Who is this
King of Glory?
A Critical Study of the
Christos-Messiah Tradition
"What profit hath not that fable of Christ
brought us!"
—Pope Leo X
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
Electronically typed and edited by
Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. I can be contacted at
pc93@bellsouth.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me
in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following
works:
The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon,
Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark
and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At
Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes -
But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Through
Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of
Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at
Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished
autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
To
THE MANY
THOUSANDS OF STU-
DENTS WHO ARE EARNESTLY
STRIVING TO RESTORE THE ANCIENT
ESOTERIC INTERPRETATION OF THE SCRIP-
TURES OF THE WORLD THIS WORK
IS SINCERELY DEDI-
CATED
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ix
I. FAITH WEDS FOLLY 1
II. MYTH TRUER THAN HISTORY 14
III. TRUTH WEARS A MASK 48
IV. WISDOM HAUNTS THE COUNTRYSIDE 80
V. FANCY’S FABRIC TURNS INTO HISTORY
90
VI. CANONIZED ROMANTICISM 129
VII. THROES OF A BAD CONSCIENCE 169
VIII. SUBLIME MYTH MAKES GROTESQUE
HISTORY 181
IX. FAITH’S ODD WONDERLAND 226
X. COSMIC MAJESTY WITH LOCAL ITEMS
248
XI. STAGGERING
XII. THE SHOUT OF PAUL’S SILENCE 276
XIII. ROBBING PAUL TO PAY PETER 301
XIV. A QUEEN DETHRONED 312
XV. A STAR--AND LUNA 332
XVI. AN EPOCHAL DISCOVERY 372
XVII. TRUTH EXORCISES DEMONIAC
OBSESSIONS 388
XVIII. THE ANOINTING OF MAN 401
XIX. LOST CYCLES OF THE SUN 419
XX. TWELVE LAMPS OF DEITY 432
XXI. ORION AND HIS DOG 457
XXII. OUR DAY-STAR RISES 469
INDEX 487
INTRODUCTION
The pick that struck the Rosetta Stone in the loamy soil of the
ix
rises from the dead past to charge
its ungenerous offspring with faithlessness and deceit. And Christianity, as
Edward Carpenter so frankly asserts, must now acknowledge its parentage in a
pagan past or, failing to do so, must perish.
The entire Christian Bible, creation
legend, descent into and exodus from "Egypt," ark and flood allegory,
Israelite "history," Hebrew prophecy and poetry, Gospels, Epistles
and Revelation imagery, all are now proven to have been the transmission
of ancient Egypt’s scrolls and papyri into the hands of later generations which
knew neither their true origin nor their fathomless meaning. Long after
There can be no question of this
necessity on its part. Almost alone one significant item enforces it. 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. From
the walls of the temple of Luxor, carved there at a date at least 1700 years
B.C., there faces Christianity a group of four scenes that spell the
non-historicity of four episodes purveyed as history in the Gospel’s recital of
the Christ nativity: the angel’s pronouncement to the shepherds tending their
flocks by night in the fields; the annunciation of the angel to the virgin; the
adoration of the infant by three Magi; and the nativity scene itself.
x
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.
But
The ineptitude of scholarly acumen
in the face of the mountainous evidence supplied by the study of comparative
religion, especially since the recovery of Chaldean and Egyptian antiquities,
surpasses all belief and flouts all conscience. It has been exhibited on so
colossal a scale, with consequences of the direst nature, that the question
whether ignorance or deliberate chicanery engineered the total suppression of
truth that has glared its overwhelming obviousness in the face of studentship,
inevitably rises to the foreground of thought. It must be assumed that both
ignorance and disingenuousness combined to produce the catastrophic result. A
thousand big and little items of comparative religion, many of them sufficient
in their single weight to
xi
clinch decisive determinations fatal
to Christian claims, conspire to erect a positively impregnable fortress of
proof of Christian errancy. This mass of data has been blithely ignored,
brazenly flouted, or damned with slighting notice, by the ecclesiastical regime
which would lose its easy hold on the masses by honest recognition of the
truth.
The lesson of European Renaissance
history has not been assimilated in its full import. Christian Europe, groping
in early Medieval darkness for centuries following the violent extinction of
Platonic Academies and schools of esoteric philosophy and religion, regained a
portion of the lost light in the fourteenth century when re-established contact
with Greek literature brought to light the long-buried works of classic
Hellenic wisdom. This recouping of cultural status went far to illuminate the
night of Christian gloom. But it can be seen now that it did not go far or deep
enough to effect a complete restoration of the full glory of ancient
intellectual brilliance.
The primary truth of human culture
which is presented by all sage religions of antiquity is the fact that there
resides deeply embedded in the core of man’s constitution a nucleus of what,
for want of a better designation, must be called a divine spark or sun. The
glow of Christliness--a thing at once both chemically radio-active and
intellectual--in us is indeed the hope of our glory. Modern science, through
the work of Dr. George W. Crile, late head of the Cleveland Medical
laboratories, has rediscovered what the ancient sages were familiar with--the
radiant SUN in man. "Every man," proclaimed the ancients and the
Medieval "Fire Philosophers," "has a little SUN within his own
breast." This sun is the Christ in man, a nucleus of fiery divine
spirit-energy. All the Christs in antiquity were denominated "Sun-
xii
Gods." The names of nearly all
of them are the immediate words for the sun, or epithets appropriate to the
solar orb. "All things are the products of one primordial Fire,"
assert the Chaldean Oracles. Life nucleates glowing centers of this fire
throughout the universe in the radiant cells of its physical body, which are
the suns. Every creature that his life shares a portion of this pervasive fire,
which is the rock of its hope for evolution to its greater glory.
The rock of human culture thus being
established as a fiery power within man’s own breast, Christianity becomes
chargeable with the most opprobrious of all possible accusations. It can be
indicted for the crime of being the only religion that in large measure
destroyed the force of man’s inspiration and incentive to cultivate this divine
solar light within his own bosom. It did this by diverting the direction of its
followers’ effort from the inner self-culture of a purely subjective
consciousness to the worship of the Christ as embodied in one man in history.
Granted that there is a powerful and effective psychology in the adoration of
an ideal model of perfection, the main issue here involved can never be dodged.
No matter how emotionally, how fanatically the worshipper pours out adoration
to a person in objective life, the work of his own evolution is not
accomplished until he effectuates the ultimate divinization of the nuclear
potentiality of deific fire within his own self-controlled area of
consciousness.
The balanced forces of human uplift
would be thrown into immediate chaos if it were in the end possible for a man
to achieve his apotheosization vicariously, or in any other way than through
his own effort. By virtue of the fact that man was provided from the start with
the presence of a unit of divine fire within the heart of his conscious being,
he was adequately equipped to fight his own way to the goal of glory. The only
treason of which religious devotion could become capable was the setting up of
a fetish outside the life of consciousness, which would divert a single
iota of resolute will from the
xiii
culture of the resident deity.
Christianity is the only religion in the civilized world that has perpetuated
this treason. The point is inexorably established by logical thought as well as
demonstrated by the historical sequel. The matter is beyond debate. By so much
as the exaltation of a personal Jesus has beguiled human devotion away from the
inner direction in the individual’s task of perfecting his own innate divinity,
by precisely that much has the outer presentation weakened the strength of
mortal struggle to the light. It is psychological, but it is mathematically
measurable. The amount measured is the item that ends all argument. If the
worship of a Judean carpenter has taken any time and absorbed any psychic
effort that could have been expended in the culture of divine graciousness
within the heart of humanity, it has by so much held back the evolution of the
race.
Christianity has taught its
adherents, so to say, to play around the fringes of the cultural problem
instead of bearing with all their psychic force directly upon its heart. It has
hypnotized their devotional mentality under the spell of a promise of
vicariousness which is itself subtly conducive to the weakening of the native
nobility of man’s true selfhood. It has made of its millions--what Nietzsche so
thoroughly detested--groveling beggars, reveling in the turpitude of
sin-confession and praying for God to have mercy on their unworthiness. It has
made them wretches pleading piteously to be saved. How it has ever been assumed
that a God of good sense would enjoy seeing his creatures, whom he has himself
divinely endowed with a portion of his own Mind, writhing in worm-of-the-dust
sycophancy at his feet, is beyond rational understanding. It is naturally to be
presumed that he would take far greater delight in seeing them standing up in
the might of their incipient divinity and making a fight of it. The morbid cast
of mentation generated in millions of Christians over sixteen centuries by the
doctrinal falsification of the esoteric meaning of "sin" is perhaps
the most lamentable spectacle presented to the world in all time. That a
religion could so far lose touch with sober sanity as to expect that it could
exalt and edify man’s spirit by grinding it down into the dust is evidence at
once of its complete divagation from basic sound truth.
It is a grave question whether the
ecclesiastical system and movement known as Christianity has any right to its
name. So far from being the cult that brought in a true Christ-worship for the
first time
xiv
in "heathen" darkness, it
was indeed--after the third century--the one system that destroyed such a true
worship. Ancient cults bent all effort upon the cultivation of the god within
man. This is the nucleus of the only true Christianity. In its genuine sense
there has been no Christianity in the Occident since that fatal third century.
Historical Christianity has substituted a personal fetish for the real
Christos, the inner Fire of Love. No matter how appealing the figure
substituted, it never can do the work of actual soul culture. And history has
sealed this verdict. It is almost certainly true that in no quarter of human
life has history so obviously and glaringly demonstrated the want of mankind’s
reliance upon the god instinct in the heart of the nations as has been
evidenced by the horrifying spectacle of inhumanity and animal savagery put on
display by the so-called Christianized nations. Christianity has never led the fight
for culture. On the contrary, it has hung like a drag-wheel on the car of real
cultural and scientific advance for many centuries. It has struck at every
pioneer in the progress of true culture. Its highest practical aim has rather
been to maintain an average level of decency in traditional forms of social
life. Much incidental good of course has emerged from an effort to which
millions of good people, in more or less ignorance of historic truth, have
consecrated their life’s devotion. But never has it been the single aim and
objective of the Christian ecclesiastical system to ground the aspirational
life of its devotees upon the one-pointed quickening of the Christ within all
hearts.
A fairly considerable number of
books have been written to defend the thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus,
George Brandes’ Jesus a Myth being a typical example. All of them have
advanced data of weight and validity. But none of them has presented the real
argument in the case. This springs from the material now available from ancient
xv
background of esoteric religionism.
The allegation that the publication of the Gospels can not be explained or accounted
for unless a great Teacher had lived whose life inspired their writing, must
give way before the understanding that their appearance was due to the
breakdown of esotericism, or the violent popular incursion into the secrecy of
esoteric polity, and the dragging forth of the arcane books and the dramas of
the occult spiritual life from the Mystery holy of holies.
A noted present-day clergyman in New
York City, the eminent Dr. John Haynes Holmes, has declared in a printed
sermon--Christianity’s Debt to Judaism; Why Not Acknowledge It?--that
Christianity drew its Founder from the Jewish people, along with five-sixths of
its Bible, the Hebrew Old Testament, as well as everything that the character
Jesus has spoken in the New Testament. Practically every word uttered by the
Christ figure in the Gospels is to be found in the Mishna, the Gemara, the
Talmud and the Hagadoth of the Jews, he asserted. But what now must be the
astonishment of the eminent minister to be confronted with the mountainous
evidence that all the material of both Christian and Hebrew systems has
emanated from ancient
It is a sign of the aberration in
religious thinking now prevailing that the presentation of the case for the
non-historic Christ will run afoul of many persons of general probity who, even
when measurably convinced that the Jesus story is a fable, as Pope Leo X so
glibly asserted, will still adhere to the persuasion that it is better to
suppress the bald and revolutionary truth and prolong the "beautiful
illusion" of the Christ’s personal existence. The original perpetration
and now the perpetuation of blank falsehood concerning the fact of Jesus’
existence is argued to be morally justifiable, even highly good, on the ground
that it has wrought a prodigious psychological and moral beneficence. But this
is, at bottom, to argue that Christianity can be better promoted by a lie than
by the truth. We are adjured by the holy scriptures of that same faith that our
only freedom comes from knowing the truth. While the world is hoping and
planning to establish the better course of its life upon four fundamental
freedoms, it might
xvi
be well to remind ourselves that in
a democracy there is a fifth freedom upon which the salutary influences of the
four and all other freedoms are dependent and contingent, and that is the
freedom of all to be put in possession of the truth, to the farthest limit of
its availability. In minor situations it often appears both judicious and
beneficent to withhold the truth. But the justification is always secondary to
larger objectives and temporary. Every situation must ultimately be resolved by
a facing of the truth. Final issues ever demand that life be met on its own
terms. The extensive concealment of historical truth at once argues something
unlovely and sinister. A great world faith, soliciting the loyalty of millions,
could offer no surer evidence of its integrity than an unbroken record of
instant eagerness to examine and accept every sincere presentment of the truth.
This work is given forth with no other motive than to present the available
evidence beating upon an issue of transcendent importance. In the hurly-burly
of human affairs truth is not always welcome or pleasant. That is
understandable. But far more vital is the understanding that it must be faced.
Our attitude toward truth-seeking is one of the supreme tests of our worthiness
to take on the responsibilities and enjoy the liberties of a democracy.
Lest it be assumed that the author’s
implied charges of dishonesty in Christian leadership spring from a personal
animosity against Christianity, he takes the liberty to insert here a few
sentences taken from a brief article in The New York Times of present
date (Nov. 29, 1943) reported from a sermon of the Rev. Bernard Iddings Bell,
eminent Episcopalian clergyman, preached in St. Paul’s Chapel of Columbia
University on Nov. 28. By inference Dr. Bell charges the Church with
dishonesty, and nobody believes that he does it from "spleen." He
said that present-day civilization "needs above all things a restored
humility and a renewed honesty in two high places--the universities and the
churches." "From kindergarten to the Ph.D. degree," he added,
"our educators help their students to run away from ultimate decisions. .
. . The universities have become resorts for the pursuit of instrumental tricks
rather than of fundamental and immutable truth. And then our educators, having
abdicated from their ancient and honorable post as keepers of the sanctities of
truth, cry out in their pride their all-sufficient greatness.
"The churches, too . . . make
of themselves pious clubs, daring not
xvii
to rebuke the brazen multitudes for
fear of loss of membership and money; and having sunk to the low estate of men
pleasers, insist they hold the future of mankind in their proud hands."
The sun of man can not be too long
beclouded with the fogs of hypocrisy and bigotry. Its mighty power will dispel
them in due season. A new day of its shining arises with the accidental stroke
of a soldier’s pick on a slab of stone.
xviii
Chapter I
FAITH
WEDS FOLLY
To the conscientious student who
will give to the matter sufficient time and reflection it becomes a conviction
that the most devastating cultural calamity that has befallen the human race in
all its history was the degradation of the esoteric spiritual purport of
ancient scripture into a debased literal and historical sense, entailing
centuries of mental benightedness and spiritual thwarting, that took place at
about the third century of the Christian era. And in this catastrophic
conversion of cosmography, evolutionary pictography and racial history over
into alleged factual occurrence, the single feature most signally fruitful of
age-long fatuity was the transformation of the dramatic figure of the Christos,
or divine essence of man’s nature, over into a historical person. It is not too
much to say that the withering wind of this distorted doctrine spread its
blight upon all sane comprehension of the sublime message of ancient sacred
literature over all the sixteen centuries since that fatal epoch. Indeed the
truth of the situation warrants the statement that the injection of a living
man into the spiritual drama in the place of the personified divine Ego in man
has held the rational mind of the Western world in the grip of the most arrant
superstition to be found in the history of civilized humanity. This work will
amass the data to support the sharp asseveration that this was the central item
in the entire debacle of theological systematism which then ensued and which
must be rated as the most tragic catastrophe in world history. The causes that
led to the fatal transference of character from the dramatic personification of
an element in human consciousness into an alleged man of historical
entification will be the central theme of this essay. To what inadequate degree
the iniquitous consequences of the blunder can be seen and delineated, these
will be dealt with in the unfoldment. But the task involves little less than
the penetrating analysis of all ancient sacred writ, and the amassing of a vast
array of factual data and basic argument in support of the momentous
conclusions adduced in the sequel.
1
The power of tradition, and more
especially religious tradition indoctrinated in the childhood of many
generations, is so overwhelming that the effort of this work to clarify the
status of the great doctrine of divine Messiahship in ancient scripture will
almost certainly be received with the cry of blasphemy from the shocked
partisans of orthodoxy. All the obloquy that has been concentrated in the word
"Anti-Christ" will be flung upon the undertaking. For this reason it
is desirable to state at the outset that, on the contrary, the task is
motivated by the highest possible reverence for the Christ ideal as the core of
all religious culture. So far from being an attempt to devastate the benignant
efficacy of the role of the Christ in religious practique, it is expressly the
aim of the study to establish that efficacy upon its true psychological bases.
This purpose entails the revelation of the true in place of the false grounds
of the claim of the Christ ideal upon our reverence. Instead of being a vicious
attack upon the sanctified name and function of Christhood, it is directly an
effort to redeem that name and function from centuries of impious desecration
that should have been seen all along as the real grounds for horrified
indignation. When rightly viewed in relation to all the facts in the case, it
must be conceded that the justification for resentment at a real sacrilege
against the Sonship of God weighs heavily on the side of the book, and is not
on the side of the inevitable hue and cry of violent condemnation that will
greet it. In the face of this anticipated raucous chorus of vilification of the
book’s aim and intent there is hurled the forthright declaration that this is
an utterly sincere and consecrated attempt to rescue the sacred name of the
Christ from an ignominy already heaped upon it over long centuries. There is
abundant warrant for asserting the righteous character of the motive on the
ground of its aim to redeem the conception of Christhood from the incredible
error and falsification that have befouled it for ages. As Socrates and Plato
so thoroughly demonstrated by a masterly dialectic, the only source of evil in
connection with anything is the failure to grasp its true status and function
in a perfect balance between excess and deficiency. Nothing is good, say these
two profound thinkers, unless its basic raison d’être is clearly
apprehended and its use fulfilled in exactly balanced proportion. The record of
historical frightfulness that has emerged into actuality over many centuries
because of the unbelievable miscarriage of the first true conception of the
character and office of the
2
Messiah is overwhelming
justification of a sincere effort to remold the mistaken view to its original
truth and beauty. In final curt statement the high intent of this work is to
end the sway of an entirely false and stultifying idea of the nature of the
Christ and inaugurate the dominance of the only conception that truly honors
it. The thesis, then, is to demonstrate that the Christ was a grade of
distinctly divine consciousness that is coming gradually into rulership in
humanity, and being this, it was nothing else. It was not a man.
Just as the conception of the
Biblical Adam as man, generic, is a true envisagement of the meaning of
the term and yields intelligible significance in exegesis of ancient scripts,
but becomes both ridiculous and unintelligible when taken to mean "a man,"
so with the Christos. The conception of the Christ as man in his divine
genius, or the God in man, opens at once the whole of scripture to lucid
and consistent intelligibility. It is indeed the "key" to any true
grasp of the whole sense of that revered body of primeval literature. But the
instant the concept is shifted from man divine to a divine man in an
historical personage, dire confusion, entanglement in contradiction, ridiculous
inconsistency and the eeriest "historical" nonsense are thrust into
the structure. The concept of the Christos as the godly higher Self in man
meets the tangled riddle of the exegesis of the Bibles with complete
satisfaction of every intellectual demand, and no other concept does so. The
concept of Christ as a man immediately afflicts the entire exegetical
situation with hopeless sabotage. Used as the "key," it jams the lock
and opens nothing to the reasoning intelligence. But it does open something to
the unreasoning psychic and emotional aptitudes of less intelligent folk: the
hypnotic gullibility of religious piety and a pitiable slavery to religious
superstition. And the quantity of the tragedy wrought in the world by the
prevalence of these two psychological forces makes perhaps the most lugubrious
chapter in human history.
The concept of the Christ as "a
man," who ate, drank, slept, walked and spoke as any mortal, is beyond any
possibility of refutation the most fatuous ideation that ever found a place in
the effort to rationalize human religious experience. No less has it been at
the same time the most baneful influence in blocking the cultural enterprise of
grasping the central power and fullest unction of that experience. Here again
the truth of the situation runs in a direction exactly counter
3
to that commonly believed. Pious
orthodox opinion is wholly aligned to the idea that the historical Jesus is the
most positive assurance of the individual Christian’s salvation and the active
agent of its realization. This work ventures, doubtless for the first time in
religious discussion, to fly directly in the face of that presumption with the
claim that it is this very idea of the Christ as a historical person that has
stood as the most concrete obstacle in the way of that salvation! The whole
essay must be taken as the evidence advanced in support of that amazing
reversal of all accepted belief. The basis of this strong contention will be
the undeniable fact that the thesis of the historical Jesus has taken the mind
and aspiration of all devotees outside themselves to an alleged man of
4
trophe? Failure in religion’s
practical effort is certain to follow as long as a meaningless worship is paid
out to the divinity alleged to be embodied in one single historical savior,
while the principle of divine mind within the self is left totally
uncultivated. Granting some psychological virtue to the adoration of a
historical paragon, it is still admitted in all religious discussion that men
can be saved in the end only by their own righteousness. No world savior was ever
sent into the world to save men from the task of saving themselves. Ever
memorable and oft quoted are the lines of Angelus Silesius, Medieval mystic:
Though Christ a thousand times in
But not within thyself, thy soul
shall be forlorn;
The cross on
Unless within thyself it be set up
again.
If any actual vicarious atonement or
salvation were possible, the whole purpose for which souls from the celestial
empyrean migrate to earth to further their evolution would be thwarted. Each
soul must become the dynamo and citadel of its own strength, or there would be
inequity and chaos in the counsels of evolution. Life grants nothing to any
unit of being that it has not earned. To do so would be to introduce favoritism
and particularity into the universal economy. The importance of this argument
merits a fuller consideration, and additional treatment of it will enter the
study later on.
The enormous fatuity of the concept
of humanity’s Savior as a man must be examined in the light of a more
candid scrutiny than any to which it has heretofore been subjected. Indeed one
of the bases of quarrel with it is the very fact of its having been accepted
without either psychological or historical critique of a thoroughgoing kind.
The closer and more keenly one brings reason and data to bear upon the matter
the more clearly it is seen that the very vogue and sway of the idea has been
made possible only through the almost total default of the rational faculty and
its displacement by sheer unction of faith. It is perhaps the most notable
example and instance of the power of the psychological elements of mystical
pietism to override and paralyze the rational elements in religion. For at any
time in many centuries it needed only a half minute’s cool and steady facing of
the realities of the situation to bring to view in the sharpest of
5
outlines the utter irrationality of
the presupposition that the power able to redeem human weakness to godlike
status could be embodied and expressed, wielded and effectuated to its grand
purpose, in the person of a man. The sheer thought that the savior of
mankind from evolutionary undevelopment to perfection could be a man, or
a power, no matter how divine, lodged in the body of a man in history,
is such an anomaly, so out of line with all known natural process, that merely
to pose the idea to the mind and hold it steadfastly there in the light of all
its ancillary implications, is to see it for what it is--an utterly baseless
creation of distorted religious fantasy. Merely to face the thought that the
whole evolutionary advance of mankind across the gulf of undeveloped capacities
from animal through human to divine nature was alleged to be effectuated and
instrumentalized by the forces embodied in a single man at a given date in
history, is to see the notion in all the glaring baldness of its inherent
absurdity. The human mind can readily enough envisage as a modus consonant with
reality the elevation of humanity from brute to philosopher, from savagery to
Christhood, through the injection from without or the regeneration from within
of a light and power to change base selfishness to divine charity, and thus
redeem the race. But it can contemplate this process as operative only through
the sweep of an influence which pervades the mass of mankind, animating all
hearts and enlightening all minds, after the natural analogy of a little leaven
raising the whole lump. That is a methodology which the human mind can grasp
and accredit as harmonious with veritude. But that this vast regeneration of
the race should be implemented by and dependent upon the birth and existence of
a single historic individual, even through the inspiration of his resplendent
example, is a concept that grows more weird, crass and chimerical the longer it
is held in the focus of thought. It has in fact held its grip upon millions of
minds solely by virtue of the total dearth of intellectual candor and the
mental paralysis induced by rabid elements of emotional religiosity. It can not
for a moment bear the light of reason. It can live only in the dim twilight of
intellectual stultification wherein the clear outlines of the rational problem
can not be distinctly discerned.
There is indeed a natural revolt in
the character of all normal men and women against the thought of their
accepting salvation purchased for them by another, the more so if the price of
the ransom is for the
6
vicar pain and suffering. What
person of wholesome instincts wants to be saved by the sacrifice and oblation
of another free being? Who that has the slightest iota of moral integrity would
wish to live under the obligation of indebtedness for his evolutionary
redemption to the sacrifice of another? Mankind cherishes a natural sense of
the moral turpitude of taking what one has not won. It introduces whim into the
normal order wherein man looks confidently for the reign of law. It is
repugnant to man’s inherent sense of right. Vicarious salvation was one of the
items of theology that led Nietzsche to cry out his bitter denunciation of
Christianity as "slave morality." Not merely the superman, but any
man worthy of the name wants to face life and nature on their own terms and
with his own resources, and will hold in contempt the man or faith that accepts
the boon of salvation in the spirit of a craven. The purchase of man’s
redemption by the "shed blood of Christ," in the literal sense in
which it stands as a doctrine of Christianity, is indeed one of the heaviest
marks of Christianity’s doctrinal degradation. (Happily it can be made
rationally acceptable, as can all other doctrines, through a restoration of the
true esoteric significance.) The learned 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 gross teaching of an ersatz salvation of man, the
race’s restoration to its lost
7
All this irrational thesis was held
for centuries in spite of the total dearth of any logical answer to the difficulties
involved in the practical problem as to how the divinity historically embodied
in one person could become and remain effectual for the evolutionary
divinization of all the other children of humanity. Jesus might be in himself a
mighty reservoir of divine essence, a veritable dynamo of godly unction. But
how it was to be made available for all other men, how transferred from him to
a distribution amongst all others, by what transmission wires or channels it
was to pass from him into the lives of those "believing on him," on
what conditions it was to be received by some and denied to others, or what
pleas, prayers, sacrifices or cajolery were necessary to draw it forth from
him,--all these elements of the practical or factual operation of Jesus’ saving
grace to deify all men have never had an answer. And they can never have a
rational answer. The groundplan and framework of Christian theology has ever
had an artificiality that has rendered it a weird and fantastic thing in all
conscientious effort at rationale. 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. Through the force of the wholly unaccountable
magnanimity of the man Christ in sacrificing himself to save a reprobate
humanity, the minds of the countless millions of Christian devotees over the
centuries since his "death" may have been, as the hymn sings,
Lost in wonder, love and praise.
But it is even more certain that
they have been hopelessly lost in total incomprehension. Forced to swallow it
by the overwhelming combination of ecclesiastical authority and unreasoning
faith, they have yet been nearly choked by its unpalatability.
It is probably the opinion of
millions of votaries of the atoning blood of Christ the man, that his saving
grace has been made accessible to them, distributed to them, by his
still-living active presence and his personal attention to their lives
individually. Granting the continued
8
existence of his individual
personality after these two thousand years on some "spiritual" plane
of being assumedly in touch with earthly affairs, there must be faced the infinitely
complex problem of explaining how the consciousness of one man is able to give
attention to the multitudinous details in the lives of millions of mortals at
every moment of every day without cessation; how he is able to read the
conscious content of innumerable minds and hearts with particularity and
accuracy and adopt appropriate measures of spiritual strategy to answer the
spoken and unbroken prayers of all these; how, in short, he is able to be a
very present help in trouble in millions of complex situations all the time,
and act in relation to all of them with impeccable accuracy and unfailing
justice. Blind zealotry blots out this problem from the uncritical minds of the
masses and priestcraft is warily content to let the dangerous dog lie asleep.
It is not made the subject of debate. But if occasionally a hint of the dilemma
is ventured, such a minor obstacle to piety is swept lightly aside with the
ever-handy reminder to such intellectual temerity that with God all things are
possible, and with the only-begotten Son of God no less. Surely the almighty
hand of Supreme Deity could manage a trifling difficulty of the sort, and at
any rate
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform.
To minds submerged in the aura of
miracle and overborne by pious authority and sacerdotal glamor, all things in a
mysterious theology were made palatable. Jesus’ pronouncement that "thy
faith hath made thee whole" and his assurance that by faith we can move
mountains into the sea had paved the way for the triumphant march of religious
gullibility and the obscuration of reason. It is granted that we must have
faith where we do not yet have knowledge. What else can a dependent mortal
creature do but have faith in the beneficence of the universe? But a
universal Power that is itself an all-embracing intelligence would not ask its
creatures, who are destined to embody all degrees of that same intelligence, to
hold to any specific formulations of faith the substance of which contravenes
our reason and the regular courses of natural law. Our faith must rest upon and
be supported by the inviolability of law and not take its stand upon any
fantastic scheme that flouts what we do know and sets at odds all our reason-
9
ing faculties. With either flaming
zealotry or stolid indifference holding the critical faculty of the masses in
abeyance, and occasional outbreak of rational inquiry smitten down with
vengeful violence, the problem of how the man Jesus, dead ages ago, could still
be the divine guest in billions of human hearts all at once and all the time,
was held in leash.
Again, it is undoubtedly the thought
of hosts of minds adjusted to miraculous possibilities of many sorts that
Jesus’ still-potent spirit was detached from the limitations of his personality
or even his earthly mind and, continuing to float about in some form of a
ubiquitous presence like a permeating atmosphere, functions with a sort of
automatism like air rushing in, wherever there is a spiritual vacuum or
spiritual pressure. It is conceived that somehow that mind which St. Paul
adjures us to let "be in" us as it was also in Christ Jesus pervades
the world like a stratosphere and is there for us to register and lay hold of
after the fashion of tuning in spiritually with the proper wave-length. But how
the efficacy of such a vibrational force could be linked with and still
dependent upon the personal Jesus of history, is in no way apparent or
explainable. There is no necessary or factual connection. Divine consciousness
or grades or rates of it may indeed conceivably be about us, bathing us in the
universal aura of their supernal vibrations. But that any of them should have
derived their origin and their present presence and operation from a man in
history is again a matter that asks for our acceptance of a wholly irrational
theological dictum.
This general notion receives some
support from Jesus’ own assurance that when he left earth he would send the
Paraclete, the Comforter, who would guide us into all truth and be the
ever-solicitous monitor at our elbow. But all that this does is simply to
rename the ubiquitous influence. It transfers the generative power from the
personal Jesus to an impersonal principle. The new divine comforter must
distribute his consciousness over as much ground as the personal mind of the
risen Jesus would have to cover. Strangely enough one of the very phrases which
the Greek theologians of the ancient philosophical religion used to picture the
pervasive scope and functioning of a divine element in humanity was that
"the gods distribute divinity." But this was in reference to the
distribution of a seed fragment of God’s infinite and universal mind to every
creature according to its
10
rank in evolution. The presence of
potential divinity distributively in all levels of life is not a crotchety but
a quite reasonable and natural procedure. It is indeed one of the great
features in the early philosophies that gave form to basic Christianity. It is
readily conceivable that a type or degree of supernal mind or consciousness
does pervade the universe, an ethereal essence, so to say, of which evolving
entities such as man can partake through the development of a receptive
capacity in their own brain and nerve mechanism. To make God’s infinite
largesse available to man some such method of impartation on the one hand and
appropriation on the other must be conceived as provided by the Oversoul of the
world. But this is not the problem that is crucial to the tenability of the
idea of a historical Jesus carrying out the part assigned to him in theology.
He is there alleged to fulfill the function of saving millions of souls through
his individual agency both during his life and for thousands of years after his
death. If to substantiate the still operative power of Jesus Christ when he is
no longer living, recourse must be had to the hypostatization of his personal
mind as a universally pervasive cosmic atmosphere, the entire force of the
method of explanation goes to weaken still further the claim for his historic
personal existence and to strengthen that for his purely spiritual nature. It
is not conceivable that the mind of one personal human being could reach and
save billions of mortals. Therefore, to postulate a conceivable method by which
such a mind could administer salvation to myriads in all ages, that mind must
be released from any attachment to personality and characterized anew as a
cosmic mental emanation or diffusion of mental substance. This deduction from
the premises at once erases the personal Jesus from the picture of theology, if
not in his life, then certainly from the moment of his death. If to render his
mind operable for salvation its connection with his personality must be
severed, then its connection with any personality is seen to be a clearly
unnecessary, indeed impossible requirement. And this brings us face to face
with the final outcome of this argument, which is that that mind which was in
Christ Jesus would have existed, has existed and does exist, entirely
independently of the fact or the question of any man’s historical presence on
earth. For no more did Jesus originate that mind than does the radio mechanism
originate the sonata that it renders in your room. Any man can catch it, as
does the radio, from an omnipresent univer-
11
sal vibration, register it and give
it expression on this plane of being. The vibration-wave of the sonata is in
your room whether there is a radio present to reproduce it on the plane of your
senses or not. The Christ consciousness was present as a cosmic outflow of
divine thought energization, whether or not any man of requisite organic
sensitivity lived to become its tubes and amplifier. The best that can be done
for Jesus’ uniqueness in this purview is to assume that perhaps he was the
first man in history (if he lived) who was equal to making that register and
that expression. But such a claim is bizarre from the first instant. It would
have to rest on pure conjecture and assumption. And against it would be arrayed
a host of vital considerations, such as that research now discloses that all the
highest and truest sermons he allegedly preached to found a saving religion had
been uttered by sage men centuries before him. If his message was the first
release of the wisdom of supernal divine mind to humanity, it should have
towered in grandeur and beauty to immeasurable height above anything taught
antecedently. Organized ecclesiasticism has been bold enough for centuries to
flaunt this legend before its following. But the discovery of the Rosetta Stone
and the Behistun Rock has put an entirely new complexion on the study of
comparative religion, opening up whole vast areas of ancient literature from
which it is seen that Christianity itself drew the body of its material. The
disconcerting result of all this for the Christian position is that it definitely
refutes the claims as to Jesus’ founding the first true religion and, far to
the contrary, thrusts upon the apologists for these claims the difficult task
of defending this sole emissary of deity to earth against the charge of
wholesale literary plagiarism! If when he came to uplift humanity with a
shining spirituality never before dreamed of, the best he could do was to
repeat the sagas of early Greek, Chaldean, Persian, Hindu, Chinese and
especially Egyptian wisdom, on what does the claim for his supreme uniqueness
and matchless exaltation rest?
Then, of course, there is that other
predicament arising from the egregious claims of the Christian party, which,
had it ever been frankly faced by ecclesiasticism, would have left the
Occidental world in better situation. It is the matter of God’s leaving the
world prior to the year thirty-three or thereabouts without any chance to be
saved by appropriating the mind of Christ. That the mere opportunity for the
operation in humanity’s evolution of the saving principle of God’s
12
grace should have been held off until the birth of
a babe in
Late in time behold him come,
Offspring of the Virgin’s womb.
It is of course an absurd idea that
the road to human elevation was not opened until the man-Christ, Jesus, landed
on the planet at a late epoch in the race’s career. This is one of many twists
and quirks which Christian dogma has asked its votaries to accept, to the
dislocation of their rational mentality.
13
Chapter II
MYTH
TRUER THAN HISTORY
It would seem to remove the
discussion from the province of rational dialectic and throw it into the field
of abnormal and precarious psychic phenomenalism to introduce an argument that
has been frequently advanced by a number of people that is by no means
inconsiderable. It must, however, be given a place in the debate if only for
the reason that it arises from a special type of experience that appears to be
actual among a surprising number of people who are at any rate sincere in their
report and interpretation of it. It falls in a domain of psychology that has
for the most part been shunned by academic investigation, its phenomena being
commonly rated as abnormal, eccentric and unauthentic, categorized in fact as
mostly self-delusion or hallucination. It has lately received some open
countenance from scholastic authority and has been admitted to the field of
legitimate study under the name of parapsychology. It may be better recognized
under the designation of psychic phenomena. At any rate the phenomenon in
question has been presented by many persons in modern religious groups of
spiritistic character as a real experience of themselves or others testifying
to them, and such is the veridical and empirical nature of the occurrence that
for them it settles the entire debate categorically and summarily. The
arguments based on it sway the attitude of thousands on the theme of this work
and it therefore merits presentation and critique.
The point is advanced by mediums,
psychics, clairvoyants and sensitives, to the effect that they can testify
directly to the fact of Jesus’ historical existence because, forsooth, they
have seen him and talked with him, in inner vision! His personality is not a
matter of doubt or speculation, because he has appeared to them in his shining
form! They have seen him as
14
This phenomenal experience, commoner
than is generally supposed, must, however, be subjected to a critical scrutiny
that it apparently has not hitherto received. This is the more desirable
because these reports of the appearance of a radiant personage to the inner
sight of many people are both too voluminous and seem too sincerely founded to
be thrust aside with the cry of hallucination. As evidently veridical psychic
phenomena they prove an interesting theme in themselves. It seems to be
necessary to concede that visions of the sort are actually seen. The shining
apparition seems to these seers to be present in reality. Whatever it may truly
be and however to be explained, it is evidently actually seen. The point at
issue for our discussion is not the veritude of the experience or the veracity
of the psychics; but what the thing proves. The critique is not directed at the
fact, but at its interpretation. The position taken is that such apparitions
present no necessary or valid evidence for the existence of the Gospel Jesus in
The identity of the personage of
light in the radiant vision can not be other than a matter of presumption. Upon
asking any of those who have "seen Jesus" in their subjective world
how they have identified their spiritual visitant with the man of
Looking first at the latter, the
"varieties of religious experience" include a wide range of
phenomenalistic susceptibility. Old men have dreamed dreams and young men have
seen visions. Saints have had rapturous exaltations, seers have beheld
apocalypses and mystics have been wafted aloft in ecstasies. These experiences
have abounded in
15
great multiplicity, variety and
profusion--unless the record is one long train of fiction and falsity, delirium
and delusion. There is Joan d’Arc, there is Swedenborg, there is Madame Guyon
and a legion of others. Modern students of this side of psychology assert that
a thought is in reality a shaped figure in the mental ether; and assert that if
thousands of people hold the same picture of such a person as the Christ in
mind with great intensity and devotion for a continued period, the thought-form
will become reified, hypostatized or substantialized to the extent that it will
drift into the mental purview of psychic sensitives and be seen and mistaken
for a veridical appearance. Modern psychology might catalogue it as an entification
of the unconscious or subconscious object of much devotion. There are strange
and uncanny possibilities in nature’s bag of tricks. There are denizens in more
worlds than the solid physical. It seems evident that many people have seen a
personage of luminous tenuousness in their subjective world. But all proof is
wanting that their testimony as to the identity of the apparition has any
validity.
There is no field in which people
generally are more gullible than in that of religion. Nowhere else are the bars
of the critical judgment so quickly and completely let down for the entry of
superstition, the supernatural, miracle, magic and marvel. Indeed no Christly
claimant would be accredited unless he could do "mighty works" to awe
the multitudes. If he can not heal the sick and raise the dead he is no Christ.
But the impotence to which these tendencies reduce the reasoning faculty in
devotees is perhaps nowhere better seen than in the situation here portrayed.
These psychics testify unhesitatingly and with total conviction that the figure
of light they have seen is the still-living Jesus of Nazareth, without a
moment’s pause to reflect that no one can identify a figure seen now with
another person never seen at all! Identification can function only on the basis
of previous knowledge or acquaintance. No one can identify the figure seen in a
vision with the historical Jesus. The assumption that they can do so is
ridiculous. Logic rules it out. Their claim that the figure is that of Jesus is
based on pious assumption and can be nothing but sheer guess. The eyes can not
identify the appearance of a person unless the eyes have seen him before, or
his photograph or likeness. The figure seen matches the popularly conceived
appearance of Jesus, and Jesus is the only historical person they can think to
call it.
16
The claim that the apparition
resembles the pictures of Jesus in books and prints is the weakest item in the
"identification." In fact it reduces the entire claim to blank folly.
In spite of gratuitous assertions of the existence of portraits of the
Galilean, assuredly there has never been an authentic picture of the man, even
if he lived. How can the apparitional Jesus look like his portraits when there
were no portraits? If even in hallucination the visionary Jesus does resemble
the conventional portrayals, we may have before us here an interesting
psychological phenomenon. For the fact would seem to lend some support to the
"occult" theory that the general communal thought-picture of Jesus,
based on the customary portraits seen for centuries, has actually entified a
spiritual thought-formation of the man in the image of his published
likenesses. The allegation of pictorial resemblance is final proof of the
purely subjective character of the visions and their inadmissibility as
testimony in the case. What they give evidence of is some extraordinary
capacities of the human psyche, not remote past history. The proof of
connection between present subjective event in these cases and past objective
event is totally wanting. The phenomena manifest in this realm are far too
uncertain, undependable, even dangerous, for the practical uses of life. As a
final observation on the point, one is permitted to express a robust doubt
whether, if the living spiritual counterpart of some other ancient personage,
unknown and unpictured through the centuries, should present itself before the
inner gaze of these psychics, they would have any ability or means of
identifying the specter. Could they identify, say, Apollonius of Tyana?
There is, however, another
consideration that falls within the realm of psychology which has far more
direct pertinence to the great question. The inquiry faces the task of
evaluating the psychological influence and spiritual or cultural
serviceableness of the idea of the personal Jesus as against the conception
that makes "him" to be a high type of universal consciousness or
principle. The defense of the historical point of view invariably lays vast
store upon the claim that any vital religion, at any rate Christianity, could
never have generated effective psychological dynamism among millions of
followers if based only upon the characterization of the Christos as sheer
principle. It required the living Jesus to generate in the Christian movement
the driving power that it has become. Jesus must have lived, is the
argu-
17
ment, if only because such a life in
actuality was necessary to give the religion based on it just that vital
psychological reinforcement that it has manifested. He must have lived because
it can be shown that it was most eminently desirable, from a psychological
point of view, that he should have lived. The conception of Christ as principle
could never have developed enough dynamic force or fervor to have enabled
Christianity, so to say, to effectuate itself.
It must be stated that the outcome
of this phase of the argument can have no direct evidential bearing upon the
question of the historicity of the Christ. To prove that his existence was
highly desirable does not prove that it was a fact. But the point is given a
quite extraordinary importance in the debate, and this not without reason. It
strikes close to the central nerve of the whole Christian system. That system
bases its unique efficacy upon the claim that it alone of religions offers to
believers a living God. The only time God ever came to earth in person, he
outlined for humanity its true religion, the Christian. By many people this
point of the psychological power of the historical Christ is maneuvered into
the place of central importance in the whole discussion. They urge the claim
that the Christ was sent into personal embodiment for the express purpose of
providing mankind with one historical example of divine perfection, and assert
that the whole argument stands or falls with the question of the psychological
value of his example. Such an example was necessary to effectuate the religious
salvation of the world. Jesus must have lived because such an ensampler was a
psychological necessity. God had to send his Son in answer to this inherent
need. It would be unthinkable that such a need would not have been
providentially met. Therefore Jesus did live. The broad prevalence and strength
of this position calls for an exhaustive critique.
It can be conceded at the outset
that in the effort of a divine hierarchy of overlords to humanize and
eventually divinize an animal-born race, the advantage of the employment of a
living example would be evident. God or his hierarchical agents, archangels,
demi-gods, heroes, divine men, could not but be fully aware of the powerful
force and virtue of a concrete example of perfection set before the eyes of
mankind. It would both quicken and stabilize the general human inclination to
strive after the ideal. It would give solid and constructive form to that
aspiration by focusing its drive upon a spe-
18
cific set of ideal characteristics
embodied and manifested in the exemplar. It would thus prevent the waste of
infinite quantities of devotional force spent in direction toward ill-defined
goals. The great divine man would stand before the world and lure all men unto
him by the attractive power of his shining beauty. No other impartation of
inspiration from God to man could make its salutary influence so effectively
fruitful of constant good stimulus. A divine model of perfection would uplift
the world through the magnetically moving force of his example. The gods must
know that humanity is psychologically set and disposed to ape a paragon. The
dynamic moral power of an embodied ideal is ever great. This psychological
disposition well prepared the stage for the presentation to the world of its
ideal hero, the Christos.
The gods did know that man would
ape the divine paragon, and they did present the hero, the great sunlit figure
of Christos, in every religion of antiquity.
With the keenest incisiveness it
must be contended, as perhaps the prime spiritual motive of this study, that
the argument based on the psychological beneficence of a divine ensampler for
the human race falls out in favor of the non-historicity, and not, as almost
unanimously believed, of the historicity. This astounding assertion must be
vindicated against the general mass of contrary opinion.
If all other things were equal,
naturally the impressive force of an ideal of perfection embodied in a living
man would be conceded to be more effective for character in the lives of
devotees than would the same paragon depicted only in the figure of a drama. A
life lived on the same terms as our own would emotionally impress all mortals
more powerfully than would any fictional representation. But all other things
are not equal in the case of the Christ. There are elements in the theological
situation environing the figure of the Gospel Jesus that make the difference
between the two quite abysmal.
The first great divergence is in the
fact that 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. He is the only embodiment of the Father’s glory and cosmic presence
ever manifested in human form. He is totally unique and lonely. No man can
match his perfection.
This fact of his solitary uniqueness
at once destroys whatever psy-
19
chological value his incarnation in
a man of flesh might otherwise have. It defeats the very purpose for which an
ensampler is designed--the effective working of the lure of his perfection
under the force of the assurance that by striving the aspirant may achieve
identity or equality with the ideal one. If it is published beforehand that the
worshipped Personage is the unattainable and forever unapproachable Ideal, the
springs of devotion and zeal are dried up at their very source. Why strive, why
aspire, why copy, if it is to be all in vain? The glistening paragon becomes
only a romantic ideal, the more radiant and bright-hued because of its eternal
remoteness and inaccessibility. It is placed there only for mortals to gaze and
gape at in awe and marvel. But it is rendered useless for the very thing
claimed as the strength of the argument from psychology, the inspirational
power of the life lived to be a moving example for us. The manipulators of the
psychological factors in the ecclesiastical enterprise, in straining to assure
the Christly figure of perennial reverence and worship of the romantic sort by
placing him on an inimitable level of perfection and uniqueness, unwittingly
sacrificed the very element in the psychological situation that it was most
ardently hoped to gain by the procedure. To keep him secure in his lofty place
of adoration they weakened the force of his ability to stimulate emulation. He
is the stainless One, incapable of sin; men are doomed sinners, who must in
craven fashion plead with him for salvation from innate degeneracy. Thus the
luminous picture of the mighty paragon has not worked out, and can not work
out, as a triumphant force designed to elevate character by the cogency of its
living reality. It has in fact operated directly to defeat that effect. It has
left men facing a hopeless effort and turning from resolute zeal for attainment
to sunken morbidity expressed in the conventional theological ideas of sin and
its dog, remorse. Before the Ideal the eyes of sinning man have been lowered to
the ground with sense of unworthiness and self-depreciation; they have not been
lifted up to face the revealed divinity as the possibility of man’s own
accomplishment. Before the figure of the man-Christ man has made himself
abject, groveling in unmanly beggarliness before the unbearable glory of the One
who stands clothed in unattainable majesty.
The psychological influence of this
only-begotten manifestation is further decisively emasculated by the
accompanying theological doc-
20
trine that this one epiphany of
God’s nature was not a man of our own earthly evolution, but came directly from
the hand of supreme Deity, a product of divine fiat from another world. Though
frequently emphasis is laid upon his community of nature with us, still he is
exotic, a transplantation from the empyrean. He did not need to go through the
long evolutionary gateway of our humanity, but was already a citizen of the
cosmos, a dweller with God before the worlds were, existent before Abraham was.
Though so high, he yet condescended, abased himself, to become for a generation
one among us, sharing our immature nature without yielding to its seductions.
He had not come up the long road of development from unicell or moneron to man,
but came down from the skies full-panoplied in cosmic resplendence, to lay for
the time being his glory mildly by, as the Christmas hymn has it. His coming
was not an act of common brotherhood of a creature kindred with us, but a
condescension and a gratuity, arbitrary in cosmic counsels and unrelated to
natural contingency. He was a pure gift from the Gods. The Father’s whim and
his own munificent spirit of self-sacrifice brought him here. The merit was
his; ours the unmerited benefit. So again the alleged great psychological
efficacy of his exemplary life is annulled by the strangeness and vast remoteness
of his nature from our own. He is no brother but a distant ambassador who
deigns to visit us for a season and labor with us, but can not abide with us
forever. He must in a moment return to the celestial palace, sending a
substitute to remind us of his one charming sojourn with us.
But the crux of the debate on the
psychological efficacy of a paragon is not reached until the matter is
approached from the side of the great question of the relative potency of two
forces, one operative from without the subject, the other from within. This
crucial point of discussion must be given thorough treatment. Though it is not
critical or decisive for the question of Christ historicity, it looms as
perhaps the most portentous phase of the entire survey. It is not too sweeping
an assertion to aver that the whole psychological beneficence of religion
stands or falls with the outcome of the discussion of the historicity of the
Messiah. It stands if the world savior be proven an element, a divine leaven,
within the soul and conscience of all humanity. It falls if he be reduced to
the futile stature of a man in history. For it is the contention of this study
that the moral effect
21
upon general humanity of being
taught to look for salvation to a savior in the person of a historical man is
inherently and inevitably degrading to the immanent divinity of man. Beyond
doubt this strong asseveration will be violently disputed. It will be contended
that it runs counter to every obvious envisagement in the situation.
Nevertheless it is urged here that these alleged obvious implications seem
obvious only in consequence of many centuries of inculcation of a false view
which has overridden and subjugated open minds, and that they would lose their
obviousness if they could be considered in the light of pure reason and apart
from ingrained habitudes of pious assumption. Had the opposite view been
sanctified by such age-long approbation it, rather than the first, would carry
the weight of obvious rectitude with it. For, of the two possibilities, surely
the method of human salvation that would instinctively at first sight commend
itself as the obviously more natural one would be that which places the agency
of universal salvation from evolutionary dereliction in a power lodged within
all men, as against an extraneous and uncertain influence somehow, but in
no understandable way, shed upon us under certain peculiar conditions by one
person in history. Obviousness is obviously with the method of a general
distribution of a divine spirit among all men to act as a leaven of
righteousness and self-transformation, and it is certainly less clearly with a
method that makes all men dependent upon the unaccountable self-immolation of
one only-begotten Son of God. The one is in consonance with man’s every normal
instinct of natural procedure; the other strains at blind faith to swallow its
artificially bizarre and fantastic features. The latter view, be it averred,
has only won its place in the acceptance of millions of purblind devotees
through the stultification of their reason by the ceaseless exploitation of the
forces of religious faith. The irrational flaunting of the Biblical text
"for with God all things are possible" has further tended to keep the
door open to the influx into less critical minds of every conceivable absurdity
in the theological field. The introduction of boundless irrationality in
doctrinism was initially made when in the third and fourth centuries the
esoteric interpretation of scripture yielded to the frightful debasement of exoteric
literalism. The whale’s swallowing of Jonah was no more difficult for piety
than the ecclesiastical swallowing of the Jonah allegory and all its brother
myths in their literal form. The tragedy of its successful accomplish-
22
ment--as far as it has been
successful--has lain in the necessary preliminary derationalization and
paralysis of millions of simple minds before the natural gagging and choking
could be overcome. Blind faith and the peculiar weakness of the human mind in
face of the alleged supernatural were the instruments of the tragic
intellectual dupery. The noble scriptures were intended to gain and hold the
perennial reverence of all intelligent minds; they were never designed to
enslave minds with the fatal fascination of a fetish.
Once the historical status was
assigned to the Christ principle the words, "look to Jesus, the author and
finisher of our faith," have exercised a damaging sway over countless
minds. To those who knew that Jesus, esoterically comprehended, was the
dramatic type-figure of the divinity within us, the words carried not fatality
but uplift and inspiration. The difference in the two cases clearly limns the
difference in the psychological character of the two influences. This work
advances the proposition that it is psychologically hazardous at any time for
people to place their divinity in a person or locale outside themselves. To do
so involves the inevitable repercussion on average minds that their salvation
is to be vicariously won. The disastrous consequence of this reaction must in
the end be the enervation and atrophy of spiritual effort and initiative on the
part of the individual to win his own redemption. The effect of the doctrine of
salvation through the intercession of the Son of God--a salvation which the
doctrine implies we had in no wise ourselves earned--could not be, as claimed,
an intensification of the personal effort at righteousness. The very words of
scripture were to the effect that man’s righteousness in the sight of God is as
filthy rags. Every presupposition of the doctrine as presented emphasized the
uselessness of effort and the casting of our burden upon Jesus’ shoulders.
"What a friend we have in Jesus!" has been sung in full-throated
unctuousness. His own invitation to the weary and heavy-laden to come unto him
and find rest has had an all-too-ready response in the literal sense. Taken
wrongly these words have gone far to impair the natural sturdiness of spiritual
character in millions. By a psychology that was hardly subtle, but simple and
direct, they militated to turn the conscientious resolution of the individual
away from the actual cultus of his own immanent deity in thought, word and
deed, while he pursued the chimera of vicarious salvation through pleading with
his personal Redeemer. He
23
was told that the more abjectly he
confessed his own folly and failure, the more effective would be his plea in
the ears of the compassionate Savior of men. In looking to Jesus in a man of
flesh the devotee neglected the indwelling Jesus, and would inevitably do so in
the exact ratio of his ignorance and his gullibility.
This is a simple proposition and is
quite self-evident. It is the law of nature that an organism or a function not
used atrophies. Man has in a lifetime only a given quantity of psychic energy.
If he expends it in one direction, the possibility of expending it in another
is diminished by so much. The only Christos that is available for him is that
hidden divine love within him. If he wastes his soul-force in straining to
induce an exterior personage to intervene in his evolutionary effort on his
behalf, he loses by so much the fleeting opportunity to cultivate his
indwelling guest. It is necessary to put this with categorical cogency, because
it will be brushed aside as inconsequential. It is close to being the crux of
the entire problem under discussion. A man can not at one and the same time
serve two masters, the one within and the other without. Neither can he reap
the fruit of an ardent cultivation of his potential divinity while pouring out
all his psychic ardor upon the person of a Galilean peasant.
Not only will it be said that this
can be done, but it will be claimed in addition that the adoration of the
Judaean carpenter is itself the prime stimulus and incentive to the end of
one’s inner spiritual culture. This brings us back to the question of the
relative psychological power of a living or of a mythical and dramatic Christ.
The great cry of the proponents of the historicity is that the psychological
power of a living historical example must surely be greater and more beneficent
than that of a purely dramatic figure. History, it is urged, is real, whereas a
myth is fictional. This debate is of critical importance, because if the
Christos of the Bible was not a person of flesh, he becomes, as would be said,
nothing but a character of pure fiction. He is a myth. And many books have been
written to prove that he is only a myth. How, it will be asked in
vigorous spirit, can a mythical figure be presumed to exert as strong a psychological
force upon the world as a Jesus in real life? As hinted briefly before, the
unique strength of the position of Christianity is claimed to lie in this one
item of the reality of Jesus’ living demonstration or epiphany of God in
humanity. It holds up to its following the assurance of ultimate victory based
on the
24
one divine fait accompli in
history. Jesus was a living example, and not a mere theological promise
unaccompanied by accomplishment. Jesus’ life is the one solid rock of veritude
upon which mortal man can build his hopes. What is a myth compared with this?
This is the argumentative situation
as viewed from the point of naïve exoteric simplicity. It is not, however, the
view revealed to deeper esoteric reflection. Esotericism understands something
about the myth that is quite unknown to the uninitiated general mind. The
ancient sages knew something concerning the myth that the modern mind has never
grasped. It can now be said with certitude that the whole genius of religious
and philosophical culture escaped the grasp of Occidental civilization as a
result of the third-century loss of this certain understanding of the nature
and utility of the myth. It is time, after centuries of stupid nescience, that
modern ignorance of a vital matter be enlightened. Enlightenment on this detail
may yet save religion and humanitarian culture, menaced dangerously by our
blind failure to concentrate upon the one cultus of a higher selfhood in man
that alone can redeem the world from immersion in the lower levels of
consciousness and motivation.
What was known of old, and must now
be proclaimed anew with clarion blast, is that the myth, as employed by ancient
illuminati in Biblical scripture, is not fiction, but the truest of all
history! So far from being fiction in the sense of a story that never happened
and is therefore false to fact, it is the only story that is completely and
wholly true! The myth is the only true narrative of the reality of human
experience. It is the only ultimately true history ever written. It is a
picture and portrayal of the only veridical history ever lived. All other
so-called history, the record of people’s acts and movements, buildings and
destructions, marchings and settlings, is less truly history than the myth! The
latter is the realest of history, as it is the account of the actual experience
of life in evolution. Real as history is, it is finally less true than
the myth. The myth is always and forever true; actual history is never more
than an imperfect approximation to the truth of life. Even as a perfectly
faithful record of what actually happened, book history is far from being true.
This is an admission so commonplace that every courtroom is on guard against
the testimony of witnesses because of the incapacity of the human senses in
making an impeccable record of event. No history book ever contained a
precisely
25
true account of occurrence. No two
historians ever wrote identical narratives of a war or a nation’s life. The
writing of actual history has never been other than the more or less careful
exercise of the chronicler’s constructive imagination.
On the other hand the myth is, as
nearly as the highest human-divine genius can construct it, a clear picture of
the more real import of life itself. It is possible for conscious beings such
as men to live through actual events of history and yet largely, at times
completely, miss the reality, in a profounder philosophical sense, of the very
experience they undergo. What history thus misses the myth expresses. History
is never more than a partial slap-stick comic or heavy tragic flirtation with
the deep realities; the myth is a clear delineation of them. The myth is no
more a fiction than a good photograph is a fiction. It is a true picture. In
the hands of semi-divine mythicists of old it was a splendid photograph of
something that is of far greater utility to men whose divine destiny entails a
struggle for spiritual culture than any uncertain chronicle of man’s tawdry
fights and scrambles could ever be. It was made to be a glowing pictograph of
those basic archai, those eternal principles of truth, those immutable
laws of growth and structure which are the everlasting essence of all being. So
the myth is ever truer than history. It is a portrayal of the meaning and
structure of all history. It pictures and preserves forever for the grasp of
unfolding divine consciousness in man that golden light of true realization
which alone elevates his historical experience above animal sensuousness and
vegetative existence.
With this revised comprehension of
the myth it is now possible to approach with better qualification for a
successful resolution of difficulties the matter of the historicity and the
psychological potency of the central figure in the early Christian and all
antecedent systems. That central figure was in the myths and in the religious
dramas of most ancient nations for thousands of years B.C. It stood there drawn
and limned by the astutest dramatic genius the race has ever produced, to be
the perennial reminder to all men of all religions of their own divine
endowment, and to serve as dynamic instruction in the methods of attaining its
progressive evolution in and through history.
In the counsels of the Sages, who
were men of our own humanity graduated in earlier cycles to the place of
mastership and perfected knowledge of the whole earthly evolution--
26
perfect"--the problem facing
them in their task of giving to early humanity compendia of truth and wisdom
that should guide the race through the course of self-controlled unfoldment was
one that called for a determination of the best practical method of both
holding before man the ideal of all his striving and stimulating his steady
zeal to pursue it. It is not known now as it was in ancient days that a grade
and council of perfected men, risen through humanity to divinity, stood in the
relation of tutors and teachers to infant humanity, and prescribed codes of
morals, religion, philosophy, law, mythology, literature and art, as well as
mathematics, science and physics, not to forget agriculture, for the beginnings
in civilization and culture. These are the authors of the great sacred books of
antiquity, the instructors in pyramid building, the founders of human progress.
Their graduate status at once explains the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon
that has bewildered and confounded the savants of modern knowledge,--how it was
that races that were still in the semi-barbaric stage already held in their
possession tomes of the most exalted wisdom and philosophical insight, as well
as moral purity, which their own undeveloped mentality could not have produced.
These men, both by evolutionary
selection and by humanitarian choice on their own part, performed the function
of formulating the cultural heritage of the human race, particularly in the
domain of religion and philosophy. One of the greatest of the problems
confronting them in their sublime work was the choice of method by which
mankind could be most deeply impressed with the sublimity of the divine goal toward
which the race was struggling and most intelligently spurred on to attain it.
The plan adopted by the counsels of the most august wisdom was based on the
decision to place before the world systems of religion, in which the outline of
the drama of life, the place of the world in the cosmos, the place of man in
the hierarchy of being, the moral conflict leading to evolution, and the
eventual deification of humanity at the "end of the age" or cycle,
should be clearly set forth for the behoof of all generations. In order that
there should be no possibility of man’s missing the mark, or failing to
understand exactly the goal of perfection to which his whole incarnational
series was destined to lift him, the Sages resorted to the measure of placing
at the very heart of every religious system an ideal personage who should
typify and personify man himself, in his dual nature as human and divine,
27
struggling forward to the
consummation of his high glory. This central character embodied the divine
element that was to deify mankind, and the drama depicted the final victory of
the god within over the lower forces in the human compound. The figure was of
course that of the Christos, who in his last triumph is clothed in robes of
solar light, to indicate that the deity within man is of kindred essence with
the sun and that as man progresses toward his final exaltation in glory his
garments shall be white as the light and his righteousness shall cause him to
shine like the sun in the kingdom of his Father. In this glorious character men
could see pictured their history, their destiny and their eventual conversion
into angels of light. This was the model, the archetype, the paragon of
excellence decided upon by the council of perfected men to be made central in
every religion given to the early nations, as their chosen means of most
cogently impressing humanity’s millions through the ages to strive after the
shining ideal of divinity. In order that historical man could never forget that
ideal or drift away from it, the Sages incorporated in every religion this very
copy and replica of the man become God, so that it needed only for men to look
at the model to see the image of their own life and their apotheosization. If
mankind needed to be stimulated to the good life by the force of a divine
ensampler, the Sages saw to it that the great spiritual allurement was
provided. The radiant figure of the Sun-God, man himself divinized, stood at
the heart of every old religion. High wisdom comprehended that mortal men
needed to have a picture of their own glorious goal set before their eyes. The
picture was given. The psychological power of a paragon to lure impressionable
mankind was recognized and the paragon supplied. The whole history of man was
diagrammed and with consummate genius depicted in a great drama, with the
Sun-God always the central and significant character. It is known that the
features and play of the drama were of such impressiveness and moving power
that no device of human conception could have transcended the purificatory, or
as the Greeks called it, the cathartic moral efficacy of this representation.
It was a veritable baptism of the spectator and candidate in transfiguring
elevation of consciousness.
It will presumably still be urged
that if these exalted personages possessed the wisdom attributed to them they
must have known that the example of one living Christ on earth would be
more effective for
28
salutary influence than any number
of dramatic figures. At least two considerations weighed against their holding
any such opinion or acting upon it. They realized for one thing that merely to
present to the world one living example of perfect humanity would defeat
the very psychology they aimed at. It would have been pointless and superfluous
in a world that was to be taught that the rough road of evolution would bring
every man to Christhood. Again they knew that it would be both confusing and
disconcerting to intelligent people everywhere to proclaim the advent of one
perfected soul in unique isolation, when it was already the general
knowledge of instructed men in early days that more than one of humanity’s
chain had reached the mark of the high calling of God in the Christos, that a
number would attain it in every age, and that all men would eventually do so. The
proclamation and the production of one only example of accomplished
divinization would have been meaningless and lacking in significant virtue in a
world that was intended to be rightly instructed on fundamental verities. If
there were but one living paragon, only one generation would see him, and if he
was an obscure person like the Galilean, only a few hundred persons would know
of him through personal contact. The sheer difficulty of having his name, fame
and life and teaching advertised to the rest of humanity would have to be
managed against real obstacles. If he himself proclaimed his unique divinity,
how could he make ignorant, blind humanity accept him? His heralding by angels
and portents might readily fall afoul of the general ancient vogue of such
things, and pass unheeded.
It was not perhaps even considered
for a moment that a purely typical ideal figure would serve to inspire men less
than a living example, because every man, it was known, became a living example
in the proportion in which he embodied the ideal in his life and person.
Nothing was thus to be gained by a historical example that could not be better
won by the ideal type impersonation. There was no point in producing one living
paragon to prove to the world that man could become divine, when it was
already known that all men would in due time become divine. All mortals, as
they became intelligent, knew that they had the struggle of evolution before
them and that perseverance would land them at the gates of godlikeness. What
they needed was the vivid dramatization of the quality and character of that
perfection toward which they were to aspire. These were clearly and
impressively
29
outlined in the dramatic type
figure. The essential ingredients for compounding the most efficacious virtue
in an ensampler were all present in this situation. Nothing was lacking that a
living man-Christ could have supplied. The prime element was the knowledge that
every man must be his own savior. This item of philosophical truth being known,
the dramatic model possessed more sanely compelling force than a living
personation. The knowledge of universal salvation robbed the latter of any
advantage over the other. An embodied Christ would have been an impressive
spectacle, but not overwhelmingly or inordinately so, for the knowledge that
men were advancing into the highest stages of purity and illumination
everywhere at all times deprived the fact of its uniqueness. One perfected man
would not have been one alone, but one among many.
It is sharply to be recognized that
the mere presumption of superior psychological advantage in a living type
figure became possible only with the decay of knowledge that man’s upward
progress is the work of the individual himself in conjunction with nature, and
the consequent entry of the vicarious concept through the corruption of ancient
divine philosophy. In the end the orthodox presupposition that human salvation
demanded the driving force of a personal God in the flesh, so far from proving
its natural correctness, demonstrates only that the world’s keenness of
philosophical insight had been blunted to the degree that a totally
insupportable thesis could be imposed upon the millions without a chance for
successful repudiation.
The momentous task of providing
nations and peoples with a divine model and exemplar was accomplished by the
sagacious tutors of the race through the institution of a ritual drama designed
and formulated to produce the most beneficent effect. It was adopted as the
method that most readily met the terms of natural expediency and
practicability. It would minister in full to the psychological needs of a race
endowed and constituted as mankind was. With transcendent genius the Sages
formulated the systems of myths, allegories, fables, parables, numerological structures
and astrological pictographs such as the zodiac and the planispheres or
uranographs to supplement the central ceremonial drama. The whole structure
was, however, fabricated with such esoteric subtlety that, the keys once lost,
the system has defied the best of medieval and modern acumen to recapture its
cryptic import. The divinity in man being a portion of the ineffable glory of
30
the sun, and necessarily therefore
typified by it, the great scenic portrayal was built upon the solar allegory,
and the successive phases of man’s divinization were enacted around the solar
year in accordance with the significance of the orb’s monthly and seasonal
positions. Ancient religion was for this reason called solar religion or
"sun-worship."
31
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
Treated cursorily already, the
argument that for full inspirational suggestiveness humans must have their
faith fortified by the assurance that one man at least actually did attain to
Christhood and manifest the ideal of perfection, must receive somewhat fuller
scrutiny. Its force was already weakened by the consideration that the one character
in history alleged to have furnished mortals this assurance was not a man of
our own evolution, and had not attained his divinity over the same pathway that
we must tread, but was an immaculate emissary from
32
inaccessible heavens, a guest from
remote empyreans. It must be accentuated that this situation introduces into
the picture the negative depressing influence of man’s realization of his own
hopeless inferiority, the impossibility of his stepping up beside the Christ.
In striking contrast to this the method adopted by the Sages obviated any such
disastrous negativism. It carried with it the invincible certainty of
attainment for every man. There was never a question of achievement, but only
of effort, method and perseverance. The very manner of the presentation of the
ideal figure carried the presupposition of final victory to the aspirant. The
type was exhibited on no other grounds than that it was the picture of what could
be achieved by all. Obviously there could be no sense or reason in holding before
all men in all religions the type of what they could not attain.
Attainment was an inevitable implication of the representation from the outset.
One man’s superb attainment could only add evidence to what was already known.
But the proclamation that only one man had ever reached the goal would have
thrown dismay into minds long assured of the high destiny of all. Heraclitus’
discerning observation that "man’s genius is a deity" had placed a
god in potentiality deep within the heart of every life, and the envisaged
prospect of divinization was simply a long growth of latent into active powers
and faculties, a process that could be in no wise affected by the birth of any
exceptional personage. That the eventual deification of all humanity should be
considered to depend upon such a birth would have been received in ancient
times with bewilderment and total incomprehension. When the true nature and
terms of the problem of human spiritual advancement were succinctly understood,
there was no way in which the
It will be seen that the entire
argument for the historicity on the grounds of its superior psychological
influence collapses finally under the force of the admission, which must be
made by all parties, that even if Jesus of Nazareth lived and is the Vicar of
God on earth, every man must work out his own salvation on exactly the same
terms as though he had not existed! Since Jesus can not come to any man and
take his evolutionary problem off his shoulders and effect his salvation for
him, the only psychological value left to the fact of the historicity is
reduced to the mere force of a sort of hero-worship. The
33
Jesus life and character, his
sufferings and virtues, can stimulate devotion and desire to emulate. His lofty
moral preachment sets a norm for ideal human attainment. The very contemplation
of his pure life and radiant divinity inspires an answering nobility in
millions of lives.
The power of a noble example, the
more especially one enhanced in beauty by centuries of pious glorification, is
not questioned. But the same beauty and indeed the same lofty spiritual
preachment was afforded imitative devotion in the case of the sun-god figure.
In the end the sublime figure of the type character was there purely for
inspirational incentive, standing free from any suggestion of vicarious
salvation for the adorer. It moved to noble effort, but in not the least hint
did it delude the worshipper with the fatuous notion that any power save his
own consecrated struggle could win his salvation for him. The greater the
claimed psychological power of the historical Jesus over the devotee, the
greater the tragedy of delusion thus wrought upon millions, since this
stimulating influence has never been detached from the concomitant imputations
of vicariousness inseparably linked with it in Christian theology. Thus the
greater part of the alleged beneficent force of the living example in the end
evaporates into pure delusion not unattended with disastrous consequences.
A few sentences in the preceding
chapter alluded to a situation brought to light by the study of Comparative
Religion and Mythology which adds further vast weight to the probability that
the whole enormous body of psychological prestige exerted by the belief in the
historical Jesus is grounded on a chimera and not on a fact. The events in the
alleged life of Jesus are pushed closer and closer to the point of myth by the
astounding fact that, as the ever-clearer implications of these studies show,
they are seen to match with nearly perfect fidelity the similar cycles of
purely allegorical "events" in the dramatic and mythic
representations of some sixteen or more--indeed probably fifty or more--earlier
type figures recorded in ancient sacred Bibles of the nations. It is certainly
to be regarded as more than passing strange that when the only-begotten Son of
God did descend to earth to implant the genius of the one true religion to save
mankind, his life only copied or matched in great detail the dramatized
typal characters or sun-gods of antecedent religions. And the earlier
figures whose careers he repeated were definitely non-historical or at best
legendarily semi-
34
historical, such as Zoroaster,
Orpheus and Hermes. The Christians of the third and fourth centuries were
plagued to distraction by the recurrent appearance of evidence that revealed
the disconcerting identity of the Gospel narrative in many places with
incidents in the "lives" of Horus, Izdubar, Mithra, Sabazius, Adonis,
Witoba, Hercules, Marduk, Krishna, Buddha and other divine messengers to early
nations. They answered the challenge of this situation with the desperate
allegation that the similarity was the work of the devil! The findings of
comparative religion and mythology constitute at this epoch a far more deadly
challenge than they did in the third century, for there is the massive body of
the Egyptian religious literature to increase the mountain of identities
between Christian and antecedent pagan gospels and there is less of
Christian hypnotism to overcome now than at the earlier date. In more
formidable form than ever before the Christian proponents must face the open
implications of the query that springs to mind out of these comparative
religion discoveries, 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! So far
from being the climax and grand consummation of a series of ever fuller
revelations, his advent was rather an anti-climax. The enlightened and
emancipated study of comparative religion, vitally reinforced by the discovery
of the Rosetta Stone, bids fair to become a veritable Nemesis to the exorbitant
claims of Christianity. It was these momentous disclosures of identity in the
material of Christian and pagan literature that gave impetus to the present
undertaking, provided the data for proof and lent overwhelming warrant to all
the major conclusions to be reached. And it is this body of evidence that
sweeps in with crushing force to devastate every one of the arguments from
psychology that have been considered. In its totality it constitutes a bulwark
of strength on the side of the non-historicity that must be rated virtually
inexpugnable.
It can now be stated with little
chance of refutation that the Gospel "life" of Jesus had been
written, in substance, for five thousand years before he came. The record is in
35
cient 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. What indeed becomes of the grandiose message he brought and the
shining light of deific perfection that he flashed on the world, if both were
already here long before he came?
There remains another spectacular
aspect of the psychological problem to be dealt with, not now of the influence
of the divine personal advent, but this time having to do with the
psychological phases connected with the sheer fact of how the world could
recognize the Christ in Jesus or any other embodiment. How could he be known
and identified on the historical arena? The amount of mental ineptitude
displayed by votaries with minds drugged into doltishness by the overweening
power of "faith" and literalism is everywhere great in religion. But
hardly everywhere does it show itself in such glaring inanity as in this item.
In the process of converting myth over into "history" the
transformers swallowed many a camel of factual ridiculousness or impossibility without
choking. But surely it must occur to even palsied minds that the matter of
knowing or recognizing as the one divine Avatar in all history a man who is
declared to have been in all respects like other men save without sin, is a
thing that lies beyond the realm of all human practicability. The whole matter
of his recognition and identification as uniquely divine has been so aureoled
with romantic suggestiveness, so exotically perfumed with semi-celestial
fragrance, that it is quite impossible for votaries to bring their minds to
take a realistic view of the practical possibilities in the case. It seems
impossible to bring them out of the shimmering roseate light of adoration and
mental sycophancy and have them face the blunt realities of such a situation.
Not a man or women of them but would say that if Jesus appeared to them
tomorrow as he appeared in his daily mien in Judea, they would immediately
recognize him and be so overwhelmed that they would instantly prostrate
themselves in adoration at his feet. This
36
is questionable; but what is not
questionable is that if another cosmic figure equally divine appeared tomorrow
in the guise of ordinary humanity these folks would not recognize him.
By what credentials would any man of "regular" human appearance, even
with the saintliest of faces, enable us to distinguish him from the commonalty
of the race and accept him as the one cosmic divine being, God’s only Son, come
to earth? How could any spectator determine from looking at him that he was the
one person in all ages set apart from the generality of mankind and really a
god from the skies? Such a rating and such a distinctive uniqueness could not
be determined from looking at any man in mortal flesh. Every age, indeed every
community, has seen men of not only saintly appearance and bearing and wisdom,
but of saintly life. Thousands of such people have lived lives essentially as
blameless, innocent and charitable as his. How could any man in person exhibit
unmistakably the marks of the supra-human distinctions claimed for Jesus in his
life by Christian ecclesiasticism? These claims included first his uniqueness
in all history as the only-begotten Son of God; then the totally novel and only
single instance of a life utterly sinless and pure; then his cosmic election as
the Logos of God, according to John’s first chapter description; then his role
as the second person of the cosmic Trinity; then his commission as the agent of
man’s evolutionary salvation; and finally as the embodied fulfillment of all
ancient Messianic hope and realization. How could such qualities and functions
be seen by merely looking at a man of ordinary human constitution? What
stupefaction of mind is necessary to nurse the belief that the people of his
day could identity him as the impersonation of all the exceptional and wholly
unnatural characterization ascribed by religious fetishism to him must be left
to the students of abnormal psychology to determine. It will be howled at this
analysis that it is an attempt to treat a sacred thing in ribald fashion. On
the contrary it is an attempt to take the situation exactly as Christian
apologists represent it. If caricature is introduced it emanates from the side
of ebullient faith and not from honest realism. The travesty of all natural
possibility in the case is created by that naïveté of mind which even the
learned theologians of every age down to the present have displayed in this
matter. They have based many an argument or exegesis on the bald assumption
that any person coming in sight of the man Jesus would have been at once
overpowered with awe and
37
would have known that he was looking
at the only cosmic deity ever seen on earth. The sheer sight of his person
would elucidate at once all the theological implications of his celestial
errand. Forsooth he carried unmistakable credentials of his cosmic character
with him in look, speech, majesty. Cosmic character shone all about him, glowed
in his face, bearing, speech. The universal ascription to him of such egregious
persuasion raises the next question as to how, if these were so, the humble
people he was alleged to have contacted came to be instructed in the difficult
art of recognizing cosmic characteristics. There is no evidence that the public
of today has knowledge of any way to identify cosmic character.
Part of the rejoinder to this would
be that he told the multitudes that he was the Son of God, the Messiah
they were eagerly waiting for, the true vine, the celestial shepherd, the door
and the way. They did not have to surmise; he gave them explicit information.
In answer to this argument it need only be suggested that if people and popular
attitudes of that day were in any way like what they are today, there is
nothing that could have advanced the evidence of his cosmic mission that would
so unfailingly have discredited his professions as his own statement
that he was the one and only Son of God. It is the one sure token that the
present age would accept as certain evidence of his not being what he
claimed. Words that could appropriately and impressively flow from the mouth of
the personified solar deity in a great ritual drama would create a riot in an
actual street scene. One has but to use constructive imagination realistically
for a moment to be assured of the vast improbability of the personal Christ’s
being recognized for what he is claimed to have been in theology. If this is
not convincing enough, let some claimant to divine status try it today! Were he
the man with the saintliest mien, with the spiritual mystic’s benignant
physiognomy and uttering the holiest of precepts, the moment he went about
proclaiming his unique cosmic status a police call would in an hour be
necessary to rescue him from the clownish roughness of the crowd. And the thing
that would arouse both pity and subtle resentment in the crowd would be the
evidence of general witlessness and lack of good sense thus flaunted in their
faces. It is of course easy to ridicule or cheapen an essentially holy thing or
a sincere action. Raillery is no true answer to real sincerity. Still pious
religionism has asked us to accept without smiling a host of situations in
38
the context of theological and Biblical
interpretation that are wholly outlandish or screamingly ridiculous (such as
the picture of Jesus riding into
39
pious indoctrination affords one of
the sorriest spectacles in all history. The cry for sanity in religion through
the play of keen critical faculty will be met with violent reprobation by
offended traditionalists. "There is no wild beast like an angry
theologian" was the comment of the philosophic Julian, the Roman Emperor
following
This matter of the impossibility of
the recognition of God’s only Son in mortal flesh has been treated with
sufficient cogency, yet it is of such importance that it needs all the
elaboration it can receive. It is difficult to present it with adequate
impressiveness. It will be next to impossible to bring minds habituated to
wholesale acceptance of the romanticism that has been built like a halo around
the person of the Jesus figure to any fully detached and emotionally
unprejudiced view of the matter. Psychology knows full well the hypnotizing
force of religious inculcations implanted on the sensitive plate of the mind in
childhood. They produce what the psychologists have called a conditioned
reflex. This is hard to supplant or overcome by any merely mental presentation.
It often persists even when the reason negates it. Said W. J. Bryan, "I
would accept every statement in the Bible literally, no matter how it
contravened my reason." This well illustrates the massive emotional
predisposition that is being dealt with here. "A man convinced against his
will is of the same opinion still." Reason has an almost insuperable
weight of psychological skullduggery to overcome and push aside before it can
gain a hearing at all. In the religious domain the reign of reason has been
challenged and its sovereignty abrogated by the usurpation of irrational
elements that spring from mysticism, and that carry an alleged higher authority
than "mere" intellectuality. The mind itself is supposed to be
transcended and overridden by something called spiritual intuition or direct
vision of God. The failure of the effort to harmonize the rational and
irrational elements in religion has been the crux of the great debacle of human
sanity in this most important area of culture. It is a question demanding a
volume for adequate handling; but as touching the subject under discussion it
may be summed up with the statement that even if there are aspects of cognition
and realization that transcend reason, their deposit in consciousness can not
be presumed to have authority or credence in flat despite of reason. Evolution
developed reason as an instrument for the guidance and safe progress of the
human monad in the
40
earthly life. It would be working at
odds with its own purposes if it at the same time deployed another faculty that
proved reason unsafe. Anything that is salutary to the welfare of the organism
must in the end prove to be in consonance with reason; otherwise there would
be, so to say, a self-contradiction within the constitution of being itself.
Yet it is believed that in spite of
arrant psychologization and mental obsessions of the deepest tenure a
movement’s vivid imagination used in the reconstruction of the "life"
of Jesus in its every-day aspects will carry home to any sane mind the full and
indisputable truth of the assertion that the world could not possibly recognize
a Person of the Cosmic Trinity if such a Person could be supposed to come to
earth in human body. Ages do somewhat differ in set and temper, but it could
hardly be contended that there ever was an age in which the appearance of a
self-proclaimed cosmic Avatar would not be greeted with the utmost skepticism
and derision by all classes of people. There are not rationally conceivable any
credentials such a claimant could present that would allay incredulity,
overcome suspicion, implant credence and carry certitude. The impregnable truth
of the matter is that such a claimant could not be accepted in seriousness,
could not be identified in the character and role claimed, could not be
recognized and known as outside the category of a human being of ordinary
stature. In Eastern lands where yoga phenomena of healing and other
extraordinary occurrences were common and understood without marvel, not even
his performance of miracles and the incidence of portents would prove to be
cosmic credentials. The argument is long, but it can be condensed and concluded
with the bald assertion, supported by every common sense consideration, that
the presupposition posited by nearly all writers on "the life of
Christ" as to Jesus’ being recognized by the populace or the age as the
only-begotten Son of God ever to appear on the planet merely by seeing his
person, is from bottom to top the most outlandish chimera of nonsense ever to
creep into the deluded minds of pious people.
So drugged indeed is the
traditionally indoctrinated mind of religious susceptibility that it has no
intelligent comprehension whatever of the great body of peculiar doctrine that
it has, like a boa-constrictor, attempted to swallow. It is in no sense
realistically aware that in upholding the historical Jesus it is accepting not
only the personalization of a divine principle, cosmic love, but also of the
cosmic Aeon of the
41
Gnostics, the Demiurgus or
Cosmocrator of the Greeks, the Ra of Egypt and finally the Logos of John and
the second person of the creative Trinity. The unthinkable crassness of this
acceptance has never once occurred to people in whom "faith" operates
in place of thought. When the sarcolatrae or worshipers of a Christ in
the flesh, transformed the Christly principle into a mortal man, they did not
know or consider what went naturally with it, what mighty powers and functions
the slender body of the man Jesus would have to carry. They did not reckon with
the many ancillary implications of the transfer. It did not occur to them that
the character claimed for Jesus had to cover also the power and range of the
Lord of the Cosmos, and that his body would then have to contain the
unimaginable creative energy assigned to this person in the hierarchy. For what
is the Logos? God the Father is the supreme generator, planner, designer and
creator of the universe. God the Son, the Logos, is that universe in its manifested
creation. The Logos is God’s boundless power and wisdom deployed in the active
work of creation. The Logos is the infinite force that upholds the galaxies of
countless solar systems and carries on their evolution. It needs only a moment
of sober reflection to reveal the degree of stupefaction necessary to induce
any mind to believe that the cosmic power great enough to create the infinite
hosts of the suns and their planets could have been contained in the tiny body
of a Judean peasant on one of the smallest of planets! If the tiniest billionth
of such a mighty force were infused somehow into the mortal body of a man on
this earth it would burn it to a crisp in a second. This idea that Jesus the
man could be the second Person of the Trinity is as dire a hallucination as any
that has ever been perpetrated even in the name of religion. Allegiance to a
doctrine that has to be secured by an ecclesiastical system at the price of so
frightful an obfuscation of the thinking genius of man is itself a tragic affliction.
The whole situation which has made such an abnormality possible is an enormity
of ghastly proportions and of ominous portent. The Logos, forsooth, embodied in
the person of a carpenter! We hold the Greeks in derision for--as we
allege--believing that Jupiter, the God of heaven, was a man who ran off with
Io and other beautiful maidens and could be jealous or vindictive. It is now
known that the Greeks were only toying with a marvelous imagery. But modern
moronism is not saved by allegory. In
42
sober earnest we have claimed that
the unimaginable cosmic might of the Logos that swings the galaxies through
their orbits came to earth and was a man of flesh! Jesus, the second Person of
the Trinity! That millions have for centuries been made to "believe"
such folly is a sickening realization. This was one item in the catastrophe
that was precipitated on half a world for sixteen centuries as a result of
turning myth and drama into alleged "history." A heavy price to pay
for bad scholarship! The pious faith of the ignorant Church Fathers did not
save them from precipitating the Western world into the Dark Ages, the blame
for which has been laid at the door of an innocuous "paganism" of the
northern lands of
Perhaps it is now possible to round
out the argument as to the comparative psychological influence of a historical
Christ and a dramatized typical Christ figure. Since the indwelling activity of
Christos is the basic indispensable factor in salvation, anything that weakens
it must be held detrimental to critically vital values. The great struggle in
the human breast between the impulses of the natural man and the implanted seed
of divine growth is ever so critical, the forces of "evil" resident
in the carnal man so persistently powerful, and the issue of the conflict at
all stages so delicately balanced, that any influence which in the least degree
lessens the developing strength of the inner god, or which detracts from the
personal effort to exercise its powers, dangerously imperils the outcome and
the individual’s evolutionary destiny. As the worship of the historical Jesus
does, by the very measure of its sincerity, divert attention from the culture
of the inner spirit, it becomes perilous to that degree. In the end there is no
dodging this issue in the moral field of our life. It is incontestable that the
exact amount of psychic energy that we expend in actualizing our reliance upon
a historical savior is so much less available for our task of developing the
inner deity. While the outer savior is receiving our devotion, the inner Christ
is permitted to lie unawakened. Mankind is so constituted psychologically that
by so much as it can lean upon extraneous help it will not exert itself in its
own behalf. The purpose of life in the flesh is to force souls who have come
here from the empyrean to exert themselves against pressure, stress and strain
in order to develop their greater potential divinity. It needs to be said in
43
clarion tones for the benefit of
overweening piety and uncritical faith, that any influence which in the least
degree diminishes the individual’s conviction of the necessity of reliance upon
his own hidden divinity must inexorably be calamitous for his progress. The
image of Jesus the man and the theological teaching of his power to save us
intrude to break the force of the knowledge that our only savior is within. And
never will the mortal man be able to bring the full resultant of his living
experience in the world to bear upon the problem of his evolutionary growth
until he divests himself of all artificial props and stands squarely on his own
feet, making his fight alone. Only when he meets the exigencies of his life
here by calling upon the resources of his potential savior within him will he
be fulfilling the conditions requisite to cultivate that savior’s dynamic
possibilities. If in the stress of experience he habitually looks to a
hypothetical power outside himself, he lets the real powers of his own divinity
lie fallow.
Much so-called "spiritual
science" of current development has worked on the assumption that a
technique adequate for attainment of consummate results in this field involves
only subjective effort. In the wake of the popularization of Hindu mysticism in
the West practice has taken the direction of an inward retirement. Values in
consciousness are sought by way of detachment from sensual experience and
contemplation of purely spiritual things. But this movement stands sorely in
need of the reminder that the seed power or sheer potentiality of Godhood in
man requires for its development something more than mere meditation upon
divine things. 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. It would never grow. 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. For the birthing of his progeny, the gods, archangels, angels,
heroes and men, there is needed the conjunction of spiritual potentiality with
the active energies of what the Greeks called physis, or nature. Clear
down the diapason from God to atom every power of mind or soul has to be linked
with its sakti, or physical energy, if it is to implement its ideal
structure for creative purposes. Spirit can not evolve when not in relation to
matter. It lies static, inactive; it is sheer
44
ideal abstraction. To actualize its
thought structures, to bring its creative designs to pass, it must be wedded
with matter. It must use the energies loaded in the atom of matter to realize
its entelechy (Aristotle), or final purpose. The whole flow of evolution,
therefore, depends upon the stimuli provided by the contingencies arising in
and from the soul’s experiences in material body. Without matter spirit can
have no experience. Not the transcendent but the immanent deity grows. Says
Emerson, "The true doctrine of the Omnipresence is that God exists in all
his parts in every moss and cobweb."
The conditions of experience bring
latent spiritual capacity to active expression under the impact of the strong
forces at play in the world of nature. Spirit awakes and exerts itself by
virtue of the necessity of responding to the incidence of blows from the side
of matter. Even the dangers threatening the existence or welfare of its own
body, its instrument, on the good state of which its own unfoldment depends,
elicits its unexercised powers.
The concept of world salvation by a
personal redeemer not one’s own inner deity is thus inexpressibly wide of the
mark for the basic meaning of religion. If the one and only begotten Son of God
performed the racial redemption, the god within each man would be deprived of
the opportunity for growth which is created only with the dawn of full
consciousness of its own entire responsibility for the consequences of acts.
Any influence that depletes the utter reliance of the outer personality upon
the inner deity is an interference with the planned economics of moral and
spiritual evolution. It should have been noted in the study of homiletics that
manifestations of divine help, as if coming from an outside savior assumed
to be Jesus--in olden times the tribal god--generally occur when one has
exhausted all known or available helps and is forced by dire anguish to call
upon some spiritual or cosmic agency in last despair. From this it might be
assumed that a degree of inner agony is just the stress needed to arouse
sleeping divinity to active exertion. Thus the exigencies of the outer man in
mortal experience prove to be the agencies of the divinization of the inner
man. And the Christ of the age-old ritual dramas was the type of the
divine Self in humanity undergoing the strain, stress and strife requisite to
bring to light the grand epiphany of his solar glory.
What can be said for the
psychological influence of the historical
45
Christ is that the concept has
engendered in Western civilization for sixteen centuries a massive emotionalism
and sentimentalism arising from thought of his personal life and sufferings, which,
if it can be shown that the Gospels are not histories but spiritual dramas,
that their contents were in existence thousands of years before his alleged
date, must be seen at last as the most prodigious waste of psychic force, the
most devastating hallucination and the most stinging humiliation of pride in
human history.
It may be appropriate to close this
preliminary survey of the more obvious features of the discussion with
consideration of another item that is closely related to the psychological utility
of the Christ conception. In fact it is the nub and core of the final judicial
determination of the relative merit of the two opposing theories. If it can be
determined finally that, of the two, one is entirely necessary for the
beneficent working of its effects on humanity, and the other not indispensable,
but only an adventitious accompaniment of the first, the verdict for superior
utility must go to the necessary one. As between the Christ in the heart of all
children of God and the Christ in one man, the first is the one both primarily
and ultimately necessary for the redemption of the individual. It is a
condition sine qua non; the other is merely superfluous and accessory at
best. Had there been one personal Christ or a thousand, it is still the leaven
of Christliness in the soul of a man that must save him. It is the agency that
must be present and operative even if the other be extant. The other could be
dispensed with and salvation still be effected. This could not be put vice
versa. If the immanent Christos be not a reality in consciousness, the
historic Jesus can avail nothing for the suppliant. Salvation could be won
without his existence--as it must have been done before he lived! For all his
life and death it could never be won without the saving grace of the impersonal
Immanuel. The historical Christ is therefore only a superadded and
supernumerary theological luxury. He is a negligible element in the system of
redemption, in no wise indispensable. So far from being true that the scheme of
human salvation rests critically and centrally upon him, the truth is that it
does not even vitally need him. It could do without him. He is surely not the
keystone of the arch or the cornerstone of the temple. The structure rests
solidly on the presence in all men of the deific leaven, and if he enters the
picture it is as mere adornment. He is not basic but extraneous and decorative.
46
His addition to the theological
equipment makes the house of religion more attractive to people of emotional
susceptibilities. His humanity, especially his infancy, babyhood, childhood and
the imagined pains his frail body suffered in Passion Week, make a strong
appeal to emotional sympathies and thus help perpetuate the institution of
religion.
The story is a long one, but to it
this work is dedicated, with the motive of restoring Christianity to its
original exalted purity and of redeeming it from the degradation of having
crucified anew the spiritual Christ in the heart on the cross of a material
concept in human thought as "wooden" as the alleged "tree of
The Logos was made flesh, yes, but
not only one hundred and eighty pounds of it.
47
Chapter III
TRUTH
WEARS A MASK
The logical point of departure for
the investigation is the study of ancient methodology in the writing of sacred
literature. It has been quite largely due to modern ignorance of a special
methodology employed in such writing, one bearing no relation or kinship to any
known technique in our period, that misinterpretation of arcane books has come about.
In spite of voluminous authentic testimony to the fact of such an extraordinary
literary method, scholars down to the present day have failed to take note of
the evidence for it, and have with unmitigated obduracy flouted the claims for
the fact and its overwhelming implications for our understanding the whole of
ancient lore. The consequences have been disastrous over the whole range of
religious interest. It is therefore necessary to begin with a scrutiny of the
peculiar style of representation which was indigenous to the ancient mind and
its approach to the grasp and expression of religious truth.
If it can be shown that the ancient
sages wrote their great books of wisdom in a form that was purely typological
or representative, and in no sense objectively historical, a presumptive
argument of nearly clinching force will be established in favor of the
non-existence of Jesus, as far as the New Testament is concerned. If
practically the only documents in which his "life" is recorded are
proven to be non-historical literature, the presupposition is well grounded
from the start that he was not a living man but a typical personification of
the god in man. The entrenched interests of ecclesiastical orthodoxy have
persistently withstood the claims and the evidence for the correctness of this
thesis, but it can be said in the face of such resistance that the case for it
is established beyond the point of speculation or further controversy. If this
is still controverted, it is designed to present in the work at hand a volume
of data that will render the case virtually impregnable at last.
The purpose of this chapter is to
adduce plentiful witness that the
48
sages of antiquity wrote their
Bibles in a method of designed cryptology and as much to hide their real
meaning as to reveal it. Contrary to all modern reasoning and expectation, they
did not write for the obvious purpose of informing, instructing or enlightening
the largest number of people. Rather it is evident that they wrote primarily to
preserve from popular desecration a treasure of recondite spiritual wisdom and
cosmological truth, that was designed to be transmitted as nearly intact as
possible from early antiquity to all later ages. Ancient literary interest
centered about the safety and purity of a great jewel of knowledge, and not, as
in modern days, about the most rapid general purveying of every item of
discovery to the largest number of people possible. The golden motive in
writing the sacred books was not how quickest to get truth to the populace, but
how most surely to keep the great secrets of divine teaching untarnished by the
populace, for the benefit of those of every age who would use them aright. To
preserve the heritage of truth intact, and not to disseminate it among the
illiterate and unappreciative masses, was the primary aim of the writers of the
arcane books.
This aim and purpose dictated a
peculiar type of writing, obviously one not directly open and simple in
meaning, but one of indirection and disguise. Books were therefore composed in
what is known as the esoteric method. An inner profounder and always more
spiritual meaning than the one ostensibly carried by the outward sense of the
words was intended to be embodied, and the expectation was that it would be
divined by the more intelligent segment of society and missed by the unworthy
and uncultured. For the attainment of this end the great cosmic, evolutionary,
philosophical and religious truths, along with the vital data for
understanding, were expressed, "not in dialogues, but in a wide variety of
typical representations, the main forms of which were drama, myth, allegory,
nomenology (or name structure), number formulations (as chiefly in the
Pythagorean system), and astrographs, or pictorial designs drawn on the open
face of the sky about the star clusters. The aim was to dramatize or
pictorialize truth and evolutionary process, and to this end there was
invented, through the exercise of the most profoundly astute insight ever
exhibited by the illumined human brain, an entire language of symbolism,
composed of an alphabet of symbolic characters drawn
49
from living nature, ranging from
atom to earth-worm or beetle to stars and gods. The great archaic texts of
wisdom were therefore not only collections of myths, allegories and dramas, but
they were couched in a language of the most extreme subtlety, ability to read
which conditioned upon the profoundest knowledge of the science of natural
analogy. The symbolic characters in this cryptic alphabet were by no means mere
algebraic x’s in the fashion of a cipher code or system. They were actual
biographs of the idea to be expressed, living and objective types of the thing
connoted. This very fact alone presupposes as the foundation for adeptship in
the handling of such a language a knowledge of life and of nature that would be
the acquirement of only the most perspicacious philosophical genius. It would
require a volume in itself to reconstruct the science of correspondences or analogy
resting on the kinship or parallelism known to subsist between the two worlds
of objective and subjective reality, or as Emerson puts it, "betwixt the
inner spirit and the outer matter," by virtue of which the discerning mind
of man can interpret the outer phenomena as the counterparts or reflection of
the inner consciousness. Nature is the analogue of the spirit; the world is the
antitype of the soul. The universe is the physical construct of the Creator’s
thought, and therefore he who can handle the alphabet of the hieroglyphs of
divine ideation in the objective presentment of nature can read God’s mind
after him. Natural forms thus become a living language of the most nearly
divine comprehension man is capable of, and afford him the most voluble vehicles
or symbols of the clearest expression he can frame. As the most penetrating
insight into the profounder aspects of both consciousness and nature were prime
essentials for such usage, obviously the mastery of a science so recondite
would be confined to a minority of the most developed individuals. These were
of course the philosophers, the illuminati, the hierophants of the temples and
the initiates in the Mysteries. They were the members of the group to which was
entrusted the custodianship and transmission of the Arcane Philosophy.
A cryptic typology and a symbolic
alphabet or language were then the essential structural features of the ancient
esoteric literary methodology. The logos of esotericism is a theme of
the utmost profundity, which taxes the human mind to grasp its rational
essence. It again would take a volume to expound, since its analysis would run
deep
50
and broad into the nature of life
and consciousness alike. There is no room in this work for any full attempt at
elucidation of the abstruse subject, though much of the work bears pretty
closely upon the central answer. It may be in the end the gist of all effort at
comprehension of the secrecy of initial world wisdom to understand simply that
as the full inner meaning of life is as deep as the deepest mind of man, the
attempt to render that full meaning for the grasp of lesser minds must be
couched in terms and forms that will lay the heaviest toll of intelligence and
sagacity upon the faculties of the student or aspirant. The answer is in part
also inwoven with human psychology, by the conditions of which nothing but
these living symbols can in the ultimate awaken in sluggish men the quickened
flare of genius for the apprehension of the most real sense and values. It is
recognized in all education that the drama carries far greater psychic
impressiveness than the best of spoken language. We can learn a mighty lesson
from the Greeks who in their dramatic rituals effectuated a mighty moral
purgation in the consciousness and character of the auditors which was spoken
of under the designation of "catharsis." It was known to them that
the drama could be used to work a purification of the innermost springs of
thought and conduct in the individual, as the beholder was made to live over vicariously
in the persons of the actors the crises and heroic or tragic episodes of the
human moral conflict depicted on the stage. The whole intent of the drama and
the Mystery ceremonials was to bring the force of the most impressive living
realization home to the inner consciousness of the audience personnel, and to
stamp in the most vivid manner upon the susceptibilities of the participants
the deepest sense of the incarnational drama in which all mortals are
adventuring. It needs no elaborate dialectic to make clear the perception that
drama carries a far more effective power for impressing moral issues upon the
mind than any language can achieve. It is a copy of living reality; it is life
itself in the particular and in miniature; and it is all drawn up in such a
form as to present to the mind the structural nature of both action and
meaning. In pain and its happiness. It gathers up a tangled or loose thread of
unrelated occurrence and displays the fateful pattern of weal or woe into which
it is being woven by the shuttle of life--or, as most ancients saw it, of many
lives.
51
As to the symbolism in language, it
was of the same order of rationale as the drama, but cast in smaller scale.
Both the drama and symbolism draw their dynamic psychological effectiveness from
the fact that they bear to truth in the large the relation of truth in
miniature. It was the knowledge of the early teachers of mankind that all
smaller process was a diminutive copy of all larger process, or of life process
in any measure. The law of life was universal. Therefore all forms of its
expression, large or small, exemplified the same one law. The microcosm, they
said, was a tiny reflection of the macrocosm. The fragment bore the image of
the whole. Man was made in the image of God. The atom and the world are alike
descriptive of the universe. Each revealed the pattern, and there is but one
pattern, though it has endless modifications in minor detail. Man is looking at
the whole of truth when he looks at any living part of creation. It is more than
a poet’s fancy that all of God is present everywhere, and that every common
bush is aflame with deity.
Hence all nature is an alphabetic
language, and every form is a symbol. Autumn is the eternal symbol of death and
spring of resurrection. The leaf is the alphabetic character that reads
repeated incarnation for the life of the tree. The seed is the greatest of all
hieroglyphs, for it is the end product of one cycle and at the same time the
beginning stage of the next, thus furnishing the key to the whole ongoing
process of life. The career of a dragon-fly is the whole epic of human life
lived in the four worlds of sense, emotion, thought and spirit, typed in the
old language by earth, water, air and fire. The symbol is therefore a
powerfully moving photograph of life and reality, a thumb-nail portraiture of
the whole vast meaning of the cosmos. Language is itself nothing but a designed
set of symbols. But symbols taken directly from nature have the additional
cogency of being parts of life itself in immediate view. In dealing with
symbols man constantly bathes his mind in reality. They are his safeguards
against folly and error. They are his perennial instructors. They unfold before
his eyes the forms and designs of the pattern of life. Says Emerson: "A good
symbol is a missionary to convince thousands."
In its power over the human mind
language comes close to deserving the term magical. Symbols, therefore, have
been employed in the sphere of philosophy and religion to wield upon general
consciousness a kind of potent charm akin to spiritual "magic." This
is
52
indeed the true magic. For thought
is the great Magician of the cosmos, transforming one thing into another and
calling the worlds into being by the wand of its vibrational power. The simple
and natural meaning of the word "magic" is this power of mind to
throw matter into the form outlined by thought. Thought makes or mars lives; it
is the eternal prestidigitator. Its legerdemain brings the invisible to visible
appearance.
All this is implicit in the nature
and use of the symbol. The picture of truth presented by it imprints its image
upon the open tablet of the mind. Through the rapport which the part feels with
the whole, the unit of consciousness with the entirety of consciousness, and
the instinctive urge of the fragment to re-become one with the All, the impact
of a symbol upon mind anywhere is inevitably to awaken in it a stir of latent
cognitive delight, the impulsive thrill of its recognition of its harmony with
all being. This recognition and delight become life’s truest guide to
rectitude. Symbols keep the mind aligned with truth. They hold it in line with
verity. They save it from vagary and fantasy. Such is the magic might of the
symbol.
This magic is finally the ground of
esotericism. It is admissible without cavil that mystic susceptibility to the
wizardry of symbols would be developed and become operative in even step with
the individual’s growth in culture. It would be a manifestation of strength of
genius and a high degree of intellectuality. Obvious it is then that a
literature conceived on the basis of a science so profound, expressed in its
recondite symbology and dependent finally upon the possession in its recipients
of the astute faculty requisite for its due appreciation, would have to be cast
in a language of esotericism. Inevitably failing of comprehension amongst the
populace, it would appeal to the more sagacious and the more illuminated. The
norms of culture were set by the more intelligent minority, as they must ever
be. The wardship of culture is in the hands of a small group, whose deeper
criteria of value at once set store by things which are beyond the mob, and
thus esotericism is inexorably introduced into the cultural or religious
situation.
It has been necessary to elucidate
the nature and bases of esotericism because the stubborn recalcitrancy of
savants in the time since the closing of the Platonic Academies in the fifth
century has imposed on a truth-seeking scholar the task of vindicating it
against the in-
53
orthodox refutation of its
legitimacy. It remains next to array in considerable volume a mass of data that
will establish beyond further evasion or quibbling the fact of its
ancient prevalence and its place in the methodology of scripture writing.
It is to be understood at the outset
of this enterprise that, considerable as is the evidence amassed here, it is
only a tiny portion of what might be assembled if all books could be consulted.
Indeed that presented here is merely additional to what has been collected in
an earlier work, The Lost Light. It is by no means the main body of such
authentication. The quantity given here could easily be trebled or quadrupled.
In the face of such an amount of testimony the question will arise in many
minds why the scholars of our day and previous periods should have so
obdurately held out against the indisputable regnancy of esotericism in the
ancient literary field. Substantiation of the position taken will call for much
quotation of documents and authorities.
A modern theologian agrees with the
fundamental rationale of the esoteric method. Benjamin W. Bacon, of Yale
Divinity School, in his valuable work, Jesus and Paul, (p. 207) says
that just as in modern times we are conscious that truth may be imparted often
more effectively by fiction than by plain statement, so it was with the ancient
world, but in much higher degree. To this another modern, the Harvard
Santayana (Dialogues in Limbo, p. 185) adds his confession that
"allegory has its charms when we know the facts it symbolizes, but as a
guide to unknown facts it is perplexing; and I am another lost in your
beautiful imagery." Strange that the philosopher should admit his
incapacity to follow natural imagery when he himself employs it in many
beautiful analogies, and the general requirement of intelligence is no greater
than necessary to see the fine allegorism in such a quotation as this from the
same work of his (p. 56): "The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed
a little before bearing fruit." Are we to assume that natural parallelism
is permissible when used by modern poets, but to be distrusted when employed by
the philosophic sages with more systematic handling?
How truly the same thinker came to
stating the full truth with regard to a greater chapter of history shown in his
statement (Winds of Doctrine, p. 50) that "it seems to many of us
that Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of meaning if you take it as
such." This is
54
forthright corroboration of the
basic thesis of this study, which claims that the scriptures yield their true
meaning only when taken as allegory and fable, and yield nonsense when taken as
history. It is worth completing his statement: "for what scraps of
historical truth there may be in the Bible or of metaphysical truth in theology
are of little importance; whilst the true greatness and beauty of this,
as of all religions, is to be found in its moral idealisms, I mean, in the
expression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries, of the
efforts, tragedy and the consolations of human life. Such a moral fable is what
Christianity is in fact; . . ." Here is great sanity of discernment, and
it largely tells the whole story of religion. Yet the same mind shows confusion
again when he writes (Winds of Doctrine, p. 33): "Even the pagan
poets, when they devised a myth, half believed in it for a fact." There is
no tangible evidence anywhere to vindicate this stricture. To be sure, they
"believed" in their myths when comprehended esoterically; but surely
none but the grossest of ignorant folk ever "believed" in them as
factual occurrence. That enormity of childish folly was reserved for the modern
academicians.
Bishop Laurence in the preface to
his work on the Book of Enoch (p. xlvi) says that the singular and
fascinating "system of allegorical subtleties" predominant in the
philosophies of the East is as inseparable from Oriental modes of thought and
expression "as the shadow is from the substance."
Bulfinch (Age of Fable, p.
12), in writing of the creation of the world, says that "the ancient
pagans, not having the information on the subject which we derive from the
pages of Scripture, had their own way of telling the story." As to which
it may be observed that it is possible to say now that the ancient pagans had
these same and many more scriptures long before we had them, and knew
infinitely better what they meant than we do. But it is noteworthy that he
admits they had their own peculiar method of writing the account.
One of the most direct revelations
of the basic interrelation of symbols with consciousness is given in a sentence
from Proclus, the fourth century expounder of Platonism who was nearly equal in
esoteric wisdom to the master himself, in which he says that "the paternal
nature disseminated symbols in souls," and through the world. This
statement pierces closer to the heart of the rationale of the science of
symbolism than anything ever likely to be said in the elucidation of
55
that abstruse science. The divine
creative or paternal mind, or Logos, has scattered symbols through the world
and placed in souls a power capable of being excited by their impingement on
the outer sense. This is an item of Greek philosophy that could profitably be
brooded over by thinkers today. It would tend to dispose us to a more friendly
and harmonious relationship with outer nature, and would reveal to us anew the
indispensable truth known to the Egyptians that, as Gerald Massey puts it,
"the symbolical can only be interpreted by the natural." This must be
so for the very sound reason that generally the symbolical is the
natural. For nature is herself the greatest lexicon of symbols extant. Massey
enlarges upon this theme when he says (Book of Beginnings, II, p. 37)
that "typology consists of various things set forth by means of one
original type. Symbolism was a mode necessitated, not a system designed,
because the one principal type had to serve many purposes of expression."
This, it has been seen, was true because there is but one universal law, and
this one law, seen in every phenomenon, has to serve as the one norm of
interpretation.
This discernment of Massey is
corroborated by the observations of C. O. Müller, who is quoted by Lundy (Monumental
Christianity, p. 18):
"Ancient Greece possessed only
two means of representing and communicating ideas of the Deity--Mythus and
Symbol. The mythus relates an action, by which the Divine Being
reveals himself in his power and individuality; the symbol renders it visible
to the sense by means of an object placed in connection therewith. . . . The
symbol is an external visible sign with which a spiritual emotion, feeling or
idea is connected. The mythic representation can never rest upon arbitrary
choice of expression; so, too, the connection of an idea with a sign in Symbolism,
was natural and necessary to the ancient world; it occurred
involuntarily; and the essence of the symbol consists in this supposed
connection of the sign with the thing signified. Symbols in this sense are
evidently coeval with the human race; they result from the union of the
soul with the body of man: nature has implanted the feeling for them in the
human heart. The human face expresses spiritual peculiarities; and so all
nature wore to the ancients a physiognomical aspect."
With the art or science of the
interpretation of nature’s physiognomy the ancient sages were profoundly
conversant. It is one of the greatest of all "lost arts." Lundy adds
to Müller’s perspicacious analysis the
56
observation that "if the mythos
has no spiritual meaning, then all religion becomes mere idolatry, or the
worship of material things," i.e., the symbols in their literal reference.
"But we have seen symbols of Oriental Pagan religions which indicate a
supreme Power and Intelligence above matter; and also how early Christianity
abhorred idolatry."
Proclus in his great work on the
theology of Plato speaks of "all the fables, therefore, of Plato, guarding
the truth in concealment." And he adds that
"if certain persons introduce
to us physical hypotheses of Platonic fables . . . we must say that they
entirely wander from the intention of the philosopher, and that those
hypotheses alone are interpreters of the truth contained in these fables, which
have for their scope a divine, immaterial and separate hypostasis and which, looking
to this, make the compositions and analyses of fables adapted to our inherent
anticipations of divine concerns."
Which is to say in plainer terms
that those who take a physical or historical meaning out of the allegories,
mistake the intent of the great dramatist and blindly miss the sense; while the
true import is to be found in a mystagogical perception of truth deeply veiled.
The same great philosopher, speaking
of the "mystic ceremonies" of the Mysteries, says that "every
part is full of symbolical representation, as in a drama." 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."
He adds that the "apparent
indecency" of these symbolic depictions had nothing to do with their
"mystic meaning," but that they were indeed "designed as a
remedy for the passions of the soul; and hence mystic ceremonies were very
properly called akea, medicines, by the obscure and noble
Heraclitus." Drama and symbol used as moral medicines!
Taylor in his Introduction to the
philosophy and writings of Plato, quotes Proclus as saying that those who treat
of divine concerns either
57
speak symbolically and fabulously,
or through images. Some, he asserts, speak according to science, but others
according to inspiration from the gods. He states that those who attempt to set
forth the nature of the gods through symbols are Orphic, whilst those who use
"images" are Pythagoric.
"For the mathematical
disciplines were invented by the Pythagoreans in order to a reminiscence of
divine concerns, to which, through these as images, they endeavor to ascend.
For they refer both numbers and figures to the gods."
It is notable that the Platonic
philosophers rated the mathematical discipline and the contemplation of the
numerological structure of the universe as the very highest and most direct
path by which the human mind could approach a rapport with the divine.1
Proclus then elucidates the reasons
"when the ancients were induced to devise fables," and this
remarkable passage is worth quoting if only for the sake of reminding a
science-ridden age that it is utterly wrong in continuing to hold in contempt
one of the greatest of all sciences, analogy.
"In answer, then, it is
necessary to know that the ancients employed fables, looking to two things,
viz., nature and our soul. They employed them by looking to nature and the
fabrication of things as follows: Things inapparent are believed from things
apparent and incorporeal natures from bodies. For seeing the orderly
arrangement of bodies, we understand that a certain incorporeal power presides
over them; as with respect to the celestial bodies, they have a certain
presiding motive power. As we, therefore, see that our body is moved, but is no
longer so after death, we perceive that it was a certain incorporeal power
which moved it. Hence, perceiving that we believe things inapparent from things
apparent and corporeal, fables came to be adopted that we might come from
things apparent to certain inapparent natures; as, for instance, that on
hearing the adulteries, bonds and lacerations of the gods, castrations of
heaven and the like, we might not rest satisfied with the apparent meaning of
such like
_______
1 In the light of which statement it
may perhaps be true that Albert Einstein, the famed physicist of our day, when,
in response to his challenge to the clergy to put an end to their preachment of
an anthropomorphic God, he was bluntly told by them to stay in his own
mathematical field and not presume to invade one in which he was not
intelligent, might be considered to stand closer to an apprehension of divinity
than his clerical detractors.
58
particulars, but may proceed to the
inapparent, and investigate the true signification. After this manner,
therefore, looking to the nature of things, were fables employed."
There are passages in the books of
the ancient philosophers that fairly shout--to the discerning student--their
regal wisdom in our ears, and this is one of them. Had the potential
enlightenment in these words been caught and held by the scholars of the earlier
centuries and incorporated in western philosophy, the entire history of
Christian Europe and America would have run a happier course. The fogs of
religious insanity would surely have been dissipated by the intelligence that
would have arisen from contemplation of God’s natural handiwork, seen as the
analogue of the verities of the unseen spiritual world. The irrational and
fanatical mysticism inspired by the preachment of sheer faith would have been
replaced by a mysticism of rational foundation, springing from the reading of
the eternal mind in the open book of natural revelation. And Paul’s adjuration
to add knowledge to faith would have averted the endless sickening horrors of
pious bigotry and persecution. The great science of analogy has been contemned
even in spite of St. Paul’s complete endorsement of Greek insight in his
amazingly clear and simple statement that "that which may be known of God is
manifest," and that "the invisible things of Him" may be
clearly seen, by looking at the visible world around us. The long and gruesome
train of ills that have been engendered by the medieval and modern contempt for
ancient "paganism," the mawkish and revolting scorn heaped upon the
alleged "primitive" child-mindedness of past civilizations
spiritually more enlightened than our own, would have given way to a cultural
sensitivity that must surely have kept the pages of the historical record free
from the black stains they now bear. The spectacle of the supercilious contempt
shown toward an ancient culture by a civilization that has not even evolved the
intelligence to comprehend its subtleties has darkened the human outlook on
life and defeated the power of the light to break through the darkness and shed
its benignant rays of intelligence and sanity upon the world. It was so much
easier for a mentality that could not comprehend the Greek myths to cast the
stigma of its own incapacity upon the framers of the myths than to admit its
proper applicability to itself. It is time that it be proclaimed in ringing tones
59
that the alleged incomprehensibility
of the myths is due to modern doltishness and not to ancient ignorance. Wisdom
was so deeply grasped that the symbols which alone could awaken its cognition
have left us gaping and mocking, incredulous and uncomprehending.
Had not the illustrious Platonic
literature been pushed aside for a spurious and emasculated version of it, we
could have been better instructed by such a sentence as this, which Proclus
adds to the foregoing: "It may always be said that a fable is nothing else
than a false discourse shadowing forth the truth, for a fable is the image of
truth." Had we the discerning sense to lay hold of the great fact
expressed in his next sentence--"But the soul is the image of the natures
prior to herself"--for a grasp of which the study of the whole of the
great Orphic-Platonic system is requisite--we would be in better position to
accept his conclusion that "hence the soul very properly rejoices in
fables, as an image of an image." And we could then follow his last
sentence in the paragraph: "As we are therefore from our childhood
nourished in fables, it is necessary that they should be introduced."
Staggering rebuke to the stolidity
of this age is implied in his further exposition:
"The poetic fable abounds in
this, that we must not rest satisfied with the apparent meaning, but pass on to
the occult truth. . . . But it is defective in this, that it deceives those
of a juvenile age. Plato therefore neglects fables of this kind and
banished Homer from his Republic, because youth, on hearing such fables, will
not be able to distinguish what is allegorical from what is not."
As it was unthinkable for us of the
modern world in 1914 to believe that in a few years the whole fabric of human
liberty that had been built up by centuries of struggle against tyranny would
be toppling to ruin, so it must have seemed unthinkable to Plato and, seven
hundred years later, to Proclus that the long-enduring structure of esoteric
philosophy could be torn down and its ruins submerged under the debris of
literal and historical nonsense. A juvenile age indeed!
What could be clearer than Proclus’
statement that "the Orphic method aimed at revealing divine things by
means of symbols, a method common to all writers of divine lore (theomythias)?"
[The word means "God-myth."] And he quotes Plutarch (De Pyth.
Orac., xviii):
60
"Formerly the wisdom-lovers
exposed their doctrines and teachings in poetical fiction, as for example
Orpheus and Hesiod and Parmenides and Julian, the so-called Apostate. . . .
Many of the philosophers and theologians were myth-makers. . . . Concerning the
myths of the Mysteries which Orpheus handed down to us, in the very things
which in these myths are most incongruous, he drew nearest to the truth. For
just in proportion as the enigma is more paradoxical and wonderful, so does he
warn us to distrust the appearance and seek for the hidden meaning.
Philostratus asserts that in the Iliad the poet was philosophizing in
the Orphic manner."
Plutarch (De Daedal., Frag.
lx, 1, 754) writes that
"the most ancient philosophers
covered up their teachings in a lattice work of fables and symbols, especially
instancing the Orphic writings and the Phrygian myths."
"That ancient natural science
both among the Greeks and foreigners was for the most part hidden in myths of
an occult and mysterious theology containing an enigmatical and hidden meaning,
is clear from the Orphic poems and the Egyptian and Phrygian treatises."
G. R. S. Mead, in Orpheus (p.
51) quotes Pico della Mirandolo, Italian occultist of the Renaissance, as
writing:
"He who does not know perfectly
how to intellectualize sensible properties by the method of occult analogy, will
never arrive at the real meaning of the Hymns of Orpheus."
Mead further endorses Thomas Taylor,
the enlightened interpreter of Plato:
"Taylor says that the Grecian
theology was first ‘mystically and symbolically’ promulgated by Orpheus. . . .
To understand that theology, therefore, we must treat it from the point of view
of mysticism and symbolism, for no other method is capable of extracting its
meaning."
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 @insert greek) by Aglaophemus, and next Plato receiving the
perfect science concerning such things from the Pythagorean and Orphic
writings."
In his book New Platonism and
Alchemy (p. 6), Alexander Wilder makes the unequivocal statement:
61
"There was in every ancient
country having claims to civilization an esoteric doctrine, a system that was
designated WISDOM, and those who were devoted to its prosecution were first
denominated Sages or wise men. . . . Pythagoras termed the system he gnosis
ton onton, the Gnosis or knowledge of things that are. Under the noble
designation of WISDOM the ancient teachers, the sages of India, the magians of
Persia and Babylon, the seers and prophets of Israel, the hierophants of Egypt
and Arabia and the philosophers of Greece and the West included all knowledge
which they considered as essentially divine; classifying a part as esoteric and
the remainder as exoteric. The Rabbis called the exterior and secular series
the Mercavah, as being the body or vehicle which contained the higher
knowledge."
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." No statement could be more explicit
than Clement’s:
"All, then, in a word, who have
spoken of divine things, both barbarians and Greeks, have veiled the first
principles of things and delivered the truth in enigmas and symbols and
allegories and metaphors and such like tropes."
In speaking of the exoteric version
of the fables and allegories Origen, Clement’s learned pupil and one of the
prime formulators of early Christian theology, asks: "What better could
you have for the instruction of the masses?" Paracelsus (Vol. I, p. 17)
centuries later wrote that it was "the property of the common herd to take
false views of things." It is certainly true that almost every conception
harbored in the minds of the "average man" today, as in the past,
concerning the true meaning of the deeper things of theology, is atrociously in
error.
In Orpheus (1, p. 60) Mead
declares: "These myths are not only set forth in verse and prose, but were
also represented pictorially and in sculpture in the Adyta of the
temples."
"Myriads on myriads of
enigmatical utterances by both poets and philosophers are to be found; and
there are also whole books which present the mind of the writer veiled as that
of Heraclitus’ ‘On Nature,’ which on this very account is called ‘the
Obscure.’ Similar to this book is the Theology of Pherecydes of Samos. And
so also the work of Euphorion, the Causae of Callimachus, and the Alexandra
of Lycophion."
62
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.
Also in Orpheus (p. 24) Mead,
describing the discipline enforced in the Mysteries, says:
"Another and most important
part of the discipline was the training in the interpretation of myths, symbols
and allegory, the letters of the mystical language in which the secrets of
nature and the soul were written so plainly for the initiated, so obscurely for
the generality. Without this instruction the mythical recitals and legends were
unintelligible."
Sixteen centuries of
unintelligibility that still enshrouds the great myths of antiquity surely add
unimpeachable corroboration to Mead’s assertion. Mead says the allegories may
be interpreted either microcosmically or macrocosmically, but in either case
yield the meaning of the evolution of mind.
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.
In a long passage in his great work
on the theology of Plato Proclus points out how the master philosopher holds
back the use of fables among those who through incapacity and shallowness would
conceive only a perverted meaning from reading them, yet assents to their
employment among those who are able to penetrate into the hidden mystic truth
veiled by them. So, he says, Plato rejects the "apparatus of the
fables" in the Republic and in certain dialogues, but admits them
in the Cratylus, where "these things Socrates indicates in the Cratylus,
jesting and at the same time being serious in what he says." 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
63
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.
A vivid forecast of all later
imbecility of the masses in religious superstition is made by Proclus for Plato
when he says that while Plato "allows the poets that are inspired by
Phoebus to signify things of this kind obscurely and mystically, he excludes
the multitudes from hearing these things because they believe without
examination in the fabulous veils of truth." Proclus speaks of the proper
intelligence "unfolding the concealed theory which they contain."
Socrates hints at the deep
psychological springs of the symbolic methodology when he writes in the Phaedrus
"that an alliance to the demoniacal genus, prepared the soul for the
reception of divine light, excites the phantasy to symbolic narration."
Proclus states that Orpheus
"greatly availed himself of the license of fables." And once more he
avers that Socrates (Plato?) "narrating the types and laws of divine
fables, which afford this apparent meaning, and the inward concealed scope,
which regards as its end the beautiful and natural in the fictions about the
gods," dodges the mental stolidity of the crass to reach the subtler
intelligence of the initiated.
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,
64
"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:
"The lost language of celestial
allegory can now be restored, chiefly through the resurrection of ancient
Egypt; the scriptures can be read as they were originally written, according to
the secret wisdom, and we now know how the history was first written as
mythology."
He adds 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,"
65
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. In his Reply to Prof. A. H. Sayce he says:
"I have amply demonstrated the
fact that the myths were no mere products of ancient ignorance, but are the
deposited results of a primitive knowledge; that they were founded upon natural
phenomena and remain the register of the earliest scientific observation."
He hammers endlessly on the point
that the whole grand structure of luminous ancient doctrine crashed to ruin on
the rocks of the early Christian stupidity which converted into literal history
a vast body of drama and allegory that "was never anything but frankly
mythological." And he has written thousands of pages to support his
contention that what purports to be "history" in Christian
systematism was actually pre-extant as Egyptian mythology. He cites as proof of
his main thesis the fact that the Biblical material is found to be nonsensical
and chimerical, in fact impossible, as history, but becomes lucidly
intelligible and possible as myth. The massed material of his great volumes
goes far to substantiate this claim.
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.
We need the directness of Massey’s
phrasing of the following passage, the truth of which is of ominous import for
civilization:
66
"The human mind has long
suffered an eclipse and been darkened and dwarfed in the shadow of ideas the
real meaning of which has been lost to the moderns. Myths and allegories whose
significance was once unfolded to initiates in the Mysteries, have been adopted
in ignorance and reissued as real truths directly and divinely vouchsafed to
mankind for the first and only time! The early religions had their myths
interpreted. We have ours misinterpreted. And a great deal of what has been
imposed on us as God’s own true and sole revelation to man is a mass of
inverted myths. . . . Much of our folk-lore and most of our popular beliefs are
fossilized symbolism."
His great contention--with Max
Müller--was that the Märchen and folk tales are not reflections, but
refractions, or distorted popularizations of the original mythos, and that,
contrary to Müller’s assertions, it was the mythos that passed into the folk
tale and not the folk tale into the mythos. The myths were first and the Märchen
were their product, through the inevitable deterioration which all esoteric
truth sooner or later undergoes when floated among the unlettered masses.
"Typology and mythology are twins from their birth and one in their
fundamental rootage." (Nat. Gen. I, 313.)
In the same volume, preceding page,
Massey has a long and enlightening dissertation on the nature of the gods as
just the "elementary powers of nature," and he reads the logical
conclusions from the fact that they were represented symbolically by the animal
types. Much other material is assembled to depict the wide variety of figures
under which the gods and goddesses were exhibited. The hundreds of religious
insignia, emblems, types and figures which Sir James Frazer presents but is
powerless to interpret in his famous The Golden Bough, Massey clarifies
with astute penetration into cryptic meanings. "Mythology" he says,
"is one as a system of representation, one as a mold of thought, one as a
mode of expression, and all its great primordial types are practically
universal."
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 man-
67
ner 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."
It is to be presumed that Higgins
erred in saying that the ancient sages Plato, Pythagoras and others disguised
the doctrines of wisdom because they were too sublime for the mass of mankind;
but he agrees that they did disguise them, alleging that this concealment laid
the foundation for the priesthoods "whose interest it became to take care,
by keeping the people in ignorance, that the doctrines should always remain too
sublime for them." Higgins seems not quite to have arrived at the point of
seeing that mystic truth is by its own nature esoteric, and disguise is
not entirely artificial, but rather natural to it. He contends that there have
been writers against "the modern or
68
exoteric Christianity,"
"but never have we had a Hobbes, a Herbert or a Bolingbroke to endeavor to
discover their secret." 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"? And how could he have
anticipated that these "dark sayings" would lead to sixteen centuries
of a nearly total obfuscation of sense and sanity in the religion of half the
world? 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.
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
69
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; and of those mysteries as entered upon
through the tradition of the Lord, or the great oral transmission from those
divinely illuminated. Massey insists we can not understand the thought of
primitive man without first learning the language of symbols in which it was
expressed, and says that "the wisdom, or Gnosis, so carefully hidden and
zealously guarded in the past" can not be regained by mere pious
lucubration. To recover it we must resort to the aid of the same nature-logic
that the sages used to give it expression.
Origen makes a categorical
declaration of the esoteric sense when he says (Contra Celsum):
"The learned may penetrate into
the significance of all oriental mysteries, but the vulgar can only see the
exterior symbol. It is allowed by all who have any knowledge of the scriptures
that everything is conveyed enigmatically."
We turn to Philo and Josephus, both
living about the time of the "historical" Jesus. There is a tradition
that Philo was converted to Christianity by Peter. If it is credible it would
put him in close touch with the very earliest Christian sentiment. His
testimony should carry considerable weight in the argument. He writes (D.V.C.):
"Now the interpretation of the
sacred scriptures is based upon the understanding in the allegorical narratives;
for these men look upon the whole of their law-codes being like to a living
thing, having for the body the spoken commands, and for the soul the unseen
thought stored up in the words . . . unwrapping and unrobing of the symbols . .
. and bringing to light the naked inner meanings, for those who are able with a
little suggestion to arrive at the intuition of the hidden sense from the
apparent meaning."
Massey says that Philo
"Platonizes the myths," reading new ethical meanings into them. But
Philo’s forthright declaration on the esoteric method is found in his terse
assertion, when speaking of the rib of Adam: "The literal statement is a
fabulous one; and it is in the mythical that we shall find the true." For
those who in spite of a mass of such testimony from eminent and godly men of
the past continue
70
to assert that there never was any
genuine and sincere esoteric knowledge, it is desirable to quote another
statement from Philo:
"Now I bid ye, initiated men,
who are purified as to your ears, to receive these things as mysteries which
are really sacred, in your inmost souls, and reveal them not to any one who is
of the number of uninitiated, but guard them as a sacred treasure."
"In the Mosaic writings,"
says Josephus (Preface to Antiq.) "everything is adapted to the
nature of the whole, whilst the lawgiver most adroitly suggests some things as
in a riddle and represents some things with solemnity as in an allegory;
those, however, who desire to dive into the cause of each of these things,
will have to use much and deep philosophical speculation."
He again (Ibid.) says that
all the sacred writings have a reference to the nature of the universe; whilst
the legislator, Moses, speaks some things wisely but enigmatically and others
under a fitting allegory.
What authority from antiquity can be
cited with more weight than the first historian, Herodotus? In dealing with the
Mystery celebrations of the Egyptians held on a lake within the sacred
precincts of the temple as Sais, dramatizing the birth, life, death and
regeneration of Osiris, he says that he considers it impious to divulge the
name of the god.
"On these matters," he
goes on, "though accurately acquainted with the particulars of them, I
must observe a discreet silence. So, too, with regard to the Mysteries of
Demeter [celebrated at Eleusis in Greece], which the Greeks term ‘The
Thesmophoria,’ I know them, but I shall not mention them, except so far as may
be done without impiety."
One must ask why such direct
testimony from credible men of the ancient world should be flouted by modern
savants. The effort to discredit the existence of a real esoteric system in the
ancient day makes liars of nearly all the outstanding philosophers of the early
world.
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,
71
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.
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 Roman poet Sallust even
classifies the fables as theology of the physical and animistic sort. He
enlarges on the characteristics of each. He says the theological belongs to
philosophers, the physical and
72
spiritual to poets, but an
intermediate mixture of both belongs to the initiatory rites (Greek: teletais),
"since the intention of all mystic ceremonies is to conjoin us with the
world of the gods."
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.
An important statement is found in
that venerated work on the first three centuries of Christian history, Baron
Von Mosheim’s "History."
"It is not, therefore, Origen who
ought to be termed the parent of allegories amongst the Christians, but Philo .
. . many of the Jews, and in particular the Pharisees and Essenes, had indulged
much in allegories before the time of Philo, but of this there can be no doubt,
that the praefects of the Alexandrian school caught the idea of interpreting
Scripture upon philosophical principles, or of eliciting philosophical maxims
from the sacred writers by means of allegory, and that by them it was gradually
propagated amongst the Christians at large. It is also equally certain that by
the writings and example of Philo the fondness for allegories was vastly
augmented and confirmed throughout the whole Christian world; and it
moreover appears that it was he who first inspired the Christians with that
degree of temerity which led them not infrequently to violate the faith of
history and wilfully to close their eyes against the obvious and proper
sense of terms and words . . . particular instances of it . . . may be shown
from Origen and others, who took him for their guide, and who, manifestly,
considered a great part both of the Old and New Testaments as not exhibiting a
representation of things that really occurred, but merely the images of moral
actions."
One can express with a sigh the wish
that the discerning practice of Origen and Philo had persisted down the
centuries!
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 geo-
73
graphical town, it by no means
confines it to that rendering, which the historical view does.
In the Anti-Nicene Library (Vol.
XXIV, p. 127) in the section of Selections from the Prophetic Scriptures we
read:
"We must therefore search the
Scriptures accurately, since they are admitted to be expressed in parables, and
from the names hunt out the thoughts which the Holy Spirit . . . teaches by
imprinting his mind, so to speak, on the expressions . . . that the names . . .
may be explained and that which is hidden under many integuments may, being
handled and learned, come to light and gleam forth."
Jowett, Plato’s academically
accredited interpreter (Thomas Taylor’s most discerning work being frowned
upon) writes: "I am not one of those who believe Plato to have been a mystic
or to have had hidden meanings,"--this in the face of evidence that is
mountainous in height and weight.
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.
We should not omit reference to a
statement by Isaac Myer, the learned Kabalist scholar, in his work The
Oldest Books in the World (VII):
"There was undoubtedly an
extremely subtle and sublimated thought in existence among the learned of the
ancient Egyptians which modern thinkers have not yet fully grasped and which
busied itself mostly with endeavors to arrive at the bond uniting the unknown
and the known or materially existing; this was more especially limited to a
religious philosophy and in that mostly to the spiritual nature in man. The
mural paintings on the walls in ancient Egyptian tombs are not for decoration;
they are symbolical and mystic and the figures thereon are intended for a
religious purpose."
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
74
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.
Rabbi Simeon Ben-Jochai, compiler of
the Zohar, taught only the esoteric signification of doctrines, orally
and to a limited few, holding that without the final instruction in the
Mercavah the study of the Kabalah would be incomplete. The Kabalah itself
says (iii-folio 1526, quoted in Myer’s Qabbalah, p. 102):
"Each word of the Torah
contains an elevated meaning and a sublime mystery."
"The recitals of the Torah are
the vestments of the Torah. Woe to him who takes this garment for the Torah
itself. The simple take notice only of the garments or recitals of the Torah,
they know no other thing, they see not that which is concealed under the
vestment. The more instructed men do not pay attention to the vestment but to
the body which it envelops."
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).
75
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.
From current reading we take a
remark made by G. R. G. Mure, in his small work on Aristotle (p. 230),
relative to the force of figurative or symbolic language:
"The eye for an effective
metaphor is, in fact, a mark of genius and unteachable. And in devoting more
space to illustrating that form of metaphor which depends upon analogy,--as
when old age is described as ‘Life’s sunset,’--Aristotle means, perhaps, to
mark the manifestation within the poet’s imaginative world of that hierarchic
order of analogous stages which pervades the whole Aristotelian universe. The
last and least important element in tragedy is spectacle."
From Esdras (XIV, 6, 26 and
45) we take the following passages:
"These words shalt thou
declare, and these shalt thou hide. And when thou hast done, some things shalt
thou publish and some things shalt thou show secretly to the Wise."
". . . . and Highest spake,
saying, The first that thou hast written publish openly, that the worthy and
the unworthy may read it: but keep the seventy last, that thou mayest deliver
them only to such as be wise among the people. For in them is the spring of
understanding, the fountain of wisdom."
76
It is Mosheim who in his famous
history of the early Church (Vol. II, 167) discloses how the matter of esoteric
writing and cryptic meaning became a nub of controversy between Origen and his
opponents. It is well to quote Mosheim’s statements in full for the sake of
their explicitness. He is referring to Origen when he says:
"Certainly he would have had no
enemies if he had merely affirmed, what no one then called in question, that in
addition to the sense which the words of Scripture convey, another sense latent
in the things described is to be diligently sought for. This will be manifest
if we consider who were the men that inveighed so bitterly against Origen’s
allegories after he was dead. I refer to Eustatius, Epiphanius, Jerome,
Augustine and many others. All these were themselves allegorists, if I may use
that term; and would undoubtedly have commended any man, as a great errorist,
who would have dared to impugn the arcane sense of Scripture. . . . There must,
therefore, have been something new and unusual in Origen’s exigetics, which
appeared to them pernicious and very dangerous.
"The first and chief was, that
he pronounced a great part of the sacred books to be void of meaning if taken
literally, and that only the things indicated by the words were the signs
and emblems of higher objects. The Christians who had previously followed after
mystic interpretation let the truth of the sacred narratives and the proper
sense of the divine laws and precepts remain in full force; but he turned
much of the sacred history into moral fables, and no small part of the divine
precepts into mere allegories.
"Nearly allied to this first
fault was another; namely, that he lauded immoderately the recondite and
mystical sense of Scripture, and unreasonably depreciated the grammatical or
historical sense. The latter he compared to earth, mud, the body and other
things of little value; but the former he compared to the soul, heaven, gold
and the most precious objects. By such representations he induced the
expositors of Scripture to think little about the literal sense of passages and
to run enthusiastically after the sublimer interpretations."
All this is so directly valuable a
contribution to the inner story of the great catastrophe that overtook early
Christianity that the long quotations can be forgiven. Here we see the most
learned of the Christian Fathers, Origen, clinging tenaciously to what he knew
was the true method of esoteric interpretation, but already beset by the
subversive and crippling insistence on the literal and historical rendering
which spelled devastation for the true meaning of scripture. This was the
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beginning of the tragedy that has
engulfed all spiritual exegesis of holy writ ever since. Origen was the last
champion of a true Christianity going down to defeat under the swelling tide of
Philistine crudity of mind.
A good part of the reason why the
literalists feared Origen’s method escapes in a naïve paragraph from Mosheim,
who says that it appears strange that a man of so much discernment as Origen
was should not have seen that his use of allegories and denial of the
historicity of scripture would place directly into the hands of the Gnostics
and others whom he sought to persuade to Christianity "the very means of
overthrowing the entire history of the life and death of Christ."
Unquestionably this strikes close to the heart of the whole matter. Once having
committed itself to the personal and historical resolution of the Christos
figure, the ecclesiastical power could not give countenance to the allegorical
interpretation. The validation of the latter would present an immediate and
constant menace to the whole historical structure of Christianity. Ever since
early times it has had to battle with the implications of comparative religion
study to avoid the general acceptance of conclusions massively obvious on the
side of allegorism. With Egypt’s evidence now available, the day of reckoning
can no longer be held off.
Mosheim sets forth Origen’s stated
view that, as "the philosophical grounds of Christian doctrine are wrapt
up in figures, images and facts in the sacred volume," if "we adhere
to the literal meaning, that harmony between religion and philosophy can not be
found." Mosheim admits that "in the objections of the enemies of
Christianity, there are not a few things which can in no way be fully cleared
up and confuted, unless we abandon the grammatical and historical sense and
resort to allegories." This goes far forward strengthening Origen’s (and
this work’s) general position, and is recommended to the close attention of all
modern literalists and fundamentalists.
So extended an array of data has
been necessary to establish the existence and influence of the esoteric method
in the whole of ancient literature. It must be kept in mind that, lengthened as
it is to the point of prolixity, it is only a tiny segment of what could be
adduced. The significant fact in reference to it is that in spite of the mass
of authentic evidence the effort has persisted in academic circles to maintain
a denial of both the employment of such a distinctive method and its
78
obvious and momentous involvements.
It is by no means an unwarranted assertion to hint that the hostile attitude
toward esotericism has been an item in the policy of a great conspiracy,
operative ever since the third century, to diminish the influence of the pagan
teachings. Evidence to support such a forthright statement is not wanting,
although, as Sir Gilbert Murray has noted, most of the evidence supporting the
pagan side has been destroyed by the Christians. Whatever the motive actuating
a resort to the method of violence to negate an important fact in religious
history, it must be held in any case a hazardous enterprise to flout the truth.
It argues something less than full intellectual integrity, something sinister
and disquieting. The world is still waiting for a good and adequate explanation
of the harsh measure that prompted the closing of schools that purveyed such
lofty wisdom and sage philosophy as the Platonic Academies of sapient Greece in
the fifth century. According to von Mosheim, Origen "introduced the whole
of the Academy into Christian theology." Bishop Synesius preferred
"philosophy" to lying legend. Neo-Platonism brought to the modern
Dean Inge his highest illumination in religion. It will call for a good case
indeed to defend the suppression of truth and light of this sort.
In our longer view it becomes ever
more patent that in the ignorant policy by the Church the world witnessed the
triumph of irrational piety and fanatical zealotry over rational religion. The
mystical and the rational sides of the religious motive, expressed in general
by two quite diverse types of human beings--the one the feeling, the other the
thinking--have always been at variance and often in conflict in the movement,
and the resurgent sweep of one or the other has marked the epic of religious
history. Hardly any event in the annals of mankind has wrought more serious
consequences than that sudden and overwhelming change of character in early
Christianity from a philosophical religion to one of devotion and feeling, so
fateful for later times. The Christian world is still enthralled by the
iniquitous influences to which this portentous event gave birth. It is with the
design of breaking the deadening spell of much of this irrational enchantment
still operative today that the great massing of data in this work is
undertaken.
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Chapter IV
WISDOM
HAUNTS THE COUNTRYSIDE
It might be presumed that the
authentic status of myth and religious allegory had been sufficiently
demonstrated. But it should further greatly strengthen the whole case and prove
of vital worth on its own account to assemble additional data that will reveal
an even closer tie between the myths and the basic genius of all religion. This
research will enable us to establish a connection between myths and another
ancient mode of religious expression, a link which is little known or suspected
by modern students. Indeed it will answer in large part the great question as
to the origin of the myths. The conclusion reached by the investigation will
again almost certainly be warmly disputed. A shorter chapter will suffice to
present what must surely be considered an important body of evidence.
The collated data point to an origin
of the myths in a place which itself vastly enhances their innate and
fundamental kinship with religion. Lacking more accurate knowledge about them,
we have been disposed to think that the myths were an independent and whimsical
creation of the free fancy and childish imagination of peoples whom we have
insisted on dubbing "primitive." That they were not thus an arbitrary
product, unrelated to the profoundest philosophical wisdom and the highest
spiritual insight of the ancient world, is evidenced by the material here
collected. The evidence almost indisputably indicates their origin from an
older religious institution or expression--the ritual drama. The myths find
their basic character and their unity at last in the features of a great
universal dramatic rite, the importance of which has been too stubbornly
belittled and neglected through the force of Christian prejudice, even where
its very existence has been granted.
First spokesman is no less an
authority than Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough. From his
lectures (p. 374) we take his item:
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"We shall probably not err in
assuming that many myths, which we now know only as myths, had once their
counterpart in magic; in other words, that they used to be acted as a means of
producing in fact the events which they described in figurative language.
Ceremonies often die out while myths survive, and thus we are left to infer the
dead ceremony from the living myth."
Corroboration is added by H. J. Rose
(Folk-Lore, p. 104): "The legend has pretty certainly grown out of
the rite, as usually happens." Says Miss J. E. Harrison in her Themis (p.
328): "A mythos of the Greeks was primarily just a thing spoken,
uttered by the mouth. Its antithesis or rather correlative is the thing
done, enacted."
Significant is the sentence from
Prof. A. B. Cook (quoted in Lord Raglan’s work, The Hero): "Behind
the myth (of the Minotaur), as is so often the case, we may detect a ritual
performance." J. A. K. Thomson, in Studies in the Odyssey (p. 54)
states that not only is the myth the explanation of the rite; it is at the same
time the explanation of the god,--the central character in the rite. Forthright
is the testimony of A. M. Hocart in The Progress of Man (p. 223):
"If we turn to the living myth,
that is, the myth that is believed in, we find that it has no existence apart
from the ritual. The ritual is always derived from some one and its validity
must be established from its derivation. . . . Knowledge of the myth is
essential to the ritual, because it has to be recited at the ritual."
Prof. Malmouski (Notes and
Queries in Anthropology) writes:
"Psychologists like Wundt,
sociologists like Durkheim, Herbert and Mause, anthropologists like Crawley,
classical scholars like Miss Jane Harrison, have all understood the ultimate
association between myth and ritual, between sacred tradition and the norms of
social structure. . . . Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in
its living primitive form, is not merely a story told but a reality lived. It
is not of the nature of fiction such as we read today in a novel, but it is a
living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times and continuing
ever since to influence the world and human destinies."
It must be pointed out that lack of
keen discernment is shown in claiming that an intelligent view of the
myths ever accepted them as having actually occurred, or that they were not
known to be pure fiction in their outward form. Error and confusion at once
enter the
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moment we attribute to them any
other than typical reality. The whole miscarriage of ancient meaning
sprang from the incorrigible tendency to assert that the ancient intelligent
people believed their myths. There is the great chasm of difference
between saying they believed them and saying they believed in them, and
the chasm is that between truth and error. Never did intelligent people believe
them; they believed what they represented, typified, adumbrated. The
whole issue of right and wrong appraisal and judgment of them and the ancient
hangs on this distinction. This work for the first time insists that this
distinction is the critical point in the evaluation of all ancient literature.
The first blows in the wreckage of archaic spiritual systems fell when the
shadow of this misconception crept in upon the mind of the early Christian
following.
Correcting the apparently slight,
but really formidable misconception, it is necessary next to repudiate utterly
this same writer’s views on the myths, as thus expressed:
"We can certainly discard all
explanatory as well as all symbolical ex-interpretations of these myths of
origins. The personages and beings which we find are what they appear to be on
the surface, and not symbols of hidden realities. As to any explanatory
function of these myths, there is no problem which they cover, no curiosity
which they satisfy, no theory which they contain."
This opinion needs refutation
because it will be seconded by many readers who are instant in opposition to
anything that extols the religion of "paganism." How any scholar
acquainted with the facts of the ancient ritualism, and possessed of ordinary
reasoning power, could asseverate that the ceremonies were entirely
meaningless, is beyond comprehension. This is to accuse Plato, Euripides,
Sophocles, Aeschylus and a long list of antiquity’s most celebrated men of
perpetrating a performance, presented annually before thousands of people, that
was in the end nothing but gibberish. The actions and speeches in the drama
reenacted the experience of mankind in its evolutionary cycle; yet this critic
asserts that there was no problem or construction bearing relation to reality
in the mythic representation. Criticism of this sort is farcical, and
represents a total failure to grasp meanings which, however faintly apprehended
by the unschooled, can still be discerned by any intelligent mind. So gross a
misjudgment of a great form of an-
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cient culture is inexcusable. From a
stupendous amount of such biased incompetence in assessing the value of early
formulations in religion and philosophy the world has suffered incredibly.
While putting forth the questionable
conjecture that the myth had nothing to do with speculation or exegesis, any
more than with historical data, the next witness, Lord Raglan, English author
of a most valuable work, The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, contributes
to the discussion a body of data, comment and cited material that goes far to
make the case impregnable. His work stands as one of the first open-minded
approaches to the investigation of the world’s hero-legends, folk lore and
Märchen, and adduces evidence which negates the historical view of the hero
stories. He is perhaps the first modern to clarify the distinction between
legend and real history.
He classifies the myth roughly as
little else than the form of words which accompanies the performance of a rite.
Citing the incongruity of the content and form of the myth with the ordinary
products of the folk (to whom all previous consensus had assigned their
origin), he states the highly important conclusion that the literature of the
folk is not their own production, but comes down to them from a source above
them. The author here brings out in clear and irrefutable fashion the
discernment that it has been a great error to attribute the creation of folk
lore to the folk themselves. The myths were made for the folk, but not by
the folk. They were constructed with a view to catch the popular fancy and
be retained easily in the folk memory. To claim that they were originated by
the folk is to argue that the products of the highest cleverness and genius
came from the ranks of the untutored and ignorant. The tales and ballads lived
amongst the folk, but they were not their creation.
But to the modern student Raglan’s
statement that, since they were not an indigenous folk production, they must
have come down to them from above, is mystifying. This is due to the
failure of modern thought to envisage properly the ancient prevalence of
esoteric spirit and methodology. There should be no more skepticism about the
realities of esoteric truth and teaching than about the situation in any
college, where faculty, representing the acquired wisdom and maturity of an
older generation, presides over and instructs the members of a younger
generation, its pupils. The from above in Raglan’s pronounce-
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ment hints at nothing more weird and
exceptional than the fact that more enlightened sages from time to time since
remote days have contrived to issue for the benefit of the general mass of
uninstructed humanity bodies of truth encased in the amber of popular legend,
ballad, castle-tale and household fable. From above here signifies no
super-intelligence achieved by the spiritually illumined aspirants, whether in
ancient days or since.
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."
Budge here spoke more truly than he
has done at other times. His words are indeed the truth on this matter, so
largely missed otherwise. Raglan declares that a dozen learned writers show
that the religious systems of many countries possessed many fundamental
characteristics in common. They were obviously systems designed for the good of
the community by the proper performance of the given ritual. This possession of
a common religious denominator by many nations looms as vitally important,
since it becomes the backbone of the argument that all the myths had one common
origin in a primal construction wherein all the ingredients were at hand from
the beginning.
Raglan’s outline of the pervasive
features of the ritual is a valuable summary. He says in effect that the basic
pattern consisted of a dramatic ritual in which the death and resurrection of
the king, who was also the god, performed by priests and members of the royal
family, were the central events. There was also a sacred combat, in which the
victory of the god over his enemies was won, and a triumphal procession,
participated in by the neighboring gods, also an enthronement, with a ceremony
by which the destinies of the state for the year ahead were determined, and
finally a sacred marriage. Somewhere in the drama was interjected the
recitation of the story whose outlines were
84
enacted in the ritual. This was the
myth, and its repetition engendered a strong psychic potency equal to that of
the ritual itself. From the start the words and the actions were inseparably
united, although in the course of time they became separated and each gave rise
to its own literary, artistic and religious forms.
He states a little farther on (p.
154) that while the separation of Greek myth from its accompanying ritual may
be due in part to the ancient philosophers, who composed allegories which
seemed to tear the myth apart from the ritual, the divorcement of the two is
chiefly due to modern classical scholars who have failed to recognize the close
connection between Greek poetry and Greek religion and who have likewise missed
the fact that the Greek descriptive writers such as Herodotus and Pausanius never
cite a myth apart from a reference to some rite or to some sacred locality.
If at any time the sages composed
myths that had no connection with the ritual, it could only have been that
there was no structural or organic linkage with it. It is hardly possible to
conceive how they could have composed myths unrelated to the ritual, for all
the myths were picturizations of the same elements of meaning which the ritual
portrayed. Perhaps not distinctly related in form, but related in meaning, to
the ritual they must have been.
Raglan says that Miss Jennie Weston
(From Ritual to Romance, p. 176), after dealing with a large group of
Grail stories, concludes that these stories "repose eventually not upon a
poet’s imagination, but upon the ruins of an august and ancient ritual, a
ritual which once claimed to be the accredited guardian of the deepest secrets
of life." But so strong is the inveterate tendency to assume that history
must somehow be interwoven in ancient constructions that Miss Weston supposes
that certain historical outlines have crept into these narratives. Nothing but
later ignorance and exoteric degeneracy ever compromised with the pure myth to
the extent of insinuating historical reference into it.
A penetrating judgment is pronounced
by Raglan (p. 225) when he definitely asserts that the myth took its rise
from the dramatic features of the ritual, and that all traditional
narratives show, by both form and content, that they derive neither from
historical fact nor from imaginative fiction, but from acted ritual. There
can be little doubt, he states, that all drama is the product of ritual drama.
The dramatis personae,
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even when they are given historical
names, are not individuals but types.
The Homeric poems, he says, have the
form of dramas. The drama, he insists, was originally a religious ceremony, and
the whole community shared in it. (The Hero, p. 240.)
Mr. MacCulloch, in alluding to the
Algonquin stories, says: "All form part of a mythological cycle dealing
with the life of the hero-divinity, Manabush." Raglan subjoins that the
Homeric poems are all mythological cycles dealing with the lives of
hero-divinities; but, he ventures, nothing so arouses the fury of scholars as
the suggestion that these cycles are based on ritual, or sprang from it. He
says they take the Tale of Troy as sober record of historical fact, woven
together from scraps of romantic fiction. As there is nothing in the Bible that
can not be found in antecedent literature, so, Raglan contends, there is
nothing in "Homer" that can not be found elsewhere. Who was
Homer?--he asks. And he answers with the pronouncement of Prof. J. A. K.
Thomson, that "Homer" was the title given to the victor in the
minstrelsy contest held at the festival of Apollo at Delos. He was the eponymous-hero
of the hymn-singers and sacred dancers, and was a personification of the Delian
Apollo.
"The hymn," says Prof.
Thomson, "has given birth to the heroic-epos. For these ‘men and women’
are the old local Daimones,--Achilles, Helen and the rest. Their legends have
combined to form one great legend recited at the Delian festival in honor of
Apollo, the father-god of all the Ionians. . . . The hymn gradually added to
itself more and more of the inherited or borrowed legends of the Ionian race
until it grew into the proportions of all ‘Homer.’ And as Homer was the
traditional author of the original hymn, so he remained the traditional author
of all the rest."
Mr. W. F. J. Wright is cited as
saying that the name of Troy is widely associated with mazes and labyrinths,
and that various instances in the Iliad correspond with known features
of a once widespread maze ritual. And Prof. Hocart is drawn on as authority for
the datum that there are twenty-six common features which characterize the
installation of kings in all parts of the world; and the inference is that
these common features stem from a common source, the ancient spiritual drama.
Raglan says the conclusion is
inevitable that such characters as the
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ogre, giant, devil, dragon, troll,
cannibal and sorcerer are nothing but titles for a personage acting in a
liturgy, representing the terrifying demon of the initiations. There is much
indeed to support the expressed view of Raglan (p. 220) that the character
known as the Horned Man was taken from the ritual and became invested with real
life, gaining a status in popular belief far more real than that of any
historical character. Perhaps Jesus is more real as mythical hero than as a
once-living person. Anent this Raglan expresses his astonishment that Sir James
Ridgeway should have been misled into taking the stock figures of myth for
actual people.
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.
The incarnation of the divine soul
in man’s animal body is the basis of all the legends of the sorcerers’ turning
the hero or his men into animals, or their disguising themselves as animals.
The Hallowe’en animal mask is the survival and replica of the same thing, for
the masks were originally the hides of animals! The prominence given this phase
of the drama’s meaning is attested by what Raglan writes (p. 261). He says that
a prominent feature of every type of traditional narrative is the man in
animal form, or the animal that can speak. Persons disguised as animals are so
universal a feature of ritual and drama as not to need demonstration, he avers.
And the answer to the query why ancient Egyptian ritual was performed largely
by people in animal masks, and why Greek gods and goddesses were so often
represented as animals or birds, holds in its symbolic purport one of the
central items of the drama of human life. For the religion of these early
peoples throbbed with an innate sense of kinship with nature and religious
ideas were sympathetically adumbrated and reflected by nature’s phe-
87
nomena. 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!
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. Scholars, historians and sociologists can now be told that they
have been shooting, not at an authentic poacher in the garden, but at a
scarecrow.
Raglan cites that the Council of
Trent believed that people can take the form of animals! The ancients, as we
have seen, are accused of "believing" their myths. It was only the
later Christians that believed them, with both humorous and tragic results.
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.
This concludes the limited
assemblage of data to demonstrate that the myth came from the pristine ritual
drama. If it is not enough to prove the point, there is doubtless much more
material of perhaps greater strength that could be found and presented. The
fact, if considered sufficiently demonstrated, might seem to be remote from any
bearing on the question of the Jesus historicity. It is indeed not remote. If
it can be shown that the Christ of the Gospels was a myth-
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ical character, we could then
confidently look for agreement of all aspects of this mythical figure with the
central character-personage in the ancient religious ritual, out of which the
myths grew. Comparative religion study has already demonstrated this close
relationship of the two figures, the Christ of the mythos and the Sun-God of
the ritual. Some material in the present work may further strengthen that
identity. If the ritual and the myth are shown to be in point of fact
practically identical, and the features to match closely the characterizations
of the Gospel Jesus, a strong presumptive case has already been established in
support of the conclusion that the Gospel hero was but another of the many
mythical type-figures, and not a Galilean peasant.
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Chapter V
FANCY’S
FABRIC TURNS INTO HISTORY
The story turns next to a chapter in
revelation that must strike all but a few readers as incredible beyond all
possibility of its being the simple truth. Even if the weight of the evidence
submitted seems indubitably to support the position, it will still fail
acceptance by many. It will leave even those convinced by the presentation
shocked, bewildered, incredulous. That so gross a blunder, both gigantic and
stupid, could have been perpetrated, and that it could have been foisted upon
the world’s intelligence for sixteen centuries without detection by the united
acumen of all scholars over that period, will appear impossible. It will be the
giraffe whose existence the farmer denied while looking it up and down. It will
come close to upsetting Lincoln’s witty apothegm, and almost prove that all the
people can be fooled all the time, or for sixteen centuries. It brings the
disconcerting realization that after all fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong.
The upset of cherished maxims of human polity is distressing. The foundations
of homiletics will be shaken. So vast a miscarriage of wisdom, embroiling the
mental life of millions for centuries in the darkest superstitions, setting
spiritual culture back for ages, will seem too enormous a price to pay for a
mere misreading of myths. A consequence of such enormity would seem out of all
proportion to the apparently trivial nature of the cause.
But the misreading of myths and
allegories, fables and dramas, brought the historical Christ into
hypostatization, euhemerized the central spiritual conception in all religion,
and thus emasculated what was to have been the most potent dynamic of the whole
religious life. It left the world chasing a chimera instead of focusing effort
on the culture of spirituality. It threw a possible great civilization under
the pall and handicap of the most fantastic conception that ever misdirected
the moral genius of man into eccentric and bizarre and eventually cataclysmic
channels. It killed the psychological efficacy of the whole religious
enterprise, diverting zeal from the one pivot point where zeal
90
alone counts,--the life of the inner
consciousness and seat of character, the soul.
The revelation thus heralded and now
to be substantiated by accumulated documentation, is the colossal blunder,
perpetrated from the third century on, of mistaking myth, drama, ritual,
allegory and other forms of typical representation for objective history, and
following this by turning the body of myths into alleged occurrence. This
chapter and indeed the entire work is the answer to the raucous chorus of
protestation that will arise on all sides against the possibility of such a
thing, declaring it absurd and demanding the evidence to prove it. In many
quarters the declaration will be laughed out of court and given no chance to
present its credentials. It can be said in patient appeal for examination of
the supporting data that the closer one looks into the matter, the more
completely does the apparent absurdity fade away and probability increase to
certainty. When scrutiny has been carried on penetratingly enough, the
absurdity of its being true turns quite around and gives place to the absurdity
of any other view. Not only can the mistake be established on factual evidence,
but the perception that a mistake has been made supplies the only hypothesis
that yields a full and consistent explanation of all the data extant in the
case. It alone provides a formula which solves all the difficulties and tangles
involved in the problem. If this is so, it must be accepted and accredited as
substantial proof. For if research elicits a formula which enables all the data
to be explained rationally and consistently by its key, the formula is
considered as satisfactorily established. The key that fits all locks must be
the master key. A thousand questions, complications, inconsistencies,
contradictions, illogicalities in current interpretation both of scriptural
text and historical implication are resolved into entirely consistent
intelligibility when the true key is applied. If this resultant can not be
accepted as ultimate proof of the correctness of the thesis, it at least gives
it the field over every other proposal that does not so resolve the
difficulties with half the consonance and reasonableness.
The ancient illuminati depicted the
soul’s experience in this life by means of myth, drama, allegory and pictorial
ideograph; and in the third century the increasingly ignorant Christian laity
and the decreasingly intelligent Christian priesthood conspired at last to
convert the whole into supposed history. That is the whole story in a thimble.
But
91
we can not go far with it in the
thimble. Its full detailing demands a great elaboration. It is frankly the
gigantic task to support the claim against determined and crafty opposition,
for the very obvious reason that esotericism did not openly proclaim or defend
itself, and therefore its defense is not in evidence in rebuttal of opposing
claims. The opposition also has possessed the enormous advantage of being able
to destroy all the evidence of the other side, a point which has been
strikingly mentioned by Sir Gilbert Murray in his studies. It seems clear that
a case which must be upheld by the destruction of opposing evidence stands
already prejudiced as a weak one.
But there are times when history
itself enacts an amazing drama of poetic justice in the operation of moral
forces. So long as the voice of ancient Egypt’s wisdom was hushed in silence,
so long as the Egyptian papyri and stelae could not be read, the pious
imposture could go on. Nearly two millennia passed, with Egypt’s testimony
unavailable. But in the fullness of time Napoleon’s Colonel, Broussard, dug up
the Rosetta Stone and Napoleon wisely saw its possible value. It is
questionable whether, for direct cultural value to all races, any event, battle
or reformation in human history surpasses this simple discovery of an
entablatured rock. It is fast proving the ghost of retribution, the instrument
of justice, the Nemesis of a Christianity fostered by ignorance and
superstition. It opens up the vast treasure-house of ancient Egyptian
literature, where, once exposed to view, there lies before our eyes the full
and incontestable evidence of Christianity’s false claims. That literature
supplies the direct missing links in the body of comparative religion study, a
study which proves beyond cavil that Christianity was not the first pure divine
release of the one "true religion," but only at best a badly mangled
copy of earlier Egyptian religion. So far was it from being an advance or
improvement over pagan cultures that it is possible to say it was not even a
good reprint of them, was in fact a vitiation and sheer caricature of more
perfect ancient systems. However much this sounds like the vilest heresy and
contumacy in flouting the traditional poses of orthodoxy, the truth should not
be suppressed merely because it shocks those who prefer to hold to the set
grooves of acceptation and who for a hundred reasons are unwilling to face a
humiliating readjustment. Conservatism ever finds an error, when coupled with
security, a more comfortable companion than truth admitted to the house with
disturbing consequences. Only after new truth has
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slowly crept into the general body
and settled itself commodiously amongst the former elements, will the
conservative group adopt it, with the lying manifesto that they had been
standing for the innovation all the time. Particularly has this been true of
religious conservatism. The last to yield old ground to new positions, it is
yet the loudest to extol the new form when finally it has established itself
firmly. History supports this analysis.
The Rosetta Stone and Champollion’s
marvelous work in deciphering its cryptic hieroglyphics will force Christianity
to face its pagan origins and admit at last its long-denied parentage in the
ancient Egyptian wisdom. It has spurned its true ancestry, and having in the
meantime heaped obloquy and contempt upon it, now finds it humiliating, when
the true descent is established, to accept the connection. But it must do so
or--perish. It can no longer support its claims in the face of contradictory
evidence, which, with the release of Egypt’s hidden wisdom, the rediscovery of
the "lost language of symbolism" in which all ancient scriptures were
written and the recovery of the buried esoteric meaning of all ancient
religion, has been raised in height and volume from hillock to mountain size.
With candid truth-seeking as its guiding star, there needs to be instituted a
sincere scholastic research of all available documents to trace the causes,
motives and circumstances of that devastating surge of forces which swept over
the masses in the Roman Empire about the third century and with fell violence
stamped out the cult of esoteric wisdom and closed up its schools and
academies. With dispiriting unanimity the religious historians and Christian
writers hail the suppression of the Mystery Brotherhoods and the philosophical
schools as the happy ending of a degenerate paganism and the beginning of a
Christianity of spiritual purity. By what distortions or chicanery of logic or
sophistry the extinction of the great Plato’s still unexampled wisdom,
Socrates’ magnificent dialectic of truth and Aristotle’s consummate
perspicacity can be twisted into a triumph of truth over error and the bright
dawn of a new day for humanity, is surely not easily discerned. The logical
inconsistency of the position is brought vividly to light in the historical
phenomenon that transpired a thousand years later, when the strength of the
whole Christian system was by the Medieval schoolmen built up on the
foundations of the books of the same Plato and Aristotle, the obliteration of
whose philosophies from the early Christian doctrinism was hailed as the end of
world
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benightedness and the beginning of
world enlightenment. During some earlier centuries of the Medieval period
Plato’s Timaeus was the principal authority for Christian exposition;
and for nearly a thousand years later Aristotle was the venerated master for all
the Schoolmen, with Aquinas in the lead, of the regnant Church. Forsooth, then,
it was a benison to humanity to have earlier closed their great colleges under
the sycamores of Greece! This is the crooked logic of factual history and in
the light of it the world can see at last that Christian claims and Christian
acts do not lie straight in the same bed. Had it not been for the Arabians and
Moors the Schoolmen would probably never have had a Plato or Aristotle
manuscript to found Medieval Christianity upon. The Christian propaganda office
has vociferated a thousand times that the closing of the Platonic academies in
the fifth century ended the Dark Ages of paganism and heralded the era of true
religion. The Catholic Church vociferates with equal vigor that the revival of
Aristotelian philosophy and its use as the bulwark of a rationalized
Christianity was again the end of the Dark Ages of later Europe. It is a little
confusing to be told that the world was saved by the suppression of Grecian
esoteric wisdom and saved again by its renaissance. A fuller survey of some
aspects of this muddled situation will be undertaken in a later chapter.
The marshaling of data to
corroborate the positions taken will again require much quotation of
authorities. The pointed force of documentary statements is in large measure
lost when reported indirectly. The apology for so much direct quotation is that
a work of this kind, combating universally accepted theses and putting forth
conclusions which will be everywhere challenged, has no recourse but to summon
a powerful array of authoritative statement to its side. The importance of the
issues involved will amply justify the extensive citation.
We can put confidence in the sincere
utterance of a fair-minded scholar like Mr. G. R. S. Mead, when he makes the
following impressive statement (Did Jesus Live 100 Years B.C.?, p. 12):
"Canonical Christianity
gradually evolved the mind-bewildering dogma that Jesus was in deed and in
truth very God of very God, unique and miraculous in every possible respect;
and the Church for some seventeen or eighteen centuries has boldly thrown down
this challenge to the intellect and experience of humanity. . . . It is because
of this stupendous claim, which has perhaps astonished none more than Himself,
that the
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Church has brought upon herself a
scrutiny into the history of her origins that it is totally unable to
bear."
We can do no better than continue
with some exceedingly valuable declarations from the pen of Gerald Massey,
which, however heterodoxical they may appear to the orthodox, cut to the heart
of the truth with startling incisiveness. This clear-eyed scholar, with the
open pages of Egypt’s symbolical and analogical wisdom under his gaze, showing
the complete case for the derivation of Christian material from that august
source, stood at a vantage point where few others have stood. Facing this
perspective, his decisive advantage was his possession of both penetrating
insight into things Egyptian and an unprejudiced open mind. It is to be hoped
that our return to sanity and our more piercing discernment into ancient
religion may bring us at last to see what he saw ahead of us, and may dispose
us to do belated justice to the name of this truth-seeking student whom our
blindness cheated of his legitimate honor and reward in his lifetime.
Massey says that the Mosaic account
of the creation is allowed by the most learned of Jewish Rabbis, by Philo, Paul
and certain of the Patristics to be a myth or symbolical representation; yet
the whole structure of the Christian theology is founded on the ignorant
assumption that it was not mythical but a veritable human occurrence in the
domain of fact. As history, he avers, the Pentateuch has neither head, tail nor
vertebrae. It is an indistinguishable mush of myth and mystery. He notes a
logical consideration that has been missed by blind zeal to countenance the
impossible in a religion of fanatical faith, but that must be granted much
validity as an argument. 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. Proofs of Bible "history" will
not be found, avers Massey, not though Palestine be dug up in the search. And
how fatuous after all to think of digging in the
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earth to find the proofs of
spiritual myths and allegories! No amount of archaeology can prove a myth.
But there was bound to come a time
when the ancient world would begin to write history of the factual sort, or
when, as recondite learning and deeper esoteric comprehension waned, the
process of weaving actual history into the texture of the myths would make
headway. In nearly every land the custodians of the myths sooner or later
intermixed some national history with the spiritual dramas. As is so clearly
evidenced in Virgil’s Aeneid, the temptation was almost unconquerable at
times for the hierophants of religion to interweave the brighter deeds or
virtues of a regnant king in the ritual drama, the more particularly since the
king in all ancient countries did become the national type and personation of
the Sun-God of the temple ceremonies. 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. This process, as Massey saw it, so confused the
impossible situations found in myth and allegory with the ostensibly possible
facts of history that to accredit the narrative as history the mind had to
entertain many bizarre and fabulous incidents under the rating of miracle. The
blending of history with myth opened the door to the entry of that
derationalizing scourge born of religious ineptitude, the belief in miracle,
Massey contends. It created the susceptibility to take stock in prodigy, the
supernatural, the ominous, which nearly all minds engender from a literal
reading of the scriptures. Massey feels that religion has unsettled men’s minds
by its glorification of the miraculous and the supernatural, when the whole
basis of its true strength and salutary influence for humanity lies in its
inculcating the majesty and divinity of the ever-present miracle of the
natural. He attests that the sane ancient religion was founded upon the
natural, the highest spiritual verities being everywhere presented in the light
of their analogy with some natural phenomenon. Massey would have endorsed
Emerson’s wise discernment that "the true mark of genius is to see the
miraculous in the common." The Hebrew writings were preserved, Massey
continues, on account of
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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, and is bred and
kept alive only by ignorance, "absolute, unquestioning, unsuspecting
ignorance of the meaning of symbolism." With them the veil itself is the
treasure, and they know not the real treasure beneath it. And since they have
centered all the sanctity in the veil, when that is torn off, all the sanctity
is lost for them. They have disciplined no faculty which would enable them to
see the real treasure when it is exposed to view. They howl that their treasure
has been stolen away from them, when only the ornamentally carved lid of the
treasure chest has been removed. And this indeed has been the tragedy of the
situation. Voltaire, Paine, Ingersol, the Encyclopedists, the Deists, the
atheists and the Freethinkers and religious skeptics generally have effectively
torn away and trampled under foot the outer garments of Bible myths, all
unaware that these clothed the body of truth. The revelation of the absurdity
of Bible allegory, taken as supposed history, broadcast by these efforts, set
on fire in millions of minds a burning resentment against the whole institution
of religion, and the Bible, theology and priestcraft as its criminal
accessories. They see nothing in religion worth saving. This upsweep of
rationalism, as reaction against centuries of omnicredulous faith, threatens to
abolish religion from the earth. This is the price the world is paying for the
loss of symbolic genius in the third century. Nothing will save the cult of
genuine religion from this menacing hand but the quick restoration of the
knowledge that there is no absurdity and nonsense, but only grandeur of truth,
when the scriptures are read as sublime spiritual allegories instead of
histories. Nothing will stay the besom of devastation but the quick recovery of
the lost language of symbolism. For nothing else will bring to light the
treasure beneath 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
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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."
Very instructive for us today is
Thorburn’s next sentence:
"To the modern and European
mind this process obscures and weakens the historical character of the human
counterpart; to the ancient and Oriental mind it merely added vividness and
reality to his picture."
It seems likely that the writer of
this sentence did not catch the profounder significance of his own words, which
hint at a superficial meaning when really great truth is being uttered. He did
not realize that "the human counterpart" of the mythical analogue was
man collectively, and not only some characters in Gospel narrative. And what
dialectic or logical justification there is in his using the word
"merely" in his last sentence it is difficult to see. It seems to be
there as evidence of the insatiate impulsion in orthodox minds to cast a slight
upon pagan systems at every turn. One of the high purposes of the mythicizing
tendency of ancient scripture was directly to "add vividness and
reality" to the productions. The writer’s insertion of the word
"merely" commits him to saying in effect that the adding of vividness
and reality to sacred narrative was something trivial and inconsequential. If
the method succeeded in adding vividness and reality, it at least accomplished
something that has been lamentably lacking in later presentation of religious
material. But Thorburn, in the very effort to discredit the utility of ancient
mythicism, has splendidly stated its entire validity. His charge that the
admixture of myth in scripture has obscured and
98
weakened the full force of its
educative power has a semblance of truth in it only because the interwoven myth
has been uncomprehended. The presence of myth in the record has been a
stumbling block only because all power to interpret it had been lost. It still
remains true that the understanding use of myths by the ancients did vastly
enhance the vividness and reality of the truths thus poetically embellished.
But it turns out that a statement meant to deprecate the influence of the myth
really concedes the claim for its high utility. Thorburn’s unpremeditated
admission states with great precision the signal distinction between the
ancient sagacious use of the myth and the modern ignorant miscomprehension of
its function.
Massey divides humanity into two
classes, the knowing and the simple, and says that the knowing ones kept back
the esoteric explanation of the myths to let the belief of the untutored masses
in the real history take root. "The simple ones, like Bunyan, ‘fell
suddenly into an allegory about the journey on the way to glory,’ which
allegory, they were led to believe, was purely matter of fact."
The great truth of history remains
to be faced, Massey insists, that the Gospel of "Equinoctial
Christolatry" was written before, with a totally different rendering, and
that the sayings, dogmas, doctrines, types and symbols, including both the
cross and the Christ, did not originate where we may have just made
acquaintance with them. This cryptology was written before in the books of
secret wisdom, now interpretable according to the recovered Gnosis. It was
pre-extant in the types which now have been traced from the lowest root to
highest branch. It was inscribed before in the records of the past drawn on the
starry skies. The truth is that the real origines of the cult of true
Christolatry (not Christianity) have never yet been reached; hardly indeed have
they even been suspected, because of the supposed "New Beginning" in
human history which was taken for granted by those who knew no further. The
evidence for all this, however, could not have been adduced before the
mythology, typology and Christology of Egypt were discovered in the keeping of
the mummies and disinterred from the vaults of the dead. Now, fortunately, the
lost language of celestial allegory is being restored, chiefly through the
resurrection of ancient Egypt, and scriptures can be read in the sense in which
they were originally written.
In The Book of the Beginnings (Vol.
II, p. 226) Massey says that
99
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:
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"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.
Higgins quotes Bryant as saying that
it is evident that most of the deified personages never existed, but were mere
titles of the Deity, or of the Sun, Deity’s universal symbol, and for our solar
system, Deity’s embodiment, as was earlier shown by Macrobius. Nor was there
ever any such folly perpetrated in ancient history as the supposition that the gods
of the Gentile world had been natives of the countries where they were
worshipped. Bryant well observes that it was a chief study of the learned to
register the legendary stories concerning the gods, to conciliate the
absurdities and to arrange the whole into a chronological series--a fruitless
and drudging labor. "For there are in these fables such inconsistencies
and contradictions as no act nor industry can remedy. . . . This misled Bishop
Cumberland, Waker, Pearson, Petavius, Scaliger, with numberless other learned
men, and among the foremost the great Newton." As to the last name, it is
not so certain that the great Newton was so completely misled. He states in his
Principia that he was led to his great discoveries by many implications
of the esoteric study, especially in the books of Jacob Böhme, the shoemaker
esotericist. Bryant then goes on to demonstrate that the whole of such
material, if literally understood, was a mass of falsity and rubbish.
Higgins makes the direct charge that
sublime philosophical truths or virtues have been clothed with bodies and
converted into living crea-
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tures. Starting with the plausible
attempt to screen them from "the vulgar eye," the purpose of
concealment worked with such thoroughness that the generality of men came at
last to treat them in a literal sense. He attributes the change which resulted
in the loss of the esoteric sense to the inevitable fluctuations that come in
the run of evolutionary progress.
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."
This is frank talk, but nearly every
scholar who has covered the ground of the ancient situation with a mind not set
in advance against the pagan religions, has felt that this is essentially the
truth. One such expression may be given. It is from the pen of the modern Harry
Elmer Barnes (The Twilight of Christianity, p. 415):
"What might have happened to
western society if the teachings of Jesus had been literally applied, we can
not well know with any precision. There seems little doubt, however, that the
total results of Christianity to date have been a decisive liability to the
human race. There is no doubt whatever that Christianity has actually produced
more suffering, misery, bloodshed, intolerance and bigotry than it has ever
assuaged or suppressed.
Massey (Luniolatry, p. 2)
says there is nothing insane or irrational in mythical representation when the
allegorical connotation is thoroughly understood.
"The insanity lies in mistaking
it for human history or Divine Revelation. Mythology is the repository of man’s
most ancient science, and what concerns us chiefly is this--when truly
interpreted once more, it is destined to be the death of those false theologies
to which it has unwittingly given birth."
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Allegories misinterpreted as
supposed history have created a veritable cult of the unreal which is blindly
believed.
Commenting on the cry that he would
take the living Jesus away from believers, he retorts that we can be none the
poorer for losing that which never was a real possession, but only a
psychological wraith which deluded us with its seeming substance. To find the
true we must first let go the false. In Goethe’s words, until the half-gods go,
the whole gods can not come.
Massey says pointedly that there is
no greater fraud than that which grew out of the historical interpretation of
early legend. This factitious "history" is forever at war, he
affirms, with all that is prehistorically true. It not only misinterprets the
legend, which would have its own value if rightly scanned, but misrepresents
the actual history of early days.
Massey stands firmly on the blunt
assertion that the doctrines and dogmas of Christian theology are derived from
Egypt and its arcana, and holds that this must be admitted when better
acquaintance with that mine of recondite wisdom is made. The door to its adyta
is only now opening. The pre-Christian religion was founded on a knowledge of
natural and verifiable facts, but the Christian cult was founded on egregious
faith which swallowed all that was impossible in fact and unnatural in
phenomena. Current orthodoxy is based upon a deluding idealism, derived from
literalized legend and misconstrued mythology. The ancients handed over to
later generations the science of the human soul, and the Christians have lost
it. They substituted the phantom of faith for the knowledge of truth. They
propagated a religion that could live only on blind belief, and persecuted all
those who would not blindly believe. They shut out the light of nature from
their sealed domicile and compelled all others to live in the same dark prison.
The ancient legends and myths do not
tell us lies, Massey insists. The men who created them did not deal falsely
with us or with nature. "All the falsity lies in their having been
falsified through ignorantly mistaking mythology for divine revelation and
allegory for historic truth."
Lord Raglan cites Prof. W. Gronbeck
(Vol. I, p. 249) in a passage that shows true discernment of the situation
which has bred no end of confusion in all philosophical effort:
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"In the history of the
sacrificial hall the individual warrior is sunk in the god, or, which is the
same thing, in the ideal personification of the clan, the hero. This form of
history causes endless confusion among later historians when they try their
best to arrange the mythical traditions into chronological happenings and the
deeds of the clan into annals and lists of kings, and the confusion grows to
absurdity when rationalistic logicians strive by the light of sound sense to
extricate the kernel of history from the husks of superstition."
This is an accurate, though partial,
analysis of the general course which esoteric degeneration has taken,
supporting Massey’s robust contention that the Märchen are the distorted
wrack and debris of the myths. Until this basic perception of the truth of the
relation between general folk lore and religious origins is gained, the efforts
of modern studentship to evaluate the place and significance of this important
aspect of human interest will be so much groping in the dark and continually
missing the truth.
A part of the process of
degeneration of esoteric mythology appertaining closely to Christianity is well
delineated by G. R. S. Mead in his fine work on Gnostic Christianity, Fragments
of a Faith Forgotten (p. 118). He writes that in its popular origins the
Christian movement had deeply entangled itself with the popular Jewish
traditions, which were innocent of all philosophical or kabalistic mysticism,
that is, esotericism. But as time went on, either men of greater education
joined the ranks or the leaders were forced to study more widely to meet the
arguments of educated opponents, and consequently more liberal views obtained a
hold among a number of Christians. In time also other great religious
traditions and philosophies contributed elements to the popular stream. All
such more latitudinarian views, however, were still looked upon with suspicion
by the "orthodox." And before long even the moderate esoteric
proclivities of Clement and Origen were regarded as a grave danger; so that
with the triumph of narrow orthodoxy and the resultant hostility to learning,
Origen himself was at last anathematized. It may not be conclusive proof of the
evil transformation of good myth into bad history to cite this broad change in
Christian polity in those early centuries; but the fact that such a change of
posture took place lends to the contention that trends in the direction of
literalism and historization of scripture were strongly in current at the time.
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Express confirmation of one of the
stages described by Mead is at hand in the statement of an eminent modern
theologian, Benjamin W. Bacon, of Yale Divinity School, in his work, Jesus
and Paul (p. 23). He declares that by creditable estimate Christianity lost
one half of its following to Marcion and other Gnostic "heretics"
bent on tearing it away from its Jewish associations and making it over in the
true likeness of a Greek Mystery cult of individual spiritual realization. This
was the movement which Mead has spoken of, due to the influx of Platonic and
esoteric philosophies from Alexandria and Hellenic centers. It was an effort on
the part of the more knowing ones to save Christianity from the debacle toward
which it was fast heading through the corruption of the sound esoteric
teaching. Almost every apologist for Christianity has hailed the defeat of the
Hellenic philosophy’s incursion into the early theology of the Church as the
triumph of the faith and the salvation of Christianity. A fuller treatment of
this chapter of Christian history is reserved for other connections in the
study. It must suffice for the moment to say here that if by the repulse of
Greek philosophy the Church gained the ignorant masses of the people, it not
only failed to help their unintelligence, but further it lost its own power to
bring spiritual light and rational nourishment to the more illumined of
mankind.
It may be that there is an exoteric
rendering of spiritual allegory that would purvey true meaning to the lower
brackets in the intellectual scale. The supposition prevails that the truths of
life can be made simple, for the simple. It has rarely worked out that way. In
all historic cases where the esoteric rendition has been lost and the exoteric
substituted, the popular conceptions of the profounder purport have become, not
truth simplified, but truth distorted into untruth. There perhaps could and
should be the milk for babes as well as the meat for stronger digestion. But,
as it has worked out in actuality in the course of history, the exoteric milk,
once it is dispensed among the populace, always tends to become churned into a
little-nourishing cheese. Instead of instructing the simpler minds in simpler
aspects of the truth, it ends by plunging them into myriad forms of outright
error. In the historical sequel, it is sadly to be said, it has been proven
that esotericism has carried the true meaning and exotericism only a false
caricature. The exoteric doctrine has ever mistaught the popular mind. So
Massey says: "An exoteric rendering has taken place of the esoteric
representa-
105
tion, which contained the only true
interpretation." And he gives the reason: wisdom designed for the
enlightenment of the inner spiritual consciousness of evolved men "was
converted into history" for the secular mind and "all turned
topsy-turvy by changing" the soul of all humanity into one mortal man.
"In this way the noble, full,
flowing river of old Egypt’s wisdom ended in a quagmire of prophecies for the
Jews and a dried-up wilderness of desert sands for the Christians. And on these
shifting sands the ‘historic’ Christians reared their temple of the eternal which
is giving way at last because it was not founded on the solid rock, and because
no amount of blood would ever suffice to solidify the sand or form a concrete
foundation or even a buttress for the crumbling building."
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
106
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
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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
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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. 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
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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):
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"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
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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. If he has admitted this point it was because he could
not avoid it. It must therefore be true. And if true, there are no words at
immediate command to acclaim the significance of this amazing admission. It
concedes the whole truth of Massey’s great volumes, and virtually does the same
for the contentions of the present work. The Gospels and Epistles of the New
Testament were ancient books of the Essenes! Eusebius was merely testifying to
what nearly all men of intelligence in his age knew to be the truth, that the
Gospels, Epistles and Apocrypha were just portions of the mass of arcane
esoteric wisdom transmitted, for centuries orally in the Mysteries, and later
in written form, from remote antiquity to their age. One can envision the
different, and happier, course that medieval and modern Occidental history
might have taken had this admission of the Christian historian not been hidden
out of sight for long centuries. The ghost of those dead centuries might
justifiably come forth and demand to know why this admission was buried. And
the living voice of the present generation, torn with a titanic strife that has
grown out of ideologies that were warped by the lack of fundamental truth in
traditional religions, might with ample justice rise to demand why the
admission is not proclaimed anew at this juncture.
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
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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?
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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."
In his famous Life of Jesus (1835,
Vol. II, Sec. 48) D. F. Strauss states that in the ancient Church the most
reflective among the Fathers considered that the celestial Voice of the Old
Testament was not like an ordinary voice, produced by vibrations of the air and
apparent to the organs of sense, but an internal impression which God produced
in those with whom he designed to communicate; and it is in this way that
Origen and Theodore of Mopsuete have maintained previously that the apparition
at the time of the baptism of Jesus was a vision and not a natural reality.
Simple people, says Origen, take lightly the great cosmic processes described
in the book; but those who think more profoundly believe that in their dreams
they have had evidence by their corporeal senses "when it has simply been
a movement of their minds." Had the discriminating practical wisdom
evidenced by Origen here been generally exercised throughout the run of the
centuries by the simple and the wise alike, the annals of religion would not
have contained the record of hallucination and fanatical credulity which they
hold.
Drews and Graetz alike regard
Josephus’ mention of John the Baptist as "a shameless interpolation."
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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.
In his effort to refute the mythical
interpretation T. J. Thorburn shows glaringly the bewilderment of scholars
anent this theme when he affirms (p. 320) that in the case of the nature-cults
the spring revival of the god is simply typical of the annual resurrection of
life in nature. This is putting the cart before the horse surely. He goes on to
prove the infinite "superiority" and greater "nobility" of
Christianity over the pagan mythological idea by saying that in the Christian
resurrection (as given by St. Paul in I Corinthians, 15) both Jesus
himself and with him all believers rise to a new and more glorious life, in
which a "spiritual body" replaces the material or "natural
body." The death and revival of the cult-god is an annual matter; Jesus
and the Christian die and are raised from the dead "once for all."
How great the obtuseness which prevented the scholars from seeing that the
pagan typism did not end with the sprouting grain and budding leaf of spring,
but from that as type proceeded to the very thing that is claimed to have been
the sole possession of Christianity! It is not easy to picture sixteen
centuries of the best acumen of the western world floundering over the simple
matter of recognizing that the ancient pagans set their cycle of religious
expression to the time and tune of nature’s solar hymn, as at once the most
luminous and moving suggestion of the cyclical advance of man’s divinity.
Unless we deny to men of the stature of Plato any sagacity beyond childishness,
it is naturally assumable that they did not, as Thorburn
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thinks, lose the spiritual reality
in the natural typism. The solar myth was not to celebrate the sprouting of the
corn; the sprouting of the grain was called upon to help the mind frame a more
realistic conception of the resurrection of the divine seed that had been, like
the grain, buried in the earth of flesh and sense. The sages used nature to
vivify spiritual processes. As most poets have done, they worshipped spirit
through its reflection in nature. They saw that an approach to a lively
apprehension of the deeper aspects of truth was vastly facilitated and enhanced
by the contemplation of their counterpart in the physical world. How false to
charge that the pagan world had only the physical fact and could not go beyond
it! The evidence is mountainous in bulk that pagan eyes pierced through the
phenomena of nature to the truth of higher levels. Pagan spiritual discernment
was all the keener for its close beholding of the natural world. The assumption
that in his primitive infantilism the pagan stopped at nature, while the
Christian went on to God, is a rank heresy. It is defied by all the fact of
antiquity. Rebuttal of this gratuitous depreciation of past civilization is
firmly based upon the early production of scriptures of the most exalted
wisdom. The authors of these high revelations knew the realm of sublimer truth
that lay beyond nature, and they also knew the mighty fact that nature was the
outer visible analogue of this other world of truth. Then as now, esoteric
genius grasped the distinction between outer and inner, but ancient sapiency
recognized better than modern the essential kinship of the two.
An interesting sidelight is cast on
our discussion by G. R. S. Mead, already quoted, who in his Fragments of a
Faith Forgotten (Gnosticism), says:
"With much sincerity our
Gnostics found these numbers and processes in the prologue to Genesis
and elsewhere in the Old Covenant Library; . . . But when we find that they
treated the Gospel-legends also not as history but as allegory, and not only as
allegory but as symbolical of the drama of initiation, the matter becomes of
deep interest" to the student of religion.
In his The Story of Chaldea Zenaïde
A. Ragozin says that the tenth chapter of Genesis is the oldest and most
important document in existence concerning the origins of races and nations,
but in order properly to understand it and appreciate its value and bearing,
"it must not be
116
forgotten that each name in the list
is that of a race, a people or a tribe, not that of a man."
To substantiate his statement on
this point Ragozin cites the authority of "many scientists and
churchmen" and quotes no less a Church Father than St. Augustine, who
pointedly says that the names in the tenth chapter of Genesis represent
"nations not men." (De Civitate Dei, XVII, 3.) So again we
find racial entities or groups made to masquerade exoterically as
"men."
Much data from various sources go to
prove that the New Testament--as now known--was compiled from esoteric texts,
which were themselves covered by a thick film of allegory and even veiled
behind misleading "blinds," the "dark sayings" of fiction
and parable. It is unthinkable, impossible that any merely human brain could
have concocted the alleged "life" of the Jewish Jesus, culminating in
the awful tragedy of Calvary. How, then, came this "life" to be
written? Esoteric comprehension answers that it came from the ignorant
literalization of the story of the Christ-Aeon of the Gnostic and Essene books,
and from the writings of the ancient Tanaim, who connected the kabalistic Jesus
or Joshua with the Biblical personifications. The Gnostic records contained the
epitome of the chief scenes enacted during the Mysteries of Initiation, from
most remote times; although even that was given out invariably under the garb
of semi-allegory whenever put on paper. The ancient Tanaim, sage authors of the
Kabalah (in its oral tradition) who handed on their wisdom to the later
Talmudists, possessed the secrets of the Mystery language; and it is in this
language, as has been said earlier, that the Gospels were written. It is
possible for us to see, then, what it was that the ignorant literalizers of such
material turned into "history."
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
117
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. And Massey flings the irony
of his pen at the fact that "such literalization of mythology is continued
to be taught as God’s truth to the men and women of the future in their
ignorant and confiding childhood." Higgins (Anacalypsis, 514)
likewise expostulates against the asinine failure to distinguish between
"the real and the fabulous." "It is allowed that Cristna is the
sun, and yet they talk of him as a man." He directly charges that "It
is evidently almost the only employment of the idle priests to convert their
historical account into a riddle and again to give their doctrines and riddles
the appearance of history." The temptation to give in full his indignant
accusation on this score in his own words is difficult to resist:
"And the reason why all our
learned men have totally failed in their endeavors to discover the meaning of
the ancient mythologies is to be found in their obstinate perseverance in
attempting to construe all the mythoses, meant for enigma, to the very letter.
I have no doubt that anciently every kind of ingenuity which can be imagined
was exerted from time to time to invent and compose new riddles, till all
history became in fact a great enigma. In modern times as much ingenuity has
been exercised to conceal the enigma and by explanation to show that it was
meant for reality. . . . Before the time of Herodotus every ancient history is
a mythical performance, in short, a gospel--a work written to enforce virtue
and morality and to conceal the mythos--and every temple had one. The Iliad and
Odyssey, the plays of Aeschylus, the Cyropaedia, the Aeneid, the
early history of Rome, the Sagas of Scandinavia, the Sophis of Abra-
118
ham, the secret Book of the
Athenians, the Delphic verses of Olen, the 20,000 verses repeated by heart to
the Druids, the Vedah or Bedahs."
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."
The last lines of this excerpt carry
the burden and gist of the effort here made to assert the psychological and
spiritual disservice of the "historical Christ." Massey goes on to
enlarge upon the theme and says that Paul chides the "foolish
Galatians" for beginning by believing in the spiritual Christos and ending
by believing in the Jesus of the flesh; and Massey declares that Paul was
himself a Gnostic, the founder of a new sect of Gnosis which recognized only a
"Christ-spirit" for the divine Avatar. One must go to the Gnostic
writings to discover the pristine teachings of the Jesus in the Mysteries. The
literal falsifiers dragged the spiritual divinity of man into matter and the
dust. And to cover their fatal work they burned--among other books--the
twenty-four volumes of the Gnostic Basilides, by order of the Church. Clement
described Basilides as "the philosopher devoted to the contemplation of
divine things." The books burned were his works on the Interpretations
of the Gospels, and they would be of priceless value to the world today.
Indications that the scriptures of
the Old and New Testament must be something far other than historical record
are found in the startling pronouncement made by the Alexandrian Clement (Stromateis,
XVII):
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"The Scriptures having perished
in the captivity of Nabuchodonozar, Esdras the Levite, priest in the times of
Artaxerxes, King of the Persians, having become inspired in the exercise of
prophecy, restored again the whole of the ancient Scriptures."
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
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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."
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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.
Prof. J. H. Rose is driven to admit
(Folk-Lore, Vol. XLVI, 22) that "we have not yet an agreed and
perfected technique" for distinguishing history from sagas. No wonder this
is so, comments Lord Raglan (The Hero, 61), since there is but one way
to mark the difference, and that is by checking alleged history with facts
known from other sources. When this is done the sagas break down utterly--as
history.
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
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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, 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
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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
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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."
If there is the providential
rulership of the universe that misses not even the fall of a sparrow, it is to
be assumed that adjustment of a wrong so flagrant and enormous as the slaughter
over sixteen hundred years of a people who merely refused to go along with a
doltish substitution of history for allegory, will in due time be made.
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
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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.
Among hundreds of passages to be
culled out of early Patristic writing which throw doubt on the veracity of the
historical side of Christianity we have a strange statement in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue
with Trypho: "In the dialogue we find Trypho saying, ‘Ye follow an
empty rumor and make a Christ for yourselves. . . . If he was born and lived
somewhere, he is entirely unknown.’" A more straightforward report on the
true situation in the second century, marked by the claims and denials of
historians, is hardly to be had. It sounds as if the early Church Father,
taking part in the original debate as to the historicity, argues on the side
taken by the present work. It was as if he said: "The Christ of the
Gospels is the mythical and ritualistic figure; if a historical Christ did
live, you have no record of his existence." The entire present debate
might be summarized in the same words. His sentences might well be made the
concluding ones of our last page. He, too, might have said: "Ye have
reduced the cosmic majesty of the Logos to the mean stature of a Galilean
peasant."
Clement of Alexandria (Stromata VII,
7, 106) records the astounding fact that the doctrine of the Evangel was
delivered to Basilides, the consecrated student of sacred things, by the
Apostle Matthew and Glaucus, a disciple of Peter! And there is evidence that
the Gospel
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then delivered must have differed
widely from the present New Testament. Tertullian’s distorted accounts of this
deposit left to posterity are no faithful guide to a true evaluation of it. Yet
even the little this partisan fanatic gives shows the chief Gnostic doctrines
to be identical with the broader and deeper esoteric wisdom of the East.
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
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the Church properly refused to
listen to it." (Hieronymus: Commentary to Matthew, Bk. II, Chap.
XII, 13).
Gibbon, in a footnote on p. 432 of
his great history, gives us material that ought to be granted consideration. He
says:
"The modern critics are not
disposed to believe what the Fathers almost unanimously assert, that St. Matthew
composed a Hebrew Gospel, of which only the Greek translation is extant. It
seems, however, dangerous to reject their testimony."
A volume of comment might be made on
data of this sort, which could be enlarged to great proportions. There is at
any rate enough of it in the Patristic and early sectarian and polemic
literature of the Christian movement to provide a sufficient deterrent to the
open dissemination of this body of Church history among the general laity. So
extensive a policy of concealment, amounting practically to a conspiracy of
silence, argues a case difficult to defend.
It may not be inappropriate to
conclude this chapter with a reflection forced upon the mind of Gerald Massey
toward the later years of a life given to a searching study of the origins of
Christianity. It is a tribute of no mean impressiveness to the power of
religious influences even when the true inner import of the ritual expressing
them is unknown. Dilating upon the Egyptian Mystery ritual, he says:
"In this divine drama the
natural realities are represented with no perniciously destructive attempt to
conceal the characters under a mask of history. Majestically moving in their
own might, of pathetic appeal to human sympathies, they are simply represented
for what they may be worth when rightly apprehended. But so tremendous was this
tragedy in the Osirian Mysteries, so heart-melting the legend of divinest pity
that lived on with its rootage in Amenta and its flowerage in the human mind,
that an historic travesty has kept the stage and held the tearful gaze
of generation after generation for nineteen hundred years."
If the mere husk of religious truth
has exerted so amazing an influence upon mortals, what might have been the
transcendent exaltation of the mind and purgation of the life of the race if
the golden corn itself had been preserved! But the corn was lost and the husk
alone remained when the myths of truth were converted into the falsities of
"history."
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Chapter VI
CANONIZED
ROMANTICISM
Doubtless, despite the evidence
assembled, the blunt charge that so apparently impossible a transaction as the
conversion of myth into history has really occurred will still remain
incredible and unacceptable. The great cry will be raised as to how so amazing
and stupendous a blunder could have occurred. With the universal presumption of
so much honesty and integrity, and likewise high intelligence in a people
divinely inspired as the devout early Christians are believed to have been, it
becomes difficult for the general mind to comprehend how such flagrant error
could have gained the day and consummated so gross a miscarriage. To what
extent was the crime knowingly perpetrated? Was it motivated by sincerity
working in ignorance, or by intelligence working in insincerity?
The answer to these queries is by no
means simple or easy. It is involved in no end of difficulty arising mainly
from the destruction of evidence and the biases and prejudices of the reviewers
of what evidence is available. But if all the facts in the situation were truly
known, it is pretty certain that the full solution would comprise a vast jumble
and admixture of all the varying degrees of intelligence and ignorance,
sincerity and insincerity, in one grand plot. Nearly all human and historical
transactions are the resultant of a mixed group of forces actuated by every
degree of intelligence and sincerity, or the want of them. It may perhaps be
questioned whether any act or decision of people anywhere at any time is of
downright deliberate insincerity. Some allegedly justifiable "reason"
lurks behind or under every deed. People do evil things of deliberate intent,
but they hardly do them with insincerity. Justification is found somewhere in
the depth of feeling or thought. Generally it will be found that where apparent
insincerity is operative, it is unintelligence that warps the action into evil
direction. Granting inherent sincerity in human nature, its miscarriage into
foul expression must be due to want of keen in-
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telligence. This is indeed the
conclusion arrived at in the finale by Plato and Socrates in their dialectical
inquiry into the nature of the good. The basic and ultimate evil is nothing
but--in one or other of its manifold forms--ignorance. So declared Buddha,
Orpheus, Hermes, Solomon and other sage teachers of early man. It is assumed
legitimate to accuse a person if he does badly when he should know better. The
acme of all evil charge is that a person does wrong knowingly. If in the
conversion of myth into history there was this commission of knavery in spite
of better knowledge, the verdict must be rendered accordingly. Again, if the
wreckage of the myth resulted from ignorance and misguided motives, the
judgment must be more lenient, although there is no sentiment in nature and she
punishes ignorance as well as knavery.
Our glance at the possibility of
insincerity in the motive behind the alteration is actuated by no mere
truculent attitude, but is warranted by a more substantial reason. Any history
of early Christianity must face and deal with the perpetration of an extensive
series of what are known among the historians as "pious frauds" by
the Fathers and partisan leaders in the first centuries and the Church’s
connivance at them then and later. The charge is brought by many chroniclers of
the period and confessed by most Christian apologists. The assembling of data
substantiating it, while an invidious task, must be made in sufficient force to
justify the introduction of it as a count in the case against the historicity
of the Son of God. If the charge of fraudulent literary practice in the
handling of religious data in the early day can be upheld, it strengthens by so
much the likelihood that the transfer of meaning from the impersonal Christos
to the man Jesus was made. The proof of fraud and deception greatly heightens
the probability that the change occurred. If analysis of the whole situation
extant at the time reveals that the transaction was of such a nature that
knavery would be suspected of being a highly probable element in it, the discovery
of such chicanery in the immediate wake of the suspicion certainly will tend to
increase the validity of the non-historical claim. If, in point of fact, it
would seem necessary to posit fraud as accessory to the great transformation in
the character of the Christos, the disclosure of fraud in the actual situation
amounts to strong prima facie evidence that the case was as suspected.
It is surely to be agreed that
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the proven presence and practice of
religious fraud in the first centuries of Christian history must be weighed
realistically in relation to every development of the ecclesiastical polity
then and after. A superficial view would not fail to conclude that there must
be a close and perhaps immediate link between such a transaction as the personalizing
of the Messiah and the prevalent impostures in the field of religion. If fraud
is known to have been a strong feature of the picture, it becomes necessary to
determine what part it played in the historization of the Jesus character. To
many it is certain that the revelation of such an unknown and unsuspected
element in the case will serve as an all-sufficient clue to the solution of the
whole complication. It will be seized upon readily as the missing key to the
entire mystery. While this may be according too much importance to the item,
the presence of fraud is nearly always presumptive testimony to a sinister
motive or maneuver.
To begin with, an initial suspicion
and distrust is awakened in the mind of the student when he is confronted from
the start with the presence and volume of documents, books, gospels and
apocrypha bearing the prefix "Pseudo-" to their title. There is the "Pseudo-Mark,"
the "Pseudo-Acts," the "Pseudo-Dionysus" and
others in bewildering profusion. Nothing less than plagiarism and forgery are
at once suggested by this phenomenon. Then the field of early Christianity is
cluttered up with works controverting alleged "heresies" on all
sides. Indeed most of the works that stand as the chief contemporary histories
of the first centuries of Christianity bear the title "Against
Heresy." This is notably the case with the books of Eusebius, Tertullian,
Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Epiphanius, a quintet of historians on whom the Church
has relied mainly to buttress its egregious claims to unique authority and its
defamations of the "pagan" religions. But it is time to gather the
amazing data on this score.
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
131
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."
Mead’s statement that antiquity did
not possess our modern standards of literary morality adds strength to the
general claim that the purpose of ancient writing was never strictly to record
the facts of history, but rather to depict mystical realities and intellectual
concepts. One is obviously privileged to use one’s fancy when the truth of
objective occurrence is not the theme, and the experience of the inner life is.
It may alleviate to a degree the weight of obloquy that may seem to fall upon
the perpetrators of so much literary crime to remember Mead’s explanation of
its religious background.
In The Hero Lord Raglan
briefly states that pious frauds of this (and every other conceivable) type
were a commonplace of medieval ecclesiasticism. And the medieval was but a
prolongation of ancient practice.
In The Anacalypsis (522)
Higgins, alleging that it was not uncommon for the priests to charge their
opponents with absurd opinions they never held for the purpose of disgracing
them, remarks that "this has always been considered by priests a mere
allowable ruse in religious controversy. It is yet had recourse to every
day."
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."
From a source within the fold of
orthodoxy itself comes a confession that is singularly and creditably frank. If
all Christian authors and apologists had been as candid as von Mosheim, the
faith of the Church would have presented a better defense than unfortunately
can now be made. Speaking of the Gospel of Hermas in his celebrated
history of the early Church (p. 91), he writes:
"At the time when he wrote it
was an established maxim with many of the Christians that it was pardonable in
an advocate for religion to
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avail himself of fraud and
deception, if it were likely that they might conduce toward the attainment of
any considerable good. Of the list of silly books and stories to which this
erroneous notion gave rise, from the second to the fifteenth century, no one
who is acquainted with Christian history can be ignorant."
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."
Another group of zealots, he goes
on, trafficking with the great name and authority of the Egyptian Hermes
Trismegistus, concocted a work bearing the title of Poemander, and other
books, replete with Christian principles and maxims, and sent them forth into
the world. "Many other deceptions of this sort, to which custom has very
improperly given the denomination of pious frauds, are known to have
been practiced in this and the succeeding centuries." The authors, he
claims, were in all probability actuated by no ill intention, "but this is
all that can be said in their favor, for their conduct in this respect was
certainly most ill-advised and unwarrantable." He shifts the major blame
for "these forgeries on the public" to the Gnostics, but admits that
he yet can not take upon himself
133
"to acquit even the most
strictly orthodox from all participation in this species of criminality: for it
appears from evidence superior to all exception that a pernicious maxim, which
was current in the schools not only of the Egyptians, the Platonists and the
Pythagoreans, but also of the Jews, was very early recognized by the Christians
and soon found amongst them numerous patrons, namely, that those who made it
their business to deceive with a view of promoting the cause of truth, were
deserving rather of commendation than of censure."
Is it possible that we are here
standing at the very cradle of what the world has come to call
"Jesuitry"? If so it can be seen that this bad excuse for allegedly
good action had its remote birth in the methods of ancient sacred writing
depicted in our second chapter, used originally with esoteric integrity of
purpose, but twisted into fraudulent usage by later piety working with less
intelligence and probity. It is another cardinal instance and proof of what is
claimed, that all corruption of religion and theology came in through the decay
and loss of the principles of genuine esoteric schematism. The case grows more
solid with every additional observation that the major cause of all religious
decadence and perversion was this early-century transmogrification of allegory
into history. This will prove to be the mysterious key to the confusion and
chaos in the entire religious domain. Mosheim’s honesty in refusing to wash
away the knavery here recorded is commendable and will in the end serve the
interests of true Christianity.
In Vol. II (p. 5) of his work he
again admits he can not deny that pious fraud found a place in the propagation
of Christianity in the third century. And again he says it is certain that in
the earliest ages of the new faith it was "not uncommon for men to fill up
the chasms of genuine history with fictitious conceits, the mere suggestion of
their own imagination." And candor could go no further than it does in
another passage (Vol. I, 106), in which he admits that when once certain of the
Christian writers had been unfortunately tempted to have recourse to fiction,
"it was not long before the weakness of some and the arrogant presumption
of others carried forgery and imposition to an extent of which it would be
difficult to convey to the reader any adequate idea."
The eminent historian Lecky, in his History
of Rationalism (I, 164) somewhat ironically records his conclusion:
134
"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.
Gibbon (Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, 502) states that
"the most extravagant legends,
as they conduced to the honor of the Church, were applauded by the credulous
multitude, countenanced by the power of the clergy and attested by the
suspicious evidence of ecclesiastical history."
135
Such a Christian authority as The
Catholic Encyclopedia (VII, 645) says that
"even the genuine Epistles were
greatly interpolated to lend weight to the personal views of their author. For
this reason they were incapable of bearing witness to the original form."
In an enlightening lecture entitled Paul
the Gnostic Opponent of Peter, Massey reveals that
"as Irenaeus tells us, the
Gnostics, of whom Marcion was one, charged the other apostles with hypocrisy,
because they ‘framed their doctrine according to the capacity of their hearers,
fabling blind things for the blind according to their blindness; for the dull
according to their dulness; for those in error according to their
errors.’"
A strong statement is made in the History
of the Christian Religion to the Year 200, by Charles B. Waite, to the
effect that a comprehensive review of the first one hundred and seventy years
of Christianity discloses the ignorance and superstition of even the most
enlightened and best educated of the Fathers; with rare exceptions they were
men who utterly despised learning, especially that of the pagans attempting to
study the laws of the material universe. Construing in the narrowest sense the
maxim that the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God, they construed the
Jewish scriptures and sayings of Christ in the most fanciful and whimsical ways.
Their credulity was unbounded and "they had a sublime disregard for truth.
. . . Their unscrupulousness when seeking for arguments to enforce their
positions is notorious, as well as the prevalence among them of what are known
as pious frauds."
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."
136
"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
137
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."
As to this serious charge he writes
(Anac., 697):
"Lanfranc, a Benedictine, was
head of the monks of St. Maur about A.D. 1050, and it appears that this Society
not only corrected the Gospel histories, but they also corrected the Fathers,
in order that their Gospel corrections might not be discovered; and this was
probably the reason for the publication by them of their version of the whole
of the Fathers."
It is not difficult to see why the
labors of Higgins, Massey, Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, and others who were
unsparing in their candid handling of obscure facts of history were relegated
to oblivion as thoroughly as could be done.
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."
138
In his great work Gibbon asserts
that Eusebius, "the gravest of the ecclesiastical historians"
"indirectly confesses that he has related whatever might redound to the
glory, and that he has suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace, of
religion."
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."
From the Editorial Preface to The
Lost Books of the Bible the following excerpt is culled. It is in reference
to the Gospel of Nicodemus:
"Although this Gospel is by
some among the learned supposed to have really been written by Nicodemus, who
became a disciple of Jesus Christ and conversed with him, others conjecture
that it was a forgery toward the close of the third century by some zealous
believer who, observing that there had been appeals made by the Christians of
the former age to the Acts of Pilate, but that such Acts could
not be produced, imagined it would be of service to Christianity to fabricate
and publish this Gospel; as it would both confirm the Christians under persecution
and convince the Heathens of the truth of the Christian religion. 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 note to page 99 of The Lost
Books of the Bible states that Tertullian is authority for the allegation
that the book called the Acts of Paul and Thecla was forged by a
Presbyter of Asia, who, being convicted, "confessed that he did it out of
respect of Paul." Pope Gelasius included it in his decree against
apocryphal books. Notwithstanding
139
this a large part of the history was
credited and looked upon as genuine among primitive Christians.
Another discredited work was named The
Death of Pilate, and still another, The Paradise of Pilate, described
by Lundy (Monumental Christianity, 243), would regale the reader with
some conception of the highly "fanciful" nature of these forgeries,
if there was space. We may be pardoned for outlining briefly the first of these
two: Tiberius being grievously sick and having heard of the fame of Jesus as a
healer of diseases, dispatched a messenger to Pilate to have him send Jesus to
Rome to cure him. Pilate replied that he had crucified him as a malefactor. On
his way back to Rome with the message, the messenger met Veronica--the woman
who touched the hem of Christ’s garment--who gave him the cloth handkerchief
with which the Lord had wiped his face on the way to crucifixion, and in so
doing had impressed his features indelibly upon it. This cloth was brought to
the Emperor and he was healed. Pilate was summoned to Rome and thrown into prison,
where he killed himself with a knife. His body was thrown into the Tiber and
such terrible storms of heat, thunder and lightning followed that the Romans
took it up and sent it to Vienne where it was thrown into the Rhone(?). The
same storms and tempests recurring, the body was sent again to Lake Lucerne,
where it was sunk into the deep waters, said even yet to bubble and boil as if
by some diabolical influence.
We might ask in Jerome’s words:
Would this be matter of edification or of destruction?
Lundy (Monumental Christianity,
245) expostulates against the rejection, as spurious, of two apocryphal Letters
of Pilate found in Thilo’s and Tischendorf’s collections; one addressed to
Claudius and the other to Tiberius, in both of which Jesus’s miracles, his divine
sonship, his crucifixion and resurrection are referred to, and the supernatural
signs which attended his coming are read as indicating the end of the world.
Lundy then puts forth the question, "Are all these forgeries?" If
they are only traditions they are certainly very early ones, and their various
statements wonderfully agree, he argues. Taken in connection with early
Christian monuments, as to the whole story of our Lord’s life, death,
resurrection and ascension, they must relate facts of a then recent occurrence,
which, he thinks, can not be doubted.
140
"Were three of four generations
of men utterly deceived and mistaken? And is all Christian civilization built
upon a lie?" Look at the monuments, he says, and see what pains have been
taken to record the verities of early Christianity. "Had the things
portrayed not been facts, how could art all at once forsake her fond
mythologies and depict such wonderful inventions as these?"
How indeed, millions will ask in
concert with Lundy. The answer is--by the most incredible stupefaction of
mortal mind that ever befell humanity; through the complete blinding of insight
into the original nature of occult portrayals of the verities Lundy refers to,
which are spiritual realities and not events of objective history. The
monuments portrayed the dramatic enaction as the paintings did, and ignorance
mistook them for pictures of factual occurrence. How indeed? By the
unbelievable transfer of the hidden purport of scripture from the plane of mind
to the plane of "history"; by the whole astonishing series of
confusions which this work is written to reveal at last in their glaring
falsity and blighting power.
A modern sleuth-hound on the trail
of Christian imposture is Joseph Wheless, mainly in his work, Forgery in
Christianity, an achievement of great value for its data, but perhaps
marred by the Freethinker’s irrational hatred of all Biblical religionism. It
is a remarkable assemblage of material laying bare the falsity of Christian
claims, and all drawn directly from Christian sources. It is a strong case
which can be supported entirely upon the admissions of your opponents. On page
43 of the work he affirms that
"no one can now doubt that
Lecky, after voluminous review of Christian frauds and impostures, spoke the
precise historical truth: ‘Christianity floated into the Roman Empire on the
wave of credulity that brought with it this long train of Oriental
superstitions and legends.’"
The Catholic Encyclopedia (IV,
498) admits it was the custom of the scribes to lengthen out here and there, to
harmonize passages or to add their own explanatory material. It also maintains
that "it is the public character of all divines to mold and bend the
sacred oracles till they comply with their own fancy, spreading them . . . like
a curtain, closing together or drawing them back as they pleased."
A most curious item that comes to
light is a supposed letter prefixed
141
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.
In the article "Midrash"
the Encyclopedia testifies that "the tendency to reshape history
for the edification of later generations was no novelty" in the fourth
century B.C. Pragmatic historiography is exemplified in the earliest continuous
sources, viz., the "Deuteronomic" writers, i.e., allied to Deuteronomy,
and there are many relatively early narratives in which the details have
been modified and the heroes of the past are the mouthpieces for the thought of
a later writer or of his age. Numerous instructive examples of the active
tendency to develop tradition may be observed in the relationship between Genesis
and the Book of Jubilees, or in the embellishment of Old Testament
history in the Antiquities of Josephus, or in the widening gaps in the
diverse traditions of the famous figures of the Old Testament (Adam, Noah,
Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Ezra, etc.) as they appear in non-canonical
writings. The Midrash of the Jews and most other ancient sacred literature
represented just this tendency to exploit a romantic sense in the old material:
142
"The rigid line between fact
and fiction in religious literature which readers often wish to draw, can not
be consistently justified, and in studying old Oriental religious narratives,
it is necessary to realize that the teaching was regarded as more essential
than the method of presenting it. ‘Midrash,’ which may be quite useless for
historical investigation may be appreciated for the light it throws upon the
forms of thought. Historical criticism does not touch the reality of the ideas,
and since they may be as worthy of study as the apparent facts they clothe,
they thus indirectly contribute to the history of their period."
This nears the statement of truth
about the theme, but misses final agreement with it, in the last sentence,
which makes the Midrashic style of dealing with truth a mere help in
understanding the "history of a period." As so often reiterated
already, the ancients were not concerned with the tawdry day-to-day eventualities
of history; their aim ever was to dramatize the genius, meaning and spirit of
all history in systematic type-forms and personifications of aspects of verity.
It is perhaps impossible that the
general public can ever be awakened to the enormity of the corruption of old
texts. None but the few scholars who have had time and occasion to go over the
immense detail of the inquiry are in position to appreciate the full import and
truth of this matter. It is well, then, to ponder deeply the sincere words of a
competent and conscientious student, G. R. S. Mead, expressed in his Fragments
of a Faith Forgotten (p. 18):
"The Received Text is proved to
have suffered in its traditions so many misfortunes at the hands of ignorant
scribes and dogmatic editors that the human reason stands amazed at the
spectacle."
On page 11 of the same work he says
with reference to the Christian religion:
The student of Christianity "is
amazed at the general ignorance of everything connected with its history and
origins. He gradually works his way to a point whence he can obtain an
unimpeded view of the remains of the first two centuries and gaze around on a
world that he has never heard of at school and of which no word is ever
breathed from the pulpit."
And certainly the truth of his next
statement (p. 14) must now be conceded:
143
"For upwards of one hundred
years liberal Christendom has witnessed the most strenuous and courageous
efforts to rescue the Bible from the hands of an ignorant obscurantism which
had in many ways degraded it to the level of a literary fetish and deprived it
of the light of reason."
It is profitable to dwell with Mead
on Marcion’s view of the Gospels. In that great Gnostic’s understanding of
theology the Christ had preached a universal doctrine, a new revelation of the
Good God, the Father of all. They who tried to graft this on to Judaism, the
imperfect creed of one small nation, were in grievous error and had totally
misunderstood the teaching of Christ. The Christ was not the Messiah promised
to the Jews. That Messiah was to be an earthly king, was intended for the Jews
alone and had not yet come. Therefore the pseudo-historical "in order that
it might be fulfilled" school had adulterated and garbled the original Sayings
of the Lord, the universal glad tidings, by the unintelligent and erroneous
glosses they had woven into their collections of teachings. "It was the
most terrific indictment of the cycle of New Testament ‘history’ that has ever
been formulated." Men were tired of all the contradictions and obscurities
of the innumerable and mutually destructive variants of the traditions
concerning the person of Jesus. (This surely points to the certainty that there
were no real facts to go upon.) No man could say what was the truth, now that "history"
had been so altered to suit the new Messiah-theory of the Jewish converts.
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.
Mead says Marcion also rejected some
of Paul’s Epistles because they had been tampered with by the
"reconciliators of the Petro-Pauline controversy." Mead calls
Tertullian’s denunciation of Marcion’s party of intelligent people, a work
called Against Marcion, "but a sorry piece of angry rhetoric."
144
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."
Another great Gnostic teacher,
Basilides, suffered at the hands of the ignorant party bent on literalizing all
the Gospels of a spiritual Christos. Mead says that Basilides’ Exegetica
were the first commentaries on the Gospel teachings written by a Christian
philosopher, and in this, as in all other departments of theology, "the
Gnostics led the way." We can only regret, he says, that we have not the
original text of the Gnostic doctor himself before us, instead of the very
faulty copy of the text of the Church Fathers’ Refutation. Hippolytus
muddles up his own glosses and criticisms with mutilated quotations,
imperfectly summarizes important passages which treat of conceptions requiring
the greatest subtlety and nicety of language, and in other respects does scant
justice to a thinker whose faith in Christianity was so great that, far from
confining it to the narrow limits of a dogmatic theology, he would have it that
the Gospel was also a universal philosophy explanatory of the whole world
drama. In its proper interpretation such indeed it is.
Heracleon and Bardesanes were other
splendid Gnostic Christians whose work was contemned by the bigotry of the
ignorant. Bardesanes was the agent directly creditable with establishing the
first Christian state, for he induced the Prince Abgar Bar-Manu to make
Christianity his state religion. Caracalla dethroned Agbar in 216. In revulsion
against this act Bardesanes made an extensive defense of the Christian faith.
Even Epiphanius is compelled to call him "almost a confessor." He
wrote many Christian treatises in Syriac and Greek. Mead says that the Gnostics
were still in the Christian ranks, were members of the general Christian body
and desired to remain so; but bigotry finally drove them out "because they
dared to say that the teaching of the Christ contained a wisdom which
transcended the comprehension of the majority."
Mead cites the great Lepsius as
saying (Die Apocryphen Apostelgeschichte, 1883) that "almost every
fresh editor of such narratives,
145
using that freedom which all
antiquity was wont to allow itself in dealing with literary monuments, would
recast the materials which lay before him, excluding whatever might not suit
his theological point of view," and substituting "other formulae of
his own composition, and further expanding and abridging after his own
pleasure."
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
146
reform it so that they may be able
to refute the objections brought against it."
Higgins sums up much data with the
conclusion that "there is undoubted evidence that our Gospel histories
underwent repeated revisions." He adds that "those who would revise
the Gospels would not scruple to revise the Sibyl." This hint is in
reference to well-founded charges that the Christians had even reached back
into the Sibylline predictions of the pagan oracles and changed them to make
them jibe with orthodox preachments.
An evidence of corruption of text is
found in an editor’s note on page 295 of Josephus’ Antiquities, which
admits that "Josephus’ copy considerably differs from ours."
Joseph Wheless (Forgery in
Christianity) is authority for the statement that eight Epistles and the Martyrium
are confessed forgeries.
"They are by common consent set
aside as forgeries which were at various dates and to serve special purposes
put forth under the name of the celebrated Bishop of Antioch."
With reference to the Christian
handling of the Sibylline Books and prophecies, one of the strongest
indictments of Christian duplicity and insincerity is framed by the facts and
the evidence. The Catholic Encyclopedia says that a letter of Polycarp
to the Philippians, authenticating the Epistle to them, may itself be a
forgery.
Says Higgins (Anac., 565):
"Among all nations of the
Western parts of the world the prophetesses called Sibyls were anciently known.
There were eight of them who were celebrated in a very peculiar manner, and a
work is extant in eight books (published by Gallaeus) which purport to contain
their prophecies. This work in several places is supposed to foretell the
coming of Jesus Christ. They have been in all times admitted to be genuine by
the Roman Church, and I believe also by that of the Greeks; in fact they have
been literally a part of the religion; but in consequence of events in very
late years not answering to the predictions, the Roman priesthood wishes to get
quit of them, if it knew how; several of its learned men (Bellarmine, for
instance) having called them forgeries."
"It is the renewed case of the
ladder: being no longer useful, it is kicked down. The Protestant Churches deny
them altogether, as Romish forgeries. These Sibyls were held in the highest
esteem by the ancient Gentiles. And it appears from the unquestionable text of
Virgil that they
147
did certainly foretell a future
Savior or something very like it. We find, on examination of the present copy
of them, that they did actually foretell in an acrostic the person called Jesus
Christ by name. The most early Fathers of the Greek and Roman Churches plead
them as genuine, authentic and unanswerable proofs of the truth of their
religion, against the Gentile philosophers who, in reply, say that they have
been interpolated by the Christians. . . . I saw pictures of the supposed
authoresses of these prophetic books in several places in Italy. Their figures
are beautifully inlaid in the marble floor of the Cathedral Church at Sienna
and their statues are placed in a fine church at Venice, formerly belonging to
the barefooted Carmelites. They are also found placed round the famous Casa
Santa at Loretto."
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."
Justin Martyr, about 160 A.D., says
the Cumaean Sibyl prophesied the coming of Christ in express words. Justin
tells the Greeks that they may find the true religion in the ancient Babylonian
Sibyl, who came to Cuma and there gave her oracles, which Plato admired as
divine. Clemens of Rome also quotes the Sibyls in his Epistle to the
Corinthians. They are also quoted by Theophilus, Antiochus, Athenagoras,
Firmianus, Lactantius, Eusebius, St. Augustine and others.
"Take the Greek books, learn
the Sibyl, how she proclaims one God and those things which are to come."
Higgins says there are several works extant purporting to be the writings of
Peter, Paul and other early Christians, in which the Sibylline oracles are
quoted as authorities in support of Christianity.
Dr. Lardner admits (Higgins) that
the old Fathers call the Sibyls
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prophetesses in the strictest sense
of the word. They were known as such to Plato, Aristotle, Diodorus, Strabo,
Plutarch, Pausanius, Cicero, Varro, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Juvenal and Pliny.
What can they have foretold, Higgins asks--and claims he can answer: The same
as Isaiah, as Enoch, as Zoroaster, as the Veddas, as the Irish Druid from
Bocchara, and as the Sibyl of Virgil: a renewed cycle of the sun and its hero
or divine incarnation, its presiding genius. They all admit of ten ages, yet
they are not agreed as to the time when the ages commence; some making them
begin with creation, some with the flood, but the Erythrean Sibyl is the only
one who correctly states them to begin from Adam. He says that ten periods of
600 years each make up the ten ages, or one Great Age.
Some of the testimony regarding the
Sibyls is assembled by Wheless in his Forgery in Christianity (p. 142).
He says that Justin in many chapters cites these oracles and points for
Christian proofs to "the testimony of the Sibyl," of Homer, of
Sophocles, of Pythagoras, of Plato. From the Ante-Nicene Fathers he
takes this:
"And you may in part learn the
right religion from the ancient Sibyl, who by some kind of potent inspiration
teaches you, through her oracular predictions, truths which seem to be much
akin to the teachings of the prophets. . . . ‘Ye men of Greece . . . do ye
henceforth give heed to the words of the Sibyl . . . predicting as she does in
a clear and patient manner the advent of our Savior Jesus Christ,’" as
Wheless adds--"quoting long verses of Christian-forged nonsense." (A.N.F.
i, 288-9).
"It is a fact that no critic
can deny," says Higgins, "that the Sibylline oracles have been
greatly corrupted by the Christians."
Gibbon (D. and F., p. 443)
says in re the Sibylline Oracles: "The adoption of fraud and
sophistry in the defense of revelation" is apparent in their handling by
the Christians.
There must be great significance
attaching to Wheless’ declaration (Forgery in Christianity, p. 195) that
Justin Martyr quotes no Gospels, except loose "Sayings of Jesus," in
his writings, but draws profusely from the Sibyls, Oracles, etc. Even Irenaeus
makes no mention of the four Gospels (Wheless); and according to Higgins (574)
Justin says that "the Sibyl not only expressly and clearly foretells the
future coming of our Savior Jesus Christ, but also all things that should be
done by him." (Cohort and Gr., p. 36; Lardner: Works, Chap.
XXIX.)
149
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."
It is hardly probable that any
factual evidence can ever be produced at this remote date to substantiate the
charges of copying on one side or the other. But it is not reasonable to
suppose that a document vastly earlier copied from its successor, although to
uphold claims of antecedence for some of their documents, doctrines and
ceremonial rites, the Christians did actually resort to the plea of
"plagiarism by anticipation" so naïvely put forth by some of the
early Fathers. As the oracles of the pagans were adjuncts of all religion for
many centuries B.C., the implications of plagiarism fall on the Christians.
Whether copied or not, the material fact is that the contents of the oracles
and those of the Christian Gospels correspond to such a degree that comparative
religion study would rate them both as emanating from a common source and being
elements of a common tradition. Practically all the tangled problems of the
chronology of documents and priority of texts might be solved on the general
terms of this hypothesis.
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). There is an abundance of evidence to
support the contention that the body of the great spiritual tradition handed on
from remotest times was incorporated in collections of the most notable and
vital utterances taken from the lines assigned to be spoken by the Christos or
solar-god figure in the great astronomically-based cryptic ritual of the mighty
Mysteries of the past. These collations of sacred utterances of the divine Son
to mankind were circulated, but in secret, all over the ancient field under the
name, in Greek at any rate, of "the Logia" or "Sayings
of the Lord." It is almost beyond question that they were the root
documents
150
from which the canonical Gospels
were elaborated, or perhaps simply extracted, and to cover deterioration were
emended, interpolated, edited by many scribes in turn. In general statement
this is as near the true history of the source, origin and nature of the
Christian Gospels as can be determined. All the data bearing in any way on the
matter can be focused with complete harmony and consistency on this thesis; and
there are no data that are hostile to it. The hypothesis precisely fits and
elucidates all the data and in turn the data support the thesis. It is the only
thesis of which this happy situation can be predicated.
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.
Since the time of the existence of
the Gospels some portions of texts have been found in Egypt, Syria and
elsewhere called Sayings or Logia, of which whole passages agree
almost verbatim with their counterparts in the Gospels. Why such a fact is not
accorded its full weight is hard to see. Of course Christian defenders
unanimously claim for these documents a date well posterior to the Christian
writings and allege they are copies of Gospel material. Yet surely documents
containing identical data were extant in very ancient pre-Christian times, and
this fact would seem to be in the end conducive for the priority of the Logia
to the Gospels.
Shirley Jackson Case, of Chicago
University Theological School, in his work to support the historicity thesis,
admits broadly that before Paul’s time pre-Christian Christianity was in
existence not only in Palestine, but also in the Diaspora. A broad admission of
this sort could include vast facts and data carrying a very definite refutation
of many Christian claims, and in fact does so.
It must have taken much strongly
evidential proof to bring Kenealy (The Book of God, p. 408) to say that
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"assuming that the copies or
rather phonographs which had been made by Hulkiah and Esdras and the various
anonymous editors were really true and genuine, they must have been wholly
exterminated by Antiochus; and the versions of the Old Testament which now
subsisted must have been made by Judas or by some unknown compilers, probably
from the Greek of the seventy, long after the appearance and death of
Jesus."
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.
According to Wheless, Erasmus and
Sir Isaac Newton detected fraud in the translation of passages.
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."
While this may not point directly to
fraudulent practice, it indicates some manipulation that could possibly hide
covert intent.
On the general score of the
authenticity of the Gospels Wheless writes as follows:
"The possibility of the
pretence that the precious Four Gospels, circulated nondescript and anonymous
in the churches for a century and a half, is patently belied by the specific
instance of the ‘Gospel according to Mark,’ of which Gospel we have the precise
‘history’ recorded three centuries after the alleged notorious event. Bishop Eusebius
is our witness in his celebrated Church History. He relates that Peter preached
orally in Rome, Mark being his ‘disciple’ and companion. The people wanted a
written record of Peter’s preachments, and (probably because Peter could not
write) they importuned Mark to write down ‘that history which is called the
Gospel according to Mark.’ Mark having done so, ‘the Apostle (Peter) having
ascertained what was done by revelation of the Spirit, was delighted’ . . . and
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that history obtained his authority
for the purpose of being read in the churches." (H. E., Bk. II, Ch.
15.)
Wheless gives other data indicating
that Peter was dead at the time alleged. But he cites Eusebius from a later
passage in his Ecclesiastical History, in which this
"historian" gives another version: the people who heard Peter
"requested Mark, who remembered well what he (Peter) had said, to reduce
these things to writing . . . which when Peter understood, he directly neither
hindered nor encouraged it." (H. E., Bk. VI, Ch. 14.) "Peter
thus was alive but wholly indifferent about his alleged Gospel" (Wheless).
It evidently was not "inspired" if Mark only "remembered
well."
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.
"So for a century and a
half--until the books bobbed up in the hands of Bishop St. Irenaeus and were
tagged as ‘Gospels according to’ this or that Apostle, there exists not a word
of them in all the tiresome tomes of the Fathers. It is humanly and divinely
impossible that the ‘Apostolic authorship’ and hence ‘canonicity’ or divine
inspiration of these Sacred Four should have remained for a century and a half
unknown and unsuspected by every Church Father, Pope and Bishop of
Christendom--if existent. Even had they been somewhat earlier in existence,
never an inspired hint or human suspicion was there, that they were ‘Divine’ or
‘Apostolic’ or any different from the scores of ‘Apocryphal or pseudo-Biblical
writings with which the East had been flooded’--that they were indeed ‘Holy
Scripture.’ Hear this notable admission: ‘It was not until about the middle of
the
153
second century that under the rubric
of Scripture the New Testament writings were assimilated to the Old’ (C.
E., III, 275)--that is, became regarded as Apostolic, sacred, inspired and
canonical--or ‘Scriptures.’"
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."
The "heretics" were making
use of many Gospels, the orthodox claimed only four for their own. It is
claimed and likely with justice that the "gospel" up to the middle of
the second century was entirely oral and traditional, or with few written
texts, and those held in more or less secrecy by the esotericists of the day. This
would quite well accord with the thesis of the existence of Logia or Sayings
of divine authorship. The Gnostics or other "heretics" were
likely the ones who began to reduce the "gospel" to writing and to
bring it out to general use, like the "occultists" of our own age.
The orthodox, in self-defense, in all probability did likewise, selecting four
and editing them to uphold conceived positions on doctrinal matters. It is
confessed in several places that the "heretical spurious gospels"
prepared the way and doubtless furnished the incentive for the canonized four.
"The Gospels are thus anti-heretical documents of the second century after
Gnosticism first appeared." This fact makes them far other in spirit and
no doubt in contents than what the Christian populace has always innocently
believed them to be--pure historical records of factual occurrence.
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
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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.
There has been much question of the
genuineness of Mark (XVI, pp. 9-20. On this the Encyclopedia
Britannica (II, p. 1880) says: "The conclusion of Mark (XVI,
9-20) is admittedly not genuine. Still less can the shorter conclusion lay
claim to genuineness." Of the 15th and 16th verses of this chapter the
"Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel" and the
"saved" and "damned" clauses, etc., are obvious
interpolations. Reinach (Orpheus, p. 221) says that it is a "late addition"
and "is not found in the best MSS." The New Standard Bible
Dictionary (p. 551) states that the longer form has against it the
testimony of the two oldest Uncial MSS. (Siniatic and Vatican) and of one of
the two earliest of the Syriac versions, all of which close the chapter at
verse 8. In addition to this is the very significant silence of Patristic
literature as to anything following verse 8. Eusebius says that the portion
after verse 8 was not contained in all the MSS. Jerome also says it was wanting
in nearly all. But Jerome put it into the Vulgate (Cath. Ency.). The
latter authority says:
"Whatever the fact be, it is
not at all certain that Mark did not write the disputed verses. It may be that
he did not; that they are from the pen of some other inspired writer and were
appended to the Gospel in the first century or the beginning of the
second."
But the Council of Trent decreed
they were part of the inspired gospel "and must be received as such by
every Catholic." (C. E., IX, pp. 677-8-9.) The New Commentary on
the Holy Scripture (Part III, pp. 122-3) comments:
"It is as certain as anything
can be in the domain of criticism that the Longer Ending did not come from the
pen of the Evangelist Mark. . . . We conclude that it is certain that the Longer
Ending is not part of the Gospel."
Massey says we learn from Origen
that during the third century there were various different versions of
Matthew’s Gospel in circula-
155
tion. 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!
Reinach contends that the episode of
Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, which was inserted in John’s Gospel in
the fourth century, was originally in the (apocryphal) Gospel according to
the Hebrews. (Orpheus, p. 235.)
As to John XXI the Ency.
Brit. has it that, as XX, 30-31 constitute a formal and solemn conclusion,
Chap. XXI is beyond question a later appendix. "We may go on to add that
it does not come from the same author with the rest of the book." (E.
B., ii, p. 2543.)
Even the conclusion of the Lord’s
Prayer ("For thine is the glory," etc.) is omitted as spurious by the
Revised Version. It is not in the Catholic "True" Version. As to that
Wheless comments: "It may be remarked that the whole of the so-called
Lord’s Prayer is not the Lord’s at all; it is a late patchwork of pieces out of
the Old Testament, as is readily shown by the marginal cross references."
Reinach, citing the Ency. Brit., under
various titles, says of the Peter, John, Jude and James Epistles--the
"Catholic Epistles"--"not one of them is authentic."
A bit shattering is the word of the
same Encyclopedia (I, p. 199):
"John . . . is not the author
of the Fourth Gospel; so, in like manner, in the Apocalypse we may have
here and there a passage that may be traced to him, but the book as a whole is
not from his pen. Gospel, Epistles and Apocalypse all come from the same
school."
This was the school of the Mysteries,
the Essene Brotherhoods, the Associations of Therapeutae, from which all the
oldest documents of a sacred character emanated, and the traditions of which
the Gnostics essayed to carry on into the new formulations of Christianity.
This is a very important datum. Reinach holds that John--or whoever poses as
"John"--is a forger.
Eusebius says that II Peter "was
controverted and not admitted into the canon." The Ency. Brit. endorses
the view and says its tardy recognition in the early Church supports the
judgment of the critical school as to its unapostolic origin.
Tertullian (Cath. Ency., XIV,
p. 525) cites the Book of Enoch as in-
156
spired, and also recognizes the IV
Esdras and the Sibyl, but does not know James and II Peter. He
attributes Hebrews to St. Barnabas.
The Apostolic Constitutions, supposed
to have been compiled by Clement of Rome and held in high esteem, were until
1563 claimed to be the genuine work of the Apostles. They were composed about
400, and were a collection of ancient ecclesiastical decrees concerning the
government and discipline of the Church, in a word, a handy summary of the
statutory legislation of the Apostles themselves, promulgated by their own
great disciple Clement. Their claim of apostolic origin is manifestly quite false
and untenable, Wheless insists. The Catholic Encyclopedia has recognized
them as the work of the Apostles and confirmed them as ecclesiastical law.
Likewise the Liber Pontificalis or
Book of the Popes, a purported history of the Popes beginning with Peter
and continued down to the fifteenth century, Wheless claims is full of spurious
correspondence, liturgical and disciplinary regulations, biographies, etc.,
which certainly must be held under suspicion.
And so the list of tamperings and
forgeries runs on down into the Middle Ages, a revelation of duplicity enough
to shake the faith of the earnest souls confiding in holy leadership, if it was
all known. Lorenzo Valla in 1440 first revealed the forgery of the Donation of
Constantine. The Symmachian Forgeries are confessed by the Catholic
Encyclopedia. Voltaire pronounced the "False Decretals" of
Isidore "the boldest and most magnificent forgery which has deceived the
world for centuries." They appeared suddenly in the ninth century, and in
them the Popes of the first three centuries are made to quote documents that
did not appear until the fourth or fifth century. They are full of
anachronisms.
Then comes the sorry recital of
lists of deceptions concerning sacred relics, starting with those of the person
of Jesus, his bones, his garments, utensils used by him, the cross, nails,
bottles of his blood and also of Mary’s nursing milk, etc., etc., which are so
obviously fraudulent that one would think the ecclesiastical system which
either forged them or winked at their exploitation would blush at the record.
The Catholic Encyclopedia does confess the policy of tolerance of
"the pious beliefs" which have helped to further Christianity and a
general indulgence toward all the fatuous superstitions connected with relics,
saints, healing and the rest. As no church was to be built without dead
157
men’s bones under the altar, so it
would seem as if indeed no church system can be historically promulgated
without the skeleton of the dead past buried deep in the core of its heart and
in its holy of holies.
The Catholic Encyclopedia announces
(III, p. 105) that Chosroes (Khosra) II, King of Persia, in 614 took Jerusalem,
massacred 90,000 good Christians, captured the cross of Christ and carried it
off whole in triumph to Persia. Yet the same authority says that we learn from
St. Cyril of Jerusalem (before 350) that the wood of the cross, discovered
about 318, was already distributed throughout the world, to show up in enough
pieces to have built a colony of summer cottages. This is indeed a miracle of
multiplication surpassing Jesus’ legerdemain with the five loaves and two
fishes. Wheless cites authority for the statement that more than seven hundred
relics of the thorns pressed on Jesus’ brow have been enumerated. For fuller detail
reference should be had to Wheless’ book, Forgery in Christianity. Draper
in his The Intellectual Development of Europe tells of the shock which
the revelation of such unblushing imposture gave to all Europe at different
times and which prepared the way for the Reformation.
The vast fraud of his Church is said
to have burst upon Luther as he ascended the twenty-eight steps of white marble
leading up to the porch of the palace of Pilate allegedly trodden by Christ,
which were brought to Rome from Jerusalem by St. Helena. It must be remembered
that the great surge of the Reformation came from the natural revolt of the
human conscience against dupery and hypocrisy. It will be admitted that the
amount of such deception necessary to cause a revulsion sufficiently strong to
overthrow a pious system consecrated and venerated by centuries of sacred
indoctrination and loyalty must have been of terrific proportions.
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.
158
Much of the alleged "historical
testimony" supporting Jesus’ human existence is material of this sort.
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.
Grethenbach (A Secular View of the
Bible) refers to the text of Jesus’ agonized cry of heroic spirituality
from the cross--"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they
do"--and says it is omitted from the earlier copies of the Book of Luke,
and is probably an interpolation from the similar expression of Stephen (Acts,
7:60), and is missing from the other Gospels. This author likewise points
out that all the details of the crucifixion given in the four Gospels are
wholly left in silence by the epistolary authors, an extraordinarily singular
fact, since, he says, Paul himself must have been in Jerusalem at the time it
occurred, and John and Peter are known to have been there likewise.
Mead cites evidence (F. F. F., p.
166) to authenticate his statement that in the "romantic" cycle of
"Gospel" writing connected with Simon Magus, the legend of Peter’s
being in Rome in later versions is belied by data in the earlier ones, in which
Peter does not travel beyond the East. We have already noted Jerome’s admission
that the present Matthew was not the original Gospel of that name, and
that the earlier text was "re-written" by a certain Seleucus.
Another work of Mead’s--Did Jesus
Live 100 Years B.C.?--adduces the datum that the authorized translation of
"almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian" is not correct, and
that the "imperfect original of it is untranslatable."
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
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"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