Chapter V
If the mythologies of the early nations have been a
source of perplexity and bafflement to students, no less so has been the
Christian Bible itself. Not even the most rabid Christian partisan could claim
that the book has throughout a clear message, clearly to be apprehended. Outside
of much simple homiletic truth which has yielded comfort to troubled hearts, the
Bible is as yet practically a sealed book. Its meaning is not known at the
present day. Nothing but the thinnest shadow of the truth that the book portrays
has yet fallen across the threshold of modern understanding. No suspicion of the
grand completeness of its message has yet dawned upon us. Nineteen hundred years
of theological digging has not unearthed the treasure buried under its
allegorical profundities. And this failure has been due to our stubborn refusal
to reject the Bible as history, and to accept it as cryptic typology. From
beginning to end the Bible is nothing but a series of spiritual allegories
traduced to history or interwoven with some history.
A further startling discovery along this line is that the
series of myths deals not with a wide variety of spiritual or cosmical
situations, but only with the same one situation in endless repetition! There is
but one story to religion and its Bibles, only one basic event from which spring
all the motivations of loyalty and morality that stir the human heart. The
myth-makers had but one narrative to relate, one fundamental mystery of life to
dilate upon. All phases of spiritual life arise out of the elements of the one
cosmic and racial situation in which the human group is involved; and all
scriptural allegory has reference to this basic datum, and meaning only in
relation to it. The myths are all designed to keep mankind apprised of this
central predicament. It is the key to the Bible. And it is the loss of this key
situation that has caused the Book to be sealed against the age-long assaults of
our curious prying and delving. The restoration of this key to our hands will
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be seen at once to open the doors to a vision of clear
meaning, where now stalks dark incomprehensibility. Cosmology has been almost
wholly discarded from religion since Milton’s day, yet a cosmical situation
provides the ground for all adequate interpretation of Bible representation. The
one central theme is the incarnation.
Beside esotericism and allegorism the Bible composers had
recourse to another method which is less readily demonstrable and which has
caused the confusion incident to mistaking myth for history to be far worse
confounded. It was the method of uranography. The uranograph was the chart of
the heavens with the constellated pictography. From remote times the ancients
dealt with a celestial chart or map, on which their earliest teachers had
essayed to depict the features of the soul’s experience in the scenes which
their enlightened imaginations had traced about the star clusters. The stellar
zodiacs left at Denderah, Pylae and elsewhere are impressive reminders of the
influence of this heavenly scenograph. The discovery in quite recent years of
the Somerset zodiac in England, a giant zodiac wrought, it is calculated, 2700
B.C. in the natural features of the countryside covering one hundred square
miles, with the figure of Leo, the Lion, four miles from nose to tail-tip, is
another most authentic attestation to the basic significance which symbolical
astrology has held in ancient religious formulations. Present students have as
yet little conception of how generally this graph was employed in spiritual
ideography and how pervasively it colored the composition of the scriptural
writings. It is next to impossible to grasp subtle references in the Bible and
other archaic literature without a knowledge of the features of this planisphere.
Bibles are in fact, in a broad general sense, just the literary extension and
amplification of the symbology of the zodiac! The sages had first written the
history of the human soul upon the starry skies.
If we hold them guilty of having thus perpetrated what
seems to us pure whimsicality, we are convicted of ignorance on another count.
They were depicting history in that sphere where it had first occurred, before
it began with man on earth. Spiritual history had been enacted on a cosmic scale
in the heavens, in higher ranges of cosmic life, before it was repeated and
copied in the human drama on this globe. The heavenly man, in whose image and
likeness earthly man is made, and in whose body the suns and planets are but
cells and organs, was the prototype of man himself. And so it comes that
humanity was in pri-
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mordial times instructed to build its life “after the
pattern of things in the heavens.” The planisphere was the historical and
anatomical graph of the Divine Cosmical Man, and it became at once a secret
glyph for the behoof of mundane humanity.
In the spirit of this understanding the religious
teachers of yore ever sought to write into human, racial, national and
individual history the reflection or pattern of the uranograph. This effort was
the secret motif back of all national epics! The epic was an attempt to fashion
national history in the similitude of the structural unity of the divine plan
for macrocosmic, and by reflection, microcosmic, man. This is in general the
theme of such an esoteric work as the Jewish Kabalah.
The distinctive features of the cosmograph are in
evidence in every case. In every religious epic there is first and centrally a
Holy City, a “Jerusalem,” residence of the king and the eventual home of all
the elect. There is next an Upper and Lower Land, typifying the dual
segmentation of heaven and earth, or spirit and body, in man’s nature, which
was in all systems held to be the union of a divine with an animal principle.
The two sections were always connected by a river, rising in the higher
mountainous sources in the Upper Kingdom and flowing thence, carrying its
blessings of fertility, down into the Lower Kingdom, which is thus nourished by
the living water from above. Then there was always a bordering sea, symbolical
in every case of the stormy ephermeral scene of the mortal life. No less was
there a smaller water, a lake, Sea of Galilee, Dead Sea, Black Sea, Red Sea,
Jordan River, Styx River, or the marshes or fens, which were to be crossed by
the voyaging soul to reach the more blessed isles, or farther shore of spiritual
bliss. Strangely enough there, was a further division of the land into seven
tribal provinces, a heptarchy or heptanomis, as in Egypt, Judea, England and
elsewhere. This division was representative of the seven kingdoms of nature, the
seven stages of unfoldment through which life must pass in the completion of
every cycle. At other times the division was a decad, after the pattern of the
Sephirothal Tree of the Kabbalah, but eventually redistributed in twelve
sections, as in the case of the Hebrews, Athens, Afghanistan and some others,
reflecting the twelvefold segmentation of the zodiac, which in turn typified the
twelve levels of man’s evolutionary attainment, or “twelve manner of
fruits” on the branches of the Tree of Life, the twelve divine elements of
man’s perfected being. Likewise there was
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always a definite locality designated as the birthplace
of the god, which was in many instances also his place of death and burial and
following resurrection. Other centers marked the scene of his initiations,
temptations, baptisms, trials, crucifixion and transfiguration, every stage of
his evolutionary experience, in fact. Then there were cities dedicated to the
special cult of the sun, the moon, and even such stars as Orion, the stellar
symbol of the Christos; or of Sirius, the great Dog-Star, symbol of the advent.
The four cardinal points were featured, as emblematic of the four pillars of
man’s constitution, his physical, emotional, mental and spiritual bodies and
natures. A warfare between the Upper and Lower Lands and their kings was
generally a part of the “history,” ending in the conquest of the Lower by
the Higher and the union of the two under the crown of dual sovereignty. This
drama was enacted so often in the “history” of so many kings of Egypt that
even a scholar of the eminence of the late William H. Breasted, in his History
of Egypt, expresses his puzzlement over the fact that nearly every Pharaoh of
the dynasties had to conquer Lower Egypt afresh and unite the two halves of the
country under a common hegemony! In all likelihood the physiography and organic
structure of the heavenly man was to some extent copied in the distribution and
construction of pyramids, tombs, temples and other sanctuaries, and the pyramids
themselves were quite obviously astronomical graphs with ceremonial design and
conformations. There was a mountain or holy hill of the Lord, and there were
points of entrance and exit from and to the lower world of Amenta.
The celestial typology having been engrafted on the
topography of the country itself, the next measure was to weave the dramatic
features into the national history. Egypt and the Hebrew tribes are perhaps the
most outstanding examples of the operation of this methodology on an extensive
scale, how extensive the general student of the present age is unprepared to
believe. Thus the names associated for ages with cosmic and spiritual typism
were spread out over the maps of the different lands; and the national kings,
heroes, warriors, sages became titular characters in the immemorial heavenly
drama. In the light of this custom we are in a position to reach a conclusion of
the very greatest importance for research, affecting the entire view of
scripture as history. For we are confronted with the inexpugnable fact that the
names and events in religious scripts were for the greater part not
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the products of objective history in the first place, but
on the contrary the names and events in assumed history were a deposit from the
religious books! The names of kings, heroes, cities, lakes, rivers and mountains
were on the uranograph long before they appeared on national maps! They were
transferred from the uranograph to the maps! The occurrences of Bible
“history” had been enacted annually or nightly among the stars of the sky
long before they became incorporated in the epics of religion. And they had been
in the epics before they became assigned to actual localities and personages.
Heavenly regions and spiritual transactions were finally brought to earth and
given a local habitation on land and in history. In short, the naming of
geographical features was done by the sacerdotal castes in each country, in
which task they simply sought to pattern their country and its history after the
scheme of the uranograph! Their map and their history were cast as far as could
be done in the mold of the cosmic chart. Each nation designed to make its
configuration and history reflect and fulfill the heavenly model!
A partial exemplification of the same tendency can be
seen even in our own American history, where the priestly class gave religious
names to the earliest settlements and geographical features. The practice is
attested by such names as Salem, Providence, New Haven, Newark, New Canaan,
Bethlehem, Nazareth (Pennsylvania), Sante Fe, Sacramento, Corpus Christi, Los
Angeles, Vera Cruz, San Salvador, San Domingo and a list of saints’ names and
holy appellations. The Puritans from England and Holland emigrated to New
England actuated powerfully by the assurance that they were going to fulfill in
the new continent the ancient Covenant between Jehovah and the Israelites. The
Mayflower was part of the religious epic. The Anglo-Israel movement of the
present day manifests largely the same tendencies.
The theory here advanced is not without support from
other authorities. The following brings the weight of a very venerable document
to the endorsement of the idea:
“It has already been suggested that the mapping out of
localities was celestial before the chart was geographically applied and that
all common naming on earth came from one common naming of the heavens,
commencing with the Great Bear and the Dog. The mapping out of Egyptian
localities according to the celestial Nomes and scenery is described in the
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inscription of Khnum-hept, who is said to have
‘established the landmark of the south, and sculptured the northern—like the
heaven. He stretched the Great Bear on its back. He made the district in its two
parts, setting up their landmarks, like the heaven.’” (Records of the Past,
XII, 68.)
An evident additional corroboration of the theory is
contained in the injunction given to Moses in the Bible:
“See that thou make all things after the pattern shown
thee in the Mount . . . the pattern of the heavens.”
“Jerusalem, the Mount of Peace, the Nabhi-Yoni of the
Earth, was one of these sacred cities that were mapped out according to the
Kamite model in the heavens.”1
“The pattern of things in the Mount,” “the pattern
of the heavens,” has not hitherto been seen to be the Biblical analogue and
symbol of Plato’s ideal forms. The Mount, the heavens, are of course the
heights of divine ideation, whereon God projected his new world in thought forms
before he impressed them upon matter. The heavens are the uplands of
consciousness, or spheres of being, not physical localities. God formed his
mental models on the Mount of Vision and Imagination before he cast them into
concretion.
So far from grasping the uranographic art as the key to
the historical problem in all scriptures, late writers vent their skepticism on
this point in passages such as this:
“What proof is there—we ask once more—that the
people, the mystics even, of two thousand or more years ago, read all this into
the heavens; that they regarded the various divisions and towns, and the river
and name of Galilee, as mystical and earthly reflexes of these celestial
phenomena!”2
There is proof enough in the very fact that the ancient
seers were poets and allegorists, and not historians. Practically conclusive
evidence that Bible names are not objective or historical (in the first place)
is to be found in the fact that there are in the Bible some scores of allusions
to such local names as Egypt, Jerusalem, Nineveh, Babylon, Tyre, Sidon, Gilead,
Assyria, Galilee, Ethiopia and others which, if taken in the earthly
geographical sense, yield no intelligible meaning whatever. Further evidence is
to be found in the notable fact that the divisions and localities on mundane
maps do in the main largely match the celestial features. Charts of the “Holy
Land of Canaan” have been
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found extant in early Egypt as much as three hundred
years before the alleged Israelite exodus, whence it is to be presumed that this
promised land of peace and plenty was allegorical before it was historical.
Massey states that an entablature on the wall of an Egyptian temple bore a list
of some hundred and twenty place names afterwards localized in Palestine, at a
date at least one hundred and fifty years before there could possibly have been
an exodus of Israelites from Egypt. It requires little “proof” to ascertain
that “Egypt” as used throughout the Bible has the meaning of the lower self
or animal-human personality, indeed the physical body of man itself. Jerusalem
means the “holy city” or the heavenly realms, which are in consciousness,
not on the map.
“The picture of this paradise in the Hebrew writings,
the Psalms, the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Revelation, were
pre-extant long ages earlier as Egyptian. What the so-called ‘prophets’ of
the Jews did was to make sublunary the vision of the good time in another life.
There were always two Jerusalems from the time when Judea and Palestine were
appendages of Egypt. Two Jerusalems were recognized by Paul, one terrestrial,
one celestial. The name of Jerusalem we read as the Aarru-salem or fields of
peace in the heaven of the never-setting stars. The burden of Jewish prophecy,
which turned out so terribly misleading for those who were ignorant of the
secret wisdom, is that the vision of this glorious future should be attained on
earth; whereas it never had that meaning. . . . Thus Jerusalem on earth was to
take the place of Jerusalem above and the Aarru-hetep became Jerusalem simply as
a mundane locality.”3
From numberless texts in the Bible itself which point to
the correctness of the uranographic interpretation of names we take one alone,
which by itself is enough to substantiate the claim made in this connection. In
Revelation (II: 8), speaking of the two witnesses whom it is said the dragon
will rise up and slay, the apocalyptic writers says:
“And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the
great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was
crucified.”
There is enough in this verse to confound the entire
schematism of Christian theology as historically based. It implies a clear
refutation of the whole Passion Week and Good Friday ritual, as commemorative of
“history.” Jesus, so it says, was not crucified in an earthly Jerusalem,
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but only in a spiritual one, the name of which is
indifferently Sodom or Egypt, the latter not even the name of an earthly city,
but of a country! Jesus crucified in Egypt! And what becomes of the Gospel
“history”? It is left to take its only true place, which is among the sacred
myths! The crucifixion was, on the authority of the Bible itself, a spiritual
and not a historical transaction.
T. J. Thorburn, author of a work aiming to invalidate the
mythical nature of the Gospels, reveals the perplexity as well as the ineptitude
of orthodox scholars in the face of the ancient trick of uranography and
allegory:
“And if their statements are not to be taken in their
natural and historical sense, then we must hold that in ancient literature it is
more than doubtful whether writers ever mean precisely what they say.”4
They surely never dreamed that an age would come, so far
lost to the mythical intent of their writings as to suppose they ever meant
literally what they said. They could not know that the wisest savants of a
distant epoch would be so blinded by the forces of obscurantism as not to
realize that the old books spoke only in the terms of those earthly forms that
adumbrate spiritual realities. The old masters of religious science were not in
the habit of speaking “precisely”; they spoke under the forms of figure
always. They could not suspect that their indirect poetical method would so
outrageously befuddle modern “intelligence.”
Ancient philosophy was intensely responsive to the
conception that all things mundane were a lower copy of things empyrean. On the
theory that all forms of life were typical of the one basic nature of all life
everywhere, the sages read into earthly things the reflection of things
celestial. Jesus said he could not tell the disciples of heavenly things unless
they had first believed in earthly things. The sea of earth life reflected
heavenly life in its bosom. The seers who knew that nature was a dramatization
of cosmic archai, sought for the evidence of the archetypal design in every
phenomenon on earth. With what remarkable nicety they traced higher truth in the
mirror of nature we shall see clearly as the story unfolds. So, in the end, in
their religious life they labored to represent their history as conforming to
the primordial type. To this end they resorted to a measure which has caught and
deceived purblind scholarship since that time.
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From the general thesis that their national history
reflected God’s plan for the world, it was an easy step to the more explicit
assumption that their national life embodied the divine plan. They threw about
themselves the aureole of divinely constituted agency to fulfill the cosmic
plan. They therefore arrogated to themselves the title of “God’s chosen
people,” and took the names allotted only to the spiritualized humans, the men
evolved to divinity! This tack will not appear either unlikely or outlandish
when we ponder the disposition of nations in our own day to put forth blatant
claims to be the chosen agents of Providence for the cultural rulership of the
world.
Even if there seems to be veridical history in the Bible,
it can be viewed properly as a setting for the spiritual dramatization, or as
the clothing in which the drama was garbled. At times, perhaps, the writers
appear to have utilized the data of actual history to stage the symbolic
figurations. To this task the religious poets dedicated their ingenuity.
It becomes evident on this thesis that the historical
element of the scriptures is of far less significance than has been supposed. It
is the philosophy of history and not the data of history that is of foremost
concern. As exhibiting providential design in world life it becomes of epic
moment. The Hebrew race has exploited this phase of the old methodology to its
highest possibility, only, however, as Egypt had done before it; and has been so
successful that it has left the impression of a unique and exalted hierarchical
status for the Jewish race. The outcome of our correction of vision will be that
we shall for the first time properly regard the Old Testament books as, in the
main, the universal drama of the spiritual life masquerading in the disguise of
Hebrew history subtly woven into the great cosmic epic! The Biblical title
Israelites is a spiritual designation purely, and is wrongly taken in the sense
of the name of an ethnic group. “My people of Israel” or “the children of
Israel” of the Hebrew deity are just the divinized humans, mortals who have
put on the immortal spiritual nature, men graduated into Christhood, a spiritual
group in the early Mysteries. Gentiles were those who were not yet spiritually
reborn. The word comes from the Latin and Greek roots, “gen,” “gent,”
meaning simply “to be born.” They were those born as the first or natural
man, but not yet reborn as the spiritual Christ. It can be given no ethnic
reference. The name “Israelite” is obviously compounded of “Is,”
abbreviation of Isis, or Eve’s original name, Issa (See Josephus); “Ra,”
the great Egyptian
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solar god, male and spiritual; and the Hebrew “El,”
God. It would then read, Father-Mother-God, making his “children” the sons
of God, i.e., Christs. Likewise the name “Hebrews” means “those beyond”
(the merely human state), and therefore is practically identical with
“Israelites.” Finally the term “Jews” (from the plural of the Egyptian
IU—Latin JU) refers to the “male-female divinities,” a title given in the
Mysteries to men made gods and thus restored to androgyne, or male-female,
condition. The national Jews thus adopted for their historical name all three of
the exalted spiritual designations conferred in the Mysteries on the Epoptae or
completely divinized candidates.
It was hardly expected that any positive documentary
evidence could be found in support of the evident fact that these names had
simply been appropriated by the race using them as illustrious titles abstracted
from the uranograph. But a direct statement to that precise effect was found in
the Hebrew Grammar of Gesenius, a learned German scholar, (on p. 6):
“Of the names Hebrews . . . and Israelites . . . the
latter was more a national name of honor and was applied by the people to
themselves with a patriotic reference to their descent from illustrious
ancestors; . . .”
This is of vast significance as affecting the historical
view of the Bible, with possible extremely severe repercussions on world history
of the present.
The fourth consideration found essential to a grasp of
archaic meaning is the knowledge that religion was an outgrowth from a specific
situation involving the human race at its beginning. Religion is commonly
assigned to a category under the head of psychology. It is a matter of mind and
emotion.
But the roots of religion are found to go deeper than any
mere inclination of the psyche. Eventually religion took psychological forms of
expression, but it was originally not mere psychology. It was an outgrowth of
anthropology. It took its rise out of the racial or evolutionary beginnings and
bore an immediate relation thereto. Every feature of it was engendered out of
the interrelation of the several elements entering into the compound of man’s
constitution.
Human nature was composed of more than one element. There
were the physical, the emotional, the mental and the spiritual. More
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compactly viewed, there are the human-animal and the
divine. Religion is just the play of the factors of the interrelationship
subsisting between these several natures in man. Or it is the relation between
man and his god, the latter being universally existent primarily within him,
secondarily without. It details the history of the soul or divine spark of
spirit in its cyclical incorporation in human bodies. Its central fact is the
incarnation, the relation of soul to body, God to man, man to God.
According to Plato’s Timaeus and other archaic
documents a group of twelve legions of “junior gods,” who were sparks of the
eternal Flame of cosmic mind, were ordered, as their assignment in the
cooperative work of creation with Deity, to descend to earth and elevate the
races of the highest animal development by linking their own mental capacity
with the organisms thus far developed by the evolution of form. They were to
lift the animals across the gulf between the summit of instinct and the
beginnings of reason. These angels were devas, “bright” or “shining”
emanations of divine intelligence, but were not exempt from the “cycle of
necessity,” or periodical immersion in forms of physical embodiment on a
planet for purposes of their own further self-evolution. It subserved both the
interests of their own progress and that of the animals they were to uplift,
that the two races, the one germinally conscious and immortal, the other dumbly
brutish and mortal, should be periodically joined together, the higher to be the
king and ruler of the lower. The procedure thus adopted by life gave to the
animal the possibility of evolving a mind through association with a mental
nature, and to the intelligent spirits the physical bodies that were their
particular requirement for contacting the type of experience they were destined
to undergo. If this seems bizarre, it must be remembered that all living
entities are the result of the linkage of a spiritual nucleus with a material
organism. No creature lives but what is compounded of “soul” and body.
In conformity with evolutionary law these legions of
devas or angels, we are told, descended to earth, took lodgment in the bodies of
higher animals and began their career of redeeming the lower creatures to mental
status. In the Timaeus these “junior gods” are addressed by the Demiurgus
(the creative Logos, Jupiter) and are told to descend and “convert yourselves
according to your natures to the fabrication of animals,” the gist of their
mission being summed up in the command
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to “weave together mortal and immortal natures.” This
is one of the most important utterances of ancient scripture, because it
announces the character of our constitution and sets forth plainly our
evolutionary commission. It tells us that we are both animal-human and divine at
once, animal as to our bodies, divine as to our intellects. For Plato says:
“According to body it is an animal, but according to intellect a god.” Our
earthly task, according to St. Paul, is to link together the two natures in
“one new man,” bringing to an end in a final “reconciliation” “the
battle of Armageddon,” the aeonial warfare between the “carnal mind” of
the animal and the spiritual mind of the god. This warfare is also Plato’s
strife between noësis, the spiritual intelligence, and doxa, the motions of the
sense nature. The soul is here in body to discipline the latter by the
inculcation of habits of rectitude until the animal learns to use the powers of
mind. Tutoring the animal, the soul at the same time achieved its own higher
schooling in deific unfoldment. This interlocking of the two grades of life in
one organism must be constantly kept in view if the proper study of religion is
to be made. No organic evolution can proceed from one kingdom to another without
the deploying of the mental resources of a superior kingdom in aid of the level
below it. And each kingdom profits by the act of brotherhood. The god achieves
his own further apotheosis by reaching down to raise the animal to human estate.
It must be noted that when the intelligence of the god is
joined to the life of the animal, it communicates but a fragment of its power to
the organism, remaining for the larger part of its conscious being hidden on its
own spiritual plane. It thus becomes an invisible guardian, or what the ancients
called the “daimon.” Lurking in the background of consciousness, it is what
modern psychology has lately discovered and named the “collective
unconscious.” From behind the curtain, as it were, it directs the animal with
only a tentacle of its power. It can not incorporate in the animal a greater
measure of its capacity than the latter can suitably accommodate and carry. It
will push down into expression more and more of itself as the refinement of the
coarse body goes on apace. Like a radio, the mechanism must be tuned up higher
to register finer vibrations. In the Greek theosophy it is stated that “the
gods distribute divinity” to the grades of beings below them, which
“participate according to their capacity.”
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sequel) this is the basic cosmological and racial datum
of every old religion. Together with its implications it is the basis of every
religious interpretation ever made or to be made. Every problem of ethics,
devotion, discipline and intellect receives its full complement of value and
meaning only in reference to this fundamentum. Religion is far more than a
posture of mystic feeling; it was in origin a series of codes, principles and
practices given by the demi-gods to early mankind to awaken the torpid genius of
our actual divinity. In a true sense it was designed to wield a semi-magical
influence to transform animal man into the divinized human! Its rites were
formulated with a view to bestirring man’s memory of his essential deific
character. It was in no sense merely worship. It was the most intensely
practical and utilitarian culture the world has ever known. It was designed to
prevent the utter loss of purpose and failure of effort in the cosmical task to
which man, as a celestial intelligent spirit, had pledged himself under the Old
Testament covenant and “the broad oaths fast sealed” of Greek theology. In
coming to earth to help turn the tide of evolution past one of its most critical
passages, he bound himself to do the work and return without sinking into the
mire of animal sensuality. We must henceforth approach religion with the
realization that it is the psychic instrumentality designed for the use of
humanity in charting its way through the shoals of the particular racial and
evolutionary crisis in which it was involved. All the stupendous knowledge
relating to the entire cosmic chapter was once available, given by the gods to
the sages. We have nearly lost it beyond recovery because the ignorance of an
early age closed the Academies and crushed every attempt to revive the teaching.
The prodigious folly of the modern essay to vitalize religion through piety
alone will be more fully seen as the ancient picture takes form in the
delineation. Our present business is to struggle to regain that lost paradise of
intelligence. We must work again to the recognition of our high cosmic mission,
and revivify the decadent forms of a once potent religious practique, based on
knowledge. For spiritual cultism was once vitally related to our evolutionary
security, which stands jeopardized by present religious desuetude.
The nature of the material to be presented in volume will
enforce by the sheer illuminative power of the interpretation itself the
necessity for this extended introduction. It was quite impossible to undertake
the exegesis of recondite scriptures long misinterpreted or never
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interpreted at all, without providing a rationale of
ancient literary methodology and setting up a background of philosophical light.
The erection of this background was made all the more necessary by the
inveterate recalcitrancy of modern scholarship to recognize the applicability of
the methods and principles outlined. Their validation by the substance and
meaning of the larger presentment now to be made involves nothing less than the
complete revision of all our interpretative norms in religious study.
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