Little could the ancient mythologists and sages have
foreseen that the “fabulous narrations” which their genius devised to cloak
high truth [the metaphorical cocoon] would end by plaguing the mind of the Western world with sixteen
centuries of unconscionable stultification. They could not possibly imagine that
their allegorical constructions to dramatize spiritual truth would so miscarry
from their hidden intent [i.e., 'hiding the truth from the wise and prudent
but yet, in the same text, revealing it to babes in Christ'] as to cast the mental life of half the world for ages
under the cloud of the most grotesque superstition known to history. Nor could
they have dreamed that the gross blindness and obtuseness of later epochs would
cite these same marvelously ingenious portrayals as the evidence of childish
crudity on the part of their formulators. Who could have suspected that a body
of the most signal instrumentalities for conveying and preserving deep knowledge
ever devised by man would become the means of centuries of mental enslavement?
Nothing more clearly evidences the present age’s loss
of fixed moorings in philosophical truth than the inconsistency of its attitudes
toward the sacred scriptures of antiquity. The general mind, indoctrinated by
priest craft, regards them as infallible revelations and holds them as fetishes,
which it were a sacrilege to challenge; while theological scholarship hedges
from pious veneration of them over to outright skepticism of their divine
origin, swinging more recently to a view which takes them to be the simple
conceptions of men just emerging from cave and forest barbarism. The character
of divine dictation and absolute wisdom assigned to them on the one thesis has
yielded to that of ignorant speculation of primitive folk on the other. That
there is a possible truer characterization of them lying midway between the
extravagances of these two extreme views has not seemed to come through to
intelligence at any time. It has not occurred to students of religion that
ancient scripts are the work neither of Supreme Deity on the one
17
side, nor of groping infantile humanity on the other, but
that their production must be sought in a region intermediate between the two.
They came neither from supernal Deity nor from common humanity, but from
humanity divinized! They were the output of normal humans graduating to divine
or near-divine status, St. Paul’s “just men made perfect.” Their divinity
is therefore not transcendent and exotic, and their humanity is not crude and
doltish. They bear the marks, therefore, of human sagacity exalted to divine
mastership [it is written that the scriptures were written by holy men of old;
divine or spiritual minded people, as the spirit of creation 'God', moved upon
them. They understood, by observation, the operation of energy in matter and how
it works in the universe and cosmic consciousness and how the mind organized
this information to be in unison and harmony with itself and all creation].
When a student graduates creditably from a college he is
presumed to have acquired a mastery over the field of knowledge covered in his
course. Human life is a school, and why should not its graduates be presumed to
have gained mastery over the range of knowledge which it covers, and to be able
to write authoritatively upon it? Humans must at some time attain the goal, the
prize of the high calling of God in Christly illumination, the crown of glorious
intelligence. Life’s school issues no diploma of graduation without
attainment, for the graduation is the attainment. We have here the ground for
the only sane acceptance of the ancient scriptures as books of accredited
wisdom. We are neither asked to believe them inscribed by the finger of
omnipotent Deity, nor forced to attribute them to the undeveloped brains of
primitives. They can be seen as the products of the sage wisdom garnered by
generations of men who had finally risen to clear understanding. They are the
literary heritage bequeathed by men grown to the stature of divinity. Their
veneration by the world for long centuries, even carried to the extreme of
outrageous sycophancy, attests an indestructible tradition of their origination
from sources accredited as divine and infallible. Their successful hold on the
popular mind for many ages bespeaks also the unshakeable foundations of their
wisdom. They have withstood consistently the test of generations of human
experience. Their wisdom holds against life; it rings true. And it is all the
more precious to us because of its authorship by men of our own evolution, since
thereby it does not miss immediate pertinence to our life.
Both the conventional views of Bible authorship have
militated against the possible high service of the scriptures to mankind. The
theory of their divine dictation to “holy men of old” has led to the abject
surrender of the rational mind before their impregnable fortress of direct
assertion, its hypnotization by a fetish, and the crippling of its native
energies. The theory of their production by early crudity tends
18
to the disparagement of the value and validity of their
message. The other view here advanced preserves their venerated authority while
it brings their authorship from alleged Cosmic Divinity back to men of earth. It
saves us from the fatuous claim that “God” took time out to dictate a volume
of absolute verity for the inhabitants of a minor planet amongst millions of
trillions of such worlds. Relieving us of the necessity of asserting that
Supreme Deity went into the book publishing business on this globe and took
advantage of his commanding position to write the planet’s “best seller,”
it preserves mental integrity by enabling us to assign scriptural authorship to
human agency, where alone it is acceptable. It is understandable that evolved
men, with vision opened to knowledge of the laws of life, would indite sage
tomes for the enlightenment of those less advanced. In any case the Bibles are
here; they must be accounted for. The phenomenon of their existence among the
nations, their hoary age, their escape from destruction through the centuries,
the ineradicable tradition of their divine origin and authority, their almost
universal veneration, must all find some factual ground of explanation. The
theory offered in refutation of the two conventional ones seems the only one
that provides such a rational and acceptable basis. And since the belief in
their sacredness generally persists, it can not be regarded as less than
momentous that the world should know of a surety that, while these revered
relics are not the voice of the personified Cosmos, neither are they the mere
speculative romancing of cavemen or scholastics. They are the sure word of
perfected wisdom.
There was a time, then, in early human history, when
enlightened men possessed true knowledge, the passport to wisdom. Clear and
concise answers to the profoundest problems of philosophy were known. In so far
as the human intellectual faculty is capable of it, an understanding of the
mystery and riddle of life itself and the laws of its evolutionary unfolding,
was achieved by men who, as Hermes says, had been “reborn in mind.”
Philosophy was no mere “speculative enterprise,” or tilting at logical
windmills; it was a statement of the fundamental archai, or basic principles, of
the science of being. It formed the groundwork for the elevation of theology to
its true place as the King of Sciences, or the Kingly Science. Together
philosophy and theology held the throne in the mental life of mankind; and
justly so, for a reason which modern thought would do well to consider: they
must ever be the ultimate science because they motivate finally the use we
19
make of all other sciences! They hold final answers to
all life’s problems. They are the determination of all human action in the
end. They alone can direct man finally to the path of good, for by no other
means can he learn to know what constitutes the good. The sore need of the world
today is the restoration of philosophy, to supply the proper motivation and end
of action.
Though zealously guarded from the unworthy by its
accredited custodians, knowledge was extant in the ancient day. Modern zeal for
publicity finds it hard to understand why it was so sedulously kept esoteric.
Briefly—for the full reason is a lengthy matter—a thing so precious, the
distillation of ages of experience and the deposit of many lives of painful
earning, could not be given out loosely to the undisciplined rabble to be
violated and despoiled. Yet it was withheld from no worthy aspirant. No bars of
bigotry or persecution interdicted its free culture. The Societies in which it
was secretly pursued were honored by kings and the populace alike.
That halcyon age passed, that priceless legacy of
knowledge was threatened with extinction, its pursuit was forbidden, its
devotees assailed and exterminated; and for more than fifteen centuries the
Occidental world has muddled through its age-to-age existence in nearly total
ignorance of the fact that antiquity held, in its philosophy and theology, an
adequate answer to the great interrogatory, the Sphinx riddle of human life.
The gift and then the loss of primal wisdom are the two
most momentous events in human history. This age will be spectator to the third
most significant event—the Renaissance of Ancient Culture. The plans of demi-gods
and divine men, interrupted for fifteen centuries of the Dark Ages, will move
forward again toward destined goals.
This age faces the denouement of a drama the like of
which has not been unrolled in world history before and will hardly be repeated
in aeons. Tragedy and comedy being copiously admixed in mortal existence, the
astounding spectacle to which the world will shortly awake will exhibit untold
calamity and the ludicrous conjoined in incredible fashion. We are destined soon
to pass from a stunning sense of tragic loss to a world-echoing burst of
laughter. The sting of our realization of our duo-millennial loss will melt away
under the dawning recognition of our previous unbelievable stupidity. We are in
a little time to be made acutely aware of a situation that will become the butt
of hollow
20
mirth for ages to come. Other egregious follies of
history can be accepted or extenuated to the point of being condoned and
forgotten. But this colossal ineptitude, prolonged over sixteen centuries, can
not escape being laughed at for centuries more. A joke owes its character to the
miscarriage of the intended sense into something ludicrously different. This
denouement will stand as the historical joke of the ages. No less than this
quantity of hilarity can balance the weight of the tragedy which loads the joke
at the other end. For the ludicrously different direction in which the intended
sense of the great mythical religions and dramatic rituals of the past took its
perverted course entailed as a consequence the greatest of all historical
tragedies,--the frightful chapter of religious bigotry and persecution. This
worst of all forms of man’s inhumanity to man was bred out of the miscarriage
of the concealed meaning of the ancient spiritual myth. The transaction carried
the form of a joke, but it also carried the substance of the most appalling
terrorism in history. And this most calamitous of all blunders was the mistaking
of religious myth, drama and allegory for veridical history!
The promise of our coming awakening lies in the progress
made and to be made in the study of Comparative Religion, Comparative Mythology
and Comparative Philology. What they will ere long make clear to us beyond
further dispute is the almost unthinkable fact that for sixteen centuries the
best intelligence of the West took the ancient sages’ Books of Wisdom, which
were in all cases the spiritual dramatizations of the experience of the human
soul on earth, for objective historical narratives. The spectacle that will soon
throw a world first into wonder, confusion and dismay, and then into clownish
laughter, is that of a civilization covering one third of the globe, and
boasting itself as the highest in culture in the historical period, all the
while taking its moral and spiritual guidance for an aeon from a Book or Books,
of the true content and meaning of which it never for a moment has had the
slightest inkling.
The superior knowledge vouchsafed from early graduates in
life’s school to disciplined pupils in the Mysteries of old was transmitted
from generation to generation by oral teaching and preserved only in memory. But
later, lest it be lost or corrupted, it was consigned to writing. Hence came the
Sacred Books, Scriptures, Holy Writ, of antiquity. So highly were they held in
the esteem of early men that when in
21
later days their true origin and character had been
forgotten, they were exalted to the position of veritable fetishes and assigned
a quite preternatural source and rating. Regarded as books of superhuman
intelligence, men have in face of them practically set in abeyance their human
reason and bowed to them as the oracles of absolute Truth. This was natural and
to a degree inevitable. But it spelled catastrophe to the general mental life of
man by fixing upon him the basest hypnotization in all the annals of record,
when a literal and historical, instead of a purely spiritual and typical
interpretation of the books was broadcast to general acceptance. The evidence is
mountain high that the taking of ancient ritual dramas and scriptural myths for
objective history and the figures in them for human persons has been the
fountain source of the most abject corruption of man’s mental forces since the
race began.
In mechanical exploit this is an age of marvel, and
credit for this type of achievement should not be withheld. In study of life and
its objective powers it has labored with wondrous accomplishment. In
psychological delving into deeper phases of consciousness it has begun a pursuit
long neglected. But in religion and philosophy it is one of the blindest of
ages. It is not overstating the case to say that in these areas of human
enterprise the mind of this era still slumbers in a state of ineptitude and
gross darkness at least a degree or two below that commonly termed barbaric. At
this moment the common mentality of the day, led and fed by a compactly
institutionalized ecclesiastical power, stands committed to ideas as to the
origin, structure, meaning and destiny of life which have not been surpassed in
crudity and chimerical absurdity by the tribes of the forest and the sea isles.
Conceptions in theology having to do with basic realities of man’s relation to
the universe are still presented in pulpits, Sunday Schools and Theological
Seminaries which the uncorrupted native intelligence of children of eight and
ten years shrinks from or accepts with startled dismay,--to the subsequent
confusion of their whole mental integrity. A “scheme” of explanation of
cosmic processes and world design, of human and angelic relations, of the plan
and purport of life itself, is advanced for popular acceptance, yet is grotesque
to common sense and fantastic to rational thought. Philosophy and religion are
still propagated on the basis of a theology that is received without
understanding by the “common people,” entirely repudiated by the
intelligentsia and brazenly
22
dissembled by the very priesthood that lips its cantos
and its oracles from Sunday to Sunday. In sum it can be said without the
remotest possibility of successful dispute that the general grasp of the mind of
this age on philosophical verity and the truth of life, as proffered by orthodox
religionism, is still steeped in the crassest forms of dark superstition. And
this has been due to the miscarriage of ancient symbolism.
History would seem to present a pattern of retrogressive
current if it can be shown that this late epoch grovels in a mire of
semi-barbaric philosophical grossness from which a former period was free.
Degeneracy must have set in at some distant time and swept onward to this day.
And such a phenomenon must have had its due cause. A great work of a learned
author some years ago pointed to the approaching “decline of the West.” What
has not been seen, however, is that the West has long been in decline, is at a
low stage of decay, and has not risen out of the murks of the Dark Ages. This
has come in the wake of causes long operative in the world situation, which have
been overlooked or failed of discovery through an egregious obscuration of the
vision of scholars since the early centuries. And if this failure of insight is
not to be attributed to stupidity that is in itself beyond understanding, then
it becomes necessary for the historian of these things to posit for it another
cause, one that casts the dark shadow of sinister motive over the whole course
of that historical enterprise in which sinister motive is of all places most
unpardonable. Corruption in politics or in economic or social life can be
understood in relation to the imperfection of human nature, and in a measure
pardoned. But designed corruption in religion is shattering to the very
foundations of human aspiration. It shocks and paralyzes fundamental urges to
sincerity. It weights the human spirit with the hopelessness of its effort to
conquer imperfection. Dishonesty and insincerity in worldly dealings may entail
disaster of greater or minor degree. In religion they are never less than fatal.
There is one domain in which untruth is insupportable, that field of the human
soul’s endeavor of which Truth is the very substance and being,--religion.
Whether stupidity or sinister design prove to have been
the cause of the loss of true original meaning must be left to the historical
sequel to disclose. And whether the cause of the perpetuation of rank
superstition in the present day of alleged enlightenment is to be laid at the
door of ignorance or knavery or a combination of both, must likewise
23
be determined as time moves on. It is certain that both
the primal and the present causes of nescience are kindred, if not identical.
It is the purpose of the present volume to set forth to
the modern mind the extent of the wreckage which splendid ancient wisdom
suffered at the hands of later incompetence. And it is designed to accomplish
this by setting up the sharp contrast between the present disfigurement and the
past glory of the structure. This purpose entails the task of revealing for the
first time the hidden meaning of the body of archaic scriptures by means of a
clear and lucid interpretation of their myths and allegories, fables and dramas,
astrological pictographs and numerological outlines. It will be at once seen to
be a labor of no mean proportions to convert the entire mass of antique
mythology and legend, Biblical graph and cryptogram, from presumed childish
nonsense into an organic corpus of transcendent scientific significance. It
involves the reversal of that mental process which in the days of early
Christianity operated to change myth and allegory in the first instance over to
factual history. As third century ignorance converted mythical typology to
objective history, the task is now to convert alleged objective history back to
mythology, and then to interpret it as enlightened theology. The almost
insuperable difficulty of the project will consist in demonstrating to an
uncomprehending world, mistaught for centuries and now fixed in weird forms of
fantastic belief, that the sacred scriptures of the world are a thousand times
more precious as myths than as alleged history. It can only be done by showing
that as myths they illumine and exalt the mind to unparalleled clarity, while as
assumed history they are either nonsensical or inconsequential. But centuries of
erroneous indoctrination have so warped and victimized the modern mind that the
effort to restore the scriptures to their primal mythical status will be met
with the objection that the transaction will wipe the Bible and other sacred
literature out of the realm of value altogether. In the common mind this would
be to rob them of worth and significance utterly. So wretchedly has the ancient
usage of the religious myth been misunderstood that the cry, “the Bible only a
myth!”, will fall upon the popular ear with all the catastrophic force and
finality of the tolling of a death knell. And no statement that words can phrase
will stand as a more redoubtable testimony to the correctness of this estimate
of the present stupefaction of modern intelligence concerning religious
philosophy than just this reaction. Ridi-
24
cule, contempt and flat rejection will be the greeting
accorded the proclamation that Biblical myth is truer and more important than
Biblical history. Our book aims at nothing less than the full proof of this
contention. It flies directly in the face of the awaiting scorn of common
opinion on the point at issue. Yet nothing is easier than to demonstrate that
Bible material taken as history is the veriest nonsense. Anyone with an analytic
mind and an imagination to convert its narratives into realism can make it a
laughing-stock. The Voltaires, Paines, Ingersols and the freethinkers have done
this successfully enough. But having disproved it as history, they have not
redeemed it as spiritual mythology. The world awaits this work of
interpretation, and only when it is supplied will the full force of the tragic
humor of mistaking drama for history be grasped.
The loss or corruption of the philosophical
interpretation of ancient scriptures precipitated the West into the Dark Ages,
and a main factor in this disaster was a general obscuration of intelligence
concerning the myth. Catastrophe was made the more readily possible because the
rationale of the use of the myth in ancient hands passed from knowledge. When
the recondite suggestiveness of the myth was lost, the inner essence of esoteric
wisdom was dissipated away. Philosophy died out. And, bereft of its inner soul,
the myth came to stand as the mere ghost of itself. With its hidden significance
gone, it read nonsense and caricature. And so it has stood till this day. The
word connotes in the popular mind of the present something about equivalent to
fairy-tale, a fiction little removed from a “hoax.” It is something that is
sheer fanciful invention. To declare a narrative formerly believed to be true
“only a myth” is to toss it out on the rubbish heap as a thing no longer of
value. This attitude of mind toward the myth is itself the sign and seal of the
decadence of this age. For ancient sagacity could hardly have assumed that any
succeeding age would prove so obtuse as to take the outward form of its
spiritual allegories for factual occurrence, or suppose that their formulators
believed them to be true objectively.
To be sure, they are fanciful creations and entirely
fictitious. They are fables of events which, as events, never happened. The aim
was never at any time to deceive anybody. It was never imagined that anybody
would ever “believe” them. Nevertheless the myth was designed to tell truth
of the last importance. Its instrument was fancy, but its purpose was not
falsehood, but sublime truth. Outwardly it was not
25
true, but at the same time it portrayed full truth. It
was not true for its “characters,” but was true for all mankind. It was only
a myth, but it was a myth of something. It used a false story to relate a true
one. While it never happened, it is the type of all things that have happened
and will happen. It is not objective history, but it embalms the import and
substance, the heart’s core, of all human history. Such authors as Spengler
and Lord Raglan have begun to see that the ancients regarded it of far less
importance to catalogue the occurrences of objective history than to dramatize
its inner “spirit.” The outward actions of humans are in the main trivial,
because they constitute in the end only a partial and ephemeral account of whole
verity. Ancient literature aimed at something infinitely higher and more
universal. It strove to depict in the myths and dramas the eternal norms of life
experience, which would stand as truth for all men at any time in evolution. The
myths were cryptographs of the great design and pattern of human history,
limning in the large the truth that is only in fragmentary fashion brought to
living enactment in any given set of historical circumstances. The myth is
always truer than history! Only in aeons will history have caught up with the
myth, when it will have unfolded the entire design of the original mythograph.
Hegel indeed essayed to read the features of a grand cosmic design in the
straggling line of actual events. But the myth already foreshadows the ultimate
meaning of history.
Such being the portentous function of the myth in the
early stages of the life of humanity, it becomes in some degree apparent what
blindness must have fallen upon the mental eye of practically a whole world to
have blotted out in little more than a single century the knowledge of a thing
of such vast utility. No matter how conclusively the data may prove the fact, it
will probably remain forever incomprehensible to unstudied folk that whole
bodies of ancient mythology and spiritual typology, suddenly became
metamorphosed into alleged history. And because it ensued through sheer
gaucherie and clumsy loutish dumbness, it will, as predicted, rise on our
horizon as the supreme folly of the ages. When it is realized that an early gift
of divine wisdom, planned to aid the race fight through the exigencies of its
historical evolution, totally miscarried into tragic nonsense through the simple
mistake of taking spiritual allegory for literal history, a
26
humiliated world will find difficulty in ridding its
memory of this preposterous blunder.
Deprived thus of a legacy of transcendent knowledge
vouchsafed for its instruction, Western humanity has wound a tortuous path
through dangerous terrain that the lost wisdom would have enabled it to avoid.
It has been a journey made without the guiding light that had been given to
render the road more easily passable. Civilization has floundered in the shoals
and quicksands of ignorance. And its contemporary phase presents the strangest
of spectacles,--that of a modern culture boasting its superiority over any
antecedent one, yet admittedly guided in its ethical life by a Book of which it
is now possible to affirm that not the most rudimentary sense of its message has
ever been apprehended. The declaration can be made and supported that the Bible
is still a sealed book. This study will vindicate that declaration by setting
forth the hidden meaning of ancient scripture for the first time. Gross
misinterpretation cannot be seen as such until its product has been set down
alongside a true rendering. The crudeness and baseness of a literal and
historical translation of the sense will only be brought into glaring light by
being held up against a background of the clarity and dignity of a true
spiritual meaning.
The promised interpretation is not predicated upon the
play of a genius superior to that of the accumulated scholarship and acumen of
centuries of religious students and theologians in Christendom. It was made
possible purely by the discovery of clues and “keys” to the old scriptures
hidden deeply in the tomes of ancient literature, which had escaped the notice
of the long line of exegetical inquirers. If wonder and skepticism arise over
the difficulty of understanding why discovery was made at this epoch and not in
so long a time before, the answer is most probably to be found in the fact that
the thousands who failed approached the study of ancient treasure-tomes with an
attitude of mind that made defeat inevitable, while success came finally through
an attitude that, if it did not of itself guarantee victory, at least opened the
door to it. This is of immense significance and carries a weighty moral
connotation with it. With the scales fallen at last from the eyes of purblind
prejudice, it can be patently enough seen that there was little chance of
discovery of the cryptic burden of ancient books as long as scholars undertook
their study with the ingrained and obstinate assurance that they were the
products of primitive infantilism. Ever thus
27
have the archaic volumes been approached by Orientalists
and Western savants. It is next to unbelievable to discover in what a rigid
posture of predetermined estimate the scrutiny of antique writings has been
undertaken by Western Christian scholars. Even when the evidence of sage wisdom
was present under the eye, the relentless force of the fixation could never rest
content until it had read the imputation of simpleness and crudity into the
text. If early literature did not manifestly read as folly, it had to be made to
do so. The inviolable presupposition in the case was that by no possibility
could it be admitted that the ancients knew a modicum of what we know today. If
it was to be granted that the seers of yore knew life truly and profoundly, it
would be gall to modern intellectual pride, and the very walls of boasted modern
superiority would be breached. The content of old scripts, mysterious and
haunting as it often appeared, had to be explained on the basis of primitive naïveté
of mind. By no right were the supposed aborigines of remote times entitled to
the presumption of high knowledge or a scientific envisagement of the world. No
thesis found in modern view could account for the prevalence of developed
culture in the early stages of the chart of progressive evolution as at present
conceived. The assignment of puerile nescience to the civilizations of even
three and four thousand years ago had to be vindicated at all costs. The rating
of primitives for early men had to be maintained.
Little wonder, then, that a literature scanned with such
a blighting spirit never yielded its buried light. Supercilious contempt blinded
the eyes of inquiry and closed the mind to all discovery. Obdurately refusing to
admit the possibility of the presence of knowledge, no amount of search would
reveal it. All the surer was inquiry doomed to failure in this field, when the
most exalted genius the world ever knew had been at pains to disguise the
outward appearance of that knowledge. It was only when at last the arcane
writings were inspected with the eager spirit of genuine seeking and the
reverent assurance of their holding precious mines of instruction, that the open
sesame unlocked a hoard of hidden wealth.
If it shatters current orthodoxy in science or philosophy
to establish the fact that archaic man possessed supernal sapiency, then
shattering there must be. The thing cannot be obviated. It is a fact that out of
the night of antiquity looms the giant light of transcendent intelligence on the
part of numerous sages. At a period remote enough to be con-
28
temporary with the times incorrigibly marked as
“primitive” by historians, the ancients possessed books of such exalted
spiritual and intellectual content as to lie yet beyond the comprehension of
vaunted modern intelligence! Modern pride must face the situation:
“primitive” people already possessed books which by no possibility could
have been produced by “primitive” mentality. Books which only sages could
have written bespeak the presence of sages on the scene.
And sages there were. Popular academic theory must
perforce revise its postulates in the case. It has stubbornly refused to admit
the operation of a law of life in this situation which it sees at work
everywhere else in the realm of genetic procedure. Universal observation yields
the truth that infant life is everywhere parented. The period of helpless
infancy is safeguarded by parental oversight. The elder generation is at hand to
protect, nurture and instruct the young of every kind. Modern theory admits the
prevalence of this rule everywhere—except strangely in the biological history
of the human race as a unit. Granting the sway of the principle in the case of
the individual, animal or human, it has refused to predicate its governance over
the early life of humanity as an entity. But the presence of sapient writings,
the evidence of great lost arts, and the remains of structures surpassing
present achievement, attest incontrovertibly the uniform working of the law of
parenthood here as elsewhere. The human race was parented. It was not left to
struggle through its helpless infancy without guardianship. Ancient legend in
the mass bears this out. Prehistoric lore teems with the stories of heroes and
men of divine stature, demi-gods and sons of God who mingled with humanity, and
who left codes of laws and manuals of civilization that manifest a mastery not
possible of acquirement by primitives. Hermes, Orpheus, Cadmus, Zoroaster,
Hammurabi, Manu, Buddha, Laotse, Moses, and even Plato and Pythagoras, hover in
the dim light of remote legendary times as figures transcending normal human
stature, and leaving behind writings that have been held up as the norm of
perfect wisdom and conduct down the centuries. The Laws of Manu have stood for
ages as the prototype of all legal and social codes since formulated. Hermes,
Orpheus taught the nations agriculture, writing, astronomy, language, religion,
philosophy and science, the saga runs.
Hence there is posited for the first time a natural and
competent answer to the great and insistent question of the authorship of
29
primeval books overpassing even present capability. The
authorship of the sages removes these books at once from the category of merely
human speculation and places them securely in the place of authority and
authenticity. They were the products, not of early man’s groping tentatives to
understand life, but of evolved men’s sagacious knowledge and matured
experience. On no other ground can their perennial durability and universal
power be accounted for. The early races obviously received and treasured these
documents with the same high reverence with which the human child receives the
codes and rules of conduct first handed down to it by its parents, who stand to
it in loco Dei. If the primal world-reverence is found wanting in certain groups
today, it is due not so much to the fact that the books have proven of unsound
merit, but to the failure to know what they actually say. They are uninterpreted
to this moment. They could not be scorned if their intrinsic meaning was known.
The republication of that lost meaning will restore the bibles to universal
veneration, but not as fetishes.
Incidentally all speculation of scholars as to the date
of the personal authorship of the Bible books or other ancient documents of the
kind must be declared to be pure and simple impertinence. Nobody knows or can
know what hand first set these verses to paper, or at what epoch. The books are
of unknown antiquity. They were extant thousands of years B.C. When they passed
from oral impartation to written form none can say. Hundreds of volumes proclaim
Moses to have been the writer of the Pentateuch. Yet the last of the five books
describes Moses’ death and burial, and adds that not in a long cycle since his
day (estimated by scholars at six hundred years at least) hath there been found
one like unto him in wisdom and piety in all Israel! To ascribe any of the Bible
books to any named writer is to trespass on the ground of folly. Indeed it is
possible to assert that, in the common meaning of the term, they were never
“written” at all. No man sat down and composed them out of his thought or
his knowledge. They were the outlines of a great universal tradition formulated
by the accumulated wisdom of those first “parents” or “guardians” of
infant humanity, and, like the thousands of lines of the great Homeric poems,
which had been held purely in the memory of the Hellenes for five hundred years,
were finally committed by scribes to written form. Thus came those set
formulations of systematic knowledge, cosmic data and moral
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codes, that have survived the test of time and still
stand as sacred commitments. Their material presents the substantial truth of
life, and not primitive man’s erratic guessings. And sixteen hundred years of
the most consecrated effort to study them has left their meaning still
unrevealed.
But the Western mind has begun to delve into the
fathomless spiritual philosophies of the ancient East. The renaissance of
Oriental thought, which was first quickened by Schopenhauer in Europe and by
Emerson in America, is now sweeping Occidental religious consciousness to a new
and lofty height of vision and uplift. The eminent psychologist, C. G. Jung,
declares this movement to be the most significant taking place in the thought
life of today. The philosophy that could give an expansive illumination to a
brain like Emerson’s is proving a fount of light and incentive to millions
more at present.
The mask of literary disguise is being slowly lifted from
the face of ancient scripture, and what has been gratuitously assumed to be the
product of primitive naïveté and ignorance is now seen to be the many-colored
cloak of recondite wisdom. Even so apparently quixotic a construction as the
body of Greek myths, which has gained for its originators the imputed status of
moronism, bewildering and baffling the world for two millennia, is to be
revealed as perhaps the most lucid presentment of philosophical truth ever given
to the world. The light so long buried under a bushel of myths is beginning to
shine through. Not only do they bear the impress of a genius able to portray
mighty truth in fable and fiction, but they register an equal skill in artful
concealment. Their employment of the craft of disguise has carried them so far
beyond us that we have been gulled into taking the mask for the reality. The
devisers of the myths were master dramatists and poets. With such deft touches
did they weave the pattern of cosmic, mundane, spiritual and physical truth
through their myriad narratives of gods and men, mermaids, harpies, satyrs,
centaurs, stags and boars, labyrinths, rivers, trees and stars, that not the
most outlandish detail of their fabrications can be ignored without the loss of
some signal link of meaning. Generations of scholars, chained in the cave of
orthodoxy with their backs to the light, have perennially scoffed at the idea
that the myths might be fanciful portrayals of esoteric truth. And we have
charged the most enlightened races in history, the Greeks, Chaldeans and
Egyptians, with possessing the mentality of immature children.
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We accused them of taking their three-headed dogs, their
fire-breathing dragons, their griffins, naiads, Cyclops, Circes and Medusas for
sure-enough actualities. We were sure we could afford to laugh at the simpleness
of a people who ascribed the summer’s drought to Phaëthon’s losing control
of the horses of Apollo’s sun-chariot. But modern presumption must brace
itself for a rude jolt, when it shortly transpires that not one in a hundred of
our population will be able to grasp the involved and profound signification of
the Phaëthon myth even when it has been clearly set forth. Face to face with
what we could not understand in ancient literature, we assumed that the
unintelligibility was due to ancient unintelligence in the construction. That it
might be due to our unintelligence in the comprehension was unthinkable. We
could only hold our ground of supposed enlightenment by shifting our ignorance
to the ancients. If the myths made no sense to us, it was proof that there was
no sense in them. But history is soon to reverse judgment. The comics in the
case will be found to be modern, not ancient. Not they, but we, will be adjudged
the simple-minded children lacking insight. And we will see ourselves at last,
clowns and buffoons, laughing and grimacing in hideous mockery of a treasure the
value of which we cannot grasp.
Perhaps there will be wanting to us the powers of
discernment needed to catch the grandeur of arcane systems of philosophy under
their covering of allegory. Habits of thought and postures of mind hostile to
the presuppositions of the archaic knowledge will not easily adjust themselves
to new views. The attempt at a full revelation of buried meaning will come with
a shock to current theological vanity, to the pride of present knowledge and to
the complacency of the mechanistic cast of modern thought. But the release of
the hidden significance of the world scriptures at this epoch may be destined to
achieve our salvation from threatened social catastrophe. For the ancient wisdom
held the prescription for both individual sanity and a righteous social order.
Folly flourished only by grace of its despoliation.
The release of the enlightenment potentially held in the
old books will challenge many traditional habitudes of mind and most of the
lingering relics of theological inculcation. It will republish the postulates of
ancient knowledge that have been lost or discredited and establish them once
more as the principia of understanding for both the
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phenomena of life and the deep lore of the scriptures.
Some of these, long without the pale of orthodox acceptance, will strangely have
been found corroborated by late scientific discovery. The philosophical method
was that of deduction, since it conceived life as unfolding in the outer order
the pattern of things innately involved in its inner heart. The conclusion
reached by evolutionists in present studies is that “evolution is centrifugal,
developing outward from within the geneplasm, rather than centripetal,
developing inward from without the geneplasm,” in the words of Henry Fairfield
Osborn. Another late finding is that “evolution is creational rather than
variational. Variation of the species is the result of an original creative
pattern within the geneplasm which is there from the very beginning.” And a
third pronouncement demolishes completely the theories of materialism, affirming
that “evolution is prot-empirical rather than meta-empirical; the organs
developing before there is any actual need for them rather than after the need
for them arises.” Nature already carries in her womb the embryo of that which
will come to form. Life works ahead to an end premeditated in the beginning, so
that Aristotle’s scheme of “entelechy” is a sound principle in philosophy.
Plato told us twenty-four hundred years ago that life is weaving on the field of
manifestation the design of the archetypal ideas in the Cosmic Mind. Modern
science and the clear interpretation of the arcane philosophy of the past will
together restore Plato to his seat on the throne of mind.
The debate on teleology has been long and acrimonious.
Negative conclusions have been fostered and apparently affirmed by the shortness
of our perspective. The immensely extended outline of evolution envisioned by
the cosmology of old will enable the mind to see the working of design. Mr.
Clarence Darrow asks skeptically if the Lisbon earthquake was designed. As well
might a colony of ants ask if the destruction of their burrow as we spade our
garden was designed. Neither to the citizens of Lisbon nor to the ants in the
garden would the philosophy of design be comforting. But we know that the
digging was designed, not to destroy the ant-city, but to prepare the garden. So
we may equally well know that the processes of world building were designed, not
to destroy Lisbon, but to adjust the earth’s crust properly about it. The
designed activities progressing in two different worlds happened to clash, man
being no more intelligent about the plans of cosmic beings than the ant about
human intentions. And as
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man cannot change his larger designs always for the
convenience of ants in certain situations, or indeed may not even be aware that
his designs jeopardize their lives, so neither presumably can higher beings
alter their operations for the temporary advantage of little man. Neither man
nor nature has yet learned how to work on in evolution without the element of
some sacrifice of life. It does not impugn design in the course and speed of an
automobile that a child has been unfortunate enough to drift into its path.
Centuries of world life have been lived all awry because
the philosophical insight into the structure of archetypal design has been
dulled and obscured. The outlines of the pattern of evolution formulated in the
beginning by Cosmic Mind were known of old, but lost in the long interim. The
world being the crystallized projection of a divine thought-form and history the
slow filling out of the lines of the pattern, what man can know of the structure
of the original ideation, or the Great Plan, becomes of incontestable
importance. This was the base and content of the Ancient Philosophy. It must be
restored to knowledge. Fortunately it has never been lost beyond recovery,
merely lost out of common thought. It was safe even while unknown, being
preserved in the amber of a subtle cryptography. Ignorance came along and swept
out of ken the esoteric purport; but at the same time it perpetuated the myths
and allegories, believing them to be history. Deluded piety made a hash of the
sense of the scriptures, yet all unwittingly saved them for the advantage of a
wiser age.
On the one hand materialism has ignored the spiritual
nature and motivation of the universe; on the other, ecclesiastical zealotry,
blinded by stupid literalism, has rendered religion ridiculous. The truth must
combat untruth on both these fronts, rebuffing a philosophy that denies the
ideal frame of things, and rebuking an eccentric religionism that distorts early
truth into revolting irrationality. To redeem religion from ignominy it is
necessary to stigmatize its historical caricature, ecclesiasticism. War must be
declared on its falsities to vindicate its truth. Medieval and modern
incrustations, excrescences and abnormalities of a hundred types must be brushed
away, if the brilliance of the splendid original creation of supernal genius is
to shine forth again. Plato’s theology and “divine philosophy” must be
vindicated.
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