. It stands in two senses, first, for the primordial essence of all substance, the water of the abyss, the mother principle of all things; secondly for the higher water of life. The first is called in Egypt the water of the Nun, or of Nu (Nnu, equated with Noah by Massey). The Greek Nux (Nyx), Latin Nox, perhaps matches this goddess of the infinite void, in whom there is nothing but the sheer potentiality of life. As this is the primal darkness and the void, Nu, Nun, Nyx, is apparently the linguistic original of all things negative in speech, as "no," "none," "not," "nought," "never," "negative," German "nichts." But out of it flashed the first ray of light. It was the water of source, and life is born out of water.

But the primal abyss splits into two firmaments, and there is the water above to match the water below. So secondly there is the water of life, the higher firmament. This is practically equivalent to spirit and is another but less used form of the fire symbol itself. The rain that falls from the skies, and not the flowing water below, would be its type.

Closer to man, however, there is a third application of the water symbol. The element is made to stand for the second of his constituent principles, the emotional nature, which is so closely inwrought with his physical body as generally to include the latter in its reference. This is the most suggestive and fruitful use of water as symbol. It is the water of earth, of sense, of generation, that holds the threat of drowning the god. It is the water in which he has to learn to walk without sinking! It is the water that he has to transmute into wine as spirit. Water is the aptest symbol of the lower life because of its fluid nature and its constant motion and fluctuation, picturing sense and emotion.

Life cast amid the senses and the feelings is in unceasing flux, as Heraclitus said. Like the restless throb of ocean, it is never still. No figure could better portray the dual sense-emotion life of mortals than the heaving bosom of the sea, or the moving current of a river or brook.

Nature indeed holds before us a marvelous textual illustration of the whole cyclical life process in her water-circulation system. We have the ocean as the source of all rising water emanations. The sun elevates great masses of moisture into the skies by its power; and a reduction of temperature causes this water vapor to condense and fall upon the land. From remote highlands it trickles into the brooks, streams, rivers and bays, and finally rejoins its primal sea of source. The circuit bristles with analogies to the life cycle at every turn. The sun’s function in lifting masses of vapor invisibly to heaven types the spirit’s power to refine the unseen elements of consciousness and elevate the substance of life. The reduction in temperature symbolizes a procedure in evolution which leads souls back to earth. The condensation of the vapor mass into individual drops symbols the dismemberment of deity. The fall to earth matches the descent of the gods. The beneficent agency of the rain in uplifting natural growth is evident as a parallel with the work of the god in uplifting the human. Without water from heaven humanity would be equally sterile, spiritually, as are the animals. The return to primal unity in the sea is manifest in the conversion of individual selfishness back to social and spiritual solidarity. Then comes a step in the cycle that yields the utmost of instruction for thought. Every phase of the round is visible except that in which the water is lifted from the sea again into heaven. The entire cycle is perceptible except the one arc in which matter is returned to spirit (vapor) form. In every visible round of life process there is always the one stage that is invisible!

This observation holds a pointed moral for science and truth-seeking generally. It has been the unwillingness to recognize the reality of the process of life in its invisible stages that has kept science from discerning full truth. For human life runs a similar cycle, issuing from the subjective or spirit world into the objective palpable life of body, and retiring again. But, like the vapor rising from the ocean, its return to heaven and its positive existence there is unseen. Science stands on its firm denial of the soul’s subsistence after death on the sheer ground of

its disappearance. Nature’s typology intimates that, like the vapor that has risen to the skies, it will return again to earth, and that it must therefore be subsistent in the interim. As the water cycle is complete in spite of one invisible segment, so the natural cycle of life is complete, with no arc missing. The apparently missing link is found in the unseen world. But is not science itself finding that the most vital and dynamic realities are in the unseen world?

The sally of the gods into nature’s realm is imaged as a welling forth of water from a living rock or secret source. Ihuh (Jehovah), the Lord, is described in Egypt as "the fountain of living waters" (Psalms, 29:10). Revelation speaks similarly (Ch. 22:1): "And he showed me a river of water of life brought as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God." And in Isaiah when it is said that the dumb shall break forth into singing, it is added: "Waters are to well forth in the wilderness, streams in the desert." Jesus cried:

"If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." (John 7:37).

In the Ritual the god says: "I flood the land with water." There were various pools and lakes which the Manes was to cross on his journey through the underworld. Pepi, the soul, is called "the efflux of the celestial water, and he appeared when Nu came into being." For the Manes the promise is made: "He shall quaff water at the fountain head." In an Irish myth seven streams flowed forth from "Counla’s Well" into the River Shannon. All cosmic effluence is in seven rays or streams. The Egyptian text says of the Manes: "He gulpeth down seven cubits of the great waters." The Rig-Veda (10:8, 3) gives us a similar hint, though it has several loftier interpretations: "When the sun flew up, the (seven) Arushis refreshed their bodies in the water." The disappearance by day of the seven stars of the Great Bear, which always typed these seven creative emanations, is probably the natural basis of this poetization. The water issuing from the base of a rock is typical of godly life emanating from the eternal rock of being. In the Ritual we meet with the hero who, like Moses, causes water to gush from the rock. He says: "I make the water to issue forth." Of this water the children of light "drink abundantly." The water of dawn, the dew, symbolizing the first outpouring, is called "the water of

Tefnut," twin sister of Shu, god of life by air. And it is notable that in the Hebrew version the first to make the water come forth by miracle for the people to drink is Miriam, whose relation to Moses is identical with that of Tefnut to Shu. This Shu, as the son of Nun, the firmamental water, is the life in breath; and almost unquestionably furnishes the prototypal character of Joshua, the son of Nun in the Hebrew book. And Joshua is identical by name with Jesus. The text pictures the goddess Nut standing beneath her sycamore tree, from which she pours out the water of life, as Hathor offers her fruit juice from the tree.

The Hawaiian mythoi have a rock that yields water on being struck with a rod.

Heaven as the source of celestial water is indicated in the derivation of the Greek Ouranos, "heaven," from the Egyptian Urnas, which is the celestial water (probably giving the root of our "urn"). It is the blood of Ouranos that gives birth to Aphrodite.

Neptune is traced to the Egyptian nef, "sailor," and this god was the sun over the waters, the god who completed the circuit round or over the waters.

Water was the first creation, and up out of its depths came the emanating gods to get the breath of life. Could one find a more astonishing replica of this cosmic situation than that furnished by the modus of human birth? Every child who in this life is to travel from nature to God issues into life out of a sack of water, and the first thing done by the attendant is to stimulate the latent breathing power. "Tefnut bears him, Shu gives him life."

The gods who brought the water of life down to mortals had thereafter to endure the drenching by this same element in its earthly form. Says Daniel: "He shall be drenched with the dews of heaven." As the original cosmic water was the Nun, or the negation of all positive life, so the earthly shadow of water, that is, matter, is similarly a type of the negation of life. It is inert. The Egyptian ideograph of privation, negation, is a wave of water! And many Indian languages have a similar term for "he dies" and "water." This indicates the idea of death by drowning, the paraphrase of incarnation. The gods descend to drink of the waters of carnal life at the peril of their immortal souls. The dead beneath the waters, says Massey, are the Manes in Amenta, where the waters are an image of the lower Nun, the water not above, but below, the horizon. Isis sought her drowned son Horus in the waters of the underworld, from which he was fished out by Sevekh. Bacchus, lord of the humid nature, in being raised again, ascends from the water, enters the air and comes then as the Fanman or Winnower, the purifier by air (mind). (Plutarch: De Iside et Osiride) This marks once more the evolution of natural man over into the kingdom of spirit, the transition from water to air, or from emotion to mind, from Tefnut to Sekhet, or from Tefnut to Shu. Jonah, the personification of the god in matter, cried from "the belly of death":

"For thou didst cast me into the depth, in the heart of the seas, and the flood was round about me; all thy waves and thy billows passed over me . . . The waters compassed me about, even to the soul. The deep was round about me; the weeds were wrapped about my head."

Job (26) cries that "the dead tremble beneath the waves . . . He stilleth the sea by his power," as did Jonah and Jesus, Horus and Tammuz and others. "He turneth back the waterflood which is over the thigh of the goddess Nut . . ." The Manes in dread of the deluge prays to "have power over the water and not be drowned" (Rit., Ch. 57). Glimpsing his coming earthly victory, he cries: "I am the being who is never overwhelmed in the waters."

Herod in attempting to kill Jesus by a slaughter of the innocents is paralleled by the Pharaoh. He attempted to blot out the menace of the Israelites by ordering the Hebrew midwives to kill all the male children at the time of birth by drowning (Exod. I:22). This is a depiction of the general danger menacing the god during his incarnation in the watery realm of the body. The Psalms express it indirectly (74): "Thou breakest the heads of the dragons in the waters." The gods had to break the power of the elementary lives engendered in the lower or water kingdoms. Sargon says that his mother gave him to the river, "which drowned me not."

"He drew me out of great waters," sings the Psalmist. Moses is water-born. Josephus explains the name as signifying "one who was taken out of the water." Moffatt translates it as "removed" (from the water). Pharaoh’s daughter called the name of the child Mosheh, and said "because I drew him out of the water." (Exod. II:10). Maui, of New Zealand legend, like Moses and Sargon, was drawn out of the water at birth. And the floating ark was the coffin. The Speaker says: "I am coffined in an ark like Horus, to whom his cradle is brought." This cradle is often represented as a nest of papyrus reeds, equated thus with the ark of bulrushes. Thor in the Norse mythos had to wade through the waters, there being no bridge for him, as he fares to the Doomstead under the Ygdrasil. The root of this great Norse tree of life was beneath the water, its stem and branches above, like the lotus. The Ygdrasil ash stands in the well of the Urdar fountain. The Egyptian Pool of Persea nourished the roots of "the two divine sycamore trees of earth and heaven." In Revelation the tree of life is planted on both sides of the river of waters.

It was in the storm on the sea that the distressed sailors in the gray light of dawn saw Jesus walking upon the troubled waters, drawing nigh to them. In quieting the storm he played the part of Horus in the Ritual, of whom it is written: "He hath destroyed the water-flood of his mother"--nature. In another form this stands: "He hath dispersed the power of the raging rain-storm." And again: "He hath dispersed for thee the rain-storm, he hath driven away for thee the water-flood, he hath broken for thee the tempests." All this prefigures the stilling of the strong restless power of the natural elements in man’s lower life, the mother-material nature, symboled by water. The god descending into the sphere of "water" was imaged by the duck, goose or swan; who all dive for food under the water. In a beautiful myth of the island of Celebes, seven celestial nymphs descend from the sky to bathe. They are seen by Kasimbaha, who stole the robes of one of them named Utahagi. These robes gave her the power of flying, and without them she was caught. She became his wife and bore him a son. Here we find ignorant primitives, according to scholastic rating, preserving a definite legend of the highest spiritual truth. For the robe stolen by the man on earth was her divine vesture, the immortal spiritual body.

The Ritual speaks eloquently again in one of its chapter titles: "Of drinking water in the underworld." And in this chapter the Manes prays: "May there be granted to me mastery over the water courses as over the members of Set (Sut)."

One of the Chinese Trinity of gods "showed the people how to cultivate the ground which had been reclaimed from the waters" (Shu-King).

We have in this imagery the meaning of "casting bread upon the waters." It is the going out into incarnation of that "bread" which cometh down out of heaven for the life of the world. As the life in generation is distressful for the god, one of the promises pertaining to final release from the ordeal emphasizes that "there shall be no more night, no more sea" in the blessed homeland of the father. But the bread cast out is multiplied and returns a sevenfold increase.

The zodiacal sign of Aquarius is the Waterman pouring from an urn the water of life in a double stream. The sacred literature is filled with references to the two waters, or the water of the double source. In many myths there are two streams, two springs, two wells, two lakes. Cosmically the two indicate the original fission of God’s being into the two poles of positive and negative life, or spirit and matter. This was the divine life that emanated in two streams to fructify creation. In the lower world it is reflected in the division between the water of the air above and on the earth below, vapor and liquid, cloud on high and stream on the ground. Sometimes the goddesses representing primal fecundity are cut in two, as Tiamat, Isis, Neith, Hathor, Apt, Rerit. Thus Nut was the goddess of celestial water and Apt of the terrestrial; Isis of the heavenly, Nephthys of the earthly. These were pictured as the two cows or two groups of seven cows (as in Pharaoh’s dream) or a cow of two colors, fore and hind. The cow, as productive source of life-food, was paired into the water-cow of earth and the milch-cow of heaven. The water-cow symboled Mother Nature alone, before the advent of divine spirit, the masculine bull, into creation--matter unfructified by intelligence. The seven cows betoken the seven creative Elohim, the living energies of matter. The two living streams of water were put in the uranograph in the form of a water-course with two branches, one of which was the Iarutana (Egy.), Eridanus (Greek), Jordan (Hebrew); and the other the milk stream, the Milky Way, Via Lactea. The Eridanus, or earth water, was the stream that had to be passed over in incarnation; the Milky Way was the water course by which the soul ascended again into the heavens of spirit. The cow of earth was constellated in the seven stars of the Great Bear, the Milch-cow of heaven in Cassiopeia.

The Hindu Aditi, as the Great Mother of the Gods, becomes twain. She yields milk for the gods, and is identical with the heaven cow in Egypt. Aditi was the primal form of Dyaus (Zeus), the sky divinity.

She alternates with Diti as mother of the embryo that was divided into seven parts, the seven Elohim. As Aditi she was the undivided Absolute; as Diti she was the divided one, mother of the two streams of outpoured life.

Of Ra it is written: "Thou bringest the milk of Isis to him and the water-flood of Nephthys." Or again: "Thou hast brought the milk of Isis to Teta, and the water of the celestial stream of Nephthys."

The Egyptians figured the two waters in the Nile, with its two arms, the Blue Nile and the White Nile. In the planispheres the south was Upper Egypt (by elevation); so the heavenly chart depicts the celestial Nile or Eridanus (Jordan) as pouring forth its divine stream from the southern sky, rising from the star Achernar in Eridanus constellation, and traveling northward to Orion’s foot, or where Orion rises up as Horus, the lord of the fertilizing inundation. Horus’ representative in the planisphere is Orion. In the celestial chart Orion is found standing, club in hand, the mighty hunter, with one foot on the water of the River Eridanus. By this it is depicted that the young solar god, our divinity, rises up where the stream of natural evolution ends and stands over it invested with the majesty and power of the lord of the lower waters of sense and emotion. Also in the case of the Nile there were two sources of its water, one earthly, the Lake Nyanza, the other celestial, or the rain and snow from heaven in the highlands of source.

The Persian Bundahish details the two waters of origin as female and male seed. "All milk arises from the seed of the males and the blood is that of the females." The two waters, or blood and milk, were both typed as feminine at first, to represent nature as productive without spiritual fecundation. To symbol the latter, the one was afterwards made masculine. The first pair was the mother’s blood and milk; the second, blood and seminally-engendered milk, or milk treated as of male generation.

As in the cosmos, matter, the virgin mother of life, was evolving her forms without the visible presence of animating divine intelligence, that is, before a creature embodying intelligence had been evolved, so in human racial history the body of man was built up by nature without the ensouling presence of mind. Matter and its inherent force, the feminine aspect of life, alone occupied the field. Marvelously this phase is paralleled not only in some aspects of biology but in early racial history itself. Following upon Totemic social organization there was the Matriarchate, when the woman was head and ruler, because she was the only known producer of life. The function of fatherhood was obscurely known. The mother and later the daughter, or the mother and her sister, were the only known bonds of blood relation for the children. As in the cosmos, so in human society, the male element, while operative, was hidden out of sight and knowledge. A child was related only through two women, mother and daughter, or mother and aunt. Massey asserts in a hundred pages that these two are the archetypal forms of the two wives, or two women who are dramatis personae in nearly every religious myth of origin. Adam, Abraham, Jacob, Laban, David, Moses, Samson had two wives, and the Old Testament is replete with stories of two women, who are sisters, as Aholah and Aholibah, in Ezekiel. Two Meris figure in the story of Osiris, and the two Maries in that of Jesus.

Two pools were pictured in the Ritual, the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt. Also the Pool of the North and the Pool of the South.

The male or seminal element, then, marked the introduction of spiritual vivification into the natural order. A new birth ensued for nature, new powers were released for her creatures, and they sprang forward to attain a new status in conscious being. The element injected into nature to produce this generation was typified, both by the Gnostics and by Jesus, as "the salt of the earth" and the "light of the world." The sowing of the spiritual seed, or the potentiality of the god, was the earnest of man’s redemption from animal status. The effort to fix the character of our "salvation" without knowing specifically the nature of our "fall"--without definite knowledge of what we were to be saved from--has held the human mind for centuries captive to a vague dread, a bogie apprehension, that has been a vast discredit to theology. Salt is the figure of preservation. As in the case of the mummy unguents, salt was to preserve the lower nature of man from decay.

Curiously the two Pools are elsewhere called the Pool of the Moon and the Pool of the Sun. In the Pool of Natron, or Hesmen, or Smen, the bloody sweat of menstruation, we have the feminine, that is, material aspect of life, for which the moon ever stands, in opposition to the sun, which is masculine, life-generative and vivifying. The moon in its phase unlighted by the sun represented the woman, nature, in her unproductive stage. She was in her virgin state, unwedded to male spirit, unfecundated by mind. Impregnation by Intelligence would make her productive and take her out from under her subjection "to the law" of periodicity and matter.

And this alone is the meaning of the "miracle" in which Jesus heals the woman with an issue of blood from her youth, who touched the hem of his robe and received the perceptible discharge of his power. The incident is just one of the old mythic depictions, using the sexual procreative functionism as a weather-vane of spiritual meaning. When matter, the virgin mother, received the impregnation of spirit, the periodic course of nature was interrupted and a miraculous new birth of life was inaugurated. The stoppage of her issue of blood was but the sign of the entrance of deity into humanity. For the ceasing of the natural flow is the sure index of the ensuing advent of a higher birth. Nature, running to waste without fruitage, was healed by divine impregnation or vivification. Christianity has been content to take from this incident the meager wealth of a physical "cure"; ancient poetic genius deposited in it a mine of inexhaustible cosmic suggestiveness, a source of great moral enrichment for all.

That antique document, the Book of Enoch, comments directly upon the point under discussion (80:7-10):

"The water which is above shall be the agent (male) and the water which is under the earth shall be the recipient, and all shall be destroyed."

Jesus said that he was from above and natural man from beneath. It is found in the Ritual that in the Pool of Natron and the Pool of Salt the sun was reborn each day and the moon each night. The circuit of experience each day, or each life, for both the divine man (sun) and the animal man (moon) amounted to a rebaptism and renewal of life. "I grow young each day," exults the soul in the Ritual.

The constellation of the Great Bear was called "The Well of the Seven Stars." The Hebrew Beer-Sheba (Sheba meaning obviously "seven") was an early form of the primordial water. Beer-Sheba in the Septuagint is given as "Phrear Horkou" (Greek), meaning: "The well of the oath." What can this strange name connote, save that it is a subtle designation for this life in watery body, to which the soul descended under the karmic "command" or covenant, or oath, which binds it to return to this living well of life?

The twin pools were located in Anu, the white water being southward, the red northward. In the Ritual one name for it is the "Well of Sem-Sem." Sem-Sem denotes regenesis. The Ritual says: "Inexplicable is the Sem-Sem, which is the greatest of all secrets." It was the place where sun and moon were renewed. In consequence it was a place where the deceased seeks the waters of regeneration, or fount of youth. He says (Ch. 97): "I wash in the Pool of Peace. I draw water from the Divine Pool under the two Sycamores of heaven and earth. All justification is redoubled on my behalf." "Osiris is pure by the Well of the South and the North."

In plain language all this metaphorization means simply that man, a biune being, strides forward in his evolution by dipping in the experiences of both the carnal embodiment, the Pool of Natron, the "Nature" Pool, and in the god’s divine essence, the Pool of Salt, the "Spirit" Pool.

The water of life is sometimes said to be concealed between two lofty mountains which stand close together. But for two or three minutes each day they move apart, and the seeker of the healing and vivifying water must be ready on the instant to dart through, fill his two flasks and instantly rush back. Zechariah (14:4) hints at this:

"And the Mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof towards the East and towards the West, and half of the mountain shall remove toward the North and half toward the South."

"Day" is a glyph for a cycle of any length, here an incarnation. The period of openness between the two mountains is just the time between birth and death in this life, during which brief moment, the soul must fall speedily to work to wrest all it can from this opportunity for contact between the two natures, animal and divine. It must strive quickly to fill its cup of experience from the flowing waters. The night cometh when no man can work. For this is the only time in its evolution when it can drink from the double spring, the two pools. The two or three minutes coincide with the two (or three) days in the tomb.

And by the shifting of the earth’s axis the east-west relation was supplanted by the north-south one, as referred to by Zechariah.

The Egyptian god Hapi, being of both sexes, denotes the eunuch in whom the two were united. He is the epicene personification, androgyne. From the mouth of Hapi issues the one stream which enters two other figures from whose two mouths it is emaned in a double stream. This is the one water dividing into two in the mythology. In the astrograph this is Aquarius.

In Egyptian and Hebrew traditions the deity is represented as shedding two creative tears, a poetic version of the two waters.

In the Hindu picture of Mahadeva and Parvati the waters of Soma are seen issuing from the head of the male deity and from the mouth of the cow, the feminine emblem. Siva is the mouth of the male source and Parvati, the Great Mother, is that of the feminine source. "He who knows the golden reed standing in the midst of the waters is the mysterious Prajapati, the generator."

Milk from the body signified the female water, while Soma juice figured the male element, the wine that went to the head!

The ancient mother source was portrayed as twofold, a breathing land-animal in front, a water-animal behind, typing the elements of water and air. This is seen in the zodiacal Capricorn, the sea-goat, land-goat in front, sea animal in the rear. The Hindu goddess Maya hovers over the waters, and presses her two breasts with both hands, ejecting the twofold stream of living nutriment. The Hermaean Zodiac shows the Great Bear with streaming breasts, and the zodiacal Virgin is represented by the Bear as unproductive in Virgo, but the "bearer" in the sign of Pisces, where she is half fish and half human. Ishtar, another personification of the genetrix, was dual. One of her names was Semiramis, the daughter of Atergatis. The latter has the tail of a fish, but the daughter was wholly human. The fish denoted water, and the dove on Ishtar’s head signified air, again throwing sense and soul into relation.

Since the Eridanus is the Jordan, the word merits closer attention. It came from the Egyptian Iarutana. Eri, later Uri, was an Egyptian name for the inundation, meaning "great, mighty," whilst tun or tana signified "that which rises up and bursts and bonds." In Eritanu, or Iarutana, we then have the mighty river rising to overflow its banks. Astrologically it was placed in the heavenly chart as issuing from the mouth of the constellation of the Southern Fish, type of life source, and flowing north to the foot of Orion.

It is of note that in Joshua (22) it is said the Eternal made the Jordan the boundary between the main body of the Israelites and the Reubenites and Gadites, who had not been permitted to cross into the Promised Land because, as it is put, "you have no share in the Eternal." Naturally this stream of life force sweeping mankind onward marks the boundary between the animal and the spiritual kingdoms. Animal man can not cross it until he has been bathed in its waters and been purified and transformed. We are crossing this boundary line between our lower and higher natures.

There is plentiful use of the water symbol under the special form of the sea. "The angel descended until he reached the sea of the earth, and he stood with his right foot upon it." This matches Horus-Orion in the starry chart standing with his foot upon the end of the Jordan River. The Dragon poured forth the water flood to overwhelm the Woman cast out of heaven. This points to the release of the surging forces of the carnal nature upon the soul after incarnation. But the earth opened to swallow up the released waters and helped the Woman, at which the Beast waxed more wroth; "and he waged war against them upon the borders of the sea which encompassed the earth." This is Paul’s war of the carnal mind against the spirit on the rim or boundary between earth and sea, our two natures!

The watery field of life is pictured as a "crystal sea wherein the fire was reflected, and upon it there stood those who had overcome the influence of the Beast, who had not worshipped his image nor borne upon them the mark of his number."

Ra brings to Teta "the power to journey over the Great Green Sea." The Manes (Teta) "goes round about the Lake and on the flood of the Great Green Sea." Again: "Thou sailest over the Lake of Kha, in the north of heaven, like a star passing over the Great Green Sea . . . as far as the place where is the star Seh (Orion)." This matches the location of the Eridanus. Hawaiian tradition says that the voyaging souls "waded safely through the sea."

One of the most specific corroborations of the meaning of the water symbol is found in Revelation in the expression that when the books of life were opened, "the sea gave up its dead, for Death and Hades found no more any place, because they were judged and cast down." Orthodox typology present two varying symbols of what takes place "when the dead are raised." One says the graves were opened; the other that the sea gave up its dead. Here is a land and water conflict, only resolvable by symbolism, which may use many figures to picture one truth. But literal history falls meaningless between two varying statements of fact. The grave and the sea both refer to mortal life, which under any figure yields up its living "dead" at the end of the accomplished cycle. Then the seer "beheld the fashioning of the earth anew; for the sea out of which the Beast had risen was now no more." "There shall be . . . no more sea."

It is necessary to give some space to the symbolism of the fish, for it carries part of the imputation of the water element. For practical purposes it is possible to equate the four terms, fish, sea, matter and mother, in significance. The fish denotes, first, life in submergence, or the god in matter, who yet does not die, who can still breathe under the elements. But more specifically it intimates the source of life flowing outward toward matter. It is the outrance, not the entrance, of life. The whale spouting out its water stream is suggestive. The Eridanus poured forth from the mouth of the Southern Fish. The os tincae, or tench’s mouth, was one of the religious symbols of frequent occurrence. Watching a fish, one notes an apparent expulsion of water from the mouth with the semblance of chewing. It is the door of life’s emanation, and it is the denizen of the waters out of which life streams. The zodiacal Pisces is the sign of the birth of saviors. Jesus, Horus, Ioannes and others came as Ichthys (Ichthus), "fish" in Greek. And we have the fish-avatar of Vishnu. The door of life is figured in the shape of a fish-mouth at the western or feminine end of a church. The Pope’s miter is the mouth of a fish. The soul of life comes by way of the water.

The Vesica Piscis or fish’s bladder denoted the presence of air in the water, and the bubbles rising from the fish’s mouth double this hint as to the presence of mind in matter. The fish was a lower symbol than the swan or duck, for it must swim in the water; the other can float on the surface. In this sense it types the god caught, trapped in water; also likely to be caught in a net. It is said that cynocephali, who lay in wait to seize fish, "were allowed to catch them because of their ignorance." It is the soul’s lack of full knowledge that causes it to be caught again and again in the meshes of carnality.

The fish zodiacally stands for the feet of the man. The mermaid with tail of fish represented the body as partaking in its nether half of the lower forces of life. Man’s feet are in the water of life. Ishtar-Semiramis was given the tail of a fish. The tail also portrays the, as yet, non-dual character of life, creative power not yet bifrond. It shows the non-division of the legs. The mummied Christ figure in the Catacombs, with legs bound helplessly together, depicts the god strapped in the bonds of the natural elements, not yet having manifested the duality. He can not use his two legs and walk, like a god. He is only the first, natural man, not man and god conjoined.

Semiramis’ brother was Ichthys in the statue at Ascalon. Ichthys was a title of Bacchus. In the Hermaean Zodiac Pisces is named Ichthon, and the fish is the female goddess who brought forth the young sun-god as her Piscean offspring, whether called Horus in Egypt, Jesus in Palestine and Rome, or Marduk, the fish of Hea, in Assyria. Christ was Ichthys the Fish from 255 B.C. unto about 1900 A.D., or for the period of the Piscean era in the precession. Previous to that he was Aries, the Lamb of God. Who will figure him now as the Waterman?

An old Egyptian story, the tale of Setnau, written by Taht himself, and alleged to be so potent that two pages of it, when recited, would open the secrets of nature and unlock all mysteries, says: "The divine power will raise fishes to the surface of the water." Metaphorically this refers to the power of the god to lift the natural man, immersed in the sea of material life, to mastery over his lower self, and bring him to the top or surface of his fleshly nature from out of the depths of it.

The Ritual reports the god as declaring: "I am the great and mighty Fish which is in the city of Qem-Ur." This is the god in matter. But it is promised that Ra "shall be separated from the Egg and from the Abtu Fish." Abtu is a form of Abydos, the place of burial of the god. Ra shall be freed from the fish or submerged state. Two chapter titles tell of "coming forth from the net" and from "the catcher of the fish." The swampy region from which Sevekh, solar deity, recovered the mutilated limbs of Horus, was called Ta-Remu, "the land of the Fish," a name given it by Ra.

Gathering up some scattered fragments of the water emblem, we note Homer describing the river Titaresius flowing from the Styx as pure and unmixed with the taint of death and gliding like oil over the surface of the water by which the gods made their covenant. Oil on troubled waters may be seen to be a profounder symbolism than was conceived before. For the god, oil is no chance symbol, as it was regularly employed in the anointing to type celestial radiance, the sheen of the divine glory. To pour oil on the waters is indeed to quiet the storms of raging animality by the calm of reason and the gentleness of love.

In the Hebrew the water of life flows from the rock Tser till the time of Miriam’s passing away. This represents the female source. The change to the masculine phase occurs when the water gushes forth for the first time from the rock Seba (Beer-Sheba) by the command of Moses. This was the water of Meribah, and in the Egyptian Meri is water, and Bah is the male.

In Judges (30) God split the rock as sign of the dual nature, and water flowed forth to quench Samson’s thirst, as in the case of Moses.

The throne on which Osiris is seated is sometimes placed, in the vignettes to the Ritual, on water, still or running. This is to say that the god is seated above the unstable foundation of the changing earth life. But life is to be established through its experience here, and so "he hath established it upon the floods."

When the god had been transformed he is said to "have gained power over fresh water." As salt typed the saving grace of divinity, the fresh water would point to the new and as yet unsaved natural creature. "Moisture," says the Chaldean Oracles, "is a symbol of life, and hence both Plato and, prior to Plato, the gods call the soul at one time a drop from the whole of vivification; and at another time a certain fountain of it."

The chapter can be brought to a close with a few intimations of the air symbolism. It is much less general than those of water and fire. The Sanskrit "Asu," meaning "vital breath" is of great importance because it is the base of Asura (Persian: Ahura, surname of Ahura-Mazda), one of the specific names of the hosts of incarnating gods.

Both Horus and Jesus came forth with a fan in their hands, as the Winnower. This emblem is a clear glyph for the principle of mind. Intellect is to sweep out the chaff of sensuality and free the golden grain. Those initiated into the Greater Mysteries were washed with water and then breathed upon, fanned and winnowed by the purifying spirit. This was the dual baptism of water and the spirit, or fire. One of the two great symbols held in the hands of the Gods in Egypt was a fan called the Khi, the sign of air, breath and spirit. The other was the Hek, or Aut-crook, which denoted laying hold, in the downward direction, of matter by spirit; in the reversed direction, of spirit by the lower personality.

Lack of air, or smothering, was a twin type with drowning for the limitations of incarnation. A phrase of the Ritual indicates this: "whose throat stinketh for lack of air." In descending to seek her lost brother and husband Osiris, Isis is claimed to have "made light appear from her feathers; she made air to come into being by means of her two wings,"--another personation of the fanner or winnower. The god fans the mortal to keep him from being suffocated for lack of air, mind. The god brings us intellect, which indeed keeps us from being smothered by the intolerable life of sense. The cogency of leaven as a symbol lies in its generating air within the material mass. The raising of dough is synonymous with the resurrection of mortality. In the Ritual there is a "chapter of giving air to the soul in the underworld." Mind came as our savior.

Chapter XIV

FIRE ON HEAVEN’S HEARTH

The way is now cleared for the majestic sweep of the fire symbolism. It rises above the other elements in grandeur and impressiveness. The full implication of its meaning lifts the mind into reaches of luminous suggestiveness as to the splendor of the experience awaiting us in nobility, and even as a mere figure it has a certain power to stir dim intimations of the magnificence of that reality which it hints at. There is in nature hardly a phenomenon more wonderful than the eating away of a stick of wood by a flame. The mystery of all life is back of that energic display. And the mystery becomes awesome when we realize that our own life is more than analogous to fire; it is of kindred nature with it. The soul within us is a spark of divine flame.

The origin of the word is of interest. It goes back to the Greek pur(pyr). Massey traces the word "pyramid" from the stem, plus the Egyptian met, meaning "ten" or "a measure," giving us pyramet. He asserts that it stands thus for the ten original measures or arcs traced by the god of fire, the sun, through the zodiacal circuit. As the great pyramid at Gizeh, and others, seem to have been intimately related to sidereal measurements, this theory of origin is plausible. The word would then mean "a ten-form measure of fire," a figure for manifest life.

But the Greek pur itself traces back to the Chaldean ur, primitive word for "fire." To this the Egyptians added their article "the" as prefix, in the form of p-, making the word p-ur or pur. The first emanation, Abraham, came out from ur, the primal fire of creation.

The Sanskrit Agni, god of fire, is traced by Massey to the general root, ag, meaning "to move quickly," as in the Latin ago, "to go," agile (Lat.), "active," our "agitate" and others. As this derivation links it closely to the Greek theos, "god," who by etymology is the "swift runner," "the swift goer," Agni, god of fire, may well be connected
 with the theos, the god whose symbol everywhere is the swift-darting shaft of fire, whether in the heavens or in the uplands of reason and intelligence. The "flash of intelligence" is the exact sign and token of the swift activity of the god within us.

That the soul is a spark from the celestial fire is attested by the words of the Speaker in the Ritual (Ch. 97): "Lo I come from the lake of flame, from the lake of fire, and from the field of flame, and I live."

In the Vision of Scipio Cicero has preserved some of the ancient doctrine concerning the derivation of souls from the empyrean. The spirit of Africanus tells his son that souls were supplied to men from the eternal fires, which are constellations and stars. Virgil says that in souls there is a potency like fire. In the Hymn to Minerva of Proclus, souls originate

"From the great father’s fount, supremely bright,

Like fire resounding, leaping into light."

One of the Chaldean Oracles runs as follows:

"The soul being a splendid fire, through the power of the Father remains immortal, is the mistress of life . . . the soul extends vital illumination to body."

And again most succinctly:

"All things are the progeny of one fire."

The first Oracle of Zoroaster tells of a ladder which reached from Tartarus to the first or highest fire. This was the gamut of stages between the lowest levels of material life and the highest spiritual. The principle of soul, says the Oracle, is the operator and giver of life-bearing fire. It fills the vivific bosom of Hecate (the lower nature) and pours on the linked natures of matter and spirit the fertile strength of a fire endured with mighty power. Concerning divine Love the Oracle speaks:

"Who first leaped forth from intellect, clothing fire bound together with fire, that he might govern the fiery cratera (bowls), restraining the flower of his own fire."

When Ceres delivered up the government to Proserpina, her daughter (intellect to soul), she instructed her to have conjugal relation with Apollo, the sun-god, as thus the god would beget "famed offspring, with faces glowing with refulgent fire."

The upper fire, the Oracles affirm, did not shut up its power in matter, nor in works, but in intellect. "For the artificer of the fiery world is an intellect of intellect." Saturn, who in the Oracles is the first fountain, the strong spirit which is beyond the fiery poles, endues all the lower principles with his essence. These, through his pervading might, "become refulgent with the furrows of inflexible and implacable fire." They "are the intellectual conceptions from the paternal fountain, plucking abundantly the flower of the fire of ceaseless time." And that our progress upward is a return to a fiery nature is shown by these excerpts:

"A fire-heated conception has the first order. For the mortal who approaches to fire will receive a light from divinity; . . ."

"A singular fire extends itself by leaps through the waves of air; or an infigured fire, whence a voice runs before; or a light beheld near, every way splendid, resounding and convolved. But also behold a horse full of refulgent light; or a boy carried on a swift horse--a boy fiery or clothed with gold."

"Rivers being mingled, perfect the works of incorruptible fire."

It was the statement of Greek philosophy that "from the exhalations arising from the burning bodies of the Titans, mankind were produced."1

An echo of this abstrusity of esoteric lore is heard in the accounts of the Wiradthuri tribe of Western Australia. One of their initiations is apparently the analogue of the whole basic structure of religion, represented in a fire drama. In the puberty initiations the lads were frightened by a large fire lighted near them, being told that the Dhur-Moolan was about to burn them. This god was supposed to take them into the bush and instruct them in all the traditional customs. So he went through a pretended killing of the boys, cutting them up and burning the pieces to ashes, after which he molded the ashes into human shape and restored them to life as new beings.2 Primitive ignorance may be the nursery of superstition, but much alleged primitive ignorance is old wisdom surviving in ruinous grandeur by the implacable power of tradition.

In the Clementine Homilies (8:18) the offspring of the unnatural and untimely union between the sons of God and the daughters of men described in Genesis are declared to be "bastards, begotten of the fire of angels and the blood of women." The gods are rebuked for polluting themselves with women, "as the sons of men do," and for creating a hybrid and unworthy progeny whose destruction they would in the future lament. (Enoch 12)

Many tribes held the fire-fly, which thrives in moist grasses, to be a typical emblem of our divinity. Its periodical flashing in the dark is suggestive.

The Logia and Revelation both yield data on the theme of fire. At the first angel’s trumpet message there ascended on the earth a hail of fire which was scattered from the Altar of Fire before the throne. "And the hail of fire was mingled with the blood of the Lamb; these were cast upon earth to consume away its evil." Horus had said that he came to put an end to evil. At the second angel’s blast lightning flashed forth and went down into the sea, which it changed into blood. We have seen that a hail of stars or sparks over the earth was the typical figuration of the descent of the bright deities. The Egyptian ceremony of flinging a blazing cross into the Nile conveys the same connotation. The deities in incarnation were styled by the Greeks water-nymphs. A cross on fire thrust into water carried the purport of the sacrificial act of incarnation. A fiery serpent on the cross is a kindred emblem. The Targum commands: "Make thee a burning." In India the swastika cross was a special emblem of fire, the god Agni. In the early Church the cross of fire was adorned on a Friday, when a lighted cross was suspended from the dome of St. Peter’s, the cross being covered with lamps in a fire-traced figure. Dante describes the souls in Paradise as praying inside a cross of fire, which is their world. The hawk is a symbol of solar fire, and Horus arose hawk-headed or divinized with fire.

When Lucifer fell upon the earth and with his key unlocked the pit of the abyss, there issued from it clouds of smoke like that which proceeds from a great furnace, and it obscured the light of the sun! That is to say, the mingled steam and exhalation from electrolyzed "water" and ‘burning flesh," or the carnal nature vivified by currents of deific potency, rose all around the god and well nigh obscured his inner glow. And out of the smoke came forth locusts and scorpions, having power to sting and poison. And these went forth to torment all the dwellers on earth; only they could not harm those who had not the mark of the Beast on them. The army of horsemen that came forth to battle these forms of evil coming out of the smoke appeared as if "emitting fire." This fire scorched those who love to do wickedness, and drove them back into the pit. This denotes the burning out of those strong animal propensities in the fiery furnace of human experience. Proclus in his Timaeus (Lib. V) observes concerning the telestic art that "it obliterates through divine fire all the stains produced by generation." This is the true and only meaning of purgatory.

Another angel descended with a rainbow on his head, his face was as the sun for brightness and his feet were resting upon pillars of fire. This lower fire searched the lives of all on earth and filled with pain those who bore the mark of the Beast.

In the Book of Overthrowing Apap this arch-fiend and his associates, the Sami and the Sebau (minions of Seb), are burnt up by the flames of the sun-god. In the Book of Am-Tuat the bodies, souls, shadows and heads of the enemies of Ra are burnt and consumed daily in pits of fire. In the eighth section of the Book of Gates a picture is drawn of a monster speckled serpent called "Kheti," with seven folds, in each one of which stands a god. The open mouth of the serpent belches a stream of fire into the faces of the enemies of Ra, whose arms are tied behind their backs in agonized helplessness. Horus stands by, urging the reptile to consume the enemies of his father. In the Book of Am-Tuat there is also a group of twelve serpents, whose work was to pour fire from their bodies "which was to light the dead sun-god on his way." The soul of the god, typed often as "the Eye of Ra," is described as "the flame which followeth after Osiris to burn up the souls of his enemies." "Uatchet, the Lady of Flames, is the Eye of Ra." Ra is addressed as "Thou who givest blasts of fire from thy mouth, (who makest the two lands bright with thy radiance)." The Manes who come out of Amenta pure "shall have burnt incense before Ra."

The inner idea of burning animal flesh on a physical altar was the consuming by divine fire of the dross that emanated from the carnal segment in man. The god came into the natural man to transfigure him. To achieve this aeonial labor his fire had to burn out slowly the grosser elements, earthy and moist, by spiritual alchemy and replace them by subtle and pure essence akin to its own diviner substance. A Buddhist phrase, "the gross purgations of the celestial fire," attests the nature of the chemistry that must take place. The burning up of dross to refine pure metal is a glib poetic shibboleth in philosophy, but few know that it is a description of an actual bio-chemical process taking place in human life. All our lower emotionalism and heavier sensualism is as fuel for the burning. The lurid flare of such a combustion is only turned to pure clear flame by pain and defeat. Animal sacrifice on an altar was only to dramatize the conversion of lower man to higher under the action of fiery spiritual energies. And it is significant that the ancients swore, not by the altar, but by the fire which was on the altar. One would not swear by the impermanent part of his nature, but by the stable and abiding. This was the fire of soul and conscience. The inner fire, imprisoned in body, strives to burn its way into flame. But its fuel is moist and damp--green wood--and it must first slowly dry out the resistant mass. The grossly misunderstood phrase, "the wrath of God," is just this steady consuming of obstructing material.

Says the Eternal, then, in Deuteronomy (32), when he notes that his sons have sacrificed to "demons, to no-gods, to gods who are utter strangers, to new-comers of gods""

"For a self-willed race are they,

Children devoid of loyalty.

My wrath has flared up,

flaming to the nether world itself,

burning up earth and all it bears,

setting the roots of the hills ablaze.

. . . . .

From Sinai came the Eternal,

from Seir he dawned on us;

from Paran’s range he rayed out,

blazing in fire from the south.

It is given in the Ritual (Ch. 108) that "the Osiris, triumphant, knoweth the name of this serpent. . . . ‘Dweller in his fire’ is his name."

The Manes "opens the doors of heaven by the flames which are about the abode of the gods; he advances through the fire which is about the home of the gods, who make a way for him, to make him pass onwards, for he is Horus."

According to another text, "Horus led the deceased through the abode of the gods situated among the flames of fire."

Sut and Horus are the representatives of the dual life of man, and are the divine twins, the first of whom, Sut, brings the water of the inundation to submerge the fire of deity in the sea of generation; and the second, Horus, brings the rebirth of the fire within the very borders of the sea of life. Both were astrologically united in the star Sut-Canopus. In an Australian myth the hawk brought the fire to the aborigines.

A typical mythical account of the war in heaven and descent of the fire-devas to earth is found in another Australian legend of the bandicoot who had a firebrand, but refused to share it. This was the rebellion. The hawk and the pigeon were deputed to get it. The pigeon made a lunge for it, whereupon the bandicoot desperately hurled it toward the water to put it out. But the hawk deflected it into the grass over the sea, which caught fire. The hawk and pigeon (dove) are birds of soul-fire, the bandicoot the bird of darkness, a type of the water that put out the solar fire.

All through the world’s Märchen one finds that fire is often dual, the first being the natural fire, as of lightning, flint-fire and other forms; the second is a fire that is human in origin, requiring mind to achieve it.

Sut and Horus, as the human duality, are typed in the two phases, light and dark, of the moon. Sut is the black vulture (which lives on blood) and Horus the golden hawk. The lunar ibis, bird of Ptah, is black and white, and portrays the two natures in one creature. There is a legend of a black raven that once was white. In a Thlinker tradition the white bird is represented as becoming black in passing up the flue of Kanukh’s fire-place. This is a form of the phoenix which transforms from black to white (or into the golden hawk) and from white to black in its passage to and from the underworld, which is called Kanukh’s flue.

A prayer in the Ritual (Ch. 163) begs the god to "grant that the flame may leave the fire, wherever it may be, to raise up the hands of Osiris," which were bandaged to the sides of his inert body in the mummy case. Osiris is himself appealed to, as the Governor of Amenta, to "grant light and fire to the happy soul which is in Sutenkhenen (Heracleopolis)," the underworld. Samson’s bound arms were freed by the burning away of his flaxen bonds. The soul (in Ch. 63B) says that Ra has "lifted up the moist emanations of Osiris from the

Lake of Fire and he was not burned." "A fire was kindled for thee in the hands of the goddess Rerit [the hippopotamus goddess of the Nile, i.e., the virgin mother]; she performeth acts of protection for thee every day." The Manes is exhorted to "kindle the fire in order that the flame may rise up; and throw incense upon it in order that the smell of incense may rise up." A chapter (137A) deals with the four blazing flames which are made for the Khu or spirit. The flame riseth, it is said, in Abru (Abydos) and it cometh to the Eye of Horus. It is set in order on the brow of Osiris and on his breast, and is fixed within his shrine. The Rubric specifies that this chapter shall be recited over the four fires made of anointed atma3 cloth, and the fires shall be placed in the hands of four men who shall have the names of the four pillars of Horus written on their shoulders. It is promised that the soul that undertakes to perform the offices of this chapter of the Four Blazing Fires each day shall find release from every hall in the underworld and from the seven halls of Osiris. The four men are the four guardians of the cardinal points, upholding man at the four corners of his being, or in his four bodies.

The Manes says again: "I am the Great One, son of the Great One; I am Fire, son of Fire, to whom was given his head after it was cut off." The descent was symbolized as a cutting off of the head, since intellect was lost.

The genetrix of the seven stars is called the keeper of fire, the spark-holder.

Sut signifies "Fire-stone," according to Massey. Oddly enough, lightning was anciently regarded as the dart of a fiery stone, and it has the name of the fire-stone widely attached to it among many peoples. So we have Jesus saying, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." But the name likely has also a reference to the flint-stone fire, as potential fire locked up in stone. Indeed flint was a frequent symbol of the buried deific potency. One of the Mexican legends reports the Mother-Creatrix as having given birth to a flint knife, which fell on earth and became the origin of men. The flint is a graphic symbol of the presence of hidden fire in the physical world. In the same fashion a god (fire) is buried invisibly within the body of physical humanity. Flint nurses the potentiality of the birth of fire within it! "When the Serpent-lightning darted out of the cloud it buried itself in the earth, leaving its stone-head in the aerolith of smelted sand." It was called the Thunder-hatchet. (Records of the Past.)

The element of fire was regarded as latent in both wood and stone, needing effort, force, a blow or heat to bring it forth. Fire, with its eternal intimation of spirit, was regarded as the divine inner essence of these materials, a conception now endorsed by late science.

When the Mystery candidate came forth from the examination he was asked what the judges have awarded him and he replies: "A flame of fire and a pillar of crystal." (Ch. 125.)

The Quiché name for lightning is Cak-ul-ha, that is, "fire coming from water"; and the serpent of fire and the serpent of water are one, ultimately. The winged serpent signified winged lightning.

The Old Testament (Exod. 24:12) declares that the glory of the Lord was in appearance like a devouring fire on top of the mount. The Psalms (18) say that he "thundered in the heavens. He made darkness his secret place; a smoke issued from his nostrils and devouring fire out of his mouth . . . and he hurtled stones and coals of fire." He is called the "Lightning-sender." In Exodus (20) the Eternal descended in fire upon a cloud. Here is the mingling of fire and water again. "Smoke rose like steam from a kiln, till the people all trembled terribly." The lightning only flashed on the third day, a significant fact explained later.

In most of these illustrations the fire alluded to is that of upper intelligence flashing forth to enlighten the natural order. But this fire, in its contact with the watery and earthly elements of the carnal self, stirs up steam, sulphurous exhalations, fumes, noxious gases and dust, and in this transformation it becomes truly a fire of Tophet and Hades! Nevertheless it is still the purifying fire. As washing by water was an emblem of purgation, so fumigation was a companion type. Says Massey:

"Amenta was the land of precious metals and the furnace of solar fire. Hence Ptah, the miner, became the blacksmith of the gods, the Kamite Vulcan."4

If, then, the earth is the furnace of fire, there can be no quibbling about the meaning of the vivid narrative of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the three who were cast into the fiery furnace, in Daniel. It is only another allegory of the solar triadic god, in his three principles of mind-soul-spirit, embodied in the sphere of flesh, typed now as a fiery furnace. The Manes, who is spirit in this furnace, is shown his Ka, his pure higher soul, as a means of aiding him to remember his name in the great house, "in the crucible of the great house of flame." One of the chapters is designed to be read so that its magical potency may enable the Manes to "escape from every fire." In another the soul prays (Ch. 17) to be "delivered from the god who liveth upon the damned, whose face is that of a hound, but whose skin is that of a man," "at the angle of the pool of fire." Here is the man and animal combined, another of the oft-recurring glyphs of our duality. And where the man and the animal are united, where they meet, is the pool of fire!

In the Psalms it is said, "They go through fire and through water" and are "brought out into a place of abundance." "So," says Edward Carpenter, "was the Greek Hercules, who overcame death though his body was consumed in the burning garment of mortality out of which he rose to heaven."5

The Book of Judges (6) recounts how at the sacrifices for the Eternal, the meat and the unleavened bread which the angel had commanded Gideon to "put on the rock yonder," were touched by the tip of the wand in the angel’s hand, at which "fire spurted out of the rock and burned up the meat and the cakes. So Gideon realized it was an angel of the Eternal."

In Exodus (12) the directions from the Eternal to the Israelites were that the meat of the sacrificial offering was "not to be eaten raw or boiled in water, but roasted in fire, head and legs and all." The true food for man to consume is not that immersed in his lower watery nature, but that transformed into suitable spiritual nourishment by the fire of spirit alone. It is to be recalled that the Titans first boiled the members of Bacchus in water and afterwards roasted them in fire. The fiery force of deity had caused the lower elements to seethe and boil; when the moisture (carnality) was all dried out, the remainder of the process was a "roasting."

The immolation of Jephthah’s daughter as a burnt sacrifice appears to be another figuration of the divinization of the mortal (feminine) nature after two and a fraction aeons. For she asked permission to bewail her unfruitfulness for two months in the hills. Hill or hills is a frequent glyph for earth. To burn her up was not to destroy her, so we can save our tears. It was to set her on fire with a brighter purer flame.

Gideon’s routing of the Midianites "in the valley below" by the smashing of the clay pitchers in which were lighted torches, is of extremely apt relevance in the terms of the symbology of fire and water. A pitcher is a water container, but these were empty. The water had been dried up, and the fire burned unquenched. The water of sense burned out, the only remaining task for the spirit, to consummate its full release from its prison, was to rend asunder the veil of flesh, the body. This was achieved in the shattering of the clay pitchers. The Midianites are the multitude of lower impulses, ever the adversaries, the enemies. They flee and vanish the moment they see the divine fire glow forth in its full release of hidden power!

The story of Samson, a typical solar hero, provides splendid exemplification of the fire symbology. When he was delivered over to the Philistines (the lower propensities again) he was bound with two new ropes. But when the Philistines were about to punish him, "the spirit of the Eternal inspired him mightily, the ropes around his arms became like flax that has caught fire, the bonds melted off his hands." The god within burned away his bonds. A whole chapter of exposition could not add force to the sublime meaning here pictured.

It is appropriate to consider the beautiful emblemism of the "pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night," whereby the Eternal manifested his guiding presence with his children on their mundane journey. In the full glare of the blinding light of divinity, some watery veil is necessary to intervene between us and the overpowering glory. The Eternal put his hand over Moses’ eyes while his glory passed by. Man’s face must be veiled in the presence of deity. God interposes the veil of matter between us and his hidden spirit. This is the cloud by day. But in the evolutionary night time, when the soul is deeply submerged in material darkness, there is needed the shining of the pillar of fire. It is the moon by night. In the Elysian or paradisical realms the angels are represented as refreshing themselves in bowers of shade or cloud. Shade is grateful in the summer. But on earth the buried god needs light. The gross physical sense of the moving pillars is impossible. A marching column of some two million people, and some twenty miles long, would need to rest at night, whereas the literal translation would presuppose their needing a light to guide their nocturnal march.

Then there is that other great religious usage, the significance of which no mind can fail to sense in all its dynamic admonition for humanity. Many nations felt it incumbent, under the strength of the most powerful obligations, to maintain a fire perpetually burning on the central hearth of the nation. In Rome a class of virgins, chosen for physical and spiritual purity, were put in charge of the Vestal Fire, and death was the penalty for letting it die out. Likewise, as is not so generally known, death by burial alive was the penalty for sexual intercourse, inflicted remorselessly upon these maidens. This, too, was regarded as a letting of the spiritual fire on the hearth of life go out. The ancients knew that if once the spark of empyreal fire kindled in the moist nature of the earthy man was permitted to die out, it was the second and irretrievable death of the soul. That portion or fragment of deity that was sent into the flesh could be divulsed entirely from its linkage to heaven--the silver cord could be cut--and the soul lost, for the rest of the aeonial cycle. The 64th chapter of the Ritual is to be recited in order that the person may not die a second time, "but may come forth and escape from the fire." To escape the second death the Manes had to keep the sacred fire aglow.

In the elaborate ceremony conducted over the mummy, there was one act which stands out in the sharp forcefulness of its meaning. The Rubric to the 137th chapter says that the figure of the mummy was to be smeared with bitumen (the same substance was used to caulk the wicker boat in which Moses and Sargon floated among the reeds) and set fire to. This was to figure the lower nature being lighted up by the fire of the higher. The life of the god, says Budge naively, "sometimes takes the form of a flame of fire." Budge adds: "These ceremonies are said to be ‘an exceedingly great mystery of Amenta and a type of the hidden things of the other world.’"6 Again we see the scholar’s mind stultified by want of that one key to ancient books: that this world is Amenta. For the mystery pertains to the hidden things of no other world than this one we know. But it is, of course, a type of the mysteries of all other cosmic worlds.

Then there is the "burning bush" of Moses. "When he looked there was the thorn-bush ablaze with fire, yet not consumed" (Ex. 2). "The angel of the Eternal appeared to him in a flame of fire rising out of the thorn-bush." To be sure, the fire rises out of the natural order, symboled by a bush. The figure of the burning bush seems to offer no more significance than the "golden bough" of classical lore, or the branch of the sycamore-fig that burns with fire but is not consumed. Horus indeed was typed as the "golden unbu" (branch) from his mother’s tree. No fact in nature lends itself with more felicity to the idea of new life from old than that of the bright new shoot (as of the pine) at the end of last season’s more darkly colored growth. Its lighter color is significant of new glory. As Jesus was the shoot of the vine (also Horus), his Egyptian mythical designation would have been the "golden unbu." In the texts the unbu is the symbol of the son reborn from the dead father. There is a figure of the disk of light raying all ablaze from the summit of the sycamore-fig, which thus appears to burn with fire, but is not burned. The Manes approaches the holy emblem without shoes, salutes the tree and addresses the god in the solar fire: "Shine on me, O unknown soul. I draw near to the god whose words were heard by me in the lower earth" (Ch. 64). One is now prepared to sense the meaning of the bright-spangled star that tops our Christmas pine tree. And by the same token one can know the cryptic meaning of the Star of Bethlehem. Need it be added that the burning bush is just the symbol of nature’s "green" product, the first Adam, being divinized to golden splendor by the touch of the god’s spiritual fire? Any green tree or stalk or stem, tipped at its summit by the bright-hued flower, furnishes the same moral. Human life is to flower out at its summit in radiant colors. And we set fire to the Yule log.

An old English legend identifies the golden bough of Horus with the bush that flowered at Christmas, the Glastonbury thorn. The flowering at Christmas depicts the birth of the solar god at the solstice, the application of which to individual spiritual history will be examined later. Says Horus (Ch. 42): "I am Unbu, who proceedeth from Nu, and my mother is Nut." Again: "I am Unbu of An-ar-ef, the flower in the abode of occultation," or in the fleshly world of hiding. Possession of the golden bough in classical mythology was the passport of release from the underworld.

There is, also, the flaming two-edged sword of the angel set to guard the tree of life in the garden. Origen says that the Gnostic diagram of this symbol was as follows: "The flaming sword was depicted as the diameter of a flaming circle, and as if mounting guard over the tree of knowledge and of life." There is doubtless much mystical, astrological and other occult symbolism in the sign; but in relation to the human situation its meaning seems to be simpler. Man’s life here is cast between the two fires of heaven and earth, the bright fire of celestial splendor and the lurid one of earth. They are of course two aspects or modifications of the same one fire. Hence his life is cut by the fire that catches him on both sides, upper and lower. The fire of life consumes in both directions. It lights and it also burns. It glows in beauteous glory; it painfully consumes the lower self. Heaven is fiery; so is hell. As the waters were sundered, so was the divine fire. The flaming sword is the eternal reminder of the two-edgedness of our nature. The doubleness of the fire that has come to deify us is announced in the line in the Ritual: "Pepi is the country (or the god) Setit, the conqueror of the Two Lands, whose flame receives its two portions." We are bathed in "the Pool of the Double Fire." The Two Lands are the two areas or fields of our dual selfhood. Man is to conquer the twoness of his being, merging the two portions into one new creation. The Ritual says that "he cultivates the Two Lands, he pacifies the Two Lands, he unites the Two Lands." It says also that "he cultivates the crops on both sides of the horizon."

John Baptist’s statement in the New Testament is a mighty affirmation of the truth of what is here presented. He represented the lower man, antecedent and preparatory to the spiritual self. He bears the symbolism of water (if not of earth), as Jesus does that of fire and air. For his statement yet rings down the centuries of Christian theology: "I indeed baptize you with water, but he that cometh after me shall baptize you with the Holy Spirit [Latin: spiritus, "air"!] and with fire." The man born of the natural or maternal order (man born of woman) alone, preceded him that was born of the Father’s divine spirit. Again our thesis is dramatically vindicated by "scripture."

Iamblichus tells us that the three golden apples of Hesperides are: (1), Illumination; (2), A communion of operation; and, (3), A perfect plenitude of Divine Fire.7

A mass of testimony could be drawn from the Bible to stress the prominence of the fire typology. Isaiah strongly enjoins us (50, 11): "Behold all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled." Job admonishes evildoers (18:5): "Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out and the spark of his fire shall not shine. The light shall be dark in his tabernacle, and his candle shall be put out with him." Paul says that if we awake "from the dead," "Christ will shine upon" us. Isaiah says that we wait for the light, and exhorts us to "arise, shine, for thy light is come." John says that "light is come into the world" and "that was the true light" when the Christos arrived. He declares that the only condemnation was the world’s rejection of the light when it came. The Psalmist says that the Lord is his light and his salvation and that "light is sown for the righteous." "In thy light shall we see light." Jesus said: "When I am in the world I am the light of the world." He assured the righteous that they were the light of the world, that indeed they needed no other light to lighten their path, as they had light in themselves. The Lord made his ministers a flame of fire. "The Lord God is a sun and a shield"--the pillar and the cloud, the meaning of which, clear at last, is simply spirit and matter. When there was darkness over the land of Egypt, "the Israelites had light in their dwellings." And this is not speaking of rush lights in Egyptian huts, but spiritual light in physical bodies. Jesus was "the sun of righteousness" and at the end of human evolution "the righteous shall shine like the sun." And if there is needed a pointblank utterance from the Bible to cover our claim, it might be found in the line from the Psalms: "Our God is a living fire." For a long series of generations Christendom has set fire to the Yule log and lighted candles on the Christmas tree. Yet there is hardly a child in the West that could give a reason for these rites that would convey a modicum of the truth. For the venerable teaching that nature put forth on its topmost bough a bright effulgence of deity, a bright flower at the top of the green stem, a shining god at the summit of elemental creation, has long been lost. Yet the Christ has come, bringing and distributing "that light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world."

The fire emblem has become involved in a host of combinations with other types, and its play in all mythology is extensive. Many of these references to it carry valuable implications.

The ancient Apt, mother of the world, is called "the kindler of sparks," the "kindler of light for the deceased in the dark of death" (Rit., Ch. 137: Vign: Papyrus of Nebseni). Thus the old first bringer of rebirth is the kindler of light in the sepulcher--of earth. Mary Magdalene who is her counterpart in the Gospel version, comes to the tomb "early, while it is yet dark," and finds the stone moved away and light kindled at the tomb sufficient to see by. Chapter 137B is entitled: "Of kindling a flame by Nebseni, the scribe in the temple of Ptah."

The great classical fable of Prometheus bears relations to the fire sign. The myth is not entirely unique. There is, for instance, the Hindu tale of the monster (Titan) Rahu, who smuggled himself into the presence of the Gods of light and drank the Amrit-juice of immortality. He was cut in two, but could not be destroyed, by Indra, and the two halves were set as signs in the heavens at the places of the lunar eclipses.

That the Promethean myth is not entirely to be dissociated from the story of the Galilean savior is shown by the fact that, according to Carpenter, "Prometheus, the greatest and earliest benefactor of the human race, was nailed by hands and feet, and with arms extended, to the rocks of Mt. Caucasus."8 When one knows that this figure fastened to a cross or rock is but the outward dramatization of the truth of the god’s impalement on the stake of matter, all historical realism connected with it becomes revolting.

The Titans were styled in the Mysteries "Thyrsus-bearers, and Prometheus concealed fire in a thyrsus or reed; after which he was considered as bringing celestial light into generation or leading soul into body, or calling forth the divine illumination."9 The natural order harbors in it the seeds of spiritual growth.

Massey quite plausibly allocates to the word "Teitan" the "number of the Beast" given in Revelation as 666. He argues that the triple "S" on the Gnostic stones, represents this number, "S" equaling 6. SSS then equals 666. It was a sign of the six elementary creations that prepare the way for the seventh. He traces the value of the letters as follows:

T ............... 300

E ............... 5

I ............... 10

T ............... 300

A ............... 50

N ............... 1

____

666

The statement that the Beast lost one of its heads, which was afterwards restored and healed (Cf. a similar case in the Egyptian mythos) is interpreted by him to mean that the descent of the Titanic hosts was the figurative equivalent of the loss of the head or intellect to be regained in the evolutionary sequel. The sevenfold corpus of deity, minus one of its heads, was thus numerically reduced from seven to six. Man, then, is to be regarded as a sevenfold being suffering the temporary loss of his (divine) intellect, or head, which he is striving to restore or heal. We must round out the Beast in us by giving him a head of intelligence. There is still more to this typology of seven minus one. The fabled Mt. Meru "is also described as being intersected by six parallel ranges running east and west. Six is typed by the hexagon or space in six directions"--a symbol of our life in this three-dimensional world, where the cube of six sides is the typical shape of any existential object. The six parallel ranges are the six planes beneath the topmost level, where the "heart of Bacchus" was preserved when the mental body was dismembered. Says Proclus in the Timaeus: "The Framer made the heavens six in number, and for the seventh he cast into the midst the fire of the sun." This was the crowning of nature’s six elementary kingdoms with the element of mind, or the first injection of intellect into the evolutionary creation in and through the person of man, Atum-Ra, the first god-born race. Nature struggles upward through six degrees of material coarseness, till her product, animal-man, is sufficiently sensitized to be made the vehicle of Manas, or Mind.

Job (5:19) relates six and seven mysteriously in a remarkable statement: "He shall deliver thee in six troubles: yea, in seven, there shall no evil touch thee." Trouble is associated with six and deliverance from it with seven. Life is captive and harassed during its long peregrinations upward through the three sub-atomic "elemental kingdoms" in the invisible world, the preliminary stages in the formation of matter out of empty space, and the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms in the visible atomic world; and intelligence comes in the seventh kingdom to release it from its sub-conscious captivity. Life is in "Egyptian" bondage to nature through six aeons. The seventh--and seven times seven--brings the glorious "year of jubilee," when all captives and prisoners are set free. In Numbers a Hebrew slave was to serve six years and go free in the seventh without paying a ransom. The fields were to be cultivated for six years and to lie fallow the seventh. But when the Messiah came--and his Egyptian name Iu-em-hetep means "he who comes seventh"--he was allegorized as coming under the dominance of the six lower forces; and so the number seven later took on in the texts the evil implications of the number six and is the numerical type of servitude. Jacob is made to serve seven years for Leah and an added seven for Rachel. In some old texts the ten plagues of Egypt were originally seven.

The profounder significance of the first "miracle" of Jesus in turning water into wine at the marriage feast of Cana hinges upon the fact, hardly ever commented on, that the servants set out for the transformation six pots of water in earthen vessels! Jesus, embodying the seventh or transmuting power, came to convert that nature that had been constituted by the first six outpourings of primal life into higher spiritual status. The Christ has the task of transfiguring six lower elemental powers into divinity. And in the Gospel story he went up into the mount for the transfiguration "after six days"! Spiritual "wine" was to be made out of the six types of elemental "water" in man’s constitution. And man, physically, comes close to being six-sevenths water in composition!

The "year of the Lord" was divided into six (double) signs of the zodiac. The sun passes annually through these six signs, and man’s soul, his sun, also passes through six levels of being in attaining self-conscious freedom. It makes the round of the elements of earth, water, air and fire in twelve subdivisions. These elements being embodied in his own constitution, the sun-soul in man passes through them to achieve its mastery of all life. His victory in the seventh kingdom regains for him all that was lost in the beginning. The Christ adds the seventh head to the decapitated natural order. The seventh and "lost" Pleiad will be recaptured by Orion, the mighty hunter, Egypt’s astrological figure for Horus. The Christ will restore the lost light.

The Titans, of whom Prometheus was one, appear in a dual and somewhat confusing character in the mythology. They are both man’s good angel and his devil. The solution of this enigma of theology will be fully expounded in the next chapter. But, briefly, it can be said that the Titans of mythology match the Lucifer character of theology.

"Hesiod says the Father called the Revolters by an opprobrious name, Teitans, when he cursed them. And they were cast down into Tartarus and bound in chains and darkness in the abyss." (Theogony I, 207; II, 717).

The god, the Titan, Prometheus, Lucifer, who brought us our divine fire from the empyrean, was in part converted into the Beast when his Titanic intellect was linked with the six elementary forces. He mingled his life-blood with theirs, and the contagion of elementary impulse went to his head! Certain of the myths tend to align the Titans with the six elementary powers; and this is a natural confusion since the higher mentality did commingle with the lower instincts. The god who was angelic, because untested, in heaven, became demoniacal on earth, and the coloring of every attribute is altered as he indeed "suffers a sea change" in plunging into the lower waters.

The myth of the Greek Saturn, who was overthrown and despoiled by the Titans in that heavenly warfare, is read as planetary cosmology by Massey and others. The meaning is that each lower grade of life organized in the progressive outpourings "steals" away the higher creative force to use on its own plane. The functions and the glory of Saturn were alleged to have been transferred to the sun, who became the new lord of the six. Saturn is identical with the Egyptian Sebek (Sevekh) whose name is "seven," and in the early mythos he was the deity who crowned the six elementary forces with completion, as their ruler and governor. Says Massey:

"The sun and Saturn both became the lord of the seventh day, the Sabbath, the day of rest and peace, which is Hept, [Hetep] the name of No. 7. But in the cult of Sebek . . . the original of the solar Sabazius, son of . . . Kubele, the sun and Saturn were combined as Sabat, Sabaoth, or Sapt, which, read as Sebti, shows the dual form of Seb, for the sun and Saturn . . . Sabazius was reported to have been torn into seven parts by the Titans, corresponding to the seven days of the week and the seven planets to which they were dedicated."10

That is to say, our number "seven" (Latin: septem) is derived from Saturn and the sun combined in their two names of Seb and Hept, compounded into sept. Seb, as we have seen, covers the dual meaning of "star" and "soul," both suggesting fire. As the coming of the god of intellect and reason, the seventh element, crowned the long elemental warfare of cosmic creation with the peace and rest of intellectual control, order and harmony, so the deific principle gives its name to the day of peace that follows the hurly-burly of the six secular days. In general we devote six days to bodily interests; the seventh should go to the interests of the soul. Ancient discernment of primary creational verities gave us our week of seven days, to stand as an eternal reminder of the sevenfold cosmic order, of which our own basic constitution is itself a reflection and a miniature. And old Egypt gives us the philosophical demonstration of all this in the dual meaning of the word Hept, which is both "seven" and "peace." The seventh element is that noetic intellect which stills the storm on the passional waters and brings peace to chaotic nature, based on its six lower mindless energies. Iu-em-hetep (Imhotep of the Greeks) is he who comes to bring peace as number seven.

In Exodus (23) it is written:

"The radiance of the Eternal rested on the mountain of Sinai; for six days the cloud covered it, and on the seventh day he called from the cloud to Moses (the Eternal’s radiance looked to the Israelites like blazing fire on the top of the mountain.)"

It is in a verse from this same chapter that a very noteworthy statement is made:

"For six years you may sow your land and gather in your crops, but every seventh year you must let the land alone, so the poor people may pick up something; anything they leave the wild animals can eat, for if you worship their gods it will endanger you."

There is ample warrant for a moment’s digression from the main theme of the chapter to follow out several implications of this astonishing passage. The injunction not to cultivate the fields every seventh year, so that the "poor" might have some "pickings," is on the face of it impossible physically. For if the land was left alone, there would be no planting and hence no picking. How could the earthly poor profit from unplanted fields?

The command has nothing to do with agriculture or charity, except that which is cosmic and spiritual. It is one of those ingenious "parables" by which ancient sagacity embodied great evolutionary truth in pictorial representation. It concerns in this case a most recondite fact of esoteric knowledge. Bizarre as it may sound to modern ears, it was the teaching of the abstruse biological science of old that at the dissolution of the several component principles of the multiple human constitution at the completion of the cycle (the seventh day), one of these bodies of etheric material (of types now predicated by science), the "astral," called the "chhaya" in India, floated free as an independent entity, possessing both sufficient vitality to preserve it from disintegration, and a semblance of mental automatism. In this condition it was utilized by nature for a particular purpose. It was made the matrix or mold about which was aggregated coarser matter, as a magnetic field organizes iron filings, which matter gave it a body and localized it on earth as a living creature. Both the Bible and other esoteric writings have mysterious sayings about the lower orders of life feeding upon the lees or dregs of the orders above them, even in some cases excrementitious matter. The meaning is approached along the line of a peculiar emblemism. Man’s discarded "astral" shells, so the doctrine teaches, serve as the models and the animating principles of lower forms of life. Our "astral" leavings, cast-off clothing, are made to serve as the feeling souls of inferior creatures. The animal picks up our emotion body and builds his physical body over it as a model. Man’s part in creative evolution is far more direct than he imagines. Every phase or grade of life is creative, to its degree. If this item seems strange, it assuredly is no more so than many of the almost unbelievable phenomena of physical biology in general in animal and insect life. Nature has a bigger bag of tricks than we realize. She employs a vast range of unsuspected and startling methods in the endless repertoire of her ingenuity. At any rate the fact was so taught in the arcane schools of occultism, and here in Exodus is a passage directly pointing to it, since the text can mean nothing intelligible in its literal sense. The seventh round in all cycles of life in nature is always the epoch at which soul consummates its work in an organism and retires to its proper level above, leaving the physical bases of life to stand without further cultivation until the beginning of the next series of seven rounds. During the retirement the lower animal self, the "poor," reaps the harvest of its previous attachment to the higher entity. The ethereal vestures survive, for they are enduring in proportion to their atomic fineness. We have already equated "the poor" and also "the people" with the Gentiles, who were the "sons of men" in contrast to the "Sons of God"; the humans in whom the Christ principle has not yet been made consciously the ruler.

And the second startling item of this excerpt asserts that what those "poor" semi-humans leave may be picked up, in a third order of gradation, by the wild animals. This is informative indeed. The process of divination begins with the highest God and is relayed, in ever diminishing power, from rank to rank, down to the animal. Only by living on the lees of the superior order can each kingdom link itself to its appropriate measure of divine vivification.

By such occult analysis is it possible to see the meaning of the final hint of danger expressed by the line: "for if you worship their gods it will endanger you." This work has already set forth the peril involved for the heavenly visitant in taking residence in animal forms, if it permitted itself to "worship their gods" of sensuality and beastliness. A number of passages of scripture admonish the children of light to "make no compact" with the "natives" of that realm to which they were sent, nor to marry their "women"!

The sum of this material which shows the world to be figuratively "at sixes and sevens" is that conscious life was in servitude and bondage to blind unintelligent elemental forces for six aeons, three in the invisible and three in the visible worlds, and was only lifted up to the liberty of sons of God when the spiritual fire of the spiritual sun, the second Adam or the Christ, was set in the heavens of man’s conscious being as the ruler of the six sub-mental powers. In Galatians (4) Paul clearly states that when we were children in evolution "we were in bondage to them that by nature are no gods." We were in slavery to the elementals of the earth and of the air, as he distinctly says! He warns his brethren not to come under the power of these elementals, as it would endanger their spiritual integrity.

Stars are closely intermingled with the fire symbolism. They are themselves fiery in constitution, blazing suns or their planets. Stars were considered the children of Ra, the great lord of the spiritual sun, who emaned them like tears from his eyes. Souls were his offspring, centrally nucleated by his solar fire. He was the parent of the Kumaras. Stars were held to be a race of higher beings, having souls of the essence of light coming from the sun. "I have shed my seed (of light) abroad for you," he says to his sons.11 In the Book of Adam and Eve, translated from the Ethiopic by Malan, God says: "I made thee of the light, and I wished to bring out children of the light from three." The sun’s children were called Ruti, or men of excellence. Under the name of Khabsu the stars are synonymous with souls, as also in the name of Seb. Souls in Amenta were represented by stars. As the souls arose in their resurrection they appeared above the horizon on the eastern side of heaven. This is why the rising star of the solar deity born in mankind was seen "in the east" in the Gospel story. It dies in the west, like the sun, and has its new birth in the house of bread (Bethlehem) in the east. The god Shu-Anhur was called the "lifter up of the sky," together with its inhabitants, the stars. Ra addresses Shu: "Be the guardian of the multitudes that live in the nocturnal sky," or sky of the Lower Egypt of Amenta. "Put them on thy head and be their fosterer," or sustainer. Spiritually this betokens the elevation of our elemental nature by the shifting of the center of intellectual and spiritual gravity above the horizon in the heaven of consciousness. The stars were in fact the bodies of gods, and the lucent fragment of deity in man is his star.

The Great Bear of seven stars drew the first circle or cycle of time in the abyss of chaos, and gave definite law, order and periodicity to the primary creation. From primal elemental disorder, nature settled down to rhythmic regularity as the beginning of stable order in her worlds. From blind erratic struggle the elements fell into order in a septenary mechanism. This was imaged first in the Great Bear, the mother of the first cycle of regular time and fixed revolutions. This primary cluster in the sky should never cease to speak to our imagination of the heptarchy of forces in nature, which are the bases of our lives as well. This mighty fact of creation was in the mind of the sage who wrote that at the dawn of creation all the sons of the Elohim shouted for joy and "the Morning Stars sang together" (Job 38). The music of the spheres began with the first swing into symmetrical order and balanced harmony between centripetal and centrifugal energies that had been jangling in confusion and dissonance before the seventh element, the sun or spirit, gave the six a king. But Plato strangely tells us that "with the sixth creation ended the order of song." (Philebus, 66.) Coincident with this we are also told that the sixth pole star in succession passed from the constellation of Lyra, the Harp, to that of Hercules, the man-god. All these veiled hints have tremendous meaning, for this would seem to indicate that the soul comes into the order of nature bringing a power of independent will, which may contravene the mechanical automatism of nature, break into the rhythm and mar the music--until it learns of itself anew to fix the measure to a higher harmony. Man’s free agency does inject either a reasoned or an unreasoned self-initiative into that which was automatically rhythmic before. In a former reference we have heard the great Lord himself complain of the spirits who had broken in upon his celestial music and marred the harmony, for which he threw them down into incarnation.

The Rubric to chapter 129 of the Ritual says of the Manes: "And he shall be established as a star face to face with Septet [Sirius, Sothis, the Dog-Star] and his corruptible body shall be as a god . . . forever." To deify the human is to make a star of him. The Manes himself prays (Ch. 102): "Let me be among the stars that never rest." It is promised (Ch. 164) that "he shall become a star of heaven." Has orthodoxy held out to its votaries any such thrilling cosmic view of their future? The Osiris-Nu pleads (Ch. 188): "May I enter into the house of his body, which, behold, hath become one of the starry gods!" This would be the higher spiritual body, not the corporeal. It is said to the soul: "Thou art purified with the libation of the stars. The stars that never set bear thee up; thou enterest in the place where thy father is, where Keb [Seb] is . . . thou becomest a soul therein." The soul (Pepi) pleads: "Make thou this Pepi to be an imperishable star before thee." The acme of directness is attained in the next statement: "Pepi is a star." To Teta, the soul, it is said: "Thou seizest the hands of the imperishable stars . . . for behold thou art one of the gods." "The imperishable stars follow and minister unto thee." Pepi is addressed: "Thou art the Great Star; Orion beareth thee on his shoulder. Thou traversest heaven with Orion, thou sailest through the Tuat with Osiris." Again: "Pepi takes his seat among you, O ye star gods of the Tuat." And finally in grand simplicity stands the categorical pronouncement : "Thy soul is a living star at the head of his brethren." For the six elementary powers were his natural brothers, of whom he, like Joseph and like Jesus, was made the chief or head. From brethren they were reduced to children when the god principle took charge and synthesized their functions. The fiery soul of intellect became king of the lower six elementary powers in man’s make-up. The Christos came as the Prince of Peace to rise to kingship over nature’s six divisions of force. "Unto you a king is given . . . and his name shall be called . . . the Prince of Peace."

But the soul is specifically typed by that great and brilliant emblem of our divinity, the Morning Star. The Titan who came hurtling to earth still clinging to his stolen possession, the spiritual fire, was Lucifer, "the bright and morning star."

The significance of this emblem is in its heralding the approach of day. "The day star is rising." It is the harbinger of the coming of the great Lord of Day. As the announcer it becomes identical in function with Anup, the fiery ape in Egypt, Mercury in Greek mythology, and John Baptist in Christianity. Anup is the way-opener for the advent of Horus, who, though coming after him, was before him in stature and authority (Rit., Ch. 44). Anup abode in the dark and empty reaches of the desert of Amenta until the day of his manifestation in the heliacal rising of the star Sothis (Sirius), the morning star of the year in Egypt, which heralded the birth of Horus, as the opening of the year. John dwelt in the wilderness until the time of his theophany or "showing forth in Israel" (Luke I:80). The soul was held out in the wilderness of the six elemental energies until the arrival of the Christ. Anup was only a star god, but as such he was the precursor of the greater solar light. As the sun in its splendor far outshines the total galaxy of the stars, so the deity whose association with man was presaged by the star-god, was far to surpass in glory any product of the natural series. And this is made clear by the Gospel statement that the least in the kingdom of the god is greater than the highest of those born of woman, that is, nature.

The stars typed one of the elementary creations, of which there seem to have been three, the first being cosmic and universal, offering a sevenfold differentiation in primal substance; the second stellar and planetary; the third racial and individual in mankind. Much of the endless confusion in the interpretation of creation legends has arisen because of failure to distinguish which of these creations was being dealt with. What is fundamental, however, to all understanding is that all of nature’s cyclic processes are typical of each other. So that cosmogenesis adumbrates the planetary formation, which in turn is an enlarged picture of the anthropogenesis. As man was formed in the image and likeness of the Elohim, the seven-rayed creative Logoi, the septenary constitution pictured in the first and second creations appertains to him by reflection. All ancient philosophy referable to man was built upon the human constitution as a septenate of powers. We see the first creation in the hebdomadal formation of all physical creation; the second in the septenary solar systems; the third in the human formed of seven principles or natures. Of the first the Mother alone, the Virgin, Achamoth, Typhon, Apt, Nut, Neith, Isis, Hathor, Rerit,

Ishtar, Tiamat, Semiramis, Cybele and other primary feminine deities become the bearer and producer. Of the second Sevekh (Sebek, Seb), Saturn, and the Sun, as the leader of the seven Rishis, Archangels, Elohim, Kabiri, were the progenitors. Of the third the twelve legions of Asuras, Kumaras, Titans, Deva-Angels, Rudras, Adityas, who came collectively as Prometheus and Lucifer, individually as sons of the solar radiance, sons of Ra, or sparks of the divine fire, were the chief agents. They still supervise their continuing creation from their citadel deep within the shrine of man’s life. In one form or another, solar light, essence, power is centered in every manifestation. In the innermost sanctuary of life dwells the spark, the ray, the flame of solar glory. The sun is the central type and embodiment of the highest divinity. The Christs were all sun-gods.

In the Kabalah the vital statement is found that in each solar system the soul in its aeonial round dwells successively on six planes and spends its seventh aeon on the sun of that system. This is after the analogy of the soul in the human body, for there it successively energizes, from lowest to highest, the six elemental physical ranges of power, and six sub-spiritual psychic centers, before it ascends into the supreme flowering of the solar fire in the head.

Sirius, otherwise Sothis and Septet, being the morning star in the mythos, etymologically supplies another significant link in the story. Septet is another form of the word "seven." The six natural forces were completed and synthesized by the coming of the seventh. The morning star heralded the perfection of the sevenfold creation as it announced the coming of the crowning glory. This Sirius, the Dog-Star, was the type of Anup, the dog or jackal god, as the guide of souls in the dark of night, or incarnation. "The star Sept (Sothis) with long strides leads on the celestial path of Ra each day, and the blessed one rises as a star." The star precedes Ra, the sun in man. Of Pepi it is written: "His sister is Sept (Sothis), he is born as the Morning Star (Venus)." And again: "His sister, the star Sept (Sothis), his guide, the Morning Star, takes him by the hand to Sekhet-Hetep." Usually women, in the mythology, are the guides, protectors and watchers of the sun-god in the mythology, as they are the natural bearers, rearers and watchers of the human infant, until his own divinity arises. As the feminine always types the natural as distinct from the spiritual, the religious myth depicts the youthful solar god as being born of woman, cradled, watched and nourished by women, type of the elementary forces. The god comes to be born, nursed and nurtured in the lap of Mother Nature. But he must leave her at twelve!

In one place the text of the Ritual says, as to Pepi: "The Morning Star giveth birth to him." In another it says: "Pepi giveth birth to the Morning Star." The apparent contradiction is a matter of viewpoint, or a matter like the priority of hen or egg. Did John the Baptist bring Jesus, or Jesus John? John himself solves the riddle by saying: "He who cometh after me is preferred before me." The star brings the dawn, but the dawn also brings the star. Of the coming god, as of the Christ, the Ritual says: "His light appeareth in the sky like that of a great star, the Morning Star." And again: "Thou revolvest about Ra, near the Morning Star." The Manes is instructed: "Command thou that he is to sit by thee, on the shoulders of the Morning Star on the horizon." Following the statement that heaven is pregnant with wine, it is said that "Nut maketh herself to give birth to her daughter, the Morning Star." And immediately follows the exhortation to the soul: "Rise up thou, then, O Pepi, thou third Septet (Sothis), whose seats are purified." Calling Pepi the "third Septet" bears out fully what has just been expounded as to the three creations, each sevenfold in organization, the last being that of septenary man. That the god in his coming was to enter the waters of incarnation and the mires of earth is betokened by the following: "He places thee like the Morning Star in the fields of Reeds (Sekhet-Aarru)."

Numbers (24:17) predicts that "there shall come a star out of Jacob." As the Gnostic Jesus of Revelation (22:16) himself declares: "I am the root and offspring of David, and the bright and Morning Star." And the angel promises in Revelation (2:28), to him that overcometh "I will give the Morning Star." This comes as the seventh of a series of promises "to him that overcometh."

The frequent use of the censer in Revelation is to be noticed. Seven angels had given to them seven censers, containing the fire from the altar of God within the innermost place, which the seven were to cast upon the earth! Here is the basic allegory again in small compass. In the Logia these details are preceded by the announcement: "And I beheld yet another sign in the heavens, which was marvelous in its meaning and great in its issues!" Surely; for it was the story of the deification of the human race. The burning of incense, a very general custom in religious observance in the world, runs parallel in meaning to keeping alive the Vestal Fire. In the Old Testament all cereal was to be mixed with oil and sprinkled with incense--a double seal of divinity. The Manes is addressed in the Ritual: "Thou art pure with the incense of Horus." Again we read" "Incense is presented unto thee, thou becomest God." One becomes a god only by the gift of that higher fire that purges the lower nature and refines it to true gold. And this gold is the immortal solar light. The words for gold, light and deity all derive from the same original root, "ar," "aur," "or."

Lightning, a great sacred symbol of the outflashing of the power of God on earth, was often pictured as seven-barbed. This usage establishes it definitely as a figure for the seven-forked emanation that engendered the creation. It is the type of a fiery power resident in latent form in the air and water elements. So the god is latent in the water of physical nature. The swift power of the fiery dart was typical of the "swift-running" power of deity, for the Greek word for god, theos, means the "swift-darter." In Assyria Tiamat, mother of "seven sons of the abyss," wielded a seven-speared thunderbolt, typifying her children, as powers. The highest of the seven is lightning by name. In Africa some tribes have a word for divinity which translates "lightning." Many peoples had thunder-gods, and the Bible is full of allusions to thunder. The fiery dart of Intelligence into the bosom of the worlds produces or carries the Voice of the Logos out into nature, in seven primary tones. The Hebrew male god of thunder, Kak, or Iach, probably equates with the Hindu Vach, the Word. As the forerunner and prophet of rain, the thunder held the office of Mercury and Anup, the announcers of divine advent.

Even embers and sparks are not slighted in the typism. We have the ancient Egyptian tale of Cinderella, the "sitter in the ashes," embers or cinders. Sitting in her lonely hutch on earth by the dead embers of the fire, she is the soul come to desolation on earth, stripped of her fire. But she surpasses her sisters and fits herself to be dight with radiance again. The flame that ramifies out in seven tongues is the original figure of the seven-branched candlestick. Deity comes to earth to manifest himself in seven flaming aspects of his being. And still stand the great ancient pyramids, the word by etymology reading "a measure of (creative) fire," with square base and triangular upper faces, the four and the three united to constitute the sevenfold physical structure of the worlds and man, and multiplied to constitute the twelve deific powers to be unfolded by spiritual humanity.

NOTES

CHAPTER XIII

1. Massey: The Natural Genesis, I, p. 344.

2. The Natural Genesis, I, p. 529.

3. Massey: The Natural Genesis, I, p. 147.

CHAPTER XIV

1. Thomas Taylor: Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 126.

2. See. R. H. Matthews: The Wiradthuri Tribes, Journal of Anthropology Inst., Vol. XXV, 1896.

3. If this term is the same as the Sanskrit Atma, it means the high spiritual essence, the soul of the soul of man.

4. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 359.

5. Pagan and Christian Creeds, p. 129.

6. Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 175.

7. Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 272.

8. Pagan and Christian Creeds, p. 139.

9. Taylor: Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries, p. 139.

10. The Natural Genesis, II, p. 78.

11. Book of Hades, Fifth Division, D.