Chapter IX
Such then was the archaic view of the origin of the soul
from on high, its fall into the darkness and distractions of the body and its
consequent submergence in carnal sense. And, drastic as is seen to be the
necessary rehabilitation of all scripture on the basis of this revised
understanding, it will be far overshadowed in theological importance by a still
more radical reconstruction arising from the ancient use of the figure under
which life in the body was mythically represented. For everywhere throughout
antiquity earthly life was depicted as our death! It is of little avail that the
portraiture be uproariously protested as not befitting such a condition of vivid
life as is ours in the body. We may indignantly cast back upon ancient heads the
obloquy of such an inappropriate metaphor. But our repudiation of their choice
of figure falls entirely wide of the mark as affecting the meaning of ancient
texts. The fact stands that they did call our life here death, and that when
they spoke of “the dead” in sacred books, it is indubitable that they meant
the living humans. The words “death” and “the dead” are used in the old
scriptures to refer to living humanity in earthly embodiment. We scurrying
mortals are “the dead” of the Bible and other sacred books, and the
“death” spoken of there is our living existence here. We may reject the
aptness of their symbolism, but it is past our prerogative to read a meaning
into their books other than the one they intended; or to read out of them a
meaning they consistently deposited therein. The astonishing point, of
revolutionary significance for all religion, will receive textual treatment in
the present chapter, and a later one will further vindicate the correctness of
the thesis. It is perhaps the cardinal item of the whole theological corpus, the
real “lost key” to a correct reading of subterranean meaning in esoteric
literature. In ancient theology “death” means our life on earth.
156
first by many—the texts of scripture will yield their
cryptic meaning on no other terms. And the Bible is a sealed book mostly because
these two words, “death” and “the dead,” have not been read as covers of
a far profounder sense than the superficial one.
To be sure, it is death in a sense to be understood as
dramatic and relative only. And it pertains to the soul in man, not to the body.
Life and death are ever as the two end seats on a “see-saw.” As the one end
goes to death the other rises to life. The death of the body releases the soul
to a higher life; conversely, the “death” of the soul as it sinks in body
opens the day of life to that body. The theological death of the soul in
incarnation is a death that does not kill it in any final sense. It is a death
from which it rises again at the cycle’s end into a grander rebirth. It is a
death that ends in resurrection. And sixteen centuries of inane misconception of
the resplendent glory of the greatest of all doctrines, the resurrection from
the dead, will be resolved at long last into the bursting light of its true
meaning when the dust of ignorance is brushed away.
For animal man the advent of the gods was propitious;
indeed it was the very antithesis of death. The plunge into carnality that
brought “death and all our woe” to the soul, brought life to the lower man.
That was part of its purpose. The gods came to “die” that we mortals might
“live.” They came that both they and we might have life more abundantly, but
at what cost to themselves—a long “walk through the valley of the shadow of
death.” Theirs was the death on the cross of flesh and matter.
The use of the term “death” must be in any case a
comparative one, for there strictly is no death, in the form of total extinction
of being, for any part of real being. All death, so called, is but a transition
from state to state, a change of form, of that which is and can not cease to be.
Life and death are eternally locked in each other’s arms, for as Thales says,
“Air lives the death of water; fire lives the death of air,” and so on. So
body lives the death of the soul, and soul lives the death of the body. It
thrives by virtue of that death. The germ and young shoot of any seed live the
death of the body of the seed. The law of incubation brings high deities into
their Hades, into Pluto’s dark kingdom. For the gods the cycle of incarnations
was the descent into hell—their crucifixion, death and burial, in all archaic
literature!
157
volume to obviate all doubt as to its validity. Upon its
successful vindication hinges the final determination of meaning for hundreds of
passages, and the ultimate interpretation of the main theses of all theologies.
As will be shown later, it carries with it the purport of the resurrection
doctrine, the cornerstone of religions. When we come to that climactic doctrine,
it will be possible to locate with exactness what and where that tomb was whose
gates and bars were rent asunder by the resurgent Lord. Modern theology little
dreams, to this day, the truth back of its own mishandled, but still grandiose,
symbols.
The incarnation, for the soul, was its death and burial.
But it was a living death and a burial alive. It was an entombment that carried
life on, but under conditions that could be poetically dramatized as
“death.” Our inability to comprehend any but a physical sense of the word
“burial” has left us easy victims of ancient poetic fancy, and led to the
foisting upon ourselves perhaps the most degraded interpretation of the
crucifixion, death and resurrection of deity in mortal life ever to be held by
any religious group. Not even woodland tribes have so wretchedly missed the true
sense of the great doctrines. Literalism in this instance has debased the human
mind more atrociously than fetishism or totemism.
The textual testimony supporting the thesis is so
voluminous that practical considerations forbid its full amassing. Nothing less,
however, than the serried marshaling of much material will avail to carry
conviction to minds unalterably set to opposing views.
Proclus advises us that the incarnating Egos were
forewarned that their venture into flesh would be successful on condition that
they achieved it “without merging themselves with the darkness of body.”
They were to make a magnetic connection with the animal body by means of a
linkage of their currents of higher life with the forces playing through the
nervous system of the animal. They were thus to be in position to pour down
streams of vital power into the body, but were not to sink their total quantum
of divine intellection into the sense life of the beast. They were to hover over
the physical life of the body, touch it with divine flame, but not be drawn down
into it. To fall into this dereliction would be to sin, to lose a measure of
their vivific life and eventually to die. For there were always two deaths
spoken of in the books of the past. It was death, in the first place, for them
to come under the heavy depression of fleshly existence. This was the first
158
death. But to sink farther down and be lost in the murks
of animal sensualism to a degree that made a return to their heavenly state next
to impossible, was to suffer the “second death,” of which the soul ever
stood in fear and terror in the old texts. The first death was the incarnation;
the second was failure to rise and “return unto the Father.”
As Apuleius says, the soul, then, approached the
“confines of death.” And on her approach, and at the moment of her divulsion
from her seat on high, there ensued an intermediate or preparatory stage, a
partial loss of consciousness termed by the writers a “swoon.” Corroboration
of this experience is found in a very old document known as the Tibetan Book of
the Dead (44):
“In the Bardo Thödol the deceased1 is represented as
retrograding step by step into the lower and lower states of consciousness. Each
step downward is preceded by a swooning into unconsciousness; and possibly that
which constitutes his mentality on the lower levels of the Bardo is some mental
element or compound of mental elements . . . separated during the swooning from
higher and more spiritually enlightened elements. . . .”
This swooning on the downward path to earthly death is
likened to a falling asleep. Jesus’ assertion that Lazarus was not dead but
only sleeping, and needed only to be awakened, is a picturing of the same
condition. Incidentally the same thing is said of the earth-bound Osiris in
Egypt. “That is Osiris, who is not dead but sleeping in Annu, the place of his
repose, awaiting the call that bids him come forth to day.” Massey comments:
“Osiris in Annu, like Lazarus in Bethany, was not dead
but sleeping. In the text of Har-Hetep (Rit., Ch. 99), the Speaker, who
personates Horus, is he who comes to awaken Asar (Osiris) out of his sleep. Also
in one of the earlier funeral texts it is said of the sleeping Asar: ‘The
Great One waketh, the Great One riseth . . .’ The Manes in Amenta were not
looked upon as dead, but sleeping, breathless of body, motionless of heart.
Hence Horus comes to awaken the sleepers in their coffins.”2
Horus says (Rit., Ch. 64): “I go to give movement to
the Manes; I go to comfort him who is in a swoon,”—showing the perfect
matching of Egyptian and Tibetan “necrological science.
The swoon attending each further step matterward deepens
by degrees until it amounts to the full “sleep” or “dream” of mortal ex-
159
istence, introduced by the incubus of body upon spirits
of light. It is the Oriental Maya. The vivid awareness of existence which we
feel so indubitably is to the ancient sages only a dull slumber and stupor in
comparison with that life of ecstatic realism from which we were divulsed by the
decree of our Fate.
Thomas Taylor expounds Greek Platonism as holding that
the soul “in the present life might be said to die, as far as it is possible
for a soul to die.” He asserts directly that the soul, until purified by
“philosophy,” “suffers death through this union with the body.”
We have the whole idea most tersely expressed in the
Gorgias of Plato:
“But indeed, as you say also, life is a grievous thing.
For I should not wonder if Euripides spoke the truth when he says: ‘Who knows
whether to live is not to die, and to die is not to live?’ And we perhaps are
in reality dead. For I have heard from one of the wise that we are now dead; and
that the body is our sepulchre; but that the part of the soul in which the
desires are contained is of such a nature that it can be persuaded and hurled
upward and downwards.”
If incarnate life is the burden of this death, then
release from it must presuppose a liberation from the thralling “dead
weight.” Our work aims to correct the misconceptions that have vitiated
previous studies in eschatology. Reputed savants in the field give no evidence
of having the remotest apprehension of textual meanings pertaining to this phase
of theology. Even Massey and Taylor have fallen just short of that final step in
comprehension which would have taken them into the temple of truth, the
threshold of which they never quite crossed. They knew that the ancients styled
this life “death,” but they were unable, apparently, to apply the
connotations to the Bible and theology. The obsessions of current thought were
too strong for them, and overrode the logic of their own premises.
The great Plotinus (Enneads I, lviii) gives us a clear
presentment of the Greek conception:
“When the soul had descended into generation (from this
first divine condition) she partakes of evil and is carried a great way into a
state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in
it . . . and death to her is, while baptized or immersed in the present body, to
160
descend into matter and be wholly subjected to it. . . .
This is what is meant by the falling asleep in Hades, of those who have come
there.”
It is worth noting that he uses the word “baptized”
to describe incarnation. To incarnate was to be plunged into the watery
condition of the body! This is the whole of the meaning of the baptism in
ancient theology!
To the above may be added a supplement from Pythagoras,
according to Clement, “that whatever we see when awake is death; and when
asleep a dream.”
It is sometimes true that archaic usage of the word
“death” makes it cover the period following the occurrence of death in its
common meaning, the demise of the body. Incarnation was regarded as a continuing
experience, the periodical rhythm of release from the body no more breaking the
sequence of lives than does our nightly sleep break the continuity of the
experience of the days. But as our waking days are the important parts of our
earthly activity, the nights being but interludes of repose and renewals of
strength, so the positive incarnate periods of our larger lives are the
primarily significant phases of our mundane history. The ancient seers both knew
more about the subjective experiences of the soul when out of the body and were
less concerned with them than modern Spiritualists. They regarded the phenomena
of discarnate manifestation as but the more or less automatic reaction of the
soul to the sum of its impressions in its last incarnation, a kind of reflex,
threshing over the events of the life just closed. They would have regarded it
as preposterous to use the vaporings of the spirits for the tenets of a
religion. They were but the products of a mental automatism set up by the
engrossments of the last life. The post mortem existence of the soul was only
the hidden side of the life on earth, and regarded as comparatively
inconsequential to the larger processes of conscious living. Theologically,
“death” was the bodily life on earth, but comprising its two aspects of
sleeping and waking, living and dying, in its comprehensive unity. Activity in
the body during the waking phase of the “death” was alone determinative of
destiny. By unfortunate diversion of the original cryptic sense, the unimportant
portion of the experience, the interlude between lives, became the locale to
which practically all religious values were shunted when esoteric knowledge was
lost. The meaning of all religion has in consequence
161
fled from earth, where it properly belongs and where
alone its true value is realized, to heaven, where present focusing of meaning
has little utility for man.
Taylor quotes the priests as testifying “that the soul
is buried in body as in a sepulchre.”3 Alexander Wilder, in a note to
Taylor’s Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (p. 31), comments:
“Hades . . . supposed by classical students to be the
region or estate of departed souls, . . . is regarded by Mr. Taylor and other
Platonists as the human body, which they consider to be the grave and place of
punishment for the soul.”
Virgil adds significant testimony. In the Aeneid, writing
of that “interior spirit” which sustains the heavens and earth, men and
beasts, “the vital souls of birds and the brutes,” he continues:
“In whom all is a potency . . . and a celestial origin
as the rudimentary principles, so far as they are not clogged by noxious bodies.
They are deadened by earthly forms and members subject to death; hence they fear
and desire, grieve and rejoice.”
Plato’s able expounder Proclus, writing that the soul
brings life to the body, says that
“she becomes herself situated in darkness; and by
giving life to the body, destroys both herself and her own intellect (in as
great a degree as these are capable of receiving destruction). For thus the
mortal nature participates of intellect, but the intellectual part, of death,
and the whole, as Plato observes in the Laws, becomes a prodigy composed of the
mortal and the immortal, of the intellectual and that which is deprived of
intellect. For this physical law which binds the soul to the body is the death
of the immortal life, but vivifies the mortal body.”
Wilder in his Introduction to Taylor’s Eleusinian and
Bacchic Mysteries comments again:
“The soul was believed (by the Greeks) to be a
composite nature, linked on the one side to the eternal world, emanating from
God, and so partaking of Divinity. On the other hand, it was also allied to the
phenomenal and external world, and so liable to be subjected to passion, lust
and the bondage of evils. This condition is denominated generation; and is
supposed to be a kind of death to the higher form of life. Evil is inherent in
this condition; and the soul dwells in the body as in a prison or a grave.”
162
It has been claimed in some quarters that the death here
mentioned is simply Greek tropology for a state of spiritual decay into which
mortal man sinks. But a proper view sees such degeneracy as the result of the
incarnation, which was the occasion of it. The concrete and the moral situations
do image each other; but it is a matter of vast importance which one is primary
and casts the reflection. There was a descent in historical fact. From it flowed
the moral delinquency.
Having seen the lucid presentation of the “death”
philosophy in Greek systems, we turn to Egypt. Does the wisdom of this venerable
nation support that of Greece? With such fullness and positiveness does it agree
with Greek conception that dispute as to the legitimacy of the interpretation
must henceforth be silenced forever. It is from these unfathomable wells of
Kamite knowledge that we draw the water which nourishes our intellectual life.
Again the volume of material is prodigious.
It must be prefaced that the Egyptian writings use more
than one character to personate the incarnating god. We may find Osiris, or Ra
himself, or Tum, Atum or Horus taking the role. Then there are the two
characters which we meet most often, the “Speaker” and the Manes in the
Ritual. These appear to be distinctly the human soul. Sometimes again it is
represented as the “deceased,” again as the “Osirified deceased.”
Besides, the names of four or more kings are used to stand for deity: Unas, Ani,
Pepi and Teta, frequently with “the” prefixed.
It is definitely corroborative of the thesis here
defended that the central god figure in Egyptian religion, Osiris, the Father,
in distinction from Horus, the Son, is consistently assigned the functions,
prerogatives and sovereignty of the “king of the dead.” He is hailed in a
hundred passages as the Ruler of the Underworld, or as Lord of Amenta (Amenti,
Amentiu), the Egyptian Hades, the correct locating of which region in theology
is one of the major aims of this work. He is assimilable to the Greek Pluto,
ruler of Hades, the dark underworld. That this dismal limbo of theology is
actually our earth is a fact which has never once dawned upon the intellectual
horizon of any modern savant, however high his name. Osiris, the “Speaker,”
the “Manes,” the incarnating deity, is indeed the king in the realm of the
dead. For we are those dead, and the god within us came to rule this
163
kingdom, according to the arcane meaning of every
religion. For the Egyptians called the coffin “the chest of the living.”4
A passage from Budge is of importance here:
“About the middle of the Ptolemaic period the
attributes of Osiris were changed, and after his identification with Serapis,
i.e., Pluto, the god of death, his power and influence declined rapidly, for he
was no longer the god of life. In the final state of the cult of Osiris and
Isis, the former was the symbol of death and the latter the symbol of life.”5
This change does not betoken what Budge supposes, but
quite the contrary. It hints at the fact that the Egyptian conception of the
character of Osiris as Lord of the Underworld of death began to weaken in the
later days, as foreign influences crept in, and the profound esoteric meaning of
“death” became obscured. The god’s influence as Lord of Death declined
rapidly at this epoch, not because of the ascription to him of a new and untrue
character, but because of the decay of the true comprehension of his place and
function in the pantheon. His influence in his perennial office decayed because
knowledge of him in that role had decayed. With many such misapprehensions must
the battle for a sane grasp of the ancient wisdom contend. The actual issue has
been beclouded at almost every turn.
In confirmation of our claim that death in the ancient
usage did not imply extinction, the Manes in the Ritual (Ch. 30 A) says:
“After being buried on earth, I am not dead in Amenta.” Horus knows that
though he enters the realm of the dead, he does not suffer annihilation. He
knows that he is that which survives all overthrow. Even though, as he adds, he
is “buried in the deep, deep grave,” he will not be destroyed there. He will
rise out of the grave of the (living) body in his final resurrection.
Such a passage as the following carries in its natural
sense the allocation of the term “dead” to living inhabitants on earth, not
to the spirits of the deceased: “The peoples that have long been dead (?) come
forth with cries of joy to see thy beauties every day.”6 It pertains to the
resurrection. Another text says: Tanenet is the burial-place of Osiris.”
Tanenet, along with Aukert, Shekhem, Abydos, Tattu, Amenta and half a dozen
others, is a designation for the earth as the place of burial for the soul
living in death.
164
tomb, grave, coffin or sepulcher. Evidence of the
prominence of these terms in relation to the descent into earth life is not
wanting in the old texts. The matter is not left in any state of doubt or
confusion. A sentence from Cocker’s Greek Philosophy speaks in terms of
unmistakable directness: “The soul is now dwelling in ‘the grave which we
call the body.’”7 Here is indeed the undebatable clarification of that
poetic imagery, the confusion of which with the natural fact of bodily decease
has cost Christianity its heritage of wisdom.
In the Egyptian records we have Osiris as the god who
“descended into Hades, was dead and buried” in Amenta. Massey’s succinct
statement covering the point is: “The buried Osiris represented the god in
matter,”—not in a hillside grave. The hillside grave, however, was the
typograph used to designate the non-historical burial in the body. What could be
more pointed and conclusive than Massey’s other declaration: “In the
astronomical mythology the earth was the coffin of Osiris, the coffin of Amenta,
which Sut, the power of darkness, closed upon his brother when he betrayed him
to his death”?8 “The coffin of Osiris is the earth of Amenta,” he says
again.9 It is worthy of note that the shrine in the Egyptian temples,
representing the vessel of salvation, was in the form of a funeral chest, the
front side of which was removed so that the god might be seen. Chapter 39 of the
Ritual contains a plea for the welfare of the incarnated soul: “Let not the
Osiris-Ani, triumphant, lie down in death among those who lie down in Annu, the
land wherein souls are joined unto their bodies.” So that it is quite apparent
that the land in which souls lie down in “death” is this old earth of ours.
For nowhere else are souls joined unto their bodies! This is the only sphere in
the range of cosmic activity where this transaction is possible, and this fact
is sufficient warrant for focusing upon it all that mass of vague meaning for
which theologians have been forced to seek a locale in various subterranean
worlds whose place is found at last only in their own imaginations.
Horus says in one text: “I directed the ways of the god
to his tomb in Peqar . . . and I caused gladness to be in the dwellers in
Amentet when they saw the Beauty as it landed at Abydos.”10 Abydos was claimed
to be the place of entry to the lower world where the “dead” lived, but in
this use it was another of those transfers of uranographic locality to a town on
the map in some way appropriately symbolizing the spiritual idea involved. There
was no actual entrance to an actual
165
underworld at Abydos (or anywhere else), but to complete
the astral typology a temple, tomb and deep well (of great symbolic value) had
been constructed there to the god Osiris. It was mythically and poetically the
door of entry to the lower world, or realm of death, Amenta. Budge does not
realize that he is writing only of the historical adaptation of a spiritual
allegory when he says:
“But about Osiris’ burial-place there is no doubt,
for all tradition, both Egyptian and Greek, states that his grave was at Abydos
(Abtu) in upper Egypt.”11
He argues that Osiris must have been a living king, who
was later deified. This is not likely, as there is little to indicate that the
Egyptian gods were other than abstract personifications of the powers of nature
and intelligence. The legend that his body was cut into fourteen pieces,
scattered over the land and then reassembled for the resurrection could have no
rational application to the life of an actual king. Myth has been taken for
history on a vast scale.
Another text carries straightforward information of
decided value: “In the text of Teta the dead king is thus addressed: ‘Hail!
hail! thou Teta! Rise up, thou Teta! . . . thou art not a dead thing.” 12 What
can be the resolution of so evident a contradiction of terms—telling a dead
king he is not dead—unless the new interpretation of “death” as herein
advanced and supported be applicable?13 The souls as deities entered the realm
of death, our world, but were not dead; philosophy dramatized them as such,
however.
In a different symbolism the Eye of Horus, an emblem
typifying his life and said to contain his soul, was stolen and carried off by
Sut, the evil twin. Of this Budge says that “during the period when Horus’
Eye was in the hands of Sut, he was a dead god.” His regaining possession of
his Eye symbolized the recovery of his buried divinity and his restoration to
his original godhood. Horus elsewhere (Rit., Ch. 85) says: “I come that I may
overthrow my adversaries upon earth, though my dead body be buried.” If such a
declaration is not to be taken for a species of after-death spiritism, it can
have logical meaning only in reference to the contention that the buried god is
the soul in the fleshly body.
It is imperative to look next at the conceptions of the
sphere of death that were expressed through the use of the term
“underworld.” This
166
region of partial death in which the outcast angels were
imprisoned was styled the dark “underworld.” A variant name was “the
nether earth.” It is often actually pictured as a subterranean cavern. It may
be asked if it has ever occurred to any scholar of our time that “the
underworld” was but another figurative appellation for the condition of life
in the human body. Again a mass of data is available.
All nations of antiquity show in their literature traces
of a legend in which the soul makes a journey through a dark underworld. The
vagueness of its location, however, has failed to give any scholar an
illuminating suggestion as to its totally figurative and unreal character.
Nobody has ever seriously presumed to locate this dreary region, in spite of the
fact that it was childishly regarded as an actual place. It was hazily
associated with the grave or assumed to lie in some dim region into which the
soul passed after death, somehow, somewhere “under,” but under what, it was
not apparently ever determined. The cause of bafflement was the ineradicable
assumption that its “underness” was to be oriented in relation to the earth!
No one has caught the idea that its location was under the heavens, and hence
that it was our own earth itself! The surface of the earth, man’s world, was
assumed to be obviously not an “underworld.” But the problem of locating
another limbo beneath it baffled theological speculation through the ages. The
outcome is that the locale of Pluto’s shadowy kingdom has been hung
indeterminately between the surface of the ground and the dubious dim region of
after-death spheres. All the while a thousand texts point to its location in the
physical body!
Lewis Spence cautiously admits that the court of the
Mayan underworld seems to have been conducted on the principles of a secret
society with a definite form of initiation, and that the Mysteries of Eleusis
and others in Greece were concerned with the life of an underworld, especially
dramatized in the story of Demeter and Kore.14 He admits that the Greek deities
were gods of the dead. But he mars his tentative approach to the truth by
advancing the conjecture that the Book of the Dead may have been the work of
prehistoric Neolithic savages! We refrain from caustic comment, save to aver
that if the Egyptian Book of the Dead was the product of Neolithic savages, the
status of modern mentality which is as yet totally incapable of understanding
its high message, must by inference lie a stratum or two below that level.
167
the gods, as kings of this nether realm, were not
subterranean deities. The gnomes and other nature sprites were the only
“deities” that were believed to subsist beneath the surface of the physical
earth. The gods of the underworld were always the gods of the dead. And as the
souls of deceased mortals were in all religions asserted to ascent to heaven and
never to remain in the burial ground with the corpse, it was again impossible to
place the underworld down with the gnomes. But it seems next to incredible that
academic diligence should have missed the plain correlation which would have
made the descent of spirits from heaven equate the descent of all the divine
heroes and sun-gods into the dark underworld—of earth.
From the great Egyptian Ritual, which so cryptically
allegorizes this earthly death, we learn that the mystery of the Sphinx
originated with the conception of the earth as the place of passage, of burial
and rebirth, for the humanized deities. An ancient Egyptian name for the Sphinx
was Akar.15 This was also the name for the tunnel through the underworld. And it
is said that the very bones of the deities quake as the stars go on their
triumphant courses through the tunnels of Akar (Pyramid Texts: Teta, 319). As
the stars were the descending deities, the metaphor of stars passing through the
underworld tunnels is entirely clear in its implication. The riddle of the
Sphinx is but the riddle of mankind on this earth. The terms of the riddle at
least become clearly defined if we know that the mystery pertains to this our
mortal life, above ground, and not to our existence in some unlocalized
underworld of theological fiction.
The entrance to Amenta, with its twelve dungeons,
consisted of a blind doorway which neither Manes nor mortal knew the secret of
and none but the god could open. Hence the need of a deity who should come to
unlock the portals and unbar the gates of hell, and be “the door” and “the
way.” The god came not only to unlock the door of divinity to human nature,
but to be himself that door. The giving of the keys to bolt and unbolt the doors
of the underworld was but the allegory of this evolutionary reinforcement of the
human by the divine nature.
Descriptions of this dark realm of our present state are
given in the texts. “It is a land without an exit, through which no passage
has been made; from whose visitants, the dead, the light was shut out.” “The
light they beheld not; in darkness they dwell.” Massey ventures the
168
assertion that “the inferno, the purgatory and the
paradise of Dante Alighieri are extant recognizably in the Book of the Dead as
the domains of Amenta.”16
The first chapter of the Book of the Dead was repeated in
the Mystery festivals on the day when Osiris was buried. His entrance into the
underworld as a Manes corresponds to that of Osiris the corpse in Amenta, who
represents the god rendered lifeless by his suffocation in the body of matter.
The dead Osiris is said to enter the place of his burial called the Kasu. In
this low domain of the dead there was nought but darkness; the upper light had
been shut out. But Horus, Ptah, Anup, Ra and others of the savior gods would
come in due time to awaken the sleepers “in their sepulchres,” open the
gates and guide the souls out into the light of the upper regions once more. One
of the sayings of the soul contemplating its plight in the underworld is: “I
do not rot. I do not putrefy. I do not turn to worms. My flesh is firm; it shall
not be destroyed; it shall not perish in the earth forever” (Ch. 154).
Inasmuch as the flesh of the physical body most certainly will perish, rot,
putrefy, and turn to food for worms in the only grave that Christian theology
has been able to tell us of, the term “flesh” in the excerpt can not be
taken as that of the human body. And that it is not to be so taken is obvious
from other passages. It refers to the substance of another body which does not
rot away.
The same sense may distinctly be caught in the term
“body” as used in the prayer uttered by the soul in the body when it says:
“May my body neither perish nor suffer corruption forever.” Such a prayer
directed to the physical body would be obviously irrelevant, expecting the
impossible. Horus, on his way to earth to ransom the captives, says: “I pilot
myself towards the darkness and the sufferings of the deceased ones of Osiris”
(Ch. 78). Massey sums the discussion:
“The wilderness of the nether earth, being a land of
graves, where the dead awaited the coming of Horus, Shu, Apuat (Anup), the
guide, and Taht . . . as servants of Ra, the supreme one god, to wake them in
their coffins and lead them forth from the land of darkness to the land of
day.”17
Analysis of other types of representation will disclose
the fact that the Egyptians, in their lavish use of animals as symbols, filled
the underworld with a menagerie of mythical monsters. Without trespassing on the
ground of later discussion, it may be briefly said that a
169
number of animals—dragons, serpents, crocodiles, dogs,
lions, bears, etc.—lay in wait in the underworld to devour the luckless Manes.
What is the significance of this? Patently it figures the menace to the soul of
its subjection to the constant beat upon it of the animal propensities, since it
had taken residence in the very bodies of the lower creatures. In a measure
detached, it was yet not immune to being drawn down into ever deeper alliance
with the carnal nature. Ever to be remembered is Daniel’s statement that
“his mind was made like the mind of an animal.”
Etymology supplies a sensational suggestion of the
soundness of the present thesis in the similarity of the two words “tomb”
and “womb,” which Massey avers rise from the same root. At all events it is
rigorously in accord with the Greek theory that the body, as the tomb of the
soul, is at the same time the womb of its new birth. In the Egyptian Ritual the
soul is addressed as he “who cometh forth from the dusk, and whose birth is in
the house of death.” This was Anu, Abydos, On (Heliopolis), or other
uranographic center localized on the map, or the zodiacal signs of Virgo and
Pisces. The Greek language bears striking testimony to the same kinship of the
two words, as Plato points out in the Cratylus, in the practical identity of
soma, body, and sema, tomb.
In the Christian Bible the textual evidence is
multitudinous. A few excerpts only can be culled. First is St. Paul’s clarion
cry to us ringing down through nineteen centuries: “Awake thou that sleepest
and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine upon thee.” Job, combining his
death with its correlative resurrection, exclaims: “I laid me down in death
and slept; I awaked, for the Lord sustaineth me.” Paul cries in the anguish of
the fleshly duress, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” And
it is an open question whether the final phrase might not as well have been
rendered “this death in the body.” And Jonah, correlative name with Jesus,
cries from the allegorical whale’s belly: “Out of the belly of death have I
cried unto thee, O God.” Paul again pronounces us “dead” in our trespasses
and sins, adding that “the wages of sin is death” and “to be carnally
minded is death.” It is sin that brings us back again and again into this
“death” until we learn better. And the Apostle affirms that we are dead and
that our life is hid with Christ in God. Our true life is as yet undeveloped,
buried down in the depths of the latent capacities of being. The Psalms say
170
that we “like sheep are laid in the grave,” though
“God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave.” The death spoken of
is at one place defined as “even the death of the cross,” when spirit is
bound to the cross of matter and the flesh. Isaiah declares that “we live in
darkness like the dead.” And Jesus broadcasts the promise that whosoever
believeth on him, “though he were dead, yet shall he live.” Assurance is
given (Peter 4:6) that the Gospel is preached “to them that are dead.” Would
not such addresses to the dead, as noted in several of these passages, be absurd
if not referable to the living on earth?
Then there is the ringing declaration of the Father God
in the Prodigal Son allegory, rebuking the churlish jealousy of the obedient
elder brother at the rejoicing over the wastrel’s return: “This my son was
dead and is alive again.” The thing described here as death was just the
sojourn in that “far country”—earth.
A most direct and unequivocal declaration, however, is
found in the first verse of chapter three of Revelation: “Ye have the name of
being alive, but ye are dead.” And this is at once followed by the adjuration
to “Wake up; rally what is still left to you, though it is on the very point
of death.” This is again a strong hint of the danger that the soul might be so
far submerged under sense as to fail to rise again, and sink down into the
dreaded “second death.”
But the most astonishing material corroborative of the
thesis here propounded is found in St. Paul’s discussion of the problem of sin
and death in the seventh chapter of Romans. The statements made can be rendered
intelligible and enlightening only by reading the term “death” in the sense
here analyzed. He says first that “the interests of the flesh meant death; the
interests of the spirit meant life and peace.” And then he says: “For when
we were in the flesh, the motions of sins, which were by the law, did work in
our members to bring forth fruit unto death.”
In this chapter Paul concatenates the steps of a
dialectical process which has not been understood in its deep meaning for
theology. It is concerned with the relation of the three things: the law, sin
and death. He asks: “Is the Law equivalent to sin?” And he replies that sin
developed in us “under the Law.” What is this mysterious Law that the
Apostle harps on with such frequency? Theology has not possessed the resources
for a capable answer, beyond the mere statement that it
171
is the power of the carnal nature in man. It is that, in
part; but the profounder meaning could not be gained without the esoteric
wisdom—which had been discarded. This Law—St. Paul’s bête noir—is that
cosmic impulsion which draws all spiritual entities down from the heights into
the coils of matter in incarnation. It is the ever-revolving Wheel of Birth and
Death, the Cyclic Law, the Cycle of Necessity. As every cycle of embodiment runs
through seven sub-cycles or stages, it is the seven-coiled serpent of Genesis
that encircles man in its folds.
Now, says the Mystery initiate, by the Law came sin, and
by sin came death. Here is the iron chain that binds man on the cross. The Law
brings the soul to the place where it sins and sin condemns it to death. Death
here must mean something other than the natural demise of the body, for that
comes to all men be they pure or be they sinful. Reserving a more recondite
elaboration of the doctrine of sin for a later place, it may be asserted here
that the great theological bugaboo, sin, will be found to take its place close
along the side of “death” as the natural involvement of the incarnation
itself. Sin is just the soul’s condition of immersion or entanglement in the
nature of the flesh. And happily much of its gruesome and morbid taint by the
theological mind can be dismissed as a mistaken and needless gesture of ignorant
pietism.
Neither as animal below our status nor as angel above it
can man sin. For the animal is not spiritually conscious and hence not morally
culpable. And the angel is under no temptation or motivation from the sensual
nature, which alone urges to “sin.” Only when the Law links the soul to
animal flesh does sin become possible. Romans (7:7) expressly declares: “Nay,
I had not known sin, but by the law . . . For without the law sin was dead.”
Paul even says that at one time he lived without the law himself; this was
before “the command” came to him. And what was this command? Again theology
has missed rational sense because it has lost ancient cosmologies and
anthropologies. The “command” was the Demiurgus’ order to incarnate. It is
found in the Timaeus of Plato and Proclus’ work on Plato’s theology. Then
the Apostle states the entire case with such clarity that only purblind
benightedness of mind could miss it: “When the command came home to me, sin
sprang to life, and I died; . . .” He means to say that sin sprang to life as
he died, i.e., incarnated. And then he adds the crowning utterance on this
matter to be found in all sacred literature:
172
“the command that meant life proved death to me.” He
explains further: “The command gave an impulse to sin, sin beguiled me and
used the command to kill me.” And he proceeds to defend the entire procedure
of nature and life against the unwarranted imputations of its being all an evil
miscarriage of beneficence: “So the Law at any rate is holy, the command is
holy, just and for our good. Then did what was meant for my good prove fatal to
me? Never. It was sin; sin resulted in death for me to make use of this good
thing.”18
The clarifying and sanifying corollaries of this
explication and St. Paul’s material are so expansive that pause should be made
to consider them. In this light it may be seen that the whole of the negative
and lugubrious posture of theology as to “sin,” and “death” as its
penalty, might be metamorphosed into an understanding of the natural and
beneficent character of all such things in the drama. Ancient meaning has
miscarried, with crushing weight upon the happy spirit of humanity; and
rectification of such misconstruction is urgently needed.
In I Samuel (2:6) it is written: “The Eternal kills,
the Eternal life bestows; he lowers to death and he lifts up.” Job says: “I
shall die in my nest, and I shall renew my youth like the eagle.”
And a most significant verse from Isaiah (53) can be
rescued from mutilation and sheer nonsense only by the application of the new
meaning of “death.” Speaking of the divinity, it says that “He hath made
his grave with the wicked and the rich in his death.” A marginal note is
honest enough to tell us that the word “death” here used was in the plural
number—“deaths”—in the original manuscripts. Here is invincible evidence
that the word carries the connotation of “incarnations,” for in no other
possible sense can “death” be rationally considered in the plural number. In
one incarnation the Christ soul is cast among the wicked; in another among the
rich. This is a common affirmation of most Oriental religious texts. And his
body is his grave.
St. Paul says some man will ask how the dead are raised
and in what body do they come. And Christian theology has stultified the sanity
of its millions of devotees by giving the answer in the words of the Creed:
“The resurrection of the body”—leaving untutored minds to understand the
physical body, or the corpse. The only comment provoked is to say that the
picture of the cemetery graves being opened at the last trump, and the
“dead” (cadavers) arising to array them-
173
selves in line before the tribunal of the judgment, has
turned millions in disgust and revulsion away from the fold of orthodoxy. Paul
states in the verses immediately following that the dead will rise in a
spiritual body.
And then we face that climactic assurance that “the
last enemy to be overcome is death.” In lack of the covert intent of the word,
Christian thought has ever believed that in some way this promise meant we
should overcome the incidence of bodily decease, and live on in the physical
vessel indefinitely. This would paralyze evolution. It would wreck the Cyclical
Law. The Trinity is the Creator, the Preserver and the Destroyer. Without the
periodic destruction of form there could be no renewal of life in higher and
better forms. Life would be imprisoned forever in matter, and choked to its real
death. Its charter of liberty is its periodical release from forms that while
they enable, they also limit. What, then, means the passage? If death is the
incarnation, the significance is found in the assurance that at the conclusion
of the cycle, when the spirit has mastered all its mundane instruction, it will
be made a “pillar in the house of God and shall go no more out.” Its
descents into the tombs of bodies will be at an end at last. “Death” will
then be finally overcome.
In the Egyptian Ritual the soul rejoices in life,
shouting, “He hath given me the beautiful Amenta, through which the living
pass from death to life.” Amenta is this world, and the soul is pictured as
running through cycles of descent from life to “death” and back again. The
same sequence is set forth in the first chapter of Revelation: “I am he that
liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore!” The Law precipitates
us from the life above to the “death” down here, but lifts us up again.
There is no sublimer chapter in the entire Bible than the
fifteenth of I Corinthians. And perhaps this treatment could not possibly be
more fittingly concluded than with some of St. Paul’s magnificent utterances
therein. It may give us at last the thrilling realization of their grandeur when
grasped in the majestic sense of their restored original meaning. Need we be
reminded that these words of the Apostle will ring from our own throats in
ecstatic jubilee, when, victorious at last over “death” and the “grave,”
we arise out of our final imprisonment in body and wing our flight like the
skylark back to celestial mansions?
174
“So when this corruptible shall have put on
incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be
brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory.”
We
have drawn enough material from the ancient fund now to have bountifully
supplied the demand for “evidence” that in archaic philosophy the field of
our life here is depicted as the dark cavern, the pit, the abyss, the bleak
desert, the wilderness, the grave, the tomb, the underworld and hell of a life
that migrated here from the skies. “We are a colony of heaven.” Our deific
souls are at the very bottom of the arc of death, and can never be as dead again
as they are now, and have been.
But stranger revelations await us still.
175