Alvin Kuhn Excerpts from Who Is This King of Glory?

From the scrolls of papyri five thousand to ten thousand years old there comes stalking forth to view the whole story of an Egyptian Jesus raising from the dead an Egyptian Lazarus at an Egyptian Bethany, with two Egyptian Maries present, the non-historical prototype of the incident related (only) in John’s Gospel. Egypt had used the symbol of a star rising in the east as the portent of coming deity for millennia anterior to the Christian era. Egypt had knelt at the shrine of the Madonna and child, Isis and Horus, for long centuries before a historical Mary lifted a historical Jesus in her arms. Egypt had from remote times adored a Christ who had raised the dead and healed the lame, halt, blind, paralytic, leprous and all afflicted, who had restored speech to the dumb, exorcized demons from the possessed, dispersed his enemies with a word or look, wrestled with his Satan adversary, overcome all temptation and performed the works of his heavenly Father to the victorious end. Egypt had long known a Jesus, Iusa, who had been born amid celestial portents of an immaculate parenthood, circumcised, baptized, tempted, glorified on the mount, persecuted, arrested, tried, condemned, crucified, buried, resurrected and elevated to heaven. Egypt had listened to the Sermon on the Mount and the Sayings of Iusa for ages. Egypt had known a Jesus who long antedated the Gospel Messiah and who presents to the student some one hundred and eighty items of identity, similarity and correspondence in word, deed and function with his later copy.

St. Paul avers that Christ -in man -is the Rock. And so ancient drama represented the Christ figure himself as saying to Peter, whose name means "Rock" in Greek, "Thou art Peter and on this Rock will I build my church." There is no other enduring Rock in man’s life on which the assembly of deified mortals -the church- could be founded. This is close to Exodus 3:15 - "This is my name forever, and my Zeker unto all generations" - esp since the Arabic word for Rock is Sakhra - a word derived phonetically from Zeker.

Ch 1 Who is this King of Glory?

Vicarious salvation was one of the items of theology that led Nietzsche to cry out his bitter denunciation of Christianity as "slave morality." Celsus in the third century tells us that Christianity appealed to and welcomed only the slaves of Roman tyranny, men and women of the most abject position. It was held in the lowest contempt by Pliny, Seneca, Tacitus, Suetonius and the more intelligent groups generally. It was rejected by all who were genuine enough to despise the self-confessed ignominy of letting a historical scapegoat bear the burden of achieving their karmic immunity. 

The spectacle of an omnipotent creator of all the worlds setting a trap to catch his own creatures by tempting them to sin, then condemning them to eternal misery in consequence of their inevitable "fall," and afterwards negotiating with them to appease his wrath on condition that his own Son, only begotten, consent to die in their stead, has stood for sixteen centuries as the rock foundation of that religion which shouts down all others with its vociferous claims to all-highest excellence among the faiths of earth.

One of our Christmas hymns sings "Late in time behold him come, Offspring of the Virgin’s womb."

Ch 2

theology has made of the historical divine man the only possible such figure in the human record. Jesus is in the religion that exploited him the only-begotten Son of God. 

a drama that was based on and interwoven with the most obvious of all natural phenomena--the rise and setting of the sun in the daily round and the larger counterpart of the same routine in the seasonal cycle. These two daily and annual operations, the alternate victory and defeat of the sun, typify of course the very gist of the whole human drama, the soul’s descent into its "death" in mortal body and its recurrent resurrection therefrom. This is the core of the central theme in all religious scripture. The daily sinking of the sun at eve in earth or ocean, and its rising again in the east at dawn, or its yearly descent to the south in the autumn and its succeeding return northward in the spring, all prefigure the descent of the soul, a unit of God’s own conscious mind, into incarnation in its "night" or "winter" of "death" and its subsequent resurrection from the tomb of the body. The fact that ancient insight allied tomb and body in one meaning is astonishingly indicated by the identity of the Greek words, soma, body and sema, tomb.

In this ceremonial drama the central figure was the sun-god, or Son of God, the Christos, Messiah. He was likewise the Avatar, the Bodhisattva, the World-Savior. A generic term for him was The Coming One, or "The Comer" in Egypt. 

The Christians of the third and fourth centuries answered the challenge of this situation with the desperate allegation that the similarity was the work of the devil! why, if the model life had already been proclaimed by numerous Avatars before Jesus and he therefore had nothing new to add, the need or occasion for his passionate sacrifice at all? The model he displayed had already been on view in nearly every ancient nation for centuries! 

An Egyptian Jesus--Horus--had raised an Egyptian Lazarus from the dead at an Egyptian Bethany, with an Egyptian Mary and Martha present, in the scripts of that ancient land that were extant at least five thousand years B.C. And a carving in relief, depicting scenes of angels announcing from the skies to shepherds in the fields a deific advent, of an angel, Gabriel, foretelling to a virgin that she should be the mother of the Christos, of the nativity in the cave, and of three sages kneeling in adoration before the infant deity, had been on the walls of the temple of Luxor at least seventeen hundred years B.C. The Virgin Mother had held the divine child in her arms in zodiacs on temple ceilings for millennia before the Galilean babe saw the light. 

The spirit might dwell eternally in the world of abstraction if it could follow its own inclination, as a man might choose to lie comfortably in bed instead of getting up and exerting himself for desirable ends. But if it did so it would never achieve its evolution. God could have no children if his spirit did not go forth into an intercourse with matter, the eternal Mother, and implant the seed of a new birth in her universal womb. Spirit can not evolve when not in relation to matter. It lies static, inactive. To actualize its thought structures, to bring its creative designs to pass, it must be wedded with matter. Without matter spirit can have no experience.

Ch 3

Thomas Taylor, editing Proclus’ work, says "the reader may perceive how adultery and rapes, as represented in the machinery of the Mysteries, are to be understood when applied to the gods; and that they mean nothing more than communication of divine energies, either between a superior and subordinate, or subordinate and superior divinity."

And Mead adds Proclus’ assertion that "the whole theology of the Greeks is the child of Orphic mystagogy, Pythagoras being first taught the ‘orgies’ of the gods (‘orgies’ signifying ‘burstings forth,’ or ‘emanations,’ from Greek) by Aglaophemus, and next Plato receiving the perfect science concerning such things from the Pythagorean and Orphic writings."

Clement of Alexandria, Christian philosopher of the third century tersely said that "it is requisite to hide in a mystery the wisdom spoken." This is the echo of St. Paul’s "wisdom hidden in a mystery." 

Mead follows these statements with the observation that while the veiling of high truth under gross outer symbols could in a pure state of society be done without moral damage, nevertheless a degenerate age would run the risk of stopping at the outer symbol, forgetting the inner reference and thus would plunge religion into grave dangers of fatal misconceptions.

In his magnificent Encyclopedia of ancient symbolic literature Manly P. Hall declares that nearly every religion of the world shows traces of astrological influences, and that the Old Testament of the Jews, its writings breathing the aura of earlier Egyptian culture, is a mass of astrological and astronomical allegories.

Proclus says that in the Fourth Book of The Laws Plato celebrates the life under Saturn, obscurely signifying the hidden meaning "through fabulous fictions." The Cratylus is a splendid example of the easy victimization of the alleged towering modern intelligence by ancient astuteness in concealment. Present academic opinion still contends that in the Cratylus Socrates spent an afternoon in punning. He points out such "puns" as that the Greeks called the body soma and the tomb sema, and the pundits of today still can see no suggestive connection between the two words, in spite of the fact that hundreds of times the Greek philosophers have told us that in Orphic theology the soul while in incarnation in the body was as though dead in its tomb. "The body is the sepulcher of the soul" is almost an axiom of Greek philosophy. Behind every one of Socrates’ "puns" hides some great and luminous item of the piercing Platonic insight into deep mysteries.

The second-century esotericist, Plutarch, says that "so cautious and reserved was the Egyptian wisdom in those things which pertained to religion"; "and like them Pythagoras conveyed his doctrines to the world in a kind of riddle." In reference to Plato’s last book, The Laws, written "when he was now grown old," Plutarch says that Plato threw off the esoteric mask, spoke not "in riddles and emblems, but in plain and proper terms" of the more recondite aspects of truth. In De Iside et Osiride (IX) Plutarch states that if the choice of king fell upon a soldier, "he was immediately initiated into the order of the priests and by them instructed in their abstruse and hidden philosophy, a philosophy for the most part involved in fable and allegories and exhibiting only dark hints to us in many instances, particularly by the sphinxes, which they seem to have placed designedly before their temples as types of the enigmatical nature of their theology."

In the same work (XI) Plutarch elucidates one of the animal representations of a god in such a fashion as to enable the dullest brain to catch a concealed meaning behind a symbol and to get an inkling as to how they operated the symbolic language.

"When you hear, therefore, the mythological tales which the Egyptians tell of their gods, their wanderings, their mutilations and many other disasters which befell them, remember what has just been said, and be assured that nothing of what is thus told you is really true or ever happened in fact. For can it be imagined that it is the ‘dog’ itself which is reverenced by them under the name of Hermes? It is the question of this animal, his constant vigilance and his acumen in distinguishing his friends from his foes, which have ever rendered him, as Plato says, a meet emblem of that god who is the chief patron of intelligence."

And in another passage Plutarch tells his age that if one will hear and entertain the story of these gods from those who know how to explain it consistently with religion and philosophy, and will steadily persist in the observance of all those holy rites which the law requires, and moreover will be disposed to the conviction that to form true notions of divine natures is more acceptable to them than any sacrifice or mere external act of worship can be, one will by this means be entirely exempt from any danger of falling into superstition, an evil no less to be avoided than atheism itself.

Gerald Massey, the profoundest and most discerning of Egyptologists, in his fine work, The Natural Genesis (Vol. II, p. 378 ff.) writes that the Revelation assigned to John the Divine is the Christian form of the Mithraic Revelation, that in the Parsee sacred books the original scriptures are always referred to as the "Revelation," and that the Bahman Yasht contains the same drama of mystery that is drawn out and magnified in the Bible Revelation. He asserts that the personages, scenes, circumstances and transactions are identical in both. Each revelation relates to the Kronian allegory and in both the prophecy is solely astronomical. He explains that Egypt is the mother of the world’s primeval religion and that the myths of Egypt were the origin of the Mysteries of the world. The main theme of most of his voluminous work is that the Hebrew "miracles" are nothing but the original myths of Egypt, misread as history.

He calls attention to the fact that the Jesus character both in the Gospels and in the Gnostic Christian work, the Pistis Sophia, announces to the inner circle of his initiated disciples that he will speak with them freely "from the beginning of the truth unto the completion thereof . . . face to face without parable." Parable was the declared method of his speaking to "them that are without" the circle of the initiated. In the full release of light and knowledge to the trained disciples parable and myth could be discarded for direct revelation.

Testimony of another life-long research student in the field of archaic philosophy confirms Massey’s conclusions. Godfrey Higgins, in his monumental work, The Anacalypsis, (p. 441) says that "one thing is clear--the mythos of the Hindus, the mythos of the Jews and the mythos of the Greeks are all at bottom the same; and what are called their early histories are not histories of man, but are contrivances under the appearance of histories to perpetuate doctrines . . . in a manner understood by those only who had a key to the enigma. Of this we shall see many additional proofs hereafter."

The Anacalypsis is some 830 pages of additional proofs. Page 446 of this work gives his final summation of his life of investigation:

"When all the curious circumstances have been considered, an unprejudiced person will, I think, be obliged to admit that the ancient epic poems are oriental allegories, all allusive to the same mythos, and that many of these works which we have been accustomed to call histories are but allegorical representations of mythologies, of the secret doctrines of which I am in pursuit and which have been . . . concealed and perpetuated . . . for the initiated, under the veil of history."

He makes the unequivocal statement that "two clear and distinct meanings of the words will be found; one for the initiated and one for the people. This is of the first importance to be remembered." He quotes Niebuhr as showing that what we call early Roman history was "mere mythos," and explains that this will account for what on any other thesis is incredible, the "degree of superstition" evidenced by the Romans. He cites an Englishman, Lumsden, as saying that events purporting to be Roman history are drawn from the heroical legends of Greece and therefore must have been copied from them; that they were not copies of one another, but all drawn from a common source; and were in fact the remnants of a mythos almost lost but constantly renewed, discoverable everywhere in the East and West--"new Argonauts, new Trojan Wars," and the like. The works of early writers without exception were "deeply tainted with allegory," he declares elsewhere. "The mythos, not history, is the object of the writer."

He earlier states that the Oriental sects were in the habit of using figurative language to disguise their metaphysical doctrines from the vulgar, but he says this gave their enemies the opportunity, by construing them literally, to represent them as absurd and outlandish. He connects the myths closely with astrology. He states that the book of Genesis was considered by most if not all of the ancient Jewish philosophers and Christian Fathers as an allegory.

What testimony could be more explicit than that of the Psalmist (Psalm 78) who says: "I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old which we have heard and known and our fathers have told us"? In the wake of this quotation Massey observes:

"It was the same with the Hebrew teachings brought out of Egypt as with the Egyptian writings, of which Origen observes, ‘the priests have a secret philosophy concerning their religion contained in their national scriptures, while the common people only hear fables which they do not understand. If these fables were heard from a private man without the gloss of the priest, they would appear exceedingly absurd.’"

Moses, avers Massey, received two laws on the mountain, the written and the oral. This oral law was the primitive tradition that contained the Apocrypha, the secret doctrines of the dark sayings and parables, the clue and key to all their hidden wisdom. That which was written was intended only for the ignorant outsiders; the interpretation was for the initiated. With the written version of the Jewish sacred books alone in our possession, we have been locked outside and left there without the key. Just after the slaughter of the "firstborns" of "Egypt" around the time of the Vernal Equinox, Moses climbed a "mount", whereupon he was given the two laws. Likewise, he and his companions were credited with "spoiling Egypt" (Exodus 12:36), and his brother Aaron was given reign over the priesthood for all generations.

Origen’s teacher, Clement, speaks of the necessity of hiding in a mystery the wisdom which the Son of God had taught; of the hindrances which there were in his day to his writing about this wisdom, lest he should cast pearls before swine; of the reason why the Christian Mysteries were celebrated at night, like the Pagan ones, because then the soul, released from the dominion of the senses, turns in upon itself and has a truer intelligence of the mystery of God "hid for ages under allegory and prophecy," but now revealed by Jesus Christ, and only spoken of by St. Paul "among such as were perfect" (perfected in the Mystery initiations), giving milk to the babes and meat to men of understanding.

H. Y. Evans-Wentz, in his work The Tibetan Book of the Dead, states that archaeological research has now proven that the Mysteries consisted of symbolical dramatic performances open only to the initiates and neophytes fit for initiation, illustrating the universally diffused esoteric teachings concerning death and resurrection; and that the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul into animal bodies was not intended to be taken, as it has been by the uninitiated, literally, but symbolically, as in Plato’s Republic. Herodotus (ii, 122) is cited as documentary support for the statement.

Alexander Wilder, previously quoted, in reference to the Bacchic Mysteries says that every act, rite and person engaged in them was symbolical; and the individual revealing them was put to death without mercy. So also, he adds, was any uninitiated person who happened to have heard them. Here is strong evidence that the ancients surely believed they had a secret supremely worth safeguarding from desecration.

The noted modern Egyptologist A. E. W. Budge, says that every act of the ceremonial dramas was symbolical in character and represented some ancient belief or tradition.

"And there was not the smallest action on the part of any member of the band who acted the Miracle Play of Osiris, and not a sentence in the Liturgy which did not possess importance or vital significance to the followers of Osiris."

Again he says that it is this "emblemism," spoken of by moderns as fetishism and idolatry, that has had a false construction put upon it, mainly by missionaries and travelers, although the Christian religion, he asserts, has been evolved from the same identical germ and on somewhat similar lines. Emblemism he explains as a merely external formula of an inner cult worship.  Graven images abound in Christianity: every religious statue, every religious painting, every crucifix is a graven image.

Though the charge would have far more fitness if made against the Christians after the third century, it was made even in the days of Grecian philosophy by Diodorus Siculus, who tells us that the Egyptians treated the Greeks as impostors because they reissued the Egyptian mythology as their own history. If the Greeks were guilty of converting myth into history, it merely indicates that that process of esoteric degeneration which inevitably set in in every occult religion had begun early and has continued ever since. Celsus, the learned Jew in debate with Origen, chuckles over the (literal) account of the Christian deluge with its ridiculous ark and impossible physical details, finding it a part of his own mythology literalized and amplified. Tom Paine, Voltaire and Ingersol chuckled in the same fashion later.

The Jewish Maimonides comes up with the declaration that Genesis, taken according to the letter, is absurd and extravagant. Whoever should find the true sense of it ought to take care not to divulge it. This, he says, is a maxim which all the sages repeat to us, respecting the exact meaning of the work of the six days. If anyone should discover the true meaning, he should be silent, or speak of it only obscurely and in an enigmatical manner.

The Schaff-Herzog dictionary of religious terms gives four meanings for such a name as "Jerusalem," following the gradient of classification laid down by Philo. Literally the name means the city in Palestine; morally, the believing soul; allegorically, the Church; and anagogically the city of heavenly peace, located only of course in consciousness. While this scheme of interpretation permits it to mean the geographical town, it by no means confines it to that rendering, which the historical view does.

It is now far over a century since C. F. Dupuis published his once-famous and still valuable work, L’Origine de Tous Les Cultes, in which he asserted that John the Baptist was a purely mythical personage, and identified his name with that of the Babylonian Fish-God, Ioannes, of the Berosan account.

In the Gemara of the Jews, it is said that he who has learned the scripture and not the Mishna "is a blockhead." The Bible, they say, is like water, the Mishna like wine, the Gemara liked spiced wine. The law is as salt, the Mishna as pepper, the Gemara as balmy spice. To study the Bible can scarcely be considered a virtue; to study the Mishna is a virtue that will be rewarded, but the study of the Gemara is a virtue never to be surpassed. Some of the Talmudists assert that to study the Bible is nothing but a waste of time. The Gemara embodied the anagogical or esoteric interpretation.

Godbey, in his searching work, The Lost Tribes a Myth (p. 697), asserts that the Jews lost the origin and meaning of the term "Israel" more than two thousand years ago. "There is no agreement in their ancient literature upon that point. All record and tradition of the old Peniel sanctuary where Jacob became ‘an Israel’ has been lost."

But one of the most revealing intimations that the Christian movement early departed from the genius and spirit of the well-known esoteric methodology is found in a sensational passage quoted in Mead’s Orpheus from Origen in his work Contra Celsum:

"The story of Dionysus and the Titans is a dramatic history of the wanderings of the ‘Pilgrim-Soul.’ And curiously enough we find the story of the resurrection of Dionysus . . . compared by the most learned of the Christian Fathers with the resurrection of Christ. Thus Origen (Contra Celsum IV, 171, Spenc.), after making the comparison, remarks apologetically and somewhat bitterly: ‘Or, forsooth, are the Greeks to be allowed to use such words with regard to the soul, and speak in allegorical fashion (tropolegein), and we forbidden to do so?’ . . . thus clearly declaring that the resurrection was an allegory of the soul and not historical." (Orpheus, pp. 185-6). Dionysus is Osiris, and his former self - Zagreus - is Seker

It will be well to place alongside of Origen’s lament over the deterioration of splendid allegory into crass literalism the unguarded utterance of Synesius, a Bishop of Alexandria after Origen’s time: "In my capacity as Bishop of the Church I shall continue to disseminate the fables of our religion, but in my private capacity I shall remain a philosopher to the end." By the "fables" he meant the mass of literalized legend which the Fathers purveyed to the ignorant laity, of which Celsus says that they were so outlandish that even a stupid child’s-nurse would be ashamed to tell them to children. And what he meant by remaining a "philosopher" would shock the churchmen who have for centuries decried the great Platonic and Neo-Platonic systems which, in spite of their protestations, have contributed so much to the foundations of Christianity. The unedifying spectacle of a Bishop fooling the populace with fables he knew were fictions, whilst he fed his own mind upon the deeper meanings of philosophy from pagan schools, goes far to support the claims made in this work and elsewhere as to the nature and causes of the terrible calamity that befell Christianity in the third century, ending in the conversion of allegory into a literalized Gospel and the befuddlement of the world.

Ch 4

The myths came down through the ages from a distant source in a mountain-spring of attained wisdom. Raglan presents this view and strengthens his conviction regarding it by a citation from Budge, the Egyptologist, who says (From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 156):

"It would be wrong to say that the Egyptians borrowed from the Sumerians, or the Sumerians from the Egyptians, but it may be submitted that the literati of both peoples borrowed their theological systems from some common but exceedingly ancient source." Sumerian Sakhar = Egyptian Seker. Sargon I was called a Sakhar - fire baptizer Lord, and Seker was both water baptizer and fire baptizer (his chamber held the lake of fire)

The principal characters in the ritual are two, a hero and a buffoon who meet with various adventures together and live on terms of the greatest familiarity--naturally, since they represent the god and the animal nature of man, who live together in the same body! And this accounts for the special privilege accorded the fool to jest at the expense of the castle baron, and for the horse-play and buffoonery permitted at the Saturnalia and the autumn equinoctial festivals (surviving in the rough mischief of our Hallowe’en), when higher and lower, god and irresponsible joker in man, were placed on the same level of existence. Fools were considered sacred on the seventh day, symbolizing the raising of the animal man to his human-divine dignity on the Sabbath, the seventh and last "day" of the cycle. Anubis-Horus, John-Jesus, Zagreus-Dionysus, Moses-Aaron, Cain-Abel, Ishmael-Isaac - dateable to Gemini?

Participants in the Mithraic Mysteries wore animal masks. Obviously the masks typified the outer personality of man, for the Latin word for "mask" is persona, and man’s personality is an animal body! Saint Christopher

It is quite worth a moment’s digression from data to exegesis to say that the world’s failure over many centuries to read the simple explication of this animal typism, as dramatically depicting the incarnation of the soul in the human-animal, and not the beast-animal, body, has buried the trap to catch untold millions of religiously simple-minded people in its disguised subtlety. Had the esoteric implications of the drama been kept in ken, all that mass of lucubrated assertion by numberless writers that the ancients endorsed the belief in transmigration of the once-human soul into the bodies of animals at death, would not have disgraced the pages of literature. 

Greek drama, like Egyptian, is predominantly tragic, because what moderns term "happiness" was not the one supreme motif of the human experience, as envisaged by Greek philosophy. By etymology "tragedy" means "goat-song." The goat was of course the zodiacal Capricorn, coming at the winter solstice, when the sun, typifying the soul in the dead "winter" of its incarnation, was in the throes of "death" as the scapegoat to carry the onus of man’s redemption. For obviously man’s only possible redeemer--from benightedness, nescience, animal carnality--is his own soul. If it can not make the grade into charity, love and compassion, what else can uplift him? Let the Church which has gulled its childish millions by substituting a historical for an immanent scapegoat, answer.

Ch 5

This is the fact that had the Pentateuch been a real history, Palestine and Judea ought to have been found overstrewn with implements of war and work, both of Hebrew manufacture and that of the conquered races, whereas, outside of the Book, no evidence of the numberless combats and the devastation of Jehovah’s enemies in great battles is to be found. Also the country of a people so rich that King David in his poverty could collect one thousand millions of pounds sterling toward building a temple is found without art, sculptures, mosaics, bronzes, pottery or precious stones to lend credence to the Bible story. 

Kings were almost invariably named after the spiritual Sun-King of the drama. The titles of the Emperor of Ethiopia and Oriental monarchs still testify to this old custom. As nearly as can be determined, the time when this transition from myth to history occurred in Jewish history was in the days of Hezekiah. From then on the allegories of the descent of the gods to earth are made to run into and blend with a line of historical personages. 

The Hebrew writings were preserved, Massey continues, on account of the sacred mystery that lay underneath the veil of symbol, the veil that Isis boasted no man had lifted from her person. The writings were held in sanctity because of what they veiled; but to the Christians their sanctity goes no deeper than the veil.

Massey maintains (Book of the Beginnings, Vol. II, p. 180) that when the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek in the third century B.C. by some Alexandrian Jews, the process of elimination of the esoteric is very visible. Dates were altered to conceal the true sense. And after the allegories had been transformed into histories, the true or symbolic reading according to the principles of the secret tradition was forbidden to be taught in schools. The Pharisees were so fearful of the popular despoliation of the Apocryphal wisdom by the unworthy that they sought to prevent the teaching of writing to the masses.

***************

Testimony that Massey is correct in saying that myth and history inevitably tend to merge into one is found in the book of a writer whose aim is to disprove the mythical interpretation of the scriptures. T. J. Thorburn, in his The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels (p. 120), writes:

"The myth proper is an explanation of some occurrence in nature--not in history--which deals chiefly with legend in its early stages. The personifications which take place in myths, however, help to link nature with history and to parallel events and persons in history with the phenomena of nature. Thus the legendary and even historical stories often become paralleled, and even confused with mythical ones. . . . In this way it is possible that John (and in a certain sense . . . Jesus also) became analogues of personified natural phenomena."

In The Book of the Beginnings (Vol. II, p. 226) Massey says that

one of two things is sure: "either the Book of Enoch contains the Hebrew history in allegory, or the celestial allegory is the Hebrew history. The parallel is perfect." Nor is there any escape by sticking one’s head in the sand and foolishly fancying that the writer of the Book of Enoch amused himself by transforming a Hebrew history into celestial allegory and concealing its significance by leaving out all the personal names. "On the contrary it is the allegory which has been turned into the later history." Sacred history may and does begin with mythology; but mythology does not commence with history.

Massey’s claim here has been disputed as a farcical fancy; but it can not be waved aside with a mere snort of ridicule when the evidence has to be faced. The Book of Enoch certainly contains the same characters as the sacred and secret history of the Jews, and as these belong to the astronomical allegory in the one book, that is good evidence of their being mythical in the other. There is no doubt that the Book of Enoch is what it claimed to be, the book of the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, with no relation whatever to human history. It should be subjoined to Massey’s last statement that he does not mean that the celestial allegory, while it has no reference to human history objectively, is not all the while the allegorical portrayal of the meaning of all human history. The same is true of the book of Revelation.

Tersely he says that the Hebrew miracles are Egyptian myths, and as such, and only as such, can they be explained in harmony with the nature and reasoning principles of the mind. Held as miracles they are amenable neither to natural fact nor to rational rating. "The sacred writings of the world are not concerned with geography, chronology or human history. The historic spirit is not there. This is so in writing as late as the Talmud." What started out to be the type of history came to be taken as the matter of history, as ignorance submerged the keener diagnosis. The hidden significance fades out from less competent mentality and slips away, letting in more and more the "historical" assumptions. How slow the modern mind has been to see this process at work! Massey promises to restore the lost key hidden in Egypt by the data of comparative religion, which will be remorselessly applied.

Godfrey Higgins is found standing beside Massey in these general conclusions. In The Anacalypsis (p. 366) he writes his rebuke to ecclesiastical insincerity in forceful terms:

"How can any one consider the infinite correlations found in comparative study and not see the mythologic nature of nearly all epic poetry and early ‘history’?"

"Mr. Faber, Mr. Bryant and Nimrod have proved this past doubt. . . . Our priests have taken the emblems for the reality. . . . Our priests will be very angry and deny all this. In all nations, in all times, there has been a secret religion; in all nations, in all time the fact has been denied."

Another passage declares vigorously that it all raises a very unpleasant doubt in his mind, after long consideration, as to whether "we really have one history uncontaminated with judicial astrology." He adds that Sir William Drummond has shown that the names of most of the places in Joshua are astrological, and Gen. Vallency has shown that Jacob’s prophecy is astrological also, with a direct reference to the constellations. To this probably Jacob referred when he bade his children read in the book of the heavens the fate of themselves and their descendants.

But the chief fault he places where Massey and others lay it--at the door of a designing priesthood:

"That the rabble were the victims of a degrading superstition I have no doubt. This was produced by the knavery of the ancient priests, and it is in order to reproduce this effect that the modern priests have misrepresented the doctrines of their predecessors. By vilifying and running down the religion of the ancients they have thought they could persuade their votaries that their new religion was necessary for the good of mankind; a religion which in consequence of their corruptions has been found to be in practice much worse and more injurious to the interests of society than the older."

The Gospel of the Christians, he expounds, began with a collection of Sayings of Jesus, "fatuously supposed to have been an historic teacher of that name." It originated, he implies, as a set of moral apothegms, but ended as believed history. Even the Jerusalem, which was a name to denote the heavenly Paradise of spiritual bliss, or the Jerusalem above, became in ignorant minds the Jerusalem on the map! And the Exodus of the children of Israel from this mundane sphere in a passage across the Reed Sea of this mortal life to the home of celestial glory, became the screaming farce of 2,125,000 marching men, women, children and camp followers, parading about for forty years over Sinai’s and Arabia’s desert sands, trailing millions of sheep, oxen, and cattle, subsisting in an arid land with little vegetation and water! Verily "history" must be strained to fairy-tale credulity, when it has to stretch its possibilities to accommodate the free sweep of imaginative typology. Massey concludes one sentence with the clause--"in an Exodus from Egypt which can no longer be considered historical," an Exodus that he says elsewhere "was never more than frankly allegorical." That Massey is not merely indulging in iconoclastic swashbuckling, it is to be noted that whatever pretense the Exodus from Egypt had to being considered as history has been demolished at one blow by Moffatt’s proper translation of the Red Sea as the "Reed Sea," a term used by the Egyptians to denote the human body, which is seven-eighths water, and must be crossed by the evolving soul to reach the Promised Land. When it is seen that the Exodus of the Old Testament is finally identical with the Resurrection in the New, it can be granted that the literal rendering of the Israelites’ journey from Egypt’s bondage to Canaan’s milk and honey becomes excellent material for light comedy. But light comedy comes close to turning into heavy tragedy when it is further realized that the soul’s dramatized bondage to the flesh in the "Egypt" of the body, has likewise been construed into the "historical captivities" of the Jews in Assyria, Babylon and Nineveh!

Incidentally it may be interjected that according to the evidence so far collected in Massey’s day (at least to 1900), there has never been found on the monuments of Egypt any mention or record of the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt, or their having played a part in Egyptian history save in one case. Petrie discovered on a stele erected by King Merenptah II a reference to "the people of Ysiraal." "But," says Massey, "there is nothing whatever in the inscription of King Merenptah corresponding to a corroborative of the Biblical story of the Israelites in the land of Egypt on their exodus into the land of Canaan." The inscription found by Petrie says that the people of Ysiraal in Syria were cut up root and branch by Merenptah. Massey insists that "Israel in Syria was not Israel in Egypt." Israel in Egypt was not an ethnical entity, but the spiritual "children of Ra" in the "lower Egypt of Amenta, which is entirely mythical." Mythical, yes; but typical of the real home of living mortals in this "lower Egypt of Amenta" that is the dramatic ritual name for a planet called Earth,--a fact, it must be confessed which even Massey did not discern. Herodotus, affirms Kenealy, makes no mention of the Israelites--nor of Solomon.

The Book of Revelation, Massey contends, is the drama of the astrological mysteries and has been mistaken for human history; and the mythical aeonial cataclysm at the end of the cycle has been misread into the catastrophic "end of the world." Revelation, he goes on, has been commonly assumed to constitute a historic link between the Old Testament and the New.

"It has been taken as a supplement to the Gospels, as if the history of Jesus had been continued into the wedded life after the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb, and that they dwelt together ever after in that New Jerusalem which ‘came down out of heaven’ ‘as a bride adorned for her husband,’ when the tabernacle of God which was to dwell with man took the place of the Old Jerusalem that was destroyed by the Romans. The present contention is that the book is and always has been inexplicable because it was based upon the symbolism of the Egyptian astronomical mythology without the Gnosis or ‘the meaning which hath wisdom’ that is absolutely necessary for an explanation of the subject-matter; and because the debris of the ancient wisdom has been turned to account as data for pre-Christian prophecy that was supposed to have had its fulfilment in Christian history."

Besides being the parent of a mass of false religious "history," mythicism evidently has been the father of endless ecclesiastical folly. One aspect of this folly has been the misinterpretation of Revelation as aspects of world history, when, as Massey says,

"the book as it stands has no intrinsic value and very little meaning until the fragments of ancient lore have been collated, correlated and compared with the original mythos and eschatology of Egypt."

Revelation has been found to be cognate with the Enoch manuscripts and, says Massey,

"Enoch, like John, was in the spirit. His internal sight was opened and he beheld a vision which was in the heavens. But his vision was admittedly astronomical. In it he ‘beheld the secrets of the heavens and of paradise according to its divisions’ (Ch. 41). The record of his vision is called ‘the book of the revolutions of the luminaries of heaven,’ and is said to contain ‘the entire account of the world forever, until a new work shall have been effected, which will be eternal’" (Ch. 71).

Much more material of the sort shows Enoch to have been the source of Revelation and the contents of both books to be astronomical allegory. Why scholars have been so slow to see the intimate relation between Revelation and its obvious prototype, the Enoch, is another of the riddles of ecclesiastical history which cry aloud for solution.

It was no less a Christian celebrity than Albertus Magnus of the Medieval Church who uttered the following, relative to a connection between Christianity and astrology:

"The Mysteries of the Incarnation, from the Conception on to the Ascension into heaven, are shown us on the face of the sky and are signified by the stars."

The sole fulfillment of prophecy, according to Massey, was astronomical, in the lunar and stellar cycles, marking the stages of cosmic evolution. The basis of Massey’s conclusions is well laid if his contention is true--and he presents massive evidence for it--that all that went into the making of the Christian historical set-up was long pre-extant as something quite other than history, was in fact expressly non-historical, in the Egyptian mythology and eschatology. For when the sun at the Easter equinox entered the sign of the Fishes, about 255 B.C., the Jesus who stands as the founder of the so-called Christianity was at least ten thousand years of age, and had been traveling hither as the Ever Coming One through all this preceding time. During that vast period the young Fulfiller had been periodically mothered by the Virgin (of the zodiac!), with Seb (equated by many symbolic indication with Joseph) for his reputed foster-father, and with Anup, the Egyptian baptizer (equated likewise with John) as his herald and precursor in the wilderness. Procyon, Halcyon All that time he had fought the battle with Satan in the desert or on the mount during forty days and nights each year. During those ten thousand years that same incarnation of the divine ideal, in the character of Iusa, the Coming Son, had saturated the mind of Egypt with its exalting influence. Little did the men of that epoch dream that their ideal figure of man’s divinity would in time be rendered historical as a man of flesh and be hailed as the fulfiller of astronomical prophecy.

If more evidence be needed to show that the origin of the data of the Christ’s "life" was in the astronomical mythos, it is at hand in the historical datum that there was in the early Church a diversity of opinion among the Christian Fathers as to whether their Christ was born in the winter solstice or in the vernal equinox. According to Clement of Alexandria the twenty-fifth of March was held by the Christian following to have been the natal day of the Lord from heaven. Others maintained that this was the day of the incarnation. But in Rome the festival of Lady’s Day was celebrated on the twenty-fifth of March, in commemoration of the miraculous conception in the womb of the virgin, who gave birth to the divine child at Christmas, nine months afterwards. According to the Gospel of James, or the Protevangelium, the birth was in the equinox and consequently not at Christmas. It is as clear as any fact can be that this uncertainty as to the birth-date of the Christos and the argument as to whether it occurred at the solstice or the equinox imply indubitably that the birth itself was not being considered as transpiring historically, or as an event, but as an item of astronomical symbolism. The very fact that it was placed on such a cardinal point in the year as the solstice, or the equinox, is practically decisive on this point. Indubitably the birthday of the Messiah was hardly ever thought of as a date, but rather always as a point of significance. This was so true in the ancient days that almost it could be said that it was the date that was the significant thing rather than the event allegedly transpiring on it. If the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem had been regarded as purely historical, the only point at issue would have been simply: on what day of the year did it occur? Why was it held that the blessed event necessarily had to occur at the most pivotal point in the solar allegory? Of course the only true answer to all this is that all ancient religion was clothed in the solar myth. No denial of this general fact can stand. On the basis of this datum, so well known to comparative religion students, so little known to the hypnotized occupants of church pews, how can it be denied that in the minds of all people of intelligence in antiquity the fulfillment of sacred "prophecy" was to come in the cloak and guise of astronomical periodicity, and not as once-upon-a-time or once-for-all history? Not only, avers Massey, did the later scribes follow the scheme and ground-plan of Egyptian solar mythicism, but they seem actually to have gone so far as to copy the earlier scriptures.

Khebt, the birthplace of the child in "lower Egypt," and Mitzraim, Egypt, are names of the old Sabaean birthplace in the north belonging to the celestial allegory, and were later applied geographically to Egypt the country. The Egypt of the Hebrew writings is a "country" in the astronomical myth, the "land" of mental bondage, bordered by a "Red Sea" that was never on any map save that ancient uranograph or chart of the heavens picturing the details of the soul or solar myth under astrological signatures. Khebt, Mitzraim, Egypt are names of that lower house of nature where the soul descends to have its incubation and death until the course of growth is finished. At the end of the cycle of mundane experience it hears its Father’s voice exclaiming: "Out of Egypt have I called my son." The Exodus out of Egypt, under that or another name, "is the common property of all mythology," says Massey.

Another most important elucidation from his pen is the following (Book of the Beginnings, I, p. 186):

"The earliest nomes of Egypt were astronomes, the divisions of the stars, whence came the name of astronomy; not merely a naming but a noming of the stars into groups, divisions and nomes. . . . Enough at present to affirm that the earliest chart was celestial and that its divisions and names were afterwards geographically adopted in many lands from one common Egyptian original."

Lest this critically vital pronouncement on the science of ancient astrography fail to receive its due consideration in the counsels of modern studentship, it should be added for greater explicitness here that the divisions, localities, features, together with their names, found in all ancient religiography were taken directly in the first instance from the early allegorical charts of the starry heavens and scattered over the maps and insinuated into the histories of all ancient civilized lands. (Perhaps the work most clearly demonstrating this procedure and its startling results is Godfrey Higgins’ grand old tome, The Anacalypsis, to which reference should be had for fuller evidence.) He who would interpret the sage scriptures must begin with the uranograph, where consummate wisdom--not childish fancy--first wrote the allegory of man’s true history. It is a fact of stupendous significance for those who can see what the ancient books are teaching that in the primitive books of early Egypt Hermes instructs Taht in the nature of the "tabernacle of the zodiacal circle."

Massey can at least cite the Gnostic wing of early Christianity as supporting his conclusions in this field. He writes:

"The Gnostics asserted truly that celestial persons and scenes had been transferred to earth in the gospel and that it is only within the pleroma or the zodiac that we can identify the originals of both." (The Natural Genesis, II, 422.)

This does not need to rest on his bare assertion. Christianity’s own historian, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons in the second century, corroborates it: "The Gnostics truly declared that all the supernatural transactions asserted in the Gospels ‘were counterparts (or representations) of what took place above.’" (Irenaeus, Book I, Ch. VII, p. 2.)

Further Christian testimony along the same line comes from that other early historian of the cult, Eusebius, whose statements are often important, however (as universally recognized and admitted) twisted and unreliable they generally are (Eusebius, b. ii, C. XVII). On this history Massey bases the statement that "it is admitted by Eusebius that the canonical Christian gospels and epistles were the ancient writings of the Essenes or Therapeutae reproduced in the name of Jesus." Eusebius did not admit things he should have admitted, and he certainly was the last historian to admit anything hostile to the Christian movement.

That the Sermon on the Mount is a derivative from ancient arcane religions is seen in the light of the fact that the Seventh Book of Hermes is entitled: "His Secret Sermon in the Mount of Regeneration and the Profession of Silence." The Hermetic books are of great antiquity, perhaps the oldest in the world. Isaac Myer, the Kabalist scholar, so declared them.

Surely the witness of such a high Patristic as Clement of Alexandria is worthy of credence. He says that all who have treated of divine matters have always hid the principle of things and delivered the truth enigmatically by signs and symbols and allegories and metaphors, "yet this foundation of primitive fable has been converted into our basis of fact." We have already noted Diodorus’ statement that the Egyptians regarded the Greeks as impostors because they reissued the ancient mythology as their own history.

Justin Martyr, second century Church Father, dashes the foundation stones from under many an arrant Christian claim when he tells the Romans that by

"declaring the Logos, the first begotten Lord, our master Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin mother, without any human mixture, and to be crucified and dead, and to have risen again and ascended into heaven, we say no more than what you say of those whom you style the sons of Jove."

This was written at the early date of the second century, when the new cult found it desirable to emphasize its kinship with paganism, which it did especially through the words of this same Justin Martyr. But only two centuries later the members of this new faith could afford to flout the pagan mythological foundations and brazenly proclaim the uniqueness of their doctrines and rituals.

Zeal to transform allegory into history was not daunted even by the incredible difficulties of changing mythical personages into real human figures. Thus Sut-Typhon, or Sevekh, the crocodile-headed divinity, type of the power of nature buried in the atom, the energies of life submerged in water, the symbol of matter, was converted into Satan, the personal devil. In this line hardly anything could be more revelatory of modern mental ineptitude in the face of the myths than the assertions of such a learned scholar as the Egyptologist, Budge, who after reciting the details of the "life" of the Egyptian Father-God Osiris, that he suffered death and mutilation at the hands of his enemies, that the fourteen cut portions of his body were scattered about and buried over the land of Egypt, that his sister-wife Isis sought him sorrowing and at length found him, that she fanned him with her wings and gave him air, that she raised up his reconstituted body whole and living, united anew with him and brought forth his son Horus, and that Osiris then became God and King of the underworld,--Budge asks us to take this as the literal history of a man on earth! He says that his body was probably buried in the tomb at Abydos. An endless amount of similar fabulous material we have been asked to take as factual history. Is it to be wondered at that the counsels of sanity in a world dominated by such delusions now and again plunge the nations into a vast general wreckage?

Josephus argues that he is under the necessity, when recounting one of the Mosaic "miracles," of "relating this history as it is described in the sacred books," i.e., allegorically, or in the style in which it was given in the writings which were considered divine because they did not relate to human events.

Drews, one of the writers who in the nineteenth century worked at the mythical interpretation of the Gospels, corroborates Massey’s identification of Joseph with the Egyptian earth-god Seb, as the foster-father of the divine child:

"Joseph . . . was originally a god, and in reality the whole of the family and home life of the Messiah Jesus took place among the gods. It was only reduced to that of a human being in lowly circumstances by the fact that Paul described the descent of the Messiah upon earth as an assumption of poverty and a relinquishment of his heavenly splendor. Hence when the myth was turned into history, Christ was transformed into a poor man in the economic sense of the word, while Joseph, the divine artificer and father of the sun, became an ordinary carpenter."

Drews and Graetz alike regard Josephus’ mention of John the Baptist as "a shameless interpolation."

Is it an inconsequential thing that J. M. Robertson (Christianity and Mythology, p. 82 ff.) can write the following?

"That Joshua is a purely mythical personage was long ago decided by the historical criticism of the school of Colenso and Kuenen; that he was originally a solar deity can be established at least as satisfactorily as the solar character of Moses, if not as that of Samson."

He notes that in the Semitic tradition, wherein is preserved a variety of myths, which the Bible-makers, for obvious reasons, suppressed or transformed, Joshua is the son of the mythical Miriam, that is, he was probably an ancient Palestinian Sun-God. Dupuis (L’Origine de Tous les Cultes) places John the Baptist among purely mythical personages and in harmony with many other writers identifies his name with that of Oannes, the Babylonian fish-avatar of Berosus’ account, the Ea (Hea) of the more ancient Sumerians.

A fair parallel of the turning of the Christos into "Christ" is seen in the cycle of stories centering about the mythical hero Siegfried. The myths developed as popular tradition, their mythological significance was forgotten and in course of time historical personages were identified with the characters. (See The Perfect Way, Kingsford and Maitland.)

Massey emphasizes the significant fact that there is found no "fall of man" in mythology. The devastating conception, as popularly misunderstood, came in only through the misreading of religious allegory and dramatization. Theologians from the first were bitterly opposed to its antithesis, the ascent of man through evolution. The scientific view of man’s ascent clashed with their lugubrious obsession. They clung to the heavy weapon of the "fall" in the sense of sheer "sin" and not understood as the natural, normal, necessary and wholly salutary descent of soul into matter and body, because it gave them a useful psychological cudgel over the laity. From the distorted application of what should have been clear in the myth was hatched that brood of morbid doctrines such as the fall of man into carnal sin, man’s whimsical thwarting of God’s plan, the depravity of both man and matter, the filthy nature of the flesh, the glorification of asceticism and bodily mortification, original sin, the corruption of natural man, the evil of the world, and others whose only basis of existence at all was the stupid perversion of ancient typology and the literalization of Genesis.

What has not been understood in the declaration that Cristna is the sun, is that he is not venerated as the sun in the heavens, but as the sun or divine spark in man. It can at last be said positively that the ancients did not worship the sun in itself, but as the analogical cosmic counterpart in the solar system of the central divine fire in the human heart.

In a printed lecture entitled Gnostic and Historic Christianity, Massey makes the positive statement that the early Christians did convert esoteric material into history:

"The claim of Christianity to possess divine authority rests on the ignorant belief that the mystical Christ could and did become a Person, whereas the Gnosis proves the corporeal Christ to be only a counterfeit presentment of the trans-corporeal man; consequently a historical portraiture is and ever must be a fatal mode of falsifying and discrediting the Spiritual Reality."

As this very claim has been made with Ezra as the inspired prophet instead of Esdras, there is at least the suggested possibility that Ezra and Esdras are two variants of the same name, which could even be the "Isra-" of "Israel" with the divine "el" dropped. In the religious myth it was of course Israel that was to restore the lost substance of the divine revelation! However that may be, if the whole body of scripture that covered the antiquity of the human family and all the particulars of the "race" "chosen" by God to exemplify his dealings with all humanity was lost, and what purports to be that scripture is in fact only the inner vision of a man divinely inspired, the most that can be said for it is that it is a very precarious foundation on which to base the moral and spiritual guidance of the human race.

What meager chance the scriptures ever had of being taken for history must be seen to be reduced to a vanishing minimum when we consider the words of the Egyptian God, Tem or Atum.

"I am Tem," he says, "the dweller in his Disk, or Re in his rising in the eastern horizon of the sky. I am Yesterday; I know Today. I am the Bennu which is in Anu (Heliopolis) and I keep the register of the things which are created and of those which are not yet in existence."

The recording of events that have not yet occurred is a proposal to make the modern scholar run from ghosts. It ought to be a consideration of sufficient force to open the obdurate minds of the deniers of the mythical structure of ancient scriptures to note that in those scriptures much of "history" recorded is still in the womb of time and yet unborn. This portion at any rate is not the record of that which has happened. The answer to this will of course be that it is the record of that which will, objectively happen. As to that, it may be interjected in passing, there is very substantial doubt. One of the largest blind-spots before the eyes of orthodox interpreters of scripture has ever been their fatuous belief in the literalness of so-called Bible prophecy. There is not room for a dissertation upon it here, but only enough space to say bluntly that, in the usual sense of forecast of future objective events, there is not and never was any historical prophecy in the Old Testament or the New. There is some delineation by the seers and sages of the general phases and aspects of later evolution of humanity in the cycle on earth; there is no specific foretelling of coming events on the plane of world history. Evolutionary typism and allegorical scenarios of the shape of things to come can without much difficulty often be made to look like historical description. Events do often match the frame of dramatism in which they are set. Deluded by these appearances, thousands of religious votaries have spilled rivers of printers’ ink in the tracing of the configuration of events in their time back to Bible "prophecy." Philological scholarship should have corrected this dupery long ago by announcing the correct meaning of the words "prophecy" and "prophet." From the Greek pro-, "forth" or "out," and phemi, "to speak," the prophet is simply a preacher, one who speaks out the truth, proclaims, gives forth. There is nothing in the word which has any reference to the forecasting of the future. A prophet is simply a preacher, utterer of truth. To this can be added the startling statement that the passages in the Bible which have always been taken for objective prophecies are, like most other material in the scriptures, allegorical visions or poetical depictions of the cyclical processes. This fact should add impressiveness to the strong position here taken that an unbelievable quantity of literal rubbish has to be cleared out of the way before a sane approach to scriptural interpretation can even begin to be made.

There is much support for the fact that the supposed simple origin of the name "Christians," its adoption by a sect that sprang up in the wake of the life of the Galilean preacher called the Christ, is by no means the truth of the matter at all. A passage from Mead’s work, Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.? (p. 325) tells us a far different story, and indicates we are dealing with something other than history in these things:

"The followers of Jesus had apparently hitherto been ‘ashamed’ of being called ‘Christiani.’ . . . It is highly possible that the name Christiani was first used by the Pagans to signify Messianists of all kinds, and was only finally adopted by the followers of Jesus in their public dealings with the Pagans, presumably first in apologetic literature, where we find it is of frequent occurrence from about the second quarter of the second century."

There is scarcely a single common or general belief about the chief items of the Christian faith that may be called orthodox which, on deeper scholastic inquiry, does not turn out to be a popular falsification of something utterly different in its pristine form.

Another scholar, Prof. Nilsson, complains of that utter disregard for history and geography which is peculiar to epic poetry. But, says Raglan, history was not their concern, and geography was an inconsequential side issue. And Prof. Hooke (Myth and Ritual, 6) says that both the Minotaur and Perseus myths pictorialize human sacrifice and are a product of myth and ritual united. Raglan himself states that the true study of Homer has hardly yet begun and will not get us anywhere until students see that the poems have no historical foundation, but are to be taken as documents picturing the evolution of religious ideas, in which sense they become highly important. Again he says that all the difficulties of interpretation disappear when it is realized that these great works are ritual narratives. He asserts that all the main incidents in the Trojan cycle take place in the first and tenth years of the siege and that in the mythological cycles, especially those of Troy and Thebes, all the main events are represented as taking place at intervals of about ten years. There are many resemblances: both cities were built where a cow lay down; both were unsuccessfully attacked, but ten years later stormed and razed to the ground; Hector is a leading hero of both cities. Nearly every state desired to be founded by refugees from Troy or Thebes. There was a Troy in Egypt built by Semiramis (Asiatic Researches, Vol. III, 454), according to Higgins. Trojan refugees are found in Epirus, Threspotia, Cyprus, Crete, Venice, Rome, Daunia, Calabria, Sicily, Lisbon, Asturia, Pamphylia, Arabia, Macedonia, Holland, Auvergne, Paris, Sardinia, Alicia, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Libya. The Trojan story was a myth, a sacred history, and became a vast conglomeration of fable and truth.

The origin of the ten-year period so frequently occurring in all these recitals is no doubt the fabulous legend that the Titans fought with the gods for ten years. The Titans represent of course the elementary forces of nature, and the gods stand for the intellectual and spiritual powers. Every traditional myth sought to depict the aspects of this universal conflict.

In Quest magazine of April 1912 a Dr. Anderson writes:

"The critic . . . will proceed to prove that the stories of the trial, arrest and crucifixion are quite understandable as scenes in a mystery play, but are quite inexplicable as facts of history. The trial is represented as lasting through one night when, as Renan points out, an Eastern city is wrapped in silence and darkness, Salome means both peace and evening: silence and darkness quite natural as scenes in a mystery-play, but not as actual history." 

It represents at least some, and possibly great, difficulty to reconcile the fact that Jesus was a Jew with the other fact that the Gospels dealing with him were written in Greek.

"A professional Egyptologist (Dictionary of the Bible, Smith, V. 3, p. 1018) has written respecting the passage of the Red Sea: ‘It would be impious to attempt an explanation of what is manifestly miraculous.’ To such a depth of degradation can Bibliolatry reduce the human mind! Such is the spirit in which the subject has been crawled over." (Massey: Book of the Beginnings, II, 176).

The reference to the Red Sea brings up one of the most direct and astounding proofs that Old Testament "history" is not history, and can by no possibility be held as such. This has been briefly hinted at, but needs further emphasis. If the partisans of the historical view of archaic literature insist that the Exodus narrative is history, their insistence places them in the most ridiculous of predicaments and in short makes simpletons of them. At the end of the debate they are left holding the bag, the gold brick vanished. For the Red Sea, whether that of the map or that of the myth, is no longer in the Bible! It is clean gone out of the story. The learned scholar, James Moffatt, of Glasgow University, has dropped it out of the correct translation, replacing it with the "Reed Sea," drawn direct from Egypt’s mythicism! Assumably his reasons for this rendering, in view of the blasting consequences flowing from it, must have been quite decisive and certain. So if there was no Red Sea in the story, the Israelites could not have crossed it. With this change the whole story falls. Practically, with the deletion from the Old Testament of the historicity of the descent into Egypt and the Exodus from it, the entire structure of "history" in the Bible is shot to pieces. At last the proper mythical translation of one word tears the mask of stupid literalism off the face of ancient esoteric wisdom, and leaves a long deluded and hypnotized world rudely shaken out of intellectual stupor, and with eyes torn suddenly open from its dream, gaping in stunned bewilderment at the wreckage of its illusion. Of all "rude awakenings" this is perhaps the most shocking, but also the most salutary.

Likewise the physical "tabernacle" of the Old Testament, in and at the door of which the Eternal was wont to meet and confabulate with Moses, has vanished along with the Red Sea, and we find the mythical "trysting-tent" in its stead. Male soul and female body in the divine allegory meet and hold their tryst here in the flesh on earth. From it they go on to the marriage, out of which the Christos in man is born.

A word must be interposed here with regard to the bearing of the Jewish rejection of the Messianic Jesus on the debate. Since the wretched persecution of a whole race has gushed from the rejection, there is no lack of warrant for giving the matter full treatment. The work here undertaken is in the large the treatment; but a few conclusions of Massey on the subject can be advanced here with benefit. In his great work, Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World (p. 519) he speaks with great candor. Referring to the Jews who in their popular trends came close to literalizing the scriptural allegories, he says:

"They pursued their messianic phantom to the verge of the quagmire, but drew back in time to escape. They left it for the Christians to take the final fatal plunge into the bog in which they have wallowed, always sinking, ever since; and if the Jews did but know it, the writings called Jewish have wrought an appalling avengement upon their ignorant persecutors, who are still proving themselves to be Christians . . . by ignominiously mutilating and piteously massacring the Jews."

Massey does not mean that the avengement of the Jewish scriptures on Christianity consists of the massacres, of course; he means that the adoption by Christianity of the body of Hebrew scriptures as their Old Testament has been the means of saddling on the back of Christianity the fatal incubus of a vast corpus of myth adopted because it was supposed to be history, and is now seen to be not that at all, but pagan mythology plucked from Egypt! There is no avengement equal to that of the irony of events. The logic of events is inexorable and merciless. Massey speaks in words momentous for the world today and for the time to come, when he writes:

"If the Jews had only held on to the sonship of Iu, the su or sif [the suffix su, sif, sef is Egyptian for son, heir, prince, and the name Jesus came from the combination of the divine Iu(Ju), the Christ, with su or sif, giving us the Egyptian Iusu, or Iusif, Jesus or Joseph] they might have spoiled the market for the spurious wares of the ‘historic’ Savior, and saved the world from wars innumerable, and from countless broken hearts and immeasurable mental misery. But they let go the sonship of @insert Hebrew [IE or JE] with the growth of their monolatry. They could not substitute the ‘historic’ sonship; they had lost touch with Egypt, and the wisdom that might have set them right was no longer available against the Christian misconstruction. They failed to fight the battle of the Gnostics and retired from the conflict dour and dumb; strong and firm enough to suffer the blind and brutal Juden-Hetze [baiting of Jews] of all these centuries, but powerless to bring forward their natural allies, the Egyptian reserves, and helpless to conclude a treaty or enforce a truce."

This was the catastrophe entailed for both Judaism and Christianity, as well as for the whole world, in the loss of Egypt’s august contribution.

In the finale Massey pays this well-considered tribute to the refusal of Jewry to endorse the historization of mythology:

"And here the present writer would remark that, in his view, the Jewish rejection of Christianity constitutes one of the sanest and the bravest intellectual triumphs of all time. It is worth all that the race has suffered from the persecution of the Christian world."

Another item of most vivid significance is brought out by Massey (B. O. B. II, 188). He discloses the fact that at a date in the reign of Tahtmes III, some two and a half centuries earlier than the "historical Exodus"--on the scholastic insistence that there was such an event--there were inscribed on a pylon at Thebes in a list of 1200 names of places conquered or garrisoned by the Egyptians, the original names of the towns and districts of Canaan to the number of 115, which, says Massey, is "nothing less than the synoptical table of the Promised Land made 250 years before the Exodus." This comes close to writing the geography and history of a nation before that history has taken place on the actual scene. As we shall find that the "life" of Jesus was in effect written before he "lived," so here we see the geography of a nation charted before the places became the locale of the events which gave their names fame in history. All this points to the whole catalogue of such charts and lists and maps as being allegorical depictions and systematic typographs covering a structure of meaning of the most esoteric and cryptic sort. The Canaanitish names mentioned in the list are Astaroth-Karnaim, Avilah, Berytus, Bashan, Beth-Sappuah or Tebekim, Ephron (Hebron), Hishbon, Hamath, Judah, Kadesh, Kison, Megiddo, Sameshu (Damascus) and others.

And another proof of the claim that the Gospel of Matthew in the usual Greek texts is not the original Gospel written in Hebrew is found with no less an authority than St. Jerome (Hieronymus) for support. The suspicion of a conscious and gradual euhemerization of the Christ principle from the beginning grows into decided conviction as one reads a certain confession contained in Book II of the Comment of Matthew by Hieronymus. For we find in it the proof of a deliberate substitution of the whole Gospel, the one now in the canon having been evidently rewritten by the zealous Jerome. This is well authenticated as genuine history. How far the rewriting and editorial tampering with the primitive gnostic fragments which have now become the New Testament went, may be inferred from reading Supernatural Religion, which ran through some twenty-three editions. The authorities and documentary support cited by its author are overwhelming in quantity and impressiveness. Jerome says that he was sent toward the close of the fourth century by "their Felicities," the Bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, to Caesarea with the mission to compare the Greek text (the only one they ever had) with the Hebrew original version preserved by the Nazarenes in their library and to translate it. He translated it, but under protest; for, as he says, the Evangel "exhibited matter not for edification, but for destruction." The destruction of what?--must be asked. Doubtless of the doctrine that Jesus the Nazarene and the Christos are one. Hence, for the "destruction" of the newly planned religion which separated the two. In this same letter the Saint--the same that advised his converts to kill their fathers and trample on the bosoms of their mothers if their parents stood between their sons and Christ--admits that Matthew did not wish his Gospel to be openly written, hence that the manuscript was a secret one. Yet while admitting also that this Gospel was "written in Hebrew characters and by the hand of himself [Matthew], in another place he contradicts this and assures posterity that as it was tampered with and rewritten by a disciple of Manichaeus named Seleucus . . . the ears of the Church properly refused to listen to it." (Hieronymus: Commentary to Matthew, Bk. II, Chap. XII, 13).

Ch 6

It may be generous to present the most favorable aspect of the evidence first. A passage of this sort is found in Mead’s Fragments of a Faith Forgotten (88):

"It must not be supposed, however, that the re-writers and editors of the old traditions were forgers and falsifiers in any ordinary sense of the word. Antiquity in general had no conception of literary morality in its modern meaning, and all writing of a religious character was the outcome of an inner impulse. . . . It should also be remembered that the mythologizing of history and the historizing of mythology were not peculiar to the Jews, but common to the times; what was peculiar to them was their fanatical belief in divine favoritism and their egregious claims to the monopoly of God’s providence."

In Anthon’s Classical Dictionary (Fourth Ed. 929, Art. Oraculum) the text stands as follows:

"The only evil spirit which had an agency in the oracular responses of antiquity was that spirit of crafty imposture which finds so congenial a home among an artful and cunning priesthood."

He says again (288) that "it is with the greatest grief that we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge" that some of the weaker brethren, in their zeal to assist God with all their might, resorted to such dishonest artifices as could not admit of any just excuse and were utterly unworthy of that sacred cause which they were unquestionably designed to support. One of the illegitimate devices resorted to, he charges, was the measure of composing eight books of Sibylline verses, designed to play upon the general ancient reverence and credulity of the populace respecting the pagan oracles and their pronouncements, in order to win approval of the Christian claims. Some Christian, or perhaps an association of Christians, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, "composed" the books with a view to persuade the ignorant and unsuspecting that even so far back as the time of Noah a Sibyl had foretold the coming of Christ and the rise and progress of his Church. The trick succeeded, says Mosheim, with not a few, nay even some of the principal Christian teachers themselves were imposed upon by it. But it eventually brought great scandal on the Christian cause; since the fraud was "too palpable to escape the searching penetration of those who gloried in displaying their hostility to the Christian name."

The eminent historian Lecky, in his History of Rationalism (I, 164) somewhat ironically records his conclusion:

"Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme infallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequalled in the annals of the human race."

Bacon, of Yale Divinity School, tells us that an extraordinary license was accorded in John’s day to the preacher to employ allegory, myth, symbolism, legend, parable, whatever he would, in the interest of religious edification. He says we know there were others in John’s time who used the same liberty of expression.

In a work entitled Discourse of Free Thinking (p. 96) the author, Collins, remarks that

"these frauds are very common in all books which are published by priests or priestly men. . . . For it is certain that they may plead the authority of the Fathers for forgery, corruption and mangling of authors with more reason than for any other of their articles of faith."

The Encyclopedia Britannica, dealing with the apocryphal books, says that "since these books were forgeries," the epithet (apocryphal) in common parlance today denotes any story or document which is false or spurious, using the word in the disparaging sense. It adds the significant sentence that each of them at one time or another had been treated as canonical. This lines up a point of considerable importance, testifying to the fact that the books were originally among those esoterically apprehended and hence as genuine as any others, and that when the esoteric sense was lost, their unintelligibility got them rated as false. There is practically convincing evidence to show that the word "apocryphal," like many another, did not have in its original usage any connotation of falsity or baseness. It referred to those books of the ancient wisdom which from the spiritual and mystical profundity of their contents were held as too esoteric for the masses. The etymology of the word apo, "from," and kryptein, "to hide" or "conceal," indicates this fully and categorically. The Apocrypha were the books of the recondite doctrine, hidden from the ignorant populace. This point holds much vital significance for study in this whole field.

Waite says of Eusebius, the Christian historian, that not only the most unblushing falsehoods but literary forgeries of the vilest character darken the pages of his apologetic and historical writings. In speaking of such and other irregularities, Miss Isabel B. Holbrook, a capable student of esoteric religions, writes in one of her brochures:

"Among the most notorious of these forgeries were gross liberties and interpolations concerning Christ into the writings of the historian Josephus, of Porphyry and other heathen and Church writers."

Waite further declares that Eusebius has contributed more to Christian history than any other and "no one is guilty of more mistakes."

"Eusebius has a peculiar faculty for diverging from the truth. He was ready to supply by fabrication what was wanting in historical data."

Niebuhr terms Eusebius "a very dishonest writer."

The thirty-second chapter of the Twelfth Book of Anselm, Evangelical Preparation, bears for its title this scandalous proposition: "How it may be lawful and fitting to use falsehood as a medicine and for the benefit of those who want to be deceived." (From Gibbon, Vindication, 76.)

Chrysostom is quoted (Comm. on I Cor., IX, 19; Diegesis, p. 309) as saying: "Great is the force of deceit, provided it is not excited by a treacherous intention."

Even Cardinal Newman appears to endorse subterfuge for the glory of the faith. In the Apology for His Life (Appendix, 345) he writes: "The Greek Fathers thought that when there was a justa causa an untruth need not be a lie."

What could be more explicit than this entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia (XII, 768)?"

"There was need for a revision, which is not yet complete, ranging over all that has been handed down from the Middle Ages, under the style and title of the Fathers, Councils, Roman and other official archives. In all these departments forgery and interpolation as well as ignorance had wrought mischief on a great scale."

Lecky states that the Fathers laid down as a distinct proposition that pious frauds were justifiable and even laudable. As a consequence of the necessity of enforcing their egregious claims to exclusive salvation, says Lecky, the Fathers immediately filled all ecclesiastical literature with the taint of "the most unblushing mendacity." Heathenism had to be combated, and therefore prophecies of Christ by Orpheus and the Sibyls were forged and lying wonders were multiplied. Heretics were to be convinced, and therefore interpolations and complete forgeries were made. Age after age it continued until it became universally common. "It continued till the very sense of truth and the very love of truth seemed blotted out from the minds of men."

In The Anacalypsis Higgins avers that

"every ancient author without exception has come to us through the medium of Christian editors, who have, either from roguery or folly, corrupted them all. We know that in one batch all the Fathers of the Church and all the Gospels were corrected, that is, corrupted by the united exertions of the Roman See, Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the monks of St. Maur."

Higgins further says (Anac., 522) that nothing which appears to be told by the orthodox Fathers in a regular and systematic manner against the heretics is credible. He berates Bishop Laurence of the English Church for his destructive translation of the Book of Enoch, and charges the iniquity of his having been made an archbishop, instead of being deservedly disgraced in return for so base an act.

Higgins confesses that his exertions to discover the truth are "in opposition to the frauds of the priests of all religions in their efforts to suppress evidence and to keep mankind in ignorance." He charges that Enoch was quoted by Clement and Irenaeus like any other canonical scripture. The Christians in opposition held it to be spurious, because it so clearly gave the prophecy of the coming of the pagan Avatars.

Lardner is quoted by Higgins as saying that Victor Tununensis, an African Bishop, of about the sixth century, wrote a chronicle ending at the year 566, in which it is recorded that in the year 506 at Constantinople, by order of the Emperor Anastasius, "the holy Gospels, being written by illiterate Evangelists, are censured and corrected."

What must be thought of the declaration of Augustine, founder of Christian theology, when he writes (Civ. Dei, Lib. IV, Cap. XXXI)?:

"There are many things that are true which it is not useful for the vulgar crowd to know; and certain things which although they are false it is expedient for the people to believe otherwise."

Augustine wrote a treatise On Lying, in rebuke to the clergy.

"This work," says Bishop Wadsworth, "is a protest against the ‘pious frauds’ which have brought discredit and damage to the Gospel, and have created prejudice against it from the days of Augustine to our own times." (A Church History, IV, 93-4.)

Massey says he will speak of certain things "when we begin to explore the monstrous deeds and fraudulent machinations of the evangelists."

The Rev. Jeremiah Jones says that such pious frauds were very common among the Christians even in the third century. . . . The same author, in noticing that Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History charges the Pagans with having forged and published a book called ‘The Acts of Pilate,’ takes occasion to observe that the internal evidence of this Gospel shows it was not the work of any heathen . . . and Mr. Jones says he thinks so, more particularly as we have innumerable instances of forgeries by the faithful in the primitive days grounded on less plausible reasons."

A most curious item that comes to light is a supposed letter prefixed to the Clementine Homilies, an epistle from Peter to James, in which Peter is made to write as follows:

"For some of the converts from the Gentiles have rejected the preaching through me in accordance with the law, having accepted a certain lawless and babbling doctrine of the enemy. And these same people have attempted while I am still alive by various interpolations to transform my words unto the overthrow of the law; as though I also thought thus but did not preach it openly: which be far from me. . . . But they professing somehow to know my mind, attempt to expound the words they heard from me more wisely than I who spoke them, telling those who are instructed by them that this is my meaning, which I never thought of. But if they venture such falsehoods while I am still alive, how much more when I am gone will those who come after me dare to do so!"

The Encyclopedia Britannica presumes that the "enemy" whose lawless and babbling doctrine has exercised Peter is none other than Paul. Massey makes much of the Peter-Paul controversy, declaring that Paul’s advocacy of the esoteric spiritual interpretation of all scripture made him the target for the attacks of the Petrine faction that swung over to the exoteric view. The Encyclopedia ventures the theory that the character of Simon Magus mentioned in the Acts and in this letter is a cover for Paul himself, and descants on the identification.

As to actual history, then, Marcion started with Paul; he was the first who had really understood the mission of the Christ, and had rescued the teaching from the obscurantism of Jewish narrow sectarianism. Of the manifold versions of the Gospel he would have the Pauline alone. He rejected every other recension including those now ascribed to Matthew, Mark and John! The Gospel according to Luke, "the follower of Paul," which he might have been expected to embrace, he also rejected, regarding it as a recension to suit the views of the Judaizing party. His Gospel was presumably the collection of Sayings in use among the Pauline Churches of his day.

In his published lecture on Paul Not an Apostle of Historic Christianity (p. 9) Massey says

"it becomes apparent how Paul’s writings were made orthodox by the men who preached another gospel than his; with whom he was at war during his lifetime and who took a bitter-sweet revenge on his writings by suppression and addition after he was dead and gone."

There was a wide circulation of "religious romances," Mead says, in the second century. Irenaeus himself says there was "a multitude of Gospels extant" in his day.

Considerable authority is back of the broad statement that the Pentateuch contained material other than that now found in it before it was re-composed by Esdras or Ezra. It is pretty certain that even after this re-writing it was still further corrupted by ambitious Rabbis of later times, and otherwise remodeled and tampered with. Sometimes, according to Horne, annals and genealogies were taken from other books and incorporated as additional matter. Such sources were used "with freedom and independence." Indeed this author concludes with the sentence: "They can not be said to have corrupted the text of Scripture. They made the text." This collection made in this free fashion, observes Kenealy, is what the Old Testament is in Horne’s view--excerpts from the writings of unknown persons put together by those who, he says, were divinely inspired. "No infidel has ever made so damaging a charge as this against the authenticity of the Old Testament."

As to both the Kabalah of the Jews and the Mosaic Bible, it is just about certain that the Western nations have not the original documents. Both internal and external evidence demonstrates on the testimony of the best Hebraists and the confessions of the learned Jewish Rabbis themselves that an ancient document forms the essential basis of the Bible, and that it received very considerable insertions and supplements in the process of adaptation. The Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Book of the Nabothean Agriculture are mentioned as being very close to the contents of this basic archaic document.

Mead establishes the fact that Celsus categorically accuses the Christians (ii-27) of changing their Gospel story in many ways in order the better to answer the objections of their opponents; his accusation is that "some of them, as it were in a drunken state producing self-induced visions, remodel their Gospel from its first written form and reform it so that they may be able to refute the objections brought against it."

Higgins says that "Sibyl" means "cycle of the sun." There was supposed to be a prophetess for each Sibyl or Cycle. A new prophetess presided over each Cycle as it passed. There were eight. At the time of Christ another was to come. Elsewhere it is said that the tenth was to mark the consummation of the age.

The Anacalypsis says that The Apostolic Constitutions quote the Sibylline Oracles and say:

"When all things shall be reduced to dust and ashes and the immortal god, who kindles the fire, shall have quenched it, God shall form those bones and ashes into man again, and shall place mortal men as they were before, and then shall be the judgment, wherein God shall do justice."

"It is a fact that no critic can deny," says Higgins, "that the Sibylline oracles have been greatly corrupted by the Christians."

The most succinct and telling statement concerning the Sibyls, however, is made by Higgins (576) when he says:

"Almost every particular in the life of Christ as detailed in our Gospels is to be found in the Sibyls, so that it can scarcely be doubted that the Sibyls were copied from the Gospel histories, or Gospel histories from them. It is also very certain that there was an Erythrean Sibyl before the time of Christ, whatever it might contain."

An early writer bearing testimony to much in Christian history is Papias. He emphatically declares that the Christian Gospels were founded on and originated in the Logia or Sayings. Massey derives "myth" from mutu (Egyptian), "utterance," "saying," and relates it to mati, "utterance of truth," from which he derives, it is believed with good reason, the Gospel of Matthew (Egyptian: maatiu). 

In this connection it seems warrantable that the name Mu, applied (by Churchward particularly) to a "lost continent" and age, is just a form of the word that means "utterance of truth." In the primordial days of cosmic creation, the Lord "uttered his voice" and his utterance was the Logos, which prescribed the form of the universe that his voice called into being. The land of Mu was no more a local region on a globe than "the abyss of the waters" was the Pacific Ocean, or the Garden of the Hesperides was in Spain or that other garden, Eden, was in Mesopotamia, or "the kingdom of heaven" in Germany.

One of the Church Fathers complains that his writings "had been falsified by the apostles of the devil; no wonder, he adds, ‘that the Scriptures were falsified by such persons.’" (Catholic Encyclopedia, V, p. 10.) This complainant was Bishop Dionysius.

It is probably a record of truth which the Catholic Encyclopedia (VI, pp. 655-6) makes as to the authentic authorship of the four canonical Gospels.

"The first four historical books of the New Testament are supplied with titles (Gospel according to [Greek kata] Matthew, etc.) which, however ancient, do not go back to the respective authors of these sacred writings. . . . That they do not go back to the first century of the Christian era, or at least that they are not original, is a position generally held at the present day. . . . It thus appears that the titles of the Gospels are not traceable to the Evangelists themselves."

It is claimed that Peter was "martyred in Rome" 64-67 A.D. The earliest date claimed for "Mark" is some years after the fall of Jerusalem, 70 A.D. The great Pope Clement I (died 97 A.D.?) first to fourth successor of Pope Peter, knew nothing of his great predecessor’s "Gospel according to Mark," for, says the Catholic Encyclopedia (IV, p. 14):

"The New Testament he never quotes verbally. Sayings of Christ are now and then given, but not in the words of the Gospels. It can not be proved, therefore, the he used any one of the Synoptic Gospels."

Wheless comments on this, that of course he did not and could not; they were not yet written. And no other Pope, Bishop or Father (except Papias and until Irenaeus) for nearly a century after "Pope Clement" ever mentions or quotes a Gospel, or names Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were all Jews; their Gospels were written in Greek. Also they speak of the Jews in the style and spirit of a non-Jew. Luke adds (I, 1) that there were many other like Gospels afloat. The Cath. Ency. confesses that no one knows why out of many such Gospels the Sacred Four were chosen. Wheless says that Matthew was used by the Ebionites, Mark by "those who separate Jesus from Christ," Luke by the Marcionites, and John by the Valentinians. Wheless will probably be disputed when he says that it is "proven that no written Gospels existed until shortly before 185 A.D., when Irenaeus wrote; they are first mentioned in Chapter XXI of his Book II."

Pope Papias--who said that Jesus died at home in bed of old age!--is among the first, about 145 A.D., to name a written Gospel. Quoting the old presbyters (whose memory must have gone pretty far back to the first century), he says that Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatever he remembered. It is not in exact order that he relates the sayings or deeds of Christ. "For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him." Matthew, he says, put the Oracles (of the Lord) in the Hebrew language, "and each one interpreted them as best he could." Papias did not have in his important church any other Gospels and had only heard of such writings from the elders at second hand.

Massey says we learn from Origen that during the third century there were various different versions of Matthew’s Gospel in circulation. Jerome, at the end of the fourth century, asserts the same thing; and of the Latin version he says that there were as many different texts as there were manuscripts!

Higgins alleges that even the Koran was forged twenty years after Mohammed’s death. For priestcraft it may indeed be recognized that necessity is the mother of invention.

Among the writings of St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury in the eleventh century, has been found a verbal description of Jesus in Latin attributed to one Lentulus, a friend of Pontius Pilate and his predecessor in the government of Judea. The letter purports to have been addressed to the Roman Senate by Lentulus. It has been taken to be fictitious. No such person as Lentulus is known of in Judea.

Origen writes that the difference between the copies of the Gospels is considerable, partly from the carelessness of individual scribes, partly from the impious audacity of some in correcting what was written, as well as from "those who added or removed what seemed good to them in the work of correction." (Origen, M. Matt., XV, p. 14.) Wheless asserts that as far as the Gospel of John was concerned, it was not identified with the Christian Church until Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, wrote about it A.D. 185, when the Gnostic Gospel was brought forward. This was founded on the Egyptian Mysteries, John being the Egyptian Taht-Aan. Massey endorses this etymology.

This may be the appropriate place to introduce the evidence that is extant as to the mishandling and juggling of the Greek adjective chrestos, meaning "good," "just," "righteous," and the substitution of "Christos," "the anointed one," for it by the Christian writers. It is doubtful, however, if much can be made for or against the historicity from the data available. It is at any rate a matter of considerable importance that the early prevalence of this spelling, or this word, should be known, as such things have apparently been designedly kept from general knowledge.

The etymology of Christos has already been outlined as meaning the "Anointed One," and its evident derivation from the Egyptian KaRaST, the name of the mummy-babe in the coffin, with the significance of divinity buried in flesh, has been indicated. KaRaST has been translated as "fleshed," and it may be of cognate origin with the Greek word for "flesh," kreas. Christos and Messiah are equated in the similar meaning of "Anointed." Oddly enough, the Egyptian mes and the Sanskrit kri both mean "to pour," "to anoint."

It seems that Chrestos is by no means a mere variant of Christos, with the same meaning. The Greek dictionary gives the word as meaning "good-natured," "kind," as applied to men, and "propitious," "favorable," as applied to the gods. The distinguished German savant Lepsius gives the Egyptian nofre (more generally spelled by Egyptologists nefer) as meaning "good," "beautiful," "noble," and says it is equivalent to the Greek Chrestos. He says that one of the titles of Osiris, On-nofre (Un-nefer) must be translated "the goodness of God made manifest," which is probably correct.

Chrestos appears in a number of places throughout the Bible text. In I Peter 2:3 it occurs with the translation of "gracious." In Psalm 34:8 it is rendered "good." W. B. Smith, in Der Vorchristliche Jesus, holds that chrestos as found in the latter passage is equatable with Christos.

Clement of Alexandria in the second century founded a serious argument on his paronomasia (juggling of the spelling, or punning), by which he makes the assertion that all who believed in Chrest (i.e., "a good man") both are and are called Chrestians, that is, "good men." And Lactantius sets forth that it is only through ignorance that people call themselves Christians instead of Chrestians: "who through the mistake of the ignorant (people) are accustomed to say Christ with the letter unchanged." (Lib. IV, Chap. VII.) It is thus apparent that the Greeks were accustomed to call Christ by the name Chrestus, not Christus. In his The Early Days of Christianity Canon Farrar has a footnote on the word Chrestian occurring in I Peter 4:16, where in the revised later MSS. the word was changed into Christian. The eminent churchman remarks here that "perhaps we should read the ignorant brethren’s distortion, Chrestian." Most certainly we should, as the name Christus was not distorted into Chrestus, but it was the adjective and noun Chrestus which became distorted into Christus and applied to Jesus. There is much evidence that the terms Christ and Christians, spelled originally Chrest and Chrestians (Chrestianoi in Greek) by such writers as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Lactantius, Clement and others, were directly borrowed from the temple terminology of the pagans and meant the same thing, viz., "good," "honest," "gracious," and the noun forms from the adjective.

Philo uses the adjective-combination theochrestos (God declared), which was worked over into theochristos (anointed of God). There may be something in the suggestion that while Christos means "to live" and "to be born into a new life" (the basic meaning of "anointed"), Chrestos signified in the Mystery phraseology the death of the lower or personal nature in man, that part of us which must die daily, as St. Paul sees it. An interesting clue that points in the direction of a cryptic theological meaning of the sort is given by the fact, brought to our notice by chance, that the zodiacal sign of Scorpio was known in esoteric studies as Chrestos-Meshiac, while Leo was called Christos-Messiah, and that this nomenclature antedated by far the Christian era, as a representation or dramatization in the rites of Initiation in the Mysteries. It is clearly evident here that Scorpio stood as symbol of the sinking sun of deity in its autumnal descent into matter, Leo standing for the glorified sun risen to the zenith. This is further attested by a writer of penetrating discernment of ancient structures, Ralston Skinner, who in his profound study, Sources and Measures, brings out a parallel to the Scorpio-Leo, Chrestos-Christos analysis. He writes:

"One (Chrestos), causing himself to go down into the pit (of Scorpio, or incarnation in the womb) for the salvation of the world; this was the sun, shorn of his golden rays and crowned with blackened ones (symbolizing this loss) as of thorns; the other was the triumphant Messiah, mounted up to the summit of the arch of heaven, personated as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah."

It is more than a shrewd guess that we have in this zodiacal characterization, which allocates Chrestos to Scorpio and Christos to Leo symbolism, the true basis of a distinctive use of the two words or spellings. We know well that the vowels in ancient Egyptian, Hebrew and other languages were of quite indifferent rating and value. There seem to have been almost no vowels in the hieroglyphics, and up to the sixth century no vowels were written in the pre-Masoretic texts of the Hebrew scriptures. It is not likely that there was any essentially marked or significant difference between Chrestos and Christos. They may have been used more or less interchangeably. But the insatiable tendency of the ancient mind to devise constructions that would graphically pictorialize basic principles, laws and truths, took form seemingly in this instance in seizing upon the two names, Chrestos and Christos, as descriptive of the two stages of incarnating and resurrected Messianic deity. This is the one inescapable theme of ancient religious writing. It would match the many other twofold designations, such as Sut-Horus, Horus the Elder-Horus the Younger, Osiris-Horus, Cain-Abel, Jacob-Esau, John-Jesus, Judas-Jesus and other pairs that represent the two opposite phases of deity, the God in matter, the Karast, and the God restored to heaven, as the Christ. Much Christian thought even makes the distinction between Jesus the man and Christ the God. It was in all probability the case that the religionists referred to Jesus as the Chrestos, or "good man" who was to be through and after his initiations and transfigurations reborn into the true Christos. The reason, then, for the indicated tendency of the Christians to change the term Chrestos over to Christos is plainly seen. It was their obvious purpose to establish the claim that their divinely prophesied and celestially born Messiah had indeed become the fully deified Savior. This should be a notable clarification and it has the subtle agreement of the zodiacal symbolism to support it.

Incidentally we have in Skinner’s data the probably true significance of the symbolic "crown of thorns" so tragically pressed down upon the brow of Jesus in the Gospels.

But it is of no little weight to establish the datum that the term Chrestoi, meaning "good people," full of sweetness and light, was pre-extant to Christianity. This is in part certified by the statement of Canon Farrar in The Early Days of Christianity that

"there can be little doubt that the . . . name Christian . . . was a nickname due to the wit of the Antiochians. . . . It is clear that the sacred writers avoided the name (Christians) because it was employed by their enemies (Tacitus: Annals XV:44). It only became familiar when the virtues of Christians had shed lustre upon it. . . ."

It is quite more likely that the Christians chose the name Christian (rather than Chrestian) for the luster that the high name would shed on them than that their virtues shed luster upon the name. The name needed no extraneous illumination; the Christians (as has been seen) doubtless did.

However that may be, the fundamental and crucial fact of the whole matter seems to center in Massey’s findings with reference to the derivation of the stem KRST, with whatever voweling, from the mummy KaRaST of Egypt. In the Agnostic Annual he says:

"In a fifth century representation of the Madonna and child from the cemetery of St. Valentinus the new-born babe lying in a box or crib is also the Karest, or mummy-type, further identified as the divine babe of the solar mythos by the disk of the sun and the cross of the equinox at the back of the infant’s head. This doubles the proof that the Christ of the Christian catacombs was a survival of the Karest of Egypt."

In Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.? Mead states in a footnote that the most ancient dated Christian inscription (October 1, 318, A.D.) runs: "The Lord and Savior, Jesus the Good"--(Chrestos, not Christos). This, he says, was the legend over the door of a Marcionite Church. And the Marcionites were anti-Jewish Gnostics and did not confound their Chrestos with the Jewish Christos (Messiah). Mead says elsewhere that Chrestos was a universal term of the Mysteries for the perfected "saint," and that Christos was more especially limited to the Jewish Messiah idea.

The final fact of basic import in the item is that the KRS stem is cognate with the same root that yields the word "cross." The Karest in the mummy-case was a variant figure for the Christ on the cross, the deity in the kreas or flesh. It occurred to some symbologists some time and somewhere to adopt a variant spelling to set over the descending phase of divinity in the cyclical round against the reascending phase, in which the pilgrim soul was called the Christ. The term Chrest was adopted to designate the divine soul going down into the tomb of the mortal body; the Christ was that same soul emerging out of it, "on the eastern side of heaven, like a star." As the Book of Ecclesiastes phrases it, this is almost certainly "the conclusion of the whole matter."

In his History of the Christian Religion to the Year 200, Waite considers certain very old texts to have been basic for the three Synoptic Gospels, and says that these source books contain no evidence as to such matters as the miraculous conception, the physical resurrection, or the miracles. He points out also that the early Apostolic Fathers, Clement of Rome, Ignatius and Polycarp make no mention of the miracles or the material resurrection. Indeed they make no reference to the Gospels or the Acts and produce no quotations from them save such as may have been picked up from extant collections of Logia. He comments on the account of Mary’s life given in the Protevangelium, her being given by the priests to the widower Joseph, then about eighty years old, with six children by a former wife.

Ch 7

Ch 8

Massey portrays the Egyptian origin and background of the Christian theology and finds it non-historical (The Natural Genesis, I, p. 479):

"Egypt labored at the portrait [of the Christ] for thousands of years before the Greeks added their finishing touches to the type of the ever-youthful solar god. It was Egypt that first made the statue live with her own life and humanized her ideal of the divine. Here was the legend of supreme pity and self-sacrifice so often told of the canonical Christ. She related how the god did leave the courts of heaven and come down as a little child, the infant Horus, born of the Virgin, through whom he took flesh, or descended into matter, ‘crossed the earth as a substitute’ (Ritual, Ch. xlviii), descended into Hades as vivifier of the dead, their vicarious justifier and redeemer, the first fruits and leader of the resurrection into eternal life. The Christian legends were first related of Horus or Osiris, who was the embodiment of divine goodness, wisdom, truth and purity; who personated ideal perfection in each sphere of manifestation and every phase of power. This was the greatest hero that ever lived in the mind of man--not in the flesh--to influence with transforming force; the only hero to whom the miracles were natural because he was not human.

"The so-called miracles of Jesus were not only impossible on human grounds; they are historically impossible because they were pre-extant as mythical representations which were made on grounds that were entirely non-human, in the drama of the Mysteries that was as non-historical as the Christmas pantomime. The miracles ascribed to Jesus on earth had been pre-Christian religion. Horus, whose other name is Jesus, is the performer of ‘miracles’ which are repeated in the Gospels, and which were first performed as mysteries in the divine nether world. But if Horus or Iusa be made human on earth, as a Jew in Judea, we are suddenly hemmed in by the miraculous at the center of a maze with nothing antecedent for a clue; no path that leads to the heart of the mystery and no visible means of exit therefrom. With the introduction of the human personage on mundane ground, the mythical inevitably becomes the miraculous; you cannot have history without it; thus the history was founded on the miracles, which were perversions of the mythology that was provably pre-extant."

This is a clear and succinct picture of the truth on the point--except, as has been indicated in our previous work, The Lost Light, that Massey erred in the matter of the mislocation of the nether world, or underworld, of mythology, the Amenta of Egyptian texts. He thought that the Christians erred in mistaking the "earth" of Amenta for this mundane realm and in transplanting the spiritual Christos from this celestial "earth" to the real earth, thereby euhemerizing and falsely historicizing him. In aiming to correct their arrant blunder, he keeps the Christos entirely away from earth, and applies the Christly legend to the "other earth" of Amenta, located somewhere in spiritual spheres. Thus, while Massey retains the Christos as a spiritual entity only, or an element of consciousness, which is assuredly his true character, he in turn errs by keeping him away from earth and the life of man in his supposititious "other earth" of Amenta. The Christos is a real entity and he is spiritual in nature, but he is on earth and in man, yet neither a man on earth (the Christian mistake), nor a spirit in any other earth than this only one we know (Massey’s error). The Lost Light has at great length established the truth that Amenta, the underworld of mythology, Hades, is this good earth, where the Christos, a principle and not a man, but at the same time the god in man, performs all the miracles that, as Massey truly represents, were typical allegories in the myth, but were made into miracles in the Gospels when ignorance dragged symbology over into "history." To sum up, the Christians said the Christ was a man on earth in history. Massey says that the Christ was not a man at all, nor was he on earth or in history. He was, instead, the Christ in man, who after death descended into the gloomy Amenta as a shade, and there worked the miracles of healing and implemented the judgment and the resurrection. Massey’s mistake was in saying he was not on earth. He was on earth, operating during the life, not after the death, of men, only not as a man, but as a principle of righteousness, in man. The previous work has demonstrated that the ancient theologists called this life "death" (the death of the soul, buried in sense), called mortals "the dead," and by their name Amenta they designated no other region than this nether world which we know as earth. The reorientation of the meanings of these three or four names is pretty nearly the whole clue to the proper interpretation of the scriptures of antiquity. It will be necessary to keep this correction in mind in reading further cullings from Massey’s works. It vitiates his main conclusions, but does not destroy the value of his findings with regard to the conversion of myth into history.

He writes that no Egyptologist has ever dreamed that the Ritual--the Book of the Dead--still exists in Christian formulations, under the disguise of both the Gnostic and the canonical Gospels, or that it was the fountain-head of all the books of wisdom claimed to be divine. But no initiate in the Osirian Mysteries could possibly have rested his hope of salvation "on the Galilean line of glory," which made individual in one "man" what was spiritually attainable by all. Egypt possessed the knowledge that a kingly power of consciousness had become a voluntary immolation on the altar of sense and fleshly body, in a passion of divinest pity became incarnate, put itself "under the law" of sin and "death" for the salvation of the world; but this knowledge did not run out in futile nonsense in the belief that God had manifested once for all as a historic personality. The same legend of divine sons sacrificing their heavenly birthright for humankind was repeated in many lands with a change of name for the empyreal sufferer, but none of those initiated in the esoteric wisdom ever looked upon Iusa, or Horus, Jesus, Tammuz, Krishna, Buddha, Witoba, Marduk, Mithra, Sabazius, Adonis or any other of the many Saviors as historical in personality, "for the simple reason that they had been more truly taught." (Massey.)

In a lecture entitled The Logia of the Lord, or Prehistoric Sayings Ascribed to Jesus the Christ, Massey sets forth many vital data. Never, he says, were mortals more perplexed, bewildered and taken aback than were the Christians of the second, third and fourth centuries, who had started their own new beginning, warranted to be solely historic, and then found that an apparition of their faith was following them one way and meeting them in another. This "double" of their faith was obviously not founded on their alleged facts which stood as the base of their original religion, but were ages earlier in the world. It was a shadow that threatened to steal away the body of their substance, mocking them with its factual unreality--a hollow ghost of the same truths they had embraced as a solid possession. It was horrible, devilish. Nothing but the work of the devil could explain the haunting phantom. The Gnostic Ante-Christ had to be made their Anti-Christ. The pre-Christian Gnostics and some of the primitive Christian sects had a Christ who was not based on the person of the living Jesus! One and all had as their divine figure the mystical Christ of the Gnosis and the mythical Messiah, the Ever-Coming One, the type of divine selfhood, manifesting collectively and spiritually in the evolution of the race.

And according to the unquestioned tradition of the Christian Fathers, which has always been accepted by the Church, the primary nucleus of the canonical Gospels was not a life of Jesus at all, but a collection of Logia or Sayings, the Logia Kuriaka, which were written down in Hebrew or Aramaic by one Matthew, as the scribe of the Lord. We have already glanced at the suggested derivation of Matthew from the Egyptian Mattiu, meaning "the word of truth," or "true sayings." Clement of Alexandria, Origen and Irenaeus agree that Matthew’s was the primary Gospel, disputing Eusebius’ story of Mark’s primacy

Now there is plenty of evidence to show that these Sayings, the admitted foundations of the canonical Gospels, were not first uttered by a personal founder of Christianity, nor invented afterwards by any of his followers. Many of them were pre-existent, pre-historic and pre-Christian! And if it can be proved that these oracles of God and Logia of the Lord are not original after the year thirty A.D., and that they can be identified as a collection of Egyptian, Hebrew and Gnostic sayings, they would be deprived of any competence to stand as evidence that the Jesus of the Gospels ever lived as a man or teacher. To begin with, says Massey, two of the Sayings assigned by Matthew to Jesus are these: "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth," and "If ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." These Sayings had already been uttered by the feminine Logos called Wisdom (Sophia) in the Apocrypha. Wisdom was the Sayer personified long anterior to Christianity. (Let it be noted that the oracular voice in the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher, is translated more recently as "the Speaker." This precisely matches the character that is the utterer of truth in the Egyptian Ritual (Book of the Dead), called "the Speaker.") It might indeed with full truth be said, as Massey has just done, that the preacher of the divine words of truth in the world’s arcane scripts of old is simply, in Greek terms, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, that is, wisdom personified as feminine. It is sheer imbecility of mind that would attempt to convert the personification into a living man.

The Buddha, in making his departure, promises to send the Paraclete, even the spirit of truth which shall lead his followers into all truth. The Gnostic Horus says the same thing in the same character. The sayings of Krishna are frequently identical with those of Buddha and of the Gospel Christ. "I am the letter A," cries the one. "I am the Alpha and the Omega," exclaims the other. "I am the beginning and the end," says Krishna. "I am the Light, I am the Life, I am the Sacrifice." Speaking to his disciples, he affirms that they will dwell in him as he dwells in them.

Buddha has his transfiguration when he ascended the mountain in Ceylon called Pandava or Yellow-white. There the heavens opened and a great light came in full flood around him and the glory of his person shone forth with "double power." He "shone as the brightness of the Sun and Moon," identical with that of Christ; and both these are the same as that of Osiris in his ascent of the Mount of the Moon. The same scene was previously portrayed in the Persian account of the devil tempting Zarathustra and inviting him to curse the Good Belief.

But these several forms of the one character did not originate and do not meet in any human history that was lived in Egypt, India, Persia or Judea. They meet only in one place--the mythos, says Massey, with indisputable truth. The mythos arose from Egypt and there alone can we delve down to the root of the origines. The myths of Christianity and Buddhism had a common origin and branched from the same root, whether in Egypt, as Massey claims it did, or elsewhere, as others may insist.

Pronounced in Greek, the Logia or Sayings are the mythoi of Egypt. They are utterances assigned to the personified Sayers in the mythology, which preceded and accounted for our theology and Christology. They existed before writing and were not allowed to be written. They still bear witness, however mangled and mutilated, against historical Christianity. "Myth" and "mouth" are identical at the root.

In the main, the drama of the Lord’s death and the scenes of the Christian last judgment are represented in the Egyptian great Hall of Justice, where a person is separated from his sins, and those who have sided with Sut against Horus are transformed into goats. (This doubtless means that they are sent back into incarnation for further experience, and life in the body is typed by the sign of the winter solstice, Capricorn, the Goat, occupying the place of the nadir of descent into matter on the symbolic zodiacal chart. To separate the sheep from the goats is naturally to set off those still needing incarnation in Capricorn position from those who, as sheep in Aries (the Ram, the Lamb) at the spring equinox, are by position and significance out of the area of incarnate life, having made the passover of the line separating physical from spiritual existence when they entered Aries.) Massey points it out as notable that of the four Gospels Matthew alone represents this drama of the Egyptian Ritual. In the Ritual every hair is weighed; in the Gospel every hair is numbered. Many chapter titles of the Ritual are "sayings" of the deceased. Horus is the divine Sayer and the souls repeat his sayings. The original Sayings were declared to have been written by Hermes, or Taht, the scribe of the gods, and they constituted the primordial Hermaean or inspired Scriptures, which the Book of the Dead declares were written in Hieroglyphics by the finger of Hermes himself.

The so-called "prophecies" not only supply a raison d’être for the "history" in the Gospels; the events and attendant circumstances themselves are manufactured one after the other from the "prophecies" and sayings, i.e., from the mythos, which was already then of great antiquity. All this was done in the course of the process of literalization of the drama into a human life and its localization in Judea, under the pretext or in the blind belief that the impossible had come to pass. The events of the Gospels were not only thrust forth out of the mythos onto the stage of alleged history, but were mysteriously romanticized with the halo of prophetic fulfillment of Old Testament prediction. Of course the coming Messiah should be foretold to be born in Bethlehem (the house of bread), for the zodiacal allegory had his celestial birthplace long prepared in the sign of Pisces, the house of bread and fishes. He who was to feed the earthly multitude with the miraculously multiplied divinity symboled by bread and fish, would have to be born in the house of the fishes and of the bread which cometh down out of heaven. The Christian scriptures carried forward the salient features of the astronomical allegory, but their ignorant idolaters thought they were purveying sacred history.

Again, the child’s being taken to Nazareth was only in order that the sayings might be fulfilled that he should be called a Nazarene. And yet, says Massey, his connection with Nazareth (which, incidentally, has never received any geographical authenticity at any time and perhaps never existed at all) would no more make him a Nazarene than his being born in a stable would make him a horse. Also Jesus came to dwell in Capernaum--"his own city"--on the borders of Zebulon and Naphtali, that a saying of Isaiah might be fulfilled. He cast out devils and healed the sick, for fulfillment of the same prophet’s forecast. He taught the multitude in parables, for the same reason. In spite of his miracles and many wonderful works among the populace the people believed not in him, because Isaiah had hinted that the Lord would not be believed. Massey asks why they could be expected to believe when it was prophesied they would not. Jesus sent only two disciples to steal the ass and colt because Zechariah had spoken it so. Judas was on the spot to betray his Lord because the Psalmist had said that the Messiah’s trusted and familiar friend "hath lifted up his heel against me." The Speaker in another Psalm had cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" and the crucified Messiah came in flesh would have to repeat the cry from the cross. "They parted my garments among them and cast lots for my vesture"; "They gave me also gall for meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink," had also to be re-enacted to match pre-extant similar passages.

Massey earns our deep gratitude once more for dissipating another of those most fatuous delusions resulting from ignorant misconstruction of ancient mythical material. It is with reference to the so-called "prophecies." It has already been shown that the words "prophet" and "prophecy" by etymology have nothing to do, directly, with forecasting future events in the objective sphere. The prophet meant simply a preacher, or utterer of truth, and his prophecies were simply preachments. The Biblical prophets were not clairvoyant prognosticators, but sages and expounders of lofty wisdom. 

Massey again adjures us that we have only to turn to the 2 Esdras (written long B.C.) to learn that Jesus the Christ of our canonical books was both pre-historic and pre-Christian. This is one of the books that have been rejected and set apart as Apocrypha, considered to be spurious because they are supposed to contain the secret Gnosis or keys to the true meanings. In this book it is said

"My son Jesus shall be revealed to those that are with him . . . and they that remain shall rejoice within four hundred years; and after these years shall my son Christ die and all men shall have life."

Massey's vigorous comment can be given once more

"The true Christ, whether mythical or mystical, astronomical or spiritual, never could become a historical personage and never did originate in any human history. The types themselves suffice to prove that the Christ was, and could only be, typical and never could have taken form in human personality. For one thing, the mystical Christ of the Gnosis and of the pre-Christian types was a being of both sexes, as was the Egyptian Horus and other of the Messiahs, because the mystical Christ typified the spirit or soul, which belongs to the female as well as to the male, and represents that which could only be a human reality in the spiritual domain or the Pleroma of the Gnostics. This is the Christ who appears as both male and female in the Book of Revelation [a reference to the fact that Jesus in Revelation is described as wearing a golden girdle about the paps]. And the same biune type was continued in the Christian portraits of the Christ. In Didron’s Iconography, you will see that Jesus Christ is portrayed as a female with the beard of a male, and is called Jesus Christ as St. Sophia--i.e., the wisdom or spirit of both sexes. 

The opponents of the latest superstition were too intelligent to accept so shallow and repulsive a story and a dying deity. Porphyry terms the Christian religion "a blasphemy barbarously bold" (barbaron tolmema). "A monstrous superstition," exclaims Pliny. "A pestilence," cries Suetonius. "Exitiabilis superstitio" (ruinous superstition), says Tacitus. "Certain most impious errors are committed by them," says Celsus, "due to their extreme ignorance, in which they have wandered from the meaning of the divine enigmas." (Origen: Contra Celsum, VI, Ch. XIII.) 

Massey states that when Peter, Philip and John, as preachers of the new creed, were summoned before the Jewish hierarchs to be examined, the Council decided that they were only ignorant men, unlearned in the oral law, unskilled in the tradition of interpretation, believers who did not know the true meaning of that which they taught. They were not punished, but dismissed with warnings, as rude anthropoi agrammatoi kai idiotai (men uneducated and narrow-minded). Idiotai is of course the root of our word "idiots." In the Greek, however, it carries the meaning of being bound up in one’s own ideas so closely as not to be able to see beyond one’s own small horizon.

Near the end of his greatest work, Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World (p. 905), Massey sums up the data that impelled him toward his momentous conclusions. He says that from the comparative process we learn that the literalizers of the legend and the carnalizers of the Egypto-Gnostic Christ have but gathered up the empty husks of Pagan tradition, minus the kernel of the Gnosis; so that when we have taken away from their collection all that pertains to Horus, the Egypto-Gnostic Jesus, all that remains to base a Judean history upon is nothing more than the accretion of blindly ignorant belief. And therefore of all the Gospels and collections of Sayings derived from the Ritual of the resurrection in the names of Mattiu, or Matthew, Aan or John, Thomas or Tammuz or Tum, Hermes, Iu-em-hetep, Iusa or Jesus, those that were canonized at last as Christian are the most exoteric, and therefore the furthest away from the underlying, hidden and buried, but imperishable truth. With these fateful words he ends his great work.

We have both Philo’s and Irenaeus’ expressed belief that the Word (Logos) could not become incarnate, Massey testifies. Philo no more knows a Christ that could be made flesh than he knew of a Jesus in human form--and he lived at almost the identical time of the alleged historical Jesus! So it was with the Gnostics. They declared it was not possible that he should suffer who was both incomprehensible and invisible (Irenaeus, b. I, ch. VII, p. 2). According to the Gnostics, says Irenaeus, "neither the Word, nor the Christ, nor the Savior, was made flesh. They maintain that the Word was neither born nor did he become incarnate" (b. 3, XI, p.3). It was impossible that the Gnostics could accept the doctrine of a masculine Logos being made flesh or incarnated in human form. Their Logos was the spiritual antithesis and eternal opposite of matter, not a redeemer of the flesh by wearing it.

Yet, Massey points out, the Christ of this conception was identical with the Christ of Philo and of Paul. Philo, he says, has defined the incarnation as Archangelos Polyonomos, "the many-named archangel."

Let us hear his forthright declaration to this effect in his lecture on The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ (p. 22):

"Whether you believe it or not does not matter, the fatal fact remains that every trait and feature which goes to make up the Christ as Divinity, and every event or circumstance taken to establish the human personality, were pre-extant and pre-applied to the Egyptian and Gnostic Christ, who never could become flesh. The Jesus Christ with female paps, who is the Alpha and Omega of Revelation, was the IU of Egypt and the IAO of the Chaldeans. Jesus as the Lamb of God and Ichthys the Fish was Egyptian. Jesus as the Coming One; Jesus born of a Virgin Mother who was overshadowed by the Holy Ghost; Jesus born of two mothers, both of whose names were Mary; Jesus born in the manger at Christmas and again at Easter; Jesus saluted by the three kings or Magi; Jesus of the Transfiguration on the Mount; Jesus whose symbol in the catacombs is the eight-rayed star--the star of the East; Jesus as the eternal child; Jesus as God the Father, reborn as his own Son; Jesus as the child of twelve years; Jesus as the anointed one of thirty years; Jesus in his baptism; Jesus walking on the water or working his miracles; Jesus as the caster-out of demons; Jesus as a Substitute, who suffered in a vicarious atonement for sinful men; Jesus whose followers are the two brethren, the four fishers, the seven fishers, the twelve apostles, the seventy (or seventy-two, as in some texts) whose names were written in heaven; Jesus who was administered to by seven women; Jesus in his bloody sweat; Jesus betrayed by Judas; Jesus as conqueror of the grave; Jesus the resurrection and the life; Jesus before Herod; in the Hades and in his reappearance to the women and the seven fishers; Jesus who was crucified both on the fourteenth and the fifteenth of the month Nisan; Jesus who was also crucified in Egypt, as it is written in Revelation (11:8); Jesus as judge of the dead, with the sheep on the right hand and the goats on the left, is Egyptian from first to last, in every phase, from the beginning to the end."

How could it be explained with rational consistency or with the salvation of respect and prestige, that the historical biography of the one and only Son of God fell into the lines of the merely dramatized "careers" of Horus of Egypt, Krishna of India, Tammuz or Marduk of Assyria, Mithra of Persia, Bacchus of Greece, Zagreus or Sabazius of Phrygia, and a list of others in various lands? The Rosetta Stone has at last brought to an end the centuries-long pretense and hypocrisy of the orthodox Christian party in the study of comparative religion.

The mythical Messiah was Horus in the Osirian mythos; Har-Khuti in the Sut-Typhonian; Khunsu in that of Amen-Ra; and the Christ of the Gospels is an amalgam of all these characters, and, one may add, of others. Jesus is he that should come; and Iu, the root of the name in Egyptian, means "to come." Iu-em-hetep, the Messianic name in Egypt for thousands of years, signifies "he who comes with peace." And this is the very character in which Jesus is announced by the angels at midnight of December twenty-fourth, a date set by the Egyptian astronomical symbology. A sententious summation of the whole matter is given in Massey’s words: "From beginning to end the canonical Gospels contain the Drama of the Mysteries of the Luni-solar God, narrated as human history." The mythos is the magic key that alone will fit the lock of the Bible material and open the door to the explanation of its otherwise unfathomable obscurities. "All that is non-natural and impossible as human history, is possible, natural and explicable as mythos." This is indeed the eventful truth, and the application of it is the only measure that will ever put an end to the farcical irrationality of Christian theology and redeem the body of doctrine from ostensible nonsense to comprehensible sublimity, after centuries of befuddlement.

The catacombs of Rome, says Massey again, "are crowded with the Egypto-Gnostic types which had served the Roman, Persian, Greek and Jew as evidence for the non-historic origins of Christianity." The child-Horus of Egypt reappears in Christian iconography as the mummy-babe in the catacombs, wearing even the tell-tale sign of origin from Egypt, the solar disk! Also the resurrection of Osiris comes into Christian scriptures as the raising of Lazarus, the identification of whom with Osiris makes one of the most thrilling chapters of comparative religion revelation ever to be brought to light. Among the numerous types of Horus repeated in Roman symbols of the alleged historic Jesus are "Horus on his papyrus" as Messianic shoot or natzer (from which root in Hebrew Massey traces the word "Nazarene"); Horus the branch resprouting each cycle for endless ages from the parent vine; Horus as Ichthys the Fish; Horus as bennu or phoenix; Horus as the dove; Horus as the eight-rayed star of the Pleroma; Horus as scarabaeus; Horus as child-mummy with the head of Ra; Horus as the little black child or Bambino; Horus of the reversed triangle.

Massey shows with sufficient clearness the origin of the cross in the Tat-cross of Egypt, or the Ankh-cross, the symbol of Life as resulting from the crossing or union of the two poles of being, spirit and matter. The Tat or cross of stability, symbol of the power that sustains the worlds and all things, was the figure of the pole, thought of as the backbone of the world, the axis of all durability. It united in one the "five supports" or the five-fold tree of the Egypto-Gnostic mystery, the four corner supports and the central axis. This power was personified in Ptah as well as figured in the Tat. The light that the clearer representation of Egypt throws on this symbol is great, for it shows that the cross figure is the insignium of the same power that is personified in the Christ himself and that true depiction should not so much portray the Christ on the cross as that the Christ is the cross. The god in matter and the cross are really one. This personified power in the Egyptian Ritual says, "I am Tat, the Son of Tat" (Rit., Ch. I), or son of the Eternal, who establishes the soul for eternity in the mystery of Tattu (Rit., Ch. 17). Hence we find the figure of the god, as the cross, extended crosswise as sustainer of the universe in Egyptian vignettes. This construction is undoubtedly back of the Gospel legend of Jesus as bearer of his own cross on which he was to "die." In the Christian corruption of the grand conception into impossible "history," the doctrine of the crucifixion, with its human victim raised aloft as a sin-offering for all the world, "is but a ghastly simulacrum of the primitive meaning, or shadowy phantom of the original substance." In what respect are the Flagellantes or Penitentes of New Mexico, lashed on by the fanatic frenzy of Christian doctrine literalized, better than barbarian tribes of the forest or of the South Seas, who are pointed at by the Christians for their inhuman degeneracy in offering living humans in some of the former rites? For they even today come close to actual immolation of a man on the cross on the Good Friday of Passion Week, which Christian miscomprehension and muddled mentality has indeed made into the Black Friday of the year.

The ox and the ass, ever present with Jesus in his stable nativity in the Gospels, were with the Egyptian Coming One, Iusa, ages antecedently. These two animals, which Christians ignorantly assume are pictured in the birth-scenario because they "were there," are evidently typically connected with the birth of divinity because of the exceptional and peculiar type of their breeding. They owe their existence to cross-breeding, and so stood as the type of perfected Christhood, which is raised above sex, or represents sex polarity crossed and unified in one, as before the breaking of cosmic unity apart into biunity. The ox and the ass are present when the Christ comes to indicate to the initiated that the development of the Christ power returns the soul from its state of dual life on the cross to its pristine unity. It is the symbol of the divine androgyneity, or of spirit detached from matter, released from the cross, one again and not two.

A further light is thrown on this by Massey (Book of the Beginnings, I, p. 516), when he speaks of the bifurcation of the child, that is then still without sex (in manifestation), at puberty into the distinctly male or female individual. The calf represented both sexes in the non-pubescent stage, or the mother and the child only, in the phase of nature that did not yet include the father, or the developed creative mind. The bull was the type of the Father or generative force of creative thought. But even the bull, says Massey, was made to conform to the type of spirit-matter in union and neutralizing each other, in the ox. According to Varro, Massey says, there was a vulgar Latin name for ox, viz., Trio. The ox being of a third sex, neither male nor female productively, return was thus made to the primitive Nu-ter or Neuter of the beginning. And as all things are ultimately the A and the O, and begin and end in the same sexless state (in heaven there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage), the ox--and similarly the ass--was the type of fully Christified humanity. Therefore would the Christ be fitly represented as riding into the gates of the Holy City or heavenly Jerusalem on the back of the lowly ass. But why the two beasts, the ass and her foal? The ass was the symbol of the Egyptian God Atum, and ancient typism always depicted the god as creating and procreating, in the two characters of Father and Son. Life was made continuous by the creation in cycles, and the Son typified the new generation as the progeny of the old, ever repeating and recurring. It was the eternal repetition of the projection of new life from old in the time cycles, the previous old cycle being father to the succeeding one, which carried the soul onward in its long journey from the hinterland of matter up to the gates of the Aarru-Hetep of Egypt, which is the Aarru-Salem, or Jerusalem, of the Hebrew version. Iusa is pictured with the ears of an ass, and Iu is both ass and god under one name, Massey states.

A pretty solid support is seen for Massey’s general claims as to the association of pagan usages with early Christian worship in that letter of the Emperor Hadrian to Servianus, in which he writes that "those who worship Serapis are likewise Christians; even those who style themselves the Bishops of Christ are devoted to Serapis." The most prominent early Egyptian Christians were at the same time members of the Mysteries of Serapis, as many leading Greek Christians were, like Origen, Clement, Pantaenus and Ammonius, students of the Neo-platonic philosophy.

The Gnostic Jesus in the Pistis Sophia says that he found Mary, who is called his mother after the material body, that he implanted in her the first power which he had received from the hands of his Father, called Barbelo and also the good Sabaoth. Here is the prototype of the great legend in ancient mythical systems of the son impregnating his own mother, as Horus fecundated his mother Isis in Egypt. Christians can spare their spurious indignation at "heathen" sexualism in religious worship, since the meaning carried by the representation is simply that the soul, or son, in man implants in the physical body that gives him his birth the power of spirit that transfigures her also into the likeness of divinity. The soul, as primordial intelligence, is the Father ever; in each new generation it is its own son; and the physical body is the mother. The son, therefore, eternally in each generation impregnates his own mother. Evil minds may see evil in this typing; beautiful minds will see both truth and beauty in it.

Carrying on the train of similarities between Gospel and Egyptian depictions Massey points to the dove symbol. The hawk is a male emblem, the dove the female, he shows. Horus rises again in the form of a hawk in the Egyptian resurrection. As matter is ever feminine, the soul or son descending into physical body would be entering what the ancients called its "feminine phase," its incarnation. Hence at its baptism, or entering the sea of matter, again always typed as water, it would swing to the dove as symbol. John brought forth Jeus, after which John ascended The dove made its appearance to attest Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, the Eridanus of the planisphere, the Iaru-tana of the Egyptian myth, and the "river of life" in any system. Horus rises also in the form of a dove, as well as that of a hawk. The dove returned to Noah with an olive branch, whereas the raven never returned He is the dove in his first phase, and the hawk in his second or perfected stage. Elsewhere, swinging the metaphor a grade higher, he says that he came as a hawk and transformed into the phoenix. first born as John or Anubis, second born as Christ or Horus: Anubis is Horus fleshed: John ascended, Jesus descended "I am the Dove; I am the Dove," he exclaims as he rises up from Amenta where the egg of his future being was hatched in the divine incubator, in the An-ar-ef, the hidden land, "the abode of occultation," the house of the blind,--our earth.

The age of twelve in Egyptian myth was one of the indices of transformation from the natural or unregenerate state of humanity into the spiritual kingdom, on the symbolic basis of puberty, change of voice and development of mind. And thirty was the index of completed perfection, type of the spiritual heyday in evolution. The fact that at twelve Jesus left his mother (type of matter and body) to attend to the things of his Father (type of spirit) has never once been discerned as the allegory of the natural man’s conversion into the spiritual man, the attainment of his spiritual "thirty years." And a hundred such failures to read their own scriptures aright attest the blindness of exoteric vision on the part of orthodox expounders of scripture.

It is out of the question to transcribe any considerable portion of Massey’s (and other) comparative religion data, but some salient items must be introduced. There is a perfect match between the flight of the parents of Jesus into Egypt for the safety of the divine child from the Herod menace and a similar protection for Horus. The god Taht says to Isis, the mother: "Come, thou goddess Isis, hide thyself with the child," and the place of concealment indicated was in the marshes of Lower Egypt--bringing the Moses analogy to mind at once! This is pure evolutionary symbology and not personal history. That there is any vital significance in the fact that Jesus fled to Egypt to escape the Herod menace, while Horus had to be saved from the Herut menace in Lower Egypt will probably be shouted down by hostile critics. The Herut reptile was another name for the Apap serpent, the water monster that was the Egyptian type of the lower nature in man waiting to devour the child of higher divinity when he incarnated. But the substitution of the tetrarch’s name for the reptile’s designation is in the highest probability one of the tricks resorted to in the conversion of myth into history. Massey openly charges it.

What were the twelve disciples, if not men? In the esoteric understanding they were the same in twelve aspects as the three Kings or Wise Men were in a threefold division. Or they were the same three powers of spirit further subdivided into twelve aspects. They were just the spiritual power and intelligence which is the Christ itself, manifesting its wholeness in a twelve-part segmentation. In the same way in which the atomic force of the universe manifests in a seven-part differentiation, so the spiritual nucleus of life manifests in a twelve-part unfoldment. Nature sounds a seven-key octave and Divine Mind sounds a twelve-key diapason. Each in its unfoldment sounds but one key at a time, until the succession covers the gamut. As soul advances through the scale of evolution she passes through twelve grades of being one at a time, adding unto her equipment the quality gained from experience at each level, till her absorption of the essence of all nature is complete finally in a twelvefold unity. These twelve qualities of perfected spiritual cognition are what are represented by the twelve signs of the zodiac, the sun’s passing successively through each sign and acquiring the special powers of each, typing the soul’s round of the elements and the acquisition of the twelve intelligences. In the Ritual of Egypt the soul had to pass successively through twelve dungeons, each guarded by a god, in each of which it was captive until the door was opened by the god, who held the key and would not use it until the mortal could pronounce his Name. Obviously man is a prisoner to a faculty until he opens up his ability to utilize and command its powers. Ignorance is ever the gaoler and knowledge is the only release. Inasmuch as light produced by suns is the highest aspect of creative energy, the dark dungeon was the appropriate symbol of the benighted condition of the soul when imprisoned in matter. The creative command--Let there be light!--was the divine fiat that ordered the suns to shine and the galaxies to glisten. And light in the physical area was the perfect analogue and symbol of the light of intelligence that was to glow in the domain of ignorance as solar light was to irradiate the universe of space. Twelve lights would therefore be the most apt symbol of the twelve basic powers of divine intelligence, and this brings us back to the primal true designation of the twelve rays of genius in man--the Twelve Saviors of the Treasure of Light! In various other symbolic typings they were also the Twelve Reapers of the Golden Grain, the Twelve Harvesters in the Field of Amenta, the Twelve Builders, Twelve Carpenters, Twelve Masons, Twelve Potters, Twelve Weavers of the Pattern, Twelve Fishermen, Twelve Rowers of the Boat with Horus, Twelve Sailors in the Ship of Ra, the Sun. They are the twelve powers of Sun-God intelligence. And as ancient philosophy brings out the astounding facts that sunlight is the eventual product of divine mentation--"the light of the sun is the pure energy of intellect," says Proclus in one of the most illuminating sentences ever uttered--the twelve "rays" of the solar Logos become at last in men and gods the twelve faculties of spiritual intelligence the evolution of which makes each man in his aeonial career a Christ, instructing and training his "twelve disciples" within the confines of his own individuality. They were the fourfold differentiation, under the symbolism of fire, air, water and earth, of each of the three Kings, or kingly powers of divine intellect into which primordial unity of Mind breaks up in its necessary fragmentation as it descends into matter. As water falling from a height breaks up into fragments owing to the resistance of the air, and the blood-stream divides from the heart, and a tree trunk from its lower stem, so unitary intellect descending from on high breaks up into first a threefold partition and finally into a twelvefold division. In reduction to simplest form, all this means that as in physical matter and its manifestation on earth there are four basic differentiations of expressions as fire, air, water and earth, so in mind there are the four analogous subdifferentiations, again in soul the same four and again in spirit the same four. So the twelve great qualities that are to divinize us are the spirit’s fire, air, water and earth, the soul’s fire, air, water and earth, and the mind’s fire, air, water and earth, all combined in one grand synthesis, the Christ consciousness. All this is represented by the structure of the pyramid, which has the four bases as groundwork, and four three-sided upper faces as the superstructure, with the golden triangle crowning all, and glinting ever with Egyptian sunlight. In the great ancient divine-human drama the twelve facets of solar deity were of course personified in and by twelve characters, and the dark-minded Christian spoliators of sage wisdom had to make twelve uneducated fishermen out of them. There was no escape from their becoming fishermen in the Christian rendition because the Jesus who was the astronomical Avatar coming roughly around 255 B.C., came under the precessional sign of Pisces and so came as Ichthys, the Fish-Avatar. He came as Joshua (Jesus) son of Nun, and Nun is the fish in Hebrew! Jonah: John, swallowed by the fish Can Massey be gainsaid or laughed down, then, when he says the twelve disciples were no more human than their teacher? It is Massey’s turn to laugh at the stupidity of his critics.

Jesus himself says in Gnostic literature: "When I first came into the world I brought with me twelve powers. I took them from the hands of the twelve saviors of the treasure of light," that is, from the twelve who are called the aeons in the Gnostic astronomy. And he adds that he took these twelve powers and "cast them into the sphere of the rulers," and "bound them into the bodies of your mothers." By this he means that he has in evolution incorporated them in organic creational systems and finally into the bodies of men, the fleshly body being the mother of the individual soul. Jesus is to reign as king over these twelve powers, the "nine guardians and the three amens," "the five supporters and the seven amens," and all the other characters which were "light emanations," and which would have had no meaning if Jesus had not likewise been an astronomical figure. He unifies them all in himself as he gathers them to himself in passing through the twelve phases of creative manifestation. Beside the twelve "disciples of Jesus" there are found in the Bible the twelve sons of Jacob, the twelve of Judah, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve stones Joshua was ordered to set up in the dry bed of the Jordan River, the twelve pieces of the concubine’s body cut up (in the nineteenth chapter of Judges), the twelve tables of stone, the twelve commandments, the twelve Urim and Thummim on the breastplate of the High Priest, and others. There are 13 tribes (Benjamin - son of Amun): 13 zodiacs (Ophiuchus - serpent bearer) and Osiris was cut into 13 pieces - one of which (his phallus) was never recovered. Osiris'13th part was swallowed by a fish. Asmodeus detests fish

Jesus gave his disciples power to raise the "dead." In the Pyramid Texts of Teta it is said: "Horus hath given his children power to raise thee up" from the funeral couch.

Massey calls attention to a discrepancy in the version of the miraculous draught of fishes in two Gospels, John and Luke. In John, when Jesus reappears to the seven fishers on board the boat to cause the miraculous haul, it is after his resurrection from the dead. Consequently the transaction, Massey thinks, took place in a region beyond the tomb and not in the life on earth. Whereas in Luke’s version his reappearance was in the earth-life and not a reappearance after death. Orthodox idea of course holds that Jesus was resurrected on earth and that Massey’s conclusion therefore is not sound. What is true, of course, is that there was no physical or bodily resurrection at all, but only the re-arising out of the grave or tomb of the earthly body of that living nucleus of soul that had descended into the body for incarnation. When the soul from elevated spheres descends and links its refined energies with the coarse life of body, the ancient seers pictured its durance in flesh as its death and burial. Just as naturally, then, its release from body at the end of a life cycle was its resurrection from "the dead." There was no place at all for the historical episode of one man’s bursting the bars of a hillside rocky tomb at any time. The resurrection, Paul tells us, was in a spiritual body, dissociating its tenuous substance from the meshes of the fleshly vehicle.

Again that which was a spiritual mystery in Egypt became a "miracle" in Christianity. In the Ritual of Egypt (Ch. 113) Sebek catches the fish in his marvelous net, and it is proclaimed by Ra to be a mystery.

Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes in the Gospels, and this incident binds wonderfully in with one of the greatest bits of comparative religion data ever to be formulated. When one has grasped from Greek rational theology the significance of the great doctrine of God’s deific multiplication of his own life by dividing primeval unity into endless multiplicity, sharing his oneness with the infinity of his creatures, and then applies to it the elucidation of the Christ’s multiplying that same divinity under the two zodiacal types of bread and fish (Virgo and Pisces), and then will turn to the Egyptian symbolic writing, he will come upon the amazing discovery that the city of Annu (Anu), (Any in English)--which with the Beth, "house," of the Hebrew gives us Beth-any of the Gospels--was described in the Ritual as "the place of multiplying bread!" From John we learn that "this is that bread which came down from heaven," the divine immortal soul which came here to multiply itself, as an oak multiplies its life in its acorns, in the house of bread, which is the human body. When will the religious mind break through the obfuscations of deadening literalism to see at last that the human body, the soul’s tenement on earth, is that Bethlehem, that house of bread, wherein the divine bread comes to be multiplied? Here at last is incontrovertible and irrefutable proof that the Christian has to go back to ancient Egypt’s wisdom to discover the keys to the interpretation of his own Bible. If ever the Christian doctrines are to shed any real light on human understanding of the problems of life and immortality, it will be only with the help of Egypt’s restored mysteries. As Massey so clearly demonstrated, Christian truth has been sealed up in a fatal obscurantism and Egypt holds the keys to release it. Unfortunately, present-day Egypt is under Islamic Arab occupation.

In the Gospels it is the women who announce the resurrection. "The goddesses and the women proclaim me when they see me," shouts Horus as he rises from the tomb on "the horizon of the resurrection."

Horus was not only the "bread of life" derived from heaven; he also gave his flesh for food and his blood for drink, as did Jesus. He says he has bread in heaven with Ra, and bread on earth with Seb, the earth-god.

Dealing further with the cross as symbol, the arresting fact is brought to light that this emblem in the Egyptian was never the symbol of death--in the sense of the demise of the body--but of life! It was the symbol of "death" only in the transferred sense of the word "death" as the circumscribed life of the soul in the tomb of the body on earth. The cross is the "tree," and the "tree" is the "tree of life which is in the garden" of this world. This chain of identity has not been seen or worked upon. In one form of the symbolism Jesus is nailed on the tree in its form of the cross of wood; but to suit another form of metaphorical approach he IS the tree of life. John likewise carried a cross He is the branch, the shoot (Hebrew natzer, whence probably "Nazarene"), of his Father, the eternal Tree whose branches ramify into all the universe. But for us in turn Christ is the tree, the vine, and we are the branches. A number of allusions in this relation from ancient non-Biblical sources would have kept in better understanding the connection between the tree of Genesis and the cross, or tree, of Calvary. Ancient mythic tradition had it that various typal Christ characters, Noah, Seth, Enoch, Moses, Joshua, plucked a shoot from the tree of life in the garden and planted it on the mount of Golgotha, where it burgeoned anew to become the tree of the crucifixion. And if, in its deepest sense, the cross of crucifixion is only the metaphor for this incarnation in body, which gives ever more abundant life to the soul by multiplying its potentialities through the ordeal of suffering, then the tree of life and knowledge in Genesis remains still the tree or cross of life and salvation, and not the gruesome cross of death. But clearly in the first instance it is the tree of the Father in his original generation of life; in the second it is the tree of the Son, in regeneration, or eternal renewal of life. The legends--some even carried on into Christian exploitation--that the wood of the cross of Jesus became alive and put forth green shoots, solidly substantiate this figurism. It is matched also by the burgeoning of Aaron’s rod when cast to earth! Divine life flowers anew from the old stem each time it is planted afresh in the soil of earthly body! The Christmas legend spoke of the rose blooming from the Glastonbury thorn in the winter solstice, and we prate in profound stupidity of the Christ as being a fresh shoot from the rod of Jesse. The mighty truth is in our midst, but goes all unrecognized.

The purely allegorical implications of the cross symbol should have been seen from the Platonic and Gnostic representations of the form of the cross called the Stauros. It was the four-armed structure of the Christ-aeon or emanation extended out over the field of creation, and represented spirit as being "crucified in space," and, Einstein would add, in time. The fourfold division of primary life energy out into space in the creation of universes is, as clearly as could be done, set forth in Genesis, where the river of life split off into four streams, named there Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates. All this is to tell us that life invariably in manifestation "quadrates" itself, or comes to expression in four differentiated aspects, which, be it proclaimed with ultimate clarity at last, are typified in all ancient literature by the four elements of earth, water, air and fire. This partition of primordial life force into the four forms of its manifestation is all that can possibly be meant by the symbol of the four-armed cross in the cosmic range. The John gesture denotes fire and water (baptisms) For the individual its meaning is the quadration of the one energy of consciousness in his life in the four aspects of sense, emotion, thought and soul.

If the Christ was in most real truth crucified in space, the physical timber on Golgotha’s ghastly height, hewn and sawed and nailed, might be accepted with enlightenment as pure symbol of cosmic process. But as it stands in common thought among Christian people it is the gruesome sign of the most abject stultification of the godlike principle of intelligence known to history. The significant times of the sun: midnight on the WS: noon on the SS: dawn on the VE and evening on the AE. These four create the solar cross via shadows, denoting direction of energy.

Lundy says that Plato must have learned his theology in Egypt and the East, and doubtless knew, from the stories of Krishna, Buddha and Mithra, that other religions had their mythical crucified victims long antecedent to Christianity. Witoba, one of the incarnations of Vishnu, is pictured with holes in his feet.

The nails of the cross have received considerable emphasis in the Gospel story. The nail, Massey shows, was a type of male virility or of the deeper power of nature that binds male (spirit) and female (matter) together for all effective progenation. The nailing of the body of the Christ on the cross would be the dramatization of the incarnational union of the two ends of the life polarity. Spirit must be nailed to matter to give it its quadration, for free from matter it remains in uncreative unity.

Drawing his data largely from Didron’s Iconography, Massey brings forth from those recesses of buried ancient secrets which he explored so capably, the fact that must startle all Christian readers with its pertinence to the general theme here elaborated, viz., that with the whole foundation of Christianity resting upon the physical cross and the man nailed on it, the religion that claims to have had its very origin from that cross and man has given no evidence of awareness or commemoration of that pivotal event in all its varied and elaborate iconography for about six hundred years after its founding! Massey records that during the first six or seven centuries no figure of a man appears upon the cross in Christian monumental hierography. There are all forms of the cross except that, the alleged starting point of the new religion! The Christ, and him crucified, says Massey, was not the initial but the final form of the crucifix. Over the first six centuries the representation of the foundation of the Christian faith in a crucified Redeemer is entirely absent from Christian art! Massey writes (Book of the Beginnings, I, 433):

"The earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde of Lombardy, now in the Church of St. John at Monza, whilst no image of the Crucified is found in the catacombs at Rome earlier than that of San Giulio belonging to the seventh or eighth century. So in the earliest representations of the Trinity made by the ‘Christian’ artists, the Father and the Holy Ghost (who was feminine as the Dove), are portrayed beside the Cross. There is no Christ and no Crucified; the Cross is the Christ, even as the Stauros was a type and name of Horus, the Gnostic Christ. The Cross, not the Crucified, is the primary symbol of the Christian Church. . . . And that Cross is pre-Christian, is pagan and heathen, in half a dozen different shapes. During centuries the Cross stood for the Christ and was addressed as if it were a living being. It was divinized at first and humanized at last."

The Gospel incident which dramatizes Jesus as running away from his mother at the age of twelve and saying he must henceforth be about the business of his Father, briefly noticed, must be scanned for some further elucidation of hidden purport. (The very first consideration is the thought that if orthodox interpretation insists upon taking "his mother" as his human female parent in the story, by what warrant does it not take "his Father" also as his human male parent? He says in effect that he must leave his mother and go to his father, and if the one parent is taken as human, why not the other?) The esoteric significance of this "incident" has never been divined in theology. It is a grand cosmic dramatization, based on the puberty transformation of the boy into the man. The parallelism is startling and suggestive. With the "mother" typing nature and the "Father" spirit, the transition of the boy over from the care of his mother, in which he had been nurtured up till then, to the interests of his father, along with the first development of sexual creative power and the budding of intellect at the same time, as well as the deepening of the voice, which is a most amazing natural symbol of the power henceforth of the voice to utter the true word instead of the fancies of the child, the physiological climacteric was the most striking possible form of depiction ready at hand of the great central truth of all scriptures--the evolutionary transformation of man the natural, or the first Adam, over into man spiritual, or the second Adam. In Egypt there were two Horuses, or two aspects of Horus, Horus the babe and Horus the man, or Horus the younger and Horus the elder. The younger Horus was the child of the mother--nature-and abode under her tutelage, that is, was ruled by natural instinct and not by reason or mind, until he had risen to the development of the twelve facets of his germinal divinity of higher consciousness, whereupon he graduated from the care of mother nature and entered the kingdom of his Father, intellect and spirit. He was then the elder Horus, the grown son of his Father, done with nature and ready to wield the powers of intellect and soul, the business of the Father. The avenging aspect of Horus was to avenge his father's death, which occurred at the moment of the creation of the universe from which all life sprang at the expense of the creator. With his changed voice allied to developed wisdom he could then utter the "true word" or the echo of the Logos, impossible with his feminine falsetto before! Could anything in nature more completely and admirably typify the profoundest of theological conceptions?

The purpose here, however, is again to indicate that the Gospel mention of the incident, brief as it is, has once more faithfully copied Egyptian prototypes. Every feature of the narrative is found prefigured in the Kamite portrayals. Horus the infant is the child of the Virgin, i.e., matter, or body, produced under natural conditions before the principle of mind (the male element) has unfolded and united with matter to generate the spiritual man. Horus the elder is the child become the man, graduated from the care of mother nature, and having germinated the seed of intellect and spirit into growth and function. Massey is the first to have made this determination clearly, but his work has been left in desuetude. The god Kephr, the world-builder, was symboled by the male beetle or scarabaeus which, the Egyptians alleged, procreated without the aid of the female. This is the type, not of virgin pure matter, but of virgin pure spirit, before union with the female or mother matter in incarnate life.

Astronomically the first Horus or natural man was the child of the Virgin in the sign Virgo; and six months later--which in zodiacal symbology would be at the entire completion of the incarnational cycle- actually no it would not -in the sign of Pisces the second Horus, second Adam or the Christ, is reborn of the Fish-mother, or in the house of the Fishes. But Jesus was neither conceived nor born in or to Virgo: however, John was. And in the Gospels Jesus the Christ is born with all the varied forms of the fish-type, as Ichthys the Fish, son of Nun (the Fish in Hebrew), and with twelve "fishermen" as disciples. Jesus was berthed (conceived) during Pisces. And Luke’s Gospel places the birth of Jesus just six months after that of John the Baptist; who as the forerunner and herald of the Christos is the dramatic character of the first or natural man, preceding him to prepare the way for him and make his paths straight! The previous proves that John was in fact the first aspect of the Christ to come Will orthodox exegetists tell us how the six months’ interval between the births of the natural man and his divine successor, the Spiritual Christ, given by Luke, are to be accounted for on any other basis than that of the zodiacal chart, where in pure typology the two births occur just six months apart on opposite sides of the zodiac? And thus the two conceptions, which fell at the two equinoxes, over which as Kohen Gadol, Zechariah would have presided. In fact, being born at the Winter Solstice would make Jesus the natural man - the Capricornian - the Fool. This single datum of comparative religion is enough to put the whole structure of Christian historicity on the defensive. If the unthinkable assumption or claim of historical factuality for the occurrence of Jesus’ birth just six months after that of John could be predicated as true, how could the human mind ever contain its wonder at the coincidence of the actual history precisely matching the chart of pagan symbology? The firstborn to nature (the world: Moses: kings), the second-born to the spirit (God: Aaron: Kohen Gadols). Is it now strange that, while Jesus was attempting to make Jews of Gentiles, Herod was usurping the high priesthood with rabbis? This is but one of hundreds of instances in which Christian "history" has had to dance to the tune played by pagan allegorism and typism.

The word "mount" or "mountain" is another link between the Gospels and pre-Christian derivations. The mount is very frequent in Egyptian typology, and the thing it did not mean in esoteric rendering was an earthly hill or elevation. It meant specifically the earth itself. The earth was the mount, raised up in space, where matter and soul, the god and the (animal) man, the one descending "from above," the other ascending from the slime to animal, met for that interrelation that meant evolution. Therefore every great transaction in the evolutionary process "took place" "on the mount." Earth is the only place where spirit and matter ever meet on equal terms or in the balance (symboled of course by the equinoxes), and so it is that God always called man (typed by "Moses") up into Mount Sinai to commune with him. Jesus, the Christ, is drawn up onto the mount to be tempted, he delivers his Sermon or Sayings of wisdom to humanity on the mount (though Luke says it was on a level plain -perhaps symbolizing an equinox), he was crucified on the hill and was transfigured in the height. Even the ark landed on the "mount of earth," as "Ararat" is a variant of the Hebrew arets (old form areth), "the earth." celestial visitation? It is as futile to try to locate "the hill of the Lord," < Mont Segur > "thy holy hill," "the hills whence cometh my strength," on the map or earth’s surface as it is to locate the milk and honey of Jerusalem the Golden in Palestine. Horus was symbolically placed, for all his ordeals and transformations, on the Mount of the Horizon, and this Mount--existing nowhere as a locality on earth, but being the mundane sphere itself--is the Egyptian prototype of all the holy mounts, Gerizim, Horeb, Sinai, Zion, Carmel, Calvary, in the scriptures. The earth, like all planets, is a mount/island in the celestial Nile of space

The mount was the "place of emergence" in mythology. This is notable because it aids in the definite localization of its meaning. Life emerges from unmanifestation in the invisible worlds of pure Form (in the Greek sense) to visible manifestation in the physical cosmos, and it can do this only where spirit can achieve its embodiment in matter. A physical planet is the necessary ground for such processing. Spirit emerges from subjective to objective existence on the Mount of Earth. A prominent modern school of philosophy, Bergson’s, has dealt so fully with this phase of cosmic procedure that it has taken the name of the "Emergent Philosophy." As life emerged out of darkness into light it gave birth to the suns, the lamps of creation. Hence the mount again was the place of birth for the sun. The solar orb, symbolizing always the divine power of spiritual light, went to its "death" in matter on the Mount of the Horizon on the West, the Western Mount, Mount Manu, and arose in its rebirth on the Mount of the East, or of Dawn, Mount Bakhu. These two names are instructive. Ma-nu is the elementary primordial abyss of the waters, empty space, or inchoate matter, as nu is the hieroglyph for water. Under the symbolism of the sun setting in the western ocean, life goes down from the heights of pure ethereality into the sea of matter. Passing through the round of the material kingdoms it emerges again on the east with a focus of consciousness developed to divine power in a physical organism, and comes forth as a soul or spirit individually conscious. Human-divine consciousness comes from the union in man’s body of the two elements of psychic soul and divine spirit, and, oddly enough these two "persons" in man were named by the Egyptians respectively the ba and the khu. The Eastern Mount would then bring divinity to birth as the ba-khu, and so the Mount of Dawn for the divine soul in man was called Mount Bakhu. Dawn is likewise the Hebrew Sachar These two mounts are in Revelation and elsewhere in the Bible.

There is no end of repetition in the Bible of the Egyptian "three days in the tomb." Hosea speaks of the Israelites being held in bondage and being released and raised up "after two days" or "on the third day." The place of captivity for the soul in matter has variable naming, such as Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Sodom, Arabia, none of which has geographical but only allegorical reference. If final and clinching proof is needed to show that the captivities and bondages in the Old Testament are only mythical representations, we have it in the prophet’s assignment to them of a three-days length. The descent of the soul into body to manifest her powers and make her appearance or epiphany (or emergence) is the only substance and reality in any of the "captivities" of scripture. When the soul accomplishes its growth in the dungeons of Amenta, Sheol, Hades, and rises in triumph over the flesh and the grave, she is beautifully said to "lead captivity captive." That the allegories of their Old Testament were known to the Jews as non-historical is shown by the fact that fragments of the original mythos crop up in the Haggadoth, Talmud, Mishna, Kabalah and other Hebrew sacred scripts, Massey points out. This material was known to the Jews, and obviously not as history. Further, most of it had for ages been known to the Egyptians and again not as history. 

In his Jesus and Paul (161) Bacon, who is not specifically aiming at giving the scriptures a mythical rendering, writes that the story of Jesus’ walking on the sea in Mark 6:45-52 has a supplement in Matthew 14:28-33, which further draws out the parallel with purely spiritual meaning; saying that in Jewish symbolism power to tread upon the sea or triumph over it signifies victory over the power of Sheol. And in reference to the inner significance of the "captivities" he speaks of victory over the imprisoning powers of darkness. Also he very rightly says (p. 205) that the history of the conception of the Messiah as a great light entering the lower world of darkness and death to effect both judgment and deliverance would carry us far back into pre-Christian interpretative application of the Isaian passage: "The people that sat in darkness have seen a great light; unto them that dwell in the shadow of death hath the light shined." This is just the kind of thing that Massey claims throughout, and supports his claim with mountainous evidence.

It is a standing challenge to the proponents of this historical thesis of scripture to explain away the eighth verse of the eleventh chapter of Revelation. If every word, verse, chapter and letter of Holy Writ is--as has been solemnly declared by four or five Church Councils--God’s unalterable truth, we then have the Bible itself in the plainest of words declaring the crucifixion of Jesus to be non-literal and non-historical. Speaking of the "two witnesses" (which it explains are the "two olive trees"--therefore certainly not persons or characters) the preceding verse says that "the Dragon shall rise up and slay them." Then follows the eighth verse with its categorical denial of a historical crucifixion in Jerusalem:

"And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified."

Jesus crucified not in Jerusalem, but in Sodom and Egypt--two places, geographically, making it necessary to assume two crucifixions or a half crucifixion in each place--and these two "places" expressly described, not as physical localities, but as "spiritually" considered. Sodom and Egypt: two crucifixions - or crossings - two conceptions and two births. Here is the Bible’s own express declaration that the crucifixion was nothing but a spiritual transaction. Christian exegesis is pretty silent about this verse; it is a question if it has ever been chosen as text for a sabbath sermon. It flies straight in the face of all that ecclesiastical policy stood for from the third century forward to the present. It is the verbatim contradiction of all official Christian theology over sixteen centuries. It is a flat denial of the physical crucifixion and inferentially of the "life" of Jesus, as the Christ. It promises still the final triumph of esotericism. Jerusalem was the "holy city" of the evolved spiritual consciousness, city of "heavenly peace," as its name implies, and never anything else. Peace is equated with silence, which leads one back to the story about Ra and Sekhmet. The Salem in Jerusalem likewise equates with evening (an equinox) as well as completion (as in Jesus on the cross uttering "it is Salem"): Salome. Was this the same Salome whom had John ''crucified''? Two Salomes - two crucifixions...  As a matter of fact, even in its empyreal connotation, Jerusalem was not the locality of consciousness in which the Christ in us is crucified. Jerusalem, on the contrary, is the city of blessedness in which, after the crucifixion, he enters into the peace of his glorious triumph, carried up to the gates of it on the back of the lowly animal, his body. I partly disagree: there are two crucifixions (crossings), signified by the two equinoxes which ''equal out'' opposing forces such as dark and light, night and day, spirit and flesh. The city of Salome is within the realm of Herod. The first crucifixion is when spirit is crucified into matter, and the second when spirit is taken back up from flesh. The fleshy animal carries the spirit to its crucifixion back into spirit The place of his crucifixion is not in heaven, where peace abides, but down in the depth (Egyptian Tepht, whence Tophet) of matter, the Sodom and Egypt of the fleshly incarnation. Incorrect: the place of his first crucifixion was in Heaven - possibly at a place later referred to as Sodom: the second crucifixion occurs perhaps at a place called Egypt, signifying the crucifixion out of ''slavery'' in ''Egypt'' (mortal incarnation being synonymous with bondage in flesh) There is enough of the primal truth of Christian beginnings left in this one verse to redeem an errant religion from its lost ways and sorry plight.

One of the Sibyl’s prophecies was to the effect that the Messiah would come when Rome shall be the ruler of Egypt. "When Rome shall rule Egypt, then shall dawn upon men the supremely great kingdom of the immortal king and a pure sovereign will come to conquer the scepters of the whole earth into all ages." The earliest Church endorsed these Sibylline utterances and cited them to prove the foundation claims of its own religion. Here surely, then, there is a prophecy whose literal fulfillment gave it the lie. Rome did conquer Egypt, and after two thousand years of painful history the world still needs the King of Kings more sorely than ever. Actually, the writer previously was correct when he stated that the term ''Egypt'' did not refer to a certain location on the earth, as it did the earth itself. Egypt literally translates to the ''House of Ptah'' - Ptah being a Khemetic creator deity (Ptah- Pater- Paternal- Father) and thus the ''father of all the earth''. Rome did in fact come to rule over the bulk of the known House of Ptah at the time of the Sibyl's prophecy. Here is an example of fulfilled "prophecy," the folly of which should--but probably will not--carry disillusionment to the rabid mongers of "Bible Prophecy."

Also there is I Cor., 8:6, saying, "yet for us there is . . . just one through whom we live." If the Lord Jesus Christ is Jesus, he is here declared to have made all things, most of which were here and made before he came. As the cosmic Logos, to be sure, he conceivably made the worlds; but as the man Jesus, his hands would have plenty to do with a few mountains and rivers. In the Oxyrhyncus papyri we have the Logos saying, "I am all that was and is and shall be! And my veil it hath never been lifted by mortals"--appropriate for the divine Word, but fatally inapplicable to the man of flesh. Even this lifting of the veil is drawn from the inscription on the base of the statue of Isis at Sais in Egypt.

Also John’s passage that "he was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not," can have no reference to a personal living Jesus. If this is so it is important to note that even the last clause--that the world knew him not--must have some larger cosmic relevance and can not refer to popular rejection of him and his preachment, according to the accepted interpretation.

A work of great statistical research and vital data is Godbey’s The Lost Tribes a Myth. In it he asserts that modern excavations have shown Egyptian dominance in Palestine through the greater part of 3000 years. There were Israelite kings who were political "sons" of Egypt, and Pharaohs warred to establish their authority. (References to the Book of I Kings are given to support this.) "But," says Godbey, "there is no extant effort to append the history of Israel to the antiquity of Egypt." Of course there was not, for the reason that neither Egyptian nor ancient Hebrew literature was dealing with history or antiquity in the historical sense. But if Godbey means that there has been no effort to append Jewish "alleged" history to the religious antiquities of Egypt, Massey’s work alone would sufficiently belie his assertion.

Ch 9

The historicity of the Gospel of Mark is directly challenged by Bacon in his Jesus and Paul (p. 147). He declares that when we look at this Roman Gospel which became so completely standard for this whole class of literature that no other considerable record of Jesus’ activity survives, and when we see how the material has been selected and what motive controls the elaboration, it will be perfectly clear that we have in Mark not a biography, not a history, but a collection of anecdotes; and even this collection is made for purposes of edification and not of historical record.

Among capable students in the field of this study who entirely disbelieved in Jesus’ existence are B. Smith and Arthur Drews. Smith denies the existence of the town of Nazareth, in which determination some others have sided with him. Origen in the latter part of the second century states that he could find no trace of "Bethany beyond Jordan." Smith advances the claim that Jesus was an object of worship to a sect of Nazarites who existed at the time when Christianity came into being, and whom the Christian Father Epiphanius mentions at great length.

It may be noticed in passing that Nietzsche, the philosopher of super-humanity in Germany a half century ago, pronounces the combining of the New Testament artificially with the Old in the Christian system as "perhaps the greatest piece of effrontery and worst kind of ‘sin against the Holy Ghost’ with which literary Europe has ever burdened its conscience." (Beyond Good and Evil, III, p. 52.)

This virtually amounts, he thinks, to Christianity’s chaining itself to a "corpse." However this conclusion must be modified by the knowledge that while the Old Testament literature may be considered a "corpse" if regarded as history--rather a ghost or wraith of history--it must be accepted as a very living thing when taken, as it rightly should be, as vital allegory and drama of verity. Solomon, Grethenbach adds, wise and wealthy as he was, left no inscriptions or other stone witnesses to his name, as did the neighboring monarchs of the Nile and Euphrates.

A light on the date of "Luke’s Gospel" is found in the item that Theophilus, the friend to whom Luke addresses himself in the opening chapter, was Bishop of Antioch from about 169 to 177 A.D. (Cath. Ency., XIV, 625). If Luke was written 120 to 130 years after Jesus’ death, the chances of its being a legitimate, well-historicized and positive account of events so far past, and entirely quiescent in the interval since their occurrence, are very slim indeed. 

For its circumstantial significance it is well to bring to daylight another feature of historical fact that has received no attention for centuries. This is the matter of the monumental record of Jesus’ burial. Says Lundy (Monu. Christ., p. 256):

"The earliest example of our Lord’s burial which exists among the monuments of primitive Christianity is, perhaps, that of an ivory in the Vatican, of the sixth century, which represents a square structure surmounted by a dome . . . with a sleeping soldier on one side of it, and two of the holy women who came early in the morning to anoint the dead body of their Lord. No such representations are found in the catacombs or ‘early’ churches either of the East or West. . . . So careful was early Christian art in abstaining from all painful representation of the Lord. It is a hint to modern idealists in art that they go and do likewise."

Perhaps it is also a hint that the basis of historical factuality behind the story of the Christ’s death was too completely wanting.

At the same level of significance is the sister fact that Lundy brings out (Monu. Christ., p. 268). This time it is the resurrection.

"It is a most singular fact that no actual representation of our Lord’s resurrection has yet been discovered among the monuments of early Christianity. The earliest that I can find is that published by Mr. Eastlake in Mrs. Jameson’s History of Our Lord, representing a temple-like tomb, with a tree growing behind it on which two birds are feeding; the drowsy guards are leaning on the tomb, one asleep, the other awake, and two others are utterly amazed and confounded; an angel sits at the door of the sepulcher speaking to the three holy women; and our Lord is ascending a hill with a roll in one hand, while the other is grasped by the hand of the Eternal Father, as it is seen reaching down out of heaven. It is an ivory carving and said to belong to the fifth or sixth century. It is at Munich."

Lundy adds that as the crucifixion is only indicated by symbol, so doubtless is the resurrection.

Grethenbach reminds us that we must make liberal allowance in our reading of New Testament Scripture for the desire on the part of Jesus’ biographers to make the "incidents" of his life conform to the texts of ancient sacred works. Hence, he says, each reader must judge for himself whether he is being treated to fact or to the results of this process of conformity. What a basis for the substantiation of events that have determined the religion of one third of mankind!

A touch of early Christian association of doctrine with Egyptian origins that did not suffer erasure by the vandal hands, is seen in an identification, by Augustine and Ambrose amongst the Christian Fathers, of Jesus with and as the "good scarabaeus," the Egyptian name for the divine Avatar coming under the zodiacal sign of Cancer, the Crab or Beetle. In accordance with the continuation for some time of the Kamite symbolism in Christianity, it was also maintained by some sectaries that Jesus was a potter and not a carpenter. The Egyptian God Ptah was the divine Potter, or shaper of the clay of man’s nature into divine form.

Not one person in thousands in the Church today has the faintest idea when the chronology or dating of the Christian era was fixed. Mead states that Dionysius of the sixth century, following Victorious of Aquitaine of the preceding century, fixed the date of the nativity of Jesus. Turner of Oxford, in his article on the Chronology of the New Testament in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible, gives the nativity in B.C. 7-6. In the Ency. Biblica von Soden of Berlin, under "Chronology" gives the Birth "circa 4 B.C." Some encyclopedias give two to three years of the ministry, others but one year.

It is impossible to ignore the force of the rather startling fact baldly stated by Mead (Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 48) when he writes:

"It has always been an unfailing source of astonishment to the historical investigator of Christian beginnings that there is not one single word from the pen of any pagan writer of the first century of our era which can in any fashion be referred to the marvelous story recounted by the Gospel writers. The very existence of Jesus seems unknown."

Mead goes deeply and carefully into the early use of the term Nazarioi (Nazarenes, Nazarites, Nazarians, etc.) and cites especially Epiphanius’ references to it, showing how this careless or over-imaginative "historian" of the "heresies" entangles himself in many flagrant contradictions in his statements. Says Mead:

"The historical fact underlying all this contradiction seems to be simply that ‘Nazoraei’ was a general name for many schools possessing many views differing from the view which subsequently became orthodox. Their descendants are the Mandaites of southern Babylonia, who have the Codex Nazaraeus."

Epiphanius claims strenuously that the Nazoraeans were the first Christians and that they used both Old and New Testament,--though how they could have used the New Testament when it was not yet in existence, he does not explain! Incidentally the present thesis that there were extant many documents like the Logia or Sayings and various Mystery ritual texts or "Gospels" in all the ancient period, both before, during and after Jesus’ "life," is the only one that permits us to solve the difficulty of Epiphanius’ claims without charging him with overt lying. The "Gospels" were in existence, yes, but not as the canonical Gospels officially apotheosized at Nicea in 325. But so were they in existence centuries before Christ.

Further with reference to the term Nazar, Mead (Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 346) has to say that the Old Testament Nazirs were those "consecrated" to Jahweh by a vow, and their origin goes back to very early times in Jewish tradition.

"Now it is to be remembered," he says, "that in Numbers VI the word nezer is applied to the taking of the Nazirite vow of separation and consecration, and the name netzer (branch) is given to one of the disciples of Jesus in the Talmud, and in one of the Toldoth recensions to Jeschu himself, and that the commentators are agreed that this is a play on notzri, the Hebrew for ‘Nazarene,’" or Galilean.

This whole debate in the early Church forum is a striking instance of the ignorance and confusion concerning their own theological material in which the Christians became entangled by reason of their smothering Egypt’s time-honored wisdom. Egypt stood all the while holding in her hands the answer to the riddle of the two contradictory versions of Jesus’ personal appearance. Its Messianic Horus was figuratively two characters in one, "the double Horus," "Horus of the two horizons" (west and east). "Horus the Elder and Horus the Younger." As the elder he typified the adult divinity of one cycle; as the younger, he was the new-born son of that aged father. Horus the Elder represented the aged past, Horus the Younger the new-born present and the coming future. As Massey so convincingly shows, the two characterizations passed over into Christianity through Gnostic or other channels, and after some time the inner connections having been lost, both stood facing the ignorant Christians with all explanation gone. Hence the debate in the dark. Again we have a grim demonstration of what a miscarriage of rational sense is produced the moment allegory is converted into history.

Ch 10

To begin with, the consideration at once occurs to reflection--when one transfers the episode from romantic subjectivism to concrete realism on the plane of everyday factuality, in the process of which nearly every incident in the Bible at once appears impossible and ridiculous--that to carry out such an edict Herod must have struck at all the infant children of his own political supporters, his friends, his courtiers, the members of the ring that are with him in power. It is incredible that a man in his position, short of being demented, would have risked the infliction of slaughter and grief upon the families of those in his own political "gang." Nor is it conceivable that this powerful coterie of his closest supporters, his cabinet, and the noblemen would have permitted an order that would have involved their own children.

Then the incident is recorded only in the Gospels; and by now it must be clear that the Gospels are spiritual dramas and not histories. There is therefore no historical record of the event. Veridical history knows absolutely nothing about it. It is a total blank as regards this incident in the "life" of Jesus. It is an allegorical formulation and nothing else. It, too, traces its mythological origin to Egypt, where the Innocents--the virgin units of divine mind, our souls-to-be--were attacked, like the infant Hercules in his cradle, by the two reptiles (representing the lower natural forces of the body, in warfare with the newborn Christos taking his initial plunge into carnality), the Apap serpent and the Herut water monster. The soul-units were characterized as "innocent" because they were children of God, newly generated offshoots of his mind, that had not ever previously been wedded to matter in full incarnation. The meaning, as always, is evolutionary, cosmic or spiritual, never objectively historical. On their downward plunge into the world and body they had to withstand the onslaught of the carnal nature with its menace of engulfing, devouring their incipient spiritual nature. This was dramatized as the attack of the serpent upon them in their infancy or childhood. The youthful David overcame the monster Goliath as one version of it, and the fairy legends of the young St. George or petit Jack battling the giant are other forms of it. It is all to typify the danger involving the hosts of young souls from the side of the carnal body on their first venture into incarnation.

Higgins says categorically that the story of Herod and the Innocents is quite unknown to all the Jewish, Roman and Greek historians. Mead states that the Talmud Rabbis know nothing of Herod’s wholesale murder of the children as recounted in the introduction of our first canonical Gospel. Josephus knows nothing of it, although he had no reason for whitewashing the character of Herod had such a dastardly outrage been an actual fact. And the Talmud Rabbis so thoroughly hated the memory of Herod that they could not have failed to record such a horror had he been really guilty. Mead adds that we must remember that the Rabbis had no belief whatever in the Gospel tradition as history.

On the subject Lundy has this to say:

"Although persecution began with the very birth and infancy of Christ, when King Herod sent his ‘blood-hunting slaughtermen’ to Bethlehem to ‘spit the naked infants upon pikes and make their mad mothers’ howls break the clouds,’ yet of this horrible massacre there is no trace at all in the Roman catacombs and none in any Christian art until about the close of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century, when we have an example on a sarcophagus from the crypt of St. Maximin, France. . . . Modern Romish art must needs represent the actual slaughter in all its horrible and sickening details to make it impressive to the vulgar, as Fra Angelico, Raphael and especially Rubens have done. Early Christian art had a more refined delicacy of taste and far better conceptions of the true and only object of art, which is to teach, cheer, comfort and elevate the soul of man, and not fill him with horrors and ideas of cruelty and licentiousness."

(Lundy adduces the valuable testimony also that there is no picturing of the flight into Egypt and return of the holy family to Nazareth in early art, and none of Christ among the doctors in the temple until about the fifth century.)

To accentuate the point that considerations of factual history had little to do with the fixing of a date for Jesus’ birth, it is worth inserting a quotation given by Epiphanius (Haer., LI, p. 22) from the Codex Marcianus:

"The Savior was born in the forty-second year of Augustus, king of the Romans, in the consulship of the same Octavi(an)us Augustus, (for the thirteenth time), and of Sil(v)anus according to the consular calendar among the Romans. For it is recorded in it as follows: When these were consuls . . . Christ was born on the sixth day of January, after thirteen days of the winter solstice and of the increase of the light and day. This day (of the solstice) the Greeks, I mean the Idolaters, celebrate on the twenty-fifth day of December a feast called Saturnalia among the Romans, Kronia among the Egyptians, and Kikellia among the Alexandrians. For on the twenty-fifth day of December the division takes place which is the solstice, and the day begins to lengthen its light, receiving an increase, and there are thirteen days of it up to the sixth day of January, until the day of the birth of Christ (a thirtieth of an hour being added each day), as the wise Ephraim among the Syrians bore witness by this inspired passage (logos) in his commentaries, where he says: ‘The advent of our Lord Jesus Christ was thus appointed: (First) his birth according to the flesh, then his perfect incarnation among men which is called Epiphany, at a distance of thirteen days from the increase of the light; for it needs must have been that this should be a figure of our Lord Jesus Christ himself and of his twelve disciples, who made up the number of the thirteen days of the increase of the light."

The sixth of January is still traditionally celebrated as the day of the birth of Christ in England and elsewhere. Christian heads are for the most part guiltless of any suspicion of the reason for the date. The quoted passage hints at it, but, without ancient Egyptian backgrounds of data, leaves the matter still obscure. We have already seen that the most primary significance of the number twelve, as pertaining to the disciples, tribes of Israel, months of the year, and other usages, was the Egyptian designation, the Twelve Saviors of the Treasure of Light. The Christ would be fully "born" in humanity when his gradual infiltration into human consciousness had unfolded to perfection the twelve rays of divine mind which man is to express. The inchoate divine light in mankind was to increase by twelve stages of growth to the full shining of Christhood in all hearts. What more natural symbolism then could be adopted than the counting of the first twelve days of increasing light from the solstice of darkness, figured as the twenty-fifth of December? And after twelve days came the thirteenth, on which the whole twelve powers were synthesized in the unified being of the Christos. So that now with the resort again to Egyptian constructions of imagery there can be announced for the first time to the Christian population the correct significance of their celebrating the birth of Jesus both on the twenty-fifth of December and the sixth of January. As the Egyptians would have said, the December solstitial date commemorated the birth of Horus the Younger, the infant Horus, type of the first or natural man Adam; while the January date thirteen days later marked the day of the birth of Horus the Elder, Horus the adult, the homme faît or man made perfect, second Adam. In simpler terms, the December date marked the physical beginning of the birth of the Christ spirit in mankind and the January date marked the concluding stage of its aeonial increase. All of which again throws the meaning of the word "birth," in reference to the Christos, into its true and proper significance, as a gradual increase of a spiritual quality over a long period, the whole cycle or aeon. Man, who is to be divinized, had first to be physically "born" on a given planet. So the Christ-man as ritualistic type of a divinized humanity, had also to be given his "birth-day"--at the winter solstice, as a babe in the flesh. It will be noticed that the tradition outlined in the Codex Marcianus lays significant stress upon the apparently extraneous fact that the Savior’s birth on the sixth of January came in the thirteenth consulship of Octavius Augustus, obviously an obscure hint that Deity fell in with the symbolism to the extent of adding another historical thirteen to the combination. Christians celebrate many a festival day in the year’s calendar without the slightest inkling as to the long-lost purport of the ritual commemorations.

Reverting to the Herodian hecatomb of infant death, if the inherent impossibilities of the case do not suffice to determine the matter against the historicity, there is another fact that settles it with finality. This is the date of Herod’s death. Christian historians have been relentlessly forced to assent to the year 4 B.C. as the date of the Tetrarch’s demise. When verified historical fact is the piper, theological fiction must dance in tune. So back goes the official "date" of Jesus’ birth to the year 4 B.C., since Herod must be kept in the story. This throws the whole dating of the Christian era four years out of line with the first guess.

But what will be done now when another authentic date is found and another shift will have to be made on the strength of it? Another ruler is mentioned as on the throne when Jesus was born, and his date is still farther away from the year one. Matthew says that Caesar Augustus levied the great world tax that required Joseph to register at Bethlehem, "now when Cyrenius was Governor in Syria." There has hardly been a period in eastern Mediterranean history when the records of the provincial governments under the Roman Empire were so well kept as just the time referred to. The official annals of the Syrian government are well preserved; and they show no Governor at all by the name of Cyrenius! The closest approximation to the name is Quirinus, and Moffatt’s translation of the New Testament inserts Quirinus for Cyrenius in the Nativity narrative. But the authentic date of the governorship of this Quirinus is the two-years period between 13 and 11 B.C.! To accommodate its dating to this item of the "historical" chronicle of Jesus’ "life," official ecclesiasticism must now endorse a date eight or nine years farther back than 4 B.C. Two such corrections leave the whole historical structure of Christianity badly shaken, near in fact to the point of tottering. Without a change in the date of the first Christmas the participation of Herod in the infant slaughter becomes impossible. The personal Herod was four years in his grave when the Bethlehem babe arrived.

Comment has already been made on the close similarity of the name of the Egyptian serpent Herut to the Tetrarch’s name, and the likelihood of a substitution of the latter for the former when the Egyptian myth was converted into "history." Presumably clinching proof of this jugglery may never be available. It must be left then to rest upon the strong presumptive probabilities inherent in the situation. It must be held deeply suggestive, however, that the name Herod occupies exactly the same place, role and significance in the Gospel "incident" that the Herut reptile fills in the Egyptian allegory! It is the Herut menace to our young divine souls in the one instance, and the Herod menace to the young divinity in the other. This alone is enough to remove it from the realm of coincidence and conjecture and to throw it over into that of identity of character. If it was one isolated single occurrence of such definite correspondence, the case might be classed as accidental. But when it is known to be but one of a long series of such agreements and matchings, sound judgment inclines to call it another historization of Egyptian myth. Such it almost indubitably must be considered.

The fact of Herod’s death in the year 4 B.C. alone jars the whole fabric of Christian systematism to its foundations. Christian apologists have belittled in the past, and presumably will again in the future depreciate the importance of the precise date of the birth of their Savior, and will in spite of all facts cling to the historicity of the episode. But we shall see that the structure of the historical claim, severely weakened by the non-authenticity of its very first chapter of events, will be still further assaulted and finally dismantled by a long series of blows from the side of fact, until if it stands at all, it must rest on sheer stolid faith alone. It will be found to be utterly discredited by reason, by data, and by the sheer physical impossibility of the occurrence of Biblical events when they are treated realistically and not romantically. The latter particular will be noted in glaring vividness when the legend of the star of Bethlehem is examined.

From Herod at the birth, it is a short jump to Pilate at the death, of the historical Jesus.

Authoritative data are wanting to present any outright negative evidence as to the participation of the pro-consul in the Gospel events.

But there is a textual detail that looms larger and larger the longer it is considered. It is a phrase in the Apostles’ Creed of the Christian Church.

The creed--worthy itself of a whole volume’s study--is by no means a mere abbreviated rune or formulary of Christian theological belief. It is that, but it is infinitely more than that. It is a brief of ancient cosmology and creative process, incarnation of spirit in matter, descent of soul into body and return to greater deific state by virtue of the victory won in the lower worlds. An item of the journey of celestial divine spirit through the planes of matter that could not be left out was the "suffering" entailed for it by the necessity of its going "under" the limitations imposed on it by matter’s lower range of vibrational sensitivity. Now matter, as has been set forth fully elsewhere, was typified universally and ubiquitously in ancient symbolism by water, so that even the name most generally applied to the mothers of the Christs was in whatever language the word for water, sea, ocean. Mary is incontestably of this origin, being Mare, Maria in Latin, and Thallath, "the sea" (name of a Hellenic "Mother of God"), in Greek. Primeval space, the mother of all things, being matter in inchoate form, was the Great Deep, the waters of the abyss, the firmament of the waters. Now the quality of matter that caused it to be the generator of suffering for the energies of spirit that were "cribbed, cabined and confined" under its sluggish inertness, was its density. It is therefore not a shrewd guess, not a mere chance discernment of a concatenation of phrase and idea that enables us to make a totally new translation of one of the clauses in the Apostles’ Creed, by which change the historical Pilate is swept entirely out of the narrative. It is not a sheer stretching of points to make designed ends meet, but must be the result of the rational necessities involved in the only correct and consistent envisagement of the matters discussed in the Creed, when it is asserted that the creedal phrase detailing with the utmost brevity the duress of spirit under the thraldom of matter, must inexpugnably have been in the true original formulation of the ritual statement, "he suffered under the dense sea, was crucified, dead and buried." "Dense sea" would have been merely a euphemism, familiar to all in Mystery Ritual cultism, for "he suffered under the limitation of dense matter,"--a shorthand expression in Mystery language. What, then, in the light of this irrefutable statement of the true basic meaning that fits with absolute nicety and exactness into that very place in the Creed, must be our amazement when we turn to the Greek and find a similarity of name even closer to identity than the Herod-Herut one-- "dense sea" in the Greek manuscripts is given as @insert Greek equiv. (pontos pilètos)! "He suffered under pontos pilètos: he suffered under the dense sea" (of matter).

It is far from being a merely specious argument, indeed it is a fully warranted contention, that the sudden introduction in this majestic cosmograph in the impressive ritual of the name of a mere man is a misfit and impertinence bordering close on to the sublimest ineptitude. It is exactly like the sudden injection of Bill Brown of 128 North Sixth Street into a line in Paradise Lost. It is too sudden a jerk from the sweep of cosmic drama to page 195 of a school history. A personal reference to our own childhood reaction to this phrase in the Creed may be pardoned. Even from the age of ten or twelve there seemed something wholly incongruous and vaguely disturbing when the Creed jumped without warning from celestial operations on a majestic scale to the judge of a court trial down in Judea. The sudden insertion of one human person’s name in the text amid otherwise lofty epic dramatization was jarring and disconcerting. It was an ideological anomaly. It did not ring harmoniously with the context. It stands to reason that the introduction of a local ruler’s name into what is provably an august formula of creative cosmology and evolutionary method is obviously an interpolation, and a glaring instance of the wreckage caused by that enormous transposition of allegory and formulae over into supposed history. It will be denied because we can produce no cinema of the scribes caught in the act of changing Herut to Herod and pontos pilètos to Pontius Pilate; but the results of the change glare at us nevertheless.

It must strike anyone who thinks clearly for a moment that the writer of a formulary, as the Creed was intended to be, aiming to express most succinctly the suffering of soul under matter’s heavy burden, would have been most unlikely to summarize the long list of dramatic ordeals in mortal career with the phrase "suffered under Pontius Pilate," the proconsul. Even in the "history" of Jesus according to the Gospels, the man Pilate was not at all a central factor in Jesus’ sufferings. His part was in fact incidental. Pilate’s decree was merely an incident in a chain of events that already had gained such moral momentum that any other decision than condemnation would have been an anticlimax and an artistic faux pas. It would have wrecked the scenario. Pilate’s pardon of Jesus would have left Christianity limp and unheroic, much as if in a murder mystery the first-chapter murder victim should recover and defeat the story. Jesus had to be condemned--"it must needs be that Christ should suffer and enter into his glory"--and Pilate’s dramatic role was merely mechanical. He has never been taken, even by literalists, for more than a puppet or marionette in the play. And all this inharmony of the elements in the situation is nicely adjusted and resolved if the original reading of "dense sea" is put back in place of the forged proconsul’s name.

Ch 11

First, as to the historians whose works record the existence of Jesus, the list comprises but four. They are Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius and Josephus. There are short paragraphs in the works of each of these, two in Josephus. The total quantity of this material is given by Harry Elmer Barnes in The Twilight of Christianity as some twenty-four lines. It may total a little more, perhaps twice that amount. This meager testimony constitutes the body or mass of the evidence of "one of the best attested events in history." Even if it could be accepted as indisputably authentic and reliable, it would be faltering support for an event that has dominated the thought of half the world for eighteen centuries.

In his work, The Great Galilean (p. 3) Robert Keable writes:

"No man knows sufficient of the early life of Jesus to write a biography of him. For that matter no one knows enough for the normal Times obituary notice of a great man. If regard were had to what we should call in correct speech definitely historical facts, scarcely three lines could be filled."

Following his statement as to the complete dearth of reference to Jesus’ life by any first and early second century chroniclers and that the very existence of Jesus seems to have been unheard of by them, Mead examines Pliny, Tacitus and Suetonius passages. Pliny was born 61 A.D., Tacitus about the same time and Suetonius some ten years later. All were in position to have gleaned all that was reported of an extraordinary character like Jesus, whose activities and marvels had aroused thousands in the Judean country, if Gospel be history. There are two short statements in Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and they deal chiefly with some disturbances aroused in Rome "impulsore Chresto," "at the instigation of Chrestus." Just what the reference could be to disturbances at Rome, leading to the expulsion of Christians by Claudius, with "Chrestus" as the instigator--when Jesus was never at Rome--is not clear. Doubtless some insurrectionist activities of his followers at the capital, it is presumed. But the Suetonius passage invalidates its reference to Jesus as a man, it would seem. For Mead says that Suetonius’ reference to "Christiani" in the second passage might easily apply to Zealots or Messianists of any type. 

Josephus (Joseph ben Mattatiah) was born 37-38 A.D., and lived to 100 A.D. His spurious passage is in the Antiquities (XVIII, iii, p. 3). Mead says there are a dozen most potent arguments against its authenticity and that it is rejected by all. (He names one scholar, F. Bole, as claiming its genuineness.) We have the explicit statement of Origen in the third century, says Mead, that Josephus had no belief whatever in Jesus being the Christ, whereas the spurious passage states categorically that he was the Christ. The Antiquities (XX, ix, p. 1) has a reference to a certain Jacobus, "the brother of Jesus called Christ." Says Mead: "It follows that Josephus knew nothing of ‘the Christ’ though he knows much of various ‘Christs.’" Josephus, he cites, had been trained in an Essene-like community and seems to have gone to Rome in "Essene" interests. He was at Rome just when the Christiani were singled out for special persecution and cruel martyrdom by imperial tyranny; and yet he knows nothing of all this. He does not know of the gruesome tragedy at Rome or even of the Christ of the Christians. Joseph Klausner in his Jesus of Nazareth (p. 55) reiterates Mead’s general observations with reference to the inharmony of the Josephus passages with Origen’s statement that Josephus did not admit Jesus as the Messiah. He emphasizes that Jesus’ life, if lived, could not have seemed of small and inconsequential moment to Josephus, who wrote in 93, when the Christians were strong and flourishing. Klausner points out the notable fact that Eusebius, of the fourth century, knew the whole of the spurious Josephus passage, whereas Origen of the third century did not. This again points to interpolation between Origen’s day and the time of Eusebius. Klausner, on good authority, speaks of "manifest additions by Christian copyists."

But it might be well to note and answer Klausner’s concession to general modern opinion in his remark that "it is far more difficult to explain how certain Jewish writers (the Evangelists) invented such a wonderful character than it is to admit that they were describing someone who did really exist." This greater difficulty in the way of seeing the truth of the situation is the tremendous fact of the loss of esotericism in general, the suppression of the knowledge of the Mystery Ritual Drama and its significance and the decay of the original Egyptian crypticism. In the absence of all this guiding intelligence, of course explanation is difficult. Certainly it is difficult to see why the Evangelists should "invent" the Jesus character and personalize him, if one does not know that the Jesus character was already "invented" and had trod the stage boards in the Mystery dramas for centuries B.C. The mere statement of Klausner that the Evangelists "invented" a character that had been the central figure of all ancient Messianic or Sun-God systems for centuries previously, betrays this capable historian’s erroneous foundations and approaches to the analysis of the Jesus situation. The Evangelists neither invented nor perhaps even euhemerized the Jesus person. He was already in the documents they rescripted or transcribed. But later ignorance changed him from a typal to a personal entification. The misleading supposition with which these analysts approach the problem is that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were first century citizens who took pen in hand and wrote the Gospels out of their heads. The final staggering truth about the Bible books is that no "authors" ever sat down and wrote them at all, in the sense in which Sir Walter Scott wrote the Waverley novels. They were never "written" at all in the sense of original creations by given authors. They were in existence long before ink ever met paper to record and preserve them. They were the spoken lines of the great drama, they were the oral tradition, extant thousands of years before they were ever committed to writing. But at some epoch, here, there or elsewhere, the sages or their pupils did at last commit them to writing, lest in some degenerate age they be lost. This is obviously the whole truth as to their origin, and there will be no sanity in the discussion of them until this is known. So let Klausner’s remark be thrown into proper form of statement,--that it is not difficult to understand how the Evangelists simply brought out to more popular knowledge the recondite Gospels, with a Jesus long their central figure, which had been theretofore kept more closely concealed within the depths of Mystery cult secrecy. Christianity will not be understood until it is seen as a popularization and consequent fatal vitiation of exclusive secret religious philosophy and ritualism, instead of being considered a new creation and a new advance on previous ignorance.

In his challenging work, The Twilight of Christianity (p. 390), Harry Elmer Barnes reviews the status of the meager amount of extra-Gospel material mentioning Jesus. He ventures the observation that it may greatly surprise some readers to learn that anyone has ever seriously questioned the actual existence of Jesus. As a matter of fact, he asserts, the evidence for the view that Jesus was really a historical character is so slight that a considerable number of the most distinguished students of New Testament times have declared Jesus to be a mythical personage, the product of the myth-making tendencies common to religious peoples of all ages and particularly prevalent at the period of the early Roman Empire. Among the more eminent scholars and critics who have contended that Jesus was not historical, mention might be made of Bruno Bauer, Kalthoff, Drews, Stendel, Felden, Deije, Jensen, Lublinski, Bolland, Van der Berg, Virolleaud, Couchoud, Massey, Bossi, Memojewski, Brandes, Robertson, Mead, Whittaker, Carpenter and W. B. Smith. Of non-Christian evidence, he says, next to nothing exists. Of the twenty-four lines, the total of this sort, not a single line is of admitted authenticity. Barnes quotes the Tacitus passage (from the Annals, XV, p. 44) as follows:

"In order to suppress the rumor, Nero falsely accused and punished with the most acute tortures persons who, already hated for their shameful deeds, were commonly called Christians. The founder of that name, Christus, had been put to death by the procurator, Pontius Pilate, in the reign of Tiberius; but the deadly superstition, though repressed for a time, broke out again, not only through Judea, where this evil had its origin, but also through the city (Rome) whither all things horrible and vile flow from all quarters and are encouraged. Accordingly, first those were arrested who confessed; then on their information a great multitude were convicted, not so much of the crime of incendiarism as of hatred of the human race."

Barnes points out that the name Chrestus (instead of Christus) used in the Suetonius passage of two or three lines, was a common Greek name, and may not necessarily have referred to the particular man Jesus.

The Josephus excerpt (Antiquities, XVIII, p. 3) is given as follows:

"About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed he should be called man. He wrought miracles and was a teacher of those who gladly accept the truth, and had a large following among the Jews and pagans. He was the Christ. Although Pilate, at the complaint of the leaders of our people, condemned him to die on the cross, his earlier followers were faithful to him. For he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as God-sent prophets had foretold this and a thousand other wonderful things of him. The people of the Christians, which is called after him, survives until the present day."

Written somewhere between 75 and 100 A.D., Barnes says the passage is admitted even by conservative and pious scholars to be quite obviously spurious. No Jew who rejected Christianity could possibly have written in this vein. It is obviously a late Christian interpolation. It may have replaced an unfavorable reference to Jesus in the original. Philo, Barnes reminds us, the most learned and brilliant Jewish scholar of his day, has nothing whatever to say in regard to Jesus and the Christians. There is therefore in extant Jewish literature of the first century A.D. not a single authentic line making reference to the founder of Christianity.

In a note on page 24 of Josephus’ Antiquities there is a statement that Photius says he has seen the chronology of Justus of Tiberias, entitled The Chronology of the Kings of Judah Which Succeeded One Another, and Photius says: "and being under the Jewish prejudices, and indeed he was himself also a Jew by birth, he makes not the least mention of the appearance of Christ or what things happened to him or of the wonderful works that he did." The inference here is obviously that Justus of Tiberius withholds mention of Jesus not because of Jewish prejudices, but in spite of them, the intimation being that had Jesus lived and been known through his wonderful works and Christly status, any Jew would have been prejudiced in the direction of giving the matter all the mention possible. His silence bespeaks his lack of knowledge of the data. He would have been glad to mention such laudable things had he known of them.

Through the creditable scholarship of Klausner, Mead and others we are enabled to approach the next issue that closely and vitally affects the investigation. This is the group of references in the Jewish Talmud to a character whom many have sought to identify with the Gospel Jesus, namely Jehoshua (Jesus) Ben Pandira (Pandera, Pantera, Pantêre). Klausner’s treatment of the personage or figure is very full and discerning; Mead has a whole work devoted to him: Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?; and Massey analyzes the situation capably. It is deemed desirable to go into the question of his relation to the Gospel Jesus, not so much because it may contribute any effective data to the main problem under review, as because it may carry to readers the important knowledge that other sacred writings before the Gospels featured a Jesus figure, with much the same narrative material of his "life," as that believed generally to exist only in the Christian canonical writings. The brief outline of the story of this Talmudic Jesus is indeed like a short summary of the Galilean’s career: he was born with an accompaniment of certain supernatural manifestations, went to Egypt, became learned in the wisdom of the Egyptians, returned to Palestine, wrought many miracles among the populace through his Egyptian arts or sorcery and magic, incurred the hostility of the orthodox priesthood, was tried and condemned, was given forty days for partisans to come and clear him, and finally stoned to death and his body hanged on a tree. The date of his birth has been placed by the best calculations of scholars at about 115 B.C. It will be seen at once that if this Talmud figure was the Jesus to whom the Gospels could be claimed to refer, or even the prototype of the Gospel Jesus, the dating would throw off base the entire structure of the Nazareth historicity, and would invalidate a thousand "proofs" of the latter based on dates, sequences of events and arguments grounded on and affected by such considerations. The dating of the Christian calendar would be over 100 years off the true.

We may start with the statement made by Massey (The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ, p. 2) that in the Book of Acts Jesus is stoned to death and his body hanged on a tree. This establishes a fairly strong point of identity between the two Jesus characters.

Massey declares that this Jewish Pandira was the only Jesus known to Celsus, the author of The True Logos, which was destroyed by the Christians. Celsus says of him that he was not a pure Word, not a true Logos, but a man who had learned the arts of sorcery in Egypt. Massey sums the case when he says that

"here is the conclusive fact: the Jews knew nothing of Jesus, the Christ of the Gospels, as a historical character, and when the Christians of the fourth century trace his pedigree by the hand of Epiphanius, they are forced to draw their Jesus from Pandira! Epiphanius gives the genealogy of the canonical Jesus in this wise:--Jacob, called Pandira, Mary--Joseph--Cleopas, Jesus."

The name Pandira is related to the French panthère, "panther," which was credited with being the "nickname" of Jacob, the alleged grandfather of the Talmud Jesus, and this Jacob was said to have been a Greek sailor. "Jehoshua ben Pandira" then means "Jesus, [grand]son of the Panther." That this Talmudic genealogy is found in Epiphanius instead of the long Jesse-David lists appended to the several Gospels is significant of much.

Massey states that Pandira was stoned to death in the city of Lud, or Lydda, and that it must have been around the date of 70 B.C., after the reign of Jannaeus, 106-79 B.C. He says that Queen Alexandra (Salomé) showed favor to him, witnessed his wonderful works and powers of healing and tried to save him from his sacerdotal enemies because he was related to her. The Jews denied the identity of Jehoshua ben Pandira with the Gospel Jesus. Rabbi Jechiels said: "This which has been related of J. ben Perachia and his pupil (J. ben Pandira) contains no reference whatever to him whom the Christians honor as God." Another Rabbi, Salman Zevi, produced ten reasons for concluding that the Jehoshua of the Talmud was not he who was afterwards called Jesus of Nazareth. The matter was unknown to Justus, the Jew of Celsus, and to Josephus, "the supposed reference to him by the latter being an undoubted forgery." Massey asseverates that "the blasphemous writings of the Jews about Jesus," as Justin Martyr calls them, refer always to Jehoshua ben Pandira, and not to the Gospel Jesus.

But Massey is firm and decisive in his conclusion that the Talmud Jehoshua can not be converted into the canonical Jesus as a historical character. The dates can never be reconciled to match contemporary history. Massey repudiates the connection as beyond the remotest possibility. "Make whatever you can of Jehoshua ben Pandira. He is not the Gospel Jesus," he says. From Klausner we learn, however, that the Jehoshua Jewish tradition was entangled at least in Origen’s mind with the parentage of the Gospel Jesus. Origen is quoted (Contra Celsum, I, IX, p. 1) as repeating a story that his opponent Celsus related with reference to the current tradition dealing with the family and parentage of Jesus. And this version of the Jehoshua ben Pandira legend is worthy of notice for several reasons. Apart from the question whether it is the truth or a distortion, it is to be considered significant, first because of the sheer fact that such a story was current at the time--the late second century; and secondly because it either carries fact or reflects a perversion of allegorism, and would be notably significant in either case. The character called "the Jew" in Celsus’ book (I, p. 28) goes on to say that the dogma of the "virgin birth" was an invention of the Christians; the true facts in the case being:

"that Jesus had come from a village in Judea, and was the son of a poor Jewess who gained her living by the work of her own hands; that his mother had been turned out of doors by her husband, who was a carpenter by trade, on being convicted of adultery; that, wandering about in disgrace, she gave birth to Jesus a bastard; that Jesus, on account of his poverty (had to work for his living and) was hired out to go to Egypt; that while there he acquired certain (magical) powers which Egyptians pride themselves on possessing; that he returned home highly elated at possessing these powers, and on the strength of them gave himself out to be a god."

True or false, it is significant that such a story was in vogue in the second century. If one was to employ the usual method of orthodox explanation of such data, which is to assume that the story, however unlikely as truth, took its rise out of some factual foundation, the conclusion would be that it was a garbled version of some more acceptable basis of simple fact. By far the most likely elucidation would seem to be that it was another of hundreds of exotericized myths, being the literalization of a mythical account of the soul’s descent into matter in the "Egypt" of the physical body, "the flesh-pots of Egypt." It is worthy of citation just as a sample of how the literalizing tendency could work a spiritual or cosmic myth over into a human story of gross realism! It is more than startling, then, that Mead is found endorsing this explanation of the story (Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 126). He asks:

"Can this possibly be based on some vulgar version of a well-known Gnostic myth of those days? Jesus went down as a servant or slave into Egypt; that is to say, the Christ or divine soul descends as a servant into the Egypt of the body. It is a common element in the early mystic traditions that the Christ took on the form of a servant in his descent through the spheres, and in many traditions Egypt is the symbol of the body, which is separated by the ‘Red Sea’ and the ‘Desert’ from the ‘Promised Land.’"

Mead advances this solution of the gossiped illegitimacy of the Christ character because he had studied ancient Oriental religionism closely enough to have found the constant operation of the tendency of the "vulgar mind" to make hash out of sublime allegory. His conclusion is therefore well justified.

But what must be the explanation of another fact which he brings to light in connection with this story, a fact which indeed seems to stand in very sinister shadow? He says that:

"Origen again refers to the quotation from ‘the Jew’ of Celsus given above, and adds the important detail from Celsus that the paramour of the mother of Jesus was a soldier called Panthera, a name which he also repeats later on (i, 69) in a sentence, by the by, which has in both places been erased from the oldest Vatican MS., and bodily omitted from three codices in this country and from others."

A note by Mead says: "See Notes on both passages by Lommatzsch in his Origenis Contra Celsum (Berlin, 1845).

According to Epiphanius’ original statement (Haereses, p. 78), Origen himself says that James, the father of Jesus’ father Joseph, was called by the name "Panther." Origen apparently wished to explain in this way why Jesus, the son of Joseph, was called "Ben Pandera," or "ben Pantere," by the Jews. According to Origen Jesus was so called after the name of his grandfather.

Klausner alludes to the Baraita, a tradition issuing from the Tanaim, quoted in the later Talmud, which says that Jeshu of Nazareth practiced sorcery and beguiled and led astray Israel. And the Talmud speaks of hanging instead of crucifixion, since this horrible form of death was only known to Jewish scholars from Roman trials and not from the Jewish legal system. Klausner cites the Pandira legend "in spite of Mr. Friedländer’s various attempts to persuade us that every Talmudist worthy of the name knows that the few Talmudic passages which speak of Jesus are a late addition" and "the Talmudic sources of the first century and the first quarter of the second afford us not the least evidence of the existence of Jesus or Christianity." (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 38.)

The Toldoth Jeshu, says Mead (Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 303), notes that the Ben Pandera legend had spread so far and wide that we find two Church Fathers compelled to insert the name in the genealogies of Jesus and Mary. The stories say that the trial of Jesus took place before Queen Helene (Helena) and that the sovereignty of all Jewry was in her hands. Her name never appears in the Talmud Jesus stories, nor for a matter of fact, do the names of Herod, or Pilate, or John the Baptist, or any others that confirm the Christian canonical date. The only date indications in the Talmud are, on the one hand, the mention of Joshua ben Perachiah and Jannai in connection with Jesus, and on the other, the Akiba Mary story. Mead says it is true that Helena was the subject of a prolific legend activity in the Middle Ages. Mead (p. 261) does quote the Talmud as saying, "Now the rule of all Israel was in the hands of a woman, who was called Helene"; also he cites the Talmud passage: "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Isai (Jesse), and I am he." And the Toldoth, like the Talmud, he states, also know of a stoning or a stoning and hanging, or of a hanging alone, but never of a crucifixion.

Mead develops a point of some weight when he says that our studies of the works of the philosophers of early times can show us only that all of them regard the wonder-works of Jesus as being due to his magical powers, or rather to the fact of his being a Magus, like many others in antiquity. Such miracles, in the eyes of the philosophers, did not prove the contention of the Christians that Jesus was God, for similar wonders, equally well authenticated, and in a more recent case better authenticated, according to Hierocles, had been done by others. This Hierocles had been successively Governor of Palmyra, Bithynia and Alexandria, and was also a philosopher. In 305 A.D. he wrote a criticism of the claims of the Christians in two books called A Truthful Address to the Christians, or more briefly Truth Lovers. Even Arnobius, in his Against the Nations, sets forth the commonest argument against the Christians concerning Jesus, which was that he was a Magus; he did all these things (sc. Miracles) by secret arts; from the shrines of Egypt he stole the names of the angels of might and hidden disciplines.

Even Jerome was conversant with the legends that floated about as vulgar caricatures of the immaculate conception of the Virgin, and in his letter to Heliodorus, which was written in 374 A.D., the Church Father seems to have in memory the passage of Tertullian (De Spect.) which Mead had already quoted; for he writes: "He is called the son of a workman and of a harlot; He it is . . . who fled into Egypt. He the clothed with a scarlet robe; He the crowned with thorns; He a Magus, demon-possessed and a Samaritan!" Further in his letter to Titus (iii, p. 9) Jerome writes: "I heard formerly concerning the Hebrews . . . at Rome . . . that they bring into question the genealogies of Christ."

Gregontius, Bishop of Tephar in Africa, in the second half of the fifth century says that Jesus had been put to death because he was a sorcerer or magician, so the Jews asserted. John of Damascus in the early eighth century, in the genealogy of Mary tells us that Joachim was the father of Mary, Bar Panther the father of Joachim, and Levi the father of Bar Panther, and therefore presumably Bar Panther himself.

Agobard in the eighth century repeats the Pandera stories.

The Toldoth speak of making a virgin pregnant without contact with a man. In the Talmud Balaam is one of the synonyms of Jesus.

With reference again to the Helene character that figured basically in many of the sacred legends connected with the Christ, there is the detail that the harlot who accompanied Simon Magus was a certain Helen (Greek Helene, Latin Helena). He said his Helen was the Sophia or Wisdom. Elizabeth spoke when Zechariah could not. Zechariah is the embodiment of the dawn sun sachar. But the conjecture is that Helene is simply the pseudograph for Selene, the Moon, whereas Simon the magician wielding spiritual powers was a pseudonym of the Sun, the type of all spiritual miracle-working power. (Hebrew for "sun" is Shemesh, whence Shimeon, Shimshon, Samson, Simon.) One of the ancient Biblical typal designations of the women who were lunar goddesses accompanying the sun, as mothers of life, the consorts or concubines of the solar deities, was the "great harlot." This appellation is simply in virtue of Mother Nature’s (water’s, matter’s) prolific fecundity in the production of myriad life, and when held as pure typism has no sensual imputations whatever--as incidentally have none of the phallic representations when apprehended as pure typology.

Thorburn, in his attempt to refute the mythical interpretation of the Gospels, quotes J. M. Robertson to the effect that

"one of the most important details of the confused legend in the Talmud concerning the pre-Christian Jesus Ben Pandira, who is conjoined with Ben Stada, is that the mother is in one place named Miriam Magdala, Mary, the nurse or the hair-dresser." (Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targum and the Midrash, part 2, p. 213, 1888.)

"Isis, too, plays the part of a hair-dresser." (Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, p. 15) Magdala yields in one ray of its meaning, nursing, rearing, hair-dressing.

"Our Lord the Sun" was used in prayer by Christians up to the fifth and even the sixth century of our era, and embodied in the Liturgy until altered into "Our Lord the God." And the early Christians painted on the walls of the subterranean necropolis the Christ figure as a shepherd under the various emblemisms of the Greek Sun-God Apollo. The very halo that surrounds the head of the Christ and his mother is the suggestion of the solar disk and its radiant light. And of great evidential value is the item adduced by Massey, that as late as the fifth century Leo the Great was compelled to rebuke the "pestiferous persuasion" of those Christians who were found to be celebrating Christmas day, not for the birth of Jesus Christ, but for the resurrection of the spring sun! The power of symbol and of social tradition has proved stronger than indoctrinated dogmatism, as the Nordic Christmas pine tree proves to this day.

Of great suggestive value to Christians would be the item of Philo’s having advanced, thirty years before Paul’s writing and the Christian presentation of the deific transfiguration, the doctrine of a transfiguration of Moses through his intercourse with God. Describing his ascension to heaven at the summons of the Father, Philo declares that by vision of God Moses’ soul and body had been blended into a single new substance, an immortal mind-essence having the appearance of the sun. This is from pagan sources, yet Christian analysts will presume to deny all connection between those wells of early wisdom and the Gospel events on the Mount of Transfiguration, where Jesus’ garments became white as the light and his face did shine as the sun; or that other New Testament promise that in the Christian’s apotheosis, the righteous shall shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.

It would be most interesting to speculate upon the possible psychological reactions of the Christian population if on a given Sunday it was read out from all pulpits in every denomination that in the year 345 A.D., the Pope of Christendom, Julian II, issued a decree fixing December 25 as the day on which all Christians should celebrate the birth of the Christ, instead of March 25, as had been the custom among the Christian people up to that time, in order that their celebration might coincide with that of the followers of Mithra and of Bacchus! And full candor suggests the inquiry why ecclesiastical subterfuge has kept the laity in Christendom in perpetual ignorance of a fact so significant and notable as that Christians for three and a half centuries regarded the annual springtime re-birth of the Sun as the most fitting type of the birth of divinity in the world and celebrated the birth of the Son of God at the vernal equinox instead of the winter solstice. And the Pope’s exhortation to his followers that it would be fitting that the Christian celebration matched the time of the Mithraic and Bacchic solstitial festival should not be lost on intelligence. And millions still think that they celebrate the birth of a babe on the calendar day of December 25!

For thousands of years Egypt was dominated by a religion whose gods were typified by the sun symbol. One of the pivotal centers of religious ritualism was Anu (Annu), said to be the On of the Bible, and at any rate the Heliopolis of the Greeks, or "city of the sun." The great pyramid was in reality, as part of its function, a temple of the Sun. Thousands of theological Thorburns have asserted that the birth of the Christian Jesus, the skyey proclamation of the angelic heralds to shepherds, the Gabriel annunciation to the prospective virgin mother, and the adoration of three Oriental Magi before the infant King, were solid events on the plane of occurrence, that their incidence helped to launch the new religion to save humanity from heathen darkness, and that they could have no connection with preceding degenerate pagan idolatry of the physical sun. It is time that this unpardonable obduracy of ignorance be summarily rebuked by the testimony inscribed on the walls of Egypt’s mighty structures in stone. Says Massey (Ancient Egypt, p. 757):

"The story of the annunciation, the miraculous conception (or incarnation), the birth and the adoration of the Messianic infant had already been engraved in stone and represented in four consecutive scenes upon the innermost walls of the holy of holies (Meskhen) in the temple of Luxor, which was built by Amen-hetep III, about 1700 B.C., or some seventeen centuries before the events depicted are commonly supposed to have taken place."

Here is witness which outshouts the falsehoods of thousands of pious books, millions of droning sermons and the insincere lucubrations of generations of theologians, with thunder tones of truth that silence forever the claims of Christianity to the historicity of its alleged Founder’s Nativity. And how could these four pivotal themes of the incarnation have been thus sculptured upon enduring walls if there had been no Gospels extant at that remote period from which to draw these scenes? If there were no formal Gospels extant so far back, certainly the contents and gist of Gospel material were in some form existent. Evidence of this sort deals sledge-hammer blows at the entire structure of Gospel historicity. The edifice indeed topples under the force of this one telling stroke. Christianity, by subterfuge, vandalism and distortion had buttressed itself against attack on every other side. But it could not fend off the attack of truth from the ancient rear. The Rosetta Stone and the pictured walls of Egypt’s tombs and temples have outflanked it and laid its pretensions in the dust. Do what it will, it can not shake off the fact that the annunciation, the incarnation, the nativity and the adoration were already on record, along with the Virgin Mother and her Child, in the Zodiac, in the papyri and on indestructible walls thousands of years before its beginning, and that as religious facts they were old when the Galilean babe was allegedly born in Bethlehem. The Christian organization and system of pious pretension can do nothing in the face of facts such as these. Its arrant claims are silenced once and finally by the deathless voice of ancient Egypt.

Ch 12

If Jesus lived as claimed, and Paul lived and wrote as claimed, it is beyond all cavil unthinkable that the apostle would have left a total blank in his Epistles on the subject of the personal Jesus. Ingenuity can bring up--and has done so--a variety of specious "reasons" to "explain" Paul’s silence about his Master. But when they have exhausted their plausibility, they have not laid the ghost of the insistent question nor reduced the pressure of its threat to the orthodox position one whit. It stalks the claim of Jesus’ existence like a mocking specter and no legerdemain can exorcise it. The fact stands in all its glaring significance: St. Paul never once mentions the man Jesus! And Paul is the earliest witness among Bible writers, the one nearest to Jesus, says Bacon.

The average man mildly versed in the Bible is amazed when told that Paul does not mention Jesus, for everywhere the assumption prevails that he did. If the matter is broached to a Bible student he will make rebuttal with Paul’s own words: "This Jesus whom we have seen," and other passages in the Epistles that sound like testimony to the Galilean’s existence,--this Jesus in whom Paul glories and whose witness he bore through pain and travail. How can anyone say that Paul does not mention Jesus?

To be sure, Paul speaks of Jesus. But even the theologians agree that this Jesus of Paul’s Epistles is not a man of flesh. The Jesus Paul dilates upon is the spiritual entity in the core of man’s inner being. He is the Christ principle, and not the man.

While this is generally enough conceded by exegetists, the reader may need some assurance on the point. Our first witness is the Yale Divinity School publicist, Benjamin W. Bacon, who in his Jesus and Paul (p. 57) is positive in his position: Paul is the first Bible writer in the first century and he definitely knows no Christ except one not after the flesh. If he had posited a personal Christ, Christianity would not have survived his day.

More than one item in the statement of Bacon is off the line of truth. To begin with it is disingenuous and logically vapid to speak of the superiority of Paul’s teaching to the figures of speech borrowed from Greek theology in which he expresses it. There is no point in contrasting Paul’s thought with the forms of speech that utter it. It is well enough known that mind is greater than the capacity of language to express it. Paul chose the best available forms at his command, and those were drawn from his intimate association with the Mystery ritual.

Then follows the inevitable allegation of the poverty of pagan teaching beside the shining splendor of the Sermon on the Mount. This has become decidedly hackneyed in the past fifteen years, or since western universities have instituted courses of real study in Oriental religions and have seen something of the profundity and grandeur of religions which it was until then the old Christian custom to despise. But it is worse than hackneyed; it is not true. Christian prejudice has hitherto prevented that frank, sincere and open-minded examination of pagan systems which would have brought to light the true magnificence of other religions. The proper answer to the smallness and error of the slight that Bacon casts on Greek Mystery morality and spirituality is simply to say that a thousand fair-minded scholars and students have more recently looked at both Christian and ancient pagan systems and have been unable to detect any superiority at all of Christian over pagan faiths. Indeed the consensus of much high opinion is that the palm and laurel would have to be accorded to the pagan.

So when Bacon asks us to imagine the abyss of difference between being filled with the mind of Christ and the mind of Dionysus, the frank reply must be that we see no difference at all. It is only because modern theological professors do not seem to know that in Dionysus, Atys, Bacchus, Adonis, Zagreus, Sabazius and others the Greeks had already expressed everything that a Christian can possibly think of as embodied in his Jesus, that they blunder into instituting comparisons and discovering huge gaps of difference that exist only in their own imaginations. If all the acumen of sixteen centuries of Christian scholasticism has not sufficed to instruct Occidental theologians in the simple fact that the pagan sun-god figures were not historical persons, but were typal characters prefiguring Christly nobility of perfected humanity, and were in fact the very prototypes, pre-extant in literature, of the Jesus personage himself, it would seem as if the credentials of Christian publicists to sit in judgment on pagan representations could be stoutly challenged. So much abject failure and incompetence must go far to disqualify further right to pronounce judgment in this field.

There is Klausner, who remarks the significance of Paul’s giving testimony to the existence of Jesus (he evidently assumes that Paul is referring to Jesus as a person) and scans Jesus’ influence on Paul, but admits that Paul shows no interest in the events of the Savior’s career. He quotes a writer (name not given) who says:

"To Paul’s mind the center of interest was not the teacher, the worker of miracles, the companion of publicans and sinners, the opponent of the Pharisees; it was the crucified Son of God raised from the dead, and none other."

Grethenbach (Secular View of the Gospels, p. 243) remarks on the tell-tale fact that in its very earliest stage of propagation the legend of the miracles performed by Jesus is absent from the writings which came from or are accredited to those who were closest to him, and are found only in later accounts by Gospel authors whose names are wholly suppositious.

"As for Paul it might appear from his own ardent avowal that had he ever heard of these prodigies done for Jesus and by him, he (Paul) would not have hesitated to use them for the great glory of God (Romans 3:7-8); and his silence about them comes with the force of absolute denial."

In Paul’s own account of his conversion he writes in this remarkable fashion:

"Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood; neither went I up to Jerusalem to them who were apostles before me; but I went away into Arabia."

Again Paul almost categorically denies that he is preaching a Gospel of a living Jesus when he says:

"I made known to you, brethren, as touching the Gospel which was preached by me, that it is not after man. For neither did I receive it from man (or from a man), nor was I taught it, save through revelation of the Christ revealed within."

Massey comments that in short, Paul’s "Christ was not at all that Jesus of Nazareth whom he never mentions, and whom the others preached, and who may have been, and in all likelihood was, Jehoshua ben Pandira, the Nazarene."

As to the Christ in the Epistle to the Hebrews, a document claimed to have been written by Paul, Massey says:

"Now in this Epistle the Christ is non-historical, he is the Kronian Christ, the Aeonian manifestor, of mythical, that is, astronomical prophecy; he is after the order of Melchizedek, who was ‘without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life.’"

It would seem that we have in this characterization of Melchizedek, after whose "order" the Christ was, enough to convince any but mystically derationalized "believers" that there could be nothing humanly personal and individual about Melchizedek, and inferentially about the Christ, as of his kind and nature. There are those who think and assert that Melchizedek was a man. He could no more be a man than righteousness could be a man, or liberty or virtue be a lady. By name he is the "King of Righteousness," as in Hebrew melchi is "king" and zedek is "righteousness." "He" is that "spirit of truth" which, when it has fully swept into all hearts and minds, will lead us all into truth and establish the kingdom of righteousness upon earth. The description of him as without father and mother and genealogy, certainly does not refer to human father and mother and ancestry. It means that "he" is "born" or generated from that highest form and level of spiritual being which is yet undifferentiated into spirit (father) and matter (mother), and is called in the arcane nomenclature "parentless." In the highest worlds there is neither marriage nor sex to induce it. Out of this pure essence comes the unit of soul and consciousness that is to descend into matter, marry it and through union with it generate the cosmos. This is why it can be further described as being "before the worlds," "before the foundation of the earth," "before Abraham," "in the bosom of the Father," "in the womb of creation." "A" (Greek alpha privative) means "not." Brahm is the Eternal and Absolute. A-Brahm (Abraham) is therefore "not the Absolute," but of course the first emanation from the Absolute, the first form of manifestation that is not the Absolute and Infinite, but the manifestation of the relative--and to us the real. Melchizedek, the power of the spirit of rightness and the great aeonial Messiah, ever-coming from the beginning of man, that could by no possibility "come" at any one moment, since it must come to all men as they slowly grow in grace, or in any one personality, since it must dwell in all alike, is that genius to which all Christified men will give body and instrumentality as humanity is redeemed and glorified.

The Docetae, a sect preaching the purely spiritual Christ, "cut away the genealogies in the Gospel after Matthew." (Epiphanius.) Tatian also struck them out. He had first accepted them, but when he learned better, rejected the gospel of the Christ made flesh. "Barnabas, who denied the human nature of Christ, assures us that it was according to the error of the wicked that Christ was called the Son of David"--in the literal exoteric sense, doubtless. Paul also tells us that no "man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Spirit" (I Cor. 12:3). Marcion does not connect Jesus with Nazareth. Paul’s Christ is nowhere called Jesus of Nazareth, nor is he born at Bethlehem,--the town, but in Bethlehem, the "house of bread," the sign of Pisces, in the astrological symbolism.

There is a ludicrous mixture--as was to be expected and inevitable--of the historical Jesus and the spiritual Christ in the first Epistle of Paul to Timothy, where Jesus Christ is spoken of as he "who, before Pontius Pilate, witnessed the good confession"; and half a dozen lines later, Paul’s Jesus is the "Lord of Lords dwelling in the light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen nor can see." Massey comments that this is the Christ of the Gnosis who could not be made flesh to stand in the presence of Pontius Pilate. Let the reader note, from the analysis of the name "Pontius Pilate" made earlier in the work, how difficulty such as this vanishes the moment the esoteric non-historical rendition is adopted in place of the historical. Slight and inconsequential as this matter may seem in an instance of the kind, it is the key to the redemption of the Christian religion from its theological irrationality. It may be indeed the key to the salvation of all religion, now threatened as never before with total obscuration.

Paul need not mention Jesus because everybody already knew of his existence, is the tacit claim. Such knowledge was a commonplace and there was no occasion to refer to it. Because Jesus was a definite historical character, his life and personal doings need never be spoken of. Paul could dilate at great length upon the fundamentals of the religion Jesus assumedly founded and had no need to speak of the founder!  For Paul to write fifteen Epistles, basic treatises on the religion that this man founded, and find no reason to refer even once to anything he said or did, would be on the order of one’s writing a thorough treatise on the American Revolution and never once mentioning George Washington,--forsooth because everybody knows that Washington had something to do with it!

The best way to promulgate the religion Jesus founded is not to mention the founder! But, says Bacon, Paul’s writings do not even dissertate on the teachings of Jesus primarily. Therefore, on Case’s line of reasoning, it must have been in Paul’s mind that the best way to advance the new Jesus-inspired faith was to write letters on it that leave out both the founder and his teachings! 

 If Paul knew of Jesus’ existence so well that he need not prove it by any reference to it at all, there would be all the more and not less reason for his describing him as a man. Why would Paul descant only upon the impersonal Christos, if he knew all the while that the personal Christ had just been present in his own land! Why write of him only as a psychological entity, when Paul knew him as a man?

Case asserts that Paul stood close to the age that professed to know Jesus. It is true that Paul stood close to the age in question, but it is not true that this age "professed to know Jesus." Data already adduced have established the strange fact that the age of Paul was as silent as was Paul himself about Jesus the man. It was a later age that proclaimed the historical Jesus, later by at least three or four generations. Over a century had to elapse before the legend of the human babe and miracle-worker found voice. Paul and his and Jesus’ own age were alike silent. Philo and Josephus were close at hand in the same age, and writing volubly of just such things as were vitally concerned with what Jesus represented, and they are silent, save for the tiny squeak of some daring interpolator in Josephus’ book. and Josephus was writing of Titus as the Christ!

in I Cor. 7:4-5 ff. Paul writes of "judging nothing before the time, until the Lord come." A row of exclamation points would hardly mark the significance of this verse. Case himself cites Paul’s writing to the Philippians his confidence that God, who had begun a good work in them "will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ." Further he counts on them to remain "void of offence unto the day of Christ," and encourages them to stand fast. How could the apostle write such things pointing to the future for fulfillment if he knew that the Messiah had just been among them?

Massey points out that according to James (5:7, 8) the coming or presence of the Lord was still being awaited. He pleads: "Be ye patient" until "the coming of the Lord," for "the coming of the Lord is at hand"--when it had just taken place! From Peter (3:10) Massey quotes:

"The day of the Lord will come like a thief, when the heavens will vanish with crackling roar, the stars will be set ablaze and melt, the earth and its works will disappear."

The Lord had come, and in spite of an earthquake and a darkened sun and other convulsions of nature, the good old earth had kept on in its course. It is important to note in passing that secular history records none of these supremely extraordinary natural phenomena, which we must assume would have been the case had they occurred. It is quite worth noting what Gibbon has to say on this score in his great history of the Roman Empire:

Again Paul’s characterization of Jesus as "the first-born," "the first-born of all creation," "the first-born from the dead," "the first-born among many brethren," would not fit a personal Galilean. "Now hath Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept." But, Massey asks, in what sense? It is impossible, he avers, to apply such descriptions to any historical person. No historical Jesus could be the first-born from the dead. In the gross exoteric sense this would mean that no man in all preceding centuries had risen out of his physical grave in a body of any kind, physical or spiritual. In a somewhat more exalted esoteric sense it would mean that Jesus was the first in all the history of humanity ever to rise as a spiritually glorified being from his body of clay in his final transfiguration into immortality. It would mean that no one before Jesus had ever accomplished the resurrection of his spiritual body out of the earthly body of this death, which is the true meaning of the resurrection. But in any of the possible eventualities that fulfilled resurrection doctrine, taken historically, it is unthinkable and presupposes vast injustice on the part of God to the millions antedating 33 A.D., that no mortal had ever achieved spiritual victory up to that time. One has to go over to the deeper esoteric sense to catch the rational significance of the statement that Jesus was the first fruits of them that slept. For obviously the Christ-type of consciousness is the first power of divine rank that is awakened to full and immortal function out of the deep sleep of age-long incubation in matter into which the living energies of spirit are plunged at the beginning of each cycle. The Christ-mind is the first perfected fruitage on the tree of life and nature. This is precisely what is embodied in many cryptic constructions in sacred lore, representing the tree in Adam’s garden as bearing the Christ as its topmost and richest fruit. The golden bough on the tree or the bright star on the highest tip of the Christmas pine carries the meaning still. After long ages of gestation in her womb, Mother Nature in her old age (Sarah, Hannah, Elizabeth!) brings forth the Christ consciousness, as the first divine fruitage of the natural order. With this knowledge and conception sane comprehension can at last replace prevalent logical dementia.

Paul also speaks of "building up the body of Christ, until we all attain unto the unity of Faith and to the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full-grown man; unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ." How could each of us build up the body of Christ, if he be a physical man? If we take such a saying of Paul as that he "knew a man in Christ," we at once run into ludicrous impertinence if we think of Christ as a man. What it would be to be "in" a Christ who is physical, would be difficult to say. Does the orthodox protagonist pronounce this a silly and preposterous argument? But he could call it silly only on the presupposition that of course the phrase means to be "in" Christ in the purely spiritual sense of being in the vibration of the same mind and soul that Christ manifested. But that is to admit nearly all that this work stands for: that the Christ is a spiritual nature in us, and not a man in history. Orthodox strategy falls back on the definition of Christ as spiritual principle whenever the argument would take a disadvantageous turn on the personal rendering, but jumps back to the latter when it seems safe to do so. But the Christ is either one or the other. The one excludes the other and the vacillation back and forth between the two prevents the fixing of one clear and determinate meaning to the term. It is beyond question that the word "Christ" means the flower of divine consciousness in man and nothing else whatever. All ancient sacred books presented a type of this beauteous development in man’s organism at the summit of his growth, and--ignorance later mistook the figure for a man. This is the whole--tragic--story.

That the life, crucifixion, death and resurrection of the Son of God were distinctly not behind Paul, but still to come as a consummation for all humanity is indubitably indicated by Paul himself in II Timothy (2:16-18) where he says:

"But shun profane and vain babblings; for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker; of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some.""

Strange as this may sound to theological ears, there is much solid reason to suspect that the whole episode of Paul’s great vision was the rescript almost verbatim of a portion of Mystery dramatism. For Paul says that the stunning, blinding radiance of Christly glory threw him with his face to the ground, after which a voice out of the light spoke to him and said, "Stand on your feet, Paul." This hardly seems like personal history; for in the Mystery philosophy the descent of the divine soul into incarnation in the early human beginning stage sent it into the bodies of animals who yet walked on all fours, with face to the ground. And as the Christ consciousness gradually asserted its rulership, the humanized animal forms slowly rose to their feet, upright! For the god-soul to incarnate at the beginning of the cycle was for it to fall to earth with its face to the ground, and then the divine voice within spoke and bade it stand up on its feet as the upright human-divine! It is not hard to presume that an age saturated with the effort to dramatize mythical typology would have introduced into the Mystery ceremonial just such a typical representation of the soul’s descent into lowly animal body and its resurrection to the upright human status.

Furthermore the transformation was accompanied by a change of name--Saul to Paul, as Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel. "A new name shall be given unto" the Christified human, carved on a white stone, says Revelation. The whole recital may not unwarrantably be construed as a bit of the initiatory ritualism of the Mystery societies, which was itself just a dramatic typing of the transformation of man, starting with his face to earth in brute body, and rising from his animal nature to spiritual stature, when he received his new baptism. In all probability it stood at first as pure typism in Paul’s writings, and may have been made over into an alleged personal experience of his by the hands and fancies of those redactors who transmogrified sublime mythicism into startling history.

Ch 13

There is first the matter found in the Clementine Homilies, which is ostensibly inspired by the Petrine faction. The author, assumed to be Clement of Rome, designates Paul as "the Hostile Man." Peter is made to say to Paul, "Thou hast opposed thyself as an Adversary against me, the firm rock, the foundation of the Church." Paul’s conversion by means of abnormal visions is attributed to the false Christ, the Gnostic and Spiritualist Christ opposed to a historic Christ. Peter is hitting obviously at Paul in Homily 17, when he says, "Can anyone be instituted to the office of a teacher through visions?" Paul is treated as the arch-enemy of the Christ crucified--he is declared the very Anti-Christ! He is predicted to be the author of some great heresy expected to break out in the future. Peter is said to have declared that Christ instructed the disciples not to publish the one true and genuine Gospel for the present, because false teachers must arise, who would publicly proclaim the false Gospel of the Anti-Christ, that was the Christ of the Gnostics. "As the true Prophet has told us, the false Gospel must come from a certain misleader." The true Gospel was confessedly "held in reserve, to be secretly transmitted for rectification of future heresies." The Petrine party knew well enough what had to come out if Paul’s preaching, proclaimed in his original Epistles, got vent in wide broadcast. Hence those who were the followers of Peter and James anathematized him as the great apostate and rejected his Epistles. Justin Martyr never once mentions this founder of Christianity, never once refers to the writings of Paul. Strangest thing of all is that the Book of Acts, which is mainly the history of Paul, should contain no account of his martyrdom or death at Rome. Paul’s writings seem to have been withheld for a full century after his death.

According to Massey, "The Praedicatio Petri declared that Peter and Paul remained unreconciled until death." Klausner (85) refers to the dispute between Peter and Paul over the observance of the ceremonial laws, circumcision and forbidden foods.

Clement of Alexandria states that Paul, before going to Rome, said that he would bring to the brethren the Gnosis, or tradition of the hidden mysteries, as the fulfillment of the blessings of Christ, who, Clement says, reveals the secret knowledge and trains the Gnostic by Mysteries, i.e., revelations made in the state of trance. Thus Paul was going as a Gnostic and therefore as the natural opponent of historic Christianity, the promulgation of which was the aim of the Petrine party. Massey declares it was the work of Peter to make the Mysteries exoteric in a human history. It was the work of Paul to prevent this by explaining the Gnosis. Paul warns against the preaching of that "other Gospel" and that "other Jesus."

The data on the subject are none too full or explicit. Controversy could easily rage over it. The gist of the matter is, however, apparent. Christianity started as Gnosticism, became vitiated by the introduction of exoteric elements and proceeded along the track of that course of literalization and historization which made it acceptable to all the ignorant and repellent to all the intelligent. Endless controversy arose between the leaders of the two trends and it appears that Paul was arrayed against Peter. If it was not Paul, the subjective esotericist, against Peter, the objective exotericist, it was at least Pauline spirituality against Petrine literalism. As has so often been admitted by scholars, Paul preached the gospel of the immanent Christ; Peter stood for the fact and the message of a personal Jesus. The resolution of the controversy in favor of the Petrine party was fateful for the whole future of Christianity and the Occident. It committed the Catholic Church to an effort to organize the whole world under its aegis in an earthly body, in which effort it has achieved so large a success, but also in which, by the very fact of its adapting its message to a form of attraction for the less intelligent masses, it has lost its own interior meaning, its profoundest spiritual genius. No one can predict history unless he is blessed with some power of vaticination, but it is reasonable to assume that had the Pauline wing of the early movement prevailed, the service of Christianity to the Western peoples over sixteen centuries would have brought more of benison than it has done.

One has to wonder whether the eminent and learned writers of this and similar material--to be found in endless profusion in Christian apologetic literature--have ever paused long enough in their laudable zeal to vindicate the Christian record to reflect upon the implications and commitments of their position thus stated. As a matter of simple fact these grandiose assertions to the effect that Christianity was fortunate to escape the Pauline influence come close to being a blank confession that Christianity has never been a wholly spiritual religion, and from the third century was not capable of absorbing and assimilating the completely spiritual message and import of the true Gospel! The realization has never seemed to dawn upon orthodox defenders of the faith once delivered to the saints that to proclaim its good fortune in escaping Paul’s thoroughgoing preachment of the indwelling spirit of God is practically the equivalent of proclaiming Christianity to be a system that refuses to go the whole way in the direction of inner spiritual illumination. The inference of good fortune in escaping a certain element implies the presence of evil in that element. If the Church is proclaimed fortunate in having escaped Paul’s spiritual systematism, the plain deduction from the syllogism is that Paul’s high spirituality was and is a dangerous and evil thing. Yet a million sermons have taken Paul’s beautiful runes and rhapsodies of the spiritual life and gone on to magnify and extol their sanctifying power in the Christian experience. If this is the benign thing that Christianity escaped (and it is our assertion that this beauteous influence is just the thing it did lose), how in the name of all that is reasonable can a religion be declared fortunate in escaping the highest blessedness of spiritual exaltation? If Paul’s ethereal afflatus, his lofty flights on the wings of beatific realization of the presence of God in the soul, are things of danger to be sedulously escaped, it is imperative, then, that the Christian system turn to repudiate Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Bonaventura, St. Francis and its thousands of idolized saints and enchanted mystics, whom it has persisted in holding up as heroes of the sacred life. In striking, however glancingly, at Paul and his contribution to their movement, the exegetists are shouting aloud the ultimate spiritual deficiency of their own cult. Their attitude represents mental insincerity, if not open duplicity, inasmuch as the condemnation of Paul’s exalted communion with inner deity clashes diametrically with a stupendous volume of experience on the part of Christian devotees from Augustine to Rufus Jones as to the supreme excellence of the Gnostic pathway to the vision of divine light. In the face of this enormous volume of most highly acclaimed and venerated mysticism of Christian votaries, which, if anything, outdoes even Paul in pure rapture--since Paul never relaxes his hold on rational elements, and the Christian mystics often do--it is surely disingenuous for theologians to decry the Pauline influence or hold it up as a potential peril happily escaped.

Paul, Bacon agrees, had not known the Galilean mechanic in the flesh. He had apparently never heard of him and writes nothing of him. Yet this bereavement and deprivation did not prevent him from being the actual founder of the true Christianity and possibly its foremost expounder and teacher. The spiritual model of the Mystery drama was quite as dynamic an inspiration as ever was needed to lift a man to near-divine intelligence and holiness. Paul’s own life and writing put out of court the arguments of his unworthy successors in the great religion he promulgated. Paul himself disproves that the existence of a living Jesus is a necessary element in the psychology of Christly attainment. He attained without knowledge of a personal Savior, as did, shall we say, Plato and Socrates long before him.

Ch 14

Nor immediately apropos to the theme of Paul’s silence, but closely cognate to the broad implications of Bacon’s position as above set forth, and of great general interest in relation to the vital changes in early Christianity which affect the study, is a statement from the Yale theologian on page 230 of Jesus and Paul, to the effect that it has been credibly estimated that Christianity lost one half of its following to Marcion and other Gnostic "heretics" bent on divorcing it from its Jewish affiliations and making it over in the true likeness of a Hellenic Mystery cult of personal redemption. Mead asserts, too, that the great Marcionite movement had cut Christianity entirely apart from Judaism. 

Almost every great popular movement--like the French Revolution--engages at its inception the interest and support of idealists. Later on, when more grossly human interests surge to the surface and find expression, the idealists are disappointed and disillusioned and drop out. A typical example of this in an individual case is the poet Wordsworth in connection with the French Revolution. The philosophic thinkers who joined the early Christian movement later either dropped out or were forced out by the overwhelming surge of crude exotericism that made hash of the doctrines after two and a half or three centuries. Origen was in particular posthumously excommunicated and anathematized three hundred years after his death for having introduced into the theology the great Oriental doctrine of rebirth or reincarnation.

The high-minded endeavor of the philosophic Christian leaders to hold Christianity up to the superior levels of sage wisdom and interior insight, could it have held its own, is the thing that would in truth have saved the religion of Christos. Yet this most salutary and enlightened trend in leadership and following, Pauline and not Petrine, is the influence that the theologians say Christianity was lucky to escape. In the ironical long and short of the matter, the claim is that Christianity was saved from a worse fate than its now known despicable record of centuries, by following a trend that left every one of its doctrines void of true or intelligible meaning and introduced chaos into every interpretation. We are asked to believe that another trend that would have retained the true inner essence of vital significance, to the eternal enlightenment of mankind, would have represented a great and catastrophic danger to the faith. If this does not reveal the poverty of exegetical and interpretative insight on the part of Christian theologians, we would not know how otherwise to read it. 

That the stream of Christian development was able to take a clear and open course by preaching to the world the spiritual Christ of St. Paul and interfusing also into the teaching of Jesus the Pauline doctrine of grace, is owing to the Ephesian evangelist. If this so great boon came to Christianity through Paul’s influence, again it must be asked: why the universal orthodox judgment that the adherence to Paul’s type of religion would have wrecked Christianity? Again it is difficult for the laymen to understand how Paul’s contribution both saved Christianity and threatened it with obliteration.

The later years of development in the early Church, says Bacon, were marked by the incoming of grievous wolves not sparing the flock, by a teaching of Anti-Christ, threatening to sweep away the whole Church from its relation to the historical Jesus. The Asiatic wing of the Church was in danger of forsaking the way of approach to God by moral self-dedication in the spirit of love and taking its course along the dangerous path of Gnosis. By what license or chicanery of logic a Christian theologian can stigmatize the inner realizations of divine grace and divine presence aspired to (and often, apparently, attained) in the practice of Gnostic Christianity as Anti-Christ, is not clear either on the surface or in the depths of the situation. The realization of inner sanctification is apparently to be belittled or stigmatized because it was not attained with the help of the doctrine of a personal Jesus. And how it can be contended that a Gnostic’s achievement of divine grace is Anti-Christ and spurious, while the same realization by a Christian saint is the legitimate divine unction, can not readily be apprehended. What can all this narrow logic-chopping mean but that Christian jealousy of its own asserted virtues has reduced its apologists to the childish maneuver of declaring the Christ it proclaims as the only true one, and the Christ non-Christians cultivate as a false one? The presence of such a motive is at hand in the egregiously overweening presumptions on which the whole Christian missionary movement was based. "We have the only true religion, because we alone have the true Christ," was the cry that accompanied the attempt to force Christianity willy-nilly upon all the rest of mankind. It took a hundred years of pretty nearly flat failure to open the zeal-blinded eyes of vaunting Christians to the fact that other religions had found ways to reach the true Christ within the heart.

Christians themselves would have their eyes opened upon a new perspective of historical values in the appraisal of their own faith if they would scan the verifiable item of history that has perpetually been held from their knowledge, the fact that in the early proscription of "heretics" by the orthodox party in the Church, it was a case of the worst elements pronouncing judgment against the best, exoteric blindness striking as esoteric insight, a fury of zealotry tramping down calm balance of philosophy. It was Christianity at its worst smothering Christianity at its best. 

And how is all this impeachment of Gnostic Christianity to be held consistent with a summary statement made by Bacon--one with which there can be ready accord--that Jesus and Paul were the champions of the only gospel that has real promise for our struggling world? How can it be both safe and salutary for the world to pin its faith to a Pauline preachment now, if the cause of the true religion saved itself by turning its back to Paul and its face to Peter long ago? This makes Paul both a menace and the bearer of salvation at the same time. 

Because this is exactly what Peter (Ptah) worship did to Seker (Saul: Paul / Solomon) worship in ancient Egypt.

On every hand there were members of the several Mystery Brotherhoods, and one after another writer would be inspired to try his hand at transcribing portions of the memorized Mystery ritual, adding his own glosses and elucidations, omitting some sections of the great mystic drama, or some of the allegories and sayings, inserting others. Many scholars predicate the existence of the collections of the Sayings of the Lord, the origin of which it seems easy to attribute to the program of the Mystery ceremonial, where in each performance a large part of the typical drama of the descent and career of the Soul in incarnation, its "death," "burial," "crucifixion" and "resurrection" in and from the "tomb" of the fleshly body, consisted of an elaborate set of discourses which constituted the message, given orally, by the Messianic spiritual principle to mortals on earth. Since, as seen, the earth itself was the "Mount" both of crucifixion and of transfiguration, the discourse of the Christ character in the ritual came to be known as the Sermon on the Mount. Burton Scott Easton, in his book Christ in the Gospels, a quite erudite treatise, says it is silly to speculate on the geographical location of the "Mount" on which Jesus preached his discourse, as it is likely not to be taken in its physical or material sense at all. This is a welcome ray of light penetrating the gloom of theological obtuseness. The "Sayings" were the body of the verbal or declamatory interludes in the acted drama. The parables were other spoken specialties. From century to century at least a few innovations or novel features might be introduced in this or that country. Though all depicted the same mystery of the Incarnation, or the oblation of the Son (Sons) of God on the altar of fleshly humanity, the various national Mysteries such as those of Samothrace, of Phrygia, of Eleusis, of Bacchus, of Atys, of Osiris, Serapis, Isis, Aten and others were modifications in one of another pronounced direction. The Mysteries solve the great mystery of the Gospels. 

When Christianity gathered in the lowest elements of the Roman population and propagated itself by catering to their level of hysterical religionism, the resentment against learning, genuine or superficial, was widespread and deep-seated. There are ever two vastly divergent planes on which the thing known as religion can deploy its psychologizations in human life, that of the intellect and that of the emotions. Like other religions, Christianity has swung its emphasis back and forth at different epochs between these two modes of the force. In the third century it was in the throes of a movement sweeping it from the intellectual aspect to the emotional. It brought, as we have seen, a hatred of books, learning, philosophy. But before the debacle became overwhelming and catastrophic philosophy had rendered the Church great service, which it is quite worth our while to recall and cogitate.

When the shift from allegory, myth and drama to history was made, the cryptic esoteric keys to the lofty and sublime inner meaning of theological formulations were lost. 

In rounding out this long chapter it is supremely desirable that the full import of Paul’s silence that so damages the case for the historical Christ be summarized and crystallized. On the basis of the premises established it is simply inconceivable that the ardent Apostle--the actual founder of Christianity!--could have left in his writings a total blank about the man Jesus. No amount of sophistry or mental chicanery can set aside the verdict of common sense. Any argument advanced to "explain" it rings from the start with the hollowness of sounding brass and the feebleness of a tinkling cymbal. Paul was in essential leanings a Gnostic, one of the Hellenic philosophers so despised by the anti-philosophical wing of fanatical Christianity in the third and fourth centuries. The ineluctable reason why Paul does not mention a historical Jesus is that he had obviously never heard of one, and further could not have conceived of one. No more could he have believed in a personal Logos than could Philo, who was about contemporary with him. Paul and John, says Bacon, saved Christianity from vitiation for the generations beyond their own. Yet Paul and John had no theology of a personal Jesus, obviously and admittedly. So logic concludes that it was a theology that had no room for the personal Christ that saved Christianity.

The Egyptians have the term from which indeed, in utmost likelihood, the very name "Christ" has come, to designate the "soul made flesh." It is their Karast, the name of the deceased in the mummy-coffin, and it means "fleshed." Modern theology will never recover the genuinely correct sense of much of the ancient sacred writ until it restores to a central place in its structure of exegesis the forgotten doctrine of "Dismemberment," the idea of the fragmentation or cutting of deity to pieces, or as the Greeks put it, "the distribution of whole natures" of the gods into infinite partition, so that a seed fragment of divine Mind may be planted in the life of every creature. This principle is indeed clearly embodied in Christian theology and ritual in the Christ’s breaking of the loaf--after declaring that it typified or "was" his own body--and distributing a portion of it to each participant in the divine transubstantiation. Each fragment of his deific nature thus transplanted in the body, heart and mind of the communicants became "fleshed" or Karast; and this became the Christ on the cross of flesh. The Christ in each of us is the Word made flesh, which after the analogy of the broken pieces of the loaf, came and dwelt among us, telling us that indeed unless we take and "eat" of this divine essence, our aeonial salvation will not be accomplished. The mind can see at this juncture that the moment one leaps from the meaning of the incarnation of the Christos "in all men" to the other sense of "in one man, Jesus," the groundwork for a rational and intelligible comprehension of the fleshing of the Logos, and with it the whole basic sense of ancient religion, flies away, and confusion stalks the effort to grasp the purport of all theology. The entire edifice of theology is built upon and around the central fact of the descent of the Logos into flesh and matter. It is the nub of the entire system. It is the key to the scriptures. The planting of the seed fragment of divine nature distributively in humanity was and is the advent of Christos, the great aeonial divine coming. That the Son of God was collectively the Sons of God, or the principle of Sonship distributed like bread to the "multitude," has never been decisively grasped as the prime key to the theological systemology. "The gods distribute divinity" is one of the most sententious and revealing items in the profound Platonic philosophy belittled by Christian dogmatists. "Each superior deity," explains Proclus, "receiving from on high the excellent nature of those gods who are above it, imparts it in divided measure to those natures immediately secondary to themselves." The gods in the rank above us offer us their very bodies, i.e., the essence of their divine natures, the substance of intellect and will, for us to feed upon by appropriation, or "eating." If the bread is the body of the Christ’s nature, how can it be implanted germinally in the flesh of billions unless it be broken into as many fragments as there are to be communicants?

This is the meaning--all lost in the historicizing process--of the multiplication of the loaves (and fishes) to feed the multitude.

The Logos was made flesh, but not in one man only. Paul thrilled to this knowledge, and the Bible hardly anywhere rises to such majesty and loftiness as in those passages in his Epistles wherein he dissertates on the forming of the Christ in us through the growth of charity in our hearts. There is no confusion there. That comes in only when the man-Christ is thrust into the picture.

Ch 15

The resources of the dictionary are hardly adequate to pictorialize what has to be styled the doltish fatuity of popular conception in Christian countries of such an accouterment or embellishment of the Oriental dramatization of spiritual history as the heralding of the birth of Christos by the appearance of a star and its guidance of three Magi of Persia to the stable in Bethlehem.

In a lifetime of reading there have been encountered only two slight or glancing allusions to the illogicality and inherent impossibility of the story of the guiding star of Bethlehem. There may be others that have not been seen. It is to illustrate or exemplify the shallowness of general orthodox thinking on matters of scripture and theology that an attempt is made to present this matter in realistic baldness. When the ordinary person at Christmas time purchases one of the greeting cards picturing the five-pointed star in a dark blue heaven of night; with a streak of rays streaming down as distinct as the beams of searchlights upon a humble structure on the edge of Bethlehem, directing the three camel-mounted Magi to the spot of the Savior’s nativity, the aura of interest and devotion in the scene is probably not dimmed or diminished by any roguish consideration that there may be a single irrational item in the representation. If the current query of American cleverness--"What is wrong with this picture?"--were put to the card purchaser, he or she would doubtless be shocked and taken aback to be apprised that there was anything amiss with it.

It may be a somewhat more difficult operation, however, to convince the hypnotized devotee of the miraculous and the supernatural, that no star--assuming now that it is a real star and not some hypothecated ignis fatuus of Christian fancy--could by any possibility become or act as a local guide to a given spot on earth. If there is any lingering remnant of protest that perhaps it could be done, let anyone go out under the open sky at night and try to determine at what moment he is exactly under a particular star, or exactly what spot that star is pointing to. With this corrective of his idle fancy, let him recall that the earth is constantly turning under the stars at the rate of over a thousand miles an hour, or about eighteen miles, roughly, a minute. Any locality thus would be rushing under the star at about four times the speed of the swiftest airplanes, and to keep over the desired spot the star itself would have to sweep around on its orbit at an unthinkable rate of speed. Even if it could shoot downward one distinct ray to point to the stable in Bethlehem, the latter would in a few hours turn around from under its finger and disappear on the underside of the planet. A star can give compass direction and nothing more. It can not be a local guide.

One theory is that at about that period, or within a hundred years of the date, there was a conjunction of four, five or six of the planets, making such a bright cluster that the childish ancient world straightway fell into hysteria and paroxysms of superstitious fear, standing in awe of some great portent, the Bethlehem babe being somehow or other announced by the planets in one voice. Another typical version is that there flared up a mighty comet which aimed straight toward, or trailed its wispy tail right over, the Judean stable. It is distasteful to be called upon to emphasize the degree of mental folly necessary to hypostatize such stupidities, yet the consequences have been so fatal that a final satirical treatment seems called for. The astronomers and divines who are heedless enough to permit their names to go under these wild conjectures to keep the credulous in line with "the sacred story," seem to imagine that if they succeed in putting some unusual luminary in the sky about the year one, they have adequately explained the legend of the star, and thus substantiated Biblical prestige. It is not enough merely to have accounted for a star in the heavens; it must be brought down to earth and made to hover motionless over the cave in Bethlehem! For Matthew says that "it came and stood over where the young child was." Imagine a cluster of five or six of our planets, including Jupiter, which is many times the size of our earth, hanging on the outskirts of Bethlehem villages and pointing to the stable! No astronomer that ever lived knows anything about a star that came within a hundred feet of the earth and stood still there. No star ever known has "stood" anywhere, since all are rushing at invariable speed along an orbit. Again, the diameter of a star that could point to a single building of tiny dimensions in a village could not be twenty to thirty feet at most. The tiniest of the asteroids has a diameter of some five miles. The only sizable star left that might fulfill the conditions is a meteor, but no meteor ever led travelers patiently across a desert and then stood still over a village. As an actual phenomenon, the "star of Bethlehem" is the most childish absurdity ever perpetrated by unscrupulous priestcraft upon religiously derationalized humans. The Sun stands still at the Winter Solstice

But the story is not only inherently preposterous; it holds a self-contradiction as well. An amazing and, to the orthodox view, most disconcerting fact comes to light in an observation that reveals absolute contradiction between the conventional legend and the Gospel text. The legend universally has it that Balthasar, Gaspar and Melchior, the "three Kings of Orient," were Magian astrologers from Persia or Chaldea, who by stellar or other forecast divined the date of the Messianic birth. Under the spur of news of such aeonial magnitude, they made the camel journey across the Arabian desert to greet the divine Messenger in Judea. According to the best geographies it is safe to say that this is going west on the map. So the Magi traveled west. But the Gospel story does not agree. It says they traveled east! For when they came to Herod and informed him of the purpose of their visit, and frightened him with their oracular prophecy that the new-born king would unseat him from his throne, they said: "We have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him." The star that appeared and led them till it stood over the birthplace was seen "in the east." The "dodge" out of this predicament will probably be the reminder that all stars rise in the east and then "travel" west. The text says nothing to this effect. The plain implications of the language of the Gospel is that the wise men saw the star in the east and therefore went there, i.e., to the east, where it indicated the locality of the Savior’s birth. But popular legend takes them westward. Something is indeed wrong with this picture.

The purpose here is not primarily interpretative, but the challenge will come to us to produce a rational meaning for the star allegory if it was not a factual verity. It will carry some credence for the denial if it can be shown that it has another meaning on the esoteric side that is both clear and acceptable to reason. The explanation is not difficult. It is simple enough to anyone who has become familiar with ancient Egyptian symbology. One of the most patent emblems by which the Egyptians typified the soul as a nucleus of intellectual "fire" was the star, and the evolutionary descent of the soul into matter, typified as earth and water, was allegorized as the sinking of a star into the earth or ocean with the rotation of the globe. Soul and star unite in meaning in the Egyptian word Seb, says Massey. And souls, like the stars, sank periodically into the domain of matter. A star falling or sinking below the horizon was the typograph of a soul going down into incarnation in the earth, or into the earthy and watery elements of the body. The "west" was therefore the typical "region" where souls went to their "death," or semi-dead condition of existence under the limitations of matter, in which state they gained a new life, were reborn at Christmas and finally resurrected at Easter. The soul that, as a star, had sunk into flesh "on the western horizon of the sky," rose in its new birth or liberation "on the eastern side of heaven." Or, putting it a bit differently, the soul that as the aged one of a previous incarnational cycle, descended anew into matter and body to be regenerated after "death" and to be reborn as its own son, would show the light of its star rising in the east. The birth of the Christos then was the emergence above the eastern horizon of the new Adam resurrected out of the dying embers of the old. The Phoenix The advent of the Christ principle in man was therefore mythically embellished by the legend of the star of soul rising in the east. It was an integral part of the Egyptian and other dramatizations of the divine Nativity.

The three Wise Men, rather the three Kings of Wisdom, who attend the appearance of the star are none other than the three differentiations of the "star" or soul itself, the three aspects or rays into which it breaks its primal unity when it comes to organic manifestation in and through a body or instrument. Naturally they would appear when the "star" of soul has its birth in the east, as they are its own three aspects raying forth, and they must come with the star. This illumination of the mind with the true sense of a beautiful allegory is worth more than a hundred volumes of silly speculation in the effort to make the "history" of the Jesus life stand up in the face of obvious irrationality. It is a wholesome relief to know that it is allegory, and to know also that one’s faith and religion do not have to be supported any longer on the unstable foundation of the star’s claimed factuality. The star must be believed if the personal Jesus is to be accepted. Rejected as preposterous on factual ground, the star can still become a virile aid to spiritual realization if the Jesus story also is taken as the dramatization of wondrous truth. The drama, more potently than the "history," was to impress this indefeasible veritude upon the early life of humanity. It represents the genius of the whole ancient literature, which has been woefully misread because this fundamentum was ignored.

Less allegorical but equally fictitious must have been that other item of Nativity accompaniment which is introduced in order to account for the parents’ visit to the village of Bethlehem, through which new scriptures were to be made to fulfill "prophecies" in old ones. This was the alleged decree of Caesar Augustus "that all the world should be taxed." The first thought that occurs--to a politician, at least--is that the Romans must have been slow to rise to their lush opportunities for income if the idea of a tax had not occurred to them before this! The student of Roman history is pretty well assured that the Imperial government had not been unduly neglected of the taxing prerogative of a conquering nation at any time in the Republic’s or the Empire’s period. But the sum and substance of the story of the Augustus tax is that there is no official Roman government record of this world-wide levy anywhere extant or ever known. And the records were well kept at this epoch. The declaration has been thundered forth from a million pulpits that the Gospel story of the Christ stands accredited by facts of authentic history. Here is one of the most salient of such facts, and it is found to be no fact of history at all. It is more fictitious than any myth. It is untrue, whereas a myth is brimming with (hidden) truth.

It would not be difficult to amass a great amount of authors’ data to support the claim as to the fictional nature of this tax and the Cyrenian (Quirinian) census preparatory to it. But an authority lies at hand that will be used extensively in this section of the study, and it is desirable to summon the witness of a defender of the historical point of view to our side of the discussion. This particular authority can well be used as representative and typical of hundreds of others, which can not all be brought forward in evidence. It has been selected out of scores of "Lives of Jesus" because its handling of many items in the "life" of the subject is fairer than usual to the realistic or concrete view, and less haloed with mystic romanticism. The work is The Historical Life of Christ, by Joseph Warschauer, an eminent European scholar. In the Preface the author aims to embody in his work the method and theories of another leading European student, Albert Schweitzer, who in turn has stated that the ideal "Life" of Christ would be one that H. J. Holtzmann did not write, but should have written. The Warschauer book, therefore, may be taken as the mouthpiece of a "school" of orthodox thought in Christianity, confessedly modernistic and liberal, and certainly highly influential in shaping and formulating present Christian attitudes. It must be kept in mind throughout that his book is building the case for the historicity of Jesus.

This writer, then, is quite frank in admitting that the total silence of history concerning the tax and census in the reign of Augustus makes such an event highly improbable. He admits the 4 B.C. date of Herod’s death and rightly says that the census would not likely have been taken in his reign by any Roman authority, since Herod was an independent ruler and an ally of Rome. A "first census" was apparently taken about A.D. 6, after the deposition of Herod’s successor Archelaus, when Judea became part of the Roman province of Syria, under Cyrenius (Quirinus). This "governor in Syria" mentioned in the Gospel as in office when the Bethlehem birth occurred, is placed as early as 13-11 B.C. This dating would change and disarrange whole blocks and chains of evidence laboriously assembled. Warschauer concedes that if the date of Quirinus was earlier (than 4 B.C.), the census could not have been conducted under his supervision. For the census over which Quirinus did preside was carried out in A.D. 7 and caused the popular revolt alluded to in Acts 5:37, for the reason that it was the first time that the Jews had been thus levied upon. And, Warschauer adds, Joseph was a subject of the tetrarch Antipas and not liable to Roman taxation! Not only that, but the issuance of such an order would have entailed almost a miniature migration of inhabitants, an unlikely act of the Roman power. And finally, he adds, even if Joseph’s journey to his ancestral city can be explained over these difficulties, no unprejudiced mind would believe that he would have taken with him his wife in her then physical condition. There is no real or plausible reason for the trip, he asserts, beyond the literary or legendary necessity of having the Messiah born in Bethlehem. He even most truly concludes that Luke’s attempt to link the birth of Jesus with Bethlehem must be regarded as unsuccessful. Yet what must be considered most remarkable in this connection is that Warschauer’s own correct vision of the non-historicity of this (and scores of other) events in the detail of Jesus’ "life" builds no grave doubt in his mind as to the historicity of the whole structure. Childhood indoctrination and traditional prepossession will not yield even to the forthright evidence of massed opposing data. Jesus must be kept alive in spite of mountainous evidence.

Other features of the Nativity story engage attention. Warschauer almost puts the case irrevocably in our hands when he says that there is indeed hardly a single statement among those in which Luke tells us of the Bethlehem birth that can survive dispassionate scrutiny. He deals frankly with the Matthew-Luke flat contradictions as to the Bethlehem-Nazareth birth and residence problem. Matthew represents Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus, and Nazareth as the adopted home of Mary and Joseph. But Luke has them residing in Nazareth before the birth of Jesus. Matthew brings the holy family from Bethlehem to Nazareth, while Luke moves the parents from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Matthew says nothing of the journey and enrollment. Luke is silent about the Herod plot and the flight into Egypt, and has nothing concerning the three Magi, or their star, or the massacre of the babes. Warschauer resolves the contradictions and discrepancies on the theory that we are dealing with two traditions which can not be harmonized. He does not know that the solution of the numerous Gospel contradictions must be sought further back than two opposing traditions. Nor does he explain how two irreconcilable traditions arose out of one original tradition. He does not know that there were more than two divergent versions of most legendary material and that the mythical representations of many aspects of the human-divine allegory branched off from one original formulation into many variations and recensions, in the same way as, supposedly, did language from one primal stock. Some of the variants can be attributed to copyists’ errors; others no doubt to scribal corrections, emendations, interpolations and forgery.

He notices the Slaughter of the Innocents and very justly equates it with a great diversity of Greek, Persian and Syrian "popular legend," in which kings were divinely warned of danger from their own infant sons. Yet it is to be assumed that Warschauer would protest the conclusion which a student of comparative religion would feel legitimately qualified to establish from these premises, that the Herod slaughter was itself derived from this common stock of pervading myth. It is time to remark here that the great--the inestimably great--service which Lord Raglan’s work, The Hero, has performed in clearing up the status of all this type of speculation is in the fact that it establishes, for the edification of these Bible analyzers and for all understanding, the truth that what they term "popular" legend and thus by a mere name brush aside as of no intrinsic import, was not the upgrowth of popular fancy and therefore mere superstition of the folk sort, but is all traceable to the one primal religious ritual-drama, to which must be assigned an authorship of truly Olympian sapiency. If it can ever be driven home to the seat of theological intelligence that the whole Christian Bible is just a somewhat specialized collection of the same stories, myths and allegories as constituted the mythical aggregations of Greece and other countries, it will mark the day-break of the new and true light on Biblical exegesis.

The role of the shepherds in the fields by night, the blinding flood of light, the celestial heralding of the advent, the proclamation of the glad tidings of great joy, are all likewise found by Warschauer to parallel similar features of the Mithra, the Dionysus, even the Augustus cycles of legends. The flight into Egypt is seen to be matched by a similar episode in several mythological quarters. The "stable" is admitted to be a "cave" in second century stories. The great Christian doctrine of the virgin birth is treated with sanity, as being akin to a series of divine progenations of both Greek and Old Testament heroes. In the Hebrew scriptures we have stories of the "wondrous births" in connection with Isaac, Samson and Samuel. The Talmudic Moses has a virgin mother; Samuel’s mother became pregnant after receiving divine seed; Zipporah was found by Moses pregnant, but by no mortal man. Tamar became pregnant by an infusion of divine seed and Isaac was not the result of generation, but of the shaping of the unbegotten. On the Greek side not only were the heroes of legend, Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, Jason and others believed to be the sons of divine fathers and human mothers, but the same legend reached down even to historical figures like Pythagoras and Plato, both of whom were "Sons of Apollo," the first by Parthenis--which Warschauer remarks sounds most intriguingly suggestive of parthenogenesis, or "virgin birth,"--the second by Periktione. It ought to be observed that the clue here noticed by Warschauer is fundamentally of far more significance in pointing the way to the truth than volumes of the blind speculation indulged in by students who flout the claims for the mythical origin of Bible material.

Short shrift is made of the genealogies by this author. First the difference between the two lists as given by Matthew and Luke is noted. They are hopelessly irreconcilable, he agrees. Then the inevitable necessity of the Messiah’s being proclaimed as of King David’s line, in order that "prophecy" might again be fulfilled, is set forth. He must be of Davidic descent and of Bethlehem birth. But the notable feature of the genealogies, in Warschauer’s estimation, is the fact that both lists trace the Davidic descent through the mother’s husband, who was not Jesus’ father, but was only his foster-father. (Massey shows the identity of Joseph’s role in the Gospels with that of the Egyptian Seb (Keb, Geb), the god of earth, who, though not the planter of the divine seed from which the Son of God sprang, yet nourished and nurtured him from birth onward.) The genealogies are included, he assumes, for the express purpose of establishing that Joseph was of David’s house and lineage. But the whole force of the set-up evaporates the moment the Holy Spirit steps in to usurp the function of human fatherhood. Christian poverty and pagan sufficiency are here seen in glaring contrast, for resort must be had to pre-Christian systems to catch the splendid hidden meaning of this cryptic situation--which was adopted by Christianity from pagan usage, but with interior meaning lost. To be sure, no power can implant the seed of divine sonship save the Holy Spirit, which is the Mind or Logos of God injected into the womb of matter, the Mother. Nothing but spirit can fecundate matter, to make it reproductive of new birth. No mere earthly parent could stand in the allegory as the divine father of the Christ. But once the seed is implanted and the matter-mother impregnated with the divine spark, then the earthly father can assume his role of rearer and protector of the divine-human child. After centuries of abuse of paganism, Christianity must now in humility turn to that despised source to learn for the first time the true meaning of its own elements. But Warschauer is quite fair and concise on this point. He says the genealogies are worthless, and ends by saying that had either Evangelist wished to prove the view of the Lord’s birth that afterwards became dominant, he would have given Mary’s and not Joseph’s line of ancestry. For if the genealogies prove anything, it is that Jesus was not of David’s line, as the Davidic descendant, Joseph, was not his father.

The "flight into Egypt" is a vivid example of how a feature of ancient Egyptian representation of lofty cosmic and creative procedure came into Christianity in the merest fragmentary form. The full elucidation of the grand sweep of the meaning back of this allegorism has been made in the companion work to this, The Lost Light. But in the mighty Kamite system the flight into Egypt is the glyph for the descent of the hosts of embryo souls from celestial spheres into incarnation on earth. There is no disputing this rendering; "Egypt" clearly is the type-name for earth and body, or matter. It is a main item in Egyptian systematism, whereas in the Christian scheme it becomes a mere incident along the way, and is no essential part of the story.

Next to be noticed is Warschauer’s mention of the circumstance that Luke has no reference to the flight into Egypt. Instead, the parents go openly to Jerusalem, without fear of the threat from Herod, to present the child in the temple and offer sacrifice. Warschauer thinks it doubtful that every infant born in a Jewish household had to be presented in Jerusalem. Who might have been at the temple in Jerusalem at this time? Zechariah, Elizabeth and John It could not be carried out in all cases at any rate. But the presentation in this case is made the peg on which to hang the episode of Simeon and Anna in the narrative, which attests the Lord’s mission as Savior of Israel. But even these incidents in the temple, Warschauer admits, are not records of fact, but are introduced to emphasize the element of Messianic expectancy then so widely extant. He even notes that the "marvel" of Joseph and Mary at Simeon’s rapturous declarations is hardly natural after Mary had herself heard the annunciation of her divine motherhood from Gabriel.

There is not a single doctrine or ceremonial of Christian theology and worship that has not been drawn from antecedent pagan religions.

The legend which reported that the name "Jesus" had been chosen for the new Messiah before he was conceived is granted Warschauer’s half-cynical indulgence as a concession to the poetizing instinct. He gives the name "Joshua," the equivalent of Jesus, as meaning "God’s help." It is not the place to enter into philological controversy; but that the root of the many variants of the name "Jesus" traces back to Egyptian origin and has a far profounder etymological significance than "God’s help" is known to many.

Of his growth and development nothing is known, Warschauer admits. Yet that nothing is better than the grotesque tales of his childhood found in some spurious gospels, which are plainly clumsy inventions. The one item recorded--the Passover visit to Jerusalem at the age of twelve, and his tilt with the temple doctors--may be fact, thinks Warschauer; but he regards it as highly unlikely that his parents would have gone three days on the homeward journey before they missed him! That Jesus lost himself (for three days?) in his absorption in the debate and forgot to join the caravan is accepted by Warschauer as credible enough to permit the incident to stand on historical footing! On such feeble bases rests much of the main temple of Christianity.

Our authority is frank in adducing data that militate against the thesis he aims to uphold. He reveals that Luke’s narrative of the nativity of John the Baptist is modeled on Old Testament prototypes of famous and wondrous births. This story includes the central mythological element of a conception and birth from the womb of a mother past nature bearing age. This is of course pure allegory and only to be understood with reference to ancient theogonies. Sarah and Hannah are earlier prototypes of the same imagery. The mother is nature, and the natural order only in its great age--after millions of years of evolutionary development--produced man and his brain in which to bring the Christ child to functioning. Other identities with previous births are cited. 

The Zacharias hymn is a Messianic psalm, he rightly states. But difficulty is encountered when it is noted that the cousin relationship between Mary and Elizabeth, stated by Luke, is directly repudiated by John’s Gospel. The remainder of the story, he somewhat sadly confesses, is an instance of haggada, or fanciful religious narrative that later Judaism so delighted in. The fact that Judaism was prepossessed with a flair and fancy for poetic figurism is lightly touched by Warschauer, as just an incidental circumstance that accounts for an annoying feature of the Gospel historicity that must be explained. 

Had he the perspicacity to concede to the fact itself--that an age of a nation’s religious life was dominated by such an (to him) eccentric and irregular tendency--that poetic allegorism prevailed and predominated in Judaism at the time. And it is rather gratuitous that he limits it to this particular period. What he fails to recognize is that this tendency was part of the universal literary spirit of the whole ancient world over many centuries, and is in itself a powerful adjunct to the present contention that the whole of ancient scripture was allegorical, both in spirit and in method. His slighting treatment of this very central datum indicates a lack of perspective and understanding of the elements of his problem.

We step out of the flowery field of romantic legend over to firm ground of history in Warschauer’s elucidation, only when we reach the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius, when John, the forerunner of the Messiah, issued the call to the age to repent in view of the imminent coming of the "Kingdom." But what evidence of factual objectivity is there in the narrative to differentiate what goes on thereafter from what had gone before? Obviously nothing more than the type of material encountered there, which is only a shade or two less romantic on the side of imagination than the more frankly mythic trimmings sewed on to the Nativity. Yet even here the expositor admits, item by item, that many occurrences connected with the story from that point onward are as obviously non-historical as the birth anecdotes. Some of these must be set down.

As early in fact as Mark’s citation of Isaiah’s announcement of the messengership of John, Warschauer says we are not dealing with history, but an Evangelistic attempt to match John’s herald role with popular expectation. The scholar even points out to us that Mark’s description of John’s voice as that of one crying in the wilderness is from Isaiah (40:3) where it is not even a reference to Messiah, but to Yahweh restoring his exile-ridden people to their homeland. And he is frank to tell us that while John proclaims the nearness of the Kingdom, he does not prophesy the Messiah either in person or in spirit.

Attention needs to be called here to the misapplied usage of the word "eschatological." Warschauer uses it here in relevance to the coming of the Kingdom, which Christian theology has erroneously connected, through the misinterpretation of several scriptural passages, with the "end of the world" (itself a fatal mistranslation of the Greek for "the end of the cycle"), and the pronouncing of judgment upon all humanity in a final scene. It can be said at last that the imagery of John’s language carried no such eschatological implications whatever. The coming of the Kingdom has no more extended reference than that which goes with the "Christification" of collective humanity. When the common variety of mortal men has accomplished the transfiguration of its life from animal or "Gentile" rating into the likeness of the shining radiance of spiritualized being, or the "Israelite" status, then the kingdom of heaven has materialized or "come" to earth. It is not likely that geological convulsions will have anything to do with it. Nor is it likely that the dawn of spiritual consciousness in the race as a whole will be delayed for the many millions of years the good earth has yet to run on in its course around the sun. Many righteous individuals have already brought their contribution to the kingdom of peace and good will here now. The matter makes clear how immediately dangerous the reading of the sage books of antiquity becomes the moment an objective rendering is introduced into what must be kept purely subjective to guard its sane reference. There is no history in antique books of wisdom. But the ideal patterns of all history are there. The eschatological suggestion, if it is such, embodied in John’s cry for repentance goes no farther than the reference to the general cry drawn from the Mystery stage character’s lines, when in the great drama the Messianic actor cries to mortals or "Gentile" man to awake to the realization that he must prepare his mind and heart for a great and always in some degree imminent transformation into the higher nature of the Christ whom "John," the natural man, precedes. The event impending is not one that is to supervene historically, that is, objectively, at any given moment, as a thing of outward observation. The "Kingdom," Jesus himself specifies, cometh neither here nor there, and not with observation. It comes silently in the hearts of men and women. The amazing ado about the age’s expectation of a personal Messiah, to be injected into the milieu of the world’s political, economic and social life, is a vast misreading of arcane meaning. Nothing in religion has ever driven sensible humans to such folly as the objective expectation of the coming of Messiah. Warschauer says that John’s prefatory preachment of the coming day of judgment created a stir and commotion in all Judea, so that the multitude flocked out to be ready to witness the expected prodigy. So did Miller’s deluded preachment of the same thing in all New England and west to Ohio in 1836 to 1843, when the whole bubble of delusion burst in ridiculous and shameful disillusionment. The "Millerite Delusion" should be read up by all who need to be impressed with the lesson of religious gullibility and the utter folly of taking scriptures as literal history.

Our scholar suggests that the multitudes who flocked out at the clarion call of the Messiah’s herald for repentance were not necessarily corrupt or sunk in iniquity. They were ill-used, oppressed and mistaught people, feverishly longing for release from hard conditions. Their greatest defect, Warschauer hints, was due to a mechanical conception of religion! They were taking the herald’s words too literally! They understood John to be predicting the coming of a great man, a king, who would redeem their lowly status, instead of a Christly or kingly instinct in the heart: this was their fault! There is entire agreement here with Warschauer on this point. But to our vision there is no reason perceptible on the horizon anywhere that makes clear why the fault of the populace of the first century in mistaking Messianic prophecy by translating it too literally and mechanically, and thereby turning the Christos, the Prince of Peace, into a human figure, is any more reprehensible then than now. The ironic possibilities and eventualities of the argument are left to the reader’s predilections.

The next bit of presumptive "history" that the scholar throws out the window is the romantic story of the circumstances precipitating the Baptist’s death: the "Salome" dance before Herod, his impetuous promise to give the damsel whatever she might ask, her intrigued demand for John’s head on a charger, and the rest. He says the entire episode is open to the gravest doubts, and again is admittedly molded over the pattern of Old Testament stories, especially that of Jephthah in Judges. John’s head is represented as being brought in and presented to the dancing daughter of Herodias then and there, whereas, says Warschauer, John was in prison at Machaerus, distant by four days’ journey from Tiberias, where such a banquet would have been held. Lastly Herodias was not a wanton character, but a loyal and steadfast queen.

Warschauer betrays his lack of acquaintance with deep and recondite ancient esoteric symbology when he says that John’s description of the one greater than he, who, though coming after him, is preferred before him, wielding a winnowing fan and bringing fire from heaven to burn the chaff, does not fit Jesus. One, however, must study the great system of Egyptian portrayal under glyph and symbol to see how perfectly it does fit the Jesus or Christ character.

It is desirable to call attention to this investigator’s tribute paid in his book (p. 46) to religious genius as a thing of subjective depth beyond all fathoming of ordinary mentality. It is the very thing that has been predicated of it in our work as the basis of the necessity for portraying its deeper intimations by the singular method and appliances of allegory and myth or drama. The religious intuition plumbs the wells of mystic realization to such depths that it is past depiction by any other typism. This is adduced here by way of showing that a Christian apologist can himself strengthen the case for esoteric methodology at moments when bias is not immediately concerned.

The next Biblical event of reputed historicity to be shunted aside by Warschauer is the opening of the heavens at the end of the baptism, the proclamation of the celestial voice that this was God’s beloved Son sent for the world’s acceptance, and the descent of the dove upon Jesus’ head. The disqualification of this as history is accomplished by the averment that it was a purely subjective intuition of Jesus himself and not an outward event witnessed by the assemblage on the river bank! The account given of the event by Matthew and Luke carries its own refutation, he acknowledges. For had Jesus’ mission thus been authenticated by such a marvel wrought openly in the sight of a concourse of people to bear it witness, neither Jesus nor the populace could have hesitated, they to acclaim and he to accept, the Messianic character of his person and his status. That no such sweeping demonstration followed, is regarded by this critic as conclusive proof that the divine approbation expressed out of heaven at the baptism could not have been objectively perceived.

Another acknowledgment weakening to the historical claim is Warschauer’s reminder that every one of Jesus’ answers to Satan in the wilderness temptation is taken from Deuteronomy VI to VIII, and that such an encounter between the Savior and the personified evil principle is paralleled in Zoroastrian and Buddhistic and other religious literature. 

The next item to be likewise disqualified is Jesus’ commissioning his twelve disciples upon a mountain. This, as given in Mark, Warschauer dismisses with the statement that it bears the stamp of legend and not that of history. Also is noted the fact that while there are four lists of these chosen "fishermen," not two of them quite agree.

With regard to the cleansing of the leper cited by the three Synoptists, he says that if it belongs to history, it could not well have happened when it is reported to have occurred. And the scholar reverts to sane criticism when he declares that for anyone who knows the deep-rooted nature of leprosy, it is difficult to believe that Jesus healed the disease with a mere word. He sees the account as just an attempt to analogize Jesus’ power with that of Moses and Elijah, who were said to have cured lepers. As to the account of Jesus healing the paralytic let down through a hole in the roof, he speaks of the glaring improbability of this detail. He calls in the modern psychological discovery of the power of auto-suggestion to account for the possible cure as narrated. He takes a wavering stand on the accredited miraculous power of the divine healer.

Coming to the great climactic miracle of the whole Gospel collection, the raising of Lazarus, the scholar quotes Prof. E. F. Scott (The Fourth Gospel, p. 45) as saying that it can not with real probability be given a place in any intelligible scheme of the life of Christ; that it is inconceivable that a miracle of such omen for all mankind, performed in the one week of the Savior’s career of which there is a full chronicle, and in the presence of multitudes just outside Jerusalem, with the miracle itself forming the direct occasion of the crucifixion, should have been left totally out of the narratives of the three other Evangelists and be given only by John,--the one, we may remark incidentally, who, like Paul, presents a Jesus who is scarcely personally human at all! And Scott ends by making the very sensible suggestion we are almost pushed to the conclusion that the raising of Lazarus is, in the main, symbolical! When will scholars receive that extra little push that will thrust them at last into the circle where alone the full truth as to the nature of all this material and its interpretative problem can be seen? When will they take that one further step beyond Prof. Scott’s suggestion that will enable them to see that not only the Lazarus story but the entire literature is symbolical?

Indeed the next author quoted by Warschauer practically does take that step. It is Prof. Burkitt, who (in The Gospel History and Its Transmission, p. 223) says that for all its dramatic setting we can not regard the Lazarus miracle as the account of a historical event! Warschauer agrees that the other (Lukan) mention of Lazarus in the story of the rich man and the beggar is pure moral apologue and suggests a very plausible connection between the two episodes. By we know not how many intervening stages, he writes, the moral fable grew through the haggadic tendency into the historic legend. It is our reflection prompted by this explanation that if he admits that the Bible material was a final outgrowth of a number of successive stages of transformation of original moral apologue into history, he has gone far in the very direction of granting the major premises on which our work stands. It is precisely our position that all ancient Biblical content began as apologue and became, in Christianity, transmuted into history. To refute that position in the large, this scholar supplies us with much data in the small, that support our contention. And after all, it is no small thing in this debate to concede the non-historicity of this particular Lazarus miracle. In fact the edifice of Christianity rests, as Paul loudly proclaims, on one single fact, the resurrection of Jesus. But this pivotal item has been considered to have been stoutly buttressed by the auxiliary death-to-life miracle of similar significance and portent at Bethany. To wipe away the latter as history is seriously to weaken the main girder in the temple of Christianity.

Additional strength is given by Warschauer to his contention that Bethlehem could not have been the actual birthplace of Jesus by his treatment of material detailing the Savior’s later visit to Nazareth, "his own country," where he found himself strangely without honor. Also the disqualification of another item of the "history" is made by Warschauer’s statement that the clause--"save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk and healed them"-sounds decidedly like interpolation, either by the Evangelist of some later editor.

Mark, he says, knows nothing of the attack of the crowd on Jesus that nearly led to his murder, from which danger he escaped by "passing through the midst of them"; and this incident, too, is dismissed as likely not historical. Also the Lord’s sayings about Elijah and Elisha manifesting their powers only for the heathen and not for the Israelites, seem to our critic as of doubtful authenticity. They belong, he significantly states, to the realm of primitive Christian apologetics!

Comment on Herod’s later suspicions of Jesus and fear of his power to stir up undesirable political ferment includes Warschauer’s statement that study of the incident is calculated to raise doubts as to the historical character of what is there said of Jesus’ identity. Admission is made in another connection that the true order of events can only be conjectured, with probability as our sole guide,--again a feeble basis for history to rest upon. Matthew made a most happy conjecture of his own, he ventures. Thus even the authors of Gospel "history" were not sure of what they recorded.

That Jesus should have twice withdrawn from the Galilean country following the two feedings of the multitude is put down as unbelievable and reduces the course of events to chaos. Resort is even had to the fictional reconstruction of occurrences to account for certain things mentioned in the history. If this liberty is permissible now, there should have been no condemnation of similar practice in the early centuries. Our safety is in being told that it is invention and not something else. A lengthy hypothetical construction is made by Warschauer on page 149 to serve as at least a not impossible explanation of the origin of the legend of the master’s walking on the waves.

Ch 16

The general proposition herein advanced that the Bible is a literary work executed in accordance with ancient patterns of design and method which are scarcely as yet envisaged in relation to their significance receives an astonishing confirmation and reinforcement from a source that came to hand only recently and as it were by accident. It has to do with the literary form-structure of the Bible books and not with their contents. But so startling is this revelation of a definite arrangement of material according to one or more peculiar form-patterns that the conviction of a hidden purpose and cryptic significance far beyond the recording of mere history in the Bible is overwhelmingly stamped on the mind. The form of this peculiar structure is so organically articulated that its claims on the attention reduce the content almost to secondary significance. This discovery has been released to the world by N. W. Lund in a book bearing the non-revealing and uninspired title of Chiasmus in the New Testament. With great detail and system and no little ingenuity the author has segregated portions of material in both Old and New Testaments into unit or constituent groups and then systematized the phrase and sentence elements of each group into the scheme of a surprisingly methodological arrangement, which roughly forms when diagramatically represented the Greek letter "Chi," whence the word Chiasmus, the name of the scheme. (For practical purposes the letter "Chi" is our "X.") 

There is a progressing succession of elements (words, phrases, constructions, whole sentences) more commonly numbering three (A, B, C or 1, 2, 3) reaching a climactic culmination in the fourth member, D, from which there is an anti-climactic recession through the same or repetition of the same or similar elements in the reverse order, D, C, B, A, or 4, 3, 2, 1. The author has succeeded in making an unbelievably large amount of Bible material fit this model structure without the usual necessity of stretching it to make his thesis hold good. Perusal of his work fixes the inexpugnable conclusion that this strange arrangement is not fortuitous and that a very large portion of the whole of the Bible was cast in the mold of this diagram or variants of it! Indeed as one finishes his work one stands pretty close to the persuasion that form was almost the primary consideration of the Bible writers and content secondary. There seems to have been a greater concern with the poetic mechanics of the writing than with the message or meaning. There is indeed something bordering on a suggestion of an eerie element in all this, as if the purpose of scriptural writing was to impart a conception of structure as an integral element in the total message, or as a cryptic haunting of a cosmogonic design behind the flowing content. Students have labored and claimed to uncover such woven-in patterns in the plays of Shakespeare.

We are challenged to adduce some theory as to the significance of this remarkable formation. It seems obvious that it is an attempt to introduce what the Hindus call "mantric force," a power of suggestion much like, but greater than, that of rhyme and meter in poetry, into the recital of verses chanting the import of cosmic creation and the life movement. If it was possible to sing of creation in the identical analogue and symbolic lines of that creation, a magically powerful psychological efficacy might be superinduced upon the mind.

Now the ancients conceived of divine spirit as descending into matter through three and one half kingdoms (see the number three and a half in the exact middle chapters, 11 and 12, in the Book of Revelation), reaching its nadir of full manifest expression in the middle of the fourth (the Gospels’ "fourth watch in the night"), and then returning with its fruits of experience to its celestial home through the same three kingdoms, in reverse order. From top down these three and one half kingdoms might be denominated the Nirvanic, Atmic, Buddhic and Intellectual (in Hindu nomenclature), or perhaps Super-Spiritual, Spiritual, Intuitional and Mental. The outward or downward progress of spirit through these three and a half states of consciousness was the emanation of soul into matter or embodiment of which all the ancient scriptures speak. It was the Greek "descent of the soul." At the same time the life in the still inchoate atom began an evolution from below upward, and it, too, progressed onward through three and one half kingdoms of nature, the mineral, vegetable, animal, and the animal-human, landing in the middle of the fourth or human, where it met and conjoined its physical energies with the unit of divine potency that had come down from above. Here at a common meeting place the two forces, spirit and matter, pressing ahead in opposite directions but toward each other, combine in what the old scriptures universally denominate a marriage, from which is to come the progenation of the next surge or cycle of ongoing life. It is at this meeting point of spirit and matter, soul and its body, that all meaning and all experience-value are localized. Soul descends half way from the summit of being and matter and rises half way from the bottom, and the two meet at the only place their energies can be synchronized and eventually harmonized, which is just exactly at the middle point in the seven levels of the gamut of being. For man the meeting point is right in his body and brain.

The sudden discovery that the divine or divine-human authorship of the ancient scriptures laid an emphasis heretofore never dreamed of upon literary form-structure must cause a drastic revision in the standards of appraisal, evaluation, appreciation and interpretation. The Old and New Testaments alike will stand in a totally new character, aureoled in a brilliant and beautiful glow of something that is more than mere meaning, something that is indeed the apotheosization of meaning.

The ancient sages, it now seems clear, worked in the glow of a great inner light. They were indeed called "Illuminati." It required no small genius to create voluminous scriptures and great dramatic recitals in which the scheme of cosmic truth was inwoven into constructions which themselves were molded in the form of creational procedure. This attempt to synchronize the consciousness of man, the microcosm, with the lilt and tempo of the macrocosmic movement, has dropped totally out of human ken for two thousand years. 

The Greek envisagement of catharsis holds deeper intimations of prime value for the modern world than anyone has yet seen. The drama was designed to throw the individual man’s mind into the sweep, the swing, the stride and the roll--the feel of the movement--of cosmos, and thus induce repercussions that would sift out the dross of unworthiness and accentuate the elements of rich veritude in the personal life. Beneath the superficial consciousness wrapt up with the concerns of ordinary existence in each mortal there slumbers the unawakened energy of a divine nature. To cause this dormant virgin energy to awake and exert its powers there is needed the impact or incidence of a vibration that for it is analogous to the vibration of the rising warmth and sun of spring to the latent energies in seed, plant or tree. And this magical efficacy was known and operated by the ancients. It was produced and effectuated by the combined elements of movement, music and meaning in a masterly blending. It was in brief the rational meaning of the universe set to the movement of the universe. It reached inner depths of mind and psyche and there bestirred into conscious activity the slumbering powers of man’s latent divinity. The dance in the Mysteries repeated the rhythmic pulse of creation and the chorus accompanying it duplicated the "music of the spheres." And this composed the mighty choral dance, the bewitching song of the divine enchanter, designed by adept wisdom from the foundation of humanity to keep the race in memory of its lost divine birthright. It is the kiss of Eros that awakens the sleeping Psyche to her new life. The Dance of John's Salome (John's Evening)  leading to John crossing/''beheading'' into his new life The continual reproduction of this sanctifying and purifying influence for the cultural refinement of humanity throughout its history was the pristine motive and function of all religion. In most religions it has been obscured, lost, corrupted, smothered. The cultural salvation of the race may depend upon the quick recovery of this essential instrumentality for revivifying the "dead" divine spirit in the whole world.

We have noted Burton Scott Easton’s rejection of "the mount" as a geographical localization. He displays forthright sense and courage in going further and declaring that as an actual discourse the Sermon on the Mount was never delivered at all, and that "the mount" is mere rhetorical or theological decoration; even in the Sayings it may have been--as in Matthew it certainly is--a Christian counterpart of Sinai. Such an utterance is indeed a notable step in the direction of sane exegesis. But the plaudits that spring forth to greet it are somewhat tempered by the thought that it is still a long way from this recognition to the understanding that both Mount Sinai and the Mounts of the Temptation, of the Sermon, of Transfiguration and of Crucifixion are all in the ultimate rendering just this good earth, no less.

Further refreshing candor as to the obvious non-historicity of much in the Gospels is displayed by Easton. The final verdict as to the authenticity of the miracles, he writes, must on the whole be a non liquet. We do not know that special miraculous forces were at work or that they were not. We can hardly think that Jesus would have expected to find figs on a tree in March, nor that he would think it sane to curse the poor plant because it did not violate the due order of nature. We must doubt the story of the fish that despite the stater in its mouth could still take a hook. We can not be expected to take literally the tale of a star standing over a house. 

And he asks if we are to class the writers of Daniel, Enoch and II Peter as outright dishonest men. Oddly enough the answer to such a query can not be given until our whole view of ancient writing has been reoriented in the direction of understanding the methods of esoteric motive. When that orientation has been made it will be found that the question need not be answered, because the question itself will not need to be asked. The "pseud-" in the pseudepigraphs can be dropped when it is esoterically understood. From the exoteric or historical standpoint nearly all cryptographic writing is "pseudo." But this is only because it is supposed to be something--history--that it was never intended to be. The only false thing in the situation is the judgment that mistakes it for history.

Another rather remarkable confession is made by Easton when he says that as a matter of fact many of the second and third century Christian rites have long defied explanation. No one knows, he avers, why oil was poured into the baptismal water, or why a candle or a staff of olive wood was dipped into it. It can be said, however, that these two ceremonial transactions are not only known, but are among the easiest and clearest of symbolic riddles. Water was the universal type of the lower natural man or animal, carnal nature; fire was the equally general emblem of the higher or spiritual nature; the introduction of fire into a moist material, to dry it and set it on fire, was the broad symbolic dramatization of the transforming power of spirit upon the carnal nature of the first Adam, man unregenerate. As the natural man, he is baptized with water; as the spiritual man he undergoes the higher baptism of fire (intellect or spirit) precisely as John declares. Oil, as the fuel for fire, carries the connotation that went with it. So the pouring of oil into baptismal water typified the injection of fire of mind and spirit into the baser, "moister" part of man’s nature, to transform and light it up. It certainly does not detract from the force of the symbology that when oil is introduced into water it floats on the surface. To dip a candle--the agent of fire again--or a staff of olive wood (either itself inflammable or the tree from which oil--olive--is produced) into the water would indicate in slightly variant form the same basic process.

On the question of chronology he advises it is needless for us to waste time; whether Jesus was executed on the Passover or the eve of the Passover we shall never know. One account gives the date as the 14th of the Hebrew month Nisan, the other account puts it on the 15th. Here again it is symbolism that holds the key to the answer, since the 14 was determined by lunar typology and the 15 by solar. The full moon of a symbolical lunar month falls on the fourteenth day, and of a solar month on the fifteenth. History has nothing to do with it.

Taking Jesus’ statement that if they destroyed this temple he would raise it up again in three days, John, says Easton, explains it as pure allegory.

There are several expressions and statements in the New Testament that have always baffled comprehension or at best offered only a semi-rational meaning, because they were taken literally. One such is the designation "the poor," as used in the two passages: "The poor ye have always with you," and "the poor have the Gospel preached unto them." Literal rendering of the word "poor" (in the economic sense) makes the received meaning of these two passages ridiculous. Especially is this the case in the one which rates the preaching of the Gospel as a compensatory balance against the misfortune of being (economically) poor! In the opinion of many, if the "poor" had to listen to the Sabbath droning from the average pulpit, they might be understood if they regarded it as an added hardship and no blessing or comfort. Obviously the term here refers to the spiritually as yet unregenerate, the undivinized mortal, the first or natural man. He shall be called John, but he is to become a Zechariah They doubtless shall be with us to the end of the aeon; and they in time shall have the consolation of having the Gospel (not the sheer material of the Bible books, but the essence of the divine tidings from deity to man on earth) preached unto them, until they pass from the poverty of ignorance to the richness of the kingdom’s spiritual treasures.

Then there is the matter of Jesus’ proclaiming himself as Messiah and as King. There are many angles to this line and it is difficult to handle as an argument. But again it is as clear as a case as many another in revealing that what is silly if taken literally and historically resolves back into the highest rationality when taken in deeper meaning. Indeed it does this in unusually striking fashion.

Easton and other writers are at pains to show that Jesus was crucified on the charge of claiming to be king and Messiah. The Sanhedrin judged the declaration by Jesus as to his kingship strictly according to Jewish law. A claim to be a prophet was, if proven false, a capital offense; a claim to be Messiah was a crime of blacker stain; but a claim to be the celestial Messiah, to sit on God’s right hand, was a blasphemy beyond pardon. That Jesus made claims to be both king and Messiah is supported by appropriate texts cited and by inferences from his acts and statements. Easton says that this brings us face to face with the basic question of all: Jesus’ claim to be not only Messiah, but celestial Messiah, Messiah in the most exalted sense, the heavenly and cosmic Son of Man. And he thinks that Jesus used the term "Son of Man" in its fullest apocalyptic force. As far as such claims constituted criminality, Jesus was guilty of both violating religious law and, in the eyes of his fellows, blaspheming God.

Warschauer represents Jesus as wrestling with his own spirit and intelligence to determine whether he should be a political king of the nations or exercise his kingship only in the silent motivations of the human heart. He represents this as the deeper inner meaning of "the temptation." Blind credulity prompts unthinkable devotees to assume that in actual history the carpenter had but to forget his divine mission and say "yes" to an actual Satan’s proposition and the throne of the Caesars would have been his. Whether as God or man, the imputation to him (as an actual person) of such a chimerical thought as a serious consideration makes of him a hallucinated dolt. The whole situation can be seen in its flaming preposterousness only when the true sense of the "temptation" is brought to light. Of course when the soul migrates to earth from celestial mansions, there is before it the choice of throwing all its interests and energies into the delights of sense, the acquisition of riches and the things of this world, or of rising above these to the rulership of the things of the heart, mind and spirit, in remembrance of the covenant and its divine mission. Satan is man’s lower animal sense nature, and of course this Satan offers the higher Ego the riches of the world and its kingdom of enjoyment. But see what egregious travesty this all becomes when the soul is historicized and carnalized!

He was charged with proclaiming himself king and the title "King of the Jews" was on the cross above his martyred head. This title or phrase has been the culprit in misleading all theology along a false trail into the wilderness of error. The phrase never had a historical reference, to begin with. The "Jews" in it were in no sense the historical racial group. In the Mystery ritual the Christos personage was announced and designated as the king, in the spiritual sense, of course, of those mortals who had adopted the nature and mind of the Christ and had become the divinized and the elect. To denominate this grade of perfected men a term derived from Egypt and its Mysteries was employed. It is the same term that the Hebrews early in their history adopted and appropriated to themselves, as Gesenius tells us in his Hebrew Grammar, "in token of their descent from an illustrious ancestry." The "illustrious ancestry" were none other than the graduates or adepts of the highest rank in the Mystery discipline, or in fact the divinized humans. The Hebrews at an early date simply took to themselves the exalted and illustrious title of the class of men who had risen to shining divinity. The Egyptians called them the short name that was the first element in the name of their Christ Messiah character for thousands of years. This great name was Iu-em-hetep. Iu in Egyptian is ‘the Coming One," or "He who comes," meaning the power that comes as our divinity. The highest adepts in the Mystery ranks then were called the "Iu’s." They were those in whom the Christ had come. In Latin the "Iu" form shifted to "Ju," as seen in the name of the Romans’ King of the Gods, Ju-piter. The Hebrews took to themselves this exalted name and called themselves the Jus, which became in English spelling later, Jews. The Jesus character in the various Mysteries had for centuries borne the title of King of the Ius, or Jus, with never the most remote historical reference attaching to its meaning. But when the historization of the drama took place, the Messiah figure had to be saddled with the claim that he was King of the Jewish nation.

As has been noted earlier, the odd thing about millennial advent theory is that its visionary and enraptured anticipators have declared in every century since at least the tenth that the particular century then in course exhibited those precise signs of the times, mentioned in the Bible, that indicated the approach of the crack of doom. This indeed shows the whole concept to be emotional fol-de-rol, with cap and bells. Yet Jesus himself is written down as having announced it would come before his generation had passed away! And so it turns out that the only-begotten Son of Omniscient Deity committed a blunder in historical judgment that no ordinarily intelligent person would make at any time. For nineteen hundred years have elapsed and the Savior’s prediction is still unfulfilled. His miscalculation has put his apologetic followers who write books about him to no end of exertion in casuistry to "explain" his error. There is sorely needed a comprehensive survey of the entire theme of Messiahship in religion. It will be undertaken in the last chapters. Unless he is speaking about the generation of Pisces

Ch 17

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.

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.

Ch 18

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.

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.

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?

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.

Ch 19

It is of immense significance that the name "Sibyl," which has earlier been discussed, is given by Higgins as probably meaning "cycle of the sun." Ancient wisdom, or ancient mythologies proclivity, or both in co-operation, conspired to allot to each cycle its presiding genius, its Christos, conceived as a ray of the solar divine fire of intelligence. But it assigned also to each cycle its female guardian, its prophetess or "Sibyl." Higgins states that we have the prophecies of eight of these Sibyls, which indicates that eight of the cycles had passed. In the first century one was still awaited. This would seem to harmonize fully with the tradition extant in Roman history as to the visit of the aged Sibyl to King Tarquin with nine of her books containing the forecast of future Roman history; going off and burning three upon his refusal to buy them; coming back and offering the remaining six for the same price asked for the nine; burning three more; and finally receiving her original price for the remaining three. The prophecies of the Cumaean Sibyl were quoted by many of the earliest Christian Fathers from Justin and Clemens to Augustine, as credible authority for the belief in the coming of the Christ on whom the Christian faith was based. Clemens of Alexandria quotes these words from St. Paul in Latin: "Take the Greek books, learn as to the Sibyl, how she foretells one God and those things which are future." St. Austin says that the Sibyl, Orpheus and Homer all spoke truly of God and of his Son. (Sir John Floyer, On the Sibyls, p. IX.)

Dr. Lardner admits that the old Fathers call the Sibyls prophetesses in the strictest sense of the word. The Sibyls were known as such to Plato, Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, Plutarch, Pausanius, Cicero, Varro, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal and Pliny. But what can they have foretold?--Higgins asks. And he answers: the same as Isaiah, as Enoch, as Zoroaster, as the Vedas, as the Irish Druid from Bocchara and as the Sibyl of Virgil,--"a renewed cycle of its hero or divine incarnation, its presiding genius." We can perhaps locate the aeonial construction of the Sibylline theory in the fact stated by Higgins that all the purveyors of the tradition admit of ten ages, which, each six hundred years long, constitute the "great Age" of six thousand years. Yet, he says, they do not agree as to the time when the ages commence; some making them begin with the creation, some with the flood; but the Erythraean Sibyl is the only one who correctly states them to begin from Adam.

The most important part of these Sibylline oracles, says Higgins, is a very celebrated collection of verses in the eighth book of the prophecy of the Erythraean Sibyl, which in its first words forms the acrostic in the Greek language: Iesous Chreistos Theou Uios Soter Stauros; or, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior, Cross, the initial letters of which (in Greek) without the last "S" spell the Greek word Ichthys, or "Fish," the zodiacal designation of the Christian Jesus in the Hellenic world all through the first centuries. The Christians in Italy and elsewhere in the early centuries were called by the pagans Pisciculi, or "Little Fishes," and both Tertullian and Augustine refer to Christ in the world as the Great Fish in the sea.

Tertullian carries out this symbolism in a notable sentence (De Bapt., c. 1):

"We little fishes, according to our ICHTHUS, Jesus Christ, are born in water, nor have we safety in any other way. . . ."

A succinct statement of the general belief in the cyclical order of Messianic return is made by Higgins (Anac., p. 200):

"It was the belief that some great personage would appear in every cycle, as the Sibylline verses prove; but it was evidently impossible to make the birth of great men coincide with the birth of the cycle. But when it was desirable to found power upon the belief that a living person was the hero of the cycle, it was natural to expect that the attempt should have been made, as was the case with the verses of Virgil and others. This great personage is, according to Mr. Parkhurst, the type of a future savior."

Mention has been made of the ancient Avataric theory as embracing ten cycles of six hundred years each, making a "great cycle" of six thousand years, presumably heralding the millennium in the seventh thousand. This--if such was the scheme--would simply represent the six Genesis "Days" (cycles) of active physical world-building, followed by the Sabbath (seventh) Day, consummating the work of creation with the flowering out of divine genius in the highest creature, man, in the seventh aeon. Each period was roughly equated with the "house of a thousand years" already mentioned. The "ten horns" of the Beast would be the ten sub-periods of six hundred years each. About the time of Jesus it was believed that nine of the ten sub-cycles had passed, and world-wide expectation was set to await the coming of the tenth and climactic aeon of the great cycle. We may have here one of the answers to the oft-propounded questions: Why, if there was no historical Jesus, did the whole great movement of Christianity start at that time? There must have been a living personage at that time to give the initial impetus to so great a sweep toward a new religious formulation as took shape in Christianity. Christian writers on Jesus all emphasize the universal deep-seated expectation of Messiah prevalent then. The religious atmosphere was electrically charged with this fervent looking and longing for the aeonial consummation, with its proclaimed advent of the Savior, exoterically believed to be about to descend into the flesh. It will surely come as a shock to many Christians, with minds fed on the all-convincing claims of the Church, to learn that the expectation of Messiah’s arrival was so deep and general that various groups of sectarians in and out of the Christian circle, looking around to locate the true Avatar in the person of some great one, actually picked on more than one prospective candidate. Among those thus marked for Messianic characterization were Apollonius of Tyana, Marcion, Montanus, Simon Magus and Arion, much as Plato and Pythagoras had been considered divine births five and six hundred years before. This probably by no means exhausts the list. And that Marcion and Montanus were chosen for the honor several hundred years after the life of the Jesus figure indicates beyond cavil that there had been no consensus of certitude as to the birth and Messiahship of the man of Galilee. Those who picked later candidates assuredly could not have been convinced that the Christ had come definitely and surely in the man Jesus in the first century.

Higgins cites old works, among them one entitled Tavanibr’s and Bermei’s Travels (Vol. II, p. 106) as speaking of the ancient belief that the second Person of the Trinity had incarnated nine times.

"The Gentiles do hold that the second Person of the Trinity was incarnated nine times, and that because of divers necessities of the world, from which he hath delivered it; but the eighth incarnation is the most notable; for they hold that the world, being enslaved under the power of the giants, it was redeemed by the second Person, incarnated and born of a Virgin at midnight, the angels singing in the air and the heavens pouring down a shower of flowers all that night."

He then goes on to say that incarnated God was wounded in the side by a giant, in consequence of which he was called "the wounded in the side," and that a tenth incarnation is yet to come. He then relates a story that the third Person of the Trinity appeared in the form of fire.

But it is not risking much likelihood of error to assert that there is a startling clue to a very definite delineation of the cycle-graph in this image construction that has never hitherto been analyzed or interpreted with the true key. The image of a man from head to foot, composed of a series of elements running in order of fineness and preciousness from gold at the summit to iron and clay at the feet, is conclusively a typing of the composite nature of man, who from his head of gold (spirit) to his feet of miry clay (matter) is a four-ply creature, constituted of spirit (gold), mind (silver), emotion (brass) and sense-body (iron and clay combined), in the allegorical depiction. Higgins is indeed partly vindicated in his judgment of these four element-divisions as time cycles, by a mass of legendary data to be found in the opening chapters of all ancient histories or world cosmographs. It is there said that ancient "poetic" tradition spoke of the reign in the earliest racial dawn of an Age of Innocence when mankind was childlike and knew no evil; and this is called the Golden Age. It was followed by the age of Silver, when life grew a little less halcyon. As man came to adulthood his childlike simplicity and naïveté was replaced by sterner qualities in the Age of Brass. And when finally consciousness had descended fully into the hard realism of earthly embodiment, came the Age of Iron, when the feet of the former angel race were enmired in the heavy clay of sense and body. All the books of the ancient wisdom say that this full course of the descent of the soul into earthly body was consummated in three and a half cycles from angel to man, while also the evolution of the body itself from mineral to human fineness requisite to house the descending spirit was achieved in a similar three and a half cycles or kingdoms. Downward as soul, or upward from the clod as body, man stands exactly where his two constituent elements of god and animal have met and conjoined their powers in the middle of the fourth kingdom counted either way. And this being the background of the imagery in Daniel’s mind, what could be more true and astonishing than that the fourth kingdom should be represented by the half-and-half valence of two symbols, iron and clay? For it is precisely at the point of three and a half stages, kingdoms or cycles from start that life, measured either as soul from above or as body from below, breaks into a twofold balance or fission into two countervailing elements, each of which is the summation of three and a half cycles. Conceived diagrammatically, this would again yield the chiastic structure outlined in an earlier place. Daniel’s grand metal image is therefore a quite true symbolical graph of man’s evolutionary development to his status as a being of three and a half kingdoms or modes of conscious life on both the spiritual and the animal sides of his nature.

On the side of the natural or animal man we have here the basis of a correct interpretation for the first time of one of the pivotal numerical symbolisms in scripture,--the three days in the tomb. "Days" here indubitably refers to cycles, as in Genesis. The text of key significance in the Bible is the verse which reads: "As Jonas was three days in the belly of the whale, so must the Son of Man be three days and nights in the bowels of the earth." The plain meaning is that the unevolved germ of spiritual consciousness must, like a seed, be implanted in matter and evolve through the three lower physical kingdoms, the mineral, vegetable and animal, until in the middle of the fourth or human kingdom it blossoms out to full function and fruition in the organic brain of man.

This clarification also prepares the way at last for the epochal pronouncement that three is not after all the correct number! Three is a blind or cover for the true number, which is or should be three and a half! Evidence for this will be found in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of Revelation, where the number three and a half occurs three times, though it is presented in such cryptic fashion that its true import has been missed. Animal man evolving from sea water rises to full development at the end of three and one half cycles, where it meets soul descending through a corresponding series of three and a half kingdoms of ethereal essence. The body evolving from below thus gives soul its incarnation and divides the area of consciousness with it, sharing its own sense and emotion life with the other’s mental and spiritual powers. Material is not at hand to verify the estimate, but it must be found a curious circumstance, hardly pure coincidence, that Higgins, who gave all such matters life-long consideration, and who did not know of the diagrammatic significance of the three and a half as it has just been analyzed, sets the length of the ministry of the Gospel Jesus at precisely three and a half years. As the estimates of the thousands of scholars who have studied the Bible through the centuries vary from one to three years or more, Higgins’ guess is as good as any.

The important outcome, however, of all this is that the weight of such considerations presses heavily toward the conclusion that the length of the "ministry" of the Jesus figure is wholly numerological allegorism, and has nothing to do with the facts of an alleged biography. Many assign to it one year. This is "the acceptable year of the Lord," or the cycle of astronomical events in the annual round of the solar year, which become the apt symbols of the events in the whole circuit of human evolution. Then there is the three-year assignment, which is the looser use of three instead of three and a half. The true symbolic period of the interrelated and reciprocal ministry of soul to flesh and flesh to soul (as Browning so well notes) is three and a half "years" or "days." As the two chapters in Revelation also so clearly bring out, the meaning behind the number 1260, given there twice, is that it is the number of days in forty-two months (also mentioned twice), or three and one half years. Daniel gives the same number, but for some reason as yet unfathomed he gives also the numbers 1290 and 1335 in the last verses of his book. Whether some zealous scribe deliberately altered the number 1260 to the other figures to throw the exoteric mind off the scent is only to be guessed. The full number of days in three and a half years would be 1278. The computation in Revelation that yields 1260 counts thirty days to the month. Just as is the case with the dates of Easter and Christmas, the fact that definite numerical (or historically factual) figures are not given indicates mathematical or astronomical symbolism. The "history" is discredited at every turn.

Higgins calls attention to the noticeable item that comes to light in the study of ancient cycles, that there were always two classes of Avatars running at the same time. Yet, he explains, though there are two, they are after all but one. This was because the Avatars were identical with the cycles, and the two cycles, united, formed a third. He does not clarify this last, but possibly means that the cycle gains a wholly new understanding when it is seen that the Avatar (as a divine "messenger") is the gist, as it were, of the time cycle. The time period is the Avatar in one sense; the Messenger (or more properly the Message) is the Avatar in another sense; and the two combined yield the complete meaning of the term. If he means that two cycles of six hundred years each unite in length and form a third cycle of twelve hundred years, the meaning may be thus simplified. Naturally the multiples of smaller cycles would form greater cycles. He does not seem to imply that the "third" cycle is composed of the ten presiding geniuses or Neroses, and the ten presiding geniuses of the signs of the zodiac. The Neroses and signs revolve over and over and cross each other, so that finally at the end of the ten signs they conclude at the same time after a period of 21,600 years; thus founding the great cycle. Or if the period be doubled, we have a larger cycle of 43,200 years, which, taken ten times, gives the still greater cycle of Brahm, of 432,000 years.

The word "mundus" (Lat. "the world") itself was used to refer to a cycle, Higgins claims. He traces the name of Cyrus’ mother, Mundane, to the combination of "Mundus" and "Anna" (a year), meaning "the year’s cycle" or circle of the year, "Cyrus" means the sun! Cyrus = Sirius?

But the central word in this connection is the Greek aion, "aeon" or "age." The mistranslation of this word in the phrase teleuten aion in the Bible as "the end of this world," instead of "the end of the cycle" has been productive of more mental havoc and psychological suffering on the part of millions of misguided dupes than perhaps any other crude bungling of rendition in all the scriptures. To be sure, the final conclusion of great cycles that run over millions of years may fall synchronously with the extinction of life on our planet. But this falls quite outside the pale of any meanings commonly given to religious interpretation. Many cults have used the phrase--"end of the world"--to justify their wild millennial and eschatological expectations. They took it literally to mean the incidence of the great final cataclysm. But any interpretation which envisages the possibility of a planetary crisis within less than several millions of years must be regarded a farrago of childish nonsense.

A remark dropped by Higgins may be very helpful in solving one of the everlasting perplexities of Old Testament meaning: the great ages of the Biblical "patriarchs." Says Higgins: "The age and its hero personage have been confounded"! Here is the most likely solution of the great conundrum of Methuselah’s nine hundred and sixty-nine years. Not the man, but the age which bore his name, reached the extended limit.

The ninth age was to bring a blessed infant whose coming would restore the beatific Age of God that went out when Paradise was lost. The age, not the child, was to live six hundred years. The coming of this infant was the nub of the expectant faith of the Oriental world for many centuries. Moreover he was to be the ninth (or tenth) great Avatar and close out one of the greater cycles of six thousand years. Nations vied with one another in claiming him as the product of their religion and their national life. He was to be of the lineage of their exalted royal house. Every sect of religionists following the millenary system believed itself to be the favorite of God. Therefore of course its people believed that the Avatar would appear among them. They were therefore ready to catch at any extraordinary person as the great one sent to be the desire of all nations. Thus, says Higgins, we have several ninth and several tenth Avatars running at the same time in different places. Bishop Horsley, he says, could not help seeing the truth that the Fourth Eclogue of Virgil referred to the child to whom the kings of the Magi came to offer presents. He adds the detail that Scipio Africanus, Buddha, Arion, Hercules, were pointed to in many places as the child of Virgil’s prophecy. He adduces the fact--if it is such--that Augustus, Solomon and others who bore Messianic reputations were strangely enough all of a ten-months pregnancy,--to fulfill, one assumes, the tenth Messianic numerical status. Also Alexander, as well as several Hindu Sages, as Salivahana and Gautama, bore the mantle of divine birthhood, being said to have been produced by a serpent entwining around their mothers. As a symbol of divine wisdom, the immaculate conception through a serpent’s impregnation of the mother could well have been one of the forms of allegorical depiction in archaic usage. The Naga or Serpent was a universal symbol of all evolution, and the cycles of seven-period evolution did make the Universal Mother--Nature--pregnant and fruitful.

That there was much credence in the Avataric cycles in the early Church itself is evident from many things. For instance Theodoret is confused about the Christos, stating that sometimes he is regarded as a spirit, and sometimes that he had a virgin for a mother, while again it is written that he was born as other men. And others claim, he says, that the Christ in Jesus reincarnates again and again and goes into other bodies, and at each birth appears differently. Hippolytus, writing of "heretical" beliefs, says Christ is held to be the son of Sophia (Wisdom) above, that he was the male potency of God when the Heavenly Man descending, separated into the two poles of being, spirit and body, and that the Holy Ghost is the female power.

Mead includes the "Holy Spirit" as one of the names of the Mother Sophia. Also "She of the Left Hand" as opposed to the Christos, "Him of the Right Hand." The Christian creed, which speaks of the Son, who sitteth on the right hand of God, is thus using Gnostic terminology and imagery. And both Gnostics and orthodox Christians were using imagery drawn from long anterior systems. It would be interesting to enlarge upon the Gnostic schematism or systemology which outlined the creations in the microcosmic and macrocosmic phases, and set the elements of the universe in proper relation in the great plan. The purpose of the whole of Life’s creational energization of the universe was to evolve mind to perfection. The emanation and evolution of the World-Mind in cosmogenesis, and of the human mind in anthropogenesis, is the main interest of the secret and sacred science of old. Midway between the upper worlds of spirit and the lower worlds of material constitution, Sophia, Wisdom, has been dwelling. There between the Ogdoad, or Eight Great Powers of Light above, and the Hebdomad, or Seven Spheres of psychic and material substance below, she fashioned her house, and there she mediates between the two worlds of being. In Proverbs (9:1) we have the statement of this in remarkably direct form: "Wisdom hath builded her house; she hath hewn out her seven pillars." For she projects from above the Types or Ideas of the Divine Mind into the cosmos, stamping them by her power upon the plastic substance of the matter below. But a long disquisition sets forth how she attempted of herself, without the informing power of the First God, to give form to the creation, and failed. This is called the Great Abortion, the effort, so to say, of matter, without the aid of formative Mind, to stamp logical form upon the material universe. Lost and wandering in chaos, then, she is represented as being rescued by Divine Love, or the Christ Aeon, Is his true wife his soul, which wandered into formative essence only to become a human and thus place the soul itself in peril? Is this the hidden meaning of the Sleeping Beauty allegory - that the one we rescue, is our own other half? which, like the Christ of the Gospels who healed the abortion of the woman with the issue of blood through the power flowing into her from her touch with his garments, stopped her fruitless wastage of life-blood and made her fruitful for the production of the Sons of Mind. This sounds like Sekhmet Thus was her abortion stopped and she became the fecund mother of the Mind-born creation. So productive indeed did she become that she was named by a name opprobrious among men, but descriptive purely of her endless and teeming fecundity--the Great Harlot. Mead lists other of her names: Man-Woman, Prouneikos or the Lustful One, the Matrix, the Genetrix, Paradise, Eden, Achamoth, the Virgin, Barbelo, the Daughter of Light, Ennoea, the Lost or Wandering Sheep, Helena and many more.

The "abortion" spoken of by the Gnostics is in many respects just another representative version of the virgin birth. It depicts the effort of pure matter to produce the creation, as it was expressed, "without a syzygy" or pair of opposites. Nature, the eternal Mother, had to be fecundated by the germ of Mind, projected from the male aeon. The Holy Ghost, the power of the highest, had to come upon her, to end her abortive virginity and make her the Mother of the Worlds.

A variant of the virgin birth typology that emphasizes the abortive aspect by means of the additional feature of life-long barrenness, is found in the stories of at least four women in the Bible, Sarah, Hannah, Machir and Elizabeth, who in their old age are made to bring forth the divine child. The import of this allegorism is of course that Mother Nature only succeeds in finally producing her child-product, the Christ consciousness, far along in her creational effort, near the end of her cycle, or in her "old age." She could not give birth to the Christ-child until six long aeons of physical effort had at last brought the creation of the brain of man, in which such a specialized ray of Mind could function. The birth of the Savior-consciousness in any cycle would come in the seventh or last round of the period, therefore in the old age of the mother-nature forces. Elizabeth was the mother of John the Baptist, disqualifying Jesus as a stand-alone savior-type.

Massey has well analyzed the virgin motherhood and what lay behind it. Of Isis he says she was the virgin mother who produced a purely natural and hence spiritually abortive or inferior type of creation, "without the fatherhood," but who regenerates or gives new birth to the "dead" Osirian powers of Mind, buried hopelessly in her material womb, until she is fructified by the later copulation with the Christ aeon, or Holy Ghost. Nephthys had to ''help her''. The key here is that the abortive issue was not one of mortal inability of manifestation, but rather of creating the essence of holy spirit within that matter. This is the threat to the newborn seen in the Moses, Jesus and Horus epics

There is the story of Salivahana, a divine child, born of a virgin in Ceylon, which shows such close affinity to that of Jesus that it would be hard to deny a common source for both. He was the son of Tarshaca, a carpenter. His life was attempted in infancy by a tyrant who afterwards was killed by him. Most of the other circumstances, with slight variations, are the same as those told of Krishna. Western scholars have been too blind to the obvious inferences from such identities in comparative religion. Bali, Semiramis, or Eros, Buddha and Cristna had long before the "time" of Jesus suffered crucifixion in like fashion as narrated of him. Moreover Salivahana was again a ninth Avatar. The affirmation was made that the tenth Avatar would come in the form of a white horse. The White Horse symbology aligns with Sagittarius  and Aries - the first rider. The Hindu Bala Rama, says Higgins, is another cycle of Neros, or Cristna of the Ram sign. Rama was to Cristna what John was to Christ. Rama, he asserts, was known by the names of Menu and Noah. He also points to the striking similarity between Noah and Janus, the Roman god of opening doors, and says their virtual identity has been admitted by every writer upon these subjects. In the Tibetan language, he says, John is called Argiun (Ar-John), and was the coadjutor of Christna. It seems evident that these two are the Tibetan counterparts of the great epic characters in the Mahabarata, Arjuna and Krishna, whose names are not very far in sound and spelling from John and Christ! And the related characters occupy exactly the same or corresponding positions, forerunner or lower way-opener, and following Lord. Seker was the opener of ways. John's father was the named Zechariah. John embodies Aires while Jesus follows as Pisces, just as the Age of Pisces follows the Age of Aries. Even the so-named Fish-Avatar of Vishnu in Berosus’ account of the Chaldean Genesis, Ioannes (Joannes), avers Higgins, was blended with the ninth Avatar. Jesus is called a Fish by Augustine, who says he found the purity of Jesus Christ in the word "fish," "for he is a fish that lives in the midst of the waters." Both Jonah and Hercules were swallowed up by the sign of the Fishes, at the very same place, Joppa, and for the same period of three days. Swallowed up meaning overshadowed, as happens to an Age when it cedes to the next. Look at what has happened to Taurus-Baal (Dupuis, Histoire de Tous Les Cultes, pp. 335, 541.) The sun was called Jona, as appears from Gruter’s inscriptions, says Higgins. Augustine also writes that "Ichthys" (Greek: "Fish") "is a mystical name of Christ, because he descended alive into the depths of this mortal life, as unto the abyss of waters." Water comes from hydrogen (abundant in space: the sun is nearly all hydrogen) co-mingling with oxygen (rarely found in space, but abundant in the earth's atmosphere). Lundy (Monumental Christianity) says the early Christians drew a fish on the sand as a Lodge sign.

Ch 20

It is worth the space to quote the great Virgilian aeonial prophecy in Eclogue IV, as it is the chief prototype doubtless of all the Sibylline and other pagan predictions of Messiah.

"The last era of Cumaean song is now arrived, and the grand series of ages begins afresh. Now the Virgin Astraea returns and the reign of Saturn recommences. Now a new progeny descends from the celestial realms. Do thou, chaste Lucina, smile propitious to the infant Boy, who will bring to a close the present Age of Iron and introduce throughout the whole world the Age of Gold. . . . He shall share the life of Gods and shall see heroes mingled in society with Gods, himself be seen by them and all the peaceful world. . . . Then shall the herds no longer dread the huge lion, the serpent also shall die; and the poison’s deceptive plant shall perish. Come, O dear child of the Gods, great descendant of Jupiter! . . . the time is near. See, the world is shaken with its globe saluting thee! The earth, the regions of the sea, and the heavens sublime."

This was called the Sibylline prophecy about the coming of Christ, lauded and extolled by the Christians until it became safe and polite to denounce everything pagan. In the aura of Virgilian heroics, however, the prophecy was dressed up to indicate Augustus as the scion of the Gods and to hint at the divine origin of the Roman nation. The legend would probably be in the background of Italian world politics today.

Irenaeus and the first Christian Fathers said that during this new Age of Gold the lion should lie down with the lamb, and the grapes were to cry out to the faithful to come and eat them!

Beside the Caesars, Cyrus the Great of Persia was one of those monarchs who was heralded as the aeonial child and the tenth Avatar. But nothing in all Biblical interpretation is more doltishly fatuous than the reading of the name of this earthly sovereign into the Greek word Kurios (Eng. Cyrius), meaning "Lord." It is generally equivalent to Christos itself, and is often used with it, as in "Lord Christ" or "Christ the Lord." It is often a generic term for God himself. Take the Greek suffix ios off the pre-Greek root and one arrives at Kur: Dog. Likewise, phonetically part of the term Seker. No wonder Cyrus sounds so close to the Dog Star (Sirius) To take it anywhere as referring to Cyrus of Persia in the historic sense is obviously an unwarranted translation. It often renders the meaning of its passage nonsensical.

At the time of Richard the First, Higgins sets forth, about 1189--the end of a cycle of twelve hundred years, or two Neroses, approaching--a general belief prevailed that the end of the world drew near, a belief which, in a great measure, caused the Crusades to Palestine, where the devotees expected the Savior to appear. This is attested by St. Bernard of Clairvaux and was forecast by Joachim, abbot of Curacio in Calabria, a most renowned interpreter of prophecy in those days. Antichrist was to appear at Antioch, and the Crusade was the gathering together of the kings of the earth to the battle of the great day of God Almighty. (Rev. 16:12, 14; Nimrod, III, p. 393.) It appears from the accounts that the possession of Antioch was made a great point, almost as much as that of Jerusalem. It was among the first cities taken by the Crusaders.

It is surprising enough to most Christians to be informed that the ancient theory of Messianic cycles had anything to do with the timing of the Crusades and indeed their motivating purpose. It will doubtless come as an even greater surprise to be informed that those within and outside the Church who held to the cyclical program of Messiahs regarded Mohammed as the Avatar of the six-hundred-year-cycle running from six hundred to twelve hundred A.D., and the tenth Avatar of the ancient Great Cycle. Higgins says that Mohammed was accredited as the Avatar succeeding Jesus, and that he was expressly foretold by Haggai, the Prophet, under the Hebrew name of H M D. Of this prophecy, says Higgins, Parkhurst (Christian apologist) was an unwilling witness. The Crusaders flocked into Jerusalem in twelve hundred, the end of the Mohammed cycle, which, he affirms, began in the year six hundred and eight, and cites Faber as authority for this date. According to Higgins Mohammedans have made the claim that a passage has been expunged from the Romish Gospels which ran as follows:

"And when Jesus, the Son of Mary, said, O children of Israel, verily I am the apostle of God sent unto you, confirming the law which was delivered before me, and bringing good tidings of an apostle who shall come after me, and whose name shall be AHMED."

This is cited as the burden of the Haggaian prophecy.

It appears that this Joachim, abbot of Curacio and renowned interpreter of prophecy, had published a book called Evangelium Eternum (The Everlasting Gospel), in which, presumptively, he had set forth the theory of Avataric cyclical reincarnation, and declared another Messiah due in the year twelve hundred, end of another Neros cycle. This work, which circulated throughout the European Church and stirred a great ferment, was never censured or suppressed by any act of the Pope, but only the introduction to it was placed under the ban. John of Parma preferred the Gospel of Joachim above the canonical Gospels.

Higgins tells us that a Rev. Dr. Maclaine said the the Evangelium Eternum consisted, as productions of that nature generally do, of ambiguous predictions and intricate riddles. This, says Higgins, is what we might expect. After it had been published some time and had received the greatest support possible from the Popes and all the orders of monks, the Franciscan fanatic Gerhard published a work called an Introduction to this Gospel, in which he censured the vices of the Church of Rome and in set terms prophesied, or deduced from the Evangelium Eternum, the destruction of the Roman See. This appeared in the year twelve hundred and fifty, close upon the last period to which the millennium could be delayed, viz., twelve hundred and sixty A.D. (Here obviously the numerology of another than the Neros cycle came into play. This was the cycle of twelve hundred and sixty years, based on the three and a half years, or twelve hundred and sixty "days," taken from the eleventh and twelfth chapters of Revelation, as before noted. The days were now figured as years, following the method as prescribed in Exodus, where the forty years in the wilderness were expressed in the formula "forty days, for every day a year.") As the fateful and climactic moment of the end of the year twelve hundred and sixty approached, the passions of the different orders of monks were excited to the greatest pitch and tension. Gerhard’s book was burned and its author persecuted, though his followers among the Franciscans claim for him the gift of prophecy and place him among the saints. The followers of St. Francis generally--the strong supporters of the new Gospel--and Gerhard maintained that he, St. Francis, who was the angel mentioned in Revelation XIV:6, had promulgated to the world the true and everlasting Gospel of God: that the Gospel of Christ was to be abrogated in the year twelve hundred and sixty, and was to give place to this new and everlasting Gospel, which was to be substituted in its room: and that the ministers of this great reformation were to be humble and barefoot friars, destitute of all worldly emoluments. This was stripping off the veil and showing the meaning of the eternal Gospel without disguise. It excited the most lively feelings of surprise, of hope, or of indignation, according as it met favor or disfavor from the opinions of the different fanatical partisans. The Pope did not, according to the usual plan, burn the author; the book only was burned, and its author mildly censured and banished to his house in the country. This took place in the year twelve hundred fifty-five when the parties, expectant of the millennium, must have been in the highest state of fear and anxiety, suggests Higgins.

The year twelve hundred and sixty arrived and passed away; but, mirable dictu, the sun did not cease to give its light, the moon and the stars did not fall from heaven; nothing in particular happened; the pious fools stared at one another and impious rogues chuckled. The Popes and Cardinals at Rome, half fools (Higgins), and the dupes everywhere else, finding themselves all in the wrong, soon began to charge folly upon one another; and as they had quarreled before as to who should display the most zeal for the new glad tidings, they now began to quarrel about who should bear the blame, each shuffling the odium on to some other. Dr. Maclaine and Mosheim have clearly established the great--and Higgins ventures to add, almost universal--reception of the Evangelium Eternum. After some time, the fanatics having by degrees ceased to preach, and the Pope to support, the new Gospel, the old Gospels recovered their credit and vogue, and the friends and promulgators of the new Gospel died away, or were burned as they came to be considered heretics. The court of Rome endeavored to guard against whatever might arise.

It seems certain that the increase in the monastic orders about the fifth and sixth centuries and again in the late eleventh and twelfth, arose from the expectation of the millennial denouement.

The aftermath of the twelfth century hallucination is interesting. After the expectation of the extraordinary manifestations had died away and the power of the Saracens seemed to increase, the Popes, says Higgins, became more than ever embittered against the Mohammedans and equally furious against all who supported anything relating to the now obsolescent Gnostic or cyclic doctrines of millennial expectation. The church realized that it was selling fraud, and that Islam is a faction of that same fraud. This accounts, says Higgins, in a very satisfactory manner for the zeal of the Popes up to a certain time for the new Gospel, and their bitterness afterwards towards the Templars and Albigenses, among whom some remnants of these superstitions remained. The ecclesiastical hierarchy in the Church had had a severe lesson in the resurgent sweep of erratic esotericism, projected or prolonged from ancient pagan sources into its own history, and became cool to all things savoring of the Messianic idea ever since. And again it is the prerogative of this study to announce that the egregious predicament of error came simply because an ancient allegorical structure clothed in astronomical typology was misread in a literal and objective sense instead of a spiritual one. It would certainly seem within our warrant to say that a hypothesis which can be supported and illustrated by such positive evidences direct from world history must be regarded as solidly established.

There is now to be considered, following a look at the cycle of Neros, that other still greater period known as the Phoenix cycle. This possesses elements very germane to the entire theory of Messiah, and yields most interesting data and correlations. Lundy (Mon. Chris., p. 422) says that when Herodotus was in Egypt he was told that the Phoenix was a bird of great rarity, only coming there once in five hundred years, when it dies and another arises from its ashes. It is reported to be like the eagle and of a red and golden plumage. But Herodotus never saw one, except in pictures. Then there is Pliny, who says:

"It surpasses all other birds; but I do not know if it be fable that there is only one in the whole world and that seldom seen. . . . It is sacred to the sun; lives six hundred and sixty years; when old it dies in its aromatic nest (frankincense and myrrh) and produces a worm out of which the young phoenix arises; and it carries its nest to the altar of the temple at Heliopolis in Egypt. The revolution of the year corresponds to the life of this bird, in which the seasons and stars return to their first places." (Bk. X; 2.)

And Tacitus says "that the opinions vary as to the number of the years, the most common one being this, that it is five hundred years, though some make it 1461 years." (Annals, VI:28.)

Lundy directly asserts that no such bird as the Phoenix ever existed; that it was only one of the constellations in the old Egyptian zodiac. It had been identified by the laborious researches of Mr. R. S. Poole, as the bird of Osiris, or Osir, so often invoked by the souls in Hades for their deliverance, as the Book of the Dead shows us. The Phoenix is elsewhere the Bennu (Benno), the Swan of the Greeks, the Eagle of the Romans, and, he adds, the Peacock of the Hindus, as the symbol of ever-renewing immortality in the heavens. In the Egyptian constellation of the Phoenix or Bennu, the dog-star Sothis (Sirius) was the most conspicuous, the brightest star in the whole heaven, even brighter than the sun by three hundred times, and greater in bulk by two thousand times, according to Proctor, though from its great distance it does not appear so. When this Dog-Star marked the summer solstice, it was the period of the new year, i.e., the great year or cycle of 1461 years, when the stars and planets return to the same position. Also it was then, or about the time of the summer solstice, that the Nile began to rise, which is the very life of Egypt. This Phoenix cycle of 1461 years was discovered not long since on the ceiling of the Memnonium at Thebes, and was identified there as the Bennu or Osir of Osiris. It signified, like the great Sothiac and other lesser periods and cycles, the beginning and the ending of all things, or the end of one cycle to be followed by the birth of another. Mr. Poole says (Horae Aegyptiacae, p. 35):

"Sothis, the Dog-star, was considered as sacred to both powers of nature, Osiris with Isis as the Good Power, and Typhon as the Evil Power; since at the time of its rising they were considered as conflicting; for the Nile then begins to show the first symptoms of rising, and at the same time the great heat was parching up the cultivated soil."

The Bennu, Nycticorax or Phoenix, was then the sign of the constellation in which the Dog-star rose to mark a new era and a new year together; just as when the star or conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation of the Fishes marked the advent of Christ. "There can be no doubt," continues Mr. Poole, "that the Bennu is the Phoenix, or the constellation partly or wholly corresponding with the Cygnus, and perhaps also with the Aquila." the Eagle and the Swan = the Raven and the Dove? (Horae Aegyp., p. 42.) "And the period of its appearance was ascertained and its manifestation was celebrated on the first day of Thoth, the beginning of the Egyptian year." (Ibid., p. 46-7.) "This constellation was one of the principal festivals of the Egyptians. It took place at the summer solstice when the Nile began to rise." Sirius rises heliacally with the Sun on the Summer Solstice - the day of the Sun/Son in all it's/his glory, falling on the Cancer-Leo cusp

Nearly a century before either Mr. Wilkinson or Mr. Poole wrote of the Phoenix and its cycle, concludes Lundy, the great French astronomer Mr. Bailly thus spoke of it:

"It is impossible to doubt that the Phoenix is the emblem of a solar revolution, which revives in the moment it expires. If any one question the truth of this, he will find the proof of it in those authors who assign to the Phoenix a life of 1461 years, i.e., the time of the Sothis period, or of a revolution of a great solar year of the Egyptians." (Hist. of Astr., 214.) The Alpha and the Omega. 1461 days equals 4 years and a day: every fourth year is a leap year, meaning a day must be added to the calendar. What the Sothic year enigma reveals, is that the ancients were aware of the leap year necessity. This extra day was undoubtedly attributed to Osiris.

Fourteen hundred and sixty and a fraction years is the period of time in which the calendar would correct itself if leap year’s extra day each four years was omitted, or, as it was put, the stars would return to their first places according to months.

Higgins states that the six hundred or six hundred and eight years is the period between two conjunctions of the sun and moon. He does not indicate how this is to be understood, as there are solar eclipses by the moon oftener than six hundred years and at irregular intervals. He says that the Phoenix was a portion of the universal principle of Divine Love, or Eros, which eternally moved over the waters (the inchoate matter of space) and which in the form of a dove was incarnated every six hundred or six hundred and eight years. Eros was the Greek Phanes, one of the deific hierarchy, so luminously analyzed in Proclus’ great dissertation on the theology of Plato. The similarity between Phanes and Phoenix must be an evidence of common origin of both names. Bennu is likewise of cognate derivation. Higgins gives us more of the hypothetical description of the bird. It was the bird of the morning Sakhar, he says, and also the bird of Paradise; its dwelling was in the East at the gate of heaven, in the land of spring and in the forest of the sun, in a plain of unalloyed delights lying twelve cubits higher than the highest mountains. Phoenix was also a tree; and upon the highest convexity or umbo of Achilles’ shield stood a palm or Phoenix tree. (Nimrod, III, p. 395.) Another name for palm tree is Tamar, which is the name of one of the Old Testament mothers of divine sons. Then there was the tamarand, tamarack or tamarisk, one of the sacred trees of Egypt. Grethenbach tells us that one equivalent of tamarisk is Asar in the Egyptian. The cycle is complete when we reflect that Asar is the original name of Osiris.

Naturally the great astronomical cycle of 1461 years would not be overlooked by symbologists seeking cyclical periodicities in the stellar revolutions. It was therefore made the date of the end and new beginning of the Avataric cycle. The fact that it was set at five hundred years, at six hundred and sixty and finally at fourteen hundred and sixty-one makes its reference to the lifetime of a "bird"--of which there was but one in existence at a time!--quite fabulous. Massey, with considerable chance of being correct, traces the word "Phoenix" to p-h-ankh, the Egyptian combination meaning "the joining for life," or in a living relation (of male and female life-powers, or spirit and matter), which took place at the end or beginning of such a cycle, symbolically. Nature achieved each new cycle of on-going life through the union of her two polarized opposite energies, so that the union of male and female potencies periodically would typify the beginning of a new birth or a new era. Ankh means "life-tie" in Egyptian. The word Sphinx Massey derives from this p-h-ankh with the "s" of causative or initiative action prefixed,--s-p-h-ank. The Sphinx would be the universal power of nature which causes male and female forces to unite for the reproduction of a new generation of life. It is the human in front and female animal behind.

Further mention must be made of the Nile inundation, which the Egyptians wove into the annual succession of stellar phases. One must read Massey’s Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World, to gain any adequate conception of the remarkable harmony and coincidence of the water stages of the great river with the star movements and positions throughout the year. It is a source of never-ending wonder that earthly phenomena and heavenly economy work together with such articulation and appropriateness. Or it is a testimony to the shrewd mythicizing instinct of ancient sages that they named a star in Virgo constellation, for instance, Vindemeatrix, the grape-gatherer, a star which rose when the grapes were ripened. And this is made to stand for the Virgin who rises on the world, as matter in evolution, to bring forth in the mature season the fruit of the vine, from which the wine of divine spiritual intoxication will be available to raise men, symbolically, in ecstasy to the gods! Thus did the Christs and the Horuses and the Krishnas and Bacchuses come as winebibbers, or to turn "water" of the natural life into "wine" of spiritual consciousness. Only through this transformation of lower element into the symbol of the higher mind could man’s ability to partake freely of his divine fruitage be aptly portrayed.

Egyptian analogical--and anagogical--genius traced the correspondence in physical nature between the cosmological data on which the structure of their heaven-taught theology was based and the yearly phenomena of the overflow of their mighty river. It may seem to us a mere poetization to assume that the rising of the fresh waters of the river in the growing heat of summer could be an interpretation by nature, or her fulfillment, of the great religious conception of the coming of the divine life to mankind. Yet the rising waters, bringing coolness and renewed fertility to the land, were the coming of the "savior" in every practical sense. The waters began to rise in the lowlands of northern Egypt in June. The Egyptian name of the June month was Mesore. Massey traces this name to Mes-Hor. Mes is the root of the word Messiah, as we have seen, and means "to be born." Hor is "Horus," free of its Latin "us" masculine termination. So Mesore is "the re-born Horus." June was the month Dazu in the Assyrian calendar, and it was the month of Tammuz in the Aramaic calendar. Horus, says Massey, was the great Father deity Tum, reborn, like the beetle, as his own renewal, or his own son. So the name of the month was Tum-mes, which worked over into Tammuz, and which became the later Thomas of the Bible! The spiritual water of life was reborn under the symbolism of the physical waters that came to revive a land parched to death with solar heat. All through the period of July and August the waters swelled to bless and fructify the land; and they stood at their highest even level at the very time of the autumn equinox. Then they began to fall and went to their lowest at the time of the death of the solar deity in the winter solstice.

As the moon was the type of the material mother bringing the solar god to his birth once a month symbolically in the new moon and to his perfection in the full moon glory, the full moon typified the coming of divinity in its fullness in humanity. The full moon must be seen to yield the full glory of the Father’s light on the body of the mother-matter. Translated, this stands as type of the mightiest of all truths for man,--that the light of the Father or spiritual Mind, long buried in the bosom of mother matter, at last comes to its birth with the full release of its shining power, in the body composed of the elements of the natural world, its mother. So is Isis the Moon, or is Nephthys? Osiris slept with Nephthys by accident. Is Osiris Jupiter? This revelation of divinity in the world of nature is the birth of God as his own Son, or himself in a new birth. If it had ever been once known that the lunar phenomena carried to the ancient mind all this splendid typology, ` the ancient scriptures could have been read with fine appreciation of their luminous meaning. So both Horus and Khunsu, a cognate deity in the same character, were placed in the disk of the full moon in the zodiac at Denderah, when the moon was at its full in the sign of Pisces, the house of bread, or, in Hebrew, Bethlehem! As the night symbolized incarnation, when the light of spirit was submerged in the darkness of matter, the child in the full moon was the type of the divine solar light, hidden and buried, yet shining in and through matter, as the light of the world by night, or the light of the spirit shining even in the darkness of fleshly embodiment. Now, when the Nile deluge began with the sun in the sign of the beetle or crab, and in the month of Tammuz or Mesore, the moon rose at full in the sign of the Sea-Goat (Capricorn), and the divine child was therefore born of the full moon at the winder solstice.

An interesting sidelight is thrown on all this when it is known that the Akkadian name of the June month is Su-Kul-Na, "seizer of seed," to explain which we must go back to the sign of the beetle set above by the Egyptians, and consider the fact that the beetle (symbol of the God Kheper, the Creator) began to roll up his seed in a ball of earth at that time to preserve it from the rising flood. This is only a portion of the story, and the list of correspondences between the astrological data and the river’s stations is quite astonishing. Modern scholastic religion professes vast contempt, impatience and irritation over this business of ancient fancy-work, and protests that if religion has to rest upon such idle speculation and "superstition," it must remain childishly inconsequential. Not so with the ancients, and not so with any modern that will live with these symbols long enough to catch the terrific power of their suggestiveness and their educational lucidity. The endless correspondences between cosmic truth and the very nature of the living world were of old, and can be today, the positive demonstrations of the ubiquitous presence of deific principle in every natural phenomenon. Surely the high truths of a divine wisdom would stand doubly accredited in the human mind if their principles were found to be matched and corroborated in the actual world outside man. The ancient thinkers lived close to nature and watched her processes; the moderns have cut the link between man and nature.

Most definite, perhaps, of all the cycles was that of the precession of the equinoxes, the period of 2160 years during which the sun at the vernal equinox continues to fall in one of the twelve zodiacal signs, or passes through one-twelfth of its entire circuit that is completed in about 25,900 years. It will be found that the symbolic implications of this cycle, with the sun’s successive occupancy of each of the twelve signs, constitute nothing less than the most recondite of keys to a large segment of all scriptural exegesis. It can be unfolded here in the merest outline.

With the Neros, the Phoenix, the 1260 and the 1461 cycles denoted, the road is open to pursue the astronomical basis of the Messianic theory to still farther reaches. These will be discerned through the instrumentality of the intimations of the features of the grand cycle of equinoctial precession. It is here that will be found the full and final purport of the great tradition, or more at any rate of its particular detail. That it was wholly an astronomically based periodicity, to serve, however, as the analogue for the greatest of all meanings in spiritual evolution, there can be little doubt when the evidence has been examined.

It seems incomprehensible that a thing as large and significant as that which is now to be disclosed could have been lost out of general knowledge and so far consigned to oblivion that its restoration will be greeted with opposition and scorn in those quarters where its loss has wrought the direst mischief. Sixteen centuries of mental beguilement of the most atrocious character is a pretty dear price to pay for the suppression of the school of astronomical allegorism in the make-up of the scriptures which still hold sway over communal acceptances. The item thus heralded with so much unction is the method employed by the sagacious formulators of the religious typologies in representing the successive cyclical incarnations or "comings" of the Messiah under the name and character of the twelve signs of the zodiac in turn.

So evidently did astronomical and astrological presuppositions underlie theological doctrinism that the very name and function of the Avatar "coming" in each precessional period of 2160 years was assigned to him in reference to the zodiacal sign. He bore the designation and was vested with the characteristic qualities of the sign. As the Messiahs were incarnations "of the sun," the "personality" of the incarnated power was assumed to embody and manifest during the cycle those special differentiations of universal deity which were severally the distinguishing characteristics of the signs themselves, or that one of the twelve aspects of completed deific nature which each sign was figured to express. Ancient astrology assigned to each of the twelve signs, and indeed to each decanate of a sign, a particular ray of influence, as one might say, each one had its proper color, tone, virtue, radiation or vibration. Hence, being the presiding genius of the sign, its expressive revelator, it must needs bear its name and number and manifest under every phase of its typical character. Hence the Messianic personage changed his name and the whole scheme of portraiture under which he was represented at the beginning of each new period of precessional advance. And not only were the distinctive sign characteristics attributed to him, but the seasonal types and the monthly traits in the annual solar round were wrought into his "life and history." With nature, he died in the autumn, was quickened at the winter solstice, and rose again "from the dead" at the vernal passing over the boundary line between heaven and earth. At one season he was the ingloriously defeated victim of his "enemies" and persecutors; at another he strode forth in triumph over all his foes. A hundred minor characterizations are germane to his office and mission, as well as to his essential nature, at the different stations in the yearly cycle. Only in the large is it possible to trace these many aspects of his astrological representation.

A large portion of the confusion that has crept into the exegetical problem has arisen from the fact that a number of designations and picturizations of Messiah in the many past cycles have survived and overlapped, and so have introduced complexity through the very abundance and variety of descriptive data of the Savior. It proved hard to absorb and assort twelve whole sets of divine characterizations in the person of deity in manifestation, when it was long forgotten that deity was given a twelvefold catalogue of changing attributes, in accordance with the phenomena of precession. We have here, then, a new-old formula which should enable us to introduce great clarification into a situation wherein miscomprehension has so long prevailed.

It must further be prefaced that every one of the twelve signs is a dual or double representation of its particular facet of divinity. Every sign is said to be "double." This is accounted for by the consideration that the sages endeavored to portray the divine nature as expressing itself in both its positive and negative phases in conflict or interplay in each day of manifestation. Indeed it is so in actuality. Manifestation can come only through the tension of forces set in between the positive and the negative ends of life’s polarity. Also it was the intent to present each aspect of deity indicated by the sign in its two opposite phases of dying and being reborn which each annual circulation of the sun was made to portray. Such phases of opposition or reversal always fell just six months apart at stations directly opposite each other on the zodiacal chart. John and Jesus

When the two forces of life are not polarized in relation to each other, life is not in manifestation. We shall see, then, how each sign presents the Messianic character and epic in the dual aspects suggested by its name and distinctive features.

Following Massey, a beginning can be made--for no particular reason--at the station of Leo in the zodiac. Under this sign, in which the vernal equinox fell some fourteen thousand years ago, the Savior manifested in his twin aspects in the character of what the Egyptians called "the Lion of the Double Force," or the twin lions, the old and dying lion, adult of the previous generation or cycle, and the reborn young lion, the "lion’s whelp" of the Old Testament. They were also called the two Cherubim, and the word "cherubim" derives from the Egyptian name of the two lion figures, which was Kherufu. These two lions were represented as guarding, the one the western and the other the eastern gates of life at the two equinoctial points of September and March. On its visit to earth the soul, in the Egyptian Ritual, cries, "I come that I may see the processes of Maat [the Goddess of Truth] and the lion-forms." The Hebrew so far carried original Egyptian typism over into their own constructions as to denominate the divine Avatar as "the lion of Judah," or "the lion of the house of Judah,"--the title still retained by the monarchs of Ethiopia. The Old Testament references to the lion and the lion’s whelp attest the continued use of the symbol over a long period. What the soul means by saying it comes to earth to see the "processes of Maat" is that its life in the flesh will bring under its conscious experience and scrutiny the concrete manifestations of Truth in living situations. Here it will see Truth in actual operation, coming to light in the acts and fates of men. Also in seeing the two "lion-forms" it will gain cognizance of the reality of its own selfhood under the two aspects or phases through which its experience in every cycle of descent and return, its death and resurrection, takes it. It will come to know itself as in the one phase, represented by its image standing at the gate of the western equinox of September, the dying old one of the past generation; and in the other phase, represented by the image or Kherub standing at the eastern gate of March, as itself reborn out of its own "death" into its youth of the new generation. It is the fruit of one cycle of growth going to its death in the autumn, and the germ springing forth out of that fruit to inaugurate the new cycle in the following spring. Maat is commonly known to Egyptologists merely as the Goddess of Truth or Justice. She is that, but in a very comprehensive sense. She is really the Goddess of the balanced relation between the cosmic forces of spirit and matter, wheresoever manifested, and her prerogative is to mete out the justice that is invoked by the disturbance of the just balance between the two eternal forces. All the issues of life are determined by the soul’s adeptness in maintaining that due balance, which alone is the condition of life’s orderly evolution. Maat is "Lord of the Balance," and each soul, as it rises to mastery of the elements of life, becomes its own "Goddess Maat" and must maintain its control of the even balance. It comes to earth time and again to become ever more expert in the science of maintaining the balance, or manifesting truth and righteousness. As the soul is the embryonic Christ, the Messiah coming in its Leonine phase was dramatized as the Lion of the Double Force, or as the lions of the two horizons, east and west.

As the precession moves apparently backwards, the next sign is Cancer. This is the sign of the Crab, but more anciently of the Beetle. Under its nomenclature the Coming One was designated as the Good Scarabaeus. He was dual in the two aspects of the old beetle dying as he went into the ground along the Nile’s edge, and the young beetle reborn, like the Phoenix, out of its parent’s death. It would be difficult to find a symbol or phenomenon in nature more faithfully matching the ideology of the incarnational "death" and the following resurrection of the soul in its periodical shuttling between heaven and earth, than the living economy of the beetle. It makes a perfect analogue with the experience of the Ego, which "dies" and is reborn with each embodiment in matter on earth. The crab offers a cognate symbolism, as it spends its life alternating constantly between the elements of water--companion symbol with earth for matter--and air. Its frequent climbing up out of the water onto the land is a type of the soul’s rising out of the lower material realm into the light and air of intellectual and spiritual being.

The beetle was the emblematic key to one of the greatest of all theological conceptions of ancient cosmology or creation, and the lost answer to the greatest of all religious controversies that ensued in the early Christian Church, one which eventually divided the Church into Roman and Greek Catholic factions. This was the Arian-Athanasian controversy and the so-called "filioque dispute." This was over the question whether the third person of the Trinity was produced from the Father alone or from the Father "and from the Son,"--"filioque" in Latin. Had not Egyptian allegorism been held in scorn and contempt and already forgotten, the beetle symbolism held the answer for the disputants all the time. For the Egyptians declared that the beetle or scarabaeus produced its young through the Father alone, without union with the female. This was simply a nature-type of the great cosmic fact of the Divine Mind, or the Father, projecting from his own intellectual being those children of his thought creation which became the mind-born Sons of God. They are born of mind alone, not of mind and matter in conjunction. The beetle presented a type of this unilinear begetting in its life habit.

The ass, another Biblical zootype closely associated with the Christ, is found in this house.

Next comes Gemini and its dual aspecting is readily seen in the Twins. Here the name is simply the Two Brothers or the Twin Brothers. These figure in many Biblical and ancient scriptural allegories, such as the Tale of Kamuas, the stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, and Pharez and Zarah, Tamar’s twins; but more definitely in the Egyptian Sut-Horus and the Persian Ormazd-Ahriman pairs. The Romulus-Remus legend of Rome’s founding is a variant of it. The two brothers are pictured as in direct opposition to each other, as they battle for alternate victory and suffer alternate defeat in their successive and never-ending conflict in the sphere of manifestation. As spirit descends under the power of sluggish matter the material brother, or power of darkness, is hailed as victor; when spirit overcomes the flesh to put all things under its feet, hell is vanquished and the Christ is triumphant. The one brother can be taken as the spiritual aspect of life, the other as the material, and the two are ever in combat during a cycle of manifestation. As the one increases the other must decrease, and most remarkably this is precisely what John the Baptist declares to be the case as touching him and the Christ. The names of two mythical brothers in a Roman classic fable, Castor and Pollux, have been given to the two twin-stars in the constellation of Gemini. Astronomically it is said that one of them is decreasing in magnitude, the other increasing.

Passing to Taurus, we have the Egyptian typing of the Messiah, Iusa, the second Atum, as born of Hathor, the "cow-goddess" in the sign of the Bull. According to Massey this period ran from 6465 B.C. to 4310 B.C. Under bovine typology the Messiah was born in the stable, and the Greek Hercules, also a Christos figure, had to clean the filth of the animal nature out of the Augean stables. in the tropic of Capricorn Duality is shown by his turning the streams of two rivers into the stables, meaning of course the streams of spirit on the one side and matter on the other, carrying for us the instructive moral that the lower nature is purified by the admixture of soul and sense in our lives. Again in dual character the Christos under Taurian symbolism was the adult bull of the past generation, dying to be reborn as his own son, the golden calf of Old Testament figurism. In the Assyrian version he became the winged bull so commonly found in the temples and architecture of that land. Candidates for initiation in the cult of Mithraism were baptized in the dripping blood of a slain bull. It was called the taurobolium or bull-bath. The initiated man was thus "washed in the blood of the Bull." The much-condemned worship of the Golden Calf in the alleged backslidings of the children of Israel into idolatry was no more reprehensible or an offense against the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob than the later adoration of Christos under the signature of the Lamb of God. So far as can be seen the only sin in the matter was their holding on to the emblem of the previous cycle after a new cycle with its changed figure had dawned. It was in no sense, even if historically true, a bald worship of the physical image of a Golden Calf, instead of the spiritual being of Deity. Any nation that had been esteemed worthy to be chosen by Almighty God as his favorite human group, yet proved to be so weak as to turn from the worship of the spiritual Lord of the worlds and bow down to a metal calf as the embodiment of an actual divine power preferable to God, must be thought a freakish genus of humanity indeed. It would have been as unaccountable and bizarre an occurrence as, for instance, it would be for a modern nation of high intelligence to give up suddenly its trust in moral and natural law and turn to expect better providence from ivory elephants or bronze dachshunds. And the children of Israel, overwhelmed time and again with the signal evidences of their God’s miraculous preservation of them, yet turned from his worship to bow down to the Golden Calf of Baal not only once, but as often as one turns the pages in Exodus and following books. And yet learned theological pundits descant on this assumed historical occurrence with undisguised gravity.

Following Taurus comes Aries. As Taurus had extended from 4310 B.C. to 2155 B.C., Aries began at the latter date and ran to about 155 B.C., close to the time of the Christian Messiah. This is indeed a notable datum, as it alone would account for the almost equal use of Arian and Piscean symbology in connection with Jesus in the Gospels. The old forms and symbols of Aries had not had time to be discarded and replaced by those of Pisces, the next sign, and were kept along with the new ones adopted from Pisces just coming in. For Jesus was introduced as Aries was going out and the sun entering Pisces. John the Baptist was not the ''natural man'' or ''first Adam'' - he was the manifestation of the Christos of the previous age. His parents were elder, and assimilated to Osiris (Ptah-Seker-Osiris = Zechariah) and Isis (El ISA Beth). He was the personification of the Christ in Aries, who later became the Christ in Pisces. 

As Aries was the sign of the Ram, the adult dying phase was balanced by the renewed youthful phase in the Lamb of God. Here is found the warrant for the angelic announcement of the Avatar’s advent to a company of "shepherds" in the fields; the parables of the Good Shepherd and the sheepfold; Jesus’ figurative title of the Shepherd of Souls (and the Church "pastor"); the shepherd’s crook as an ecclesiastical symbol; and the congregational "flock." The sacrificial lamb on the altar was again an emblem of the immolation or oblation of God-life for man. When an age ends, does it fall like the soul falls into flesh? "Other sheep I have" would be a sentence put into the mouth of the Messiah figure in a Mystery-drama when the typing was molded on Arian lines. Likewise such an utterance as "I am the door of the sheepfold" and "The sheep know me when they hear my voice" would have this astrological origin.

Pisces follows Aries and blends its sign-types with those of Aries in Christian allegorism. It is the true sign of the Galilean Savior, and this dramatic character lived up to its proper emblemism with full fidelity. Tertullian and Augustine and other early Fathers exalted Jesus as the Great Fish in the mortal sea and designated his followers as "little fishes." The Christians dubbed themselves Pisciculi, the Latin for "little fishes." The Greeks named the Piscean Avatar Ichthys, the Greek for "fish"! We have noticed the famous sentence whose initial letters spelled Ichthus. The twelve "disciples" were "fishermen." The gold for the taxes was found in the fish’s mouth and the last miracle was the overwhelming draught of fish. The Roman catacombs were replete with images of the two fishes everywhere with the Christ figure. One of the two typical articles of divine food with which the Messiah fed the multitude was fish, and fish was also constellated in the heavens as a type of divine sustenance. Jesus offered himself as sacrifice for humanity not only as the lamb led to the slaughter, but also as fish to be eaten along with bread for mortal salvation. Man cannot live on bread alone Duality is seen in the two fishes of the sign. Pisces is the plural form, as Piscis would be the singular.

The roll of the cycle brings us now to Aquarius, into which sign the new age or dispensation is entering about the present time. But where are the hierophants of old who watched the time-table of the cycles and were alert to introduce the new typology and hail the new-born Avatar and adorn him with his new panoply of characterization? Alas! for the first time in world history there are no Magi, no Council of Sages, no Demi-gods to change the nomenclature and salute the incoming Genius of the Cycle with his proper figuration. Nor is there a populace reverent or intelligent enough to do aught save jeer at it if it were announced.

Pisces was the "house of bread" as well as of fish, and this in Hebrew reads "Bethlehem." As being just six signs distant from and therefore directly opposite Virgo, in which the first or natural man was born, Pisces was the inevitable symbolic birth-place of the Christ or divine man.

Aquarius is the Waterman, pouring out the ichor of divinity from his urn in two streams, again representing the division of the life-stream into spirit and matter, both equally beneficent. Nu is the watery fount of primordial origins, elemental source, and holds the waters of the abyss. From it emanates that water which is to generate life for all the universes, as the sea water generates life on our planet. Aquarius is the only man in the zodiac of animal signs; so in man the two streams of living water flow together to purify the nature for the generation of the Christ consciousness. Jesus proclaimed himself as the bringer of that water of life which all men must drink to be immortalized.

Capricorn, beginning at the winter solstice, is the Sea-goat. Matter’s most consistent symbol in the ancient type-language is water. Spiritual consciousness is most deeply buried in matter at the point in evolution symbolized by the winter solstice. But as the Sea-goat is an animal mythically combining the forefront of a land animal with the body and tail of a sea creature, the representation is that of man, who is a god immersed in a body composed of combined earthly and watery elements, though seven-eighths water. "Capricorn" means "goat-horn," and the horn was an emblem of intellect and spirit, probably as growing from the head. Christ is described as "the horn of our salvation." But also he is, as sacrifice for mortals, the "Scape-Goat" of ancient dramatism. His death for man spells tragedy, which, oddly enough, in Greek means "goat song."

Sagittarius yields duality in the half-man, half-horse constitution of the Archer. Man is a god in the body of an animal, according to the pronouncement of ancient philosophy which must be seen to be the key to the meaning of this Centaur figure of Sagittarius. He is the Bowman drawing his bow. What is he aiming at? The answer to this has been found in only one place in archaic literature. A verse from the Book of the Dead in the mouth of Shu, a high spiritual God, says: "I am the lion-god, who cometh forth with a bow; what I have shot at is the Eye of Horus." Coming in the late autumn with shortening days and waning sun-power, the shooting out of the Eye of Horus, great Egyptian symbol of divine sight, was a typing of spirit’s loss of intellectual and intuitive spiritual vision as it descended into the darkness of material embodiment. So here the God Shu is figured as the mighty hunter, a title carried by Orion, Nimrod, Hercules, and other deific characters in the mythic annals.

The same autumnal loss of divine genius, but under a quite different allegorical guise, is portrayed in Scorpio. Instead of the loss of his spiritual eye, the deity, plunging into matter and coming under its spell of inertia, here is typed as suffering the scorpion sting of matter’s inhibitions, represented as poisoning the divine soul and throwing it into a lethal sleep or "death." It is not the god himself who is personated by the scorpion, but the power which the god must overcome and transmute into the agent of his own resurrection on the other side of the zodiac. Or it may be thought of as the beneficent influence that inducts spirit from above into the lower realms where its victory over material opposition will exalt it to higher status through the regeneration of powers sown in weakness and raised in strength. An intimation of this is shown in a singular statement in the Egyptian texts otherwise incomprehensible, that Serkh, the Scorpion goddess "stings on behalf of gods and men." This is a clear assertion, badly needed in general understanding, that the "sting" of incarnation, the temporary submersion of spiritual powers "under the law" of flesh and sense, is wholly salutary and beneficent for the purposes of evolution. For eventually the risen Christ in the heart imparts to all his followers as they grow to spiritual adulthood the power "to tread on serpents and scorpions." Students of astrology are well aware that the sign was represented by the eagle in very remote times. As the eagle above and the stinging poisonous insect below, it is again dual. Indeed it is possible to see in this double aspecting the basis of the Phoenix myth, the bird as the one phase and the worm which is to renew its dying life as the other. Job says that he shall die in his nest and renew his life like the eagle. Christ is the swift eagle, renewing himself periodically from the worm.

Standing on the great "horizon" line that divides spirit from matter, and so indicating the point of equilibration between the two evolutionary forces is Libra, the Scales of the Balance. Duality is seen here in the two, positive and negative, scales of the balance. This is one of the most philosophically instructive of all the signs, as it connotes one of the greatest of all principles of human understanding of the basic meaning of all life in the flesh. The great truth carried by the sign is that while in the body man is standing directly on a horizon line separating the two kingdoms of life, spirit and matter; that he lives in both regions, heaven and earth, at the same time; and that consequently his whole experience is an ordeal of "being weighed in the Balance." The mighty significance of this fact is that it is the substance of the doctrine of the Judgment, which is thus incontrovertibly demonstrated to take place on earth during the life in body, and not in heaven after death! One of the greatest of theological discernments is thus brought to light after centuries of groping error in the misconception of a great cardinal doctrine. The Messiah’s title under this symbolism was "Lord of the Balance" in Egypt. He was addressed as "thou who weighest all souls in the Balance." Human history might well be made to run in happier courses if it was general knowledge that souls are being weighed in the Balance of the Judgment here on earth.

It was practically inevitable that a sign denoting matter should stand in immediate juxtaposition to Libra, and facing it across the boundary line. This is Virgo, Mother Nature, matter in its primordial "virgin" state. It is an "earth sign"! This "virginity" of primal matter is shown by the position of the sign in the (symbolic) zodiac, which is just above the border line between spirit and matter, still, so to say, in the heavenly or spiritual world and not yet substantialized or concretized into physical substance, but preparing to become the mother of the forms of creation that would eventually bring the body of man as the birth-house of the Christos. The Christ of this sign is of course not the Virgin, but her Son. He is in the sign in his Mother’s arms. Just under her feet is the head of the great serpent, Hydra, whose elongated body stretches across seven signs of the zodiac below the horizon line, with open jaws ready to devour the Christ-child if she should let him fall. Two great truths are adumbrated by this relationship. The first is that the Christ principle in its incarnational experience must pass through a cycle of seven stages in the realms of matter, figured as the devouring serpent which swallows the eggs of the bird of spirit. The second is meaningful in reference to the Genesis promise that the heel of the woman and her seed (the Christ) should bruise the head of the serpent. The Christly power to tread on serpents and scorpions is immediately cognate also. The ancient zodiacs and planispheres placed the universal Mother, Eve, where she could crush the serpent with her heel.

In Virgo is the constellation cluster called the Grapes. Rising in the autumn as the sign emerges above the horizon, this signalizes the coming of the Christos into the flesh and suggests the potent meaning that he will give mankind the higher "intoxication" of the Wine of Life, an uplift of consciousness which Plato calls "a divine mania." It is something more than a chance play on words, really full of the sublimest sense, when one says that the Christ comes to intoxicate man with divine "spirituous liquors." We have here the ground of all the wine symbolism in ancient Bibles, and the origin of such an ancient festival as the Hakera of old Egypt, at which Har-Tema (Horus) came "full of wine," and was styled "the Jocund." This is matched, somewhat at a distance, in the Gospels in the person of Jesus, who came "eating and drinking," the copying of an Egyptian allegorism, which represents him as making merry with the lowly of earth. This is the closest the Gospels come to representing the man of sorrows as "jocund." The scene is the counterpart of a similar dramatization found in the Noah allegory, where Noah, the "no-etic" or divine intellectual principle, on his return to earth after the flood that washes away all forms, plants a vineyard and shortly becomes intoxicated, so that his sons have to go in backward to cover his nakedness. The Father principle of spirit, descending to earth, loses its divine vesture, becomes "naked" and must be reclothed by the renewal of its heavenly garments by its own sons. All this is pure Egyptian typism, matched in every feature in the Kamite texts. The elevation of mortal mind by the buoyant afflatus of divine thought quality, which, to speak in the figure, goes to the head and induces ecstasies and raptures, is what the ancients symbolized by the ideogram of intoxication resulting from man’s imbibing the Wine of Immortality poured out for him by the gods. As all such symbolizations are dual, there is also an intoxication of another sort, that undergone by the god himself when he, like Noah, lands again on earth and becomes intoxicated with the wine of sense, reveling in it like a drunkard, forgetting his divine nature. The carousal and buffoonery of the Hallowe’en festival are survivals of the original representation of this typology. The god-man and the animal-man in us mutually intoxicate each other, until in the end the higher intoxication neutralizes the lower and man becomes soberly wise.

As each one of the twelve months in the annual round brings its distinctive characteristics and types of weather, so the zodiac was designed in ancient sagacity to intimate that in the whole round of the aeonial cycle the passage of the sun through each of twelve signs, symbolizing the peregrination of the soul through twelve stages of expanding growth, brought out in manifestation the final twelvefold perfection of its power. As the Christ unfolds successively each new aspect of his developing faculty, he "comes" to that further extent. So he "comes" in every new and full moon; in every morning sunrise; in every springtime; in every month of the year; in every precessional thousand years; and in every Great Year of twenty five thousand years. He "comes" in every cycle large or small. Each age and aeon brings a particular segment of his nature to manifestation. He "comes" regularly and periodically because each throb of life’s pulse pushes the living stream of divine energization farther out to the remotest periphery of being. Nothing less can accrue to knowledge from the perusal of our brief sketch of zodiacal typology than the summary realization that the various scriptural accounts of Messiah’s coming were all grounded on astrological figurism, and had nothing whatever to do with history. All people have been mildly aware of the use of a few touches of Arian, Piscean and perhaps Taurian symbolism in connection with Christly religionism. The Lamb, the Bull and the Fish seem to be interwoven for some reason into the story. The Virgin is there, too; but as long as she is assumed to be a mortal young woman in history, her astrological connotations have not been evident. Perhaps this work announces for the first time since ancient days that the Christ was figured as coming in each sign and under each sign’s particular symbolic characterization and significance. It is therefore an epochal revelation for all religion.

Ch 21

One must ask, in the wake of this disclosure of the astronomical and astrological character of ancient Messianism, how it is that the birth of the Christian Messiah, claimed to be a purely historical event at a given hour about the year 4 B.C., still carries with it so many of the marks and vestiges of the non-historical astrological depiction. The fixing of the Christmas date on December 25, three days after the winter solstice, was done confessedly to match Bacchic and Mithraic cult practice; and the dating of Easter on the first Sun-day following the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox equally has not a single shred of linkage with history. Both these great festival dates speak purely of solar mythicism. Likewise, if scrutinized closely, nearly every major and minor incident in the career of the Gospel Jesus is interlaced with one or more features of cyclical or constellational typism. It would take another book to present this body of correlative material. One instance may serve to give substance to the claim.

Take the lowly figure of the animal type (zoötype Massey calls it) so definitely interwoven with the Gospel Messiah,--the ass. It was present, along with the ox, at his birth; along with its foal it bore him in triumph into the celestial city at the end; again with its foal it was brought in to help him toward his crucifixion. The Christ as the Good Samaritan was mounted on it. Out of his life-long study of astrological types, what has Massey to give us about this animal symbol?

"The ass has been obscured by the lion and other sacred animals, but it was at one time great in glory, particularly in the cult of Atum-Iu, the ass-headed or ass-eared divinity. The ass has been badly abused and evily treated as a type of Sut-Typhon, whereas it was expressly a figure of the solar god, the swift goer, who was Iu the Sa (Iusa) or Atum; and Iu-sa is the coming son, or the Egyptian Jesus on the ass." (Sa is the Egyptian suffix meaning "Son," "Heir," "Prince," "Successor.")

"The Ass in ancient mythology was a symbol of great importance," says E. Valentia Straiton, in The Celestial Ship of the North (p. 47). The ass originally typified the deity of the Dog-Star, then known as Sut, son of the Typhonian Mother, who had the honor of rearing the first child in the heavens. The Book of the Dead says: "The Great Words are spoken by the Ass." (Baalam’s ass speaks in the Old Testament.) In original Egyptian the Hebrew Jah, Iah, Iao or Ieu (Iu) mean an ass, the type of the Sabaean Sut, who was the earliest El, the Son or Sun. An ideograph of an ass’s head was the equivalent of a period of time and a cycle. Oddly enough, says Miss Straiton, the ass was an ideographical hieroglyph of the number 30, symbol of a luni-solar month, which was divided into three weeks of ten days each in the twelve-month year. The twenty-eight days of a lunar month belonged to Sut-Typhon. What is called Sut’s resurrection--perhaps better his transformation into spiritual being--was symboled by the shift from the lunar cycle of twenty-eight days to the solar thirty-days cycle, and from Sut’s day, Saturday, to the solar Sun-day. A three-legged ass found in Persian scriptures, says Miss Straiton, typified a month of three ten-day weeks.

Even the Christian St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, calls Jesus "the Good Scarabaeus, who rolled up before him the hitherto unshaken mud of our bodies." (Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity, Samuel Sharpe, London, 1863, p. 3.) And St. Epiphanius has been quoted as saying of Christ, "He is the Scarabaeus of God." Christian forms of the scarab yet exist, used as an emblem of the Savior.

In his introduction to the Nubian Grammar, the noted German savant Lepsius says: "At every step we meet in Babylonia with the traces of the Egyptian models." And it is surely unlikely that if Babylonia absorbed Egyptian prototypes, it could have done so without transfusion through Hebrew, Syrian and Greek channels.

Bailly is quoted by Miss Straiton as saying, "All the classics support Herodotus in the knowledge of the three Divine Dynasties preceding the coming of the human race." It is also noted by De Rouge in The Turin Papyrus: "Most remarkable of all, Champollion, struck with amazement, found that he had under his eyes the whole truth. . . . It was the remains of a list of Dynasties embracing the furthest mythoic times, or the reign of the gods and heroes." Citing Pandoros he continues: "It was during this period that those benefactors of humanity descended on earth and taught men to calculate the course of the Sun, Moon and Stars by the twelve signs of the Ecliptic." Creuzer writes that it is

"from the spheres of the stars wherein dwell the Gods of Light that Wisdom descends to the inferior spheres. . . . In the system of the ancient Priests, all things without exception--the gods, the genii, manes [souls], the whole world, are conjointly developed in Space and Duration. . . . The Pyramid may be considered as a symbol of the magnificent hierarchy of Spirits."

Miss Straiton (p. 36, op. cit.) verifies what has here been affirmed as to Egyptian city-naming and typing:

"The Egyptians expressed the place of birth and rebirth of the Sun and its burial below by saying, ‘The tomb of one life was ever the womb of another.’ They built their cities accordingly, as places of Resurrection."

Abydos, Annu (On, Heliopolis), Thebes, Sais, Luxor, Memphis and others were particular examples of this usage.

"When the vernal equinox receded from the sign Aries, the Lamb, into Pisces, the Fishes, and the Sun-gods were born under this sign, the Gnostics or early Christians, who were versed in ancient wisdom, typified the Sun-gods as Fishes."

Venus, who was the same as the Norse Freia, and whose day is Friday, is exalted in Pisces; so fish is eaten on Friday. Well does Miss Straiton observe that "all the falsities found in the interpretation of the myths are due to their having become literalized."

Each movement of the sun into a new sign in the precession brought about the fixing of a new birth-place in the heavens. A significant basis of meaning is attached to the rising of one sign as its opposite sign went to its death. The Bull, Taurus, dies with Scorpio opposite rising. "Scorpio is the sign of night, darkness, death, while Taurus is the sign of life, physical generation." In the eternal conflict between spirit and matter, the one waxes as the other wanes. The "death" of the one is the increased "life" of the other. John was Aries, not Virgo: however, his mother Elizabeth personified Virgo

Our attention is called to the fact that one of the calendars in use among the Hebrews shows all the remarkable events of the Old Testament occurring on the days of the equinoxes and the solstices. Likewise on the same calendar days the most outstanding events of the New Testament happened, as for instance the Annunciation, the Birth, the resurrection, the birth of John the Baptist. Jesus was crucified at the same time of the year that he was conceived - exactly 31 years apart (thus, 31 being 13 backwards, signifies death in reverse). This would mean that John was ''crucified'' (crossed with a sword) at the same time of year as his conception - the Autumn Equinox. Such a fact goes far to prove that the founders of the Christian religion, so far from being under the driving persuasion that they were giving to the world the first light of a true revelation, quite obviously were trying to adjust whatever they felt was unique in their message to the time-honored forms and programs of ancient pagan usage.

The Dog-Star, Sirius, rising in the south to announce the beginning of the year, on the imagery of the farmer’s dog barking to announce the dawn of day, may be a poetization that has nothing to commend it but its prettiness. Yet when it is taken along with a hundred other such constructions in a system of uranographic depiction, all of which go to make the most lucid portrayal of the entire meaning of the basic religion and philosophy of the world, it becomes far more than merely playful fancy. In limning the history of man’s soul in relation to its body in the imagery of the celestial movements and cycles, the sages of antiquity took the most eligible method open to man to perpetuate in one great universal language of nature-myth the sublime meaning of this cosmos and man’s life in it. They wrote their unforgettable advertisement on the one signboard that would forever command man’s view,--the open face of the sky. God obliged by writing the exact counterpart of it on the surface of Mother Earth. So that whether man looked below or looked above, he found the heavens telling and the earth making reply. The one shouted God’s eternal message and meaning, and the other echoed it. With its daily voice in his ears, how could man ever lose or forget it? The allegedly silly childish myths of the stars were intended to be the most vivid mnemonics to all the human race of its own cosmic being and destiny.

Another lucid sketch of constructive fancy is seen in the myth that is linked with the origin of the "dog days" that fall in August. Astrological theory places the beginning of the "dog days" at the time when the sun rises simultaneously with the Dog-Star. The common tradition that a mad dog shuns water or will die if he drinks water, almost certainly had its origin in remote astrological symbolism. For the constellation of the Dog, Canis Major, has his back turned toward Cancer, a water sign. The great Dog-Star, Sirius (the name based on the root of the word "Osiris"), typified the divine nature, as Anup, the Dog, Jackal, Fox in the Egyptian mythology, represented the keen-scented Deity that could guide man through the darkness of incarnational night. The great Sirius, that blazed brilliantly in the dark night of winter, fitted and filled this conception. Water, as always, represented the body of man in whose humid confines the soul descended for its incarnation. The body is seven-eighths water. Along with and exactly akin to the representation of the soul’s falling into an intoxication by the strong wine of sense in its fleshly experience, was the analogue of its going mad when it bathed in or imbibed of the waters of incarnation. The great Dog of soul went "mad" when it dipped into the waters of the bodily life. It therefore turned away from the water, and no doubt is turned toward an air or fire sign. The twelve zodiacal and the thirty-six other constellations have been designed to depict the several aspects of general truth under a varied but always deeply enlightening allegorical modus.

Then there is the legend of the "three Kings of Orient" who came on Christmas to adore the new-born God. Who shall say that the term or title, Three Kings of Orient, as the Christmas hymn phrases it, is not some early zealous and jealous scribe’s work of shunting out of sight a bit of too evident and open pagan astrological symbolism from the Christian material? For from of old the Three Kings were the three conspicuous stars in the belt of Orion, the mighty Hunter, that so easily distinguish this notable constellation, making it next in prominence in all the heavens to the Great Bear itself. And their title was for long centuries the Three Kings of Orion. The three King-Stars in Orion, himself the personification of the Horus or Christos power, rise in the east on Christmas Eve and ascend to the mid-heavens on the celestial equator. Sirius, the Dog of Divinity, rises right after Orion, being the Hunter’s dog, lesser deity following in the wake of higher deity everywhere in nature. And man in evolution, the thinker, is followed on the upward path by the animal, who will at a later day stand where he now does. Some thousands of years ago, when on Christmas Eve the Dog-Star stood at the height of the sky, on the horizon of the east rose in its turn the constellation of the Virgin, bearing in her one arm the Christ-child himself, and in the other hand gripping the great star Spica, the head of wheat, for that divine bread which cometh down from heaven, the eating of which will sate man’s everlasting hunger for God.

The births of Abraham, Moses, Caesar and many other great figures were all foretold by the appearance of a star, according to Higgins.

"I flatter myself," he says, "that I shall convince my reader that this story of a star was no fiction, but only a mythological or allegorical method of representing the conjunction of the sun and moon, and the conclusion of the cycle at the end of every six hundred years, and the periodical restoration of some star or planet to its old place, or to its periodical rising in a place relative to the sun and moon at the end of the time. Thus whenever the star arrived at its proper place they knew that a new cycle commenced, a new savior would be born; and for every Avatar a star was said to have appeared."

Higgins asks how the French and Italians came to dye their own god Cristna black before they sent icons of him to India. And how came his mother to be black?--the black Venus, or Isis the Mother of Divine Love, the Aur or Horus, the Lux of St. John, the Regina Coeli (Queen of Heaven), treading in the sphere on the head of the serpent - all marks of Jesus of Bethlehem, of the temple of the sun, or Cris, but not marks of Jesus of Nazareth? Summing up much of the material Higgins declares that there can be no dispute about the prevalence of a common doctrine both east and west of the Indies, purveying the same elements; and the only question will be whether the East copied from the West before the birth of Christ, since the same doctrines were there before his birth, or the West copied from the East at a later time.

In Egypt, Massey tells us, the ordinary year was timed largely by the inundation of the river and the heliacal rising of Sirius. In the cycle of the Great Year of precession, the time was marked by the retrogression of the equinoxes and the changing position of the pole. This time was kept by double entry. And when the birthplace of the Messianic child was made zodiacal it traveled around the backward circuit of precession. The birthplace of Horus, the divine babe, born of the Virgin of the zodiac, was made coincident with the vernal equinox, and the "date" thus became subject to the change of precession. It parted company with the lesser year and the inundation to travel from sign to sign round the circuit, staying in each sign 2160 years. Fourteen thousand years ago, the calculations reveal, the vernal equinox coincided with the sign of Virgo, and the autumn equinox with the sign of Pisces. So Eratosthenes (276 B.C.) testifies to the fact that the festival of Isis, which was celebrated in his time at the autumn equinox, had been celebrated when the Easter equinox was in Virgo. Higgins claims that a great part of Moses’ object was to make the shift of the festival of the equinox from Taurus to Aries, thus throwing the onus of sin upon the worship of the Golden Calf (Taurus) when the proper emblem should have been the Lamb of God (Aries).

Modern religious ritualism has only the fragments and tatters, so to say, of the majestic fabric of the ancient Sun-worship. And in the main even those remnants stand without any competent appreciation of their original moving significance. In the distant past every festival of the religious year was replete with a meaning of great moment, since every phase and position of the sun in the annual zodiac carried a corresponding meaning with reference to the pilgrimage of the soul round the cycle of outgoing into matter and return to spirit. The (apparent) progress of the sun through the four seasons, the two equinoxes and solstices, and the twelve solar and thirteen lunar months, as well as the sun’s position at critical or meaningful points in the circuit, were made the basis of a correspondent movement, progress and position of the divine Ego or Self in man in its aeonial round. How perfect this correspondence is and how graphically the meaning of the soul’s experience in its cyclical evolution could be represented or dramatized by these features of the solar year, can not be realized until one scrutinizes this material with a bit more than lackadaisical interest. One must take the time and pains to see the remarkable exactness with which the transactions of the solar, lunar and stellar movements re-enact the eternal drama of the soul and the body, in their alternate phases of union and dissolution. The great commemorative or ritualistic festivals were of course those dated at the two solstitial and the two equinoctial points, fixing the Christmas festival in December, Easter in March (or April), the ancient Fire-festival in June and the Michaelmas or Hallowe’en festival in September (or October). But astronomical configurations and conjunctions brought significance to other periods in the year. There is, for instance, the beautiful but little-known festival of the Assumption of the Virgin. Some pretense is made at keeping it by ritual observance in a few churches, but it is doubtful if any unction can go with its perfunctory celebration, since the depth of its real meaning is no longer plumbed by the celebrants. Dupuis gives us the background for understanding:

"About the eighth month, when the sun is in his greatest strength and enters into the eighth sign, the celestial virgin appears to be absorbed in his fires, and she disappears in the midst of the rays and glory of her son."

This, comments Higgins, represents the death or disappearance of the virgin. The sun passes into the Virgin the thirteenth before the Kalends of September. The Christians consider this as the reunion of the Virgin and her Son. The feast commemorates the passage of the virgin. At the end of three weeks the birth of the Virgin Mary is fixed. In the ancient Roman calendar the assumption of the virgin Astrea, or her reunion with her son, took place at the same time as the assumption of the Virgin Mary; and her re-birth, or her disengagement from the solar rays, occurred at the same time with the birth of Mary. This was the eighth of September in our calendar.

One has to go back to the most recondite view of cosmic operations to divine the hidden meaning of this Assumption of the Virgin in the rays of the Solar Lord. With the Virgin and the Sun personalized in the characters of Mary and her son Jesus, in the Gospel legendary form, it is not easy to work out the reference. An alleged historical man and his mother are hardly dimensional enough to carry the burden of the vast cosmic representation in their tiny personalities. Resort must be had to the language of symbolism, which was the current coin for the transmission of such profound meanings in the olden time.

Now, to begin with, the Virgin represents matter in its pure primordial form. It is engendered in the bosom of Absolute Being by the first fiat of Divine Creative Will. The first act of this Creative Will is the division of itself into the two elements of the eternal bipolarity, the interaction of which two forces is the condition necessary for its own manifestation or creation. The separation thus entails the detachment of matter and of spirit severally out of each other’s arms, the abstraction of the one soul of life from the polar opposite and the setting of the two in mutual tension with each other.

The next point to be noted, with symbolic language as our guide, is that matter was invariably personalized by the great Mother or Mother-Goddess character, and represented by the symbol of water. Water was the element out of whose womb all life was to come to birth, and, with the magical consistency with which this symbolic language spells a thrilling meaning, it is water that is the first mother of all life! All first life on the planet emanated from sea water. The human birth issues out of a sack of water. This water, or matter, was the "water of the firmament," which Genesis notes as the very first creation, divided into its two segments or forms of the upper and the lower firmament. The upper firmament of water is matter in its super-atomic, ethereal or invisible state, that is "above" the substantial creation; the lower firmament is matter in its visible, concrete, substantial or atomic construction.

So Being detaches its watery (material) part from its fiery (spiritual, solar) part and sends both forth upon the creative business of the Divine Mind. On the material side the work begins with the formation of the atom and proceeds to the evolution of all the forms which it is designed to provide for the organic expression of life in all its creative fancy. It builds up the visible universe which gives Life its manifold play throughout the cycle. But when the cycle has run its long course and the day of dissolution arrives, matter, the Virgin of the world, is drawn back into union with the fiery principle from which it was separated in the beginning, and is once more absorbed into the enveloping rays of Infinite Being.

Each new expression of life in and through matter--each new birth from the Virgin Mother--generates a new type of advanced realization of its fiery spiritual principle. Yet this is always achieved through a course of experience of the germ of mind in a body of matter, and is therefore the Virgin’s own Son. Matter is the mother of the Suns, which are her Sons. Actually, stars are made of hydrogen Hence the fiery power of life on its spiritual side reabsorbs into its bosom at the end of each cycle the masses of matter which entered into the form-structure of spirit’s ideation. And see how astonishingly earthly Nature carries out the symbolism! In the period of the summer’s greatest solar power the fiery energies have barometric capacity to absorb more water than at any other time of the year! It is commonly the period of drought; the air moisture is absorbed and not precipitated. It is the season when the watery element is absorbed by the fiery. Ancient philosophical poetic fancy must needs seize upon the natural fact and use it to give body to cosmic truth.

Each new generation of life produced by a cycle of manifestation and growth is the Son of Virgin matter. But the material creations inevitably must dissolve away and be reabsorbed back into the bosom of the primordial and eternal Infinite. In each cycle of manifestation, which by definition in the symbolic language is Matter’s or the Virgin’s Son, it is this newest release or formulation of spirit’s fiery energy that absorbs matter’s potencies at the period of dissolution. Hence it is said that the Virgin is taken up or assumed by her own Son and lost in his fiery rays. So the Assumption of the Virgin is the climactic act in the aeonial round. And after three weeks in the tomb of non-being, the new year begins with the rebirth, i.e., the reappearance of the Virgin as the drought ends with the equinoctial rains! Matter’s reappearance on the creative scene is intimated by the reappearance of the water, its symbol, on the earthly scene. The Virgin is absorbed in the glowing bosom of her own Son, the Sun, but emerges again to become mother of the next generation of being. The New Year’s festival that is dated in mid-September is indeed well placed.

Another interesting item of ancient symbolical and astrological reference is the legend of the "Halcyon Days." Ordinary dictionary or encyclopedia sources explain the name as referring to a period of about fourteen days during the winter solstice, when the kingfisher, otherwise called the halcyon bird, nests on the waters, supposedly bringing them to a tranquil smoothness. Halcyon has therefore come to mean tranquil and peaceful. The supposed origin of the legend is the Greek myth of Halcyone, daughter of Aeolus, God of the winds, who in grief over the loss of her husband Ceyx, cast herself into the sea, which became calm.

It would seem, however, that the etymology of the word--halcyon--points to some more recondite reference in relation to the Dog-Star, Sirius. The "hal" is obviously the Hebrew form of the Egyptian "har,"--Hebrew "l" and Egyptian "r" being equivalent, So Ezekiel is actually Ezekier (El Zeker) and shalom/Salome is actually Sharom/Sarome (Sharon/Sarah-me) as the Egyptian has no "l"--and "har" is the equivalent of the "Hor" of "Horus." It therefore means "God" or "deity." The cyon is unmistakably the Greek Kuon, meaning "dog." "Halcyon" thus comes to mean "the divine Dog," or "God (as) the Dog(star)." As the coming of the Day-Star from on high was to bring "peace" to earth, the birth of the God at the winter solstice would fittingly be thought of as the basis of a legend that placed the "Halcyon" days at the winter solstice. Interesting that the OT Zechariah foretold the coming of the son of the NT Zechariah - the Day Star being John the Baptist - the Halcyon three months conceived at the winter solstice preceding Jesus' conception.

Another solar date in the year, of early significance now forgotten, is the second of February, Candlemas Day, or the holy day of the Purification of the Virgin. It marks the termination of another period of forty days length, of which there are at least five in the year’s course. The Christ was born symbolically on the night of December twenty-fourth, and February second ends a stretch of forty days from that date. As forty days was the ancient cryptogram in number for the period of the seed’s incubation in the ground or matter before germinating, therefore a glyph for the general fact of incarnation, the end of all the forty-day periods would signalize the perfection of the product of the incarnational experience. Hallowe’en ends the forty days from the autumn equinox, and May-Day ends forty days from the vernal equinox, as Easter ends the forty days of Lent. So Candlemas ends forty days from Christmas. The conclusion of the period of soul’s tenancy of the body is presumed to have raised the constituent matter of the body in which it was housed to final purification. The candle flame, drawing up and transmuting into its own glorious essence of fire the lowly elements of the animal body of the candle (animal tallow), is the grand symbol of this transfiguration of essence which soul works upon lower body. And this is the Purification of the Virgin.

Albert the Great (Lib. de Univers.) says that the sign of the celestial Virgin rises above the horizon at the moment in which we fix the birth of Christ, that is, at midnight of December twenty-fourth. He adds that all the mysteries of his divine incarnation and all the secrets of his miraculous life, from his conception even to his ascension, are traced in the constellations and figured in the stars which announced them. (See Dupuis: Histoire de Tous Les Cultes, Vol. 3, pp. 47, 318). This symbolic allegorism was the true and high employment of ancient astrology. Higgins (Anac., p. 314) strengthens this assertion in remarking that "the trifling but still striking coincidences between the worship of the god Sol and the stories of Jesus are innumerable." It should be noted that if the resemblances are sometimes apparently "trifling," this is the fault of the ignorant copying of earlier definite constructions, due to the loss of esoteric insight, and is not attributable to any want of exact correspondence or identity in the material originally.

Ch 22

The pagans were first, centuries ahead of them! A thing is not copied before it is in existence, but after. Later copies earlier, not vice versa. There was but one dodge to escape the dreadful onus of the logic of the situation, and peerless Christianity saw it and resorted to it. This was to charge that the pagans, instigated by the devil, copied the matchless Christian doctrines that were still to come with the birth of the true Messiah in the year one (or four, or twelve) A.D. Paganism was of the devil and the scheming serpent that whispered blandishing words in Eve’s ear came on the scene again to dictate artfully to the many pagan seers the "plagiarism by anticipation" of the faith to be. The pagans craftily copied the Christian religion centuries in advance.

Alternative to copying the items of Christian dogma ahead of their pronouncement, Lundy admits that the pagans may have preconceived the realities of Christ’s manifestation as "independent types and prophecies," with or without Satan’s whispering aid. If so, all that any sane mind could think of their accomplishment is that it was a feat of wondrous genius. If Christianity be the transcendently lofty pure revelation it is claimed to be, the pagans soared high to match its conceptions in advance. Yet a Christian writer musts needs treat it with a slur.

Then Lundy calmly admits that Bel, Mithra, Agni, Horus and Apollo all "bear a striking analogy to the Real Son of God," without the remotest suspicion that such an admission points with practical conclusiveness to the fact that Jesus was just another Sun-god figure with the others.

The Christ comes in the fullness of time, in mother nature’s old age, to elevate and transform the child of nature. Paul states that the whole (natural) creation groaneth and travaileth in pain, waiting for its transformation by the power of manifested spirit. The great Egyptian religion is built on the conflict between Sut and Horus, who typify the natural forces and the spiritual. Horus’ victory over Sut is the symbolization of the highest aim and goal of all religious aspiration. The ancients expressly did not intrude the area of nature into the kingdom of spirit. To retain nature as mere symbol of higher values is precisely the thing they did do. And they did it so grandly that if Christianity does not turn back and adopt the same method of natural analogical representation and depiction of spiritual laws, it will continue to hobble along groping in semi-darkness, ignoring the natural correspondences that alone could eliminate its labyrinthine difficulties.

This King of Glory was named by the ancient Egyptians I U. This became later J U and Y U. As he was also God, the Hebrews added their word for Deity--E L. This gave Y U-E L, eventually YULE. The French form used the short root of the divine principle of intelligence, N O (cognate with our English know), the No-etic faculty, with the Hebrew E L and derived NOEL.

As fortune would have it, the study is completed in December, on the very fringe of the winter solstice. In ancient typism the period of the god’s incarnation in flesh and matter was dramatized as the midnight and the midwinter of its cycle. At midnight in midwinter the mighty constellation of Orion, followed by the great Dog-Star Sirius, takes its position in the central heavens south of the zenith. Orion prefigures the greater divinity; and as divinity endlessly seeks the thrill of life that accrues to it from becoming periodically incarnated in matter in its seven-period cycles, so the mighty hunter, Orion, with his Dog, is dramatized as pursuing the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades, ahead of him,--matter being eternally feminine.

But in the belt of Orion, the part of his dress that gives organic stability to his whole body, are the three stars known as the Three Kings. They point almost in a direct line to the following Dog.

Man is most philosophically described as "a God in the body of an animal." The God is leading in evolution, but it is bringing the animal behind it along toward the same high goal. Within the animal is the God that, like the dog, can dower the mortal animal-man with the divine instinct to guide himself unerringly through the darkness of incarnational night. So Sirius was made the type of the Christ-soul in mankind. He is preceded by the Three Kings who anticipate his coming and hail and adore him on his arrival. The Three Kings of evolving consciousness are Mind-Soul-Spirit, the ineffable trinity of divine life. In man’s ordinary consciousness they manifest as Goodness, Truth and Beauty. When brought to glowing intensity in the field of conscious being in man, the three fuse into one grand power of divine Love. This is the three-starred, three-rayed King whose birth is hailed at midnight of December twenty-fourth.

When Yuletide carolers raise paeans of joyous song to greet the birth of humanity’s King at midnight of the winter solstice, it is all in token of the birth of the three kingly elements of consciousness that are destined to rule in the life of man on earth,--Goodness, Truth and Beauty. Fused in the white heat of Love, they become that Prince of Peace who can touch the animal in man with his wand of magic and transform him into the fairy spirit. And only then will begin that reign of Saturn, that Golden Age, when the "halcyon days" set in, and the King-fisher of the souls of men can build its nest in safety on the tranquil waters of the erstwhile stormy sea of mortal life, in the winter solstice of evolution.