Chapter XVII

TRUTH EXORCISES DEMONIAC OBSESSIONS

The debate on diabolic obsession and the predicament in which the history thesis plunges it are both beautifully resolved and reason is restored to the throne in the kingdom of Biblical exegesis once more by the simple device of understanding that the entry of Christly love-wisdom into the life and consciousness of the race and the individual drives out those irrationalities, fixations, obsessions of error, those almost literally demoniac possessions, which the rampant elemental forces, centered in the lower carnal mind, stamp upon the psychic nature. This is all that could ever have been sanely meant by the myth of the Christ casting out evil spirits. The Bible stories are but the scripts of the dramatizations of the inner change.

Likewise, it can be said summarily, the diseases, leprosies, palsies, "deaths," infirmities, cripplings, which are the subject of Jesus’ whole run of miraculous cures, belong to the same general category of typology. The touch of Jesus’ physical hand, or his magic words, upon the human sufferer is beyond any doubt or controversy the type, and type only, of the general healing and integrating power of the impact of true Christliness in the subjective life. The miracles, as Massey so clearly noted, can not be taken as objective historical occurrences. It has been seen how even a writer like Warschauer has thrown grave doubt over the most of them. Again it is seen that as history a large section of the Gospels is unacceptable and stirs incredulity; as allegory it takes its high place in both understanding and cultural stimulus. In every case gain is won by discarding the history and accepting the allegorism.

Then there is the matter of the several numbers used over and over again in Gospel narrative. Nothing has so glaringly revealed the pitiable meagerness of the orthodox scholar’s equipment for archaic interpretation and the innocence of his mind as regards knowledge of ancient systems of numerology in scriptural writings as does his blindness or opacity of mind as to the meaning of these numbers. This want of insight into a profoundly technical subject and the inveterate refusal to credit the matter with any definite significance whatever, have become a trifle pathetic in these late days, when competent research has well established the bases of intelligible comprehension of a profoundly abstruse science. Even chiasmus would have been howled down before this epoch; now it is accredited. Number symbolism must now also be legitimatized. The recurrence of such numbers as 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 30, 40 and 300, more especially 3, 7, 12 and 40, should have spoken to the dullest of imaginations as to the lurking presence of great significance in their ubiquitous appearance in scripture. It would take pages of elaborate exposition to set forth here the meaning of the three days in the tomb, the walking on the water at the fourth watch of the night, the five wise and five foolish virgins, the servant’s setting out six pots of water to be turned into wine and this happening "after three days," Jesus’ going up into the Mount of Transfiguration "after six days," his tarrying at certain places seven days, and the 40 days’ duration of the temptation. The number forty occurs sixty-three times in the Old Testament. It is surely a bit naïve to ask coincidence to explain why so many events in the natural course of actual history should run just forty days or forty years. The very unlikelihood of so much coincidence should have taught students that they were dealing with symbolism and not factuality. Forty was a universal number used to typify the period that the seed of divine consciousness must lie dormant in incubation in matter before germinating in a new birth. The human foetus is forty weeks in the maternal womb. In Egypt the grain was said to lie in the ground forty days before sprouting.

There is the item of Jesus’ unknown years. Can it be imagined that if the Gospels were in any real sense intended to be biographies, or even merely works designed to link the principles of the new religion with the ostensible life and acts of the divine Messenger who allegedly brought it into being, they would leave a nearly total blank in his history from the birth events up until the last few months of his abbreviated life? The very doubtful incident of his temple argument with the doctors at twelve is the only item that breaks the long hiatus. This plan of the presentation of the material does not suggest history. The claim is that the data were--by the time Mark came to think of writing his recollections--meager and scant enough. In the first place, the Gospel that is alleged to have been written first does not read in any respect like the work of a man who is really trying to piece together what he recalls of events that he had once had actual knowledge of. No man in any age would produce a work that reads as those Gospels do, if he were aiming to restore a series of veridical historical events in a historical narrative. He would not inweave and embellish it with so large a proportion of admittedly legendary garnish. Reading it, one gathers the feeling that one is reading a work of allegorism. If it is history it is surely the most lyric type of history ever written. Practically there is little to its very substance save a cluster of prodigies at the birth and a larger cluster of prodigies and miracles, interspersed with discourses and moral philosophy, and a dramatic denouement at the end. Anyone with a cultivated sense for ancient dramatism can feel that it is allegory he is reading, and not history. The three years of his "ministry"--all there is of his life--have even been reduced by some scholars to one and a half, or even to one. The ancients did indeed represent the cycle of spiritual initiation, or symbolic history of the Christian life, under the typism and within the frame of the solar year, with its twelve solar months and its thirteen lunar ones. The festivals around the year were all set to match the symbolism of the dying sun of autumn, the resurrected one of spring, the balance (of spirit and matter) at the two equinoxes, and the alternate victory of light (spirit) and darkness (matter) at the two opposite solstices. Samuel, a type of the Christos, is said to have made an annual circuit of Ramah, Bethel, Gilgal and Mizpah, which can be equated with the four "corners" of the annual zodiac, or the two solstices and the two equinoxes. The Biblical "year of the Lord" was a phrase that had this typological reference. The sun being always masculine and the moon feminine, several of the patriarchs were given a progeny of twelve sons and one daughter! It is of no avail for the modern theologian to snort in annoyance at such renditions of meaning, or such a method of exegesis. The snort is silenced by the fact that the ancient sages did resort to such devices to embalm the precious core of meaning in structures of subtle indirection. If we would interpret what they wrote, we must at least follow their method and cease grumbling at its peculiarities. We shall no longer be annoyed if we yield our recalcitrancy, follow their scheme and find at last that apparent nonsense is replaced with the most luminous intelligence. We are annoyed at their method because our own presuppositions defeat our efforts to comprehend. Our key won’t fit their construction and we blame them for stupidity. When we have sense enough to use the key they used, or the key that alone fits their lock, the obstructing door can be opened and the light let in. The events between birth and final climactic end of the Christ story are missing, not because Mark forgot anything in that interval, but because those given were the episodes featured in the allegorical depiction. It must be put down as a very unlikely circumstance that if Mark could remember even the words spoken by many characters throughout, and short speeches of long discourses in places, and the minutiae of the miracles and journeys, he could not recall a single item between the birth and year twelve, and between twelve and thirty! Massey is authority for the observation that the same two lacunae occur in the "lives" of other legendary Messiahs; so that again every rational implication points to its being allegory and not objective fact.

The triumphal entry into Jerusalem: not only is this as unlikely a historical event as could be imagined, but it is definitely an episode in the dramatic ritual of initiation. It did not need to happen on the streets of Jerusalem to get into Gospels; it was already in the scripts of the ritual drama. Like many another incident and miracle of the narrative, it would have been in the "record" if no Jesus had ever lived--for it was already there centuries before Christ. Every religious dramatization or initiatory ritual had as part of its climactic denouement the entry of the candidate into a room, palace or "city" emblematic of the "city of heavenly peace"--St. Augustine’s "City of God," Bunyan’s "Celestial City"--as the place to which the exiled pilgrim soul returns to its empyrean "homeland." This feature of dramatic topography originated--as did nearly all others--in Egypt, where the prototype of the Greek Elysian Fields was found in the form of the Aarru-Hetep. "Hetep" is the Egyptian for "peace" and so is the equivalent of the Hebrew Sholom or Salem. Aarru is the origin of the "hiero"--meaning "sacred," which became the "Jeru" of Jeru-salem, the city of "sacred peace," or finally the celestial paradise. Jerusalem is spelled in old manuscripts "Hierosolyma." The entry of Jesus into the Holy City is but the historicized drama of the soul making its regal entry into the "city" of blessed peace and rest after its triumphant battle with the lower forces on earth. Each nation of antiquity used its capital city, named often to fulfill this function, as the earthly counterpart of the heavenly city of the allegory. That he entered it riding on an ass and her colt is the cryptic fashion of representing the soul’s being carried from the outlying regions of the material experience up to and through the gates of the Holy City by the agency of the animal portion of its own dual nature. And the presence of two generations of the faithful animal is to typify the fact that the soul’s journey from animalism up to divinity can not be consummated in one cycle of experience in the flesh, but must proceed through a succession of lives, passing continuously from the older phase of one generation to the succeeding younger phase. If this seems far-fetched and strained, it will be seen in its proper relevance if one studies the functionism of the Egyptian pair Osiris-Horus, Father-Son, Horus the Elder-Horus the Younger, and Kheper, the beetle-god, and the ideologies connected with them. The scarab beetle is synonymous with the zodiac Cancer, in which lies the Ass and Colt. In fact, the symbol for Cancer is the Ass and Colt. Cancer begins at the Summer Solstice, which is the birth-date of John the Baptist. Each younger generation of animal bodily life took up the labor of carrying the soul ahead through its progression and the ideograph of this had to represent the older and the younger stages in the line of procreation to convey the full meaning. If literalism pictures Jesus as entering astride both animals at once, it faithfully preserves the idea that he has won his victory by virtue of what both generations of the animal embodiment have done for him.

On its realistic side the incident seems logically impossible. How Jesus--if he had stirred up the popular hostility that was to hound him to his death within a week- He rode Cancer into Jerusalem and was crucified seven days later: seven days after the Summer Solstice, similar to how Epiphany is celebrated seven days after the Winter Solstice -could have found the populace at Jerusalem in mood to welcome him with hosannas and strewn palms, and how he got the crowd out for the reception, is a little more than credulity can swallow. And to crown the whole procedure with anomaly, the episode, taken from the drama, got into the Gospel scenario at the wrong place. It was put in too soon. The Gospels being a dramatization of the unfolding history of the soul in its struggle through the elements, it is an anachronism to put the final episode of his return from earthly exile to his celestial home ahead of the crucifixion and death. It would logically even follow the ascension, and should be the final and climactic act of the entire drama. Life proceeds outward from the silence of the inner chambers of creation at the beginning of a cycle of new growth, fights its battle on the plain or on the "mount" of open visible manifestation then retires again within the inner sanctum of the temple of the universe, its last tones ringing like an echo over the scene of its late activity. The church recessional symbolizes the return of the evolutionary pilgrim to his Father’s house, chanting its song of triumph as it enters the gates of the "Holy City," "Jerusalem, the Blest." If one will in imagination rise to some degree of appreciation of the grandeur of this evolutionary drama, and then displace it suddenly with the imagined realism of Jesus’ riding the lowly animal into the Judean capital, one will gain a realizing sense of the tragedy which befell human culture when allegory was turned into history. By feeding our minds on the grossness of historical realism instead of the dynamic psychic power of allegorism and typology, we have lost touch with the bases of cathartic purification.

The crucifixion! The longer and more closely one ponders it--realistically--the less it seems possible as an actual occurrence. It, too, had its dramatic prototype in the Mystery ritual where the candidate for initiation was tied or bound or symbolically nailed to the cross and even put into a hypnotic coma to be awakened from "death" after three days on Easter morning. Thus the non-historical source of the feature is clearly evident. There is much doubt as to the Roman practice of physical crucifixion, and particularly on a Tau cross. It was not a Hebrew custom, or sanctioned by Hebrew law. It was resorted to, as far as known, only in exceptional and rare occasions. It seems on the surface more like a ritual procedure than a physical event. Again, like the temptation, the Sermon, the transfiguration and ascension, it was consummated "on the Mount," which is the hieroglyph for the earth. And it is surely not without occult significance that "Calvary" is from the Latin calvus, meaning "the head," and "Golgotha" is Hebrew for "the place of the skull." It is of course clear that the inner significance of all that goes into the interior experience of the crucifixion of the Son of God as immortal soul on the cross of matter, is "localized" within the head or brain, or mind, of man. This datum is enough to enable anyone familiar with ancient habits of typology and dramatization of truth to penetrate to the heart of the mystery behind the names of the Mount of Crucifixion. Prometheus, whose name signifies the archetypal creative Fore-Thought, was chained to a rock on a Mount and tortured there. The allegorical background and archetypes of the Gospel crucifixion are complete and perfect; the historical evidences and possibilities are far from similarly strong. It makes much greater sense as drama than it possibly can do as history.

The picture of the Son of God coming to earth to show mankind how to be victorious over the conditions of mortality, and then demonstrating his victory by the method of physical helplessness and an ignominious death of his body on the cross, has never seemed anything but unnatural to the naïve mind. The mind even of piety and devotion has to be "conditioned" by subtle sophistries before it can accept the postulations of Christianity. Not until one studies the Egyptian and Greek philosophies and views the resultant findings through the eyes of symbolic depiction can the feature of sacrifice and immolation in the mission of the divine Son to earth be aligned with the reasonable background of our position. Long lost to ecclesiastical philosophy is the ancients’ characterization of matter as the cross on which the Christ-soul is crucified, and this physical life itself as the "death" of the divine Ego. These two concepts were the ribs or spine, so to say, of the archaic wisdom. For the Christ to die on the cross was simply a dramatic glyph for its incarnation. Incarnation was the ground and primary base of all meaning in religion. Therefore to represent the incarnating divinity as being immolated on a cross was to dramatize the basic experience from which all religion flows. Any soul is being crucified on the cross whenever it is alive in a physical body. This life is its (comparative) "death," for in all ancient systems the body, living, was the tomb of the soul’s "death." Witness the Greek sema, tomb, and soma, body. Even sarcophagus is from the Greek for the physical body,--sarx. Here, then, is the full meaning of the crucifixion:--the soul’s life in body in its incarnational experience, with the infinitude of varied signification attaching to or flowing from that ground. Drama portrayed it by the binding or nailing of a man on a cross of wood. That is drama; the thing dramatized is the god’s life under the limitations of mortal flesh. But the drama was not history. It merely depicted the meaning of history. But who can calculate the tragedy of the annual wastage of emotional stress and strain in the pouring out of oceans of maudlin sympathy and vicarious grief over the Passion Week sufferings of a man who never lived? The numberless crucifixes seen on every side stand as a most gruesome and lugubrious sight, filling the beholder not only with morbid revulsion at its positive ugliness, but with a sense of the lamentable breakdown of reason under the force of indoctrinated ignorance. For it stands not as luminous symbol of high meaning, but as the graven image of alleged but impossible historical fact. It stands as the sickening seal of the enslavement of the human mind under the force of a gross delusion and a lie. As the picture of alleged fact it is ugly; for the fact itself--if true--is ugly, because it is incompatible with reason and intellectual integrity. Anything which mocks the reason and strikes at the probity of the mind is ugly. The crucifix, as monument of historic event, is the darkest, most dispiriting object in any landscape, for it speaks of the darkness of the human intellect under the pall of religious superstition.

And the resurrection? So majestic, so powerful in the reach of its grandeur is this doctrine that even though the deeper meaning may not be apprehended, it is deeply affecting. It is so sublime that no inadequacy of conception or representation can quite mar its beautiful suggestiveness. Yet again, it must be said that if it is still full of majesty even in its misconception, how infinitely more moving must it be when rightly comprehended! As the supposed miraculous bursting of the bars of a rocky hillside tomb by a man in human form, risen from bodily death, it leaves us in wonder, awe and--incomprehension. As the dramatization of our own eventual bursting of the bars of "death" and the physical limitations of the mortal body, and our ecstatic stepping out of this prison-tomb through the rent in the veil of this bodily temple into the glorious resurrection-body of light, it leaves us truly lost in wonder, reverence and--comprehension. Surely a more salutary repercussion for the whole of the Ego’s mind, soul, body flows from the adequate grasp of a great metaphysical reality than could possibly accrue from the same representation completely misapprehended. If this is not granted, then the argument is that incomprehension is more beneficial than understanding. This is indeed a frequent resort of ecclesiastical helplessness in face of questions that children can--and do--ask. As a glyphic representation of the climactic rapture of our final apotheosization the resurrection is transcendently meaningful and exalting; as the claimed exhibition of one exceptional man’s miraculous power, it arouses speculative wonder. Paul says that if Christ has risen, the bases of Christianity are sound. For if he rose, we, too, shall rise. Yet nineteen hundred years have passed and not one believing in him has ever risen in the same (alleged physical) manner. If more were needed to prove that the Gospel resurrection could never have been meant to be taken in the objective historical sense, it is found in Paul’s statement--which indicates that Christianity has put a wrong interpretation on the incident--that the divine Ego is sown, i.e., incarnated, in a natural body, but is resurrected from that physical tomb in a shining spiritual body. Equally, then, with the crucifixion, the resurrection is dissipated out of its historic character and becomes resolved into its infinitely more marvelous transcendental significance. And as in every other case, for it to die as history and be reborn as dynamic enlightenment, is gain.

The ascension, in any physical sense, is similarly a degradation and caricature of its lofty transcendency. At a high rate of speed, a physical body rising off the earth nineteen hundred years ago would not yet have reached the nearest star. The perfervid but not very realistic imagination of piety assumes that Jesus arose in the sight of his disciples in his body (that Thomas touched) and when he got up a fair distance, his physical substance somehow changed over into what angels are thought to be composed of. And that is enough for faith and credulity. Does "heaven" begin at forty thousand feet above the earth?

There is left one situation that comes under critical view in the Gospels, which certainly bears weighty testimony to the disqualification of another large group of events recorded as history in the Jesus "biography." This relates to the long list of "events" that allegedly transpired on the night before the crucifixion on Good Friday morning, of Passion Week. When zeal for history outran intelligence it did not seem to occur to the ignorant transformers of the myth into that category, that in a case where Egyptian wisdom had concentrated many aspects of meaning into a single symbolic point of time, the transferal of allegorical representation over into factual occurrence might meet unexpected difficulties in the crowding of a long series of symbolic "happenings" into a limited period of actual time. Mythical depiction requires only hypothetical time; history demands actual time or measured duration. This very predicament developed in connection with the incidents recounted in the Gospels as taking place on this last night of Jesus’ life. It was the night of the Passover, placed by one account on the 14th of Nisan, by another on the 15th, and both dates symbolical of the first full moon after the vernal equinox, a fact which at once gives it the simple significance of Easter. It was the night in the religious (solar) year on which all the significance of the entire course of incarnate experience came to a head in its last (symbolic) climactic moments. On this "night," under solar symbolism, the soul in the flesh on earth came to the end and consummation of all its labors in the body, finished its assigned task, accomplished the final stages of its perfection and stood on the door-sill of its liberation forever into celestial freedom out of earthly bondage. On that night all things heaped up in consummation and in victory. It was the night of triumph. All phases and lines of development reached their apical convergence in the glorious unfoldment into light, as the Greeks call it, of all the latent potentialities of the spiritual Ego in that final consummatum est. In the nineteenth chapter of the Egyptian Ritual (Book of the Dead) the symbolic narrative recounts a long list of allegorical processes which depict the concluding stages and steps of the many varied forms of portrayal under which the soul’s experience had been typed. It was all one experience, but it comprised the blending in one grand climactic moment or realization of many strands and facets of growth in man’s composite nature, and each phase had been allegorized under its appropriate typism. It was the final merging of all the varied rays into the ultimate white light. So in this nineteenth chapter there is a description of the climactic stage of each aspect. So to say, each stream of the living force had to be brought up to empty its final product and consummation into the crystal sea of complete divinization. The chapter therefore speaks of this last "night" of the soul on earth as "the night of" some fifteen or more apparently different transactions, when in fact it is descriptive of but the one grand collective denouement of salvation. And this "night" in the Ritual is none other than the night of the full moon of the vernal equinox! Symbolically the soul then crosses the line (of the equinox) which in the diagram of meanings marks the boundary between earth and heaven; and thus at its climactic moment in all its earthly experience it "passes over" from earth to heaven, to become "a pillar in the house" of its God, to "go no more out."

Frankness calls for the admission that the Egyptian list of "events" occurring on that meaningful "night" has apparently not been reproduced or copied in the Gospel story. Several of them correspond and might point to transmission from Egyptian into Palestinian literature. However, the difference in most of them can readily be accounted for on the ground of the great diversity of symbolic representation and the constant attempt throughout the ancient day to vary the systems of typing. Hebrew symbology did assume a quite different face from the Egyptian in many respects. But it still remains highly significant that in both the Egyptian and the Hebrew (or Greek) scriptures the narrative crowds a long list of "events," factual or ritualistic, into the few hours of this night of the Passover. The meaning of both groups of occurrences is, if the symbolism be penetrated, one at base. But the Egyptian was frankly allegorical; the Hebrew, under Christian handling, purports to be history. This difference becomes exceedingly, overwhelmingly embarrassing to the claims of the historical rendition. For it turns out that there could not possibly have been time enough--on the historical presupposition--in that night to enable the events narrated to have occurred in reality. On the symbolic basis one can crowd any number of developments into a single "night," for meaning expands into a fourth dimension and occupies no space or fills no time. But when one converts these imponderables over into history, they require time to occur. It makes a vast and in this case catastrophic difference. It all conspired to give the personal Christ a very full program and a busy time on his last night on earth! It is interesting to list the card for the hours from sunset until the next morning’s gruesome finale. This schedule began with the "Last Supper" with the twelve, which, if held at "supper-time" would have started off the night’s activities. This would have taken several hours, perhaps, if the animated discourse pictured so vividly by Leonardo in the famous painting be accepted as possible reality. After that came the walk out to the Mount of Olives and return. As there would have been no point in turning back the moment of arrival there, this item would have consumed time running on toward midnight. Then came the switch of scene to Gethsemane and the detailed series of incidents there, including time for Jesus’ long agony and sweat; his chiding of the disciples for falling asleep and not being able to watch with him "one little hour"; his arrest by the special guard sent out to take him; the cutting off and healing of the ear of the centurion’s servant; then--wonder of wonders!--three separate and distinct court trials, involving the presence of officials, the procurator, the Sanhedrin, and the masses, all in the late hours of the stillness of an Oriental night; then the mockery of the soldiers, the casting lots for his garments, the pressing of the crown of thorns on his brow;--then at last the toilsome journey up the hill, with cross on bleeding shoulder, to Golgotha; the erection of the cross, with those of the two thieves; and the final agony. It may be argued that this program could have been run through in the ten or twelve hours that have been assigned to it. But the three court trials seem to throw the decision against the possibility. To accept this all as history is indeed asking us to swallow a camel. It seems clear that in this instance history overreached itself and betrayed its own incompetency as an interpretative key. History here at last breaks down under its own impossible weight. It reads itself out of court. It fails when tested empirically. As fact it goes down; only as allegory can its material retain plausibility and sane meaning.

Writers spin fine theories to render it all acceptable as occurrence, but in the end it comes back to the point of obvious impossibility in any common sense view of it. The legerdemain of miracle must be called upon to rescue it. There is really no likelihood that it could all have taken place as narrated. And once more all unseemliness and difficulty vanish through the simple expedient of viewing it for what it obviously is,--a dramatic play, garbled and altered to make it fit the dimensions of history.

Although it is by no means the whole of the available material, this much of the refutation of the Gospel narrative as history must suffice. Here, then, we have the record of events making up the biography of the man Jesus of Nazareth, a biography acclaimed by hundreds of learned scholars as one of the best authenticated of historical lives. The entire story is found only in one book, in four varied "editions." We take this book’s elaborated detail and, instead of finding it to be admittedly genuine history, we are amazed to discover that, even on the admission or by the declaration of the supporters of the historic interpretation, event after event, whole series of events, whole sections of the text, evaporate into the thin mist of legend and poetry, leaving next to nothing of solid substance to ground the historic position upon. The very material that has been advanced as proof of the historicity is admitted to be not history at all! Orthodoxy is found to have for centuries maintained the claim of the historicity of a character whose available life record turns out to be myth and fable. And the egregiously vaunted unimpeachable history of the man of Galilee rests only upon allegory at last. In the plainest of words Paul says that the Abraham-Sarah-Isaac-Hagar-Ishmael story in the Old Testament "is an allegory." His own silence as to Jesus and a hundred other silent but logical voices seem to proclaim that the whole Gospel story is likewise allegory. The whole of its "history" fades at the touch of realism into the unsubstantial hues of dramatic romance. And this verdict comes as forcefully out of the mouths of its confessors as from its opponents. And the final devastating blow to the historical thesis falls with the recognition that not only does the supposed historic framework prove to be in the end mythic invention, but it turns out to be in the main a mere copy of mythic material from originals drawn from earlier pagan systems. The grand upshot of the whole investigation is that the life of Jesus reduces to nothing but the re-edited body of ancient Egyptian mythology.

Chapter XVIII

THE ANOINTING OF MAN

No critical survey of the question of the Biblical Christ could be considered thorough unless it covered the entire theme of ancient Messianism, since the Gospel Jesus came in the aura and setting of this concept and his alleged mission and the movement founded on it derive most of their essential meaning from it. It will be found as the result of such a survey that a clear grasp on the features of this great ancient persuasion yields for us finally the substantial bases for determination of the main question of the historicity. In curt statement, when it is known fully and correctly what the conception of Messiahship really was, it will be seen that it never looked to its fulfillment through the birth or advent of a historical person, no matter how divine. If Jesus came as the fulfillment of all ancient Messianic expectation, and came as a human babe, his coming was not after all the true fulfillment, and the proclamation and belief of his Messiahship was a miscarriage of the true import of the tradition. No intelligent adherent of ancient religious systems ever dreamed of the Messiah’s coming as a man. It was clearly understood that that which was to come was a principle, or spirit, or rule of righteousness in all humanity. The Nativity, to be sure, under the sway of symbolic method, took on the aspect of the birth of a babe in the zodiacal house of bread, or Bethlehem, and of course from the kingly line of divine Davidic intellection. But esoteric intelligence knew where symbolism began and also where it ended. Symbolism can sweep in strong force over the human spirit, carrying it straight into the core of vital meaning as it presents to the mind the reality of that which it adumbrates. But it can not thus enlighten and empower the mind if it holds it down to its own level and insists on its own factuality. A symbol is not to engage the thought longer than to give it a vigorous push and send it away from itself as from a springboard into a realm of apprehension never glimpsed before. A symbol is only the initial energization of a thought, which is to proceed from it to more distant flight. With the literalist or exotericist thought ends with and at the symbol. Thus, the act of worshiping the image of Jesus fleshed - especially as him upon the Cross is idolatry of a Graven Image The tragedy of this is that while the symbol is powerful enough to suggest the vital import of meaning symbolized, it can never contain that meaning within itself. Its translucence betrays that it is empty within itself: its need for illumination betrays it as an affront to the true light of spiritual truth from which it adopts its radiance  But a strange phenomenon occurs in the psychological field if one dwells with symbols attentively for a long time. At the same time that the meaning passes beyond the symbol to the inner regions of mind and thought, it tends in the end to reflect back upon the symbol and transfuse it with the glow of the greater light which through it as lens has been thrown upon the screen of a subjective world lying beyond. So that while the symbol is overpassed, it is not discarded, but itself becomes more vividly irradiated with sublime pertinence. He who celebrates Christmas knowing that the Bethlehem babe is only a symbolic type of something remote from the physical and not an event at all, still will find the stable, the manger, the babe, ox, ass, and star all in themselves radiantly alight with transferred meaning poured down upon them from above. Though they are not the containers of the meaning, they will be freshly lighted up with meaning reflected from on high. Being the adjuncts and indicators of that high meaning, they will by repercussion come to share the meaning itself. The whole pageantry and accouterment of meaning can be heartily entertained and in no sense (save the historical) rejected, when a reference to reality beyond it is accepted and one that it can not carry is rejected. It becomes translucent with beauty through simply being the agency of the mind’s grasp of supernal beauty beyond it. The greater light that it helped the mind to discover flows back to bathe it in the hues of a mystical iridescence. It may be a paradox, yet it is thoroughly true that religious imagery and pageantry exercise a far stronger dynamism when they are known to be allegorical than if they are believed to be memorials of fact. The symbol helps the mind to grasp greater reality over in the subjective world; from that clearer vision the mind can swing back and embrace the symbol as an integral part of the great treasure of light caught by its aid. It will not be cast aside as worthless when the full gods of glorious meaning arrive. It can be carried along as the outer coin and mnemonic seal of the golden revelation. This is to refute the charge that if the events of religious ceremonial and festivity are thrown out as non-historical, the whole celebration of such festivals as Christmas and Easter will lose all their gripping impressiveness. On the contrary the symbols will exert a ten-fold weightier significance when they are envisioned truly as symbols and not falsely as events.

The theme of the ancient Messianic conception is a majestic one. It seems clear that no true knowledge of it has been extant since remote antiquity. Every rendition of it, every view or exposition of it in the centuries down to the present has been a gross material caricature of it. The best effort to reinvest it with its pristine magnificence may not be adequate to the task. But the fuller glory of the mighty cosmic event it illustrates can not be sensed until at least the mental statement of its profound significance is attempted.

The name--Messiah--calls for examination, to begin with. It is of combined Egyptian and Hebrew etymology. The mess is from the Egyptian mes, meaning to give birth to, to be born. The -iah is the well-known Hebrew terminal, meaning in its broadest sense "God" or "divinity." In deeper connotation it is a hieroglyph for deity that has descended into matter to be born anew. (As such it is an abbreviated form of the seven-lettered Jehovah, denoting male-female deity in union.) The word Messiah then means "the born God," or "the born deity," in the fuller sense of the "reborn deity." KRST

Another meaning of mess in Egyptian is "to sprinkle" or "anoint." Through this etymology the word comes to have the secondary meaning of "the anointed God." Anointing with oil was throughout ancient days a ritualistic typing of the more abstruse meaning of a baptism of the lower nature by the higher divine influence. It carried the idea of pouring on the head of a man a substance that could be set on fire. The key is to be found in John Baptist’s statement that while he, the preparer of the way for a higher influx, baptizes us with "water"--type of the life of the natural order--the more exalted one coming after him is to baptize us with "air" (Latin: spiritus) "and with fire." Oil symbolically is higher than water, for the reason that it always rises to the top of water and besides is the fuel for fire, which water is not. It is a substitute symbol for "fire" itself, being its fuel and giving a bright and shining appearance. So then the Messiah, as the "anointed God," was the Christos, come or coming to earth to be gradually reborn into his next stage of expanded life and consciousness through a baptism or anointing with the "oil of" divine "gladness." Therefore, only a water baptizer can become a fire baptizer? Whom anointed John/gave him the authority to baptize? His father was a High Priest - and by extension of his tutelary name a fire baptizer (Zechar = Sakhar)

The "anointing" facet of the meaning allies the term "Messiah" with the Greek name of "Christos." We have already traced this as a likely derivative from the Egyptian KaRaST, the name of the mummy, or the god "fleshed" (Greek: kreas, "flesh.") It is probable that all these are kindred to the Sanskrit kri, "to pour out," "to rub over," i.e., "to anoint." Messiah and Christos are therefore identical in meaning. The kri derivation of the word at once establishes Krishna as a Messiah of the first order. And John's father Zechariah as a baptist

The intellectual roots of the Messianic tradition lie away down in the ancient cosmogonic formula that the Logos was to become fleshed and dwell among the inhabitants of earth. The fleshing of the Logos, which was the condition and concomitant phenomenon of his earthly advent, was the coming of Messiah. Begotten before all the worlds in the bosom of the Father, dwelling in the inchoate depths of the "abyss" of matter before the creation swept into organic form, he was destined to come to the fullness of his manifestation in the flowering of the genius of his divinity in a race of human but potentially divine men on this planet. As much of his cosmic power as could function through the mechanism of fleshly body on such a planet was to be brought forth in full epiphany, or to full appearance in human fleshly embodiment. This segment or ray of its power was the Christos. The Logos is the unbounded Power that informs and ensouls the whole manifest creation. In no way could the totality of its energy be circumscribed and contained in a single solar system, a single planet, or a single race of beings on a given planet. How much less, then, could it be embodied in the tiny confines of the body of a single man? But that degree, measure and aspect of its universal vibration--that one note of its infinite gamut of tones and chords--which the brain and nervous system of a race of conscious beings on a globe could embody and express, or in the etymological sense of the word, per-sonal-ize (i.e., sound through, from sonum, "sound," and per, "through,") that form of the universal expression was the Christos. It would come to birth in the milieu of mortal strife, in the body of a biologically developed animal race wherein animal carnality would contend furiously with its incipient new order of gentleness until subdued by the all-conquering power of a higher order of intelligence. It would gradually grow into the fullness of its stature of conscious power and at last take over the rulership of all the motivations of action and end by seating himself on the throne in the kingdom of the world. The Christos was one ray of the energy of the Logos, that ray which could rule in the kingdom of man’s mind, heart, soul. Its gradual growth in the spirit and consciousness of the human race was the coming of Messiah.

Playing the role of the central event, and embracing indeed the entire inner significance of the whole process of human racial evolution, it was at once the dominant theme, the nub and focus, of all the schematism in religion and philosophy. The gist of all the meaning in scriptures and theology falls within its pale. The coming, that is, the birth, of the Son of God, his chain of experiences dramatized as his circumcision, baptism, temptation, trial, condemnation, crucifixion, death and resurrection, formed the ritualistic outline of his life on earth, his sojourn in the flesh.

But the first onset of the rush of perception that springs from this basic statement brings with it the vitally significant realization that the "coming" of Christos to humanity would be a process covering the whole life span of humanity itself. It would be a coming of such gradual movement that it would far better be described as a growth carried forward over the entire history of man. It would be a coming only in the sense in which we say that a child comes to be a man. There is seen to be no possible place in the conception for a "coming" in the sense of an arrival in objective manifestation at a given moment or year. It is to be seen as a coming that is always being forwarded, ever taking place from one end of the cycle to the other, from the beginning of a period of creation to the end of the aeon. The basic conception of Messiah thus rules out from the start the idea of its fulfillment in and through the birth of a man at any "date" in history, and reduces any such statement of it at once to the category of symbol.

The correctness of this view is found immediately at hand in the several titles prefixed to the Messianic figure in ancient Egypt. He is "the Ever-Coming One," "He Who Ever Comes Periodically." The idea is emphasized also in one of the many addresses uttered by Horus, who is the Messiah, when he announces himself in the words "I am Horus, who steppeth onward through eternity." Again it is the background of his declaration: "Eternity and everlastingness is my name." He says he is Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, and the name of his boat is Millions of Years." "I am the persistent traveler on the ways of heaven." A score of other appellations and descriptions would fortify the diuturnity of the conception. The "regular" and "periodical" nature of the coming will be dealt with more at large when the astronomical aspect of the typism is reviewed. Nothing is clearer than that the ancient tradition of Messiah connoted nothing whatever in the form of an event that could be dated in history. It definitely reads as the unfoldment of a power through a process that runs on continuously through the cycle of the race. It is a growth that takes place in the life and consciousness. Osiris slept with Nephthys - his earthly wife but not his soul-wife - Nephthys being a human was the wife of Seth. Nephthys was the original sin: Eve(ning) - Salome. It has its beginnings, its mid-course and its climactic denouement. But while all these stages are accomplished through an instrument that binds the operation to a scene in time and place, still no stage, aspect or crisis in the process is a local temporal event. The birth can be said to take place in "Bethlehem" or in "Abydos" or in "Annu." But these were names of subjective realities long before they were assigned to cities when the allegory was foisted on local geography. The birth would have taken place in "Bethlehem" and "Annu," and the crucifixion on "Golgotha," no matter what particular localities later received these names. The baptism took place in the Jordan, yes, if the Jordan is the river of life that runs on the borderline between the kingdom of the flesh and the Holy Land of spirit, and must be crossed by the peregrinating souls to reach the Promised Land of blessedness. The temptation took place on the Mount, if the "Mount" is the planet earth. And the resurrection took place in and from the tomb, if that "tomb" is the mortal body. The death took place on the cross, if that "cross" is the deadening inhibition of the sluggish vibration or inertia of the material corpus in which soul comes to be housed for a season. Yet in no soul’s experience can these "events" be organized into a series of historical occurrences as for an individual human being. Although they are in themselves the essence and meaning-gist of all historical event, they do not transpire in the realm of three-dimensional space, nor are they commensurable with the human sense of temporal happening. They do not occur "once upon a time." They are rather the final deposit of the whole historical stream upon the ocean bed of basic consciousness undergoing its initiation into reality. If, as Tennyson avers, life is ever going from more to more, the birth and transformation of the Christ nature is the cycle of cosmic event that gives a particular mode of life or type of consciousness its baptism into a larger sweep of sentient being. It was and is the event of human history; but still not an event in human history. It was the one event and not one of the events. None of the typologies by which ancient genius dramatized this chapter of evolutionary history could be detached and called an event in that history. The whole straggling line of linked events in world history make up this one cosmic event. We are all living now, individually and collectively, the baptism, the temptation and the transfiguration of the Christos, yet no single event of our lives is any of these transactions. The gradual upsurge of the spirit of charity and good-will in human hearts was the birth of the Christ on earth, and the continuous expansion and growing sway of that spirit among men was his ever-coming.

Massey’s unequivocal declaration is that the advent of Messiah was periodic, not once for all. His words are stirring:

"Once-for-all could have no meaning in relation to that which was ever-coming from age to age, from generation to generation, or for ever and ever. Eternity itself to the Egyptians of the Ritual was aeonian, or synonymous with millions of repetitions, therefore ever-coming in the likeness of perennial renewal, whether in the water-springs of earth or the day-spring from on high, the papyrus-shoot, the green branch, or as Horus the child, in whom a Savior was at length embodied as a figure of eternal source. At the foundation of all sacrifice we find the great Earth-Mother, following the human mother, giving herself for food and drink. Next the type of sacrifice is that of the ever-coming child. . . . Thenceforth the papyrus-plant was represented by the shoot; the tree by the branch; the sheep by the lamb; the Savior by the infant as an image of perpetual renewal in life by means of his own death and transformation in furnishing the elements of life."

The phrase of central importance in this passage is that which describes the life as unfolding its germinal potentiality into product through millions of repetitions. The first of all principia in the knowledge of life is that it eternally renews itself in periodic cycles of birth, growth, decay and death (of its forms), building its constructions each time anew out of the debris of the old, and unfolding a segment of its predetermined pattern in each renewal. That which becomes ever increasingly apparent to the student of Egyptian wisdom is the great fact of the eternal renewal. It is the hub of the universe and the nub of all discourse about it. The understanding that life endlessly renews itself, dying to be born again, turning the very wrack of death into the sustenance of new life, and so advancing to its purpose through the series, is the first fundament of knowledge, the ground of all wisdom.

And that which "comes," which manifests itself in increasing revelation at each successive wave of ongoing, is just the archetypal design, the ultimate as it was the primary goal, of the whole movement. This structural and organic whole is Logos, the "logical" form that the creation is to take. Obviously that which conforms to and harmonizes with the primordial cosmic mental design is "logical"; that which does not is "illogical."

We can not doubt that through the ages one increasing purpose runs, and that life is making its epiphany through the circling of the suns. In its minor cycle, too, the Christos, arm of the power of the Logos, ray from its larger cosmic fiery heart, manifests its developing beauty through its successive reincarnational expressions in material body on earth. Each descent to earth, where it dies as seed of former growth to be renewed as new shoot, brings to view a larger graciousness, a more resplendent loveliness of its nature. It makes many "comings" in order finally to be here in full. The endless repetition of cycle in the life movement makes the coming of deific power both periodic and regular, as the Egyptians have it.

If the fundamental truth about life is that it eternally renews itself, the human mind has not far to go to find the natural analogue of the principium. Two types of endless renewal confront the eye of man at all times. The one is the seasonal death and rebirth of nature; the other is the periodical cycles of the stars. The seasonal renewal of nature has an astronomical basis and background. It will readily be seen, then, how this determination operated to throw the whole delineation of Messianic advent into the forms of astronomical cycles. It was but a matter of looking at nature, which herself set the norms and figures of cyclical periodicity, to discern the types that would exemplify the ceaseless adventing of the Christos into the mundane sphere. Utilizing primarily the two most patent cycles of the day and the year, as well as the annual cycle of growth and death in the vegetable world, the fashion under the typism of the zodiacal precession and the great mythical and stellar-cycles. These will be elaborated presently.

In the Rubric directions to Chapter 149 of the Ritual (Birch) there are given the secret instructions "by which the soul of Osiris is perfected in the bosom of Ra." This perfecting of the soul of deity is the equivalent of the "coming" of the Christ on earth to establish the reign of good-will among men.

"By this book the soul of the deceased shall make its exodus with the living and prevail amongst, or as, the gods. By this book he shall know the secrets of that which happened in the beginning. No one else has ever known this mystical book or any part of it. It has not been spoken by men. . . . Carry it out in the judgment hall. This is a true Mystery, unknown anywhere to those who are uninitiated."

It is ever to be remembered that the "deceased" in the Egyptian Ritual is the living mortal, not the earthly defunct; and therefore its making its exodus among the living is a reference to its coming to full development in the life on earth. The great Mystery is of course the whole import and the reality of life in the cycles, the secret wisdom that the soul picks up throughout its whole peregrination through the kingdoms of organic existence. It unfolds in course as the cycling spiral of experience extends.

Massey’s further delineation of the Christos principle is enlightening:

"The Messu, or the Messianic prince of peace, was born into the world at Memphis in the cult of Ptah as the Egyptian Jesus, with the title of Iu-em-hetep, he who comes with peace or plenty and good fortune as the type of eternal youth. Here we may note in passing that this divine child, Iu-em-hetep, as the image of immortal youth, the little Hero of all later legend, the Kamite Heracles, had been one of the eight great gods of Egypt, who were in existence 20,000 years ago; (Herodotus, 2:43) known as Khepr, Horus, Aten, Tum or Nefer-Atum according to the cult. . . . His mother’s name at On was Iusaas, she who was great (as) with Iusa or Iusu, the ever-coming child, the Messiah of the inundation." [For even the periodicity of the Nile overflow was used to portray the rhythm of the coming.]

One of the most revealing of all ancient scriptural indices is this great Egyptian name of the Messianic Christ-figure that held in Egypt for some thousands of years B.C.--Iu-em-hetep. It is nearly the whole story in itself. Iu is the verb "to come" ; em is "with" or "in"; and hetep is, most significantly, both the noun "peace" and the number "seven." As all cycles are encompassed in seven stages or sub-cycles, the "peace" that is to be consummated in this seven-part cycle of human development is thus the equivalent or counterpart of the seventh and climactic tonal vibration which synthesizes the whole expression. When humanity shall have reached the apex of its seven-toned perfection, its "peace" will be the harmony of seven keynotes synchronized in one grand master-tone. Therefore "peace" and "seven" are identical, and the Egyptian expressed this profound knowledge in the one word "hetep.'' Peace in Hebrew is Salome - which also means finished. As John the Baptist is exactly six months antecedent to Jesus, might John's death taken place at the Autumn Equinox - in Sept-ember (seventh or perfect - ember)? Was his death a fire baptism ritual? Jesus' earthly father's name was Joseph: perhaps Io-Sept? IO-Sept is close to Jove-Sept, and Jove is a form of Jupiter (which itself is derived from Ptah)... Was Jesus' father actually Ptah - that is, Ptah-Seker-Osiris (Zechariah)? It is beyond belief that Zechariah would not have joined his wife and son on their journey with Mary and Jesus into Egypt: truth is, Zechariah was there - with his wife, her maidservant and their sons. John's mother personified Virgo, just as Jesus' mother was said to be a virgin. If he was ''beheaded'' at the High Holy Days, much would fit: Jesus was conceived and crucified at the Vernal Equinox: John was conceived at the Autumn Equinox. Autumn was the evening of the year - Salome likewise means ''evening'' - was Elizabeth Salome, and the beheading of John an allegory hinting at something far-more profound? " (It is our "seven" even now, as the hetep form shortened to "hept," the "h" roughened, as it has often done, into "s," and so the Latin has its "sept-em" and the English its "septenary" and "September.") Iu-em-hetep then reads: "(He who) comes with or in peace as number seven," or as the seventh or climactic stage of the cycle. This name is alone enough to negate all historical assumptions connected with the coming of Messiah. It declares that Messiah comes in his last and consummative stage only in the last round of the cycle. If Messiah came in person two thousand years ago, it was an untimely and futile advent. He came too soon and wholly out of relation to cyclical denouement. The Bible itself is loud in its proclamation of the aeonially cataclysmic accompaniments of the last days of the cycle, when the Son of Man (the product of the "man" cycle and therefore its Son) shall come in the clouds of heavenly consciousness to pronounce the final judgments on the results of the cycle’s effort. The "coming" in Judea in the year one A.D. is therefore like the entry of an actor into the play long before his cue and out of all pertinence to his part in the drama. Inaccurate: the end of the Age of Aries denotes the unfolding of a new Great Year, which due to the precession of the equinoxes moves in a counter-clockwise fashion, The solar year start of Aries is simultaneously the end of the Great Year (The first shall be the last). In the premature appearance of the Christ in embodied form at a given date in world time the whole framework of the ancient theological structure would have been disorganized. In brief, a personal Messiah at any time is not necessary to the meaning or fulfillment of ancient theology. In fact the latter can not in any way accommodate in its essential structure a historical Messiah. The introduction of such an element into the system deranges the logic and upsets the meaning of the whole. Ancient theology had no place for a man-Savior.

The Jesus-legend, says Massey, was Egyptian, but, he adds, it was at first without the dogma of historic personality. The latter was a spurious addition made to it by misguided Christians.

In the Ritual Horus, the Egyptian Christ, says:

"I am Horus, the prince of eternity. Witness of eternity is my name." (Ch. 42.)

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He steps onward through eternity without ever stopping or standing still. Or he sails in "the boat of Horus," the name of which is "Millions of Years."

It is significant that, according to Higgins in the Anacalypsis (p. 591), seven Zoroasters are recorded by different historians. The Avatars of Persia bore the name of Zoroaster, and thus it is to be inferred the Chaldean priests of Babylon and Persia simply designated one Messiah to each of the seven stages of the cycle. Again one reads that there were fourteen Zoroasters. As nearly every aspect of life force or intelligence was susceptible of a double or two-fold representation, or was the result of the interplay of two opposing energies, the twice-seven enumeration is understandable without change of essential connotation. But we have a very direct and likely correct hint as to the inner purport of the name Zoroaster in Higgins’ conjecture that, as he suspects, "he was merely the supposed genius of a cycle." It is hardly possible for us to light upon a more sententious true definition of a Messiah or Avatar than this phrase of Higgins: the genius of a cycle. Life runs its course through the kingdoms and the cycles, and it is more than poetry to say that it sounds out a given note in a scale of tones in the cosmic tone-poem in each cycle. The dominant note produced by the energic vibration in each cycle, understood in terms of conscious expression as sense, emotion, thought and intuition, would be the divine Messenger, the Messiah or Avatar of that cycle. As Heraclitus so well says, "man’s genius is a deity." In the light of this truth we have the links that form at last a chain to bind our thought fast to a stratum of all theology, namely, the enlightened meaning of Messianism. Higgins says (Anac., p. 616) that every cycle has its muse, its song and its Savior. Doubtless, too, if we were conversant with cosmic schematism, we should find it has its dominant vibration, its key rate or frequency, its color, its number, its proper name. We are yet, perhaps, too ignorant of cosmic graphology to evaluate the import of the fact that the color of earthly vegetation is green.

We find Democritus saying that "Deity is but a soul in an orbicular fire." There is in a pronouncement of this kind a fathomless well of profundity, which our minds must struggle to comprehend. The soul is a fragment--and a seed fragment, capable of reproducing its parent--of God, an embryonic child of his Mind; and the fragment is set whirling through the cycles under the force of a fiery creative energization. This energization sets up, as it were, a draught or a friction by the power of which the divine potencies slumbering in the seed are awakened to budding, growth and fruition. The universal direction of the movement engendered by the energy of creation produced by God’s thought is "orbicular." The helix or spiral is the ancient Greek symbol of all creative motion.

It may be noted in passing that, as Higgins narrates, Zoroaster was born in innocence and of an immaculate conception, of a ray of the Divine Reason. When he was born the glory arising from his body lighted up the room, and he laughed at his mother. He was called a splendid light from the tree of knowledge, and in the finale he or his soul was suspended a ligno (from the wood), or from the tree, the tree of knowledge. Here again we find the cross or tree of Calvary, the tree of the Christ, identified with the tree of knowledge of Genesis. Suspended from the tree as a snake would suspend itself? To tempt Eve? It is in the imputations of such data as this, strewn prolifically over the field of comparative religion study, that the true significance of the literature of which the Gospels are but a fragment is found.

Iamblichus, the "divine doctor" of the Neo-Platonic school, writes that the sun was "the image of divine intelligence," and Plato speaks of the sun as "an immortal living Being." But no statement surpasses the mighty pronouncement of Proclus, as he discourses on Plato’s theology, that "the light of the sun is the pure energy of Intellect." The energy of thought in man’s tiny brain is found to be able to engender a glow of light, heat and power, electric in nature. Thought, divine from the start, was the first General Light and Power plant. The ineffable universal power that lights the suns is the energy generated by God’s Mind in process of thinking and willing! As man’s puny thought organizes his life and his world in his fragmentary sphere, so God’s thought organizes and controls the universe. Souls are seed-sparks of the mighty fiery glow and gleam that flash out in the darkness of the void to become the centers of light. Little wonder the Egyptians equated the two words "star" and "soul" in the same word, Seb, as they equated "peace" and "seven" in the word hetep. And even Seb likewise means "seven," since each soul is in reality the potentiality of seven souls, IU Seb (Joseph) - the ever-manifesting seven or a soul building itself up to perfection in seven cycles, unfolding a segment of itself in each. Most instructive is the promise found in the Sibylline books: "He will send his Son from the Sun."

The first seven emanations from the heart of Deity were called the "Sons of Fire" in the sacred scriptures of all great nations. They were the seven lights on the Tree, the seven archangelic "candles." The Jewish book of esoteric truth, the Kabalah, denominates them the seven Sephiroth upon the Sephirothal Tree. They are the seven Powers before the Throne. A word of seven letters in each different tongue is found carved in the architectural remains of every grand religious structure in the world, from the Cyclopean remains on Easter Island to the earliest Egyptian pyramids. The seven candles of the churches still mutely flaunt their ineffable cosmic meaning before the blind eyes of the flocks of modern worshippers, who are sublimely innocent of comprehension.

Quoting Clement of Alexandria, Thomas Aquinas says the candle "is a sign of the Christ, not only in shape, but because he sheds his light through the ministry of the seven spirits primarily created and who are the seven eyes of the Lord." Therefore the principal planets are to the seven primeval spirits, according to St. Clement, that which the candle-sun is to Christ himself, namely--their vessels, their phulachai, or guardians.

It has been proven more difficult to find the clear and explicit significance of the number fourteen, or twice seven, already glanced at, than that of most other forms of symbolism or numerology in the ancient formulations. That the number has real relation to cosmic or evolutionary fact, however, must be presumed on the strength of numerous occurrences of it in ancient lore. There is a possible base of meaning in the fact that, since life is the result of an interplay between spirit and matter, and each stage of growth is consummated in a cycle embracing seven steps, there would be a seven on the physical side and a corresponding seven on the spiritual. Every sign of the zodiac is dually aspected, presumably to indicate that the particular ray of potency expressed through it is the resultant of opposed spirit-matter energies. (Likely these are the four-and-twenty elders of Revelation.) Possibly the seven planes or stages of the physical creation are taken dually in the same way. At any rate we find Damascius saying:

"There are seven series of cosmocrators or cosmic forces, which are double; the higher ones commissioned to support and guide the superior world, the lower ones the inferior world (our own)."

We have significant allegorical treatment of the twice-seven in the Old Testament, when Jacob has to serve seven years for Leah and an additional seven for Rachel. But there is other use of it in Genesis, where it is said that from Adam to the Flood is fourteen generations, from the Flood to the going down into Egypt is fourteen generations, and from the going down into Egypt to the Exodus is fourteen generations. Every intimation seems to point to the genealogical lists of Patriarchs in the Old Testament as being type-names of the cycles, as one generates, or "begets" its successor. This is indeed the verdict of the best students in the field of esoteric and comparative religion. It turns out, on the basis of much clear evidence, that the "Patriarchs" of Jewish "history" are the names of what the Hindus have called "Manus." Capt. Wilford in Asiatic Researches (Vol. V, p. 243) says: "The Egyptians had fourteen dynasties, and the Hindus had fourteen dynasties, the rulers of which were called Menus." These "dynasties" are obviously not the dynasties of lines of historical monarchs. They are clearly evolutionary epochs, distinguished, at least in schematic diagram, by the predominant key-note of expression of the life or consciousness in each epoch. As "man" is the Sanskrit verb "to think," this term "Manu" seems to say with the utmost definiteness that these fourteen Manus or "genii of cycles" were actually the designations for fourteen (or seven taken doubly) types of progressive manifestations of the thinking principle in evolution. This clarification of otherwise meaningless and baffling Old Testament recondite narrative is an important gain in understanding.

The "rulers" of the dynasties just as clearly would not be men, certainly not men of the strictly human category, but rather the dominant key-type of mentality of the different stages.

Still another signification of the fourteen is advanced by Massey, who takes from the Egyptian phrase, "house of a thousand years,"--"house" being used in the sense of a zodiacal sign--the meaning that makes it equivalent to another phrase, "fourteen life-times," rated at seventy-one years each, or nine hundred and ninety four. Horus or Iusa, in the "house of a thousand years," was the bringer of the millennium. Sut, or Satan, released for "seven days"--the period of matter’s dominance over spirit, buried in its inertia--was then bound for a thousand years--the period when in turn spirit gains ascendancy over matter and turns it to its service--and religious typology worked this out as roughly fourteen life-times. What more typical example or instance of a true cycle than a human life-time?

If the title of address to deity by early Christians was "Our Lord, the Sun!" up to the fifth or sixth century (when it was altered into "Our Lord, the God!"), it is not difficult to see the profound and fundamentally true meaning of the most general statement that can be found in ancient literature to describe the nature of the Messiah or the Avatar, which was, "the Messiahs were all incarnations of the Sun." This is indeed a sentence which holds the pith and marrow of all theology. Yet it falls meaningless upon the mind of this age because the great Sun-myth in religion has been misconstrued by ignorance into rankly materialistic conception. Through this miscarriage spiritual ideology has been warped into physical sense. The mighty truth hidden behind all sun-symbolism in ancient thought escaped recognition when that great item of knowledge had been lost which revealed that the sun is the blazing effulgence of divine intellect. It is the ineffable light of Mind. If the light of this truth could be made once again to enter the mind of man, all the alleged material degradation of the conception of the Sun as God--the charge brought by shallow and uncomprehending Christianity against the wiser ancients--would be swallowed up in the magnificence of the truer conception. When will it be seen--as the ancients knew it--that the Christos, the deity in man, is a seed fragment of the deity that glows in insupportable grandeur in the sun, is in fact a little sun of divine intellect embodied in each man? Only when again that luminous truth is regained, will the full grand import of ancient "sun-worship" dawn to cognition in the modern brain, and the slur of arrogant modernity against pagan worshipers of the heavenly luminary be ended by reverent understanding.

We can now take a passage such as the following from Higgins (Anac., p. 588) and see its essential truth. Referring to the many Messianic figures as repeated incarnations of the solar deity, he says:

"Here we see the renewal of the incarnation just spoken of in the fact of identity in the history of most of the ancient hero-Gods, which has been fully demonstrated by Creuzer in his second volume. The case was that all the hero-Gods were incarnations--Genii of cycles, either several of the same cycle in different countries at the same time, or successive cycles--for the same series of adventures was supposed to occur again and again. This accounts for the striking similitudes in all their histories. Some persons will not easily believe that the ancients could be so weak as to suppose that the same things were renewed ever 600 years. Superstition never reasons."

If comment on Higgins’ concluding fling was seemly, perhaps it would be enough to observe that modern Christians may gather some stimulating reflections from the thought of their having for sixteen centuries accepted as literal history a long and involved series of such dramatic "adventures" of their own purported hero-God, which had been the twentieth or the fiftieth or the one-hundredth recorded repetition of the same adventures of solar deity in the flesh.

The truer view of the import of the saga, says Lord Raglan, was not confined to the Norse, but was, according to Prof. Hooke, general in the ancient world. That the ritual-drama and the hero-legend that grew out of it were dealing with elements of knowledge far higher and more meaningful than mere adventures of an ancestral hero in the flesh, is evidenced by what was behind the representation. Some of these features were: the cyclic movement of the seasons and of the heavenly bodies, together with the ritual system associated with them, which "inevitably tended to produce a view of Time as a vast circle in which the pattern of the individual life and the course of history was a recurring cyclic process." (The Labyrinth, p. 215.) Raglan comments that this view of time as a ritual circle seems to have been carried over into Christianity, since, according to Prof. James (Christian Myth and Ritual, p. 268) in the Eucharistic sacrament the redemptive work of Christ was celebrated not as a mere commemoration of an historic event; for in the liturgy the past becomes present, and the birth at Bethlehem and the death on Calvary were apprehended as ever-present realities independent of time and space. This is welcome light amid modern darkness.

A remark of Higgins may fall in appropriately here. He contends that it is philosophical to hold in suspicion all such histories (as the legendary recitals concerning Roger Bacon), but unphilosophical to receive them without suspicion. The mythos, he says, has corrupted all history. Who can doubt, he asks, that the Argonautic expedition is a recurring mythos? As Virgil has told us, new Argonauts would arise from time to time. But while one can sense the legitimate connotation of Higgins’ observation that the mythos has intruded on the ground of actual history and "corrupted" it, this is a great deal like saying that music and poetry have come in to corrupt real life. The mythos was designed to irradiate history with meaning, as music and poetry are adapted to halo life with deeper significance. The only mistake--and it is the invariable and unfailing one--was in reading the mythos for history, and not seeing it as the light of history. And if new Argonauts would arise from age to age, so new Christs would arise in future times and countries,--but in the recurring mythos, not in human embodiment. As a thousand adaptations of the love-lyric have arisen in every age to celebrate the great passion, so the equally vital theme of the soul’s incarnation in flesh was reissued in ever new mythical and allegorical dress.

Higgins adds:

"I suspect that new Troys were expected every six hundred years. In the case of the Romans this was a superstition, which could not be corrected by that kind of experience which we acquire from history. What we call their history, Mr. Niebuhr has shown, was mere mythos. This will account for a degree of superstition which would be otherwise scarcely credible among the higher ranks of the Romans. . . . An Englishman called Lumsden has asserted that many of the incidents in Roman history were identical with those in the heroical history of the Greeks, and therefore must have been copied from them. . . . They were not copies of one another, but were drawn from a common source; were in fact an example of remaining fragments of the almost lost, but constantly renewed, mythos which we have seen everywhere in the East and West--new Argonauts, new Trojan Wars"--and new Messiahs under changing names, though always a name indicating solar deific character.

This is well and truly discerned; and in connection with it Higgins sets forth his consistent thesis that all early histories were originally composed and written in verse for the sake of correct retention in memory, and further set to music for the same reason. The most ancient of the ancients had nothing of the nature of our real history. Real history was not the object or aim of their writing, any more than it was Virgil’s or Milton’s or Dante’s.

Cristna (Krishna), Moses, Cyrus, Romulus and others were all exposed, Higgins reminds us, but all were saved from the tyrant’s power. And, like Alfred the Great (whom Raglan shows to have been also a semi-mythical character), they were all preserved by a cowherd. The cowherd would have relevance under Taurian zodiacal symbolism, and the figure would have been changed to a shepherd at the incidence of the next sign in the precessional order, Aries, the Ram.

And very enlightening is Higgins’ comment on the deification of the Caesars:

"Much nonsense has been written concerning the heroes of antiquity being converted into Gods, but now in the Caesars I think we may see the real nature of the apotheosis. They were not supposed to be men converted into Gods, but were incarnations of a portion of Divine Spirit; at least this was the real and secret meaning of the apotheosis. They were men endowed with the Holy Ghost. They were nothing but men supposed to be filled with more than a usual portion of that Spirit.

"Like Christian saints they were not generally declared till after their deaths. . . . I am surprised that we have not a life of Octavius by a Latin Xenophon to match the heathen gospel called the Cyropaedia."

Higgins cites the ancient mythical figure known as "Nimrod" as interpreting "the Beast" of Revelation, which had seven heads and ten horns, as a glyph for the Great Cycle of Life in animal (beast) embodiment, during which the ten later spiritual powers were developed in the seven sub-cycles; or in Kabalistic language, the perfection of the ten (twelve) higher spiritual faculties or Sephirothal powers through the seven elementary cycles.