Three ancient and
long-discredited sciences have experienced a surprising renaissance in the
modern day: symbolism, alchemy and astrology. The last particularly has come
into widespread vogue, but on a basis which still inclines conservative
positivism in science, scholarship and orthodox religion to regard it as
closely allied with "popular superstition." In its predictive or
"fortune-telling" aspect it is generally looked upon askance. But there is
another facet of it in which it has pertinence and value that has not been
recognized in its modern revival and on which perhaps its most legitimate
claim to consideration should properly rest. This is its function as
symbolic theology.
It is beyond question
that the great ancient design of the zodiac is a wondrously conceived graph
aimed to depict the structure of the Logos, the pattern or creative
evolution, the essential constitution of the universe and the course of the
current of life in the cosmos, and by analogy in man the microcosmic replica
of the macrocosm. Almost infinite nuances of significance have been
adumbrated in those twelve signs or houses of the zodiac and the thirty-six
other constellations, as well as in the semantic pictorializations which
ancient sagacity and an ingenuity born of a sapient understanding of the
profounder truth of life conceived and drew around those star clusters in
the heavens. The uranograph, or chart of the skies, was incontestably the
first of all Bibles, pictorially edited. Not quite simply and patently, but
still most luminously for the initiated who held the recondite keys to the
symbolic lexicon of ancient writing, it can be affirmed that all Bibles are
but amplifications and elaborations of the original volume of ideography
that was first written on the open slate of the sky, then charted in the
zodiac and the planispheres carved on the ceilings of ancient temples and
later transferred to earth and inscribed in scrolls, tablets and parchments.
Man, adjured the old Scriptures, was to fashion his new body of spiritual
glory "after the pattern of the heavens," the frame of the heavenly or
zodiacal man, the primal Adam
Kadmon. And a cryptic
graph of the nature and history of this celestial Personage was sketched by
the enlightened Sages in the configurated star groups. Zodiac comes from the
Greek word zodion, meaning a small animal zootype, or living symbol of the
microcosmic life of man, who is indeed made in the image and likeness of the
Divine Man pictured in the cosmic heavens. Man’s little physical body is a
miniature copy of the universal body of God. The illimitable frame of cosmic
Man was outlined in the scroll of the skies, the solar systems and galaxies
being living cell clusters in his immeasurable organism.
The almost endless
intimations of vital significance inwrought into the structure of these
Gestalt configurations carry the essence of the esoteric import of the
Scriptures. But there is one group of zodiacal items that strikes so deeply
into the heart of general theology that its constituent particulars are
assembled here as a striking and challenging exemplification of the
methodology of the archaic science which is in truth the "lost key to the
Scriptures." This presentation will serve as introduction to a vast body of
evidence which will prove beyond controversy that Biblical theology rests
more completely on astrological symbology than has been discerned in any age
since the ancient day. The republication of this outline will come as a
matter of the greatest momentousness, enforcing as it must a new approach
through a new avenue of technology to the proper interpretation of the
Bibles, yielding a quite new and revolutionary orientation of their true
meaning. These items trace the unsuspected and crucial significance of two
of the twelve signs, Virgo and Pisces, in the heart of the New Testament
narrative. Let the reader picture before him the circle of the zodiac, with
the house of Virgo at the western or right end of the equatorial meridian
line drawn horizontally through the center and intersecting the circle on
the east and west, and with the house of Pisces directly opposite it on the
left and eastern end. The simple fact that they stand opposite to each other
and six months apart will presently be seen to dramatize cosmological and
anthropological truth of the most basic and, in our present state of
ignorance, astonishing pertinence and importance.
THE TWO
MOTHERS OF THE CHRISTS
The exposition must
begin with the perplexing and hitherto unexplained item of ancient religious
myth that the Christs, the Sun-Gods, the Messiahs were generally allegorized
as having had two mothers! How, one asks, can there possibly be rational
significance in such a predication? It has been put out of serious
consideration as just another of the extravagant conceptions of ancient
primitive unintelligence, just some more of the rubbish of fantastic Pagan
superstition. It will therefore come as a surprise and shock if an
intelligent re-examination forces us to realize that in profundity of
knowledge and semantic skill in portraying it ancient perspicuity so far
surpassed our own in this field of anthropological science that we are found
to be the ones still immersed in primitive superstition, not the ancients.
This dual maternal
parentage of the Messianic characters should not have appeared so outlandish
and bizarre, seeing that the Gospel Jesus himself, dramatic figure of the
divine principle in man, categorically announced this very feature in
declaring to Nicodemus that "you must be born again." The startled Nicodemus
asks if this means that he must enter a second time into his mother’s womb
and experience a second birth in the natural manner. Jesus, implying that
this idea would be preposterous, replies that you "must be born of water and
the spirit." It must be noted here that the Latin word spiritus, translated
"spirit" in many passages, means also "air," "breath" or "wind." Taken in
connection with the great basic usage in Scriptural symbolism of the four
primary elements, earth, water, air and fire, this "air" symbol at once
assumes a position of the deepest revelatory moment.
The body of the
physical, natural first man, of the earth, earthy, was symbolically
conceived as being composed of the two lower, or coarser of these four
elements, earth and water; while air and fire, representing mind and spirit,
commingled to constitute the higher, or spiritual man, the second Adam, or
the Christ. Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus could then as meaningfully have
been phrased "born of water and air." Thus we can see a new signification in
the statement of John the Baptist, in which he uses three of the four
elements to symbolize his meaning when he said that he, the forerunner of
the greater Christ, baptizes us with the two lower elements, water and earth
(but omitting earth, which should have gone with it); but that the mightier
power of spirit that is to supervene after his preparatory work has been
accomplished, will baptize us "with the Holy Spiritus (air) and with fire."
Jesus thus affirms that
we have two births, necessitating two mothers, and John adds the
corroborating datum that we have two baptisms.
Since man’s spirit-soul
is an indestructible fragment of God’s own eternal spirit, truly a tiny
spark of that cosmic Intelligence and Love which we call the Mind of God,
the ancient symbologists typified the divine element in man by fire, and in
contrast, emblemed the lower human elements by water. The fiery essence of
soul is housed in a tenement of flesh and matter, which is seven-eighths
water by actual composition. The crossing of rivers and seas and the
immersion of solar heroes in water in the olden mythologies, and the rite of
baptism in organic religion signified nothing beyond the fact of the soul’s
immersion in a physical body of watery composition in its successive
incarnations.
Under the terms of this
evolutionary condition man is distinctly a creature compounded of two
natures, a "higher" spiritual and a "lower" sensual, a divine and a human, a
mortal and an immortal, and by symbolism a fiery and a watery, the two being
conjoined in a relationship of mutual beneficence, in the organic body of
the lower physical self. Says Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire,
imprisoned in a body of earth and water." Describing man, Plato wrote:
"Through body it is an animal; through intellect it is a God." In creating
man God implanted the germ of a fiery spiritual principle of conscious being
in the watery confines of physical bodies. This is the truest description of
man that anthropology can present. All problems spring from that foundation
and for solution are referable back to it.
Man is, then, a natural
creature and a god in combination. Our natural part administers to our
spiritual part the rite of baptism by water; our nascent spiritual self is
to give us the later baptism by (air and) fire. We are born first as the
natural man; then as the spiritual, the latter crowning the former. Or we
are born first by water, then by fire. Of vital significance at this point
are two statements by St. Paul: "That was not first which is spiritual, but
that which is natural"; and "First that which is natural, then that which is
spiritual." Again he says: "For the natural man comprehendeth not the things
of the spirit; neither can he." Of course he can not; for he is not yet at
that higher mount of evolution, and he must be transformed, transfigured,
lifted up into a superior world of conscious dimension before he can cognize
spiritual things. Evolution will thus transform him, and nothing else will.
Utilizing astrological
ground facts for the depiction of cosmic truths, the ancient astrologers
localized the birth of the natural man in the zodiacal house of Virgo, and
that of the spiritual man in the opposite house of Pisces. These, then, were
the houses of the two mothers of life’s progeny. The first was the Virgo
(Virgin) Mother, the primeval symbol of the "Virgin Mary" thousands of years
before Christ. Virgo gave man his natural birth by water, and became known
as the "Water-Mother;" Pisces, the Fishes by name, gave him his birth by the
"fish," or in the sign of the Fishes, and was denominated the "Fish-Mother."
The Virgin Mothers are all identified with water as symbol, and their
various names, such as Meri, Mary, Myra, Myrrha, Miriam, Moira, Venus (born
of the sea-foam stirred up between the knees of Jupiter as he waded through
the seas), Tiamat and Thallath (Greek for "sea.") Are designations for water
or the sea. On the other side there are the Fish Avatars of Vishnu, such as
the Babylonian Ioannes, or Dagon ("fish" in Hebrew is dag); and the
goddesses Atergatis and Semiramis were actually called "fish-Mothers." Virgo
stood as the mother of birth by water, or the birth of man the first,
earthy, in a watery body. Pisces stood as the mother of birth by the spirit,
or by fire, or the birth of man the second, described by St. Paul as "the
Lord from heaven." Man’s physical body is the high product of a biological
evolution that actually started in the ocean water! And the blood in man’s
veins is still identical in chemical composition with sea water. Virgo was
poetized as the Water Mother of the natural man; Pisces as the Fish Mother
of the spiritual man. So Virgo was the first of the two mothers of the
god-to-be in the life of mankind; Pisces was the second.
CONCEIVED
IN HEAVEN--BORN ON EARTH
In spite of the presence
of these significant data standing for all to read in mythology and the
Scriptures, any profound grasp of the interior intimations was missed
because the true relevance of the symbolic sense of both water and the fish
had never been glimpsed. Prominent as the fish symbol has been in Christian
literature of the inceptive period, no one has seemed to divine its
enlightening cryptic import. It is of astonishing revelatory character.
Water is the type of natural birth because all natural birth proceeds in and
from water. All first life on our globe originated in sea water, and all
vegetation must have water to maintain its life. The fish is a birth in and
from water, and it therefore stands patently as the generic type of organic
life issuing out of the inorganic! The fish typifies life embodied in a
physical organic structure, subsisting in a sea of inorganic matter. Organic
life is born out of the inorganic just as the fish is born out of the water.
It is the child of the water-as-mother. And if organic life (the "Fish") is
in its turn to become mother, its child will be mind and spiritual
consciousness, son of the Fish Mother. Water is thus the mother of natural
physical life, and organic physical body becomes the mother of later
evolving divine mind.
Now, strangely enough,
water is the type of another essence, which is even more than water a
universal mother of life, namely matter. Matter is the virginal mother of
all life in the aboriginal genesis. All things are generated in the womb of
primordial matter, the "first old genetrix" of the Egyptians, Apt, Hathor,
Meri, Isis. And it is by a consideration of the nature of matter and its
evolution that we are enabled at last to arrive at a true comprehension of
the double motherhood of the god nature. For this universal matter-mother is
now known to exist in two vastly different states, at each of which, at two
different levels, it generates its child. Primordial matter, the sea of (to
us) empty space, is the first mother of all living forms. This is the primal
"abyss of the waters" in Genesis. The Latin word for "mother" is our very
word "matter," with one "t" left out--mater. And how close to "matter" is
"water!" And matter organized and structuralized over patterns of divine
conception is the second mother, genetrix of spiritual mind.
In the sagacious
dramatism of arcane writing the two mothers were always presented in pairs.
They were designated the "two mothers," or sometimes the "two divine
sisters" of the god character. Or they were the wife and sister of the
central deity, as Juno was wife and sister of Jupiter, and Isis was wife and
sister of Osiris. Others were Venus, Ishtar, Cybele, Mylitta. In ancient
Egypt they were first Apt and Neith, later Isis and Nephthys. Gerald Massey
relates Neith to "net," the device to catch fish! Clues to their function
are found in the great Egyptian Book of the Dead, and there it was that the
mystery of this double motherhood of life was solved. For here it is
revealed that the function of motherhood was, so to say, bisected into two
phases, so that, of the two mothers, Isis and Nephthys, each was seen to
have performed but one-half of the function of motherhood of the infant god,
thus requiring the two of them to consummate the birth. For the text reads:
"Isis conceived him; Nephthys gave him birth." Again, with a shift of the
suggestive symbolism, it is said: "Isis bore him; Nephthys suckled him."
Even with these elucidative data the full sweep of the true import was not
caught until a further clarification was found in another verse, which ran:
"Heaven conceived him; the Tuat brought him forth." With this came the
brilliant flash of clear insight into the mystery. For "heaven" is precisely
the place, or the state of the first matter-mother, the "firmament" of empty
space, and in the bosom of this first mother form the unit potential of the
seed of divine mind-to-be is conceived. All later potency of a godly mind is
latent in the depths of sub-atomic matter. "The shape of things to come" in
the evolution of universal life is archetypically conceived at the arc of
the cycle when spirit and matter, as yet undifferentiated, are identical and
homogeneous. Spirit yet slumbers in dreamless unconsciousness, and matter
exists only as what the Hindus call Mulaprakriti, the "root of matter." All
things are initially conceived in the innermost heart of primordial Being,
where spirit as Father and matter as Mother are yet One. Being is then
Father-Mother, not Father and Mother.
This is mirrored in the
Egyptian statement that Isis conceived Horus, the Christ-to-be. Matter was
the womb of the first conception, and Nephthys was to give birth to what
Isis conceived. Isis is therefore the true Virgin of the world, because she
is matter in its virginal state, matter still subsistent, and not yet
existent, unable to be paired off as the opposite pole of spirit and hence
unwed. As virgin, she has not yet given birth to the Christ. That role will
be performed by Nephthys, matter impregnated by spirit. Cosmically and
evolutionarily speaking, Isis is the young girl who can not marry and bear
the Christ; Nephthys is that same young girl grown to womanhood and able to
produce her child. In the same sense in which we say that the child is
father of the man it can be said that Isis is the mother of Nephthys. And we
shall see that this legend of the two mothers, the second being the daughter
of the first, is found intact in the New Testament Gospel story.
If heaven, in the sense
of virginal matter, conceived the divine consciousness principle, what is
the "Tuat" that brought it forth? It must be equivalent to Nephthys. This
locality is the Egyptian designation for earth, or matter in its substantial
evolved form which can finally bring spiritual consciousness to manifest
expression. It is matter in its physical form. Isis was matter subsistent in
the form of "empty space;" Nephthys was atomic matter, existent as visible
structural form, or the "fish." The fish is seen to be the type of organic
matter floating in the sea of inorganic first matter, the "waters of the
firmament." We see the physical worlds floating about in the sea of empty
space like fish in the water. The physical universe is that Great Fish in
the sea of infinite Being which contains the germ of the Jonah consciousness
(for Jonah is another figure of the Jesus or Christ consciousness) and which
will transport it across the sea of evolving life and spew it out on the
farther shore of higher Mind. This great universe is the second form of
matter and hence is the second mother, Nephthys. It is the developed bodies
of organic matter that give birth to the Logos in the macrocosm and to the
Christos, a seed unit of that same Logos, in man the microcosm. Man’s
physical body, with brain and nervous system organized to give expression to
that grade of mind denominated the Christ consciousness, is the divine Fish
of the mythologic tradition of early Christianity. One needs only to refer
to the Greek designation of the Christos of the precessional period of
Pisces as Ichthys the Fish to be amazed at the play of the symbolism in the
ancient day precisely when Christianity was being formulated. For the sun
had entered the sign of the Fishes about 255 B.C.
So under the conception
of the divided function of motherhood it can be said that man’s future
Christhood is conceived in the womb of Isis and brought to birth from the
womb of Nephthys, the second mother, the immediate incubator and gestator of
the Christly power in the world. One might analogize the situation by
thinking of a human child as first conceived in the minds, or in the love of
its parents and later born from the womb of its physical mother. For this
life has two births and must have a mother for each. It is conceived by the
mother and born by the daughter. Life is spiritually conceived and
physically born. Man is born first as man, by water, the sea of primordial
matter, in whose depths he is conceived; then he is reborn later as god, by
the fire of spirit, emerging with biological life out of the womb of the
sea, the Water-Mother.
The two mothers can be
sharply distinguished as these two forms of matter in the following
delineation: the first or virgin mother is matter in its first creative
form; invisible, inorganic, unsubstantial (in our sense) and subatomic. The
second mother is matter in its later evolved form as visible, organic,
substantial and atomic. The first mother, virgin though she is, generated
her child, organic matter, who by virtue of her "immaculate conception" was
confusedly still called "virgin." And this daughter, grown to adulthood by
evolution, became the second, or "Fish Mother," and in her turn produced,
not now a daughter, but her Son, the masculinity indicating a spiritual and
not a further physical progeny, the birth of Mind from matter.
As hinted a moment ago,
this genealogy or divine lineage is found in the New Testament of
Christianity. The first mother, corresponding to Isis is Anna, and the
second mother is her daughter Mary, who bears the Christos, Jesus. Anna and
Mary are the Isis and Nephthys of the Christian dispensation. And it is a
question whether the Christian Anna and the Hebrew Hannah are not immediate
derivatives from the Egyptian An, Ani, Anu. An was an alphabetical glyph for
existent being. Ani was the name of the human entity evolving to deity in
the Book of the Dead. Anu will come to astonishing significance a little
farther on.
THE HOUSE
OF BREAKING BREAD
The first, or virgin
birth was depicted as taking place on the western side of the zodiac, in the
house or womb of the Virgin Mother, Virgo. This allocation was due to the
fact that it is in the west that the sun, universal symbol and embodiment of
the fire of spirit, descends each evening into the earth and water that
represented the body in which the soul incarnated, this body itself being
composed of those two elements, earth and water. So man is, zodiacally, born
in the water, as natural man, on the western side; and is to be reborn, or
regenerated, as spiritual man, at the end of the cycle, on the eastern side.
Spirit’s descent into water (of the body) on the west makes it man physical;
its later resurrection on the east makes it man spiritual, man deified. Says
the text of old Egypt: "Pepi saileth with Ra to the eastern side of heaven,
where the gods are born." This is the death and resurrection of the god, the
basic theme in all religions. It is simply incarnation and return to heaven.
It is the descent of Messiah into "Egypt" and his exodus back to spirit,
historicized in the Scriptures as "Canaan."
Further browsing in the
ancient tomes brings to light links of connection between the zodiacal
pictorialization and the Bible. The chief one is found in the symbol of
bread in connection with both Virgo and Pisces. Pisces is the house of the
Fishes by name, but it is not commonly known that in the astrological
portraiture Virgo was the house of Bread. This is indicated by several items
of the typology. Many centuries ago in the precession of the equinoxes the
end of the year was marked by the position of the great Dog Star Sirius,
brilliant heavenly symbol of the divinity in man. Precisely at midnight of
December 24 this bright sun stood on the meridian line running from the
zenith to the south. At the same moment there was rising on the eastern
horizon the constellation of the Virgin, bearing in her left arm the Christ
child, symbol of the Christhood coming to function in man; and in her right
hand she clasped the great star Spica (Latin: a head or "spike" of wheat),
symbol of that same deity coming as the celestial food for man. It must be
remembered that the Gospel Christ told us that, if we would have eternal
life, we must virtually eat his body as our divine food, and drink his
blood. Hence typism represented him as coming in the form and nature of man,
the human babe; and coming as spiritual food emblemed by wheat. The Gospel
Christos describes the supernal gift of the spirit in the words: "This is
that bread which came down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall
hunger no more." Jesus took the same symbol, a loaf, and, breaking it into
fragments, gave a morsel to each of his disciples, saying it was his
(spiritual) body, broken for them.
We now have Virgo
established as the House of Bread and Pisces as the House of the Fishes. The
characterization of the two houses can now be brought along to a more
specific evolutionary reference. Just what are these "houses"? What do they
represent? As already set forth, they are poetic graphs for the two states
of matter. But now they are to be shown to stand for something in immediate
relation to man’s life. It should not appear too extravagant a declaration
if the evidence warrants our assertion that in the ultimate resolution of
their meaning, they are in the allegory to be considered as the human body
itself! For these physical bodies of ours consist of matter in both its
visible and invisible forms. As St. Paul tells us, we have a natural and a
spiritual body. Man’s body itself houses the two mothers. The human body is
this double house of Bread and of Fish.
The next link is seen
when it is considered that the physical body is for the soul the house of
death and in its regenerative phase, the house of rebirth. It is the house
into which the spirit descends and in which it suffers a more or less
complete obscuration of its powers in the darkness of its tomb of matter. It
is the house in which for an initial period it lies in a state of relative
"death," out of which it is to arise in a new birth, or resurrection, on the
opposite side of the cycle. A significant passage from the Book of the Dead
recites, alluding to the Horus (Christ) principle: "Who cometh forth from
the dusk and whose birth is in the house of death." This applies to the
incarnating soul. In the recondite esoteric sense of the archaic Scriptures
the soul "dies" on entering the body in incarnation, but has a resurrection
from this "death" and its rebirth, or the tomb of the crucified Christ and
the womb of his second birth.
As we could expect, the
Egyptians had a name for the body as the locus of these evolutionary
transactions, which carry the central meaning of all theology. This name now
rises out of the dim mists of ancient Egyptian religious lore to enlighten
all modern Biblical studentship. This city of the body, wherein the sun of
soul sank to its death on the cross of matter to re-arise in a new
generation, was called the city of the sun, which in Greek became Heliopolis,
but was in the Egyptian Anu. The name was, of course, given to an actual
Egyptian town, where the rites of the death, burial and resurrection of
Osiris, or Horus, were yearly enacted. But the name bore a theological
significance before it designated a geographical city,--as indeed did most
Biblical names of localities.
The significant name is
obviously composed of Nu, the name for the Mother-Heaven, or empty space, or
the abyss of nothingness out of the bosom of which creation emanates. The A
(alpha privative) means, as it does in thousands of words, "not." It is
prefixed to a host of words to negate an affirmative meaning, as atheistic,
amoral, asymmetrical, amnesia. Anu would then mean literally
"not-nothingness," or a world of concrete actuality. The negation of a
negative posits an affirmative. It refers thus to our world of physical
manifestation. Precisely such a world it is in which units of virginal
consciousness go to their "death" and again rise out of it. Says God in the
Old Testament: "I cast down to death and I raise up again." Anu is then the
physical body of mortals on earth. The soul descends out of the waters of
the abyss, or the Nun, which is simply space in its primordial
undifferentiation. So Nu (neuter), Nun (masculine), Nut (feminine) is the
cosmic negative, the name and sign of all non-being. When life is
reintegrated at the end of each cycle of outgoing and return in the
completeness of its restored unity, it is negative. It is the Nun. When it
is undifferentiated as spirit and matter, it is neuter. To manifest its
potential life it must disintegrate its unity, segregate itself into the
duality of spirit and matter, establish positive-negative tension and from
that split up into infinite multiplicity.
Here we are brought face
to face with the important Biblical sense of the word "multiply." To exhibit
its infinite creative resources, life must multiply itself endlessly. The
unitary life of deity must break itself up into infinite fragments if it is
to fill empty space with a multitude of worlds and beings of diversified
natures. The primal sea, or Mother must engender a multitudinous progeny, to
spawn the limitless schools of organic "fish-worlds." This is the meaning of
the promise given to Abraham that his seed should "multiply" until it filled
the earth with offspring countless as the sands and the stars. And if the
life divine was symbolized by bread as the type of the first birth, and by
fish as the type of the second, then we might expect to find in old
religious typology the allegory of a Christ personage multiplying loaves and
fishes to feed a multitude! Should we be astonished then, when we do find
that the Gospel Jesus does this very thing? The leads to the significance of
the two numbers woven into the story are not too clear. But since the bread
symbol pertains to Virgo, mother of the natural man, the five loaves may
have been intended to refer to man’s five senses, while the two fishes could
have represented the two natures unified by the second birth.
This is astonishing
enough in all conscience. But even it yields in wonder to the next item of
comparative religion data, which came to our notice as a further tie between
the Bible and antecedent Egyptian mythology. Who can adequately estimate the
seriousness of the challenge which this finding of scholarship throws down
to Gospel historicity? For a thrilling discovery indeed it was which brought
to notice a passage in the Book of the Dead that referred to Anu as "the
place of multiplying bread!"
Here, then, in the
long-silent tomes of old Egypt was found the original, the prototype, of the
"miracle" of the loaves and the fishes in the Gospels of Christianity. In
the light of this correlation of material it is seen that a new and
enlightening meaning must be read into this New Testament episode. The
revelation indeed makes it necessary to lift the incident quite out of the
realm of history and orient it into that of allegory. For at last we are
given a lens of proper focus through which to read aright, for the first
time in centuries, the hidden sense of the Gospel narrative. We see that
Anu, as the physical body, is the place wherein the unity of the Christly
power is broken into an infinite number of fragments, which are distributed
out among a multitude of God’s children enhungered after a three-days fast.
This latter detail can readily be taken as referring to the deprivation of
spiritual food suffered by souls in their sojourn in the three elemental
kingdoms, mineral, vegetable and animal, before attaining to the plane of
mind. St. Paul lends authority to this rendering in saying that before we
develop the Christ-mind, we are in bondage to the elements (in several
passages the "elementals") of the world, meaning the powers of nature as yet
unillumined by mind.
Here are all the
components of the inner meaning of the Christian Eucharist: the broken, but
multiplied fragments of the body of the god, distributed to feed hungry
humanity. And as humanity is composed of twelve groups of conscious units
struggling on the road to divinization, there were gathered up twelve
baskets of fragments. For in the synthesis of all powers to be evolved in
the process of deification, the twelve aspects of the Christ consciousness
are finally reintegrated, or "gathered up" in one climactic unity.
One must ask what it can
mean to the future of Christianity to realize now that this episode of the
ostensible life of Jesus is found to be the Judean republication of an
antique Egyptian allegory, completely unhistorical in character.
THE HOUSE
OF FISH
But new involvements
arise and take us on into still more startling disclosures. The Hebrews fell
heir to the Egyptian wisdom and appropriated Egyptian material. They picked
up the name Anu, and, fitting it back into its zodiacal setting as Virgo,
they called it the House of Bread. This led to their adding to the name Anu
their word for "house," which is beth. This yields us Beth-Anu. It is a fact
of common philological knowledge that when the ancient Greek and Egyptian
"u" in a word is transferred into English, it is invariably rendered as "y."
For instance, the Greek word for "water" is hudor. In all English words it
becomes hydro. Shifting the "u" of Anu to the "y", Anu becomes Any, so that
Beth-Anu now stands before us as Bethany of the Gospels! Bethany, then, is
just the sign of Virgo, as "the House of Bread," the home of the great star
Spica, the head of wheat!
But let us say "House of
Bread" in ordinary Hebrew. What further amazement strikes us here as we find
this reads Beth-lehem. For "bread" in Hebrew is lehem. The Christ had the
first of his two births in Bethany, or Bethlehem, the astrological "House of
Bread,"--the human body! And this, be it noted at last, is the only place
where it can be of any benefit to humanity.
Later it seems that the
two signs, Virgo and Pisces, and their symbols, bread and fish, were almost
interchangeably confused or commingled in symbolic imagery. This was likely,
in fact almost inevitable, since the two signs represented the same human
body as the two houses in which soul died and was reborn, and the two
processes are just the two phases of the one operation.
If Pisces is, then, the
"house" in which the Christ in man comes to his birth, it is altogether
pertinent to ask if there are evidences in the Bible or Christianity that
Jesus was represented under any of the characteristics of the fish typology.
Here we encounter material enough to provide another nine-days wonder. For
Jesus is decorated and haloed by the Piscean symbolism on every hand. His
twelve disciples were "fishermen!" In earlier Egyptian depiction the twelve
were at one time or another carpenters, reapers, harvesters, fruit
gatherers, sailors, rowers, builders, masons, potters or keepers of the
twelve treasures of light. Jesus instructed Peter to find the gold in the
fish’s mouth; his last "miracle" was the net-breaking draught of fishes; he
declared that he would make them "fishers of men." Also astrological
ingenuity had delineated the River Eridanus (Jordan) as issuing from the
mouth of the constellation of the Southern Fish and flowing north to the
very feet of Orion, starry symbol of the Christ, intimating that the stream
of life issues forth from the organic physical life of man and runs right up
to the foot of divinity. The Bishop’s mitre in Christianity is in the shape
of the mouth of a fish. In the catacombs under Rome the symbol of the two
fishes crossed in the "X" form was displayed on the forehead of the Christ
image, at its feet, or on a plate on the alter before it. And the Romans for
several centuries dubbed the early Christians Pisciculi, "Little Fishes,"
members of the "Fish-Cult." Augustine and Tertullian both likened the
Christian laity to "little fishes" in the sea, Christ being the Great Fish,
or Whale. And perhaps the crowning datum in all this piscatorial
Christianity is the fact that the Greeks denominated the Jesus Avatar figure
as Ichthys, the Fish. They would doubtless have alluded to any claimant at
that time for the mantle of Messianic messengership under the title of
Ichthys, even if the Christian movement had not thrust on the world the
Gospel character of Jesus as humanized Savior. For ancient arcane science,
resorting ever to subtle types of representation, and all grounded on the
circle of the zodiac, attached to the Messianic figure the name, title and
features of the zodiacal house in which the sun stood at the time, its
sojourn in each sign being two thousand one hundred and sixty years. When
the sun was entering Pisces ancient astrological observance would in any
event have saluted the embodiment of the coming god-power as Ichthys.
Still other startling
correlations come to view. As has been here delineated, the Christ is the
offspring or creation of Divine Mind, first in the innermost bosom of
Spirit-Matter, then entified in organic bodily structure. Primeval space, as
has been seen, was in Egyptian terms the Nun, the "waters of the Nun." What
Bible student does not know of "Joshua, son of Nun"? But so far has
ignorance and obscurantism gone with its deadly work in Biblical literalism
that hardly any one knows with definiteness that Joshua is just a variant
(one of some ten or twelve) form of "Jesus." The phrase has actually been
found written in ancient texts as "Jesus, son of Nun." At any rate there is
no question and there can be none, that Joshua is Jesus, no less. This
asserts that both names in various versions of the Messianic legend stood
for the one same typal figure representing man’s coming deity. But the
wonder increases when we turn to the Hebrew alphabet and find that, while
"M" is called and spelled "Mem," and means "water," "N" is called and
spelled "Nun," and means, of all astounding things, "fish." Jesus, then, is
son of Pisces, the Fish-sign; as indeed he is in the Gospels themselves.
And Horus, the Egyptian
Christ, who is identical with the Jesus of the Gospels in some one hundred
and eighty particulars, performed at Anu a great "miracle." He raised his
father Osiris from the dead, calling unto him in the cave to rise and come
forth, intimating that he was not dead but only sleeping. Anu, as has been
seen, became Bethany of the Gospels; and it was at Bethany that Jesus raised
Lazarus from the dead! And we run into another amazing link when, through
Egyptian sources, we are enabled to establish the identity of Lazarus. This
is close to the greatest of all the marvels in this chain of comparative
data. For we find that the ancient designation of Osiris was Asar. Now the
Egyptians consistently expressed reverence for deity by prefixing the
definite masculine article, "the," to the name of the chief of their gods.
This was Osiris. Just as the Christians say, or should say, the Christ, they
said the Osiris. And there applies here another point of language usage not
discovered by scholars, but pertinent to our elucidation. It is that the
definite masculine article, "the," connoted deity in ancient writing. Our
definite article, "the," is the root of the Greek word for God, the-os, to
which the Greeks prefixed their masculine article, ho theos. The Spanish
article masculine, el, is the Hebrew word for God. And the Greek masculine
article ho, is a Chinese word for deity. To say "the Osiris" was equivalent
to saying "Lord Osiris."
So when the Hebrews took
up the Egyptian names and titles they converted the name of "the Osiris," or
"Lord Osiris," directly into their own vernacular, with the result emerging
as "El-Asar." Then in turn the later Romans, speaking Latin, took up the
same material that had come to them through Hebrew hands and to "El-Asar"
they added the common Latin termination of the second declension masculine
nouns in which most Roman men’s names ended, namely "us;" and the result was
now "El-Asar-us." In time the initial "E" wore off, as the scholars phrase
it, and the "s" in "Asar" changed into its sister-letter "z," leaving us
holding in our hands the "Lazarus" whom Jesus raised from the dead at
Bethany! So the allegorical raising of the Egyptian Osiris from death by his
son, the Christ of Egypt at the Egyptian Anu became the raising from death
of the Hebrew Lazarus by the Palestinian Christ at the Judean Bethany, and
what was sublime spiritual dramatism became incredible "history."
To support the
contention that this derivation is not a fanciful invention or sheer
coincidence, we find the Egyptian "Azar" reappearing in the names of two of
the Hebrew Priests in the Old Testament,- Azar-iah and El(e)azar. The -iah
(or -jah) appended to deific names substantially equated the prefixed El in
Hebrew usage. But a further and far more authoritative confirmation of the
linkage was found in one place in Renan’s famous Life of Jesus (page 308).
The French theologian displayed an extraordinary knowledge of Judean
history, geography, sociology and religion, and in connection with the
elucidation here presented this citation from his great book confronts the
Christian exegesis with a challenge which it may be difficult to fend off.
We quote the passage as follows:
"The village of Bethany,
in particular, situated at the summit of the hill upon the incline which
commands the Dead Sea and the Jordan, at a journey of an hour and a half
from Jerusalem, was the place especially beloved by Jesus."
Following this a numeral
directs us to the note appended at the bottom of the page, in which the
reference is to Bethany:
"Now El-Azerie (from El-Azir,
the Arabic name of Lazarus) in the Christian texts of the Middle Ages,
Lazarium."
On the next page (309),
speaking of Mary he states:
"Her brother Eleazar, or
Lazarus, was as much beloved by Jesus."
Here is indisputable
evidence that the Egyptian connection with the name of Bethany clung to the
town up to the Middle Ages. Since it is agreed widely that John’s Gospel is
far more mystical and spiritual and less historical than the other three, it
is quite apparent that this reprint of an ancient Egyptian allegory would be
more likely to be included in John’s Gospel and omitted from the three
synoptic ones. What can it mean to Christian theology that the story of the
raising of Lazarus was extant in Egyptian papyri possibly 5000 years B.C.?
Nor was Osiris,
masquerading under the name of Lazarus, the only Egyptian personage present
at the scene of this supposed Christian "miracle." Isis, the wife and sister
of Osiris, under her ancient designation of Meri, was present also. As the
feminine counterpart of the male deity was dualized to match the doubling of
Horus as Horus the Elder (otherwise Osiris) and Horus the Younger, so the
Meri name was sometimes pluralized, becoming Merti. In Latin feminine form
this became Mertae. But in Hebrew it resolved into what in English was
rendered as Martha. So even in the ancient Egyptian transaction there were
present the two Maries, or Mary and Martha, the sisters of "Lazarus."
A
SIGNIFICANT SIX MONTHS
All this sets the stage
for the crowning item in the correspondence. In the Gospel drama John the
Baptist enacts the role of the first-born or natural man, coming first to
prepare the physical ground of evolution for the advent of the second Adam,
or Christ. He would therefore stand in the allegory as the son of the Water
Mother, Virgo, and under the astrological symbolism would be born at the
autumn equinox, or in his mother’s house, which stands as that station in
the zodiac. On the other side of the cycle of descent, "death" and
resurrection, would stand Jesus, the Christos, son of the Fish Mother, born
in his mother’s house of the Fishes. These houses are six months apart on
the zodiacal chart!
Hence the whole edifice
of Gospel historicity trembles under the impact of the strange dramatic
circumstance, given in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel, that the
Annunciation to Mary of her conception of the coming Christ by the Holy
Spirit came in the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the
Baptist. So we can see what the myth-makers devised for discerning
intelligence in the allegory in Luke. The natural man, having covered the
zodiacal "six months" between his conception and the date of his quickening
into spiritual status in his evolution, was dramatized as being "quickened"
at a point exactly opposite from the point of the beginning of his life. Six
months on the chart would mark the end of an epoch begun opposite it. Six
months, speaking purely zodiacally, would terminate the period of mortal
life and bring the natural man to the place of his deification. At that
point he would be represented as being quickened from natural to spiritual
life. So then, according to the Lukan account, when the mother of the true
spiritual Christ, who had just been impregnated by the Holy Ghost, came into
the presence of the first mother, carrying her child at the figurative
completion of his cycle of physical evolution, and awaiting only the advent
of the spiritual Lord to be quickened into a new order of exalted being, he
was dramatized as manifesting this reawakening by the statement that "he
leaped in his mother’s womb." The Luke narration makes it clear that the
conception of Jesus had just taken place when Mary visited her cousin
Elizabeth and found her at the six months stage of her pregnancy. Mary’s
coming into the presence of Elizabeth is made the occasion of the natural
man’s leaping in his mother’s womb. When the Christos comes to the natural
man the latter leaps into the higher kingdom of spirit.
It is but a simple
matter of arithmetic to note that the last three months of Elizabeth’s
pregnancy with John coincided with the first three of Mary’s pregnancy with
Jesus, bringing the birth of Jesus just six months after that of John! So
Luke has it. But it was in the zodiacal chart some thousands of years before
it could have "happened" in Judea. It had occurred zodiacally long before it
could have occurred historically. And the implication is overmastering that
the supposed historical occurrence is but a presumption of ignorance based
on the zodiacal when that became circulated as history among the
unintelligent masses.
The final link of
significant data, now to be presented is by no means a minor one. St. Paul
declares that we come to birth spiritually only as we die carnally, meaning
that the quantum or quality of divine character in us grows in proportion as
the quantum of raw nature decreases. We increase deifically as we decrease
humanly; the god gains in power as the animal dies. So the structure of the
allegory depicted the spiritual man, Jesus, son of Nun, the "Fish," as
increasing, while John, son of Virgo, the Water Mother, decreases in
stature. Astrologically, as a star or constellation sinks below the horizon
in the west, its opposite star or constellation would be rising in the east.
As John, type of the first, the natural man, went down (having completed his
mission of preparing the way for his greater successor), Jesus, type of the
spiritual birth, rose on the world. So the narrative has John saying: "I
must decrease, but he must increase." In the descent of soul into the body
spiritual power decreases as physical life increases. But on the reverse arc
of the cycle, or evolution, the physical (John) decreases as the Christ
power increases in its new round of growth.
THE
CHALLENGE TO CHRISTIANITY
No intelligent reader
can peruse this assemblage of semantic data without being profoundly
impressed by at least two considerations of the most momentous gravity. He
will see first that the great principles of theology were presented, rather
are concealed, it would be permissible to say, under the cryptographic forms
of astrological symbolism. Then he will be impressed beyond measure by the
incontestable evidence of the fact that Biblical events he had assumed were
historical occurrences in the first century A.D., Were already written in
timeworn books of the ancient Egyptians thousands of years before, and that
they were there not as objective history but as spiritual allegory. And in
the train of reflection that would follow upon these recognitions, how could
he avoid asking of his intelligence the question fraught with critical
moment for the Christian faith: were then the Gospels and Epistles of the
Christian New Testament compositions originally written between the years 40
to 80 of that first Christian century? In the face of the evidence here
assembled, can there be much doubt that these Gospels and Epistles were
republications of old Egyptian religious scripts, revamped and redacted
doubtless by Judean influences, in the first century of our era? Does
Christian history make any authoritative pronouncement that would throw
light on the question? In spite of fanatical zeal to obliterate all trace of
the derivation of its literary heritage from antecedent Pagan sources, there
has been permitted to survive for us a statement made by the man who himself
was chiefly instrumental in founding the Christian ecclesiastical system,
the Christian historian and bishop, Eusebius. In his famous Ecclesiastical
History, chapter 17 of Book II, treating of the Essenes, called Therapeutae
in northern Egypt, he wrote:
"These ancient
Therapeutae were Christians and their writings are our Gospels and
Epistles."
As if to corroborate
this declaration of the fourth-century Christian protagonist the Dead Sea
scrolls now rise out of the mists of pre-Christian time to certify beyond
cavil that the New Testament documents were products of the antecedent Pagan
religions.
If Eusebius’s statement
and the evidence of the scrolls (and much other data) point to the ancient
origin of the Scriptures, there would then arise the further crucial
question: for what reason were ancient Egyptian documents of secret esoteric
and occult spiritual lore, embodying the innermost teachings of the Magian
and Sabean astrological science, brought forth from their age-long sacred
custodianship of the heirophants of the Mysteries and spread broadcast to
the world in that first Christian century? The answer to this query is
many-sided and complicated. But among other influences there was one
certainly that can be traced with considerable distinctness. This was the
work of a philosopher too little credited with importance. Philo Judaeus was
born at or about the year 1 A.D. He labored in the early and middle portions
of the first century to effect a syncretism of Greek Platonism, Egyptian
Hermeticism and Mosaic Hebraism on occult theosophical bases. His work could
have given a powerful stimulus to the cultism of mystico-spiritual science
throughout the mid-Eastern countries, as it apparently did lay the
foundations for the great Alexandrian philosophical center which, under the
headship first of Pantanus, then Clement and Origin, introduced these
elements into Christianity. In the conjunction of his effort with the
currents of spiritual force emanating from such groups as the Essenes and
the Gnostics, we are as near to a correct answer as we perhaps ever shall be
to the question of the origin of Christianity and the publication in the
first century of documents long in existence, but never disseminated beyond
secret guardianship in the occult societies until that time.
It therefore seems
certainly to be within the bounds of distinct plausibility, indeed of
imminent probability, that the rise of Christianity is to be explained on
the truly human and rational grounds of a movement that was galvanized into
momentum as the result of the first wide republication of the secret and
sacred books of the hierarchy of very ancient Egypt. Many astute
investigators of the provenance of the Gospels have been driven to the
conclusion that the four included in the New Testament canon were traceable
to and based upon what they are pleased to call a "common document," which
obviously must antedate those building upon it. Almost to a certainty this
hypothesis points in the direction of a true solution of the problem of
Gospel origins. Irenaeus, first Christian Bishop of Gaul (France) in the
second century, states that there was a multitude of Gospels afloat in his
day. It would be in accord with some positive data and many other
well-grounded assumptions if one were to posit the thesis that the four
Gospels of the canon were based not necessarily on any one "common
document," but on the collective esoteric tradition coming down from old
Egypt and found extant in Irenaeus’ "multitude of Gospels.
The historical fact that
Christian scholarship has for seventeen centuries spent itself in the effort
to account for Christianity’s upsurge and character formation entirely
without reference to this mass of literary lore of the antecedent world, out
of whose very womb it actually was born, is to be seen now as one of the
most fantastically eccentric phenomena in all the religious history of
mankind. It is only to be accounted for by the factual circumstances that
the Christian movement was from the start motivated by a psychology of
faith, emotional unction, pietistic zealotry of the most ignorant and
fanatical sort, gullible expectation of miracle and the supernatural,
apocalyptic revelation with the cosmic "end of the world," the ignorant
literalization of Biblical allegorism,--all which element bespeak the wholly
unintellectual, unphilosophical character of the mentality and the
psychology that launched the faith, to which after a considerable time the
name of the Greek deific principle, the Christos, was attached. Beyond all
contradiction this list of prime psychological factors in the incipient push
of Christianity explains its ignoring the whole great corpus of esoteric
literature which was unquestionably the garden bed of its growth.
Furthermore the invincible repugnance which the movement manifested to this
body of the lore of a spiritual science at once too intellectual and
philosophical for the simple and uncritical folk who promulgated the
Christian faith, attests volubly the plebeian status of the movement and its
personnel.
Let the modern mind
essay to diagnose with an accuracy that these outer symptoms amply guarantee
the motif of a movement to promulgate a claimed divine revelation from the
universal All-Father himself, and it will see on what low and unworthy bases
the system of Christianity does indeed rest. Completely flouting the noblest
and most authoritative characteristic of man’s finest culture, his most
piquant afflations of aesthetic refinement, scorning the intellectual
delight in the classical poetry and philosophy of the great Graeco-Roman
exaltation, including the two great Homeric and the Virgilian epics, the
rabid pietism of the early communicants of Christianity so filled its
devotees with hatred of the Pagan cultural treasures that they forced Jerome
to recant his earlier statements of his addiction to the classical
literature, tore Augustine away from his interest in the philosophy of
Plotinus and the esoteric theosophy of Manichaeism, led Tertullian to shriek
"What has Homer to do with the Gospels?", burned in a frenzy of wild rage
the great Alexandrian library and murdered the esoteric lecturer Hypatia as
she took sanctuary at the altar and scraped the flesh off her bones with
oyster shells. Deeply inwrought in the texture of this anomalous aberration
of good human intelligence are to be found, still weaving the somber thread
of the tragic story of the victory of mass ignorance over sage wisdom, the
true causes of the rise of Christianity.
The elucidation, then,
of a large section of Scriptural text such as is here presented must be seen
as valuable and precious beyond all calculation. It reveals how the
pietistic fanaticism that bred a hatred of poetry, music and art, and a
scorn of wholesome human pleasure which has held pretty solidly to the
present day, was generated by the twisting of the normal human mind into
forms of weird hallucination by the literalizing of myth, allegory, drama
and natural and astrological symbolism in the mind of the uncultured masses.
This episodic debacle of religious culture that befell the ancient world in
the first three centuries of the Christian era (treated in full in the
author’s major work, Shadow of the Third Century) is the crucial key to the
understanding of the religious complication in the world today. It is an
odd, but a challenging reflection that one can not well escape on reading
this assemblage of amazing data of semantic significance, that half the
world, and the half boasting more or less justly of leadership in modern
intelligence, has been thrown for over seventeen centuries under the spell
of a mental and psychological dementia that has given birth to the foulest
superstition, bigotry and inhuman savagery recorded in all history, and that
this tragic outcome has ensued as the result of the stupidity of a group of
Galilean peasants in mistaking zodiacal history for veridical history.