The Lost Light

An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures

Alvin Boyd Kuhn

Chapters 15 and 16

Chapter XV

NOXIOUS FUMES AND LURID FLARES

It has been necessary to anticipate the substance of this chapter in one or two places in the preceding one, because many important statements so closely link the two fires, the supernal and the infernal, that it was impossible to present the one in entire disseverance from the other. The background for the clarification of this aspect of the interpretation has therefore already been set up. Yet the whole doctrine of "hell-fire" has fallen so infinitely remote from even the outskirts of true understanding that it must be grappled with in good earnest. The deplorable state of modern exegesis in this segment of theology impels one to a vehement expression of that disgust at the harrowing grotesquerie of rendering which a comparison of ancient esoteric meaning with current superstition so readily excites. But this situation must be evident by now as a general matter, and should need but little reinforcement beyond the continued revelation of gaping chasms of difference between the old and the present readings. Yet this theology of a hell of fiery torment has suffered such an unconscionable distortion from its primary bearing, and has afflicted the mind of mankind with so outrageous a delusion, that every consideration points to the necessity of a vigorous handling in the interests of sanity and social benefit. The perversion of original teaching regarding the lower fire has cast over the collective mind of the Western world the foulest hypnotic obsession which it has ever suffered. The strangling tentacles of this theological devil-fish have spread over the whole of Christendom and have compressed the spiritual genius of that segment of mankind into the coldest and most inhuman bigotry known to history. For ages the doctrine in its misconceived form has deprived the Christianized world of its reason, and opened doors to the entry of every superstition. It has snuffed out the native spark of human brotherhood and brought between man and man the lurid glare of its own devilish mischief.

For the fiercest fires of persecution and fiendish cruelty ever lighted upon earth flared out under the impulsion of the fantastic theological teaching that the acts of one’s brother may be the impious machination of "the devil." It is too gruesome and ghoulish a chapter of horrors to linger upon; yet the same philosophical benightedness out of which this atrocious monster of diabolism and demonism has emerged has never to this day been dispelled by the light of wisdom. A more sensitive humanity of the present, sickened by the ghastly spectacle of past tortures and holocausts inspired by fiendish zeal, has tried to drop the subject as far as possible out of sight, and has imposed a taboo upon its exploitation in religious quarters. But the darkness has not been dissipated, and the monster is still capable, on provocation, of glaring fiercely out of the murks. The light that would have enabled the Christian world to descry the Beast in his true outlines and character has never been rekindled since it was extinguished about the third century. Had that light been available it would have revealed that the fiery dragon of the pit was none other than the god himself, his face begrimed with smoke, his features distorted by the grimaces of the Beast through whose eyes he looked out upon this strange world, and his countenance luridly alight with the smudgy flare of the earthly furnace. Milton’s lakes of seething fire in Paradise Lost are a travesty of truth, unless taken purely as the symbology they are. For Satan is the god himself--on earth! This broad assertion is incontestable. It is proven by the very name. The descending god was the Light-bringer, Lucifer, the bright and morning star, which is precisely the character assumed by the Jesus of the Biblical Revelation! The Christian devil, the hated serpent of evil, Satan, is Lucifer, the god of light on earth, Prometheus, the "benefactor of mankind,"--"the god" himself.

Indoctrinated orthodoxy may rise to protest the identification. Some ghastly mistake will be alleged in the philology. It will be in vain. Erudite theology has at times perhaps known the truth, but has kept an advised silence. The general mind has lost the key to the mystery. By dropping the name Lucifer and clinging to that of Satan alone, the mischief has been bred and perpetuated. That Satan and Jesus are identical is as true as that Sut and Horus in Egypt are twins! The god and devil are kindred. They are full brothers. Their mother is one. They are the two aspects or manifestations of the same force. It may be said that the evil character is the good seen in reversed reflection on earth. For an ancient esoteric adage in Latin ran: DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS, "the devil is the god turned upside down." Satan is the god in incarnation; or he is the god as he appears after his nature has been diffracted in its passage through the blurred medium of earth life. The devil is the god transformed into a being of reduced power, blunted moral sense, befogged intellect and forgotten glory. He is the god bemired with the slime of carnal generation, beset with the strong sensuous and sexual urge of the brute. In short, he is the divine soul entangled in the bestial nature and himself lending more fiery intensity to the impulses of the body by his vitalizing presence!

The genesis of what is called "evil" may perhaps be dialectically derivable from the fundamental premises of thought. But the origin of evil in reference to man’s specific cosmic situation is a particular problem, only to be determined by full knowledge of this situation. As the world does not possess such knowledge in full measure, the great problem is enveloped in some obscurity.

But the sages of the early dawn vouchsafed a portion of this knowledge deemed sufficient to yield to reflection an intelligent comprehension of the issues involved and a philosophic attitude toward them. The rank of the gods sent to earth, their endowments and capabilities, their attitude toward their mission, their obligation in relation to past dereliction, and the implications of their tenanting the animal bodies assigned to them, were broadly revealed to the initiates and theodidaktoi of an early period. With all these interests and relations the connotations of the term "evil" are intimately concatenated. This knowledge, elaborated to much detail, was the treasure of the Mystery Societies and Brotherhoods, and formed the esoteric motivation of their regimes of discipline, instruction and consecration. The modern revival of interest in this mine of truth has not yet recovered all that has slipped away. The uncertainty about some of the major premises is supplemented by the additional difficulty of determining which of the two phases of the representative figures, Satan, Lucifer, Apap, Sut, Typhon, the serpent, the dragon, the beast, is being emphasized in the numberless myths and legends. And there is the ever-present doubleness of the meaning of the symbols, making it difficult to know whether the higher or the lower aspect is meant. But enough hints are provided usually to enable scholarship to work with intelligence upon the material.

The origin of evil is indeed the mystery of our life. It is inwrought with the key situation of humanity. The arising of evil in a system of total and absolute good is indeed a riddle that taxes the best effort of brain and heart. The difficulty, however, has been made by the mistaken common assumption that Good is absolute, that is, good as conceived in human ideation, good in its specific human relevance. The Supreme God has been called the Good, and this has been misleading. Good can only be absolute if evil is also absolute, and this can not be, since there can not be two different and opposing absolutes. The absolute is beyond good and evil alike. There is an abstract and detached conception of good which the mind can predicate of the entire scheme of things, to posit which, however, would require our saying that that which is beyond both good and evil is the good. Yet such a declaration is dialectically impossible, because that which we would characterize as good is beyond all character. Descriptive statements about it are empty sound. It is not within the scope of any predication whatever. The ultimate is neutral to us always.

It only becomes either good or bad to us when it ceases to be absolute and relates itself to itself as spirit and matter, positive and negative, male and female, light and dark. And, be it proclaimed in clarion tones, the whole matter of the theological bogie of the devil, or incarnate evil, arose solely from the miscarriage of the dramatic necessity of ascribing an adverse, opposing and relatively evil character to the negative or material pole of life force! The bifurcation of the Unmanifest into the two nodes of being to become manifest threw both poles in contrariety and opposition to each other. The spiritual, or active and conscious end came to be represented as the "good" and the inert and negative material end carried the dramatic imputation of the "evil." The two can never step out of their poised interrelation with each other, since they have existence only in the terms of such relation. They are only and always relative to each other. Good and evil have no human meaning outside the terms of a counterpoise with each other. Each gets its characterization by virtue of its being not what the other is, being its diametric opposite. Each gains what it possesses of substantiality and character from being the reflex of the other. Good is Not-evil and evil is the Not-good.

Manifestation of life comes only through the tension between the two modalities, because it requires just such a stress to awaken latent consciousness to open awareness. Actuality comes to birth only at the central point of contact between the subjective and the objective worlds. If life does not establish the countervalence between its two opposite aspects, it remains unconscious. The friction between spirit and matter is the ground of life’s ultimate or at least increased self-consciousness. So the soul comes to this earth to partake of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Evil is therefore one of its two essential conditions for normal growth and expansion. A sagacious view of philosophical archai, therefore, perceives "evil" in its true light, and once and forever lifts from off its imputed entifications in religion all stigma and bad odor. At the same time it apprehends its role in the drama, in which it plays the part of the "adversary," "the opposer," of the active building power of life. This is the role that has all to easily become misunderstood for one of absolute evil, when it should have been judiciously envisaged as but relative, and as conducive to the awakening of the positive energies of life itself. For without the necessity of exerting itself and deploying its as yet unawakened powers to overcome the opponent’s resistance and inertia, the divine seed would continue to slumber on in unconscious ignorance of its own capabilities. It awakes its dormant giant potentialities by "overcoming the adversary."

This is the heavy role of the villain in every play. He is the foil. He acts as the stepping-stone over which the hero strides to victory. His dark designs make the hero’s virtue shine out the brighter by contrast. He furnishes the dark background against which the conqueror’s exploits stand out in relief.

Hence that which in human and worldly affairs wears all the outward appearance of evil--defeat, disaster, loss, crime, treachery--is to be seen only as good under a disguise. It subserves a karmic purpose,--the challenging of some hidden power to come awake and rouse itself to function. Later on, its hidden beneficence is seen, and we say: Now I know why that happened; without it I would never have gained what I now possess. So "evil" is good under a mask. The villain is our other self in masquerade. If we could at the moment tear off his false face, we would see him as the lovely fairy, ready to transform us into something nobler.

It is the antithesis of good and evil, our experience with both wings of the bird of life, and the resultant deposit of wisdom in our own interior vehicle of consciousness, that gives us ultimately our cognition of values. And in the finale this valuation overleaps mere characterization as either good or bad. We are balanced between the two in order to transcend them both. The child unites characteristics of both its parents and carries life forward one step higher.

The gist of the matter is that value--which should not be thought of as good in contradistinction to evil, but as evolutionary gain--can not be brought to birth unless good is opposed by evil; and evil is just this opposition. It is in every sense except that of immediate human estimate of it entirely necessary, salutary and beneficent. But no one can calculate the untold volume of wretchedness that has been heaped up in world history by the frightful miscarriage of this basic understanding. For the mass mind was overridden by the assignment to "evil" of a positive character, reifying it into a living bogie, and was in the last stage of gross literalization devastated by its personification in an actual "devil." The transmogrification of this dramatic personage into the realistic bogieman to harass millions of earth’s simple-minded children by Christendom is perhaps the crowning disservice which a distorted theology has rendered its unenlightened devotees.

Our sense of evil only arises because of our imperfect vision. As Paul said, we now see life in part and through a glass darkly. If we could see it whole, we would see all things in their proper place in the large picture, and hence in their beneficence. More piercing vision would penetrate the mask of evil and reveal it as good. But our sense of evil, and our reactions to it, are part of the cost of our growth. They are the terms and conditions under which we advance to larger appreciations. The apparent evil is part of the path we must tread to reach values beyond. Evil may be said to be episodical, an incident along the way, as life marches on. Seen out of proportion and relation it assumes its grim aspect.

And what is sin? Again has a baleful theology terrorized the minds of millions with an apparition that is as unsubstantial as the bugaboo of evil. Again it is a normal and natural phase of the evolutionary situation which has been wrested from its balanced meaning in the dramatic typology and turned into a thing of psychological terrorism. Sin is in brief nothing but the "lust for life" itself, and the appetency and zest of the higher soul for the life of flesh and sense, through which alone it can become creative in new generations. Sin is the entangling of the entified spirits in the laws and nature and motivations of the flesh, not to add the world and "the devil," and its free indulgence in the play of its creative powers through and upon these elementary forces. Sin is the spirit’s subjection of itself to the dominance of these proclivities to an inordinate or disproportionate degree. The Cycle of Necessity draws it down into their domain and makes it for a time and in a measure subject to their sway. Whether duly or unduly influenced by them, its submergence under their power is what the ancient drama pictured as sin.

At least one philosopher has kept his vision of this portrayal true and steady. Plotinus declares that if the soul keeps her eye fixed steadily on the star of her higher self, "she need not regret having become acquainted with evil or knowing the nature of vice," and having had the opportunity of manifesting her creative faculties through her conjunction with the body. This is grandly refreshing amid the welter of corrupted philosophies berating and belaboring the life of sense with the stigma of evil and the curse. The latter have grown up in the wake of a morbid religionism turned ascetic when the lighter play of drama was burdened with the lugubrious weight of misconceived ideas of sin and the devil.

A portion or degree of cosmic divine spirit was to become creative in man, and was sent here to try its intellectual powers upon a formative work. It had thence to show its lordship over the elements and the matter with which creative intelligence had to work. It had to be thrown in strategic relation to the world of matter at its appropriate place and station. Like both Jesus and Jonah, it had to be thrown into the "sea," to subdue its ungoverned raging. It had then to take charge of the seven lower furies and range them under its higher command. The unregulated play of these subordinate and irrational forces of sense in the field of life, once the god had plunged into their milieu, is sin. It is powerful at first and for a long time, until the soul gradually rises to assert its kingship over the seven heads of the Beast. It is only admissibly evil--and then still in a relative sense--when it usurps the prerogatives of the lord, unhinges the balance between the two forces, and becomes grossly immoderate and libertine. Only when the soul, still not wide awake and vigilantly in control, permits the lower animality to rule inordinately, is it sin in the mawkish theological sense of shame and remorsefulness.

To help a world lift itself out from under the darksome shadow of gloomy moroseness, induced by twisted theologies, into the brighter day of clearer comprehension, it may be said that the general mind must grasp once again the basic deific motif in creation, to begin with. As set forth just now, "sin" has its rise in the desire of life to become parent of each new cycle of recurrent creation. Spirit and matter must woo, win and wed each other; and their copulation, envisaged through the medium of a diseased human view of sexual relation, became tinged with the stains of moral baseness. This is the psychological genesis of the interpretation so long foisted upon the "fall" of Adam and Eve "into carnal sin." Physical parenthood has long borne the stigma of some remote spiritual transgression, and still the shadow of social and universal shame clings to it. A great modern cult, and some of its offshoots, have expressly stressed the possibility of regaining the Edenic spiritual creation of human beings without resort to the physical mode of procreation. And of course the Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth doctrines have been haloed about with intimations of the same sort. This is all, however, the result of incomprehension turning charming and luminously suggestive typology into crass realism.

Why does God create? Why is he not content to enjoy his exalted position in endless contemplation of his own perfection? As far as human cognition can rise to conceive of it, God’s motive in creation announced in the old books, is Lila, translated "the sport of the gods," "the delight of God." The highest joy and sweetest preoccupation of work. As man reflects deity, it may be known from this datum that God’s highest pleasure comes from his creative labors. He creates for the sport and the joy of it. He first thinks out (in Plato’s "archetypal ideas") what sort of universe he will build, and then proceeds to reap the delight of seeing it grow under his hands. "The sea is his for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land." His reveling in creation does not stop at his ideal conception of prospective worlds; like the true artisan, he must realize the satisfaction of seeing them take form in the concrete. Plastic matter, susceptible to every breath of creative impulse, is his potter’s clay. God comes out of his noumenal world to enjoy a period of activity in the realm of sense. Having thought long enough of his projected creation, he now wills to emerge onto the field of physical activity and bring it into substantial reality. He longs to feel the play of elemental energies through his vast physical frame. Any man yearning to rise from sedentary occupation and brain work to experience the "feel" of muscular activity outdoors, is a sufficient analogue. The opposition, tension and zest for the game are provided by the playing forces on the two teams of matter and spirit. The game or battle will yield him adequate thrills, since in it he will find coming to function still unevolved latencies of his own measureless being. Each act will enhance his sense of power and glory. That he may live again and enjoy a new joust with matter he must plunge his nucleated units of consciousness into a state of "death" and burial in material inertia. Paul asks if this is evil; and his own answer, overlooked and never understood, must become the keynote of a new world attitude to life: "Never! The law was holy, just and altogether righteous."

There is evidence that the word "sin" has derivations and connections of the most momentous import. Some of these are astonishing. In the first place "Sin" was a name for "the mount of the moon." Arcane books speak of the incarnating souls as having fallen into the moon, and earth is still called the "sublunary sphere." This has immediate links with pertinent meaning, since the lower aspects of man’s nature, his two lower bodies, the "astral" and physical, have been built up over the "astral" molds left by the retreating race of men on the moon chain of evolution. Since the spirit plunges into the lower man, the belly of death, it may aptly be said to fall into the mount of the moon. The soul fell into "Sin" or landed on "Mt. Sin."

But another etymology falls in here with unexpected force. The lower physical and emotional half of man’s constitution is, in its relation to physical nature, typed in ancient tomes by "the woman." The lower nature, that holds the soul in material bondage, is specifically dramatized by the character of Hagar, the concubine of Abraham, significantly dubbed "the bond-woman." To "her" we are in bondage. There is very definite connection between this name Hagar and the Agar, or Akar, or Aker, which was the name for the tunnel of the underworld through which incarnating souls had to pass from the rear (material) end of the Sphinx forward to the front (spiritual) end or head. The materials are now ready for St. Paul to use in making for us a startling weaving of the several etymological strands into a thread of great strength. For in Galatians (4:24 ff) he makes a positive identification of Mt. Sinai with Hagar (Agar): "Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children." To call a woman a mountain, and that localized in a specific country on the map, for once clearly shatters all possible literalism or historicism in the verse. But beyond that it throws into relation, likely that of identity, the two mountains Sin and Sin-ai. Sinai is derived (by Massey) from the Egyptian senai, sheni, meaning "point of turning and returning," and almost surely refers to that point where life strikes a balance between the forces of involution and evolution in the cosmic "solstice." In its descent spirit reaches the nadir point in the depths of matter, is held in a state of exact equilibrium with it--the "pool of equipoise" of the Egyptians--experiences its new birth of life from this relation, and then turns to return to the Father above. The name Sinai, then, is most revelatory. All communication with deity, all revelation of deity to man, must occur on this Mount Sinai, when the feet of the woman clothed with the sun rest upon the moon, or lower part of man’s organic structure. So Moses (man) ascends into the mount to receive the commandments of the law and the dicta of the Lord. And Jesus ascends into the same Mount to deliver his sermon unto mortal men. This whole situation is of strategic importance for the entire theme and must be unfolded at length in later connections.

Evil and sin must be cleared of their theological accretions of gruesomeness and morbid sentimentalism. They were involvements of the evolutionary predicament which, under the ruses and resources of dramatic representation, became tinged with darksome psychological hues and inspired a volume of unnatural effort to mortify the human part of our nature. Whole generations of children, taught by literal-minded parents and tutors, imbibed the idea that in the universe there was a deity, dividing power equally with God, who was wholly bent on defeating the good, and who must be resisted, if life is to be "saved." Back of this miscarriage, as back of all absurd popular religious notions, lurks the great truth, that Life has divided its powers between spirit and matter, and that all growth is the outcome of the "war" between these two energies. Clearly apprehended in a philosophical view, this is knowledge of high verity, knowledge that stabilizes the mind with a grasp on the ultimate beneficence of the scheme. On the other hand the popular distortion of it is a horrendous fallacy, devastating to faith in the salutary operation of cosmic law. Between the two there is the whole vast gulf of the difference between sanity and composure and the practical certainty of a monstrous dementia.

The devil is just the god on earth; and how the radiant son of the morning, bright angelic Lucifer, became transmogrified into the dour person of Satan is a matter of deepest concern for religion and for humanity. This problem could have been solved readily enough if the Western mind had not lost the data for thinking. Logic can not proceed when the due premises are wanting. These lie buried in forgotten books dealing with cosmology and anthropology. To supply them again to modern reflection is a major purpose of this work.

The basic item is the duality of man as the result of the incarnation. Evil arises from the union in one organism of brute and god. When the god stepped in, the potentiality of evil was engendered. Evil could not arise from animal alone; paradoxically, it awaited the coming of the god. The animal is unmoral, incapable of either morality or immorality. He has no sense of good and evil. He has not eaten of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. The "god" in man is the first being in evolution who steps out from under the law of natural automatism and periodical regularity, and assumes his training in the art of balancing consciously discerned forces of evil and good. He came into the flesh for the very purpose of opening his eyes (Cf.: "and their eyes were opened" in Genesis) and seeing consciously how to weigh his action in the balance between the two poles of life. He came to eat of the fruit of the tree. While the beast was unmoral, the god was morally capable, but innocent. He had to learn grace by contacting guilt. He had to win his right to the enjoyment of good by overcoming evil. "To him that overcometh shall all things be given," but not to divine souls that would rather dream away their existence in mystical bliss in the empyrean. Without warfare with evil the soul would never come into cognition of its own capacities. As Plotinus affirms, "she would not know what she possesses," and her faculties would never receive their development. Nature could not become productive until it had thrown its opposing forces into the duality of spirit and matter, positive and negative, and provided thus the basis for experience. Consciousness can not come to self-consciousness unless the subjective aspect is confronted with the objective. Spirit and matter are helpless, or rather, as Plotinus adds, are really non-existent, until they interact in "opposition." It is this "opposition" that stabilizes them in relation to each other. Monism is a true philosophy applicable only before and after the worlds are! It takes both Nux and Lux to make life conscious. And virtue can not be won except as the laurel wreath for victory over vice.

The opening of the eyes in the creation allegory is the dramatic typing of man’s awakening to his first glimpse of self-consciousness. It marks the distinguishing insignium of man’s superior position above the beast. It marks the line of his evolutionary passover. At this point man stepped over the greatest boundary line in all the universe of life. He passed out of the sway of the unconscious mindless energies of nature, the "sub-conscious mind" of cosmic deity, and became, albeit at the lowest level, a sharer with God in his conscious creative intelligence. He stepped across the line from the kingdom of bondage to the natural mindless forces into potential rulership of them. He ceased being the son of Hagar, the bond-woman, and became the son of Sarah, the free-woman. He became, collectively, children of the promise and of the adoption, sons and heirs of the Father. He stepped from bondage under the law to the possible "liberty of the sons of God." Liberty! The animal can not sin; man can. He has this freedom! He may choose--good or evil. But he must face the consequences. These are the terms of his evolutionary education. The good or evil consequences would instruct him. Choose he well or badly, karmic compensation would advise. But his new freedom was his highest prerogative, his badge of incipient divinity. That he was prone, of necessity, to make many bad choices until his karmic education had sobered and enlightened him is indicated from a most significant passage from Plotinus:

"They began to revel in free will; they indulged in their own movement; they took the wrong path. Then it was that they lost the knowledge that they sprang from that divine order. They no longer had a true vision of the Supreme or of themselves. Smitten with longing for the lower, rapt in love of it, they grew to depend upon it; so they broke away as far as they were able."

This tells the whole story of whatever there is intrinsic in the perverted idea of the "fall." It was just the fall of the child learning to walk! It was nothing but the floundering of ignorant innocence before it has grown wise through trial and error. It was inherent in the very conditions of the evolutionary situation. It was more or less inevitable. And its "evil" consequences were to be absorbed in the vicissitudes of later experience, as the follies of youth are ironed out in subsequent larger vision and more steady conduct.

The god brought the possibility of "evil" with him on his arrival. He came to suffer many things, because his coming threw a stable and orderly evolution temporarily into an unstable one. The animal was bound to a fixed order in nature, whose unvarying laws left him no choice, no freedom to deviate. The god came to get practice in the use of freedom to break through this order and win independent creative facility for himself. And he was incidentally to impart to the animal in whose body he lived that part of his new found knowledge that he managed to make habitual, or transferred by the force of repetition over to the sub-conscious, which is the animal’s highest conscious self. For he was, along with his own education, to help the animal bridge the gulf between its kingdom and the human.

But he threw a disturbance into a condition that had previously been equilibrated and stable. He introduced free choice and variant procedure into the hitherto inerrant course of the animal’s behavior. He could break natural routine, initiate new tentative and note the result. A god who could not do evil is a marionette, not a god. There is no merit in compulsory good. Reward must come with victory. Trial and error was to result in knowledge, which therefore could not be its antecedent or concomitant at the start.

Wisdom is a resultant, a deposit, a crystallization of fluid elements. Freedom began with ignorance in order to end in wisdom. Freedom and blunder were means to an end. The smooth harmony of natural law was bound to be thrown, for a time, into discord. This is the meaning behind the rebel angels’ breaking in upon the harmony of the great God’s festival song with raucous shouts, which may be seen possibly as their riotous exultation at the prospect of a new freedom never enjoyed before, like schoolboys let out for a holiday, as Plotinus paints it.

While the god was thus to be buried in the very belly of the great Abtu fish, his immunity from complete drowning and loss of his deific life was provided for. It is hinted at in various typographs. He was to be protected, as Plato says, like an oyster in its shell. He was as the fish in the water, that would be able to breathe even under the water. Again he was shown as learning to walk on the water without sinking into its depths. The Ritual of Egypt speaks of his being immersed in the water of the underworld, but hovering over, the water; or in it as to his body, but aloof from it as to his soul. The latter is especially prominent in the Ritual for the "dead." More than one passage repeats that while "my dead body lies in the grave, my soul is in heaven." "Thy material body liveth in Tattu and in Nif-urtet, and thy soul liveth in heaven each day." "Heaven holdeth thy soul, O Osiris Auf-ankh, and earth holdeth thy form" (Ch. 163). "Thy soul is in heaven, and thy body is under ground" (Ch. 169). "Ra grasps his hands, a spirit in heaven, a body on earth." "Thy water is in heaven; thy solid parts are on the earth." "The Sun-god," writes Massey, "whether as Atum-Iu or Osiris-Ra, is a mummy in Amenta and a soul in heaven."

These passages are of great value. Particularly should the one be noted which says that "thy material body liveth in Tattu" while the soul lives in heaven. This forestalls, the likely argument that these passages refer to the ordinarily deceased person, whose body is in the ground (if not cremated) while his soul has gone to heaven. The deeper meaning here is that man actually inhabits two worlds at once. He is in heaven by virtue of his divine consciousness; he is on earth through his physical body.

All this situation was part of a larger divine plan. The god was to touch the tip of the head or inchoate mental faculty of the animal with the flame of his intellect, but not further embrace the animal’s life. He was to light the wick of intelligence for the lower being. He was to kindle a fire in the body, but not be burned thereby. But it is said that the waywardness of the gods pretty badly marred the progress of the work. As a group they had bound themselves under a covenant to do the work promptly and return. But earth currents overwhelmed them, swept them into forgetfulness, and they truly lost their divine heads and were carried down into sensuous life and sexual procreation. The passage from Plotinus tells why the first essay of Phaëthon to drive the chariot of the Sun resulted in a wild orgy of uncontrolled movement. The seven charges drawing the chariot proved unmanageable for the untested powers of the young god. He gave himself to the delight of a wild revel in the sensual enjoyment of life, and the thrill of adventure tingled through his blood as he indulged his fancy in free creational direction of energies. His drive was outward, and he threw himself into the interests of the lower vehicle. And here lurks the rationale of his changed character from Lucifer to Satan. In drama he was pictured as in part the author of evil when he lent his own superior forces and faculties to the virile energies of the beast. He threw the added power of his own dynamism into the life of animal man. This is the evil aspect of his kindling a fire on earth, or in the sea around the earth. He in fact kindled a fiercer fire under the caldron containing the water of life and the animal ingredients of the lower human constitution, and raised the potentials of all the elemental appetencies. Into the hellish brew went the qualities of the creatures of earth, of the water and of night--the bat, the owl, the toad, the lizard, the newt, the snake; of herbs gathered under the light of waning moon; of every noxious and venomous thing; and under it all burned the fire of the god! Around flitted the three witches, the masquerading earthly forms, feminine and material, of the three divine principles of mind-soul-spirit, the solar triad, poking the fire. And as they revel around the eerie scene, the fire burns and the caldron bubbles, brewing the double toil and trouble for god and man; but all the while the broth is being transformed into its spiritual sublimation, so that it returns to heaven as vapor, in the midst of which the geni can be seen taking form. So the animal ingredients are transformed and lifted up in the burning lake.

In mutual interplay god and animal accentuate each other’s potential energies. In a sense the god makes a worse hell of this nether pit of Tophet, for he plays a part in the degradation of the beast. An excerpt from the Codex Nazareus seems to confirm this delineation:

"He himself will captivate the sons of men by the allurements of cunning delusions and will imbue them with blood and monthly pollution."

Yet both parties find an enhancement of their range and powers of consciousness through the struggle. But traditional figures of the Satanic personage have taken form and clung to popular fancy out of the allegorical depictions of the cosmic scene. The god, plunged into the hell of body, was painted as plying his fierce labor in mingling his higher fire with the lower elementary fury, stoking the furnace with the fuel of his pride, rebellion and lust for sense, and enjoying with the animal the mutual exchange of their polarized forces. Fantasy sets up the portrait--his body reeking with sweat (Cf. the bloody sweat of Gethsemane), his countenance grimy and lurid in the glare of the fire made murky with the commingled smoke, steam, ashes and soot (Sut) arising from his effort to "burn" the damp green material. This is the ancient picture drawn by high poetic fancy to convey the recondite philosophical principles actually involved; and the failure of heavy ignorant zealotry to catch its fanciful import has cost a crass civilization centuries of woe. The Logia speak in no uncertain terms of this tradition:

"There was one who reigned over them all, even the Star of the Morning, which had fallen upon the earth, Lucifer, but they named him Abaddon, for he was the Destroyer."

Here was in fact proud Lucifer, rebel against the too long protracted passivity of life in the higher worlds, come to earth, baptized in the waters of the Jordan River on the boundary between the two kingdoms, kindling a fire in the water itself, throwing his reed or rod into the Nile of earth and turning it into blood, injecting his own fiery energies into the sluggish life of the beast, himself torn and distracted, abased and crucified, disfigured out of all semblance of his divinity. Let us recall here Isaiah’s account: "How was his visage marred, more than any man!" The figure of intoxication used by the mythicists to betoken this phase of the god’s condition is by no means inapt. This was indeed the "riotous living" in which the Prodigal Son spent his substance. And St. Paul helps us understand the depth of degradation into which the innocent souls fell by his statement that the sweep of lower motivation caused them to change "the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator . . ." This is also the story of Ichabod, from whom "the glory" had departed.

With its roots winding deeply into the heart of this theological depiction, there has sprung up the growth of a gigantic excrescence on the psychological life of mankind that has found no explanation, and can find none, outside the purview of the background just presented. Here lies the key to one of the most inexplicable and redoubtable phenomena in the domain of sociology, for which sociological science can provide no material for a formula of understanding,--the sense of shame appertaining to the sexual organs and functions. From instantaneous creation in the noumenal world by projection of thought energies, the god found himself thrust into lowly physical bodies and reduced to the sensuous procedure of sexual progenation. Swooning into the "deep sleep" that attended his descent from the higher planes, he awoke on the plane of earth to find himself forced to procreate physically like the animals. From deep within his most real self sprang that sense of revulsion at the change, the shadow of which has clung to his consciousness in spite of all rationalization or sophistication. The soul sensed its degradation. Ancient scriptures reflected this feeling in their naming the physical body, as the agent of this debasement, "the garment of shame." In the Pistis Sophia Jesus tells Salome, in answer to her question, that his kingdom shall come "when you shall have trampled underfoot the garment of shame" and returned from the divided life of sex to androgyneity.

If the sense of shame was not inherent in the anthropological situation at the beginning, it was developed and strengthened by the wild license or "Harlotry" in which the first groups of the Sons of God indulged with the females of the higher animal species after reaching earth. There seems to have been a long period of sexual miscegenation, the experience of which would have imprinted the reaction of shame lastingly upon the sub-conscious psyche of early humanity. This is perhaps the "evil concupiscence" against which Paul crusades in his Epistles. And it is significant that in a later passage in the first chapter of Romans, in which Paul states that God gave them up to a reprobate mind to do the things "which are not convenient," he adds as their final description that they were "covenant-breakers." We protest that this takes his preachment out of the rank of mere pious homiletics and makes it referable to the racial predicament we are dealing with. Greek philosophy speaks of the violation of "broad oaths fast sealed."

Reverting for a moment to the philosophic analysis of evil, it is highly desirable that the view of Platonic systematism should be gleaned from a few pointed excerpts. Near the end of his two great volumes on the theology of Plato Proclus dilates at length upon the nature of evil in grand fashion. There is not such a thing, he says, as

"unmixed evil or evil itself, or an eternal idea, form and essence of evil; but moral evil is mixed with good, and so far as it is good, it subsists from divinity; but so far as it is evil, it is derived from another cause which is impotent. For evil is nothing else than a greater or less declination, departure, defect and privation from the good itself . . . in the same manner as darkness from (want of) the sun. It is debility and absence of power. And that which is evil to partial natures, is not evil to the universe."

Christian aberrancy from high philosophy can be seen in the erection of evil into a positive, active force and personifying it in a semi-deity.

Evil is only a by-product of the good on its march to full development. Proclus has further enlightenment for us, which should not be missed:

"Evil in souls is a debility of not always and uniformly adhering to better natures and to the good. Hence arises their descent to things subordinate, their oblivion, their malefic inclination to things conversant with body, and their dischord with reason. According to some, matter is that which is primarily evil, and is evil itself, and the debility of souls arises from their lapse into matter."

But we owe to Thomas Taylor a reminder that it is error to impute evil gratuitously to matter:

"This Proclus denies and says that both body and matter originate from deity and that both are the progeny of divinity. He adds . . . that souls sinned before they were thrust into matter; that there are not two principles (matter and deity); and that matter is neither good nor evil, but a thing necessary, and distant in the last degree from the good itself."

Here is balance and sanity, so sorely needed in an age overrun with cults of the "spiritual" raving against the "evil" nature of matter, making it a theological "devil." This declaration should be advanced to prominence in the philosophic treatment of the place and function of matter in evolution and systematic thought. Modern spiritual cultism needs to be enlightened with the assurance that matter is in itself neither good nor evil, but neutral. It has no moral quality in itself, but receives such from the good or evil use made of it, as any mechanical invention. It is to become the implementation of the good, and is therefore vitally necessary, as Proclus declares. Cult diatribes against matter as evil are at last seen to be beyond the mark, and the orthodox hypostasization and personification of evil is discovered to be equally inane.

Whatever seems evil exists indeed for the sake of the good:

"To divinity, therefore, nothing is evil, not even of the things which are called evil. For he uses these also to a good purpose . . . For he [the demiurgus] concealed evil in the use of good." Evil "consists in the privation of symmetry between form and matter."

The last statement is a detail which is doubtless most relevant. The god and the animal being conjoined in one organism, evil arose from the want of harmony between them. This is at the base of those Platonic discussions on harmony and symmetrical allotment of function in the Greek thought. Two widely diverse and in a sense antagonistic elements were thrust into a marriage in one body. A conflict was inevitable. Paul’s war of the flesh against the soul was on. The animal could no longer drift in his course of unintelligent natural instinct; and on his part the god was erratic in his incipient lordship over lower forces. What measure of human wretchedness, instability and recklessness does not flow from these factors operative in the situation?

Hence Lucifer became transformed into Satan. Without his intrusion the animal would have known no evil, no aberrancy, no contravention of cyclic order, with consequent pain and distress. But he would have purchased the continuance of his halcyon blissfulness at the cost of--remaining an animal! He could not step across the gap between beast and sentient man without awakening the knowledge of good and evil. The god stepped into the beast’s own province and brought that disturbing influence that began the harrowing process, for both, of learning through suffering. By the god’s stripes we are healed, and both he and his pupil suffer many an anguish before the healing is effected. Fittingly the Logia are found saying: "The Beast that was, that is, and that is soon to be cast down into the bottomless pit, is the mystery of iniquity by whose power the world hath been made full of sorrow."

The Beast that was chained in prison or cast down into the lake of fire that burned with brimstone is to be found, along with the lake, in the Ritual (Ch. 17). He is called Baba, the eternal devourer, whose dwelling is in the lake of fire, the red lake, the pool of the damned, in the fiery pit of the recess or "bight" of Amenta. It is to be pointed out that this Baba, called "the lord of gore," extracts the hearts and viscera from the corpses doomed to be consumed at his banquet and "eats the livers of the princes." This personation is identical with that of the Beast in Revelation (10) who makes war on the "Logos of God," but is defeated and cast into the lake that blazes with brimstone. The angel invites all the "birds that fly in mid-heaven to gather for the great banquet of God," at which "the flesh of kings" was devoured. In the Promethean myth the bird, vulture or eagle, comes daily to consume the liver of the king of heaven, bound helpless to the rock, or the cross. The bird typifying generally the soul, coming to devour the liver of the god, unquestionably has some reference to the purificatory offices of the spiritual nature in the evolutionary process, though a more subtle knowledge of the function of the liver in vital economy would probably enable us to read further astonishing significance in the symbology. The myth may perhaps simply signify the soul’s periodical visitation to earth to pluck the fruits of the purgative and purificatory experience, by which through bodily suffering evil is transmuted into good, as the liver cleanses impurities of the body.

Paul in Ephesians (2) and elsewhere sets forth the forces in conflict in the arena of the human breast:

"You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you moved as you followed the course of this world . . . when we obeyed the passions of our flesh, carrying the dictates of the flesh and its impulses, when we were objects of God’s anger like the rest of men."

Again this use of the word "anger," often elsewhere "ire" or "wrath," must be carefully delimited in meaning, since it refers to nothing like human vindictiveness, but just the "fire" of deity working its natural efficacy in and upon the elements of the body. "Ire" is "fire" with the Greek diagamma dropped off, and "wrath" is the original fire of creative force.

Paul’s admonition was to "abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul." He speaks of the deadly enmity between the two natures, as does Plato, and pleads with the disciples to strive for the victory of the spiritual man over the carnal. He puts sexual vice at the head of a list of corrupt practices, and sexual continence at the head of a list of virtues.

Through the diversion of dramatic meaning into false channels, the god, then, became regarded as the instigator of all evil in the moral situation. It is noteworthy that in the Jonah legend, the god, asleep in the hold of the storm-tossed vessel, is found, by casting lots, to be responsible for the storm. Two features here deserve elucidation. He was asleep. The god, who should have been awake and alert to control the sweeping urges of sensual thought (water agitated by air, mind, symbolically) was asleep. While he lay inert the storm of air and water raged. He was thus responsible, for he was sent to be the master of these very elements. He waked in time and his destiny demanded that he be thrown into the midst of the waters, to take charge and still them. The storm then quieted.

Next, he lay in the hold. This was called Akar (Agar, Hagar), a region of Amenta. It types the lower self, the lower part of the organism, the natural, carnal man. He had been captivated and his divine genius and memory were narcotized by the oblivion-producing influences of incarnation. He lay in a torpor in the hold of the ship, the belly of the mortal man.

So the god, rendered at first sluggish, beastly, brutalized, became the evil one. And the alteration of character from benefactor to demon, has wrought ghastly mischief in religious machination. Spurred on by the imaginary hypostatization of an Evil Spirit in the world, men have by the very force and contagion of a fixed obsession wrought themselves into the likeness of this malignant demon and dramatized in actual history their conception of his diabolical role. Swept on by the inculcated theory of his presence in personal form in the world, bigots everywhere found in the assumption a ready subterfuge for persecution and cruelty. Since embodiment had to be found for the Evil Spirit, every unacceptable act or idea of one’s brother or one’s enemy could be charged to demoniac possession. Thus there was provided an easy channel for a terrible outpouring of man’s inhumanity to man, and there was let loose an orgy of vicious despotism in religion that has stained the record of Christianity almost past repair. Nothing but philosophical understanding of the real issues involved will clarify the error in religious attitude on this matter. Nothing but the realization that Satan was and is himself the angel of light, our heavenly benefactor, will restore sober sanity to a race rendered next to demonical by an infernal theology.

There is documentary evidence to indicate that this figure was not at first regarded as the evil genius of man at all, but was rated as the Agathodaemon, or Guardian Spirit. On Massey’s authority it may be stated that "the Serpent in Egypt, Chaldea, India, America and Europe is the Good Serpent generally, the Agathodaemon." The Ritual (Ch. 83) affirms that "The Great One shining with his body as a God is Sut." Sut was strictly not the evil one. He was the seven-headed serpent or dragon. And the seven Uraei, or serpent-headed gods, are typical not of death, but of life. Another voice concurs in this estimate.

"Like Satan himself, even as the Rev. Dunbar Heath has shown (The Fallen Angels), the serpent had not, indeed, a wholly evil character among the early Hebrews."1

The same authority (p. 57) goes further:

"Whatever may be the explanation of the fact, it is understood that, notwithstanding the hatred with which he was afterwards regarded, this god Seth, or Set, was at one time highly venerated in Egypt. Bunsen says that up to the thirteenth century before Christ, Set ‘was a great god universally adored throughout Egypt, who confers on the sovereigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties the symbols of life and power.’ He adds: ‘But subsequently, in the course of the twentieth dynasty he is suddenly treated as an evil demon, inasmuch as his effigies and name are obliterated on all the monuments and inscriptions that could be reached.’ Moreover, according to Bunsen, Seth ‘appears gradually among the Semites as the background of their religious consciousness’; and not merely was he ‘the primitive god of Northern Egypt and Palestine,’ but his genealogy as ‘the Seth of Genesis, the father of Enoch (the man), must be considered as originally running parallel with that derived from the Elohim, Adam’s father.’"

This is effective corroboration of the claim advanced herein that the father of intelligent man was the Titanic host, typified by the fiery serpent. Once revered by infant humanity as the bestower of light and life, this collective being later suffered a transformation of imputed character and became thought of as the father of all ill. Some of the dramatic implications worked over into popular belief, and the dramatic character of the Adversary overbore the true understanding of the hidden beneficence of the son of the morning.

The doctrine of hell-fire has drifted from the original connotation far away from intelligible meaning. It must be reduced again to rational sense.

Chemically all life processes are a burning. Oxidation is a slower burning, as in rust. All decomposition is a burning. Disintegration of a composite by operation of a superior potency is a burning. Hence all energic activity among the elements of life is thought of as the work of fire. Man’s whole life, then, is cast in the midst of a veritable welter of fiery forces, and so Egypt described the world as the lake of fire, or again "the crucible of the great house of flame" and "the Pool of the Double Fire." "Higher" fires and "lower" fires, or the rays of cosmic thought and the purely chemical energies embosomed in matter, called by the Egyptians "the seven Uraeus divinities," unite on earth in a combat and interfusion which constitutes indeed "the fiery furnace" of theological myth. The god came here, to transmute both himself and his animal protégé into higher natures. He was to burn out the dross and refine the material of the coarser sheaths, those of "earth" and "water," to make possible the unfoldment to function of the principle of mind. This type of spiritual combustion is all that was originally meant by the purging by fire and the winnowing by air. To purify is to make clean by fire. Burning out, or blowing out, the chaff of the animal compound in us by the divine fire of soul, or the divine afflatus of spirit, was the universal mythical symbol of our divinization. Coming with his fan in his hand "he will thoroughly purge his floor." The floor is the physical base of life. The higher potency will cleanse the lowest. More than once the Egyptian Ritual harps on the soul’s "acquiring dominion over his feet." The rite of feet-washing can be immediately divined as a type of cleansing the lowest nature. Texts in the Ritual state that he who has won control over his feet has done all he needs to do to insure salvation.

Says Isaiah (I:25): "And I will turn my hand upon thee and purely purge away thy dross and take away thy tin." After purging his floor, "he will gather his wheat into the garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable" (Matt., Luke). We are in hell because the lower segment of us needed the burning, and the upper segment the winnowing, or both segments needed both operations, according to the application of the figure.

To be consumed in the lake, or the furnace, of fire, then, is not, as theology has mistaught a harrowed world, to writhe in flames of torment piled by a vengeful god to satiate a thwarted wrath. There are seven-league-boot strides of distance and difference between this insufferable product of a fiendish theology and the august philosophical conception of primal wisdom. The latter is instinct with dignity and truth; the other a frenzy of inhuman weakness goaded by ignorant fear. Some semblance at least of the hidden truth should have been conceived from the fact that even in the distorted rendering, the souls in hell burn, but do not burn up. Their torment, says orthodoxy, is eternal; and the true and sane original meaning of this whole doctrine went awry because "eternal" was substituted in the translation for "aeonial." The stress of anguish of the fiery experience was to last through the aeon or cycle of incarnation. This rendering yields instruction and intelligence; the other mocks the reason.

The souls burn, but are not extirpated. They die, but live on, eventually transfigured. "I died yesterday, but I am alive today," cries the Manes. "In one of the hells the shades (Manes) are seen burning, but they were able to resist the fire, and consequently it is said: ‘The shades live; they have raised their powers.’"

The lower fires burn with smudge and murk; they must be transmuted to pure flame. Fire there will be; its quality is the vital concern. Says Isaiah (9:17):

"For wickedness burneth as a fire. It shall devour the briars and thorns, and shall kindle in the thickets of the forests."

The briars, thorns and thickets are the dense undergrowth of coarse sensualism, which will burn themselves out, by conversion into gentler flames.

In Egypt the goddess Sekhet is made to play the part of the avenger of the wicked with hell fire. She is the fiery energies latent in matter, generating the various forms of burning and purification to which the Kumaras will be subjected. The release of her powers upon the god will search and purge his nature. She is typed by the lioness, material consort and counterpart of Shu, the lion-god, astrologically the hot July sun of the lion sign. Nature’s typology is most striking in this relation. In the incarnation cycle, symboled as well by winter as by night, the fire of soul immersed in earthy and watery body, absorbs, as it were, an excess of the two lower elements. In the inter-life periods, when the soul is out of body, and figuratively in its summer time, the heat of July drives out the water and its earthy admixture in sweat! But life in the empyrean then runs to an excess of fire and heated air, and the soul has to escape from this menace by a retreat again to earth and water--incarnation. Even this intimation has its appropriate and very suggestive summer emblemism; for, as in winter fire and heated air stand as the types of salvation for man from menace of earth and water, in the summer water and earth, and even darkness (shade), offer salvation from the menace of air and fire. The seasonal swing, with all its concomitant conditions, can be taken as an exact duplication of the evolutionary pendulum, which swings the soul from an excess of mind and spirit over to the opposite excess of sense and feeling, and back again. In embodiment the water struggles to quench the fire; in heaven the fire expunges the water. It is an axiom of occult and esoteric study that the world shall be alternately destroyed by fire and water. This has been accepted in a literal way, so that the legend is that the continent of Lemuria some millions of years ago was destroyed by fiery convulsions and the later continent of Atlantis submerged by water. If continents sink both fire and water must of necessity play a part in the development. It is true that living factual history, of men and of universes and planets, does in general carry out the outline of symbolism. Yet it may be suggested that perhaps in this instance it is possible that sheer typology became once more too directly historicized. As Horus and Sut alternately vanquish each other in endless repetition, so fire and water eternally dominate in turn.

As Sekhet is linked with the Lion sign, so Serkh, or Heh, is instructively seen as related to Scorpio. We can see this better through Massey’s studies:

"The serpent-goddess Heh especially represents the element of Fire that was first symbolized by the lightning of the serpent’s sting. But the serpent itself was recognized before the goddess of fire or heat was personified. She is called the ‘Maker of Invisible Existence Apparent.’ But it was the serpent that first revealed and made manifest in pain and death the fiery power that existed invisibly. The fury of the solar fire suggested the fang-sting. The name of the Sirocco, the very breath of fire, identifies itself with Serkh, the (Egyptian) name of the Scorpio, which further shows the hard form of Serf, the blast of burning breath."2

Before dilating upon the Scorpion typology, a moment’s attention must be paid to the remarkable name given to the serpent-goddess of fire: The Maker of Invisible Existence Apparent. The whole program of incarnation is designed to enable incipient divinity to bring out into manifestation all its latent powers. All manifestation is to effect an Epiphany. There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed, as evolution throws out upon the screen of concrete existence the deeper things of God. And the sculpturing tool that molds in matter the forms of archetypal conception is the burning flame of material energy in the veins of substance, guided by intelligence. To impale a cosmic thought in a fixed structure of matter, to imprison it in inert substance, required the deadly sting of the Scorpion-goddess Serkh, which threw the invisible existence into motionless stability in the arms of matter.

The allegorical function of the sign of Scorpio is most impressive. The god in his autumn descent into body to make his hidden existence visible is stung into lethal sleep by the Scorpion-goddess. This is a most striking natural emblem of the swooning noted in connection with the downward march toward body. God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam when he was to be bifurcated into duality in earthly life. The entire progression into flesh involved the soul’s "death," as from a sting of poison. The baser fires of sense, permeating his more ethereal bodies, injected noxious elements into it, rendering it lethal and sluggish. The foreign substances of the lower man poisoned the god. He was stung to death as he descended. This is in keeping with the position of Scorpio in the zodiac, which falls in the October-November date, when the sun likewise is going to death in winter. He comes with power to tread on serpents and scorpions and put all things under his feet; but his victory is not won at the start; it will come at the end. Like Jesus, Job and Samson, he must first come under the power of the adversary. He first becomes the helpless infant attacked by the serpent, the Herut menace; he becomes Sekari, the silent sufferer. The Scorpion sign in the autumn of the year is the intimation of the fatal sting of spirit by the serpent of the lower nature, the asp or Uraeus of Egypt, "a serpent of fire."

The sense is more directly to be apprehended in connection with several myths that represent Isis (nature) as scheming to extract from Ra his mighty secret of wisdom. She arranges to have Ra pass a certain place at which he would be bitten by a snake or scorpion. In the ensuing coma the secret could be wrested from him. This is a mighty glyph of incarnational truth. It is only when the god is bound in oblivion in the lap of matter that he imparts to matter (Isis) the qualities of his mind. She must reduce him and his intellectual fire to inertness so that she may abstract from him his living intellectual essence and impregnate her body with the seed of his mind after his death, which is exactly the substance and gist of another of the great Egyptian myths of the gods. This one has given ignorant Christian scholars and priests paroxysms of affected revulsion against the imputed sacrilege and obscenity of pagan "beliefs." So Serkh, a form of Isis characterized as the Scorpion-goddess, causes the descending god of pure intellect to be struck and paralyzed by the sting of bodily sense.

It is hardly less than astonishing that one can turn to the field of natural phenomena and find there a living duplication of the death of the Christos on the cross of matter. A number of species of insects resort to a stinging of the male by the female, as the result of which the former is thrown into a state of coma, and the mother takes advantage of his helplessness to deposit her eggs in the fleshly portion of his body, so that when they shortly come into larva form they may have his body to feed upon until able to find food elsewhere. Jesus commanded us to eat his body. He was laid in the manger, where the animals eat. The god goes to his death, and from his dying body and shed blood the young generation draws the nutriment that sustains life. Job and Isaiah refer to the sting that poisons the god.

Budge seems to have become so entangled in the dual relevance of the serpent symbol that he gave up the effort to grapple with it in despair:

"In short, the serpent was either a power for good or the incarnation of diabolical cunning and wickedness."3

He did not know it was both. But the matter is complicated and his distress is easily comprehended. There is the dragon of wisdom guarding the tree of knowledge, and there is the Apap monster, the crocodile of the waters. The latter is the "villain" of the play. But there is light in many statements that the serpent of evil is to be transformed into the serpent of good. There is the "lifting up of the serpent," which, however, again may have a twofold interpretation, denoting either the lifting up of the elementary powers (the lower serpent) to a higher condition through transformation; or the lifting up of the fiery serpent of the god-nature, after it has fallen into degradation. When Moses lifted up the brazen serpent on the cross in the wilderness, it can mean either that the Israelites should lift up the fallen god to his fiery purity, or that they should raise up the baser nature to a higher place through linkage with their exalted status. Both meanings at any rate eventually merge into one. For as the higher self had intertwined his nature with that of the lower self, the lifting up of the one must involve the redemption of the other. In the famed caduceus of Mercury the two serpents intertwined around the staff or wand are united at the bottom, because spirit and matter are joined in man’s physical life.

Moses’ raising the serpent is paralleled in Egyptian lore by the saying of the Speaker: "I am raised up to (or as) the serpent of the sun." The influence of the Christly deity lifts up the lower self. Moses stands for man, and Jehovah ordered Moses to build a tabernacle in which he (Jehovah) should be raised up. It may fall with surprise and incredulity upon most readers to be told that the Jehovah character of the creation legend is by no means the Supreme Lord, but merely one of the seven Elohim, or builders of the physical universe. He is one of the seven Uraeus "deities"; another one of the seven bears the name of Oreus, which is a form of Uraeus. So man is to raise up the natural order to the spiritual, and he is to do it in the "tabernacle" which he is engaged in building. This is that body of spiritual radiance which every man is steadily formulating out of the fiery essence of the very matter of his body, as lower fires are transmuted to higher. This transformation is made by man here on the cross of material life. The seven

Uraeus deities, of whom Jehovah was one, were the powers that lay embosomed in matter, the forces that built the physical universe, all below the level of mind. They were the Apap or Hydra monster swimming in the water of the lower Nun; and man had to transmute them into solar fire. Uraeus, the name, evidently derives from Ur, the original creative fire, and aei, meaning in Greek "ever, always." They were the "eternal fires" that forged the various creations. They create life below the level of mind, but must be lifted up to be changed into spiritual intelligences. They begin around the feet of the gods and goddesses, and end on their foreheads. In man physiologically they are brought up from the base of the spine and crown the human development by opening up the latent faculties of divine intelligence locked up in the pineal gland and pituitary body in the head. A line from the Ritual dispels all doubt as to their higher or lower rating and nature. It reads: "The seven Uraeus divinities are my body." They are the fiery formative energies of matter, not of mind. They are the energy in the atom, seven blind forces, which, however, draw the chariot of creation and must therefore be directed by intelligence.

One form of the serpent of the water is the great Hydra monster of the uranograph, Apap or Herut. He swims alongside the ship of Horus crossing the Lake of Putrata, or water of the bodily life, ready to devour any careless sailor who may fall overboard. In the planispheres his elongated body stretches across seven signs of the zodiac, and his head, with open mouth, comes directly under the feet of the Virgin. Her feet are over his head, fulfilling the Biblical promise that her heel should bruise his head. He is the serpent or dragon of many myths.

The manner in which this monster is to be overcome or beaten off is of great interest. The Speaker (Ch. 108) exclaims triumphantly: "I understand the mystical representation of things and by that means I repulse Apap." By "mystical representations of things" is meant something that modern insight does not discern and with which it is not conversant. It indicates the ancient use of spiritual typology, carried to a high degree of subtlety and artistry that engendered dynamic forms of psychological reaction. The cathartic virtue of Greek drama has been fairly well envisaged by students. But the practice of handling symbolic formulae of profound truth was in olden time a high art, used as a means of exalting and purifying the entire life. We note this often in the directions appended to the Ritual chapters as Rubrics. To put it tersely for modern skepticism, symbols can be used aright to exert a positive and salutary magic. Certain potencies in nature are released to play in the individual by the habitual contemplation of truth on the analogy of natural and other images. Much ancient ceremonial in religion was repetition of magical formulae of the sort. In the mind’s grasp of subtle correspondence between physical phenomena and hidden truth there was liberated a psychic dynamism which was cathartic of the whole nature. To repulse Apap, to transform bestial desire into love and brotherhood, demands the skillful handling of subtle forces. Thought, will and feeling must be harmonized in a delicate balance. Theurgic magic and spiritual therapy were closely bound up with "the mystical representations of things."

To prevent the serpent from stinging, to meet this massive brute force of primal instinct and tame it to reason, required that the god-soul should learn to "charm the serpent." The significance of this "charming’ is profound. "These are the gods who charm for Har-Khuti (Horus) in Amenta. They, the masters of their nets, charm those who are in the nets." In the scene portrayed in this chapter of the Ritual men walk before Ra to charm Apap for him. They chant: "O impious Apap, thou art charmed by us through the means of what is in our hands!" The first star in Ophiuchus is called "the head of the Serpent-Charmer."

"Who is Manitou?" an Algonquin chant asks. "He that goeth with the Serpent"--the god who lives with and tames the lower self. The widespread use of such terms as Manitou, Mana and Manna to indicate a spirit power in man and things is indicative of much. The words connote "magical power" as believed to be possessed by every tribal medicine-man. The probability is that the term is of kindred root with the word "man" itself, and Manas (Sanskrit), "mind." For mind constitutes man what he is, and it is the mind principle in man that was sent precisely for the purpose of charming the animal propensities into culture. A "mantram" is a Vedic word for a magical incantation. The god’s action upon the brute self was likened to a charming, and the word "charm" is itself from the stem that gives us "Christ" and "Eucharist" and "charity." For the god to "charm" the beast was to lull the animal nature to docility, the while it lent ear to the sweet strains of a higher melody which transformed it magically.

The great potent serpent-charmer is mind, thought. Man is the thinking magician, rendering impotent the baleful sting of the serpent. The Christos tramples underfoot the serpents and scorpions, whose lethal sting endangers him.

Singular verification of these interpretations is found in the mythical episodes of Orpheus, the Greek hero-god. He is shown seated amidst eight animals (the elementary seven powers, counted as eight with their Lord) playing upon his lyre of seven strings. Massey traces the name Orpheus to the Egyptian Uarp, "the harper." The word is from the root signifying "to delight, charm or be charmed." He enchants the wild beasts and overcomes with the charms of his music all the powers of Hades. Circe’s charming was at once followed by a transformation, but in this case from men into beasts, marking the god in his descent charmed by matter, and it had to be followed by a countertransformation back to men. In most legends of classical mythology in which the solar hero faces the task of rescuing a maiden (the soul) from the cave in which she is guarded by a dragon, he is represented as first lulling the dragon to sleep or charming him by some potent talisman.

Immediately after Jesus said to his disciples that he beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven he subjoined: "Behold I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy." And when the seventy returned with joy from their mission, they exclaimed: "Lord, even the devils are subject unto us in thy name." The power to tread on serpents and scorpions was the power to rule--not necessarily to crush--the elementary nature. They were in Egypt the Sami and the Sebau and the minions of Sut. The latter was assigned the scorpion as the type of evil.

The power to charm a dangerous serpent by silent concentration was so evidently a demonstration of the efficacy of some invisible magic that mind, thought and magic were named after the serpent. It, too, was seen to possess this strange power. And the (higher) serpent became the type of occult control, wisdom, sagacity, for this reason. It even was one of the chief symbols of deity itself. The Greek drakon, "dragon," denotes the keen-eyed seer, as does the Sanskrit Naga, "serpent."

The dual aspect of the serpent symbol is graphed in the heavens in an ancient Egyptian planisphere. The great crocodile (dragon, serpent) appears at the place of the autumn equinox, close to the Scorpion, yet stretches across six signs to the spring equinox. It is the power that reaches from sense to soul. Likewise there is found in the northern sky the (former) pole star Alpha Draconis, and in the southern heavens the star Eta Hydri. On this dual pivot of the dragons the starry skies revolved. As in the uranograph between the two Dragons was run the line of the axis of stability for the planet, so the axis of stability in man’s life is the line of force running between the upper serpent of spiritual wisdom and the lower one of animality. All cosmic stability is fixed upon a line of force playing between the two poles of vital affinity, positive and negative, the two serpent fires. Man exists only because spirit and body were united in one organism and the reciprocal play of currents of force between them sustains his life. The seers of old wrote the signs of this relationship in the skies. There was the serpent of heaven and the snake of earth. And man is the compound of their two energies.

Apap, the water monster, grasps at souls to devour them. The souls on board Horus’ ship exult at having escaped his jaws. Appropriately he is also called the "eater of the heads" of the dead in Amenta. He subverts the intellect of man. But even his nature is finally changed and exalted, and he, along with the seven Uraei, is lifted up. They all become the servants of the god of light in the sun-cults. They at first war in fierce opposition to man as the Seven Adversaries; later they fight for Ra against every manifestation of evil. The Scorpion eventually stings "on behalf of gods and men." Serkh, Scorpion-goddess, becomes the guardian of the sun and keeper of the chained Apap. "I have come," says the Manes, "like the sun through the gates of the Sun-goer, otherwise called the Scorpion." (Rit., Ch. 147.) This puts Scorpio at the place of the autumn equinox, where it was in remote times,--the eagle, one of the four cardinal guardians.

When the seven Uraei were raised to be worn on the foreheads of the gods, that which had been most deadly was transformed into that which was divine. It is said of each serpent emitting jets of fire in Hades, "Its flame is for Ra." The death-darting dragons became the watchers of the gates of heaven and guardians of the tree of knowledge, the three golden apples (mind-soul-spirit) and every treasure of light. The seven elementary powers first described as Wicked Spirits are promoted from that character to become the "Seven Great Spirits in the service of their Lord," and the seven attendants of the solar Ra in Egypt. This transformation is matched in Persia and India. In the planisphere they stand behind the constellation of the Thigh or Meskhen, Ursa Major, in the north. They are called "the Followers of Osiris," who "burn the wicked souls of his enemies," and "the givers of blows for sins." Four of these are Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef and Kabhsenuf, prominent in Egyptian lore as the "Four Chieftains of the Four Corners," and Sons of Horus. They were emblemed by the four Canopic jars at the corners of the mummy-case.

The gist of all this is that the first seven-ply creation was elementary and chaotic, and that the advent of mind in creation in the person of man put these wild forces for the first time under rational control in an organic being. From the status of enemies and opponents, the first principles were tamed to man’s service. As a reward of service they will be lifted up to partake of man’s higher nature. The text (Ch. 85) has the Osirified dead saying: "I pass through substance. I pierce the darkness. Hidden reptile is my name. The soul of my body is a serpent of life." Chapter 87 of the Ritual carries the expressive title "of making the transformation into the serpent Sata." Allusion to the danger encountered by the god in the underworld is found in the "chapter by which a person is not devoured or bitten by the eater of the head, which is a snake."

The frequent early figure of a serpent coiled seven times round the summit of a hill or a cone (seen in the serpent mounds of America) types the fiery energy of life circling the round of the seven cycles in all creations. There was a sevenfold movement in each of the creations, the stellar, the solar or planetary, and the human, both racial and individual. The Beast had seven heads. The Ritual gives: "O the very high hill in Hades! the heavens rest upon it. There is a snake on it, Sati is his name. He is about twenty cubits in his coil." He is also called "the Serpent of Millions of Years," which indicates that he is a type of the cyclic revolutions of life force about the globes. The crocodile-god Sevekh (seven) is said to be on the hill of the Lord of Bata.

The serpent laying its eggs and coiling about them for incubation was the true type of natural gestation, which brought forth fixed cycles of revolving life arising out of the primal chaos. By shape the egg itself is a symbol of revolution. Each seven coils or revolutions of the mother life engender a new creation. The seven non-intelligent powers--monsters, giants, blind adversaries--are the breeding force of a new life that is intelligent. The powers that swirled and swarmed in the abyss of darkness become the nursery of the sun of intellect in the kingdom of man, who is so far the crown of earthly life. The great old giant dragon was simply a type of primordial darkness and chaos. It gave birth to seven powers which fought blindly until they were subdued and synthesized under the last and highest of them, the Christ mind. This great dragon was pictured with its tail in its mouth. The figure betokened the cycle returning into itself or back to source, or the parent life reabsorbing its own products. Kronos, Father Time, in the great myths devoured his own children. The Oriental expects his individual consciousness to be drawn back into the universal Nirvana. The dragon of the original abyss later came to be the dragon of mother earth herself, who swallowed up her children one by one as the grave closed over them. Also she swallowed the sun each evening and the stars as they set.

Sut, as a later representative of evil, became the opponent of the god both in the physical and the moral order. He waged war with the sun-god and was defeated, but never slain. Horus attacked him and fought with him for three days, and though wounded, he escaped with his life. He suffered rout periodically and perpetually, but was not destroyed, or only figuratively so. He lived to fight again. The sun-god cast a spell on him every day and rendered him powerless for evil. He was chained down for the aeon. All this was the natural expression of the moral conflict in man’s soul, as it is of all other conflict, for life subsists in manifestation only by virtue of the pull, tension or struggle between the two nodal forces. Now one, now the other, is conqueror. The original mother of life, represented variously as the crocodile dragon, the hippopotamus, cow, sow, lioness, water-horse and finally woman, "the great harlot," who all meet in Kep, or Kefa (Heva, Chavvak, Eve), "the mother of the living," was the gestator of Sut and Horus, who are born twins! They typify the two aspects of life’s expression, activity and passivity, positive and negative force, light and darkness. The story of life is a story of unending conflict between the two "hostile" powers. The legends paint but a single cycle of growth, but the cycles repeat themselves endlessly. Any cycle is emblematic of every other one, and hence of all movement or all truth. If man knows his own life in its cycle, he knows all. The arcane wisdom exhorted man to know himself.

In Egypt the conflict was first waged between the sun-god Ra and Apap. It was symboled variously by the death and rebirth of sunshine daily and seasonally, by the waxing and waning moon, and by the setting and rising stars. In the realm of spiritual activity it was carried on by Sut and Horus. Astrologically the Dragon in the northern sky was the good serpent of Ra, or Horus, while the elongated Hydra was the evil serpent of Sut or Satan. Lastly the two were depicted as twin brothers fighting over their birthright! Their conflict took place, be it noted, in Amenta, where they fought upon the mount and were constellated as the Twins contending in Gemini. We shall see them as Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau and other pairs.

The Bible offers first the warfare between Cain and Abel, the first two sons of Adam (Atum). Research brings to light the little-known fact that Abel is feminine in gender! This would seem to put Cain in the role of the conqueror of material nature and darkness. Massey states that Abel represents the waning light of evening or autumn, the god descending into incarnation or entering upon his "feminine phase." Cain then would be the one who puts an end to this cycle, and rises to victory in a new birth. Cain may be a type of Khunsu, Egyptian god, son of Atum-Ra, but Khunsu obtains his victory under the typology of the moon’s phases, rather than those of the sun. He is the lunar light, victorious over the dark phase.

In the struggle between Horus and Sut over the succession the two were parted by the intervention of Taht, the moon-god, who assigns each to his domain, the one north, the other south. This marks the bifurcation into spirit and matter, or male and female potency, by the instrumentality of matter, represented by the moon. It is allegorized in the fairy princess stories by the awarding of one half of the father’s kingdom to the hero-rescuer of the king’s daughter who had been captured by the dragon. In the kingdom of man it meant the placing of the god’s intelligence in the upper portion of the body and the animal soul or Sut below the diaphragm, in Jonah’s "belly of death." The significance of Taht’s mediatorship is that the moon is the agency of effecting an intermediate relation between the hidden solar light and the dark power of night, by its reflection of the sun-god’s rays in the darkness. The moon is thus the perfect type of the mediatorial function of that principle in Plato’s philosophy which stands midway between the higher Nous, or spiritual intelligence, and the doxa, or sense mind of the animal self. The bee gets some of its character as type of soul because it is the active agent of marrying the male and female elements of the flower. In Roman religion this principle was the Pontifex or Bridge-builder between the two natures, since it spans the gap between them and makes communication possible. And in human history it grandly types the situation in which, when the soul in body is quite cut off, like the earth at night, from the direct rays of heavenly light, and gropes in darkness, there comes to its aid the principle of Manas, the hidden intellect, to intervene, like the moon that relays light from an unseen source, between man and the god who seems to have deserted him. The moonlight is the symbol of that spiritual light that shines not directly in full power, but refracted through intervening media, into our prison of darkness. Cut off from our full solar light in the darkness of incarnation, we still have the divine light by reflection upon our physical lives. The moonlight is not that true light, but it bears witness to that light.

Beside the pairs of contending brothers, mythology presents the many pairs of the two women, whose representative functions are somewhat more difficult to discern. The solar heroes have ever two mothers, a heavenly and an earthly one. The one conceives the son, the other bears him. "The Two Daughters of the king of the north gave birth to thee, the great ladies of his head." It is added, significantly: "Heaven beareth thee up on thy right side, earth on thy left side." The intent here is to tell us that we are upheld by the opposite action of the positive and negative strands of primal force, the powers of "heaven" and "earth," or, for the individual, mind and body. The two women are elsewhere described as the "Two Goddesses who conceive and do not breed"--until fructified by the germ of mind.

But it is said that Sut opens and Horus closes up the two mothers. There is abstruse meaning hidden under this typing. It seems to use the imagery of opening and closing the womb in impregnation and childbirth. The opening was ascribed to Sut because it signals the coming forth of conscious life into and under his domain, matter. As St. Paul has told us, sin and evil sprang to life when the soul came into incarnation. Sut opened the womb of being and began the phase of manifestation in all the lower realms. Horus, spirit force, led the life of nature back from matter to the noumenal worlds, and thus closed the womb of the universal mother. As the "Bull of his Mother," he impregnated her again and again, closing her womb until the birth. The sons of intelligence must reproduce through union with natural and material forms in each generation. Matter, the mother of life, is the Great Harlot, ever fecund, yielding her bosom to spirit to embody its forms. Horus closes the womb with fertile seed; Sut opens it again to let the new birth escape into darkness and death. If this is not the sense of the typology, it hides something else profound indeed.

The two brothers were typed by white and black birds, respectively. The golden hawk pictured Horus, the black vulture Sut. Eagle and crow, dove and raven, hawk and blackbird, pigeon and bandicoot are often paired. The stars Sothis (Sirius) and Canopus likewise carry the characters in the sky. In India Krishna and Bala-Rama do the impersonation. Krishna asks the other: "Do you know that you and I are alike the origin of the world?" Krishna came from the black hair of Vishnu and Bala-Rama from the white. Krishna comes (Massey) from a word meaning "waning moon"; Bala means virile male force. There are the two brothers in the Babylonian books, the one ousting the other each night. It is the younger of the twins that always slays the dragon with seven heads, rescuing the soul. Ultimately he marries the princess, which is to say that the two natures merge into one; and he inherits half the paternal kingdom.

On one occasion when Horus and Sut were battling, Sut cast filth in the face of Horus and blinded him; Horus retaliated by tearing away Sut’s genitals. If incarnation entails the god’s being blinded by having the "mire" of earth cast in his face, he at least wins the use of the procreative powers of matter for the time. His release finally from the dominance of carnal instincts and his graduation from sexual generation back to spiritual creation would be the general significance of his circumcision.

In the resurrection of the dismembered Osiris, "Horus, who loves him, brings him his Eye; Set, who loves him, brings him his testicles, and Thoth, who loves him, brings him his arm and shoulder." Set (Sut) is here painted in friendly colors. So in another text: "Nut gives thee to be a god unto Set in thy name of God. . . . Horus seizes Set, he places him under thee; Set bears thee up, he is beneath thee as earth is beneath thee. Rule thou him, therefore, in thy name of Ta-tcheser.

Horus makes thee to grasp Set by his middle; he shall not get out of thy hand." Here is evidence that the elementary powers were to be taken in hand by the god and utilized in support of his life. The subordination of the beast under divine faculty is surely indicated in this material. The eye definitely identifies Horus as the deity of spiritual vision, the testicles relate Sut to the realm of generation, or flesh.

Sut is definitely made the upholder and servant of Horus in some passages. "Hail, Osiris (deceased), wake up! Horus hath made Thoth to bring thine enemy to thee. He places thee on his back; he cannot throw thee off. Thou makest thy seat upon him. Come forth, sit upon him, he escapes not from thy hand. Hail, be thou master of him."

"He sets thee on thy throne; Horus makes thine enemy to bow beneath thee. When he would have union with thee, thou escapest his member."

Here is further and unquestioned confirmation of the claim that the seven lower powers are later drawn into the service of the soul. The god was to "put all things under his feet," to have dominion over the beast, bird and fish of the worlds lying below his plane. The allusion to escaping Sut’s member bent on intercourse would dramatize the idea of the soul’s escape from being drawn into defilement and pollution by full immersion in the animal nature on its low plane.

Roman classicism presents the fable of Romulus and Remus, and again one kills the other. A common early tradition in the world is the founding of a city by a fratricide.

A Greek version of the twins is seen in Eros, Love, and Ant-Eros, the latter being the opposing phase. He avenged unrequited love and contended with Cupid (Eros).

The natural man and the spiritual son were charactered most peculiarly by another set of symbols. The former became the uncouth "lad from the country," au naturel, and the latter the "gilded youth from the town." Grotesque as this may seem, it attests the invincible studiousness of the ancients for suggestive symbols borrowed from nature and life. A companion pair was the King in the city and the Chief in the bush.

Astrally the twins are given places in opposite quarters of the sky, as gods of the north and south. Then they are distinguished as the setting and rising sun, waning and waxing moon. Sometimes the character of Sut is assigned to a double of Horus, who is the ugly old man, fading in his dotage, or the crippled deity, or the immature and impubescent child. He is being worsted and supplanted by the young solar Horus, born anew and come to pubescence (type of the rebirth of his lost power) at the age of twelve, when his wisdom confounds the old men and he leaves his mother. This second and virile character is also taken by Jesus, as the Christ of the catacombs, the "blooming boy" Bacchus of the Greek Mysteries, the youthful Mithras of the Persians, and the fair Apollo of Greece. Also there was an elder and a younger Horus, the one born to suffer and die ignominiously, the other to rise crowned with light. So the Hindu Prajapati was one-half mortal, the other half immortal, and in his mortal life he feared death. There was a double Horus, a biune Bacchus, a two-faced Janus and the two-sided Jesus, the little mummied child and suffering servant, as well as the risen and glorified Lord.

A very important facet of the myth of the Two Brothers is to be envisaged through the story of another pair of twins, Jacob and Esau. They struggle for supremacy in the mother’s womb. In the womb of the abyss of matter the two forces struggle before they come to manifestation. We have seen that hair, as in Samson’s case, stands as the type of solar radiance or power. Esau is the "red, hairy one." Jacob (Egyptian Hak, Hakh, or Hakekh) is the dark twin. When Rebecca found that "twins were struggling in her womb," she was terrified and consulted the Eternal. She was told:

"In your limbs lie nations twain,

rival races from their birth;

one the mastery shall gain,

the younger o’er the elder reign."

Esau emerged first and Jacob came out grasping the other’s heel. Much the same story comes to light in the delivery of the twins of Tamar, who had been impregnated by Judah, her father-in-law. During labor a hand appeared, and the midwife tied a red thread around it. But the hand drew back and the other babe was born first. The first-born was Perez (Breach: his untimely birth a breach of order). The brother’s name was Zerah (Scarlet).

It is, however, in a well-preserved tradition of the Rabbins that we find the pointed significance of the Jacob and Esau birth. The grasping of Esau’s heel by Jacob can not be seen in its full import without completing the story by means of the tradition. It says that on Esau’s heel there was the likeness of a serpent! Again we have the heel of the god treading the head of the serpent and being marked with its imprint. If the two natures, one higher, one below it, are conjoined in man, obviously the foot, or heel, of the upper man will be just over the head of the lower, and vice versa. And at the point where the two contact there would be localized the whole friction and alternate bruising between them. The god would trample on and eventually crush out the nature, the head, of the brute elementary forces; but he would not come off unscathed. He would bear the mark of the beast on his heel. Esau is thus identified as the higher or spiritual twin.

The vulnerability of the gods in one point, the heel, was not confined to Hebrew literature. Osiris was wounded in the feet and had to recover the use of them. The classical example of Achilles, whose mother Metis held him by the heel while she dipped him in the waters of the Styx, leaving him vulnerable in the heel which was untouched by the water, occurs to every mind. The mother, nature, holds the god in her realm with her grasp only on his lowest part, the heel. If he is stung, it must be there. We are dipped in the river Styx of this life to render us invulnerable to further attack.

The serpent fulfilled his prophesied mission of enmity against the woman’s seed, the Christ nature in man. He pursued the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and with twelve stars in her diadem, down to earth and went away to make war with her offspring on the border of the sea that encompassed the earth. The divine sun pours its rays upon the soul and "clothes it with light as with a garment." The moon is the generator of the forces that constitute the nature below, and so the moon is under her feet. And the topmost output of the whole cycle will be the twelve shining powers of intellectual light that man is to evolve. Every impact of the carnal nature of man against the rule of pure intellect in his mundane life is a skirmish in the serpent’s warfare against the soul. The war in heaven was transferred to earth and is still going on. It is the Battle of Armageddon. The two wings of a great eagle that were given the woman to transport her to a place prepared by God, where she should be nourished for three and a half cycles, until the time of her delivery of the Christ child, very probably refers to the sign of Scorpio, coming in the late autumn, the time of the soul’s descent. For the Scorpion was in its higher of two aspects the eagle, and it is still taken in that character by astrologers. The waterflood poured out by the Dragon to overwhelm her evidently types the release of the strong sweep of karmic and evolutionary forces which drives about one-third of the "stars of heaven" into incarnation. But earth helped the woman and swallowed up this flood. This is our assurance that mundane life is beneficent. The hard experience on earth tamed and subdued the wild energies of elementary nature and became indeed a place of refuge and safety. And here in the crypt of earth, the "bight of Amenta," mother nature brings up her Man-child.

But finally at the judgment, which is held on the highest mount of resurrection glory, the great old Mother and her seven earth-born spirits are judged, rejected and cast down out of heaven. Apt, as the primordial mother of life, is succeeded by Hathor, and the Sevekh dragon by Horus. What this sheaf of events seems to imply is that the powers that had at first functioned cosmically, came in the course of aeons to operate in the building of physical man, a miniature replica of the cosmos, and when finally converted to a higher level, received a new name and nature. The harshness of the details of being judged and cast out is purely a dramatic blind to cover the fine meaning astutely. Deity works out of its system in the fires of earth life the debilitating and paralyzing effect of its initial poisoning by the seven influences of Seb. The text of Revelation says that "fire descended from heaven and consumed them"; but consumption must be read as conversion into natures of finer purity. The Christ then moves out of the control of his mother nature and seeks the things of his father, spirit, at the perfection of his twelve facets of intelligence.

It is of the utmost significance that the new heaven and new earth, in which the tree of life was to bear twelve fruits upon its branches, was to be formed according to "the measure of a man." Man means "thinker," fundamentally; and so thought, intelligent mind, was to rule the new dispensation. It would establish life finally in its spiritual kingdom of twelve divisions, superseding the natural order which was founded on a basis of seven divisions. The mother’s number, seven, was to be supplanted by the father’s number, twelve. Man was to go on to evolve his twelve divine faculties. The twelve signs of the zodiac depict the twelve segments of the nature of man when all have been perfected. No ancient religion can be understood without reference to them. The coming of the twelvefold spiritual hierarchy ended the reign of the seven elementary powers, from bondage to which Paul says we must be freed. The Dragon of seven heads is overthrown, and on the head of the Woman, saved by earth experience, is placed the diadem of divinized humanity, studded with twelve stars, or spiritual fires.

The statement in Revelation is that the fifth angel poured out his bowl upon the throne of the Beast in his kingdom of darkness, overthrowing the reign of that power which had filled many with sore disease and made them cry out against the Most High. Occult books reveal that we are now in the fifth race of the fourth round of life energy on this globe, and are developing the fifth principle, Manas, the intellect. The reasoning mind, then, is destined to put an end to the reign of bestiality.

When the seven angels had poured out upon the earth the fires of "the seven bowls of the judgment of him that lives for ever," it is said that the temple (St. Paul assures us that the temple is the body) became filled with the smoke from the seven bowls, so that the power and the glory of God could no more be seen, nor could anyone enter the temple again until the seven angels had poured out the fires of judgment upon the earth. This is clearly an occult reference to what we have described as the smudge, smoke, vapors, soot and murk arising when the powers of god and beast first mingled in the body. It may also cover the unnatural intermixture and miscegenation of god-men and animals that seems to have been a fact of history. The "temple" had of course to be purified before the true Ego of the individual could enter and rule. Hence the whole earthly experience is the purgation, beyond question.

Matching the splendid imagery of Revelation, the Ritual of Egypt presents "the woman clothed with the sun," who says: "I am the Woman, an orb of light in the darkness; I have brought my orb to the darkness; it is changed into light. I overthrow the extinguishers of flame. I have stood. The fiends have hidden their faces." The seven elements were the powers of material darkness; the Christ power was that of light. The unevolved soul goes into darkness to become irradiated with light. The lower passions would extinguish the flames of deity and must be overthrown. They are the fiends, the minions of Sut and Satan, who turn and flee as the light of virtue shines forth, like the host of Midianites when Gideon’s three hundred broke their clay pitchers and revealed the lights hidden within.

In the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, when the boy had been bitten by the serpent, the Lord Jesus says to his playmates, "Boys, let us go and kill the serpent." He proves his power over the reptile by making it suck the venom from the wound. Earthly and Satanic influences poison the descending soul; yet experience in overcoming their power in the milling grind of life extracts the poison in the end. "God sends down to death; he also lifts up," says the New Testament. In the same Gospel it is related that a damsel was afflicted by Satan, the cursed one, in the form of a huge dragon which from time to time appeared to her and prepared to swallow her up. He also sucked out all her blood, so that she remained like a corpse. She is cured by a strip of clothing from a garment worn by the child Jesus (Ch. 33). This is obviously another form of the story of the woman with an issue of blood who touches the fringe of Jesus’s garment. In the Gnostic version it is Sophia who suffers from an issue of blood, and is sustained by Horus when her life is flowing away. The Christ principle fecundates Nature and closes her unfruitful womb to make her give birth to the glory of an intellectual delivery.

As Joseph takes charge of the virgin mother and the infant fleeing to Egypt for safety, so in the Egyptian mythos the earth-god Seb becomes the protector of Isis and the foster-father of the child Horus when they are forced to hide in the marshes till the threat of Herut is passed. And as "the earth helped the Woman" in the Revelation version, so Seb, the earth deity, helped the woman and child in Egypt. The dragons issue from a cave on the roadside, but Jesus appears, according to the Gnostic story, and they adore him. So the demons cringe before him in the New Testament. In the Ritual Horus saves his father from the four crocodiles. "I am the Son," he says, "who saves the great one from the four crocodiles." He orders them to go back one by one and they obey him. For Ra has given him sovereignty over Lower Egypt, with power to tread down serpents, scorpions and dragons. But there is much hidden value in the legend that the serpent stings the child on its way into "Egypt," and that the earth-god heals the wound. It is a mighty item of philosophy, this assurance that mundane experience for the god-soul is the only antidote for certain imperfections inhering even in celestial beings. It is evolution’s cure for lack of development, the prime cause of all that is named evil. The god needed further tempering and purification in "the crucible of the great house of flame" of flesh and sense. He was carried far down toward dissolution in the fiery test, but was re-welded into finer temper by the ordeals of earth, water, air and fire, and rebuilt to more perfect wholeness. The goose portrayed on the head of Seb in an Egyptian planisphere (according to Kircher) types the earth as "the goose that laid the golden egg daily." If this be but a poetograph for the new-born daily sun of golden light, that sun in turn is the everlasting symbol of the rise of a golden egg of new divinity from out the confines of earth or the "sea." The god is the divine egg laid in humanity, for he is the heavenly foetus in the womb of the body. As he is destined to burgeon out, like the flower, into a burst of golden glory, it is by no means mere poetic fiction to call him the golden egg. And earth lays this golden nugget. The earth being our common mother, we have before us the Egyptian source of "Mother Goose," and the mysterious sagacity concealed in her catchy jingles.

The Goliath story is but an embellishing of the original glyph of a dragon in its conflict with the young deity in man. A dragon is always exchangeable with a giant. The fabled giants and those mentioned in the sixth chapter of Genesis, the Nephilim (the "fallen ones," by etymology) were early beings produced by the intermixture of the Titans with the largest animals in the miscegenation, and are therefore the most literal or historical embodiments of the dragon-monster idea, and they were the prototypes of the ogres of children’s books. Egypt shows us fables, more than one, in which the giant-ogre was killed by the blow of a small egg (of the pigeon, dove or other bird) in the middle of the forehead. The significance of slaying the beast or dragon of mental darkness by sinking the symbol of incipient mind and light into its forehead should need little elaboration. The elemental giant or ogre in us is killed when the egg or pebble of intellect (the white stone of Revelation) is implanted in the citadel of reason. The egg or pebble can undoubtedly be taken to stand for the pineal gland in the middle of the skull, the opening of which to function brings the full light of deific consciousness into manifestation, and slays the giant or ogre. The germ of mind, reason, intellect will charm and "kill" the Goliath in us. David is proven to be another figure of the solar god.

Horus too, pierces the Apap-dragon in the eye with his lance and pins him to earth. The lance was a figure for the sun-ray tipped with red flame for effective piercing power. The tree we have seen used as the paramount symbol of living force, and the Christmas tree tipped with the blazing star, or the main stem of the pine made red hot at the top, was an instrument in the hands of the sun-heroes. There is outside of Egyptian sources a most famous instance of the occurrence of this emblem. Ulysses bores out the single eye of the massive Cyclopean giant Polyphemus with a great pine stake fired at the tip. And this operation takes place in a cave, which had become the prison of death for the hero and his men--the underworld. The solar hero wounds the giant of darkness by the injection of fire into his head! And fire signifies intellect. Horus at one time fights Sut with the branch of a palm. This weapon matches the golden bough and is a particularly pertinent solar symbol, being a product of torrid lands, and also, according to Massey, putting forth a new branch on its trunk every thirty days, thirty being the number of days in a solar, twenty-eight in a lunar, month.

These seven mighty engines of creative force, presumably the seven great spirits before the throne of God, were indeed the seven creative Logoi, Elohim, Kabiri, Ali, Baalim, Rishis, Cosmocratores, Sephiroth, Aeons. Enoch gives their names: Azazzel, Amazarak, Armers, Barkayel, Akabeel, Tamiel and Asaradel. In the ancient Hebrew version they are: Ildabaoth, Jehovah, Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloeus, Oreus and Astanphaios. Again in Chaldean they are: Bel, Ea, Rimmon, Nebo, Marduk, Nerra and Ninib. They were typified by the seven stars of the Great Bear. By some they are taken to be the powers that ruled the seven successive pole stars, which fixed the earth’s axial position from age to age. For in one rendering of the mythos the seven giants bore the world of the heptanomis, or cosmos of seven divisions, upon their backs, each standing at his station as one of the seven great guardians of stability. It is said that when the Demiurgus asked their help in the work of creation, they meditated and forgot. They slumbered and fell from their posts one by one. The seven sleepers of the myth, and those specifically in the cave at Ephesus, with their dog, answer to the seven sleepers with Anup and his jackal at the pole in the Egyptian portrayal.

In its human application the myth is reflected in the seven elementaries, which, being the original founders of man’s constitution, fell from their status as rulers of his life when the crowning principle of conscious intelligence placed mind on the throne and superseded the reign of the seven. The seven giants that have been "slain" by the young solar power, Jack the Giant Killer, were subdued, like wild horses, until they bore the spiritual ruler on their backs. All domestication of wild animals to serve man is a type of the conversion of natural energies in man’s constitution to the service of his thought. They are the "seven devils" that had to be cast out of Mary Magdalene (type of the mother or nature again), the seven plagues of Egypt, the seven lean kine that ate the fat kine, the seven lean years, the seven ages of servitude. They were previously our pole stars, but are to be displaced now and cast down by intellect, which should be our pole star or rod of stability henceforth. In their human phase they are the earth elementals under whose dominion Paul asserts that we fall when we woo the carnal mind. They govern the life of every child until the age of seven, when mind begins to dispossess them and move toward the throne. And again they are the seven diabolical propensities, the seven deadly sins, which, only too thinly covered over by a veneer of social restraint, gush up now and again in the individual, in the nation, in the world, when vital forces sweep upon them and fan them into expression. Apap is being bound, but he is yet far from being securely tied by the thongs of reason and disciplined mind.

In the Kabalah the seven, or first hebdomad, headed by Ildabaoth, say: "Come, let us make man after our image"; and the mother having furnished them with the idea of a man, they formed a giant of immense size. But he could only crawl along the ground until the Father had breathed into him the breath of life, emblem of mentality. From Ildabaoth’s sentence in the Kabalah it can be seen who it is in the Genesis story that propose to make man after their image--not at all Supreme Deity, but the seven lower archangels, one of whom was Jehovah. But Jehovah is used in the Bible myth to represent the entire seven, as are also Sabaoth and Adonai at times.

And in the Divine Pymander of Hermes one reads: "This is the mystery that to this day is hidden and kept secret; for nature being mingled with man brought forth a wonder most wonderful." There are accounts of previous creations of worlds or systems that fell because they were imperfect. Perfection awaited the generation of man, the advent of the Christos. The septenary creation was the formation, principle by principle, of the natural man in the image of the seven Kabiri, Elohim, who could endow their creature with the six (often called seven) elementary constituents, culminating in sensation and emotion, but could not give him the baptism of air and fire, or mind and soul. The twelve-part division came when the pole star passed from Lyra into Hercules, the sign of the Man, whose twelve labors are the achievement of twelve distinct stages of evolutionary development. The music of the spheres ceased--for the time--with the conquest of the seven; and the introduction of free will, coupled at first with primal ignorance, brought the beginning of the world’s woe, man’s slow attainment of mastery by the sweat of his brow, in a milieu of disorder, misery and struggle, typed by the twelve labors of the solar figure. The struggle of man, the thinker, with the seven maternal forces which he has to surmount is the great Battle of Armageddon, which Paul and Plato make the supreme moral issue of mundane life.

The Druid and other ancient temples were formed of twelve stones set in a circle or oval. A most striking repetition of this duodecal symbol is found when Joshua (Jesus) in crossing the Jordan into the kingdom of peace and plenty is commanded to set up twelve stones in the bed of the river, the waters being dried up. Also it is seen in the Gilgal circle which became the lodging place of the Israelites. The "chosen people" were to be given a Promised Land abounding in milk and honey; but it was already occupied by the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites and Girgashites, the primal seven powers! The Lord kept promising Israel that he would dispossess these seven tribes of the land on behalf of his nation of twelve tribes. Old Testament narrative leaves little question as to the mythical nature of this whole story. For it is told later on with what inhuman ruthlessness the Eternal, in campaign after campaign under Joshua, Gideon, Jephthah and other leaders, slew "multitudes in number as the sands of the seashore" on single days. The only salvation of sense and sanity for the narrative is to transfer its meaning from outer history to inner relevance, where it properly belongs. Then one can absolve the Eternal from unthinkable cruelty, in understanding that the solar ray within us, after crossing the boundary between the two kingdoms of our nature, before it can institute its twelve-act regime, must dispossess (by conversion of nature) the countless myriads of natural instincts, animal impulses, carnal desires that previously operated there--the progeny of the seven mother powers.

Seven blasts upon the ram’s horn on the seventh day brought the fall of Jericho (seven letters in the name); and seven blasts upon the seven angel’s trumpets in Revelation announced the new heaven and new earth, founded upon the twelve bases in man’s constitution.

Sut, the head of the seven first powers, is said to be bound in chains each morning. "Chains are flung upon thee by the scorpion-goddess and slaughter is dealt out to thee by Maati [Judgment]. Apap is fallen and is in bonds" (Ch. 39). This daily drama was enacted yearly as well. Sut is put in chains, cast into prison, or made to flee with a chain of steel upon him (Ch. 20). Or he is pierced with hooks. Horus is described as "putting an end to the opposition of Sut, the power of darkness" (Ch. 137B). Sut and his minions, the Sebau, are declared to have thrown down the pillars of Osiris on the ground. Horus, the young solar god, came to set them upright. Sut was the master of the legions of devils that Jesus (Horus) had to cast out of the man whom they had obsessed on the Gadarene lake shore in the Gospels. Could anything be more significant than that the dispossessed demons should be made to come out of the man beside a body of water and enter animals? And there is the further detail that the herd ran down the "steep into the lake and were choked" (Luke 8:33). The demoniacal powers could not be permitted to rule man; their activity appertained only to the animal kingdom, to which the Christ relegates them in the watery milieu of the body. Was this incident original in Gospel literature? In the Egyptian judgment scene, when the person whose life record marked him as evil was condemned and rejected, he was delivered over immediately to the Typhonian beast, crocodile-hippopotamus-pig all in one. And he was, as thus indicated, sent down again into incarnation in the body of the beast! In short, he was not released, but thrust back into animal body for more experience.

Matching the temptation scene in the Gospels, Sut is said to have seized Horus in the desert of Amenta and carried him to the top of the Mount called Hetep, the place of peace, where the two contending powers were reconciled by Shu or Taht, according to the treaty made by Seb.

In the Gospel of the Infancy there are two boys, the bad one and the good one. In some of the Apocryphal Gospels the bad boy, who in Pseudo-Matthew (29) is called the Son of Satan, runs at Jesus and thrusts him in a way to injure his shoulder and paralyze his arm. The Gospel of Thomas recites the incident. In the Egyptian material Sut has weakened Horus by pinning down his arm, and in this condition Horus is subject to his assailant’s might. But at the resurrection Horus frees his arm and strikes down Sut or stabs him to the heart. Sut was designated "the eater of the arm."

Sut thus has a manifold function to fulfill in the typology. He is a versatile adversary. He puts out Horus’ eye; he seizes and imprisons him; he ties his arm; he sows the tares amid the grain; he lets loose the locusts and other plagues; he entraps Horus and his company in the ark; he swallows the falling stars and devours the damned (those condemned to earth life). He represents opposition to Horus, the good light, at every point and in every form. So Horus comes to put an end to this opposition. In victory he says to his father Osiris: "I have brought thee the associates of Sut in chains."

When Jesus was seized in the Garden of Gethsemane he acknowledges the (temporary) triumph of the enemy: "This is your hour," he says to his captors, "and the power of darkness" (Luke 22:53). In the seizure of Horus by the associates of Sut, they see the double crown on the forehead of Horus and fall to the ground upon their faces (Rit., Ch. 134). The magical efficacy of the double crown of Horus lay in the fact that it signified the god’s control over both Lower and Upper "Egypt." When Judas and his associates came to take Jesus he said: "I am" (not "I am he"--Massey). Then "they went backward and fell to the ground." Scene for scene the two are the same.

The seven stars of the Lesser Bear were figured as the followers or reflections of the greater creation, the second creation in the likeness of the first, or the small creation in the image of the cosmic one. The microcosm was formed over the grand lines of the macrocosm. In the center of the great Denderah zodiac there is the hippopotamus (identical with the Bear) and her dog, fox or jackal. The two are Typhon-Sut, or the mother and her child at the center of all. This is nature’s ancient stellar picture of the Madonna and her child before it was reduced to the human phase. The dog, fox and jackal, with their instinctive faculty of following a trail in the dark, were limned as the guide of souls in the darkness of incarnation; and the little bear, dog or fox whose pivotal star was the pole itself, thus became the "cynosure" ("dog’s tail") for night-bound mariners in a literal sense, the spiritual meaning being evident to all who are not obtuse. The guide or watchdog was double-headed, a watcher by day and by night, or guardian of the two segments of our life, the heavenly and the earthly. The great stellar universe served as the model for the formation of the smaller, though higher, universe in man’s life, for the great first gods of nature said they would create man "in their own image." The Great and Little Bears type these two creations. And the Little Bear, symbolizing man’s divine part, is the only one anchored fast to the very pole of heaven, the pledge of eternal stability. Truly "the heavens are telling."

Strangely and with amazing fidelity, in spite of intervening centuries of ignorance, social custom preserves the original form, if not the meaning, of symbolic festivals. Horus or Iusa (Jesus) in the "house of a thousand years" was the bringer of the millennium. Sut or Satan was released for a little period, seven days at most ("days" meaning cycles), and the commemoration of this cyclic event was fixed in the world-wide carnival which indicates by its name its derivation from Satan--the Saturnalia. Saturn, the chief of the primary seven powers, was identical with Sevekh, Seb, Set, Sut or Satan. He was, as in Job, Genesis and elsewhere, released for the seven periods of a cycle, during which Horus had to do combat with him. Then he was bound for a thousand years, the millennium of peace. It is instructive to see in the Saturnalia, with its license, the far-flung prolongation of the ancient idea of the release from bondage of the elementary powers, both in and out of human nature. The elemental forces, or Saturn or Satan, are unbound when the god comes into incarnation, and, as Paul shows, they bring sin to birth. In astrology Saturn is the power that limits or constricts the native. Horus and Sut alternately bind each other and as often escape the bondage. The lower instincts are given rein to test the god and develop his fiber when he comes to fight them. They do not succumb without a battle. And here at last is the end of the mystification for orthodox Bible students of the disconcerting riddle, as to why God gave Satan free hand to tease and harry a godly man like Job. Thousands in ancient Roman streets, gay throngs in Paris, Naples and New Orleans once a year commemorate the freedom of the elemental nature to play upon the spiritual, by the temporary relaxation of conventional bonds and the venting of sexual suggestiveness.

Horus wounded Apap so severely that he sank in the depths of the sea, and his defeat took place, according to Maspero, Birch and Chabas, at the very moment of the beginning of the new year. In the solar mythos this point of time betokened the end of the dark powers’ reign and the beginning of the new dispensation. The constellation Corvus, the Crow, reveals the bird (the soul), perched on the body of the dead monster, pecking at its folds, sign of victory.

But while Apap lives, he subsists on "the slaughter of the glorious ones, the gods and the damned in the nether world." He feeds upon those gods who became enamored and infatuated with his clammy seductions, and thus supply him with food and fuel to keep alive his natural hunger. He feeds upon the livers of the princes. The degenerate gods become the damned, on whom the monster lives. The Manes, personating Horus, addresses Apap:

"I see the way toward thee. I gather myself together. I am the man who put a veil upon thy head without being injured. I am the great magician. Thine eyes have been given me and through them I am glorified . . . I am he who takes possession of thy strength. I go round the sky; thou are in the valley, as was ordered to thee before."

Here speaks the conqueror, the solar fire, reciting that he has grappled with the elementary serpent, subdued him without being injured in turn, and yet, be it noted, converted his opponent’s elemental strength to his own high purposes. "I have repulsed Apap and healed the wounds he made."

As hinted, the far-famed but generally misconceived Battle of Armageddon, supposed ignorantly to refer to some catastrophic world conflict, is this spiritual warfare between the two opposing parties in the great drama of life. With reference to man’s life, it is the warfare waged between the spiritual and the material energies on the stage of human consciousness. We are fighting the Battle of Armageddon now. The conscious life of every soul is the battle ground, and individual moral character is the issue. The terrain of this conflict is man’s own psycho-physical organism. Misguided Christian interpretation has re- moved the meaning of every representation as far from the life of the individual as it was possible to take it. The Battle of Armageddon is the Battle of Incarnation. We are deciding its issue by every act of present living. A likely derivation of the world traces it from the Egyptian title of Horus as Lord of the Two Horizons, Har-Makhu; to which the Hebrews or Greeks added the Hebrew word for "Lord," Adon; making it Har-Makhu-Adon, or "Lord God of the Two Horizons." And the Ritual gives a significant detail in connection with the battle between Horus (Har-Makhu) and the hosts of Sut. It is fought at midnight (incarnation) and on the horizon! This assuredly clinches its purely symbolical character.

The Sebau or Sami were just "the imps of Satan"--really the word Seb pluralized. They are Paul’s "elementals of the earth" and those "that by nature are no gods" (Galatians: 4). In the legend they were finally defeated on the night of the judgment, when the last adversaries were overthrown. Horus, Un-Nefer, is to triumph over Apap in the presence of Osiris, Lord of Amenta, and of the great sovereign chiefs who are in Annu, on the night of the battle with and overthrow of the Seba-fiend (Seba equals seven).

Horus, the new-born divine child, is immune to serious injury from the evil Apap. "Not men or gods, the glorious ones or the damned, not generations past, present or to come, can inflict an injury on him who cometh forth and proceedeth as the eternal child, the everlasting one" (Rit., Ch. 42). He tells the serpent, here called Abur, that he is the divine babe, the mighty one. One of the representations shows Horus as a cat, cutting off the serpent’s head with a knife. The god is a cat because he can see in the dark and his eyes shine in the dark--of incarnation.

Apophis, like Sut, was not originally evil. He was formerly the divine messenger, the earliest Mercury, the character afterwards assigned to the moon-god Taht. He was termed "The Good One, the Star of the Two Worlds."

One of the water forms of the Dragon was Leviathan. In the Psalms (74) the soul is addressed: "Thou breakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces; thou gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness." This appears to be a reference to the Good Dragon, the gods descending to be food for "the people" in this "wilderness." The breaking in pieces seems a clear allusion to the dismemberment.

This treatment of the entire theme of the Titans, Prometheus, Lucifer, Satan, Sut, Apap, Seb, the Sebau, the two serpents, fiery and watery, the dragon and the crocodile, under all their mythical representations, has made along and perhaps prolix recital. But it is justified if it will demonstrate the original good character of the Saturnian personage, clarify the reasons that led to his transmogrification into a "personal devil" to frighten humanity, and replace harrowing misconception in the Western mind with sane comprehension, with reference to this lamentable miscarriage of wisdom. The discussion has opened up the cryptic meaning of a score or more of pivotal constructions in the Bible. With keys derived from the mythoi we can once more read intelligible meaning into material that by perversion has thrown the human spirit under subjection to motivations the most fiendish and diabolical. Surely the world desperately needs the scholarly perspicacity that will cast this "devil" out of human thought.

Chapter XVI

BAPTISM AT THE CROSSING

The water symbol yields a series of special scriptural and theological interpretations which will correct much insufferable misconception. It is questionable if today any hierophant of orthodox religion has the most distant idea of the esoteric meaning of the rite of baptism. People receive baptism or impose it on their children with a sanctimonious acquiescence, but with heads guiltless of comprehension. It is vaguely felt to betoken an outpouring of divine grace upon the recipient. This may be conceded to be a part of the meaning. Yet in the form in which it is conceived by the participants, it is not in the faintest degree an image of the hidden truth. It is hardly a quarter of the full import. In consonance with the force of the great Law of the Two Truths, or the doubleness of truth, it is not only the mortal who is baptized by the god; the profoundest understanding flows from the knowledge that it is the god himself who is undergoing a baptism. Indeed, as long as it is a baptism with water, it is not at all the baptism of the spring of life. It is more truly the baptism of the god by the animal. For John, the pre-solar or natural man, says: "I indeed baptize you with water," while the baptism of the lower by the higher nature was with fire! Jesus, the god, was baptized by John, the mortal, in the waters of the river Jordan. Jesus was there baptized as part of the process of his further divination. The water baptism was the god’s submergence under the waters in the body of man.

What, then, is the basic meaning of the ceremonial? It is simple indeed. Reverting to the four elemental signs, we have the adequate data for interpretation. Bluntly, water is the symbol of bodily life, the body being mainly water in composition. Also water symbols man’s second psychological principle, emotion, because it is intimately linked with the body and its humors. The sea, the swamp or Reed Sea, or the mire, is the typical picturization of life in the body. Water types soul in body, or the god in matter. Baptism with water, then, is just the experience of the god in this bodily life. It means what the incarnation means, and nothing more. The ceremonial of sprinkling or immersion is but the dramatic representation of the fact of this life itself. By the application of the Law of the Two Truths it can be made to typify the baptism of the lower nature by the celestial water. But this is the obverse of the meaning usually intended in symbolism, and would involve the baptism of water by or in water, which wrecks the typism. It is the god’s immersion in the waters of generation that is the theme of most baptismal ritual.

That this statement embodies the correct view is competently attested by the zodiacal signatures used in the typology. The sun in the lower half of the zodiac is symbolically pictured as being immersed in a sea of water; and according to one derivation the word "Galilee" signifies "water-wheel." The Sea of Galilee is the lower material world--in man the watery body itself--through or across which the fiery spark of soul must pass in rounding its cycles of necessity. Heraclitus’ statement that "man is a portion of cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water" (Plato’s "mire") is apt here. And earth and water stand for the physical and emotional aspects of man’s life, or sense and feeling, both sub-mental. The soul in its rounds must dip down into a life that is irrational, motivated by elemental impulses that are not amenable to reason. It comes under the sway of the pure instinct of life itself and is overswept by the surging tides of elemental being. This is its baptism, its going into or under the water. It is not by chance that the name Galilee was given to the lake or sea of mortal life in the Jewish adaptation of the uranograph. For on it the savior of mankind had to quell or quiet the raging storm of sensual passion. The storm is a true mythograph of the sweep of the forces at play in the lower segment of man’s constitution, for they blow through his life, for the long first cycle of his evolution, in nearly uncontrolled intensity. They rush in upon his spirit, which is as yet unawakened, asleep like Jonah and Jesus in the hold of the ship, and stir up a welter of animal instincts and rapacities in lower man. Proserpine, the soul, was held for half of each year in duress in the underworld of Pluto. Merely put under water symbolism, this is the soul’s baptism. It is earthly embodiment.

A profound significance never fully fathomed attaches to Jesus’ ringing statement to Nicodemus (John 3:I ff):

"Except a man be born of water and the spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. If I told you earthly things and ye believe them not, how shall ye believe if I tell you heavenly things? And no man hath ascended into heaven but he that hath descended out of heaven, the Son of Man which is in heaven."

The elemental man, child of Mother Nature and her seven powers, can never enter the kingdom of conscious immortality except he be reborn of the spirit. His chance to be so reborn arises only through the great sacrificial oblation of the sun-gods. For they came to share their nature with him, to tabernacle with his flesh, and to suffer that he might be quickened to a new expansion of capacity to know life. Jesus is stating the rudiment of all practical knowledge. Unless a man unite the two fiery elements, the mortal and the imperishable, he can have no access to the kingdom of divine mind. For flesh and blood can not inherit the legacy of spiritual consciousness.

Herein lies the necessity for the twice-born experience of every initiate. Hermes describes the form of the second birth:

"I see in myself an unfeigned sight or spectacle made by the mercy of God: And I am gone out of myself into an immortal body, and I am not now what I was before, but am begotten in mind."

To this may be added Paul’s inspiring statement that we can transform ourselves by the renewing of our mind. Hermes also says of the physical and spiritual natures:

"He that looketh upon that which is carried upward as fire, that which is carried downward as earth, that which is moist as water, and that which bloweth or is subject to blast as air; how can he sensibly understand that which is neither hard nor moist, nor tangible nor perspicuous, seeing it is only understood in power and operation? But I beseech and pray to the mind; which alone can understand the generation that is in God."

The phrase "born of water" embalms implications that are commonly passed over unnoticed. All birth in the natural world is by or in water. Paleontology discloses that the first protozoan life emanated from the salt water. The human foetus grows in a watery sack. It emerges from water into air. All growing things must have water as a primary condition. The fact was therefore used by the sagacious mythmakers as an index of birth of any kind. Says Massey:

"Birth from the element of water was represented in the Mysteries of Amenta by rebirth of spirit from the water of baptism."1

It was out of the primordial "waters" of space that the first forms of cosmic life were generated. From the infinite bosom of watery night flashed out the first rays of that light which was to be the life of all things. So in the rain-storm of summer, fire is born out of the banks or moisture or suspended water. Hence the very deities had to be incubated in bodies of water like the foetus in the watery egg. This accounts for the presence of the god in the lake of the moist human body. Horus is born from the lotus plant in the water, as Venus from the sea-foam. So the souls that come forth to populate earth are born of the Lake of Sa, one of the two lakes of paradise, which contained the "waters of life." One of the meanings of this short word "Sa" is "spirit"; another is "soil or basis." It was a lake or body of primordial life essence, spiritual "matter," from which spirits were drawn, as snowballs from a bank of snow. The word is part of the name for the spiritual body, the Sahu.

The twice-born, then, were those born first of the water of nature and again of the fire of spirit. The upper lake yielded the nuclei of spirit force that were to find a higher birth of divinity from immersion in the water and mire of the earthly lake beneath. The Lake of Sa generated the fiery seeds that were to be brought to lotus growth in the muddy lake of the earth. "Heaven conceived him, the Tuat brought him forth." The one was the Pool of Sa(lt), the other the Pool of Natron (Nature). The upper was the pool of life, the lower the pool of death, which is ever the gateway to new life. The spirits from the Lake of Sa needed further cleansing. The sa(lt) may lose its savor. They came down to bathe in the lake of the world, where, linked to a creature already born of water and earth, they would have the chance to wash away ingrained impurities. The Ritual text (Ch. 170) calls to the glorified soul: "Hail, Osiris, thou art born twice!" Again: "Stand up living forever. Thy son Horus reconstituted thee. Arise on thy bed and come forth! Come! Come forth!" They call him to come forth "like a god" "from the mysterious cave." (Cf. the raising of Lazarus and the man who took up his bed and walked.)

This double birth, or birth and rebirth, is no more strange than is its physical counterpart and lower symbol in the life of any mortal. We are born out of nature at physical birth; we are reborn, as a being of dawning mind, again at twelve, when we leave Mother Nature for Father God.

Life advances by periodical and unending regenerations. To live again, the soul must indeed enter again and again into the body of its mother matter and experience repeated new births. This was another esoteric hint beneath Jesus’ answer to Nicodemus.

We are conceived in spirit and born to actual power in nature. The natural man is reconstituted by a spiritual birth. We should be reminded here of the wine, born or made of water, but reborn as "spirit" through fermentation. The twice-born were the twice-baptized, first in water, then in fire. Says Irenaeus (Bk. I, Ch. 21:2): "The two baptisms of the Gnostics were recognized by them as the animal and the spiritual." In olden times children were baptized first with water, later with smoke! One form of the cleansing was by fumigation. In certain places there were administered two baptisms, one a passage through water, the other an ordeal by fire. Already spoken of was the tribal ceremony of having girls after the puberty initiation run naked in the first thunderstorm to receive the blessing of the water and the fire. Every seed cast into the ground for incubation undergoes the baptism by water or moisture, followed by the fiery baptism of the sun’s rays.

Horus in his baptism is transformed from the word made flesh to the word made truth. This again delineates the change from natural to spiritual.

Temples and pyramids were generally built over or near a water course, lake or well. In the Vision of Hermas it is asked: "Lady, why is the tower built upon the water?" She replies that it is because the soul’s life is saved and shall be saved by water. The necessity that forced the gods into this low life was that of purification. In (the Alexandrian version of) John (5:2, 4) we read: "An angel of the Lord washed at a certain season."

The Manes in the Book of the Dead says: "I purify me in the southern tank, and I rest me at the northern lake" (Ch. 125). After dipping into the ordeal of bodily existence he had to rest in the peaceful fields of the northern Aarru-Hetep. The first chapter of the Ritual contains the saying by the priest: "I lustrate with water in Tattu and anoint with oil in Abydos." The sheen of oil replaced the fire typism here.

The ceremonial purity so often insisted on in the texts of the Ritual is acquired by the Manes after he

"purifies himself in the Lake of the Country of Reeds. Horus dries his body, Thoth dries his feet, Shu raises him up, and the Heaven-goddess Nut gives him her hand. He appears in the Field of Reeds and purifies himself therein." [The diseased in the Gospels were promised healing if they bathed in the Pool of Siloam.]

On the second day’s celebration of the Mystery rites in Greece, the one commemorating the descent of the gods into matter, the cry "Alade, mustai" ("to the sea, ye initiated ones!") was the keynote of the ceremony.

"Besides, the sea was am emblem of purity, as is evident from the Orphic Hymn to the Ocean in which that deity is called theon agnisma megiston, i.e., the greatest purifier of the gods; and Saturn . . . is pure (intuitive) intellect . . . Pythagoras called the sea a tear of Saturn (Meursius)."

Plutarch affirms that the child Jesus fell into the sea and was drowned. Likewise Horus.

In many religions the baptism was apparently a rite held for the dead and again for the living. This confusion was due to the loss of the original connotation of "death" as the life lived on earth. Of a surety it was for "the dead"--on earth, who were alive enough to get the instruction. Therefore Paul asserts that we are circumcised "with a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with him in his baptism . . ." (Col. 2:12). This is weighty, for here Paul distinctly figures the burial and the baptism as one and the same. This firmly supports the primary claim of this study, that the incarnation is the one central theme of all scripture. Burial of the soul in the water of the body on earth is all that could ever have been meant by the baptism.

An aspect of the baptism formula was the rite of feet-washing.

Jesus washed the disciples’ feet. This act surely was a dramatization of his laying aside his superior dignity, humbling himself to become a servant and pouring out the water of deific potency for the cleansing baptism of the lower nature of man. For he himself poured out the water in a basin. The Speaker says that he comes that he may purify this soul of his in the most high degree. The Teacher in the Pistis Sophia says that he tore himself asunder to bring unto mankind the "Mysteries of light to purify them . . . otherwise no soul in the whole of mankind would have been saved" (Bk. 2:249, Mead). Here is one of the most explicit references to divine dismemberment anywhere to be found.

In the text of Unas it is said of the Manes: "Horus takes him with his two fingers and purifies him in the Lake of the Jackal." Again: "The followers of Horus purify him. They cleanse him." It is asserted of the purged soul: "He hath been purified in the Lakes of the Tuat, he hath undressed in the Lakes of the Jackals." The unregenerated Manes was always pictured as black or black-haired. But when he kneels before the throne of Osiris his hair has become white. This is the mark of his having been washed pure in the waters. The four sons of Horus are said to wash his face. The Book of the Dead says the soul is "censed" or purified with fire, with the Smen incense and the "bet" incense, which are the

"saliva that comes from the mouth of Set, wherewith Horus was purified, whereby the evil which appertained unto him was cast to the earth when Set performed the censing for him; wherewith Set was purified, whereby the evil which appertained to him was cast to the earth, when Horus performed the censing for him. This Pepi is purified thereby, and the evil which appertains to him is cast to the earth."

The symbolism of spittle as a cleansing substance has before been pointed out. But this passage yields most direct corroboration of the idea that has been presented several times--the reversibility or double direction of the application of the meaning of scriptural glyphs. For here Horus and Set mutually purify each other! Soil and plant mutually exalt each other. God and the human reciprocate purification. The god bathes in the southern tank, the animal in the northern lake. Each baptizes the other. The Gospel story is incomplete without an alternate baptism of John by Jesus.

The Great Harlot, or mother of prolific life, whose fornicatory ways the kings of the earth (the descending gods) had followed into a mire of iniquity, when they yielded to her blandishments, was likewise consumed in the purifying fires.

Those who had exchanged their dark robes for the garments of white linen had, it is declared, "washed their raiment in the blood of the Lamb of God until it was white without blemish."

In the Ritual the mummied deceased is said to go "purified in the place of birth." This is of importance because the purification is categorically stated to be on earth, the place of birth. "He has been steeped in resin in the place of preservation." Divinity, the immortal preservative, is won on earth. Else why did we leave the empyrean?

A passage later to be noted says that the body-soul which rises from Amenta has to suffer "purgatorial rebirth" before it can become pure spirit.

Apollo, who collected and restored the dismembered Dionysus, is called a deity of purification. Greek philosophy was itself the offspring of Mystery systems designed to effect the purification of the soul from the contaminations of life in the flesh.

A striking picture of the alternate besmirching by earth and purification by water is given in a Zulu tale of transformation. A beautiful girl enters the earth, and it is said of her that her body glistened, for she was like brass in her pristine purity; but she took black earth and smeared her body with it. She was then seen, very dirty and soiled, to enter a pool, from which she emerged with all her radiance restored and body shining.

Among the Yorubas a remarkable ceremony of purification is performed over both mother and child seven days after the latter’s birth. The water which is always in the earthen vessels placed before the images of the gods, is brought to the house and thrown upon the thatched roof, and as it drips from the eaves the mother and child pass three times through the falling drops. The performance of the ceremony on the seventh day is meaningful, as final purification in any cycle comes with the crowning seventh round.

The rite of circumcision was generally performed on the eighth day following birth. It types the cutting off of the god from the cycle of generation in the flesh, and was outwardly symbolized by the cutting off of the foreskin of the organ of generation itself. The seventh power released man from bondage to the flesh, and its celebration followed on the next day.

The Manes with satisfaction exclaims:

"I have made an end of my shortcomings and I shall put away my faults. What then is this? It is the cutting off of the corruptible in the body of Osiris, the scribe Ani, the victorious one before all the gods; and all his faults are driven out. What then is this? It is the purification (of Osiris) on the day of his birth. I am purified in the great double nest which is in Suten-Khen(en)."

Another text affirms:

"He is conceived in Isis and begotten in Nephthys, and they cut off from him the things which should be cut off."

An important corroboration of the purely figurative value placed on the rite of circumcision (matching the similar elucidation of mummification) is found in a passage from Budge:

"The general trend of the evidence suggests that circumcision was practiced in the Sudan, as well as in Egypt, from time immemorial, that it had nothing to do with considerations of health, that it had a religious significance, and that it was originally connected with some kind of phallic worship."2

The rite indicates man’s cutting himself free from the law of bodily generation, and his readiness to generate by spiritual will. He stands clear of the law which bound him to sexual carnality. A passage from Paul stoutly vindicates this interpretation:

"Circumcised with the circumcision not made with hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ." (Moffatt trans.: "In him ye have been circumcised with no material circumcision that cuts flesh from the body . . .")

A most curiously involved application of the circumcision typism is seen in Exodus (4), wherein, after the Eternal had tried to kill Moses on his way back to Egypt, his wife Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off the foreskin of her son Gershom (Stranger) and touched his (apparently, Moses’) feet with it, crying, "There, you are my bridegroom in blood . . . by this circumcision." Then the Eternal left him alone!

By the curious operation of the Law of the Two Truths, both circumcision and its emblematic organ, the foreskin, may be taken as typing two distinct phases of meaning. The cutting off can have a double signification. The gods in descending suffered a severing of their connection with deity above; and the mutilation of the phallus, organ of their attachment to sexual generation, would directly type this "discerption" from deity in order to be linked with animality. The foreskin was the symbol of the god’s bond with, and bondage to, matter. Yet on the other wing of the symbolism, the phallus was a type of male virility, spiritual creative renewing power, generative productiveness, and as such it seems to figure in the Moses incident. Salvation from the menace to the young incarnating soul came through the wife, the material life, by means of the application of the son’s foreskin to the father’s feet. Here again, as in Egypt, it is the power of the son that reconstitutes the father. In a word, the meaning of it all is that earth experience brings the power of the reborn god to bear upon the salvation of the original god seed, buried and disintegrated in matter. The earth (mother) joins the creative power of the god to the animal nature (feet) of man. Horus performs almost identically the same operation on his father Osiris in the latter’s reconstitution and renovation.

Foreskins were piled in a heap in the circle of the twelve stones set up at the Eternal’s order by the Israelites at Gilgal. The meaning can be taken in any of the three ways suggested: (1), The twelve legions of angels were sacrificing their foreskins as types of their lost divine power; (2), They were coming into generation, typed again by the foreskin; (3), They were, in the exodus, cutting themselves loose from generation, typed by the removal of the foreskins. Herein is demonstrated the advantage of myth over dogma; the former leaves the mind free to make its own application of truth adumbrated.

The umbilical cord served as a companion symbol with circumcision. Its cutting betokened the severance of the god from his connection with elementary mother nature. It was thus a figure of rebirth, adapted from its part in the function of birth. Weaning was used in much the same fashion.

We, as gods, are sent down to earth to undergo a further bathing in the waters of experience. This experience is nature’s available instrumentality for refining untested spiritual quality. Incrustations which are the deposit of earlier ignorance and error have to be dissolved, burnt out, washed away, by the pedagogical agencies of physical contingencies. There is no power in heaven, where the soul is detached from body, to cleanse or purify it. Only earth can provide the requisite conditions of suffering and hardship to burn out the crudities of undevelopment. Nature must have our hard predicaments of bodily life in order to reach and impress our souls, which, apart from body, float in dreamy irresponsibility and unrealized potentiality. Nature casts us here in order to furnish the conditions of realism which alone can wake our slumbering faculty. We can not in the spirit world be linked with an animal by whose tutoring on earth we advance our own progression.

The children of Israel were "tried as silver is tried," "in the refineries of the nether world"; and they were on earth, not in the hazy spirit realm.

Mesheck, or Meska, was the Egyptian place of scourging and purifying in Suten-Khen. It is the Kamite purgatory, the place of cleansing, then of rebirth and resurrection, Amenta in fact. This is doubtless identical with the Meskhen, the Thigh or Haunch, a term applied to the Great Bear cluster, as the old first mother, Apt or Typhon, from whose thigh emerged all birthing. The purging took place in the lower part of man, the oft-mentioned Suten-Khen, the dwelling place of the Sut powers; khen meaning birthplace.

Examining the baptism of Jesus, we find it in itself a complete representation of the incarnational experience. Contrary to most interpretive opinion, it must be said that the pivotal experiences and allegories of the Christ do not mark successive stages in spiritual development according to a fixed pattern, but are sententious glyphs of the entire cycle. It appears to be so with the baptism. Jesus’ baptism by John, the antecedent earthly man, in the Jordan River adumbrates the incarnation unquestionably. Next we have John’s hitherto utterly misconstrued reluctance to baptize one of a higher order than himself. It was as if the animal man said to the god within him: "My Lord, it is not fitting that I should subject you to the incarnational ordeal. It is more seemly that you should baptize me with your divine fire and lift me up. This is the wrong order of procedure." And as if the Lord rejoined: "No; to you it may seem so. But a necessity of which you can know little forces me to undergo the incarnation and baptism through your good offices. I must, if only for a cycle, be subject unto you and be further educated to divinity in your watery realm. And thus only can your salvation, too, be won." "But Jesus answered him: ‘Come now, this is how we should fulfill all our duty to God’" (Matt. 3:15). Then the immersion took place. And it was at the conclusion of the rite that the spirit from heaven descended upon him in the symbol of the dove. This bird, sharing the role with the hawk and bennu or phoenix, emblemed primarily the life-giving power of the third element, air (mind). Dove is traced to "Tef," the breathing force. It stands in general for the divine energy of the soul. In the planisphere another star beside Sothis, somewhat farther south, stood in position to announce the coming of the solar year and the sun-god. This was the star Phact, the Dove. The hawk, allied to the dove, was the divine symbol of Horus. When divinized Horus received the hawk, Jesus the dove. Horus rose as the dove as well as the hawk; for he exclaims: "I am the Dove; I am the Dove!" Seven doves, showing the sevenfold nature of all deific emanation, are frequently found. In Didron’s Iconography (Fig. 124) the child Jesus is represented in the virgin’s arms or womb, surrounded by seven doves as symbols of the seven nature powers he was to spiritualize.

The baptism preceded and is followed by the deification. Earthly sojourn was to place man finally on Mt. Olympus.

In this exposition is to be found the reason for the forerunners of the Christs, as John, Anup and Mercury, performing the function of the baptism. The earth-soul is to subject the heaven-soul to its immersion in matter, and must precede and prepare the ground. John says: "After me cometh a man who is come before me." "I make way," says Horus, "by what Anup has done for me." What is obviously implied in John’s statement is that the Christ principle, a superior and therefore older evolutionary product than the man of earth, will come to occupy the physical house when nature has made it ready. Earth has but recently fitted a tabernacle to be occupied by a guest who is of venerable age and station in the cosmic family. The house is new, never constructed before; but the coming visitant from celestial spheres is of the family of the Ancient of Days and has been abroad many times before and lived in other houses. John means to say that he is the physical self, a new and late creation, but that the Christos had preceded him in manifestation by aeons. Anubis (Anup) is designated as the "preparer of the way of the other world," the power making straight the paths to the upper heaven. Anup was the guide of the sun and the sun-souls in the nether earth. The Ritual (Ch. 25) speaks of "the god Anubis, who dwelleth in the city of embalmment," and who gives a heart to the deceased. Sut-Anup, the stellar guide and announcer of the new cosmic cycle, was superseded by Taht-Aan, the lunar Mercury, whose more frequent periodicities made him a more reliable measurer of time cycles. Anup and Mercury are closely allied. Mercury’s character as the swift-winged messenger of the gods is matched by Anup’s reputation as the "swift-runner." The planet Mercury was said to be the servant of Sothis, the star announcing the solar birth at the winter solstice. Plutarch suggested that the horizon immediately before the rising and after the setting of the sun was symbolized by Anup (De Isid. et Osir.) Says Renouf: "I believe that he represented twilight or dusk immediately following the disappearance of the sun." He was typified by the jackal that came out at night, and was painted with a black head, as the guide through the dark. The planet Mercury, as sometimes evening and again morning star, fulfills the terms of this identity with the functions of Anubis. As a warder of the gate of sunset and dawn, of descent and resurrection, it is written of him: "All the festivals of earth terminate on the hill (or over the hill) of Anup." It is Anup who in the judgment tests the beam of the scales, and if he finds the balance even between the heart and the feather, reports the verdict to Thoth. This he does as watcher on the two horizons or the scales of nature, where spirit and matter are exactly balanced in our constitution. Aan, the scribe, records it.

It is notable that Jesus is not baptized by John until he is thirty years of age. Horus was baptized at thirty by Anup. There are occurrences of thirty in connection with Samson. There is a lacuna in the life history of the sun-gods between the ages of twelve and thirty. Both numbers are purely typical, standing for the completion and perfection of cycles, the end of an age, or stages of transition and transformation.

The study shifts to another aspect of the water symbolism, but one intimately related to the baptism, if it is not but another typing of the same thing. It is one of the most frequent of religious figurations, and demands sufficient attention to settle clearly its function and scope. This is "the crossing of the waters." Best known are the Biblical crossing of the Red (Reed) Sea and the Jordan, the classical ferrying of the souls of the departed over the underworld Styx by Charon in the Greek mythos, the crossing of the sea by Ulysses and Aeneas in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, the crossing of the Euxine Sea by Jason, and others. Baptism by immersion was a simple glyph of the incarnation, but a crossing of some water permitted a more extended play of fancy to elaborate the symbolism. Such a natural phenomenon as the salmon fighting its way from the vast primal ocean up the waters of an individual stream to the sources, there to deposit the spawn of new generation, was indeed a vivid emblem of the soul fighting its way back to source against the downward current of elementary pressure. The soul, like the salmon, comes out of the great original ocean of life, the lake of Sa(lt), works its way into the channel of an individuality, battles its way far up the stream in the face of the current of animal propensity, and there plants the germ or seed of new life, which in the next generation will run down and join the mother sea. It is a nearly complete analogue of man’s incarnation history.

The crossing of a stream was a serviceable allegory of the passage of the life spark through and across its span of experience in the watery body. As the crossing involved the use of a boat or ark, the chain of ideas carries the research into the whole mass of material dealing with the crossing, the Passover, the cross, the ark and the flood or deluge. An enormous amount of relevant material must be drastically abridged.

The mummy was ferried over the water to the western mount where Hathor-Isis or the Cow-Goddess awaited the solar god and the crowd of Manes with him. This was in preparation for his burial--fittingly on the west side where the sun sank--and the body was placed in a mausoleum there.

But the journey of the Manes across the sea of this life, over the "waters beneath," was from west to east, from the gate of entry to the underworld on the west to the gate of resurrection on the east. That which dies in the west must rise again in the east. The level stretch of "water" between, over which the voyage is made, is the "sea of life." Across this expanse of stormy water the soul essays to sail in the "boat of Horus," with the young god himself in the pilot house directing the course, and with his twelve (collective) sailors, rowers or companions, who man the craft. Alongside swims the great Apap reptile, eager to devour careless sailors who fall overboard. His figure stretches out closely parallel with the horizon of the zodiac. The Manes prays to the Conductor of Heaven that Osiris may safely pass the "great one who dwells in the place of the inundation." And the deceased rejoices in that "He had made me a boat to go by." A boat is now the symbol of safety.

In the chapter "of breathing air and of prevailing over the waters in Hades," the Manes have to escape from the devastating flood by means of the Makhu, or ark of plaited corn, with paddles formed of straw. Here is background for the ark of bulrushes that bore Moses.

A phrase several times used symbolically is: "going into the cabin." This might be taken as the equivalent of the soul’s going into the "belly" or hold of the ship. Yet as the cabin is the locale of the directing intelligence of a ship, it might again refer to the inmost seat of divine spirit in man’s "ship," the holy of holies in the deep center of being, into which he enters as the "captain of his destiny." Release from it in the end seems to bespeak salvation. On the day of the birth of Osiris the utterance is:

"The valves of the door open, the gateway of the god opens. He has unclosed the doors of the ark. He has opened the doors of the cabin. Shu has given him breath, Tefnut has created him; they serve in his service." (Ch. 130)

The Greek imprisonment of soul in body is here seemingly the poet’s "cribbed, cabined, and confined" life in flesh. Escape comes with final victory over the elements.

The picture of the sun-god swallowed by a great fish is very common. In the "crocodile" chapter of the Ritual we read: "I am the crocodile whose soul comes from men . . . I am the Great Fish of Horus." The crocodile was perhaps the earliest form of the Fish-Mother Atergatis, Hathor or Venus, who first produced life from the water. The seizure of the souls of men by a great fish in the sea suggests both capture and safety, as both are implied in incarnation. The astrotype is the constellation of Cetus, the Whale.

The baptism, the crossing a water, the death by drowning and the transformation from a being water-born to one born of fire, are all closely interwoven in various depictions. Confusion has come to scholars from this admixture. Massey is puzzled a trifle to observe that "in the inscription of Shabaka the baptism occurs without death." He adds:

"Either way, the baptism or death was but figurative of the regeneration or rebirth which was affected in this region; from which the second Horus issued at the age of thirty years as the Adult God, the Sheru or Homme Fait. The baptism for the dead was continued by the Christians, although its origin and significance seem to have been unknown to them."

As we have seen, Massey lacked in his exegesis the one key that would have enabled him to unlock the mystery of how baptism can be for the dead, and yet not be attended with ceremony suggestive of the sort of death he is thinking of. It was itself the "death" or experience of incubation of the soul, to achieve a new generation from the seed of its parent. In the cycle of necessity, in which the soul makes the round of all the elements, it must go through those kingdoms in which water is predominantly subsistent.

In the Hottentot fable the sea opened to let the men cross in safety, and the floods closed on the pursuing enemies. The ax, as in the Roman fasces, was a symbol of the sun, because in making its transit through the earth and water of fleshly life it was known as the divider or cleaver of the way. It cleft a passage for itself through the lower elements, dried up the water by its fiery potency and crossed on dry land!

Egyptian ingenuity, using the typology suggested by the life habits of certain water animals, represented the god as making his way across the water in more ways than one. He crossed on its surface, through it and even under it. Sebek-Horus, the crocodile-headed god, the child assigned to Neith in Virgo, swam across as a crocodile; the god, as Atum, the Eel, crawled through the mud; Kepher-Ptah, the beetle god, bored through the earth; Horus Behutet rode across on the vulture’s back; Horus, deified, flew across as a hawk; and Har-Makhu crossed through the corridor of the Sphinx.

In Joshua (I:2), after the death of Moses, the Eternal bade Joshua "arise, go over this Jordan, thou and all this people, unto the land which I do give thee, even to the children of Israel." "All Israel passed over on dry ground."

The eastern shore was the terminus of the voyage. There a plate of tahn was given each disembarking sailor, as a type of protection and salvation. This matched the recovered "eye of Horus" and the white stone given to the redeemed in Revelation. It may be seen at the place of the vernal equinox, between Aries and Pisces in the zodiac of Denderah. Tahn was resin and symboled eternal preservation, and was given to the soul at the completion of its crossing, as a badge of new-won immortality.

The Manes-soul entered or embarked on the sea on the western marge, plunged into the underworld of darkness and emerged on the eastern horizon of light. So he was the evening and the morning star through sheer symbolism. The Gospels keep a slight but unmistakable suggestion of the Egyptian typism in Jesus’ entry into the boat to cross the lake "when even was come." "He entered into the boat and his disciples followed him, And behold there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the boat was covered with waves, but he was asleep." "Then he arose and rebuked the winds and the sea and there was a great calm" (Matt. 8:24). Of Apap it is said: "Now at the close of day he turneth down his eyes to Ra; for there cometh a standing still in the bark, and a great slumber within the ship." The attack of Apap or Sut and the storm of sensual riot of the carnal passions are made while the deity is asleep in his bodily tomb, the belly of the flesh. Then the god awakes to his task, exercises his sovereignty over nature, and the elemental forces obey him.

Other solar heroes beside Jonah crossed the sea in the belly of a fish. Both Horus and the Greek Hercules crossed inside the fish during the three days at the winter solstice. In some ancient calendars three to five days were intercalated at the winter solstice, additional to the 360 days of the twelve solar months--30 days each--and correspond to the three dark days of the lunar "solstice," or dark of the moon. They typed the time of the incubation, when there was a calm or balance or stasis in the cycle, the solstitial stasis or balance between spirit and matter in evolution.

After these many centuries of zealous study of the Bible in Christian lands it is questionable whether one person in a thousand knows why the number three is basically connected with the baptism. The answer is presumed commonly to lie in the ministrant’s phrase accompanying the threefold sprinkling of water on the head or the three immersions under the water. "In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost." The ceremony commemorates man’s baptism by and under the three forces of the solar triad, mind-soul-spirit, according to this view. This may be taken as a correct interpretation, if the rite is performed by sprinkling, and if it is regarded as the baptism of John by Jesus. But Christian baptism is alleged to be modeled after the Biblical baptism, which is that of Jesus by John! And if the ceremony is that of the three immersions under the water, as performed by many sects, it can not then signify the downpour of the threefold spiritual nature from above on the recipient. Or it could do so only by reading the submergence of the god under the waters of sense as somehow imparting his threefold divinity to lower man. This is most indirect. One would have to say that the god brings his three aspects of higher selfhood under the water. This is implied, of course; and here as elsewhere the intimations of allegorism and symbolism apply both ways and work from either end. Both man and his god subject each other to a mutual baptism, we have seen, the god pouring his flood of transforming fire upon lower man and lower man drenching the god with water of sense and sin.

But the three immersions in or under the water speak definitely of a cosmic meaning that is little known, but that is one of the cardinal features of the arcane systematism. It is a numeral cosmograph of the death, burial or incubation of life in matter before its germination and resurrection. It is the ideograph of soul-death. Jesus was three days in the tomb. Under water emblemism it was the three-days’ sojourn of Jonah in the belly of the fish, though even there it is called "the belly of death." It is primarily expressed in the New Testament verse: "As Jonas was three days in the whale’s belly, so must the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of the earth." In its broad cosmic reference it outlines the great truth that the soul of life must evolve upward through its pre-mental period of gestation. The fiery spark of consciousness must lie dormant in "death," its conscious functions unawakened, for the three aeons of its involvement in dense matter before it comes to self-awareness in the fourth kingdom. In the lunar cycle of twenty-eight days, the three days of the dark moon, when the sun lights no part of the orb’s surface (visible to us) are the emblem.

But Egypt adds a most pertinent and apt phrase to this group of designations in a passage already given in another connection, from an inscription called "The Destruction of Mankind." Atum-Ra decreed that he would punish the rebellious angels who broke in upon his song with raucous shouts by destroying them "in three days of navigation." This carried the meaning that he would commit them to incarnation in lower ranges of being characterized as the sea or realm of "water." They would have to sail across the water of mortal life or become mariners or navigators in the great ocean of what Massey calls "the lower Nun." And that this period of "sailing" was to be three days attests to its identity of meaning with the other glyphs and graphs.

In addition to the cited instances, the three days as glyphs of incubating life are quite numerous all through the Bible and in other scriptures. There are scores of them in varied form. Before the Exodus from Egypt "darkness was over all the land of Egypt for three days; no one could see another, and no one could move about for three days, although the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings." In Exodus (3) Moses declaims to the people: "Pray let us travel for three days into the desert, then, that we may sacrifice to the Eternal our God." A Chaldean Oracle matches this passage remarkably: "And yet three days shall ye sacrifice and no longer." Revelation (11:11) says that after the oblation for sin had been made for three days and a portion of a day, the two witnesses of God rose upon their feet to renew their testimony. (The "portion of a day" will receive its very important treatment in its proper place.) The detail given here as to the witnesses rising to their feet to renew their testimony intimates that the old Egyptian dramatism of throwing down the Tat cross with its face to the ground as a sign of the soul’s fall into matter and death, to be raised up in the opposite season, was employed in this verse.

The three months from the autumn equinox to the winter solstice, ending with the new birth at Christmas or New Year, were one facet of the same symbolism. Again, the three months from the dead of winter to the spring equinox, ending in the resurrection of the solar god, were kindred types. And in a purely symbolical zodiac the three autumn months were earth signs, and the three winter months were water signs, those of spring being air signs, and those of summer fire.

Amsu, the rejuvenated Horus, rose in a new body of light on the third day. Horus, the child, is crowned in the seat of Osiris at the end of three days. In the lunar typing, Osiris dies at the winter solstice to be reborn again as Horus on the third day in the moon. He then rose from the water in his baptism. The resurrection on the third day must have been vividly motivated by lunar phenomena.

As the Eye (of Horus) was a symbol of light reflected (as the eye reflects all images in it), the moon reflecting solar glory could be called the "Eye of Horus." It is a matter of note that the Ritual says: "His eye is at peace . . . at the hour of night; (it is) full at the fourth hour of the earth . . ." So odd a phrase as the one italicized could hardly be given relevant meaning except in the sense of the fourth kingdom of life, the human, on the earth. It is to be noted here that since the two phrases, "the hour of night," and "the fourth hour of the earth," are obviously matched in this passage, this must be the Egyptian origin of the Gospel’s "fourth watch of the night."

Many of the myths contain a hiding or seeking of refuge for three days or three months. In Joshua Rahab the harlot, who sheltered the two Israelite spies, hurried them off with instructions to get away to the hills and "hide themselves there for three days till the pursuers return." A clear intimation of the resurrection on the third day is seen in an Egyptian text which runs: "I will arrange for you to go to the river when you die, and to come to life again on the third day." Here again water types the incarnation and it is also figured as a death. In speaking of the rearising of the dead Pepi, the Ritual says: "Pepi is brought forth there in the place where the gods are born. The star cometh on the morrow and on the third day." Mary searches for Jesus for three days as Isis sought the hidden Horus. In Matthew (15:29-32) Jesus takes compassion on the multitude that followed him into the desert "because they continue with me three days and have nothing to eat, and I would not send them away fasting." The three days’ fast is emblematic of the three "days" in the bleak underworld without the sustenance of the solar light, the divine bread of life. In the story of the dismembered concubine in Judges (19), previously noted, the girl’s father detained the husband three days. With reference to Herod, Jesus enjoined his followers to "Go tell that fox, Behold I cast out devils and I do cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I shall be perfected." Then there is his memorable declaration: "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. But he spake of the temple of his body," (John 2:9)--and obviously of his spiritual body. The thunder and lightning that emanated from the summit of Mount Sinai at the Eternal’s appearing to Moses came "on the third day in the morning." The manifestation of the Lord’s glory on the mountain was anticipated by Moses, who had been instructed to go to the people and tell them to "consecrate themselves to-day and to-morrow; let them wash their clothes and be ready for the third day, for on the third day the Eternal will descend upon the Mountain of Sinai in the sight of all the people." Joshua told the people to prepare food, for within three days they would cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land. And they remained three days on the banks before crossing the river. A study of these and the many other occurrences of the three days’ period will disclose to any mind the general idea of life being held in bondage or limitation for three cycles or aeons and its release to liberty or to function on the third (properly fourth).

The significance, then, of the Passover festival becomes clear in relation to the only cosmic or anthropological datum to which it could have any reference. In its widest sense it memorialized simply the passing of the soul over the flowing stream of this life. It was the pilgrimage of the Manes across the sea of experience that lay between mortal and immortal life. It must never be lost sight of that the Jordan was a stream that marked the boundary line between the desert and the Promised Land. To migrate from animal existence to godlike status of being we must cross the boundary line separating the two kingdoms. The soul plunges in this water on the western marge, swims or sails across and reaches the "farther shore" on the eastern boundary where he rises to a new day like the sun. As the final stage and termination of the passing over came at the equinox of spring, this date, the first full moon after the equinox, was invested with the cumulative and culminating significance of the whole pass-over. It was the fourteenth or the fifteenth of the Hebrew month Nisan. But after all it is a question of minor difference whether the term "Passover" is taken to embrace the whole extent and duration and experience of the passing across life’s sea, or more specifically the crossing of the final boundary line at the Easter equinox; whether the passage is over the lines at beginning and end of the journey, or over the entire space between them. It may mean the passing into, the passing out of, or the passage across, the realm of bodily life, and has apt significance in any case.

The sun, typing ever the immortal fire in man, dipped down into the sea at evening and underwent his baptism during the night. He crossed the water of the Nun each night and emerged each morning. Also it is to be observed that the boat of Horus makes its journey across the sea on the border of the earth at night. Night in the diurnal cycle matches winter in the annual cycle in solar typism. And both figure the incarnation. Our voyage across the water of mortal existence is made when our souls are struggling through the darkness of material night. At any rate this is the symbolical language in which the ancient sages try to delineate our experience. This is "the dark night of the soul," and "the twilight of the gods." The "dead" are described as those who have voyaged in the boat at night, bound for the city of Akhemu at the polar Paradise.

A flood of light is released by the statement of the Ritual that the ship of Nnu, described in the "chapter by which one saileth a ship in the nether world," was ordered built with three decks or stories. It was to bear the crowd of Manes in safety across the abyss in which the devourer Apap lurked. The Manes supplicates the god:

"O thou who sailest the ship of Nnu over the void, let me sail the ship. Let me be brought in as a distressed mariner and go to the place which thou knowest."

And again he exclaims:

"O thou who sailest the ship of heaven over the gulf which is void, let me come to see my father Osiris" (Ch. 44; 99).

He is told he has to know each part of the bark by name and to repeat each name before he is admitted on board. From the examination in the judgment hall we learn the nature of the boat and its three stories. The lowest story is Akar (Hagar), which is identical with the Hebrew Achor, and that is the same as the Valley of Sheol (Amenta). Akar means also the hold of a ship, deep within which the god fell asleep while the storm raged without. The god was first intoxicated with lethargy and drowsiness. The ark was built first with one story, then two, then three. The lower was earth. The next was lunar, that is, the emotion body; and the third was the lower mind body; and the spirit lives in each or all of the three according to its focus.

In the "chapter of bringing home a boat in the underworld," the several parts of the ship are specified and their correspondences given. The posts at stem and stern are "the two columns of the nether world," or the points of entry and egress, west and east. The ribs are the four sustaining gods, or the four bodies typed by earth, water, air and fire. The boat is said to be brought in over the evil lake of Apepi, and the Manes prays that he may bring the boat along and coil up its ropes "in peace, in peace." Bringing in the boat must be taken to figure the soul’s final uplifting of the animal self to the human kingdom, or "landing it." The wood of the right and left sides constitutes the Lord of the Two Lands, master of soul and body. The rudder is the leg of Hapi, one of the four supporters of the world and of man. The towing rope is the hair of Anup. Spiritual guidance is indicated here, as Anup is the keen-scented guide of souls in the dark of incarnation. He also helps to tow the boat, as one of the two "Openers of the Way." The oar-rests are the pillars of the underworld. Earth and water furnish the basic leverage against which one can exert force to push ahead. The mast is described as "he who bringeth back the great lady after she hath gone away." The lower deck is the station of Apuat, protector of the Manes, who sees that they do not fall overboard into the jaws of Apap. The sail is Nut, the original driving power of nature. It is that which engenders moving power by opposing matter to the invisible force of spirit, the wind or breath. The paddles are the fingers of Horus, taking hold and exerting power from within. The planks are the seven constituent elements furnishing the groundbase for all operation. The hull is Mert (Merti?), the womb and sustainer. The keel is the thigh or leg of Isis that Ra cut off with a knife to bring blood into the Sektet boat. The sailor is the traveler, the Manes. The wind "cometh from Tem, to the nostrils of Khenti-Amenti" (Osiris), and is the impelling spiritual power that gives life to the Manes. The river is "that which can be seen," the visible material world, on the bosom of which all flows along. The mooring post is the celestial pole to which the voyaging ship is made fast with the cable of divinity.

The Speaker says: "I stand erect in the bark which the god is piloting." He is the god himself, learning to pilot the boat. "I am the great god in the bark who fought for thee." Ra says to the sailors: "Take your oars, unite yourselves to your stars." And again he assures them: "O my pilots, you shall not perish, gods of the never-setting stars."

A most enlightening name of the boat of Horus on the nether sea is "Collector of Souls for Ra." This name at once takes on meaning against the background of the dismemberment doctrine, and would be otherwise unintelligible. As the overlord fragments himself to nucleate the multitude of souls in the world, the return journey across the sea of this life will operate to reunify the individualized units in the Lord’s reconstituted body. The ship of this world will bring the scattered members of that original unitary body together in a new bond of fellowship. As it sails along it will collect again the fragments scattered broadcast in the descent to earth. Whatever unity of spirit and action mankind will achieve will to that extent make life the collectors of souls for Ra. The Horus spirit in man will reunify the dismembered Osiris.

The offices of scholarship have served no better purpose than to have us look through the glass of ancient mythical construction into a world of alleged fantastic conception of primitive naïveté. Our essay is to direct the modern eye through the same glass to see, not a bizarre world of childish fancy and credulity, but a factual world of meaning enhanced for the first time to resplendent illuminating power. Nothing beyond a meaningless Egyptian word has been to scholars and the world the name given to the boat of Horus in which we cross the lower main from west to east--from birth to death: the Semketet boat, or "boat of the setting sun." That there was another boat that made the voyage back again from the eastern morn to the western eve to repeat the cycle, and that it was named the Maatet boat, or "boat of the rising sun," has remained hidden in dry-as-dust Egyptological research as a pretty poetism, but nothing more. Yet these two boats and their two journeys are almost the two facts of prime import for mankind in this life. For the Semketet and Maatet boats are respectively the physical body in which the soul makes its way across the river of life in the flesh, and the spiritual body of solar light in which it ascends to heaven and traverses the sky in its summertime of disembodied being toward the autumn of another descent into matter. The one is Paul’s "natural body," the other his "spiritual body." The latter is now being gestated within the other as its womb, and upon its delivery at its Easter morn on the side of the rising sun, the soul will transfer its residence from the old body to the new one. Since flesh and blood can not inherit the kingdom of heaven, the soul prepares for its habitation there a fit vesture that can subsist in the celestial Paradise. All this is told in Egyptian myth in which, when the Semketet boat of the setting sun, after voyaging the night on the sea, arrives at last on the eastern marge of sunrise, the passengers with Horus, who are the human Manes with their twelve powers perfected, disembark from it and embark anew on the Maatet boat, or glorious ship of Ra, the spiritual Sun. With the redeemed, the elect and the glorified humanity on board, this majestic boat of the sun then sails upward to the zenith of heaven, and on across the sky till the recurring cycle brings it down to the western gate of the Tuat once more. Man at Easter, or at sunrise, steps out of his mortal vesture into his immortal spirit vehicle to live forever in non-physical realms, robed in light as a garment. The night voyage of the fleshly vessel of Horus ends at dawn, and the joyous sailors, now divinized humans, leave the mummy body of flesh and crowd exultingly on the shining ship of spiritual sunlight, to make the ascent to heaven.

In this boat, along with Ra, there sat the gods Khepera and Tem; but these were only the personifications of Ra’s own forms as descending and rising god of evening and morning, or of incarnation and resurrection. These two are again known as Hu and Sa, the two gods who had their places in the boat of the sun at creation. They personify the two nodes of being, spirit and matter. It is written in the Ritual (Ch. 120) that while Unas sails towards the east side of heaven, his sister, the star Septet, giveth him birth in the Tuat. This is based on the fact that the west-to-east journey through incarnation fits the soul for birth into the vesture of the sun-god. Ra-Harmachis, a later form of the risen Horus, is denominated "the great god within his boat." Another name for the sun-boat was the "bark of Millions of Years."

The lower boat of Horus, the Semketet, is also that place of refuge or retreat in which the Manes find sanctuary from a pressing menace of the great Dragon Law of the wheel of birth and death. In Numbers (35:6) it is stated that six cities were appointed for refuge; and six is the number typing the elemental forces that built the physical body. The lower boat is the earthly refuge for spirits fleeing from heaven. The solar heroes were saved in a basket of reeds. The typology depicts the birth of heavenly beings into the human body on earth. There was always conveyed the idea of safety from circumfluent waters in some sort of enclosure, a boat, ark, or nest of reeds, or an island. In the Norse mythos it was the ash-tree, called "The Refuge of Thor," that caught and saved the young god when he was being swept away by the overflowing waters of the river Vimur. Osiris is saved in the midst of the bole of the tamarisk tree that floated on the water. The reed that offers an escape from the water to the dragon-fly, whereby it may ascend into its proper sphere of the air, is a type of salvation from the water.

A mound of earth, the papyrus reed or a willow stuck in the moist ground were some of the portrayals of emergence or rescue from water before the boat had furnished a more generally used type. The soul must find a place or means of stability amid the flux of life. The early symbols of wading and swimming shadowed the stage of evolution when the soul was deeply mired in matter. The boat typifies the time when the higher entity was able to cross over dry-shod.

It is an extraordinary confirmation of the theses here presented that the entry into the boat to begin the underworld journey was in all respects identical with the burial of Horus or Osiris in their coffins. This certifies to the identity of the physical body of man with the boat of the lower Nun. The boat and the coffin are the same symbol in effect, both typing the physical body. For the Manes says: "I am coffined in an ark like Horus, to whom his cradle is brought." For he is to be reborn in the same body in which he "dies." He transforms his coffin into his new cradle. This cradle is the nest or ark of papyrus reeds, and indicates that the "death" and burial take place in the same realm where a new birth is to occur. The lotus was a type of the boat or ark of safety in the water and of the womb of birth in one. Some of the later ships were lotus-shaped at prow and stern. The cabin was the Hindu Argha-Yoni or the womb of the mother. The constellation Argo Navis, the Pleiades, the Little Bear and Orion were uranographic picturings of the boats of salvation in various relations.

It is evident that the tabernacle which the Eternal ordered Moses to build, in which he might dwell with his children, the Israelites, and eventually be raised up, is but another form of typism for the inner shrine of the sanctuary, the holy of holies in the ark of the covenant. And this in turn is depicted under the water emblemism as the ship of the sun, or boat of Ra. The exchange of passengers from the boat of Horus to the ship of Ra betokened the successful completion of the incarnation cycles. It was the index of their new birth, which was not now that of water. For they had finished the water baptism at that point, and were to enter upon the baptism of fire, which would induct them into the spiritual universe. The solar bark was to pick up the survivors of the mundane sea voyage and transport them across the expanse of a kingdom of air and fire, which required a boat of airy and fiery texture. The happy passengers were carried upward on board the "bark of Hasisadra" "to be like the gods." "Nu saileth round about the heavens and voyageth along with Ra." The material of the ship of Ra is imperishable stuff, formed out of the indestructible essence of solar light. Imprisoned for many incarnations in the tabernacle of the flesh, we finally are released from it, to pass over into another temple of shining glory, our true spirit body. One of the great purposes of our coming into the world is to build this fabric. When it is finished we exchange our house of darkness for this vessel of light. This is most plainly indicated in a sentence on a Chaldean tablet: "O man of Surippak, son of Ubarratutu, destroy the house and build a ship." A house is stationary, bound to a given locale. A ship is mobile. In the glorious vesture of the sun-body the soul of man can traverse all realms and worlds with electric alacrity. When the Osiris obtains command over the upper sea he exclaims: "Collector of souls is the name of my bark. The picture of it is the representation of my glorious journey upon the canal." The canal was probably the Milky Way, which was thought of as the path of souls to reach the empyrean. The solar boat is fastened to the celestial pole by seven ropes. Both boats are drawn by groups of seven or twelve powers, represented by the seven horses of the sun, the seven swans, seven dolphins, and others. The boats were drawn first by the seven nature powers, later by the twelve spirit forces; or the lower boat by the seven and the celestial by twelve. In fact the Egyptians enumerate and name seven boats to suggest the seven principles which carry evolution along. The Ritual (Ch. 89) contains an apostrophe of sublime beauty to these basic energies of life:

"Hail, ye gods who tow along the boat of the lord of millions of years, who bring it above the underworld and who make it to travel over the Mount, who make souls to enter into (their) spiritual bodies, whose hands are filled with your ropes . . . destroy ye the enemy; thus shall the boat of the Sun be glad and the great God shall set out on his journey in peace. May it (the soul) look upon its material body, may it rest upon its spiritual body, and may its body neither perish nor suffer corruption forever."

Chapter 136B is entitled: "of sailing the great boat of Ra to pass over the circle of Bright Flame." And in it the Manes says: "I am the spiritual body (sah) of the lord of divine right and truth made by the goddess Uatchet."

A vast flood of light is let in upon Gospel interpretation at one burst if it is understood that the twelve disciples of Jesus symboled the twelve powers of spiritual light energy to be unfolded by man in twelve labors or stages of growth, all imaged by the twelve signs of the zodiac. It should from the first have been seen without cavil that the function of "the Twelve" in the Gospels was far more than that of useful agents of a historical personage to found an earthly ecclesiasticism. For when the Gospel Jesus told them they would sit with him on the twelve celestial thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel, the declaration took them at once from the realm of personal history into that of cosmic hierarchism.

Egypt gave them a more definitive naming and function. Accompanying Horus or Ra, the twelve were astronomical powers, rulers or "saviors of the treasure of light." As light was the crowning product of all cosmic operation, the saviors of its treasure were the culminating depositories of dynamic agency. They became the twelve great spirit-children of Ra’s unimaginable might. With Horus they became the twelve who accompany the god to earth as sowers of the seed and later reapers of the divine harvest reaped on earth for enjoyment in heaven. When the Gnostic Jesus of the Pistis Sophia (I:5) rises as the first fruits of them that slept, he becomes the teacher of the twelve on the Mount of Olives (the Mount of the Olive Tree of Dawn, or the resurrection). He suddenly appears in their midst as they sit on the Mount and dazzles them with his glory. It was the function of the Christos to gather up and synthesize in himself the potentialities of all lower forces. In the Ritual we find this remarkable duplicate of the scene on the Mount of Olives (Ch. 133, Renouf): "Ra maketh his appearance at the Mount of Glory, with the cycle of the gods about him." Here is incontestable evidence that the twelve disciples represent twelve deific powers, and not men.

The twelve were also the Gnostic Aeons, who were powers or "saviors" of light. The Gnostic Jesus gives this testimony:

"When I first came into the world I brought with me twelve powers. I took them from the hands of the twelve saviors of the treasure of light."

There is power in these mighty utterances from old Egypt’s Ritual to dispel the fogs of many centuries of religious superstition.

The first seven powers in physical phenomena had been gathered up, divinized and unified by the coming into evolution of the Christ Avatar. Additional unfoldment raised them to twelve. As the young solar deity passed through the twelve signs of the zodiac, he appropriated to himself and harmonized in the alembic of his own constitution all the natural radiations of deific light put forth by the twelve aeons or emanations. Jesus speaks of them as his ministers and messengers, whom he hath made "a flame of fire." Jesus brought the gift of soul to the natural energies and converted them into agents of cosmic mind. These were the twelve who as kings rowed the solar bark for Ra, with Horus at the prow. These were the twelve knights about the table of King Arthur; they were the twelve sons of Jacob; and the twelve gods with Odin in their midst. And they were the divine powers which were said to be unfolded, one each year, for the first twelve years of the solar god’s life, bringing him to the stage of divinest birth at the age of twelve. And this was a sublimated meaning shadowed in the ancient puberty festivals of many tribes. All the solar gods ended their childhood, or subjection to Mother Nature’s law, at twelve and entered the period of spiritual maturity, consummating it at the age of thirty.

The twelve were called "the saviors of light" because they upheld the radiance of the spiritual sun. They are described as the emanations of the seven voices and the five supports. The seven voices are the seven primary radiations of tonal vibration that carries the energies of the Elohim or Logoi into manifestation. The five supports are apparently the five basic elements, earth, water, air, fire and aether, that support the edifice of the being of man and planets alike. The twelve in Egypt were Sut, Horus, Shu, Hapi, Ap-Uat, Kabhsenuf, Amsta, Anup, Ptah, Atum, Sau and Hu. They accompany Jesus and Horus through the twelve zodiacal signs (Pistis Sophia, 339-371), and it is said they "go forth three by three to the four quarters of heaven to preach the gospel of the kingdom." This "preaching" does not sound as if it meant the Sabbath pulpit oratory. The four quarters of heaven is a description of their location on the zodiacal chart.

The Gospel Jesus repeats some of the features of the sea voyage of "the ark of earth" sailing eastward. Horus emerges from the nocturnal storm on the waters into the calm of daybreak. Jesus comes walking over the water to the boat, while the lower soul (Peter) implores his help in saving him from sinking in the lake and is "lifted into the bark" (Matt. 14:22) like the rescued Manes in the Ritual. Jesus sustains the character of Horus who in the boat is the oar, paddle and rudder of Ra, and who exclaims: "I am the Kheru [ruler, controller] of Ra, who brings the boat to land" (Ch. 63). Jesus becomes master in the ship. It is again noteworthy that the Gospel sun-god appears on the water in the morning watch, the fourth watch of the night. The god of intellect rises after "three days" in the tomb of matter and the sea of earth. The Manes prays: "Grant that I, too, may be able to walk on the water as thou walkest on the Nun without making any halt." In another place he cries: "I fail, I sink in the abyss of the flowing that issues from Osiris."

Before the sun-boat can begin its upward journey from the eastern boundary, the giant Apap must be forced to relinquish his hold on the Tree of Life and to "disgorge the waters of Light." This apparent mixing of metaphors would indicate the birth of the sun-god’s powers out of the womb of lower nature. In man it would connote the parturition of the solar Christ principle in and from the physical body. If the figure of "disgorging" is not a most impressive suggestion of evolution from within the heart of life outward to the periphery--which modern science has now asseverated--one would be at a loss to think of a more forceful one.

The crossing is not the same as the cross in immediate portrayal of meaning, yet the two lead by a short step into each other’s province. In a very direct sense the cross is connected with the flood of water that must be crossed, with the baptism and the lower sea voyage. In its totality, as the allegorical expression of a real experience, racial and individual, all this was the cross. This most ancient, perhaps, of all religious symbols (by no means an exclusive instrument of Christian typology) was the most simple and natural ideograph that could be devised to stand as an index of the main basic datum of human life--the fact that in man the two opposite poles of spirit and matter had crossed in union. The cross is but the badge of our incarnation, the axial crossing of soul and body, consciousness and substance, in one organic unity. An animal nature that walked horizontally to the earth, and a divine nature that walked upright crossed their lines of force and consciousness in the same organism. The implications of this situation are all that the great symbol ever connoted. There can be nothing more religiously holy and sacred about the sign than about any other figure of human life. It means just that human life--nothing more. By ecclesiastical psychologization it has come to betoken a range of emotional repercussions, but it still carries no basic meaning other than that of the god immersed in matter. Whatever is sacred in human life is so by virtue of that single fact. However, since all values in life flow from that fundamental ground, the symbol may legitimately be made the talismanic focus of both emotional and intellectual reaction. If it conveys to the mass mind the strong intimation that this life itself is haloed with august significance, is essentially sacred and worthy of being lived with deepest consecration of purpose and effort to its intelligently discerned ends, its symbolic influence would indeed be salutary. If it is taken to be a cross of wood on which a man of flesh was physically nailed some nineteen centuries ago, its effect on thought must be stultifying and deadening.

Plato says that the divine man was "bicussated and was stamped upon the universe in the likeness of a cross." When primal unity of life bifurcated into spirit and matter, the two forces had to be crossed in interplay in order to engender the worlds and all manifestation. The coming of mind in man to rule nature brought the figure of the cross into symbolism because it brought the upright line to cross at right angles the horizontal line denoting the feminine or natural creation. Man was the first to raise the animal from horizontal position to the vertical; yet both natures live in him, considerably at "cross purposes" with each other. At any rate typology figured the mother creation, before mind came with man, by the horizontal line, which is the minus sign. Nature was privation--the Greeks called matter "privation." The union with it, however, of the intellectual principle made it capable of adding and increasing, giving itself more life, and so the cross is the plus sign. But great multiplication of living beings could not come until the forces were set in motion; and motion was indicated by a moving of the straight cross one half of a quarter revolution, or out of motionless position; and this gives the multiplication sign, as well as the numeral (Roman) ten, the number that joins male and female signs, I and O, in activity. It was the crossing of spirit with matter that moved and multiplied the worlds. And ten is the number of the completed cycle, and the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is Yod, the name of God. The bread of life had to be vastly multiplied before it could be distributed. The mathematical sign of division is the horizontal line, with a dot above and below to signify that when life divided it split into two kingdoms, one above, the other below, a median line. And we shall see that this gives a perfect picture or glyph of man’s nature lived on the horizon line between "Upper and Lower Egypt."

The Toltecs called the cross the Tree of Sustenance and the Tree of Life. The tree and cross are identical, and even the staff or rod is a reduced form of the tree-type, for Aaron’s rod was fabled to be a stem from the Tree of Life in Genesis. The cross is a symbol of life, never of death, except as "death" means incarnation. It was the cross of life on earth because its four arms represented the fourfold foundation of the world, the four basic elements, earth, water, air and fire, of the human temple, and because it was an emblem of the reproduction of new life, and thus an image of continuity, duration, stability, an eternal principle ever renewing itself in death. The whisperings of esoteric fable report that the very tree on which Jesus was hanged was grown from a sprout or seed from the forbidden Tree of Life in Genesis! There are many instances of the cross burgeoning into fresh life. The savior is not nailed on the tree; he is the tree. He unites in himself the horizontal human-animal and the upright divine. And the tree becomes alive; from dead state it flowers out in full leaf. The leaf is the sign of life in a tree. The Egyptians in the autumn threw down the Tat cross, and at the solstice or the equinox of spring, erected it again. The two positions made the cross. The Tat is the backbone of Osiris, the sign of eternal stability. And Tattu was the "place of establishing forever."

That the cross betokened the basic idea of the impregnation of elemental matter with divine potency typed as male is evidenced by the fact that Apt, the old first Mother, figured as the hippopotamus and the Great Bear, is depicted with a fourfold phallus on her breast in the form of a cross. Again and again the goddess of primal source is figured with male features or the male member, mutely proclaiming her power as re-begetter of the dead. The Christ in the form of the Stauros, or cross, impregnated the Mother Sophia and gave to her who was otherwise formless an ideal form and beauty. Forgetting the ancient Gnostic teaching and calling it "heresy," the early Christians warred over the question of the sex of the Logos. The knowledge that would have saved them all this sad miscarriage of zeal can be summarily stated. The Logos is the product of cosmic male and virginal female substance, in union. A virgin is unproductive until embraced by creative power. At bottom the cross indicates sex union, be it on the plane of the cosmos, in the heart of the atom, in the solar systems, or on the nuptial bed. A crossing is consummated or a cross made wherever the positive and negative poles of life cross each other in their interblended affinity. And then the Son, or Logos, is born. And the child becomes a man, and must enter into creative relation with his Mother Nature in his turn. Gnostic literature states that the Christ fertilized the Mother Sophia by making the sign of "Kr" or "Chr" (Greek XP) over her body. This was the cross within the circle, or the male crossed with the female. The symbol then gave rise to the many words beginning with Chr- or Kr-(Cr-), such as Charis, Christ, Kheru, Cross, Chronos, Course, Circle, Karast, Crest; as well as, by the curious process of reversal employed by the ancients, Rekh, Ark, Arche, Argo, Arch, etc. The letter "A" bears testimony likewise to some ancient philosophy, as it apparently represents the single vertical line of male deity, or god in unity, split apart or in two, as male and female, and then joined by the middle cross stroke, the Ankh-tie. The "O" also proclaims its own meaning as being the boundless infinite, without beginning or end, self-contained, ever returning unto itself, embosoming all things, yet, as the Absolute (that is, released from all finiteness or form), the sign of total negation of Nought. And we are now in position to see something of the significance of the great Gnostic name for the sun-god or Logos, son of Sophia: I A O. It reads under our eyes: "I" am the "A" (Alpha) and the "O" (Omega), the beginning and the end. But, seen with a bit more philosophical penetration it reads again: I, the first emanation of being (typed by the straight vertical line, the No. I), split into two phases, joined (in the "A") in incarnate and manifest existence, and end in a return to infinite Be-ness, "O." The "Y" near the end of the alphabet is an "A" reversed, and the two separated streams returning into the "I." The "U" and "V" show the original "I" split in two, united at the bottom in incarnation, and the force descending and then returning. The "J" indicates the turning to return of the "I." "S" and "Z" are types of turning and endlessly returning life. Other letters show design in their construction, as they were glyphs of esoteric philosophy.

A tradition that the cross of Calvary was made of four kinds of wood, palm, cedar, olive and cypress, signifies again that it stood for the four segments of the nature of man and the world.

The cross of Calvary of Christian iconography is common on the breasts of Egyptian mummies. It is identical with the Ankh-cross, denoting life and renewal. The cross was placed in the hands of the dead as an emblem both of incarnation and the new life to come. It was carved on the back of the scarab, with the same meaning. The Horus of the resurrection is pictured with the Cross of Life in his hand in the act of raising the dead body from the bier. The sign of the cross was made upon the mummy entering the realm of the dead; it was also given to the soul as it arose out of the body as an emblem of rebirth.

The cross has been appropriated by Christian ecclesiasticism as the unique and distinctive emblem of its faith. Yet in the iconography of the catacombs no figure of a man on the cross appears during the first six or seven centuries of the era! Instead there are all forms of the cross except the one which is claimed to be the very basis and origin of the religion itself. The cross of Calvary was not the initial, but the final form of the crucifix. The cult that now buttresses its authenticity upon the historic Calvary presents not a single reproduction of its crucified Redeemer in its symbolic art during the first six or seven centuries! According to Massey the earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde, now in the Church of St. John at Monza; while no image of the crucifix is found in the catacombs at Rome earlier than that of San Siulio belonging to the seventh or eighth century. In the earliest representations of the Trinity made by Christian artists, the Father and the Holy Spirit, the latter being feminine in the form of the Dove, are pictured beside the cross. A Christ, and him crucified, is utterly absent. Not the Crucified, but the cross, is the primary symbol of the Christian faith. Yet that same cross is pre-Christian, is a pagan and heathen symbol. For centuries the cross stood for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a living thing. Crucifixes have been found in Christian churches antedating the fourth century, with a human figure nailed or bound in the conventional way; but the figure is not that of Jesus! It is that of Orpheus! In Christian imagery the Lamb was the usual figure on the cross, when a sacrificial victim was added to the bare cross emblem. But it appears that about the end of the seventh century it began to be felt that the alleged historical life of the personal Christ was in danger of being lost amid the mass of symbolic representations and the multiplicity of Messianic and sun-god characters which were current in most countries as the heritage of pagan symbolism. In order, then, to focus emphasis upon the uniqueness of the Christian Jesus as the physically crucified one, it was decreed by the Council of Trullo, or the Quinque Sixtum, in the reign of Justinian II, that in future the figure of the real historical Jesus should supersede the astrological sign of Aries "in the image of Christ, our God." "He shall be represented in his human form, instead of the Lamb, as in former times" (Cited by Didron: Icon. Chret., pp. 338-9).

In the eighth century Adrian I, Pontiff of Rome, in a letter to Barasius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, voiced the opinion that the time had come for the Christ to be no longer portrayed as the Lamb:

"Forasmuch as the shadow hath passed away and that Christ is very man, he ought therefore, to be represented in the form of a man."

"The Lamb of God must not be depicted on the cross as a chief object; but there is no hindrance to the painting of a lamb on the reverse or inferior portion of the cross where Christ hath been duly portrayed as a man."

No criticism can be legitimately lodged against the Holy Fathers for desiring to use the human figure as a symbol to carry the vital truth that the Logos had put on the form of a man, and that the new heaven and earth was to be formed "according to the measure of a man." It would indeed have more impressiveness than the more abstract symbol of the astrological Lamb. But the world, and especially those millions of souls whose earthly lives were snuffed out in the name of an alleged gentle Galilean peasant, call out a vigorous challenge to the procedure of turning an innocuous symbol into a veridical historical personage, when the change entailed, as the sequel showed, the transformation of devotional reverence for a spiritual ideal into frenzied zeal and inhuman cruelty, in the name of an actual man. It was not until the long process of mental corrosion had brought to decay the ancient power to discern spiritual truths through outward symbols that the figure of the personal God was thrust into the place of immolation, and the cross as emblem became the cross of wood.

In John’s account the crucifixion takes place at the time of the Passover, and for the Paschal Lamb is substituted the victim in human form. The killing of the Lamb of God (the Logos under the sign of Aries, as it had been the Bull in the preceding 2155 years) was the divine sacrifice; and his slaughter, with the sprinkling of the doorposts, or gates of the new life, with his blood, was the sign of the new birth of spiritual life. In one sign humanity was washed in the blood of the Bull, in the next in the blood of the Lamb; and again in the next in the blood of the Christ whom the Greeks named Ichthys, the Fish.

The sprinkled blood of the gods, poured out for humanity on earth, was symboled as fertilizer to nourish the earth. In early times the mother’s blood, too, was believed to fertilize the fields for the new sowing. The function of fertilizing the ground is assigned both to Sut and to Judas, the adversaries and betrayers of the sun-god in the Christian and Egyptian myths. Sut was said to fertilize the fields with his blood "on the night of fertilizing the field in Tattu." The coming of divinity to dwell with man was to make the soil of his life productive by enriching the natural self. What more apt symbol, then, than that of fertilizing?

An ancient festival not copied by the Roman Christians was that of the Hiding of the Cross in the Nile, followed in the opposite sign by the ceremony of Finding the Cross. The person traditionally assigned to the finding was Helena, a name which must be taken as derived from Helios, the sun, in Greek. It was the boast of Isis that she had given birth to Helios. The "Hor" of "Horus" is also Har, Hal, Hel (the Egyptian "R" becoming the Hebrew "L"); hence Horus is Helios by name, as Jesus is Joshua. Isis lost the fiery cross in the ocean of incarnation and Helena or the sun-spirit recovered it from the river to blaze in renewed glory at the Passover or crossing in March. Nothing more is depicted by these festivals than the incarnation and resurrection of life in matter, or the god in mortal man. As Isis lost her child at the autumn equinox and found him again at the equinox of spring, there is again a clear identification of cross with Christ-child.

Nothing could more definitely point to the meaning of the cross as the fact of incarnation than the name of the ancient Mexican cross itself, which was Tonocaquahuitl, "the tree of our flesh." We are nailed on this tree of flesh, out of whose symbolic wood alone is to be constructed the only cross on which the god has ever died. This is the only death on the cross known to erudite sages. And every imagined hammer-stroke driving nails through rended flesh on a geographical Golgotha has been a renewed stroke of misguided fanaticism nailing the free spirit of man still more firmly to the cross of ignorance, superstition and bondage.

Baptized with the god in his death on the cross, we shall happily disburden ourselves of this weight of toil and suffering when we have finished the crossing of the waters and see the golden sun rise at the end of the fourth watch of the night.

NOTES

CHAPTER XV

1. Westrop and Wake: Phallism in Ancient Religions, p. 47.

2. The Natural Genesis, I, p. 324.

3. Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 236.

CHAPTER XVI

1. Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, p. 131.

2. Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, II, p. 222.