The Ultimate Canon of Knowledge
by Alvin B Kuhn

Chapters 16 through 20

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The motive that inspires the production of a book is generally the intent to promulgate a theory, and the method followed is to present, formulate and elaborate the theory and then adduce the evidence that might constitute its corroboration. Our work up to this point has been in the main the promulgation and elaboration of the theory, which, stated in briefest form, is that the ultimate grounds of truth are mirrored in nature. Now the task must be to demonstrate the validity or, in blunt terms, the truth of the theory. From this point on, the material can hardly escape the imputation of being an audacious attempt to achieve nothing less than a formulation of the archetypal divine ideas over the pattern of which God created the universe. Nor can it dodge the implication that it is an attempt to divine the architectonic structure of the Logos, the very mind of God. The elaboration of the theory has implicitly carried the expectation, if not the promise, of fulfilment in demonstration. The contention, several times, repeated, that the theory, while advanced and advocated by many philosophers from early days down to the present, has never been convincingly demonstrated so as to win universal acclaim, bespoke at least some measure of performance in the present instance. It does little to palliate the enormity of the presumption involved in this situation to protest that the effort represents simply the intent to elucidate a number of reflections that any thoughtful person with a bent toward the poetic flair would be capable of formulating over the analogical pattern if he had a penchant for that sort of thing. The undertaking will be simply a compilation of many random glimpses of analogical similitude between natural phenomena and noumenal structures. Any pretence to arrange them in a structural form that would constitute them an organic synthesis of the universal archai of the world of truth is vigorously disclaimed. They might be presented as just some thoughts on nature, with their intimations of higher truth. Virtually every poet and philosopher makes some sort of pretence in this direction. They must themselves demonstrate whatever validity and worth they possess.

It is indeed a bewildering matter to choose the point of departure for the enterprise. To pinpoint a "beginning" of creation is a precarious undertaking. But if the creative God force projects itself in cycle after cycle, one must think of what goes with the beginning of the present grand cycle. The primary realization here is that God begins his exertion in each cycle with the operation of splitting his unity, first into duality of spirit and matter, then on into infinite multiplicity as the resistance of matter to the projection of noumenal force fragments the primordial energies into smaller units, much as a quantum of water in one body falling from a height is fragmented into multiple drops. On the statement of revered Scriptures, God’s purpose was to enhance, augment and multiply his life. If we may judge by nature, which is his own work, his method in this procedure was to break up his unitary being into infinite units, each carrying the potential of renewing his entire life, planting them in matter, where through growth each would reproduce his being in toto. The fact and the truth of this methodology is seen in every ear of corn or spike of wheat. Each grain is dowered with the potentiality of reproducing itself many times. And how does it achieve this miracle? By its inherent capability of generating its seed. All living vegetation shouts this wonderful truth to us. Its universal and unexceptional character attests its veracity. All units of abounding life follow this law of multiplication of their kind by generation and planting of seed.

The prime instructive force of this natural fact for religion is implicit in the realization--so completely overlooked by theology--that seeds must be  planted. Any one knows this, what makes it so significant for theology? The answer to this is that orthodox theology seems never to have known that the divine soul in man is a seed of God’s own life, therefore his Son, and that for its growth and glorification it had to be incarnated in human flesh. The whole dialectic of the incarnation is flashed into our intelligence here, but theology has never seen it as the rationale of the incarnation. God could conceive these Sons of his in heaven, in his mind; but for their birth, growth, and evolution to godhood, he had to plant them in the soil of earth, in the garden of the world. If they were to cooperate with him in his creation, they had to gain competence through mastery of the laws of matter which they would have to manipulate.

The seed production, planting and germination are at the same time the open sesame to the central sacrament of the Christian faith, the Eucharist. What could the breaking of the bread into fragments signify but the dismemberment of the deific unit force, and the distribution of the pieces to each and all be but the planting? Each higher animal entity received his seed portion of the divine potential, which it was to nurture in the womb of its physical organism and bring to birth therein. Lacking the clarifying insight that analogy with the natural seeding process would have brought to bear on the doctrine, Christian mental dereliction stultified the whole science of theology. Seen through nature’s eyes, the whole mystery of the incarnation would have retained its illuminative intellectual character as well as its dynamic cathartic spiritual power. And what psychic motivation could have exerted more influence to lift the human spirit to heights of beatific exaltation than the positive knowledge that every son of man bears deep within his constitution a seed of the imperishable splendor of the infinite and absolute Life? What could be a more sanifying and salutary influence than the realization that he has the obligation to bring to birth, growth and maturity this child of God?

Much of nature’s intricate and involved procedures in the accomplishment of her purposes was known to the hierophants of the ancient Mysteries and occult brotherhoods. They retained a quantum of explicit data and arcana of knowledge that clarified the understanding of the modes and mechanism of the incarnational procedure. This knowledge reveals that as the stream of evolving life moves forward, it organizes the substrate matter with which it must work into a series or scale of gradations determined by the density, substantiality or vibrational rate of the force at each place. It does this for the formation of material structures through which it can manifest its powers and its modes of the divine being. We know these formations superficially as the planes, levels or kingdoms of life, and they confront us openly and palpably in many forms, but most universally in the four kingdoms of the natural objectivity, the mineral, vegetable, animal and human orders or stages.

The Greek wisdom lore postulated the projection of the stream of creative force "from on high as far as to the last of things." This means from the apex of spirit to the nadir of descent into matter. But on the way "down" the rhythmic and cyclical plan of emanation brought temporary stops at these movements, where the outgoing force of the creative energies was exactly counterbalanced by the inertia of matter at the point, and at each such station the spirit force and the material stability united to structuralize organic life in its expression appropriate to that stage. These formations constituted, as said, the planes and kingdoms. The progression of life downward into matter proceeded under the modus and mechanism of a law by which the energic force stepped down from one of these stations to the one below it until it reached the nadir of descent in the mineral kingdom, or the subatomic kingdoms beneath it. Still in the sphere and aura of the seed generation and dissemination analogy, this has been called the Law of Incubation. It ordains that since the life of a being whose world is one of these platforms of nature is to be reproduced in its succeeding generation, and this process always entails the production of its seeds and their planting--since in homely terms its eggs are to be hatched--it must enwomb its seeds in the soil of the kingdom just below it in the gamut. So we have the seed of a vegetable incubated in the soil of the mineral kingdom; the seed of animal reproduction mothered in a body that if it is not ostensibly vegetable in texture, is at least composed of the vegetable matter ingested into its body as food; and we definitely have the seed of the human nature incubated in bodies which are of the animal order. We have noted Plato’s statement that man is a god inhabiting the body of an animal.

Well, then, it requires only the extension of the law’s jurisdiction just one step higher to discern in one flash of analogy a fact of stupendous importance for all theological science: this marvelous truth that man harbors the Christ-child within the precincts of his humble domicile of flesh. As the law applies to man, his physical body is the soil of the plane lying just below the "divine," and it must therefore become the planting field in which the seed-germ of the divine life of that higher plane must be incubated. That unit life of divinity is the lowest of the divine orders; Plato speaks of its units as "junior gods," "minor gods," the Innocents whom Herod tried to destroy, the "younglings in the egg" in Egyptian terms, the Kumaras of Indian systematism, at any rate fledgling gods, infant deities, Sons of God. But it is the order of divine life that occupies the plane just over man’s head in the scale of the kingdoms. So man is incubating, hatching, in his body the seed-germ of the first of the supernal deities. On his physical side, he is the mother of the Christ-to-be. We prate of the dignity of man, in spite of his abject relapses into brutishness and savagery. If the term has any appropriateness--and it truly has--it is by virtue of the incubation of the infant god within the womb of his physical nature. It is our animal task in the end to join forces with the growing god and help him to redeem us.

With such a goad to inspiration, imagination, seeing how the multiple grades of life’s manifestation stand linked in living connection all the way from first emanative impulse down to near statisticity in the mineral kingdom, or matter’s lowest depths, buoys the mind into a whole gallery of semantic realizations in the sphere of religion and philosophy. The sheer fact of the operation of such a law acts like a magic wand to open up vistas of understanding and vivid ideas carrying entrancing meaning. All questions of immanence or transcendence of nature and life by postulated deity, and the relation of man and nature to each other are at once linked in a mutually congenital affinity. What theological blindness has left in obscurity and perplexity is clarified by this analogy with nature. In one flash of vision, the vast gulf that in lieu of this discernment has been unbridgeable by intelligence between man standing far down in the scale and his God at the summit, is spanned by the knowledge of the law which shows the interconnection of all intermediate stations stretching over the interval.

The Egyptian mind, nature-wise as ever, fixed the symbol of a stairway between man and God--echoed in the legend of Jacob’s ladder--and placed man at his proper station upon it. Each gradation of the volume and power of the life force in its outgoing from first deific projection, is thus linked with the summit of all through its immediate connection with the superior grade just above it, which grade, by virtue of its higher voltage of the divine fire, becomes for its immediate inferior its god or daemon or "higher self." In its turn it enacts the same role for the order below its station, to whom it passes on the further dismembered seeds of its order of creative essence. Hence the vegetable is the god for the mineral, the animal the deity for the vegetable, the human is the genius governing its own animal appanage. And now we can see that the young deity, variously styled as our Ego, Soul or Christ nature, is the divine entity more or less consciously awakened to its aeonial task of playing God to our humanity. He is the God potential, the God seed, assigned by the Father the commission of becoming the God actual, that is, the God consciously expressing his divine nature through the brain organism of the animal in whose fleshly domicile and for whose evolutionary uplift he has been sent to earth. He remains an element of our unconscious until we, the humans, evolve and sensitize the bodily apparatus of brain and nerves to the capability of registering at our level his higher vibratory waves.

Nature thus irradiates our mind with the grandiose conception of how the God force disseminates itself throughout the entire domain of its manifestation. Just as in human physiology, the life-giving oxygen must be carried to every region of the body by the red corpuscles of the blood, so in the whole body of creation the formative and sustaining power of the God-life impregnates the entire corpus of existence. And is the instructive lesson for theology to be missed here? Since there is but the one stream of the God-force that proceeds from the throne at the summit and animates the whole creation, it is a certain truth that the life of the universe is in all parts and at every elevation, low or high, intrinsically divine. One part is not beatific and divine, in contradistinction to another segment which is earthly, sensual, devilish. There is but the one life and that is essentially divine, at whatever level it manifests. However our minds must take account of the gradations in the scale of manifestation, and through misconception of the law of polarity, the lower half of the gamut’s stations, the expression of God’s automatic subconscious, have been stigmatized as hostile to the higher stations, or the spiritual life and so have incurred the contumely of evil. Every part of the universe is instinct with the presence and its appropriate rationing of the mind and spirit of God. Every creature embodies and expresses as much of the God-power as the grade of its organic life enables it to instrumentalize.

As the divine creative impulse thus subsumes the corollary of infinite multiplication of primal unit being, nature again furnishes the paradigm by which we may rationalize the diffusion of primal energy into endless diversification. In the outward-downward sweep of creative force through the operation of the Law of Incubation, the seed-planting of higher dynamic in the soil of the kingdom below, the multiplication of seed from higher parentage looms as a necessary corollary of the process. For the life of the higher parent plane vibrates at a more dynamic rate and frequency and wave-length than the life of the plane below it, so that if a unit of the higher potential is, as seed, to be buried in the matter of the kingdom below, which functions at a far more sluggish tempo, it is obvious that the voltage of the unit life of the superior plane must be stepped down, if it is to accommodate itself to the slower rates of the plane below. This demands the breaking up of the heavier charge of the upper plane’s dynamic into smaller units, just as electricity must be transformed into smaller voltages according to the size of a smaller light. Thus the Eucharistic doctrine applies to life at every stage of descent, higher voltages of living energy having to "dismember" their larger units to synchronize with the more inert forces of the planes in the lower segment. Thus life achieves its infinite multiplication through the paradox of infinite division. Unless the One divided itself endlessly, there could be no multiplication. The ability of one grain of corn to produce several ears is the mystery of life that it always will be, but at least nature displays it to us. What theology has not seen in ages is that the mystery furnishes the paradigm over the pattern of which we can grasp the sense of the doctrine of the incarnation, the Eucharist and the existence of souls in mortal bodies. Arcane wisdom allegorized this principle of the breaking up or "mutilation" of the higher units of soul dynamic for incubation in secondary orders by the doctrine of "dismemberment"

and "disfigurement" of the bodies of the gods. The gods were cut to pieces, and it was the work of the fragments to restore the primal unity through the integrating force of love and brotherhood. "That ye may all be one in Christ Jesus," the higher consciousness. It remains only to say on this subject that the farther the creative power proceeded from the summit source into matter, the weaker became the voltage and the more multitudinous and smaller became the units. The unity of God atomized itself.

In all ancient religion the central legend was the mutilation of the body of the God, his shedding his blood for the redemption of mankind, and his "death" on the cross of matter. Nature again holds the key of interpretation. Always in the rhythmic alternation of the two nodes in the swing of the cycles, in incarnation spirit-soul goes "dead" that matter may live, and at the cycle’s end, matter goes "dead" that spirit may live. The two exchange life and death. This truth is of absolutely paramount importance for religion, as it elucidates the fundamental principle of all religion, the idea that the deific power sacrifices its life for mankind, higher orders die for those below them.

It is therefore a revelation of absolutely crucial import for, particularly, the Christian religion, that the "death" of the Christ for the salvation of the world can not connote the physical demise of the body of an assumedly living God in the flesh. It can mean nothing but the "death" of the spiritual principle when it is buried in the inertia of matter. The bodily demise of any personalized figure playing the role of the Christ nature dying for mankind could be nothing more than dramatization of a great truth. For the positive node of polarity must "die" if the negative is to live, and vice versa.

The light which this arresting natural principle casts into the dark region of theology is of such illuminative power that it fairly dazzles mind and imagination. It is in effect the one great central beam that lights the understanding of all religion. The whole of the relation of God and man to each other is prefigured by the analogy with nature in the relation of seed or young plant to soil. The soul stands in precisely the same relation to body as seed to earth. A seed of godhead is planted in our bodies. The body is Paul’s "natural man," the soul is his "spiritual man." The two are polarized. It therefore becomes permissible to assert, on grounds which nature is doubtless prepared to supply, that every aspect and nuance of the living relation between soul and body will be found prefigured by the phenomena of the relation between seed, or plant, and soil. If we would comprehend the spiritual life and history of man, we must set up our study in the garden. For there the paradigms and analogies will be found in evidence. Some of these may be caught and noted.

As ever in polarity, there is a mutual exchange, a maintenance of balance, or a diminution of one force for the expansion of the opposite. If a physical organism, the negative pole, is to live and mature, the soul of its life must be poured into it and go in abscondito, or "dead." The physical frame of the expression absorbs the energic force. Here once more is the natural key to a Biblical structure. When Jesus symbolically broke his body into pieces and distributed them among his disciples, he adjured them that for the gift of immortality they must "eat my body." He might have said: You must incorporate the sublimated essence and living dynamism of my spiritual body into the texture of your nature. My divine substance will go into obscurity in your bodies, but it will be your life. In the form of Heraclitus’ expression, he could have said: I will die unto your life, as later you will die to restore my life to me.

As, also, it is the tensions of polarity that advance the life principle, the God-force, to new and greater expression, the interrelation must work to mutual advantage. While the soil gives nutriment to the seed or plant, it receives benefit for itself from the power in the latter. It is a fact of agriculture that the roots of alfalfa deposit nodules of nitrogen as deep down as fifteen or more feet, the chemical power of which is absorbed by the soil for its enrichment. The analogue of every such interaction must be discoverable in the mutual interchange of influences between soul and body.

Again, religious philosophy gains immeasurably from the implications here involved. In view of the inveterate drive of religion to detach souls from the influence of earth and the flesh as the enemies of the spirit, the stern rebuke to this errant persuasion is forcefully administered by nature, which so clearly shows that there could be no growth for souls apart from their "marriage" with matter. If religion is to serve humanity helpfully, henceforth it must reduce the emphasis on the mystical lures of "heaven," and accentuate the beneficence of soul’s attachment to earth.

Greek astuteness had embodied these basic concepts in symbolic and allegorical forms. Since it was known that soul goes "dead" for the life of the body, yet renews its own life through the experience of incarnation in it, the body thus was poetized as first the tomb of the soul’s "death," and then in turn the womb of its new birth. So their word for body was soma and that for tomb was sema, while in English tomb and womb make the equation.

The ancient semantic genius played all around this central idea and constructed many a metaphorical figure for the body and the earth as the home of "death" for the soul. The earth was first the "underworld," the deep, dark dungeon, the pit, the cave, the grave, the sepulcher, the coffin, the wilderness, the desert, in which soul spent its dark night and winter hibernation, to emerge renewed and resurrected in the spring turn of the cycle. From the first, all the ritual forms and the annual round of festivals of religion were dated and symbolically structuralized in celebratory form according to the relation of the sun, earth and moon (and several prominent stars and constellations, as Sirius, Orion, Spica, the pole star and others), all to analogize and pictorialize the elements and phenomena of the interlaced life of soul and body. All semantically bespoke the occult meaning of our human life, soul and body in polarity.

Obviously the two solstices and the two equinoxes had to be given great prominence for expressive intimations of relevant significance. The sun, crossing the horizon line downward at eventide and rising afresh each morning, became ineluctably the symbol of divine soul-fire descending in the west for incarnation. This emblemism made the September equinoctial date the time for the memorializing of the meaning of soul’s descent to earth and body, which is now the lost significance of our wild and semi-licentious revelry on the night of October thirty-first, Hallowe’en, the eve of All Souls’ Day, November first. The relevance of the October thirty-first date is that it comes just forty days after the September equinox, and forty is the number symbolizing the incubation period between "death" and resurrection, or planting and germination.

Just as inevitably the winter solstice (advanced three days to conform to the legend that life must lie in the tomb three days, to December twenty-fifth) became the time that ended the descent into matter and the beginning of new birth for the soul. And just as inevitably the spring equinox had to be the epoch of the resurrection out of body into the life of "paradise regained." The whole fabric of ritualism and semanticism lies charted before us, and leaps into meaning as we survey it from its basic analogy with nature. All of religion’s dark and mysterious rites and usages are to be resolved into relevant meaning only when they are referred back to elements inherent in the natural apologue. In most of the festival semanticism the sun, as spirit, and moon, as dead matter, replace the seed as central symbol of the divine power that incarnates. And this is most appropriate, as the soul is in fact constituted of the same spiritual essence as the energy of the sun. The moon, being dead, symbolizes not that divine light, though it does bear witness to that light,--the same as does the body of man to his spirit. One need not be reminded of the prominence of the analogy of the sowing of the seed in the parables of the New Testament.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Throughout all the operations of nature, the formation of objects, the run of phenomena, and the rhythms and durations of periodicities give prominence to the play and significance of numbers. The Pythagorean system made number the basic element in its philosophy. This is not strange when one recognizes the immense part mathematics plays in life.

Some aspects of the significance of the number four have entered incidentally into an earlier discussion. But the way nature features this particular number and the function it serves in the business of the interpretation of the Scriptures entitle it to much fuller consideration.

These Scriptures inform us from the very outset of the creation story that four is the number, so to say, on which the world rests. They say that the stream of creative force issued from the "throne of God" and divided into four heads. It does not elaborate, but leaves us to presume that these primal four branches further subdivided and finally carried the constructive streams out into infinite proliferation and ramification.

As is evident to sense in our dimensional world, four is the number that bespeaks stability, firmness, secure setting, as in a table of four legs. The things in the world must stand four-square for steadiness and permanence. The four divisions of the river of life put under the world the four supports of existence. They were, to be sure, only the lower four of the total seven that, the Egyptians said, compose the structure of life. They were conditioned to lay the physical foundation on which the superstructure of man’s metaphysical triad of conscious spiritual principles could rest and flare into manifestation at the summit of the order of evolution. These three exalted states of being may be described, or merely named, as the abstract mind, enlightened consciousness (as that attributed to the Buddha) and an ultimate consciousness of transcendental being beyond thought or imagination. The lower four thus established the lower platform on which the trinity of conscious life could parade or dance to the tune of existence. How meaningfully this numerical basis of life has been wrought into the architecture of the Great Pyramid, as also inscribed with fathomless semantic genius in the figure of the zodiac! The foundation of four sides, supporting three-sided faces! In the zodiac, a sphere of twelve segments grouped in four elementary divisions, each with three aspects! Such is the recondite artistry of the archaic genius of semantic representation of cosmic truth to human mind.

Of the primary seven substances, four, then, were sufficiently progressed in atomic evolution to emerge into material substantiality in the concrete world, while the upper three remained in invisible static essence. We must look closely now at these four in the world. They can not be readily missed, as all things are composed of their material substance. They are earth, water, air and fire. (Aristotle posited a higher one as the fifth, which he called aether, as the ultimate sublimation of the essence of the three. It is beyond human cognition, except abstractly. Being the fifth, it has come to be called the quintessence.) These four lower substances must be examined, not from the standpoint of physical science, but semantically for evidence of their valence in the structure of the world of life and for the endless analogues they provide between nature and ideation.

All students have known that the ancients claimed that all things were constituted of the four primary elements. What perhaps few know is that the ancient esoteric insight considered the four not from the angle of physics but from their perception of the analogy subsisting between them and the nature and constitution of man. This parallelism having long been a lost secret, it appears that nobody in the history of philosophy since ancient days has essayed the task of tracing the lines of the correspondence. It will be found to yield the most thrilling run of accordances at every turn.

It must be seen that the identity that demonstrates the paralogue can not be a matter of coincidence. The four in nature will be seen to run an exact parallel with the operation of the four in man’s psychic makeup. Man, himself a creature of nature, shares nature’s constituent ingredients. In outer nature the four operate in lower matter; in the human, their play is at the level of psychic forces and sublimated essences, in the realm of sensation, feeling, thought.

The genius of analogical sense made each of the four elements in the outer world the counterpart of a corresponding psychic mode of consciousness. Earth represented sensation; water matched emotion; air symbolized thought; and fire was the universal ancient emblem of the spirit-soul. At the mere listing of the chart the mind senses a fitness, if not some phases of actual suggestions of identity, of these correspondences. Earth is appropriate to the fact of sensation, because this psychic state is generated in a body composed of earthly elements, the physical. Paul reminds us that the natural man is of the earth, earthy. And how kindred seem emotion and water! Both are lightly mobile, fluid, unstable and readily changeable, shimmering at every turn of sun or wind. Likewise how close in affinity are air and thought! Both are invisible, yet alike they reveal their character by what they affect outwardly. It is a testimony to the reality of this correspondence between air and mind that virtually every people in the world, in casting about for words suitable to convey the idea of mind-soul-spirit, has simply appropriated for this concept the words for air, wind or breath. Mind and air are definite poetical counterparts of each other. Then fire; universally this chemical phenomenon, subsisting on air and some more subtly potent elements above it, gave man his most realistic conception of the fiery nature of the creative energy. "Spirit" is itself from the Latin spiro, I breathe. The breath keeps the fires of life burning. The Greek has it as pneuma, which again means "breath." To deeper reflection, the energy of life creative assumes the concept of a fiery potency, both able to build up and to dissolve. The light of the sun, naturally conceived to be the fiery energy of the creative power, was antiquity’s universal symbol for the life-giving power of the Logos. It was the great god Re in Egypt, whose hieroglyph is the sun. Expressing a recondite item of ancient esoteric knowledge, and one which modern science seems to be on the point of confirming, stands the statement of the Greek Neoplatonist Proclus: The light of the sun is the pure energy of intellect. Not man’s intellect, to be sure, but God’s, of which man’s is a miniature and potential copy.

This is verily a concept to stop one’s breath with its astounding significance: the suns in infinite space would then be the glowing fiery brain cells of God’s mind. When God said "Let there be light!," he carried out the command by the exertion of his mind. The light of the universe has been generated by the thinking process of the cosmic mind! Even at the human level, it is a fact that the act of steady thinking generates in the brain a quantum of heat and light, measurable by delicate electrical apparatus. Thought is known to be a product of the flash of electricity from one brain cell to another oppositely charged quite analogous to the lightning in a thunder-storm.

It is not surprising, then, that we find the so-called "Fire Philosophers" of the Medieval period expounding the theory that "every man has a little sun within himself." He would necessarily have a central dynamo of life and "light" within himself, on the cardinal principle of his microcosmical relation to God, the macrocosm. If God has brain cells glowing with ineffable splendor, man in his image would have tiny suns of intellect similarly glowing within his organism. If this seems too much poetry and too little fact, it is to be remembered that the atoms and cells in our bodily structure are proportionally as far apart as these sun-brain-cells of God in the abyss of space. And again much that modern fact-minded mentality has put down as ancient myth and puerile fancy turns out to have been very subtle and recondite scientific reality. Modern science seems to stand close to the conclusion that the ultimate "stuff" of the universe is mind force. Matter has resolved into pure energy, and this energy seems to be akin to the force of mind. Recovering such basic facts of knowledge, the religion that shouted in wild and drunken triumph two thousand years ago that "Great Pan is dead," must now, in humiliation and contrition, acknowledge that in cutting itself off from nature, it severed its connection with the very fount of life.

As the four elements constitute and operate as a gamut in the outer world, their four corresponding grades of consciousness in the life of man will be seen to act in the same serial fashion. A change in the condition of any one will by close association induce changes or initiate effects in its neighbor above or below. As we are more familiar objectively with the outer world, the action must be viewed there first. Following Hermes’ maxim that "that which is above is that which is below," we look at natural fact first, as it is visible. The invisible can not be the clue to the visible; the opposite must be the workable formula. The close and affective relation the four bear to each other in the outer world may be well viewed in such a phenomenon as a thunder-storm. We may say that the causative factor in the action is the topmost element, that is, fire, heat. The latent potency of fire in the air is released in the form of lightning, with the effect of condensing the aeriform particles of moisture in the air, which again results in the precipitation of water down to earth. The phenomenon is an action involving all four. The sunheated earth helps to fire up the air, and all tends to precipitate the water. Fire, air, water, earth; all participate in the interaction.

Is there anything comparable and analogous to this in the psycho-spiritual realm? The fidelity with which the correspondence holds will prove illuminating. To begin with, the four coefficients of consciousness, sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual vision are as interdependently associated in action as are the four external elements. They are related even more closely than are the base, tenor, alto and soprano of a singing quartette, though quite analogously. If either of the four notes in the voiced harmony is off key, the harmony of the whole ensemble is jangled in discord. So if sense, as a toothache, if emotion, as anger or hatred, if thought, as a wrong idea or concept, if a misguided spiritual aspiration, is active in the area of consciousness, the equable balance of the psyche as a whole is disturbed. As in the thunder-storm, the impulse precipitating action seems to start at the top with fire (heat from the sun), causing pressures in the air, which in turn send down the rain to nourish the earth, so we have precisely similar communication of energies from top to bottom of the scale. The dynamic power of the highest inmost spirit pushes out to seek expression in and throughout the organism. Out of the unconscious region of the oversoul there flashes the vision of some exalted truth, an impulse of good, a touching sense of beauty, a new, more cognition than any experienced before. This is comparable to the lightning of the storm. A flash of the fire of spirit, it impinges on the stratum below it, the mind. In this it stimulates vigorous new thoughts of dynamic voltage. From mind it impacts upon the next level and arouses emotions of gladness, happy elation. The well-known psychic effect of such states of feeling is a vivification of the life force through every nerve and fiber of the body. A vivific impulse of spiritual character can thus start at the summit and run down the scale. But an impulse can also originate at any of the four gradients and send its mantling influence both upward and downward, the impact being likely to affect all four levels.

The interrelation of any two of the elements when scanned with a poet’s reflective sensitivity, yields most fascinating intimations of significant meaning. Holding strictly to the four-aspected symbolism, what could more vividly analogize the power of an idea to agitate an emotion than the impact of a breeze, gentle or violent, striking upon the surface of a pond or other body of water? Here is nature dramatizing before our eyes the power of a thought to bestir an emotion. Every degree of the force with which the wind strikes the water surface bespeaks the benignance or the virulence of the emotional repercussion. A raging gale in the air, a rage of feeling in the mind; a gentle breeze, a gracious placid feeling. Then if thought is controlled, steady, luminous, how perfect the reflected image on the water! But if thought is of the irrational order, how unclear and disturbed the feelings!

The phenomena resulting from the intercommunication of the four elements yield in all cases significant intimations of moral-spiritual instruction. As fire takes water out of the air, so spiritual intensification eradicates emotion from thought, leaving pure intellection. Then if air dries up water, thought clears or purges, purifies and sublimates emotion, as when calm reason is exerted to stop anger, passion, violent emotional storm. The Biblical allegories of both Jonah and Jesus stilling the storm on the lake by the power of the spirit, or the Christ-mind, reflect this analogue. Plato picked up the symbol of mire, and the Bible that of miry clay, to emblemize the carnal nature of man. Well, mire, mud, is the mixture of earth and water, and carnality is the mixture of sense and emotion. Pure water will cleanse the dirt and muck of a garment or a surface; pure emotion will purify the grossness of animal tendency. The drying up of the Red Sea and again of the Jordan River for the facilitation of the Israelite crossing is the amplification, is the mythicization, of the power of mind and soul (heated air) to extinguish the elements of sensuality and emotion, as impediments to the soul’s progress across the sea of life.

Can we miss the impressive force of the analogical instructiveness of the fact that water is the deadly enemy and conqueror of fire? Do we need any cogent "proof" that an overcharge of sensual emotion can kill the divine spirit in man? St. Paul’s "carnal mind" and "concupiscence" and "fleshly lusts that war against the soul" and asceticism’s misguided drive to subdue the flesh in the interests of the soul acclaim this relationship.

The correlations between the four within and without stand in still more striking suggestiveness when we take the ancient sages’ bifurcation of the nature of man into its two upper-lower components, the natural man and man spiritual, man of the body, man of soul-mind. "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven," says St. Paul. "First that which is natural, then that which is spiritual." Obviously it must be so, since patently the body must be here before there can be a brain through which an intellecto-spiritual nature can function. Just as obviously the natural man is composed of the two lower elements, earth and water, by actual physical constituency, about seven-eighths water, one eighth earth. So he has the conscious powers of sense and emotion. Just as certainly the second or spiritual man from heaven is composed of mind and spirit, with air and fire as their symbols.

The realizations which come to us through reflection upon this symbolism give us an insight of the most vivid character into the significance of the great doctrine and fact of the incarnation. If the spiritual man is composed of fire (spirit) and air (mind), and the natural man of water (emotion) and earth (sensation), the incarnation of the higher in the body of the lower carries every suggestion of the phenomenon of the introduction of fire into water. And precisely under these terms the arcane scientists conceived it for purposes of graphic representation. It vividly portrays the entire moral-spiritual conflict in the life of man as an analogue of the struggle between fire and water. Gross sensuality will as effectually douse the pure fire of spirituality as water will quench fire. From the other side the superior chemical power of fire can dry out and evaporate the dank, moldy "moist nature" of the carnal impulses. It is this latter symbolism that is the interior sense of all the allegories of God drying up the rivers to effectuate the passage of his children across their period of immersion in bodies that are three-fourths water. The power of the sunlight of mind and spirit to purify and cleanse the foul corruption of the flesh is the ground-base of the theological hypostatization of "purgatory." This is indeed the catharsis of the Greek conception, which was rightly applied to the struggle of the soul on earth, and not, as in Christian misconception, reserved for the after-life. The soul-figure in the Book of the Dead distinctly says that he comes to earth to purify himself in the most high degree, and to effect this purification by bathing in the pool beneath the two divine sycamores of heaven and earth.

Also he says that he takes his position on the line of the horizon because there he stands directly on the line that separates the air and fire of his divine nature from the earth and water of his lower bodily life. Strikingly illuminating too is the idea that the soul finds purification from what in the symbolism must be thought of as verily a mud-bath on earth! This emblemism is found in some systems.

But most significantly of all, the symbolism depicts the esoteric purport of the rite of baptism. It never could have carried any other connotation than the dipping of the soul into the water of the body. However, in the warped ideas of theology, it has seemed incongruous that an innocent soul issuing from the "pure" state of heavenly life should have to plunge into the muck and mire of earthly sensuality to be purified. The paradox disappears when the terms of the situation are known and the rationality discerned. The Book of Revelation portrays this transaction under the metaphor of a mountain of fire from heaven going down into the ocean which is on the border of the earth and, as it were, setting the sea on fire. It is the tragic fate of poetizations of this sort to be transmogrified by the ignorant masses always into arrant nonsense through literalization, so that the occult sense is traduced into gibberish. Lyrically inspired philosophical genius conceived the figurative purification of man by his being washed in the blood of the divine nature shed for him. Under zodiacal symbolism it was the blood of the lamb slain from the foundation of the world, of the bull in the Mithra cult, or the sacrificial goat, or the wounded lion or the ram in the Moses story. But from the other side the young god needed to undergo baptism in the earthly pool, the body’s blood. This is made expressly clear in the New Testament allegory of the baptism of Jesus by John, his forerunner. John defers to the superior evolutionary rank of the Christ nature, and hints that it would be far more fitting that he, the lower, should be baptized by Jesus, the higher. Jesus demurs to this, protesting his necessity of being baptized by the lower element of water. His baptism is only that of water, and for evolutionary purposes, this is necessary for the infant deity; the baptism which he will later give the lower human will be that of air (spiritus) and fire. The youthful god, however, is to walk on the surface of the water and not sink into it.

We have but to reflect a moment on Paul’s animadversions on the power of the carnal mind to drag the soul down into the dank and corrupting mire of sensuality.

How marvelously nature confirms the reality of his fears by its own symbols! For earth and water fall! By natural gravity, they move downward. What, on the other hand, is the tendency of air and fire? Just as naturally they rise! Does any reflective mind need any further confirmation of the theological doctrine that the Christ nature came to earth to lift the human race toward divinity? Our humanity degrades us; our divinity exalts us. The conflict of these two opposing tendencies is depicted in the figure of the Solomon’s Seal, the six-pointed star formed by the interlacing of two triangles, the apex of the one pointing upward, the other downward. Man lives his life at the point of the clashing of the "upward and the downward ways," as Heraclitus said.

Then theology receives another quite astonishing corroboration of one of its chief psychological forces from the side of nature, the redemptive power attributed to the experience of what is called "conversion." To be redeemed and exalted, man must be converted. He must inhibit the downward drag and turn and move with the upward attraction. If his "watery" carnal nature will not rise by any power of its own, does nature suggest any possibility of its being converted into a form in which it will rise into the air? And what power would effect this transfiguration? Mirabile dictu, nature comes forward with the instant answer: There is a force that can transform water into a form in which it, too, will rise, and that force is fire, the fiery power of spirit-soul. The entry of the soul into the body in incarnation puts its spiritual fires under the kettle of the water of human life. If the soul-fire can not elevate the carnal nature in its unconverted state as water, it can do so by first converting it into vapor, steam. Steam stands just midway between water and fire, thus representing the union of emotion and spirit. Here is forever established the truth that if man will mix his emotions with the fiery energies of thought, he will rise in evolution. Here is the gist of most religious science, condensed and thrown on the screen of the mind by one nature symbol.

Shakespeare drew this analogy for us in the scene of the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth. This word "witch" is from the German wissen, "to know," and the knowing principle is the work of the divine spirit, the trinity in man that matches the trinity of the cosmos. So the three "knowing ones" dance around the steaming, stewing kettle, in the water of which the poet has placed a mixture of elements all symbolizing the dark, gruesome nocturnal side of life. The fire beneath the cauldron is the fire of spirit doing its work of converting the hellish brew into the steam that will "cause the principles to rise," as Egypt puts it.

But nature has more than one way of symbolizing this principle of conversion. One of the most compelling forms is seen in the great religious symbol--the candle and its flame. The verisimilitude of the two sides of the analogy is perfect. You have first the body of the candle, and then what might be called its spirit, the flame, and the two are mediated by the wick. If the flame is to remain in connection with its body, it must exercise its power to convert the elements of its body into the likeness of its own fiery nature or texture. Again the converting power is fire. Through the process of first converting the tallow into liquid, then into gaseous form, the flame effectuates a perfect illustration of all that can be conceived as what theology calls transubstantiation of the elements of human nature into those of the divine status. Some murders of delegates to early Church councils, where the heat of creedal passion burned more fiercely than the fires of reason, might have been avoided if mind has taken counsel directly from nature.

Again a light shines from nature into theological darkness when one looks closely into the aspects of the hell-fire doctrine. Heavenly light and glory have been universally symbolized by the element of fire. But so also has the hypothecated experience of souls unfortunate enough to fall into the hell of religious conception. But occult science has in its symbolism always distinguished between two kinds of fire, the one of spirit burning in its purity, the other of spirit enmired in the carnal life of the flesh. The one is the pure clear light of the spirit, the other is the murky, smudgy, sulphurous dark flames of purgatory, generating lurid flares and noxious fumes to asphyxiate the hapless inmates of the underworld. Since there is no hell lower than our good earth, the suffering in hell’s fiery tortures must be experienced in the life here. It needs only a flare of active imagination to carry the mind from symbol to reality if one will reflect on the connotations of the emblemism here under the eye. It is fire fighting water again. The fuel the spirit is trying to convert into sublimated form is damp and moist with sense and emotion, and when fire has to contend with damp material, the product is smoke, foul acrid fumes, heavy offensive odors and dull turbid flames, in dark contrast to the bright translucent flames of soul. To purge and purify the murky fires of the soul’s experience in hell, the moist elements of such psychic states as hate, passion, violent emotion of all kinds must first be eliminated. Then the flame of conscious life can burn brilliantly even here while still attached to the candle of the body.

Clear insight into further illuminating revelation comes with consideration of the datum that each of the four elements standing below its upper neighbor, contains the essence of the one above it. Earth contains some water; water contains air, as is seen in the bubbles raised in boiling; air contains fire, and fire no doubt harbors in its interior composition the potency of still higher-pitched energy in sublimated form. This would seem to intimate that the primal basic "ultimate" stuff of the universe contains within itself all the lower manifestations and extrudes them out of its unmanifest unconditioned essence in the process, so to say, of unfurling its flag of being out into limitless space.

The ancient sages do speak of matter as being the dregs, the lees, of the wine of life. This symbol of matter as a sedimentary deposit at the bottom of the vessel of life gives the mind an apt hint of profounder reality.

The concept of fire emanating out of water was ubiquitous in religious semanticism of the early day. In the first place all birth issues from the primal motherhood of water. Life on earth issued from the sea. The blood in man’s veins is sea water, though somewhat transformed by the air in lung breathing over long ages. Shall we think it strange, then, that many of the various mother-goddesses of mythology were actually named from the sea? Mary is of course the Latin maria, the seas. In the Berosan account of creation, the primal mother is named Thallath, which is the Greek word for "sea." Mother, matter and water are metaphorically one.

Moreover our Christian Bible definitely uses the figure of the fire of soul descending and kindling a flame in the ocean, setting the sea on fire. Several verses in Revelation speak of the fire going down into the earth or the sea and "causing a burning within the sea," which, incidentally, turned the sea water in man’s body into blood. It is established beyond cavil now by present erudite scholarship that in fact the "Red Sea" does not historically refer to the geographical body of water on the map, but to the blood of the human body. The translation of iam suph (Hebrew) as the "Red Sea" was a hint of ancient esotericists to that effect, as the original sea water of the biological evolution had become red. As a matter of straight fact, the translation as "Red Sea" has no other warrant, since iam suph does not translate as "Red Sea" at all, but as "Reed Sea," several later Bible translations having made the true translation back to the true one, the "Reed Sea."

The ancient semanticists pointed to all vegetation as emanation of life out of earth and water. One of the most favored symbols of this kind was the lotus. It stems from the mud and water and rises to fructify in the air and the sun-fire. As human life is impossible in or under water, life was pictured as coming out of or floating upon it. Even the kingdom of the heavens rested upon the water: "He hath founded it upon the waters and established it upon the floods." The coming of soul (air symbol) down to rescue man immersed in the water of the body was referred to in several chapter titles in the Book of the Dead: "May air be given unto these young divine beings," the incarnated young god-souls. "Of sniffing air in the waters of the underworld." "Of breathing air and having dominion over the waters of the underworld."

But nature can show us another symbol of the sevenfold constitution of man in her display of glory in the rainbow. In its coloration we read again the septenary Gestalt of the universe and of our own construction. The one primal essence of being, symboled by white light, being refracted as it passes through the grades of matter--whose symbol, be it remembered, is water--is broken into its seven constituent rays. In the supreme cosmic reference, these are the seven Archangels of religion, the first subdivisions of the primary unity of God. All manifest form must therefore be septenary in structure. Every cycle runs its course and attains its culmination in seven sub-cycles. Hence the rainbow comes at the end of the rain, in shining token of the fact that never again--in that cycle--will the life of soul have to be immersed in the water of incarnation. Also it is clearly delineated in the rainbow phenomenon that creation can come only through the passage of the creative fire through the medium of water, i.e., matter. How mutely instructive is our schoolmistress, Mother Nature!

Then there is the phenomenon of an optical nature which seems to endorse the theological doctrine of the Trinity, as well as that of the seven-aspected form of creation. How singular it is that when a ray of sunlight is passed through a three-sided prism, the image thrown on a screen is that of the seven colors of the spectrum, the rainbow! The stream of energy emanating from the one, passing through the trinity, is precipitated out into a septenary manifestation.

In addition to the concern that the soul should have air to breathe in the waters of the underworld, there was expressed also the danger of its being burned by the smudgy fires of lust and passion. So we find other chapters of the Ritual with such titles as: "Of drinking water and not being burned by fire in the underworld;" and "Of not being scalded with water." The noted Egyptologist, A. E. W. Budge, comments: "as fire and boiling water existed in the underworld, he hastened to protect himself from burns and scalds by the use of chapters 63-A and 63-B." We find the echo of this in Isaiah (43): "When thou passest through the water I shall be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee; when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle on thee."

This underworld, then, must be the place where fire and water are joined in affective relation. And the history of mankind over the last two or three millennia would beyond all cavil have presented a more felicitous, certainly less horrendous, record, if intelligence had been sharp enough to inform the religious mind that the only place in evolution where fire and water are mingled in such a relation is in the human body on earth--which, then, must be that underworld. For while fire has been variously associated with heaven, and the very name of the celestial region is the empyrean (pyr is "fire"), never in all religious literature, either actually or figuratively, has water been located there. That element has always pertained to the lower world. Ancient semantic perspicacity represented the soul, the young god, as in danger of drowning in the water of this nether world. And when to this water there was applied, like an alcohol flame under a test-tube in a laboratory, the fire of spirit brought down by the Promethean soul in incarnation, and the flame elevated the temperature of the water to the boiling point, the metaphor depicted the soul as in danger of scalding.

A common form of air and water mingled with some violence is foam or bubbles. Froth arises when air is forcefully associated with water. Here beyond doubt is the clue to the esoteric riddle of Greek symbology, which represented the birth of the goddess Venus from the sea-foam which was stirred up about the knees of the great God Jupiter as he strode through the sea. Here is the beautiful poetic figure hinting at the truth that Love is born in the evolutionary process when the energic injection of the god’s power of fiery mind into the emotional life effects the blending of air (mind) and water (emotion) in the consciousness. Can analogy that runs as true to fact and life as all these things do be thrust aside as too flimsy for intimations of the living truth? Is not love the product of the conjunction of mind and emotion? Froth would indicate the elevation of emotion to the plane of thought, the injection of mind into feeling. The emergence of bubbles of air to the surface suggests how thought is generated out of the mud (sensation) and water (emotion) of the bodily experience. Scriptural exegetists should not forget the name "Moses" means "drawn out of the water;" and the legend had him picked up as the infant floating in a basket of reeds, calked with bitumen, among the marshes at the river’s edge. The same tradition went with the semi-mythical Sargon of Assyria before him. Life and consciousness do take their rise out of the mingled earth and water of the worldly, the human underbase.

In this connection it is most fascinating to find a legend that clung to the symbolical baptism of Jesus by John in the Gospels. According to the second-century Christian exegetist, Justin Martyr, at the baptism of Jesus, "a fire was kindled in the waters of the Jordan." In a human birth, the new unit of fiery life is born out of a sack of water.

It should not demand a special poetic genius to catch the trenchant force of the realization that mind truly is born out of the elements of sense and feeling. By incarnation the fire of soul enters the watery realm of the body, and water is already permeated by air in hidden form. Heat from spirit fire raises the water into vapor, which, being an airy form of water, typifies the generation of mind. How amazingly true to this symbolism we find the figurism of old Egypt’s portrayal of verities when we read in the Ritual (chap. 164): "Oh, the being dormant within his body, making his burning in flame, glowing within the sea by his vapor. Come, give the fire, transport or transform the vapor of the Being!" The very breath of life, air containing moisture, is the symbol of the fiery soul now linked with emotion. This exhortation was a plea to the god, with his fire, to enter the lower human nature and sublimate the emotional element, water, by impregnating it with the air of mind. Each higher element is able to raise the potential of the one below it and refine it. By the single application of this principle of understanding, a hundred subtle discernments of abstruse meaning hidden esoterically in myth and Scripture, are apprehended with the force of a luminous clarification hardly dreamed of. There is cathartic dynamism in these conceptions of psycho-spiritual realities when they are seen in the analogical light of nature’s inescapable realism.

In the range of the symbolism of water and air, it was impossible that so conspicuous a natural thing as the existence of creatures like fish in the water could fail to be caught and elaborated for semantic figures. It is doubtless of great significance that in the arcane lore of the mythologists, all world saviors were represented as being born in one phase of zodiacal emblemism--in the sign of Pisces, the Fishes. The birth at Christmas, or the winter solstice was rather the quickening of that which had gone "dead" at the lowest point of fire’s immersion in matter. The final delivery of soul-fire out of the water was consummated at the end of Pisces, the spring equinox, when the sun crossed the line separating the underworld from the heavens. For here the soul graduated finally from its schooling in this underworld of matter and body into the kingdom of spirit. Symbolically this occurred at the end of Pisces, and is the base of all Eastern ritualism. In the understanding of the seers of old time, the first of the two mothers of the Messiah-Christs was matter in its inorganic, invisible, subatomic state; the second was matter organic, visible and atomic. Hence legend gives to the Savior-gods two mothers, Isis-Nephthys, Sarah-Hagar, Leah-Rachel, Aholah-Aholibah and Elizabeth and Mary, to bring the Sun-gods to birth. The first conceived them, the second gave him birth. And so, as Jesus said, the first birth is of water; the second is of spirit.

How significant it becomes, then, that both in Greece and Rome the early Christians were given the appellation denoting "little fishes." Both Augustine and Tertullian compared Jesus to the Great Fish in the sea, and his followers to the little minnows. They were dubbed the "members of the fish-cult." The Greek word for "fish" is ichthys and its five letters were made the initials of the designation: Iesous Christos theou uios soter: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior. This was all because the early esotericists in the movement (who were soon silenced) made a play on the zodiacal symbolism. In Indian religion, there had been the Fish-Avatar of Vishnu, and in Babylonian the coming of Ioannes, half-man, half-fish, and in the old Hebrew tradition there was Dagon, whose image was broken (dag is Hebrew for "fish.") It is not to be flouted as without significance that in the "miracle" of Jesus feeding the five thousand in the desert, fish and bread were the two elements of nutrition. And Bethlehem, where figurism placed the Christ-birth, means the "house of bread," with the birth in the fish-sign. The Christ is figured as the divine food, as bread and fish, to be eaten by humanity. As symbol the fish points to the submergence of the god life in matter (water), who yet does not drown there, who can still breathe under the elements. Even the fish’s bladder came in for suggestiveness, as the means by which the fish can rise higher or sink deeper in the water, hinting at the power of mind (air) to control life in incarnation.

Then how readily the fish symbolizes the forms of organic life floating in the medium of the inorganic! As was shown above, the two states of matter, first inorganic, then organic, give birth to the ultimate divine product in evolution, the Christ mind. These two mothers, first matter and second matter, are usually two sisters, but sometimes are mother and daughter, as the first must give birth to the second. Isis, first mother, says that she gave birth to the suns; naturally enough fish floating in the water suggests the infinite hosts of suns floating in the sea of space. Several of the Mother-Goddesses, notably Atergatis and Semiramis, instead of being named for the sea, bore the designation of "Fish-Mothers." And how few would know that, as Jesus was the son of Pisces, the fish in symbolic legendry, so his Old Testament paralogue, Joshua, was the son of Nun--and nun in Hebrew means "fish."

There will be the feeling on the part of many that all this semantic flourish is strained, far-fetched, irrelevant and proves nothing. What it does prove is that the ancient genius, in its effort to portray the deep cathartic power of spiritual truth, turned to nature for outward pictorializations of the cosmic thought.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

As the sun injects the rays of its dynamic into the body of its system, so the little spiritual sun in each person’s life irradiates the body with its energies. One special exemplification of this process was in view everywhere in such a vegetative operation as is seen in the production of the grape. And in respect to the fruit of the vine being the main source of the intoxicating efficacy of wine, this natural symbol gained the widest prevalence. To minds seeking semantic parallels, the production of the grape was viewed as an analogue of the god-power of the spirit-sun in man turning water into wine. In the most direct view of it, this is just what happens. The energic life of the vine seeps up water through the roots and the sun turns it into wine. In so doing, it injects into it a fiery potency to raise the "spirits" of the one who drinks it. Even naive imagination caught this imputation so strongly as to give rise to the vulgar name for wine or intoxicants--fire-water. It is water with fire in it. Also the law could find no more suggestive descriptive term for it than "spiritous liquor"--liquor with "spirit" in it. So it is said in an Egyptian papyrus addressed to Horus, the god: "Thou didst put grapes in the water that cometh forth from Edfu." The Quiche name for lightning is Cak-ul-ha, "fire coming forth from water." The symbolism of Jesus coming as a wine-bibber has been badly distorted to suggest his loose mingling with the lowly sinners and the outcast. On a higher level, it means that he came like Horus of Egypt, "full of wine" or "the Jocund," or as in Greek ideology, as Bacchus, God of Wine. The ancient semantic tendency seized on intoxication itself as a not inapt symbol of man’s apotheosization, his being raised to a divine exhilaration or ecstasy. The spirit elevated his consciousness to a divine mania, as Plato called it. "Heaven is pregnant with wine," is an Egyptian fragment. The natural man, with his body seven-eighths liquid, furnishes the raw water, and heaven puts the grape of divine exaltation into it.

There must therefore be a similitude between the natural chemistry of fermentation and the spiritualization of the elements of the psyche, that effects a transubstantiation of lower consciousness to higher. Fermentation generates air in a liquid, faithful paralogue of the generation of mind from emotion. What is imparted is literally an inflation--better, afflation--of feeling into subtler apprehensions, a higher mysticism. Matching it is of course the figurism of yeast in the dough of bread which "raises" it. Leaven is like a seed with potency to expand to higher dimension.

The power of air in motion--mind at work--to dry out the "moisture" of the subordinate sensuality was picturesquely illustrated by the figure of the god with a fan in his hand, in the act of winnowing the wheat on the barn floor. It was a type of spiritual purification, achieved by the work of the intellect operating to sweep out the dross of sense, the chaff, and thus free the golden grain of the divine food for its proper nourishment of man. The initiates in the ancient Mysteries were washed with water, then fanned as evidence of their purification by spirit. "Let air be given to these divine beings in the underworld."

The incarnating soul, being typified as a nucleus of fire in the sea, can be poetized in scores of suggestive ways. It all dramatizes the ruling, converting power of intellect in every relation to the lower life. The Chaldean Oracles declare that "the artificer of the fiery world is an intellect of intellect." The mortal who approaches to fire will receive a light from divinity, it was said. The brightening spirit of man "becomes refulgent with the radiations of ineffable and implacable fire." Men were begotten, was the statement, by the mingling of the fire of the gods with the blood of women. Hence the sacred books affirm that "in the blood is the life of the soul."

Inescapable from the semantic mind seeking analogies was the light of the firefly. It seems to glow best in moist grasses, a typical emblem of our divinity flashing in the emotional atmosphere of our lives. Then the presence of phosphorescent fish deep down in the dark of the sea! How vivid a token of the power of the light of mind-spirit to reach far down into the sea of matter!

The general idea behind the sacrifice of animals on the altar was that of the conversion of mortal flesh into higher forms by fire of soul. The glory of the Lord was pictured as a consuming fire on the top of the mountain. Even the lower smudgy fires of Hades and Tophet were purgatorial. Most suggestive, then, is the descriptive name given this earthly underworld by Egypt’s hierophants: "the crucible of the great house of flame." That the burning is always in connection with, or having to overcome, the soul-deadening power of water is attested by the idea of the soul’s keeping its flame intact "through three days of navigation."

The idea of the need of the human to keep the divine fire alight in the house of flesh, the temple of the soul, was, as is well known, carried out ritually by the Romans in the institution of the vestal virgins, who maintained the fire on the hearth, and by the Greeks with their eternal torch. The fire on the household hearth was another form of the same thing, and gave rise to the significance assigned to the chimney in the Santa Klaus legend.

When Moses was to receive a communication from deity, he ascended the mount and the voice of God spoke to him out of the flashes of lightning mingled with smoke on the summit. The fiery glory of the full presence of divinity was so overwhelming to mortal sight that it had to be dimmed by the intervention of a cloud. So the figure for it was a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. By day man can see his way by his own inner light, but in the darkness of incarnation, the soul’s night, he must have the aid of the divine light.

And how can one miss the beautiful poetic intimations of such a metaphor as is seen in the Bible’s figure of the burning bush seen by Moses? A green moist raw product of nature, yet burning with a fire that did not consume it. Here we have man’s vegetative life aflame with the fire of divinity, yet able to sustain the illumination. The fire arises out of the natural order, though the torch that lights it descends from above. "Our Lord is a living fire."

The Egyptians it was who took the Babylonian word for "fire," which was ur, and added the initial "p" which made it pur (pyr) as "the fire," and gave it to the world’s most massive structure, the pyramid, as "the measure of fire," and they are also the authors of the symbol of the fiery serpent. Ubiquitous in their iconography was that little figure of the uraeus, a serpent of fire. This was Satan, the son of divine fire turned demoniac by the forces engulfing him on earth, "that old serpent," the reputed stoker of the underworld furnaces. It is he, our lower sensual emotional self, that keeps feeding the fires of lust, passion, greed, hatred, and all iniquity and uncharitableness. The Chaldean ur was that original creative fire out of which all things were first created. The first father of life, which was A-Brahm (not Brahm but the first emanation from Brahm--a meaning "not"), issued forth from Ur of the Chasadim, the first seven radiations of the archangelic fires of life, who made creation sevenfold. The cleansing power of fire is marked in our word pure and the many derivatives from it. "Wickedness burneth as a fire. It shall devour the briars and thorns and shall kindle in the thickets of the forest, the animal underbrush of man’s bodily life," says Isaiah (9:17).

The ancient religious figure of the sea-serpent, or fiery dragon of the waters, breathing out flames from his nostrils, portrays the potential divinity of man, mingling the potency of spirit (fire) with the moisture of his breath.

Revelation dramatizes the seven angels as pouring out their fires upon the sea and upon the earth. The net effect was to set the sea on fire--need one say, allegorically?--as well as to turn the sea into blood, in which is harbored the fire of spirit. When the biological evolution which originated in the sea was shifted to the land, by the exchange of gills for lungs, sea water was turned into blood. And as blood is red, here at last is the solution of a Biblical conundrum that has defied elucidation for over two thousand years.

How apt is Heraclitus’ definition of our nature: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." Just as a babe at birth transfers from the kingdom of water to that of air, so by evolution man comes out of the sea and has a new birth in the kingdom of air. All this states the scientific fact that the evolution of consciousness brings man first through the level of sensation and emotion up into the kingdom of (air) mind, and fire (spirit). Hermes says: "I am gone out of myself into an immortal body, and I am not now what I was before, but am begotten in mind." Man bathes, said the sages, in two pools, the pool of water and the pool of fire. "I purify me in the southern tank, and I rest me in the northern lake," says the soul in the underworld.

In ancient Egyptian scripts, the twelve followers of Horus, the Christ, were, according to the varieties of the figures used, called masons, carpenters, potters, harvesters, reapers, fishermen, herdsmen, shepherds, husbandmen; but were in all these characters the "twelve saviors of the treasure of light." For divinity was destined to come to a fiery glow in the human constitution in twelve modifications of the innate divine flame. That is why all world saviors came accompanied by twelve supporters.

As souls made their journey across the turbulent sea of life in physical bodies, these were inevitably represented as boats that crossed the lower main, the "lower Nun." As "nun" means "fish" in Hebrew, the semantic origin of the Jonah story is clear. On board were Horus and his twelve rowers or sailors. But having crossed this lower sea in the boat of the physical body and being destined to cross the expanse of the heavenly life after the dissolution of the body, there was required for the heavenly journey a boat of a "spiritual" texture, the fabled "ship of the sun." When man at death drops his physical corpus, he is not bodiless, for body of some substance, coarse or tenuous, the soul must have. So at what we call death, the soul disembarks, say the Egyptians, from the boat of Horus, the physical body, and reembarks on the bright ship of Re, the boat fabricated of sublimated sun-essence, and in it majestically sails across the heavens to begin its next descent on the western side. This is that "spiritual body" which St. Paul says we have, along with a physical body.

This run of natural features forms a large and distinctive body of the analogical material utilized by the authors of the sacred books to dramatize spiritual and cosmic verities. Our effort with it has been to correlate it significantly with its actual scientific references. The fact that the mentality that conceived and expressed the literature most highly and universally accredited as oracle of truth in human history, found nature symbolism to be the most graphic and dynamic mode of expressing this highest grade of truth, should solidly attest the affinity between nature and the principles of spirituality. It can on this ground alone be assumed that in the minds of those ancient sages nature was held as the highest tribunal, the court of final authority on all matters of truth.

But there is an immense, almost measureless, area of nature’s essences that relate to general philosophy without particular application to religion or the Scriptures, although an indirect relevance to spiritual law may be discovered. Much of this grade of typology will be seen to throw a brilliant light on the principles of general science, or life’s universal laws.

As introduction to the next appeal to nature for verification or illustration of universal formulae of truth, it may be instructive to review the most fundamental of those primal archai. First there is the bifurcation of original unity of being into the duality for the necessary action of polarity, then the further division of the stream of creative energy into infinite multiplicity. The outward creative movement proceeds, as seen, not in a continuous smooth flow, but in the wave-like motion of rhythm, periodicity and eternal alternation of activity and rest, life and death, and all the shuttle movement. The conjunction of life and spirit with matter gave rise both to the tension between them and the alternate exchange of predominance, now of one, now of the other, the balancing and then the rotation of the forces of life and death. Notable also was the principle that life expresses itself in the active arc of each cycle in manifest organic existence, then when time dissolves the organism, it retires into its arche or beginning form, to bide its time for renewal of its active expression in matter. Perhaps the greatest mystery of life for the mind of man is the miracle by which life can dismantle such a gigantic structure of its creation as a great oak tree, condense the entire particularity of its organism in some sort of durable essence, and pack it all up in the body of a tiny acorn, preserve it in that form for its period of quiescence, then at the turn of the cycle, bring it forth again with every part intact. by its ability to perform this living legerdemain life proclaims itself as the alpha and the omega of being, the first seed and the last fruit, the beginning and the end. Finally we have the phases of the struggle between the two forces, positive and negative, between spirit and matter, matter moving upward from first inertia and spirit descending to wrestle with it.

The purpose of this brief sketch of the most obvious basic archai was to make impressive the statement now to be made, that in truth every item and element of these principia is to be found demonstrated in the life of perhaps the most wonderful of nature’s productions, the majestic thing we call a tree. Yes, the tree is the fit object of our wonder and adoration. At the same time it becomes the most illuminating teacher of the great basic laws of our life and that of the cosmos. It preaches to us its gospel, flaunts in our eyes its message and dramatizes for us the living formulae of truth.

We have for a moment to go back to the diagram illustrating the sevenfold staging of the approach to each other of spirit and matter and their meeting in the middle on the line of the "horizon," to engage in their aeonial battle to achieve eventual union. We must contemplate closely the phenomenon of the two forces moving toward each other in opposite directions. Suddenly in the light of what the tree shows us, we get a keen and subtle comprehension of what Heraclitus meant by the movement of the upward and the downward ways in the living process. The tree displays the life force moving in the two directions and carries thought on to astonishing further revelations of hidden truth.

The great "vegetable" stands rooted in earth, yet with its organic body reaching up into the heavens. From the earthy watery depths through roots and trunk rises the life-bearing current, the sap, and spreads upward to the topmost and outermost branches, distributing the vivifying nutrients for physical being to the entire organism. That is the movement upward; is there a creative power from above descending to meet it? And would such a power come through the agency of air and fire? Sure enough; down from the celestial heights through the air streams that splendor of the light of the sun! Having lifted the material elements up as far as they can go, the upward movement is met by the magical converting power of a heavenly essence, sunlight. And the miraculous process of photosynthesis takes place. In scientific terms, this results in the production of chlorophyll, green leaf substance. The fact of greatest moment here is that the conjunction of the vivifying power descending from above and the watery substance ascending from below brings the generation of a new birth of life. Just as in man the divinity is born from the union of body coming up from below and soul descending from above, so the tip of every branch of the tree becomes that mid-point where sun and sap meet to procreate new life.

From this phenomena mind leaps to the determination so clearly symbolized: that new life is generated and given birth always out on the periphery of creation, on its remotest frontiers. Not in the interior recesses of being, but out in the open sunlight of its organic existence do the two nodes of the eternal polarity travel to find their rendezvous. The unity of being can not breed renewal; only when the two forces of the duality swing far out from their point of emergence to meet each other halfway between summit and nadir is new birth possible.

Only one allusion to this arche has come to the notice of the author in the Bible, but the reference to it is a very pointed one, and that its deep significance for theology has seemingly been missed for centuries is again an evidence of the blindness to esoteric truth which exoteric literalism has thrown upon spiritual vision. In addressing his audience, presumably of Jews, in the temple, he said: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world." (John 8:23). He means to tell them that they are of the order of the first or natural man, born physically, but not reborn spiritually. His reference to himself is of course as the type of that divinity that despised not the virgin’s womb in bringing the seed of the divine life down for implantation in animal man.

All arcane wisdom of the past is at one in affirming that while the evolution of atomic matter could generate brain consciousness to the level of sense and emotion in animals, there was required, as it were, a spark of ignition supplied by a higher development of mind dynamic to impregnate the natural order with the potential of future divinity. For everywhere it is asserted that this power "came down from heaven" and was made man. "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven." It is said to be a light to enlighten the unregenerate and that it came from the Father of all lights.

Again it is our universal mentor, nature, that can turn what is outwardly poetic figurism into meaningful significance even in the province of science. In the meeting and marriage of spirit and matter in man’s development, the forces operative under--be it remembered--God’s subconscious mind work to evolve the physical bodily functions and instrumentalities through which the higher dynamic of spiritual force can express themselves in open consciousness. What, then, is spoken of in the Biblical allegories as the descent from heaven of the Lord of life to become the new leaven in the being of lower man, can be more realistically seen as simply the building from beneath, by natural evolution, of the organic functionalism for the flowering out of the divine expression. The development of this mechanism for the manifestation of the divine seed potential in man is what is meant by the natural life coming up from below.

An illustration, crude but patent enough, is at hand in any radio or television apparatus. The air is vibrant with the waves of a symphony, which would remain in the upper gamuts of the vibratory area if our mechanical genius had not contrived an instrument which by synchronization brings the effect into the room.

So when the natural man, coming up from below, has through the stress of experience developed a brain and nervous system of requisite sensitivity, the higher octaves of the celestial music resound in the area of consciousness. This certainly is the meaning of the Promethean myth; this is the method by which Jove’s fire is stolen off the empyreal altar and brought down to man on earth. Mortals will receive all the supernal power for which they can provide receptive apparatus.

Quite likely, if the minutiae of the processes of photosynthesis were completely under observation, more than one highly instructive analogy with the interfusing of soul and body would no doubt be discernible. For the fire of the sun in the air and that of spirit in the mental realm must work analogously. Natural and spiritual processes must be generally commensurable, since the spiritual is in fact a proliferation at a more advanced stage of the natural force. The upgrowth of spiritual seed in human soil must be the more highly organized analogue of the vegetable growth. The process would reveal spiritual mind calling to the unconscious to awaken to its grander conscious potential. Even the resistance of matter provoked the latent divine spark to glow brighter by exertion. And this kindling spirit-fire in the lower man is the match that lights the candle of life.

A strange fact which comes to light in the science of agronomy carries certain intimations as to the relation of seed to soil that would parallel and clarify the relation between soul and body. It appears that the action of the sun’s rays falling upon the ground have the effect of breaking down the elements of the soil and releasing carbon in a form assimilable by plants. But, wondrously it is found that the lightning of a thunder-storm is the higher voltage that releases the nitrogen element in the earth for plant nutriment. A matter of this kind spurs thought on to rare apprehensions. It gives validity to the inference that, in the scale of energic forces, the higher reach down to exert influence and pressures upon the lower, thus to transform and raise their status. The superior potencies elevate the lower. It is not fanciful poetry, but a quite scientific concept which religion has asked us to accept, that the spiritual man reaches down, flashes a ray of his richer dynamic of love into the compound of our sensual life and releases its elements that will then work for an accelerated upward movement. The flashes of divine spiritual lightning that are generated in the storms of life definitely transform the lower into the higher order. And once again a fact from the natural world enlightens a religious doctrine.

And how can one miss the significance of the earthworm and other lower lives? Without this lowly creature’s ministry man would be far less able to derive his sustenance from the earth. It refines soil for a richer product. In a handful of earth there are countless living entities that raise its level. So religion stands on scientific rock-fact when it exhorts us to let spiritual motivations have rein: they will transform man from bottom up.

Another meaningful fact is that the science of chemistry is seen to work at three distinct levels. First there is the reaction resulting from the commingling of any of the many elements in a test-tube. This is chemistry at its lowest level, its purely material state. Then there emerges a different reaction when the same elements are brought into interrelation within the confines and processes of a living organism. This is called biochemistry. The purely "chemical" reaction is now modified by the play of the higher energies that living organisms generate. But there is a still higher category into which matter is lifted when its elements are subjected in the human stage to the impact of such a more potent force as that of mind, and even more when forces that may be called spiritual impinge upon the chemical processes. These forces, the Greeks said, emanated from the twelve gods on Mt. Olympus, spearheaded by Jove’s thunderbolt. They are the mind energy of God, in general religious terms. The regular play of these forces in nature, as has been shown is the fixed activity of God’s subconscious.

There is yet more instruction in the tree. It bespeaks the divisibility of life’s unity into infinite multiplicity. Its one ground trunk divides and subdivides. In the light of this salient fact, the religio-philosophical debate as to whether life is monistic or multiple is gratuitous. It is a unity unfolding into multiplicity. The division of the blood leaving the heart in one vessel to nourish all parts of the body exemplifies the principle again. But possibly the blood’s return through the arteries has not been seen in its analogical pertinence. Nor has it been discerned for its full value in indicating that a current of involution from source must precede a return to base, the latter movement being what we call evolution. Science is too prone to start investigation of living phenomena in matter without asking how matter was endowed with these potencies to begin with. The essence of all truth here is that the prime source of all things rhythmically involves itself in matter in order to deploy its creative energies and manifest itself, and then withdraws. The function of matter is to implement the consciousness of the eternal force.

A brilliant light on this rhythmic cycle of outflow and return is caught when one views its natural analogue in what may be called the round of the water cycle in nature. It is seen in any rain. The fall of the water from "heaven" and its return to the skies to fall again offer points of significance. There is the condensation of invisible vapor in the upper air, which brings it to visibility as a cloud, and then follows precipitation. Reascending it returns from individuality to unity; likewise in falling it passes from individual drops into lake or sea. But how does it get back again to the sky? Here is an item that can speak volumes of meaning for religion. And it can even pronounce a decision on the eternal question whether, when the human body returns to dust, the soul does return to God who gave it, as Ecclesiastes declares. Religion has affirmed that the soul does return to the heavens of spirit; science is dubious because it can discover no empirical evidence of such return. But science can no longer remain so naive as to limit evidence only to empirically verifiable form. It itself takes the stand that the existence of sublimated physical energies and their activity are not amenable to empirical verification. No one will probably ever see an atom. Yet the reality of atoms is logically demonstrated by the phenomena conforming to prediction and logical inference. In the same way the imponderable realities of visions of high truth may be substantiated.

So it is with the features of the water cycle. Rain does fall and just as surely returns to the skies. But it falls in one form--as visible liquid--and returns in another and more sublimated form, as invisible vapor, borne aloft by the convection of heat. It visibly descends, but invisibly returns. Again nature gives religion a lesson. For it testifies that soul, which descends to earth or arrives there in visible body, completes its round of outgoing and return in invisible but still existential form. Exactly as that of the atom, its invisibility can constitute no disclaimer of its existence and reality. The rain that invisibly returns to the sky assures humanity that souls, too, must complete their cycle. The invisibility of evaporation gives the mind the conviction that soul likewise gets back to heaven. Nature here enters the court to refute the denier of the continuity of the existence of her elements, merely because they change their outward form. Life’s forces move outward to construct their physical tenements, then dissolve them and retire.

Nor yet has the tree exhausted its oracular preachment for our edification. In every new leafage in the spring, it mutely proclaims life’s ordinance in answer to the most pleading interrogation that the human heart sends up to the supreme intelligence: If a man die, shall he live again? And the categorical response from this deep source of truth is a ringing affirmative. In what language does the tree utter this assuring pronouncement?

It presents a living formula and pleads to us to read it with intelligence. Can we not see, it cries, that I am a creature that has in my existence two parts, one that is permanent throughout my existence, but another that comes and goes? In roots, trunk and branches I maintain my life through all seasons and vicissitudes. But this other part of me is transient; it comes forth from my body each springtime, flourishes in the genial summertime, but looses itself from me each autumn. As I am under the eternal rule of all being, this phenomenon announces to you the decree of the law of life: that nothing exists but does so by virtue of the universal root-principle by which every existent organism periodically thrusts forth a projection of its force to afford it the experience of Lila in the exertion of its potentia, without which exertion and its delights and pressures it would remain oblivious of its own nature and capabilities for glorious progression. By divine impulse the inner soul seeks aggrandizement of its selfhood, and this is only to be achieved by projecting rays of its power out to reap a harvest of growth in conflict with material inertia. "Having impregnated the universe with a portion of myself, I yet remain," affirms the deity in a Hindu scripture, and it speaks the law of all life behind the screen of invisibility. Even in the human organism, the inner genius expresses itself in outward action and reaps the reward. But under the law of periodicity, each outward exertion is temporary, a foray out of being into the streams of becoming. Souls put themselves forth into action, but withdraw at the end. They return, "bringing in the sheaves" of their harvest of experience.

And now for the supreme illumination of dull mortal mind, the tree reaches the pitch of its eloquence in its final revelation. By the law of rhythm, as well as by the eternal decree of supreme mind, the tree gives itself this repeated experience of baptism in the soil and water of earth, this thrilling joust between earth’s moisture and sun’s rays, because thus only can it grow. Without this beat of the pulse of life, systole of effort and diastole of repose, the life of the vegetable would remain in static inertness. Miracle of all miracles it may be, but so it is: The permanent part of the organism can expand its potential of being only by its exertions put forth periodically in its production of the leaves and the utilization of the sun’s transforming power appropriated through their agency. The inner life’s expression through its temporary extension in the leaf gives the permanent part its growth.

Here indeed is one of life’s crowning mysteries: Life expands from within outward, but does so by periodical repetitions of exertion through a temporary extension, a tentacle of itself, as it were. What it protrudes from root and trunk comes back to it with increase. One grain of wheat planted in the soil multiplies itself manifold. What transpires as the result of the polarized relation of sap and sun at the branches’ ends makes a deposit of permanent increment in the whole of the organism. Life multiplies and increases by exertion in the outward movement. Corruption and decay ensue from stagnation and failure of effort. By the innate urge to renew itself, periodically, life maintains itself in wholesomeness, purity and integrity. So our sacred scriptures beautifully say that the leaves of the tree shall be for the healing of the nations. They liken the righteous man to a tree planted by the river of waters, whose leaf shall not wither. Again, it is said that blessing comes when the tree is planted on both sides of the river. This evidences the ancient recognition of the principle of polarity, the soul standing in necessary relation to both poles.

The no less than amazing outcome of this parallelism is the revelation to all intelligence that if reincarnation be the order that life has prescribed for the effectuation of its cosmic purposes, it is the periodical leafing of the tree of life. The "leaves" of life’s tree are its successive incarnations. How disastrously erroneous, then, must be that philosophy which makes the life of man the only manifestation of being that does not continually renew itself? "I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself, and I grow young each day," exults the soul in the Egyptian Ritual. "I am yesterday, today, and tomorrow. I am that which was and is and which shall be." "I am eternity and everlastingness."

Philosophers have speculated that God is not a being of absolute perfection but is the total universal life itself in process of evolution. Religious theory has also asserted that since we live and move and have our being within the context of his life, he grows through what we, who are in this figure the "leaves" on his permanent tree, do in our individual and collective evolution. As cells in his body, we increase his glory to the degree that we cause the tiny portion of his life aglow in us to more radiant shining. It may be blasphemous to pietism to speak of God as short of "perfection," or less than absolute in any respect. Problems involving the Absolute, infinities and ultimates are beyond the scope of human intellection. But it may be permissible to think that God is that part of the Absolute that is adventuring into finitude and conditioned existence. So thinks Sri Aurobindo and other profound scholars. God is thus the first emanation from the Absolute. In Indian systems, he is Ishwara. The Gods are emanations from the Absolute, generated by it in the first place as seeds, or seed-atoms capable of infinite growth who now have risen through the grades of matter to become mighty powers in control of vast natural energies in the cosmos. In so far as we are gods in the making, we are the leaves on the tree of eternal and absolute being planted in the garden of material existence.

Implicit in all this symbolic figurism is the great principle that becomes the redoubtable assurance that the relative and conditioned existence--so harshly reprobated by monist-absolutist theorization--is the expression and embodiment of the Absolute. The life of the eternal is expressing itself in the rhythms of the temporal and the transient. Here is the vindication of Aristotle’s "entelechy," Heraclitus’ permanent in the changing, and the general teleological view of purpose in the world order.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

If any natural object evokes more of man’s homage and adoration than the tree, it is the flower. Gazing at its vivid coloring and varied structures, the sensibilities are gripped by a seizure of awe and a strong upsurge of the sense of beauty. What must be marveled at is the virtual miracle that nature has produced in bringing this glory of color out of that crude green stem just below it. Although the common mind does not rationalize the analogy, nevertheless some modicum of its psychic import seems to seep through from a higher area sufficiently cogent to bestir the sense of a numinous shadow of divine intuitions and intimations.

For even more incredibly than does the candle flame, the flower proclaims our divinity with the unimpeachable authority of God’s own utterance, his monograph in nature itself. Yes, the red, red rose atop that coarse green stem is the utter certification of our credentials for divinity. For any one who can grasp the wonder of nature’s transfiguration of the green sap into the brilliance of the flower, there can be no question that by it God proclaims the certitude of our spiritual transmutation. It is a keystone affirmation of deeper religious conceptualism that our animal-natural life is destined to be crowned with a radiant light. The burning bush is a figure of the descent with Prometheus of the empyreal spiritual flame that is to set the natural world in man on fire. The flesh is to ascend back to deity in the smoke and fumes of the altar sacrifice. It is most patently pictured in the Scriptures in the drama of the transfiguration, when the final burst of divine force in man’s life caused his face to shine as the sun and his garments--his inner spiritual bodies--to gleam white as the light. In Hindu religious science, it was expressly averred that in literal fact in the higher stages of our transubstantiation into divinity there would blossom in the area of the head a lotus of a thousand petals, each a radiation of celestial light. This is the glorification of man. In only a variation of detail, the Yule pine tree, adorned with glittering ornaments or lights, emblemizes the same idea. In the body there are what the Hindus called chakras, or "wheels," nucleated centers of a force generating light, which in advanced evolution will come aglow with a spiritual light, as naturally as the phosphorescence of certain fish in the deep sea, or the flash of cold light in the fire-fly. Man’s little sun of righteousness will then have risen with healing in his wings, and man will be forever henceforth the Lord of Light. The bedizened Christmas tree is so close to an actual pictorial representation of what man’s glorified body of his resurrection will be that it might be said to be a facsimile thereof.

The emblemism of the rose or other flower was so forceful and piquant in its suggestiveness that it became the accepted symbol of our burgeoning divinity. And the rose blossoming on the axis of the cross became the mystic symbol of the Christ-legend. The key significance was lost for its full cathartic efficacy when the cross as emblem was deadened to the hardness of wood, its esoteric relevance and power thus killed. The cross was truly the signature of life, not of death; so that the allocation of the rose to the cross carried the true dynamic of the realization that our divinity was won in life and not inherited in the after-life. Accentuating this earthly localization of our transformation, the legend added the semantic detail that the divine rose burgeoned at the solstice of winter. In England it was the tale of the Glastonbury thorn-tree that put forth its flower at midnight of the solstitial date, "when half-spent was the night." Figuratively this was the witching hour when the old year passed into the new, suggesting the end of the old or natural dispensation and the rebirth into the kingdom of spirit. Beyond question, the flower testifies that man, a product of nature, will flower also in light and beauty at the summit of his being.

In and of itself, the vegetable kingdom is vocal and articulate in its moral-spiritual preachments. To catalogue all the ways and forms in which the many interactions of the four basic elements; earth, water, air and fire; with sensational fidelity analogize their four conscious counterparts; sensation, emotion, thought, and spiritual intuition; would constitute a convincing demonstration of the theory of nature-mind correspondence. These would further harmonize amazingly with the facts and features of the four kingdoms, mineral, vegetable, animal and human. Thousands of phenomenal data of natural history would provide the material for thousands of such analogies.

First it is clear that, in blunt terms, the kingdoms above their subordinate brothers feed upon the life of the latter by natural ability to appropriate and assimilate their substances. The vegetable, clear down to moss and lichens, feeds upon the mineral, consuming the very rocks. The animal consumes the vegetable, and the human the vegetable and sub-animal life. In numberless respects animal life takes advantage of the habits, periodicities of vegetable species in order to promote their own welfare. A notable instance is the connection between the night-blooming cereus and some other plants whose fertilization depends upon the visits of certain birds which fly only at night. Phenomena of this sort by the hundreds makes natural history a source of endless fascination. The four kingdoms, like the four elements, are inextricably intertwined in a network of relations that make the life of all a unity. The effort here is committed to the task of showing that these interrelations provide vivid analogies with the interactions between the four elements of psychic life. Perhaps in all this field of interest nothing yields more trenchant admonition to the mind than the characteristic phenomena of that extraordinary creature, the bee. Whole books have been written and not exhausted the marvel of the story.

One Egyptologist, Gerald Massey, may be right in claiming that the name of this busy denizen of our fields comes from the name of one of the seven bodies of sublimated essence in the constitution of man--the ba. It was of psycho-etheric nature and was one of the several "souls" of man, an intermediate one between higher and lower ones. Much as a soul extracts the sweet nectar of spiritual value from every "flower" of experience in the broad field of life, the bee becomes a fit type of this agent of integration in the moral-spiritual field. Again the bee and the ba stand in a striking similitude in that both perform the function of the priest as marriage officient. As the bee, by introducing the fertilizing pollen of the male organs of the flower into the female organs and thus marries the two for the birth of seed, so the ba, by his intermediary offices in the psychic economy of human life, marries the two forces of the polarity, soul and body.

Then in its great avocation of collector of honey, the bee is provocative of the most enchanting reflections. Poetic instinct may readily be charged with imaginative libertinism; yet could anything be more beautifully suggestive than the comparison of the bee collecting the sweet product of the life of every flower and depositing it in a central treasure-house, with the work of the soul, which similarly extracts its scintilla of sweet wisdom from every living experience and collects it in the central bank of spiritual memory? The ego-soul of man is the bee that collects the spiritual honey from all life’s efforts at growth.

Furthermore there is a positive sweetness of the treasures of mind exactly matching the sweetness of the material nectar, and to this all great philosophers have testified. Honey’s properties and working efficacy in the human dietary bear as close a parallel as could be demanded for the validation of analogy. Honey is long chemically incorruptible, is the most delectable and sustaining of human foods. All this holds true when transferred to the honey-sweetness of truth, or man’s assimilation of it. Our venerable Scripture lauds the supreme virtue of mental nectar: "With all thy getting, get wisdom and knowledge; sweeter are they than honey and the honeycomb." Egyptian perspicacity chants the prayer of Pepi, one of the type-names of the soul. He pleads for the bread of eternity and the beer of everlastingness; the bread that will not go moldy and the wine that will not go sour. The soul does pray for the honey and nectar of eternity.

Three things, the sages declared, were not products of earth, but were brought by the gods with them when they came to earth from Venus, as the most pungent symbols of divinity. These three were wheat for bread, the grape for wine, and the bee for honey. Be the tradition myth or charming fantasy, there is ample ground for all the play of poetic perception that discerns how fittingly the analogies hold. Egypt speaks of the incarnated divinity as the "collector of souls." The honey of each flower may be considered as the sweet soul of the plant. The divine ego, collecting this distillation of sweetness--moral and spiritual--out of the experiences of each individual, garners them all in a central place. This typifies the eventual unity of all souls. The bee and the soul, alike in their several spheres, are the collectors of the sweet values that life distills out of its activities. Perhaps the most potent lesson from honey is its prod to mind to realize that out of the effort at existence every creature distills a drop of sweetness of a spiritual thing that will never "go sour."

At least one touch of the honey symbolism was retained in the Old Testament, in the Samson dramas. The hero--his name from the Hebrew shemesh, the sun--slays the young lion by the way and casts its body by the roadside. On his return he finds the bees have made a nest of honey in the decaying carcass of the animal. Then he propounds the riddle of the eater bringing forth meat and the strong generating sweetness. Are we so crass that we fail to discern the magnificence of the theology hidden in the construction? This divine nectar which life must distill for eternal preservation is produced amidst, and as it were, drained off out of the muck of our sordid life in body, the sweet byproduct of life’s tribulation. Another figure makes it the oil of gladness that is squeezed out by life’s pressures. So the allegory pictures it as being nested in the very body of animal decay. Bees have often made hives in the hollows of dead trees.

The tree has taught us that it is the fleeting and transient that generates the permanent. Nature’s intimations are all to this effect, as some of our illustrations have shown. The eternal values issue from the flux and are aggregated in spiritual storehouses for the eternal behoof of souls. Nature repudiates at every turn philosophy’s disparagement of the values accruing from the changing, flowing stream of living events. Nature refutes these negative conclusions by showing that the seemingly meaningless eventualities of the daily activity head up finally in rich and abiding blessings.

The golden treasure garnered from life’s fields of effort has been figured under different symbols. As in the Book of Judges and in some Greek myths, fleece is used as a symbol. This has reference mainly to the zodiacal Aries, the ram, and his son, the lamb of God.

But another most interesting emblem is the manna with which it is said that God fed his children of Israel in the desert. The significant feature here is that it was precipitated on the ground and is described as being as light and thin as hoar-frost. If we drop poetry for gross realism, we face a fabrication which is downright impossible as factuality. How does one scrape a substance as thin as hoar-frost off sand or grass, for edible purposes, without also scraping up the muck of earth with it? How would enough be collected to supply the commissary department of a host of two and a quarter million of people for three "squares" every day? Perhaps history records no more lamentable hallucination of the human mind than that directly due to the literal-historical reading of the "Scriptures."

As the bee, roving in all directions from the hive, unerringly finds his way back home, this may be nature’s assurance that our ba-soul, roaming afar in fields of incarnate life, will be guided by its homing instinct back to the heavenly palace.

Amazing imagery of the same drying-out of sense-emotion by spirit fire comes to view in one feature of the life of the bee. As the industrious insect on a wet day will bring in honey admixed with a bit of moisture, rain or dew, it is necessary that the water be drained off within the hive. One reads that for this purpose two platoons of bees poise on the wing, the one just inside the open door at the right, the other at the left, keeping a steady vibration of their wings, the one acting as a ventilating fan drawing in air, the other propelling it out on the other side. A circulation of air is thus produced to dry out the moisture. Here is the drying-up of the "Red Sea" and the Jordan River in the Bible. The soul, the bee of our life, will dry up the watery elements of sense and sin out of our lives.

The principle that enjoins upon gods the obligation to come to earth and give their life blood for the redemption of humanity is enacted in living form by the king bee. Male spiritual essence must be sacrificed for the production of new life. The spiritual force must die for the life of the physical order. If ever nature dramatized the play of this principle, it has done so with staggering literalism in the case of the bee. The king bee, pursuing the queen in her flight, copulates with her and--falls down dead.

Nature is replete with parallel illustrations of the same rule for life’s renewal. Graphic instances come to view in the life of certain insects of the aphid family, plant lice. The female breeds the eggs, and as a provision for their coming need of sustenance when hatched, she digs a cavity in the fleshly portion of her husband’s body and there deposits the eggs. When the larva awake and look about for food, they simply consume the surrounding substance of the father’s body. "Unless ye eat my body and drink my blood . . .’ said the son of divinity in our New Testament.

Nature of course infinitely varies the play of her general principles. The palolo worm of tropical waters puts on a show of strange character. It consummates its reproductive history annually on one fixed day of the year by a spectacular procedure. It thrusts out from the rear of its body a structure of softer material until at a certain stage, this separates from the body. It floats up to the surface and there runs the course of its existence, while the original segment retreats to the depths. Here is the bifurcating into duality, the one portion going "up," the other "down." Any one who has witnessed a tiny paramecium split its single body apart into two while you watch will know of life’s breaking from unity into duality, for the endless multiplication of creatural existence.

Sharply pointed in its hints of meaning is another of nature’s products, one that shared the semantic interest of old Egypt’s theological romanticists even beyond that of the bee. This other insect is almost a cousin of the bee and almost bears its name. He is the scarabaeus, the beetle. Primarily its type reference is to the sun. It is observed to follow the sun so as to be directly under its radiation. On a grape arbor which stands over a garden walk, it will be found consuming the east-side leaves in the forenoon, on the top area at noon, and on the western side in the afternoon. In temperate zones it emerges from the earth in summer, then bores back into the ground for the months of hibernation. The sun’s rays glisten on the metallic back of the insect, as a type of divine glorification. With the snake and other animals, its emergence in summer and retirement in winter typifies the soul--our sun--in its descent to mundane life and return to the skies.

But this creature, in some special and very mysterious way, manifests a unique trait in its living economy. The esoteric significance of this strange phenomenon could have furnished a light to Christian theology at a crucial juncture in the formulation of its dogmatic system, and this happy development could have drastically changed all Christian history--and for the better. In this connection the lowly insect’s habitudes and traits take on an importance of the first magnitude. It gives us an absorbing revelation.

A start toward this key elucidation must be made somewhat farther back in the exegesis. In fact we take off from Genesis. In the Egyptian figurism, creation was generated by the Gods, through the self-projection of their power from head source into the field of space, and a main idea of the natural formula by which it was typified was the self-ejection of the life-blood of the deity; or, bluntly expressed in occult terms, the ejaculation of their seminal essence, which, falling upon the earth, generated mankind. The sun is the source of the life energy in the blood and hence also of the seminal essence. In fecundating the female, a man actually sheds his life-blood for new birth.

So the Egyptians represented the creative Lord, Tum, Atum, as pouring forth "the blood of his being" for the generation of mankind. In a variant version, it was the God Kepher, the "beetle-God." Under symbolism that does not flinch the bluntest realism, these gods were represented as drawing forth their creative fluid either by "mutilation" of their bodies, or by projection of their essence with their own hand, and sprinkling it upon the earth. So flatly is this typology exploited that these gods, Ra, Tum, Atum or Kepher, were dubbed the "masturbating deities." The central item is that they thus expelled their creative essence without conjunction with the female. That is, the divine Fatherhood, the solar light of cosmic mind, generated the seed of world creation without the aid of mother matter.

The first conception of the world originated out of the energies of mind. "This is the sun within us," said the semanticists of old, "the seminal source of life. Do not dim its luster or cause it to suffer eclipse. Save your soul and do not sin against the treasure of light."

Imagery makes it a sowing of their seed upon the land, fertilizing it. The Greeks distinctly say that the gods scatter divinity upon earth, or sow the divine seed. Jesus does essentially the same thing in the ordination of the Eucharist. So the world was created from the drops of seminal solar essence that were ejected from the phallus of creative deity. The male creative fluid became the type of creative deity. It was said that the holy emanation that proceeds from Osiris vivifies gods, men and cattle. This was the blood-shedding of the Gods. In the case of Bata, the younger of the twins with his brother Anup, the phallus is torn away and thrown into the water and devoured by a fish. As the fish is a type of organic life floating in the sea of inorganic life, its swallowing of the emblem of creative power suggests the incarnation of soul in body.

What should be seen here is that this figure of masturbating deity matches on the male side the "virgin mother" and the "immaculate conception" on the female side. The so-called "Innocents" whom the dragon of mortal life tried to slay immediately upon their birth were in Hindu, Greek, and Egyptian symbolism figured as masculine, as well as feminine. The "Kumaras" of India, the Hamemmet Beings of Egypt, who had not yet united with matter, were styled "Virgin Youths" or "celibate young gods." They were as yet "innocent" of intercourse with matter, having been generated by mind alone.

It is here that the beetle enters the scenario. A fertile source of much arcane imagery which bases theological thought on nature, is an obscure early writer, Hor-Apollo. Plutarch is our main source of quotations from him. He says:

To denote an only-begotten the Egyptians delineate a scarabaeus as a creature self-produced, being unconceived by a female. The scarabaeus also symbolizes generation and a father, because it is engendered by the father solely.

To this Gerald Massey, English Egyptologist, adds: "Kepher, the beetle-god, buried himself with his seed in the earth; there he transformed, and the father issued forth as his own son."

Before the primal unity bifurcated into the duality of polar opposites, it was androgyne, hermaphrodite, epicene. Hence it was as much father as mother, being father-mother. But when the spirit side was foremost in thought, it was masculinized. Hence the beetle was a kind of male-mother. (Gods were often represented as male-female, even Jupiter being named Ju-mater. Likewise, goddesses were pictured with beards. Plato in the Timaeus says that "all things are contained in the womb of Jupiter.)

The Litany of Ra contains an apostrophe to the great sun-god: "Homage to thee, Ra, the beetle that folds his wings, that rests on the empyrean, that is born as his own son."

This regeneration of the God of life through projecting himself, in the form of his life-blood, into the womb of matter, and his coming forth again as his own son, is a key necessary for understanding what involved the early Christian movement in acrimonious controversy that has not yet been adjusted, but remains in an impasse in theological polemics. Nature now stands with the key formula in hand, and the beetle is the umpire whose verdict is final.

It is possible that the provenance of earliest Christian theology, which at first held to much of the occultism and arcane wisdom lore of remote ancient times, especially that from Egyptian crypticism, was mainly responsible for the ejection from the Trinity doctrine of the mother principle and the substitution of the Holy Ghost. The Egyptians stressed the mind-born origin of the cosmos, before it included the polarized parentage of the Father and the Mother. The clear original comprehension of the elements involved gave way to imperfect conceptions, and it all eventuated in a sad wreckage of the truth. Consequently Church Councils wrangled with almost tigerish ferocity, inspiring the Emperor Julian to declare that "there is no wild beast like an angry theologian." the controversies culminated in a deposit of a legacy of warped theology and false dogma that verily has twisted the psyche of the West into tragic illusion for all the centuries since the fourth. And this falsity and mental corruption were embodied in one fateful word in the Christian creeds. That fate-laden word is "only-begotten."

In the Latin it is unigenitus; in the Greek, it is monogenes. Its translation as "only-begotten" may transliterate or paraphrase the wording, but it fails utterly to render the true meaning. Far from intending to connote the limitation of God’s progeny (which Scripture declares is multitudinous) to one son, its reference is to the limitation of universal progenation of his offspring to but a single, instead of a dual, parentage. In short, God’s spiritual sonship sprang from one parent only, not from the copulation of two. The Son was generated by the Father alone, from God as Kepher, who brought forth his young without the aid of the female. It connoted the primal conception of the creation of mind, as yet not polarized with matter, still epicene. The proper translation might be achieved by changing "only-begotten" to "onely-begotten."

Had Egyptian subtlety in semantic artistry been rationally envisaged by the delegates at the earliest Church Councils, and in all that vicious cycle of controversy over the fourth century, the grievous disputes that rent the movement in twain over the Arian-Athanasian issues could have been obviated without a ripple. Man, as Adam, means "red earth;" that is, earthly clay reddened by the injection into it of the vivific life-blood of the Gods. The God who shed his blood and mixed it with earth, and the beetle that similarly goes underground to renew himself in a new birth, would have stood as the two luminous symbols of bright angelic spirit incarnating in human bodies. Divine life had to undergo a baptism in the stream of earthly existence to be born again. These two symbols stood prominently in that long-sealed mass of old Egypt’s wisdom-lore ready and at hand to resolve all the fury of theological disputation. Alas! those tomes of buried light had lain unreadable for five hundred years even then. And fifteen hundred additional years had to elapse, while mental darkness reigned, until the Rosetta Stone in 1799 opened the door to the renaissance of ancient light. The beetle could have enlightened the minds of the warring theologians as to those basic questions concerning the relation of the "three persons" of the Trinity, as well as the homoousia-homoiousia conflict and the famous filioque disputes.

The question arose between the Church factions of Arius and Athanasius as to whether the Father and Son of the divine Triad were of identical substance (ousia) or of different ousiae. As by descent but one step removed from the being of the Father, the Son was held by the Arian party to be of a substance differentiated by at least one step of gradation. But the Athanasian party held firmly to the complete identity of the ousiae between the two. When the question is viewed in true light, it is at once apparent that the question itself is gratuitous and more or less inane. It only arises at all out of a wrong conception of the problem itself. The beetle holds forth, if not the answer--for none is needed--at least the full light of understanding in which all the issues of the matter are resolved. For, declares our self-renewing insect, I and my father are one; my father has renewed himself in me. How can we be different, if we are one and the same being?

The Egyptians held Osiris the Father and Horus the Son to be identical. Horus was Osiris redivivus. It was Horus the Elder and Horus the Younger. At the declining stage of each cycle he was Osiris old and dying; at the start of the following cycle he was Horus youthful and resplendent. As to ousiae how could there be any difference? Young or old, decrepit or virile with new life, both were of the same ousia. If the still involved dispute may be said to have been compromised, it was at any rate left in dubious and equivocal status and so remains. Is the Son of the same or only of like substance with the Father? On the answer to that question, the issue hangs today. If like is not equivalent to same, who knows the difference?

As to the filioque dispute: the Latin word means "and from the Son." The debate was over the matter of whether the Third Person was the product of the Father and the Son; or of the Father through the Son. There should have been little room for question, as virtually every Christian prayer ends with "through Jesus Christ our Lord." All benison comes to us from the Father, but through Christ, the Son. But what says our oracle, the scarabaeus? As all projection of spirit into matter proceeds from the Father through the descending gradations of matter-energy formations, any subordinate rank of being receives its allotment of vivification both from and through--how else?--the powers immediately above it in the scale. At the same time it is, is not, untrue or misleading to say that the vivifying powers flow down also from the grades still higher than the one just overhead. So again, as in the other dispute, it is true in either case; and all a matter of comprehending the true relation of the elements in the graded hierarchy of being.
 
CHAPTER TWENTY

Could nature symbolism, anymore than Biblical, overlook the semantic potential of the serpent? Its significant intimations match closely those of the beetle, or any form of life that hibernates in earth. Still as nature infinitely varies her procedures, different creatures or phenomena are likely to adumbrate variations in the spiritual principle analogized. Imagination catches suggestive resemblance, in the form of the snake’s body, to the two ends of polarity and the seven ranks of being between them. The picture of a lengthy reptile coiled, with his head projecting from the center and his tail erect at the end, with the three or four (theoretically seven) coils of his body between, is an apt enough mimeograph of the same meaning structure. The coils, too, give a verisimilitude of the cycles through which life must swing between head and tail of evolution. Also, when pictured with its tail in its mouth, it graphs the idea of the eternal cycling of life, round and round from alpha to omega.

But, further, this creature manifests a characteristic feature in an especially glaring form, although it is shared by many in less striking fashion. If the scarabaeus renews himself in his seasonal regeneration through his own son, the serpent has his resurrection from death in his own person. He casts off the outer body of an old nature and comes forth sleek and shining in a new embodiment. As the retirement of any creature into the earth in the autumn suggests the soul’s incarnation and descent into "wintry death," so its vernal emergence bespeaks with clarion voice the resurrection of the "dead." The snake accomplishes this in thoroughgoing fashion, by actually throwing off his own skin and coming forth in new and radiant garment. In a social way, humanity has come to imitate him in blossoming out with new and brilliant raiment on Easter Day. But the serpent’s garish Easter parade is self-generated, whereas man’s is artificial. The snake indeed puts off the old man and comes forth in the body of the resurrection. He can show us an empty tomb on Easter. In somewhat different form, the locust, casting off his old shell in August, illustrates this same life procedure.

In Egypt the dog and jackal were made the types of the god Anup, the Anubis of the Greeks. By no means could the typism of an animal that is able to follow an invisible Ariadne’s thread through field and forest and in the dark of night escape the eye of those searchers for nature’s clues to eternal truths. Anup was the god to whom was attributed the function of guiding souls through the darkness of wandering in the underworld of earthly incarnation. Does it do nothing to strengthen our assurance of divine guidance to have nature validate the presence of a divine bloodhound deep within our constitution to guide us unerringly through the shadowy forest of sensuous existence? Anup was the type-figure of our inner divinity that senses the straight road through the dark night of human life, when the god is in the Goetterdaemmerung on earth.

Sharing aspects of this ideation was the cat. He, too, can browse abroad in the dark and catch the unwary bird or the field mouse; or perhaps attend to his mating. It is in the darkness of the night of incarnation that souls find and mate with their wives, their physical bodies. Ancient sacred tomes abound in the legendry of the Sons of God taking unto themselves wives from the daughters of men. Nearly all soul-parentage unite a god-hero and a daughter of earth. Even Love (Eros) came down from heaven to kiss into joyous wakefulness the soul of the human psyche. Egyptian art pictured the divine cat standing with foot on the head of the serpent, or with a knife cutting off the reptile’s head. In the person of the goddess Bast, the feline was an object of ritual worship, not as a fetish, but as symbol.

In his short poem To a Waterfowl, the young American poet Bryant caught the image of a beautiful analogue in one of nature’s impressive phenomena, the seasonal migration of birds. It is to be explained "naturally" enough, to be sure, as simple instinct, to follow seasonal shifts of temperature. But, as one writer remarked, "Nature is not altogether as ‘natural’ as it may appear to be." As one penetrates to the depths of a mysterious and quite incredibly submerged intelligence in lower orders, the almost overwhelming conviction is that indeed a keen mind power is marvelously at work almost everywhere. The bird weaves his nest and not without adroit planning. The beaver builds his dam. Creatures take measures revealing prevision of future contingency. The chameleon changes color to remain unseen. The male flaunts gaudy plumes to attract the female. But the "instinct" that tells the flying geese when to migrate, and guides them back to the same locality they haunted the previous season, is enough to quicken our senses of providential leading, the assurance that we are souls

"Lone wandering, but not lost."

Souls, too, migrate periodically from a spiritual clime to another, a physical one. We somehow must have the instinct of the homing pigeon.

The ichneumon, or mongoose, was a companion type with the cat in overcoming the serpent from its amazing ability to throttle the deadly cobra.

An observation which the present writer has noted may have a bit of pertinent significance for analogical suggestion. It would appear that nature carries out a principle of philosophical truth in the habits of birds. The paradigm that finds expression here is life’s methodology in fragmenting primal unity in the beginning, that is, in the springtime of a cycle, and restoring it in the autumn of the round. Inference here may be faulty, but we do not recollect ever seeing birds flying in great flocks in the springtime, whereas in the autumn this feature will be observed everywhere, as one strays over the countryside. The gods distribute their powers in the outward migration into elementary nature, but reassemble--remember--the separated units in the cycle’s end. Jesus enjoined that his people recollect and re-member the scattered fragments of his dismembered body for his resurrection. As the first movement toward creation is the breach from unity into multiplicity, birds come forth in the spring, not in flocks, but in single pairs, for mating. In the autumn they return to unity, also having multiplied life bountifully.

In Egypt the town of Anu (Annu) was localized as the place where Osiris went to his death and in the turn of the cycle had his resurrection. It was described as the "place where thousands reunite themselves;" also as the "place of multiplying bread."

One of the most keenly suggestive features of noumenal relevance is a gesture instinctively exhibited by at least one species of the ape family, the cynocephalus, dog-headed ape, or gibbon. This animal affords mankind a most singular example of sympathy with nature, the luminous implications of which can stir the deepest wonder. There is a wide-spread ancient tradition that groups of this species of ape assemble at sunrise on an elevation facing the east, and as the solar orb spreads its light over the earth, the animals prostrate themselves as if in worship; then with cries and a strange effort at jibbering speech, which Gerald Massey calls "clicking," rise to salute the lord of day, with hands raised on high.

Who can fail to read in this scene one of nature’s most striking evidences of a fairly patent intent to play the role of dramatic poet? As Proclus has prodded our intelligence with the knowledge that the light of the sun is the pure energy of intellect, and as philosophy agrees that the development of intellect came pari passu with and by the implementation of speech, this animal species, closely approaching the human, somehow senses that the birth of the sunlight of intellect in their lives would unlock the faculty of speech. If this is natural history and not a bit of mythical play on the Platonic model, it testifies to nature’s ineluctable bent to dramatism. If a baboon can have an inner subconscious prescience of the rise of the sun of intellect and connect it with the effort at speech, merely from sight of the rise of its outer symbol, and this strong enough to send it out on the bank to salute the appearance of the symbol, he is the paragon of all natural philosophers. It will be claimed, of course, that the cynocephalus, for some reason unknown to us, is instinctively led to enact this spontaneous ritual, and that not he, but we, read into it its analogy with mind. It is the habit, if not the divine necessity of our minds, to search for meaning in all natural things, and this may be our supremely divine necessity. That being granted, the important point is that we do find in nature items of the most gripping analogical significance.

But this near-human species challenges our disbelief with another and perhaps even more sensational demonstration of its kinship with nature in a form that proves that he is far more acutely sensitive to nature’s occult forces than is man himself. Gerald Massey cites this excerpt from the writings of that ancient narrator previously mentioned, Hor-Apollo. It seems necessary to give Massey’s quotation in full:

Hor-Apollo says the cynocephalus, the personified speaker, singer and later writer, that the Egyptians symbolized the moon by it on account of a kind of sympathy which the ape had with it, at the time of its conjunction with the god. For at the exact instant of the conjunction of the moon with the sun, when the moon became unillumined, then the male cynocephalus neither sees nor eats, but is bound down to the earth with grief, as if lamenting the ravishment of the moon. The female also, in addition to its being unable to see, and being afflicted in the same manner as the male, ex genitalibus sanguinem emittit; hence even to this day cynocephali are brought up in the temples, in order that from them may be ascertained the exact instant of the conjunction of the sun and moon. And when they would denote the renovation of the moon, they again portray a cynocephalus in the posture of standing upright, and raising its hands to heaven, with a diadem on its head.

So majestic and impressive is the semantic cogency of this extraordinary phenomenon, that any attempt to vindicate its instructive compulsion would weaken its histrionic force. It was the last of ancient occult seers, Plutarch, who asserted that man derived his "astral" or emotional body from the moon, as he got his spiritual body from the sun, his mental body from Venus, and his physical body from earth. Is it silly illogical credulity to assume that these counterparts of the two orbs man has incorporated in his own constitution still retain an affinity with their source? Power currents and rays as we know them, from their parent bodies, must vitally effect their descendants even down here. Our magical modern science has only begun to acquaint us with the might and marvel of nature’s finer forces. The day for sniffing at the dynamism of the most delicate radiations is now past. Distance itself is melting away when rays of finer character are sent out.

While "elucidation" of the gibbon’s sensitivity to soli-lunar influences--the conjunction of the two orbs symbolizing their "sexual intercourse"--may come as anti-climax to nature’s superb drama, it will likely be missed, if not pointed out, that intercourse between sun and moon (spirit and matter) prefigured the incarnation. Not until it is either poetically or in gross actuality realized that the soul’s incarnation in body is the impregnation of female matter with the seminal seed of spirit, will these similitudes be cogently perceived. That incarnation should naturally or logically, or even semantically, be a cause of lamentation and grief, casting the imputation of catastrophe upon the natural order, is a segment of theology against which the pen of the present writer has inveighed consistently in protest. He contends that in effect the "fall of man" was not in any sense a miscarriage of divine schematism, but a natural procedure in divine operation. It is as clear as anything can be that the doctrine of the fall, in the sense that it was a dereliction on the part of earthly humanity from obedience to God’s injunction, and thus the cause of all disaster to the race, is simply an ignorant misinterpretation of the allegorical constructions aimed to dramatize the descent of the soul into incarnation. This cosmic procedure was wholly within the scope and province of natural law, and entirely beneficent. Souls are sent to earth for schooling, for education. Ignorance in the realm of Christian dogmatic theology is responsible for involving the soul’s descent for incarnation in all the lugubrious miasma of sin and retribution. It has overlaid the Christian conscience with a totally gratuitous and depressive morbidity.

In Adam’s fall

We sinned all.

This Puritanical dictum has no grounds in evolutionary economy.

Whether the analogical intimations of another challenging natural phenomenon match those of the migration of birds, it is a fact that fishes, such as the salmon and the eel run the round of a remarkable cycle of outgoing and return. It is found that the eels hatched in the headwaters of the rivers of the eastern United States from Maine southward emptying into the Atlantic make their way downstream and strike eastward across the sea to the Sargossa Sea west of Portugal. Fulfilling here some essential function in their living ecology, they return in due season, find and enter the mouth of the same river from which they had debauched, and made their way up to the region of their previous spawning. The Prodigal Son was not the only soul that was brought back to source of its life by the imperious force of the homing instinct.

Fruitful in analogical hints is the tremendous phenomenon of the waterspout occurring in the Indian Ocean. How completely it exemplifies the mutual attraction of the upper and lower of the four elements in their interaction! By the force of a fierce fiery energy, the heated air hovers over the waters with such a power of convection as to create a nearly vacuum-like suction that is able to pull up the surface water from below, and unite it with the whirling maelstrom of superheated air. The same semanticism is manifest in the land tornado and hurricane. All are natural evidences of the law of polarity between rarefied energies above and gross ones below.

Some further aspects of bird symbolism are singularly impressive. A creature so naturally intriguing to poetic fancy could not escape the notice of the sages looking everywhere for analogues with nature. As a denizen of the air, the bird became the leading zoo-type of the soul, which can divide its life between "heaven" and earth. It can soar aloft or nest on the ground, and in the latter position, it typifies the soul in incarnation; building its home in a tree it suggests soul that rather hovers over the earthly personality than descends fully into it. And this sort of connection of ego with the personality is spoken of. The unfortunate fledgeling that falls victim to the stealthy cat or the wily snake bespeaks a soul caught and imprisoned, as St. Paul says, in "the body of this death."

The Greek esotericists created the myth or legend of the cavern of Avernus, the mouth of the pit of the fabled "underworld," and the bird is the representative figure in it. This name, Avernus, is of most interesting etymology. It is made up of "a," meaning "not," and ornis, Greek word for "bird," with the "n" thrown in between "a" and "av" to interpose a consonant between the two "a’s" for the sake of euphony. The meaning then would be "no birds," but with the mythical intimation of "not a good place for birds." In fact the legend had it that it was a deadly place for birds, as in flying over the orifice in the earth, birds--and by analogy souls--were certain to be overcome and asphyxiated by the noxious exhalations arising from the corruption in the underworld, so that they swooned away and fell helplessly into the cavern--incarnation. Here is a perfect mythologization of exactly what the Buddhistic doctrine alleges as the way the souls falls into this region of deadened spiritual sense. And other Hindu figurism directly asserted that the soul actually swooned away in a sort of preparatory stage to the Platonic loss of divine consciousness in incarnation. And Virgil’s famous line from the Aeneid--descensus Averno facile est, (the descent to Avernus is easy) has been turned into the ribald jest: "It is easy to go to hell."

There is, of course, the great legend of the fabled phoenix, which every five hundred years migrated from the north of Egypt and there died in its nest, but out of its ashes came the worm that renewed its life in a new cycle. This is strictly not a natural representation, rather a fabrication of mental ingenuity and artificial. However it does naturally depict the law of reincarnation in repeated cycles of "death" and renewal. One feature of the legend was that this bird became black in its northern migration, but regained white color on its return to Egypt. The raven and some other black birds stood for souls besmirched by the soil of earth; the white dove of course suggested the purified soul, washed white in the blood of the gods. In Hebrew the raven, evening, and darkness are virtually one in the word ereb.

The cow and bull were the base of much symbolism centering around the zodiacal sign of Taurus, the Bull. As the bee provided the supreme type of divine food with its honey, the cow furnished the companion nourishment, in milk. The ram-lamb, the lion-whelp, the goat-kid, the whale-minnow, were other types deriving significant semantic relevance from their incorporation in the zodiac.