Chapter VI
The rectification of misguided rendering of holy writ in
its entirety is a work of great magnitude and will tax severely the capacity of
a single book. Particularly in regard to the traditional dogmas of theology,
where misconception has become embedded in set habitudes of mind, the
reinterpretation can be established only by the presentation of material in
overwhelming quantity. The bare statement of the main theses of the venerable
philosophy would be met with contempt or arrogant rejection. The claims must
therefore be buttressed by a mass of irrefutable data. This material has not
been marshaled for this use before in anything like organic array.
The story most properly begins with what is called in
theology “the descent of the gods.” Traditional lore is replete with legends
of the “expulsion of the angels,” “the fall of Lucifer and his hosts,”
“the fall from heaven,” and the more philosophical “descent of the
soul.” These phrase-titles relate to the first step in the series of
pre-historical and even pre-mundane episodes which culminated in the
establishment of humanity on earth and the fabrication of human nature combining
both a natural and a supernatural element. The substrate datum in religion is
that man is an animal and a god in union. There were animals on earth and angels
in heaven; and the counsels of cosmic intelligence decreed that the angels
should join forces with the animals and be their gods. The conjunctive
experience would educate both parties. The effort to overcome matter’s inertia
and the sense urge of the flesh would develop more dynamic spiritual initiative
for the gods. They would be forced to deploy more of their potential and as yet
static divine power to gain mastery over the elementary forces of the physical
world.
Hints are not wanting in the old scripts to show that
their obligation to leave their home of blissful rest in dreamy
sub-consciousness in
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the ethereal spheres and suffer the hardships of earth
life in gross animal bodies was in some part at least a measure of karmic
retribution for past dereliction elsewhere. Pride and insolence are ascribed to
them by Greek theology. Violated oaths and “Moira’s bounds transgressed”
are alluded to by the philosophic poets. As evolution links penalty with
readjustment and forward progress, it is not difficult to admit the play of both
retributive and normal procedure in the enforced descent of minor deities to our
globe. It is the expulsion of Satan and his hosts from heaven in Paradise Lost
and Revelation. So presented, it has been taken either as a mythical unreality
or an inscrutable chapter of celestial history, and discarded from serious
consideration in religious systematism. It is, however, the central situation
and must be restored to its pivotal place of consequence in the picture. The
doctrine of the “descent” is crucial for the interpretation. True or false,
it is what the scriptures are building their narratives upon.
Of the original twelve legions of deities, ten have
plunged into the stream of incarnation and are now passing through the
experiences incident thereto. At the conclusion of the venture, after many
incarnations for each individual member, they will return to their celestial
abodes, transfigured and further divinized. The allegory of the Prodigal Son is
a short glyph or graph of this evolutionary descent and return. There is hardly
a religious book of any ancient nation that does not deal more or less directly
with that event.
To see the “descent” as an integral function of
cosmic process and not as a calamitous “fall,” it is quite necessary to
expound a portion of Orphic-Platonic cosmogony.
The beginning must be made where creation itself begins.
It starts from Unity. All things proceed from what was aboriginally and ever
ultimately is, the One Life. The pagan name for the Supreme Power was commonly
The One. All things ultimately resolve into the primordial One, since they
emanate from that One in the beginning. Before manifestation takes place, Being
is homogeneous, undifferentiated. It is uniform similitude and excludes
dissimilitude. It is all One Essence, alike in every part, if parts there are.
But in such state it is unmanifest, and from our point of
view unconscious, asleep, inert. The Hindu term is Pralaya. And out of Pralaya
it must awake, for it sleeps only in alternate turn with waking
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activity, as do all its creatures made in its likeness.
It passes, like them from death to life and back again, in eternal routine.
To awake and come into being it must by force of logic
perform an operation upon its own nature which is the first ground of
manifestation. It can not create a universe in which to live and suffer
experience without breaking its Unity apart into duality. For it must become
Consciousness on the one side, in order to know what and how to create, and
Matter on the other, if it is to have material with which to create! So it must
split its primal Oneness into a dualism which however is still subsumed under
the unity. It becomes two in one or the One in two. The One has not become Two,
but a twoness.
It virtually can not create without throwing itself into
the condition of being at a tension between two aspects of itself, on the
strength of which tension it can exert its inchoate energies. It must therefore
manifest itself as the two ends of a polarity, positive and negative. It must
become polarized in relation to itself; and so it takes on the double-aspected
characterization of spirit and matter, male and female, consciousness and
vehicle, function and instrument, attraction and repulsion, visible and
invisible, real and actual. Positively, like the proton of the atom, it must
stand stably in the center, governing, holding, regulating the cyclical whirl of
negative force about its eternal rock of durability. Negatively, like the
electrons, it must revolve in the periodic swing of active life. It must provide
the dual grounds for living existence, a conscious nucleus presiding at the
heart of moving, changing embodiments. It must become, out of itself, subject,
knowing, and object, to be known. Its entire purpose is obviously to arise out
of unconscious slumber and become ever more awake and more concretely conscious.
Since there is nothing of which it can be conscious save itself, the aim of Life
is thus ever to become more Self-conscious! Therefore it must, so to speak, set
itself as object over against itself as subject, and down the ages and the
cycles ever thus contemplate itself. It is the seeing eye and the thing seen, as
all profound esoteric philosophy asserts.
As Genesis puts it, God effected his creation, gazed upon
it with gratification and pronounced it good. To see his creation he had to
objectify, hypostasize, reify his thoughts, the radiations of his subjective
aspect. For he creates by thoughts. He must see his ideas form in
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concretion before him, take on material body and come to
visible manifestation for himself and his creatures.
So his expression proceeds from unity to duality, and
from duality it runs further onward to infinite multiplicity. Multiple
manifestation is achieved by the operation of a principle which is easily
comprehended. As life has split into spirit and matter, the one mobile, the
other inert, the unity of the mobile is broken up into multitude as it moves
against the immobile. The lighter essence, spirit, is broken and divided as it
moves outward against the resistance of matter. A suggestive illustration is the
infinite division of a body of water dropped as one unit from a height as it
falls against the resistance of the air. Its sheer motion and speed throws it
apart. The circulation of the blood from the central heart, dividing endlessly
till it reaches the periphery in numberless streamlets, is a similar reflection
of the universal law. Outward bound, it divides; on the return it reunites! Life
descends, “falls,” from the summit of its primal unity down into the arms of
matter, dividing as it goes. Division is a logical necessity if it is to
multiply itself, for unity can not multiply out of itself without first dividing
itself. And it can not divide itself unless it falls or descends against
resistance. The importance of this determination for clear grasp of basic
theology can not be overstressed. Angels “fall” by divine ordinance, and not
by literal folly of rebellion against deity. Evolutionary gravity brings them
down from heaven to earth.
The wind does not commonly blow a steady gale, but comes
in rhythmic puffs. Creative impulse acts similarly. Every cycle of energization
of the universe finishes its work in seven waves or impulses, and the sub-cycles
have also seven waves. Life projects its formative energies outward, or
matterward, in surge after surge. Each one carries the impulse as far as it will
go under its original force, or until the wave is brought to a dead standstill
by the inertia of matter, the carrying and resisting medium. Each propulsion of
power comes to a stop, locked in the embrace of matter. In this embrace the
capacities of the two nodes of being interplay, fecundate each other, generate a
growth of new life, and build up what is termed a plane or level or kingdom of
nature, with creatures embodying the type of life there engendered. Thus there
are terrestrial and celestial worlds (as Paul says), noumenal and phenomenal
realms, physical and ethereal planes, material and spiritual bodies, heavens,
fairy-lands, underworlds, hells, limbos, Isles
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of the Blessed, Elysian Fields, the meadows of
Aarru-Hetep and homes on high. And the beings on the ranges from high divinity
down to man are the gods of ancient mythology.
The capacities of life on each level are expressed and
given play by the organic beings built up thereon. Thus each kingdom has its own
specific nature and determinations. But life is not static; it is generative,
reproductive, forward-moving. It creates anew, in its turn, at its level, and
passes the stream of creative force on down the line. Thus the succession of
waves of projection runs down the scale, each one carrying the formative force
one surge farther out. On and on it goes, establishing the kingdoms of nature
and the living citizens on them. The contiguous planes form a link of connection
from top to bottom of the series, and this is the golden chain of life. And each
level bears a definite relation to its neighbor on either side.
The explication of this relationship involves a law that
is basic for all evolution. Its statement will render understandable the
constitution of man. It tells why he is a soul and a body linked together. It
may be called the great Law of Incubation.
Under its terms each plane is mother to the life on the
plane above it and father to that of the plane below it. It receives from above
the seed germs of higher life and harbors them in the womb of its soil, or
matter, gestates them and eventually gives them their new birth. This is the
function of motherhood. And matter (Latin mater, mother) is the universal
mother. But, having received from above, it also gives the impulse to the order
below; and as giver it is active, aggressive, generative—the father function.
Feminine to life above, masculine to life beneath, it is the link and bridge
between two worlds.
But at each step of transmission the primal impulse
suffers a diminution of its impetus, a weakening of its force, and in
consequence a further and further fragmentation. The matter of each plane on the
downward or involutionary track being more dense in atomic structure than that
of its superior, the living bodies it provides can not bear as heavy a life
charge as the beings above can support, and the voltage of power must be stepped
down if it is to be incorporated fittingly in the less capacious bodies of a
lower kingdom. To effect this reduction in dynamism the bodies carrying the life
of each plane act as electric transformers, changing a high current into
numerous lesser currents to be accommodated to the lower carrying capabilities
of bodies on the
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plane beneath. Hence the unit charge received from the
plane above by each life structure on any place must, in falling one step
further downward, be again broken up into a large number of fragments, each of
which will become the energizing soul of a lower body. The Greek philosophers
say in this connection that “the gods distribute divinity,” scattering its
higher units abroad from plane to plane, the units multiplying in number, but
diminishing in power, as the stream flows on. This is what ancient theology
connotes by “the river of life.” The Orphic system speaks of “rivers of
vivification,” which, they say, “proceed from on high as far as to the last
of things,” or to the lowest stratum of the mineral kingdom. And as the gods
distribute divinity, the secondary ranks in each case are said to “participate
according to their capacity.” The gods pour out their life for the vivifying
of all lower beings, and the latter partake of this bounty or “grace” to the
measure of their receptivity. Nothing other than this is meant by the “shed
blood” of the gods, given for the life of the worlds. All old theologies aver
that the blood of the gods, or of God, mixed with the clay of earth, makes the
“red earth” which is given as the etymological signification of Adam in
Hebrew, i.e., man. Man is compounded of the red life-blood of deity and the dust
of the ground, which in Hebrew is Adamah, purely the feminine or material aspect
of Adam, spirit, itself. Deity mixed together spirit and matter to make man.
One more step in the analysis yields the final phase of
the Law of Incubation. If life is to be propagated in eternal renewal, in
multiplied individualization, it becomes necessary for any living creature on
each plane to produce a multiple progeny of the seeds of its own life and
“plant” or bury them in the soil of the kingdom immediately below it. There
they go first to their “death,” after which they are reborn or resurrected
in the sprouting of the seeds and their growth back to maturity. Each generation
lives anew in its regeneration, but multiplied by as many times itself as the
number of seeds it produced and successfully germinated in the plane below.
The vegetable buries its seeds in the soil of the kingdom
beneath it, the mineral. The animal’s life is embodied in a corpus built up of
vegetable material taken in each day as food. The human is rooted in an animal
body. And now comes the pivotal fact in theology. The lowest ranks of gods, in
their position just above humanity, must, by the Law of Incubation, send down
their seeds, plant (incarnate) them
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in the bodies of humans, and win their next cyclical
generation of divine life in that ground! Centuries of theological maundering
have not told the millions of hungry sheep this plain truth as to why man
nurtures a winged spirit of intelligence—a soul—in his physical body. The
soul of man is in his body as a seed of divinity planted, buried, gone to its
“death” in the soil of the human kingdom, and bears the same relation to
that soil as does any seed to its bed. The greatest truth that can be told to
mortals is that their bodies are each the gestating womb of a god. As said St.
Paul, the Christ is being “formed within” each mortal body. Man has a soul
because his physical human self is the nursery or breeding ground of the seeds
of divinity. And man’s divinity is, or begins as, a seed. His duty is to
cultivate the growth of that deific embryo. It is gestating in the womb of his
physical body, and he must, as said Socrates, become a philosophic “midwife”
and aid in its birth. Plato reports the Demiurgus in the notable speech to the
legions of devas in the Timaeus as saying that “whatever is immortal and
divine” in the human makeup, “of that I will furnish the seed and the
beginning. It is your business to do the rest; to weave together mortal and
immortal natures.” The upper plane furnishes the seeds of godhood, the lower
furnishes the soil or garden. Divinity is planted in “the garden of the
world.” It is the seminal soul of divine mind, destined to germinate and
eventually blossom in the ground of humanity.
If, in sum, God is to multiply himself, his tree of life
must reproduce on its branches a numerous progeny, each child bearing the
potentiality of renewing the parent life in its fullness, and of carrying its
eternal unfoldment one step ahead. As no living thing can subsist save as a
result of a linking together of spirit and matter, a germinal unit of spirit
must be incubated as the god in a body of material structure. This divine
economy gives every creature its soul, which is its god. In the long chain of
linked lives, from God down to mineral crystal, no being is deprived of its
possibility of immediate communion with deity, up to the border of its capacity.
But the “arm of the Lord” that is potent to bless and to save is within, not
without. It is Emanuel, God with us, the hope of our glory. God is everywhere,
within and without; but his son, the Christos, is only within. If he is not
sought there, he will not be found. His inner presence is the provision of life
that no entity should be bereft of instant contact with its parent god, who
dwells on the plane just over its head, though rooted in its very
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body. Man’s deity is not a personage in a distant land
and time, but, as an Eastern saga puts it, “closer is he than breathing,
nearer than hands and feet.” No man can fail of touching his divinity, but
failure of his knowledge that his deity is in himself may palsy his effort to
arouse its latent faculties.
A legend of India tells of a council of the gods at which
it was purposed to invest man with deity. A debate arose as to how it might be
entrusted to him without his misusing it. One suggested that it be buried in the
depths of the sea, so that he would not easily find and abuse it. Another
advised placing it on the most inaccessible mountain top. Finally the supreme
head of the assembly declared he had thought of a place where no man would ever
think of looking for it,--in the deepmost chambers of man’s own heart!
The basal truth that every living thing is a union of
spirit and matter, soul and body, was put in a graph by the Egyptians. It is
perhaps the oldest and most meaningful of signs. The great symbol carried in the
hands of the gods was the Ankh, or crux ansata (ansated cross), a “T” topped
with the circle. The circle is the female symbol, the boundless infinite matter,
the mother of all things in endless round. The vertical line is the male symbol,
a ray of intelligence that goes out from the heart of the universe to impregnate
the worlds. The horizontal line is the line of division between the two, at the
point where they are joined. It is the cross-line between them. The word Ankh
means three most significant things: love, life and tie. It is a formula of all
life, signifying that life is the resultant of a tying together of two things,
spirit and matter, by the force of an attraction, which is love.
The great doctrine of the “descent” or “fall” can
now be clearly envisaged. Deity, in the form of its seed potency, must descend
from its own plane into the soil of the plane below it and be incubated there.
It must leave its own home, its father’s house, and go out into another
country, where it will be an exile and a stranger. And like the youth going out
from home into a rough world to make a fight of it under temptation and gross
influences, he must undergo a long toilsome trial and testing and crucifixion to
become an eventual victor and return with laurels. Said Jesus: “I came forth
from the Father and am come into the world.”
Additional elucidation of basic meaning flows from the
consideration of the great doctrine of the Trinity in theology. One is not too
bold
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in asserting that this formula of ancient truth is not
comprehended in its clear and profound significance by the Church which still
blindly offers it. Once a year the pew occupants listen to a sermon on the
Trinity, but go away unenlightened. Yet it is the heart of the mystery of life,
the base of theology, and—easily comprehensible.
Plotinus, the Neo-Platonist of the third century, who
gave the doctrine to Christianity through Augustine, has given us an analogy
with a natural phenomenon by which it is possible, with the additional link of a
finding of modern science, to see the simple meaning of a doctrine that has
baffled comprehension for sixteen centuries. He said that we can understand how
one deity can have three aspects if we think of the sun, its light and its
active energy. The sun in heaven is comparable to the Father of the Trinity. It
is a glowing globe of fire. The fire of the sun does not go forth into the ends
of space, but abides at home. Like a match which you strike in a dark room, the
fire stays on the match; it does not leave it. The fire stays’ but it
generates and sends forth its son,--the light. This is the second aspect or
“person.” It is of the same essence with the Father, yet not he. And the
Psalmist sings: “Send out thy light”!
Now a flood of clear light is released on the problem by
following the implications as to the identity of the third “person,” the
Holy Spirit. But here it is necessary to adduce some pertinent data which is
given to us by modern physical science to round out our analogy. We are told
that a ray of the sun’s light out in the void of space (not near a planet) is
inert. It is both cold and dark. If one could reduce one’s body to the size of
a pin-point, one would be in total darkness and the intensest cold, though the
sun be glaring overhead. The ray is impotent, inactive, uncreative and can
generate no life until—and here is the nub of all philosophy—it falls upon a
surface of a material body, a globe or planet! Only by incidence upon its
opposite pole, matter, can the light of spirit come to its creative function.
There is required the interplay of its rays with a resistant surface to bring
out its own powers from latency to potency. Matter is, as already shown, the
“mother” of life, while spirit (God) is its father. And, as everywhere,
father spirit can not become creative until it unites with and fecundates mother
matter! His ray of power, his son, is in a sense the phallic emanation of his
seed, and the seed must become coefficient with the unfructified egg of life in
matter’s bosom to bring a new birth to
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pass. Almost it might be said,--here is all truth in a
nutshell. The light of God would remain uncreative unless it entered the body or
womb of mother life and aroused the slumbering potentialities therein. And here
is the solution of a riddle of mythology which has baffled and horrified
Christian moralists no end. The fables of the gods represent the son of deity as
turning about and creating upon his own mother. Horus is called “the Bull of
his Mother”—Isis. The sons of God marry their own mothers! Horrible!
Detestable! shout the offended Church Fathers. Yet the son of present life
marries and impregnates his own mother every time an acorn or grain of wheat
falls into the ground and germinates! It is discernible at last why the letter H
comes a second time into the form of the sacred tetragrammaton, or four-letter
name of Jehovah, the Ineffable Name of ancient Kabalism—JHVH. “J” is the
Father God, the line that comes down from on high, goes deep into the heart of
matter and then turns upward to return to deity. The H represents by its two
vertical lines life divided into its two aspects, spirit and matter, joined by
the cross line, and so brings its activity into the realm of the mother, matter.
The V is their son, who goes down in his turn into matter and returns. Now, why
does the mother H come into the formula of creation a second time? The J H V
would be a formula covering one—the first—generation of life. It would take
it through one cycle. But that would not be a glyph that would represent life as
perpetuating itself through endless cycles of renewal. It would end there. The
graph must carry it on. As, then, the son must take up the line and become
father in his turn, he must unite his productive fecundation with his old
mother, matter. And so the H, or mother, must be brought into the picture once
more. And the holy name becomes thus a descriptive form for all creation. For
spirit is creatively helpless, like the sunlight, without the co-operation of
its opposite, matter, which is dramatized as its wife and sister. Hence every
mythological deity was linked with his shakti or spouse, his creative potency,
without whom he would remain forever ungenerative. The implications of this
determination are tremendous, for if spirit can not give birth to its archetypal
conceptions without the implementation of matter in actual creation, neither can
it function apart from matter in philosophy! And a thousand fantastic
“spiritual” cult systems that have deluded uncritical minds in every age by
a denial of the utility of matter, are at one stroke given the coup de grâce as
illogical fallacies.
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Reverting to the Trinity, it is desirable to go further
with the Greek elaborators of the Orphic wisdom in delineating the aspects of
divine activity.
Of the Father they assert that he “abides.” A Hindu
script has the passage in which Lord Krishna says: “Having impregnated the
universe with a portion of myself, I yet remain.” He remains on his own plane.
He is the unmoved Mover and the uncaused Cause. He is without experience
himself, delegating the function of acquiring it to his Son. He is unaffected,
undivided, unchanging and undiminished.
Of the Son they say that he “proceeds.” He bears the
Father’s potentialities out into all the universe. He is the radiating arm of
his Father’s power. He goes out to do the will of his parent and become his
vicegerent in the worlds. He becomes God’s spoken Word. He conveys the Logoic
ideas out upon the bosom of his Father’s emanations to stamp them upon plastic
matter. And proceeding from the bosom of the Father, he goes forth into every
condition which is precisely the opposite of that of the Father. He will become
subject to experience and suffer all things, while the Father abides unmoved. He
will be affected, divided, changed and be sadly diminished, suffering the loss
of all that he enjoyed with the Father. He will endure all experience in every
kingdom, will be fragmented into “partial natures,” will enter a moving
stream of endless change, and will be reduced to a minimum of his glory on the
cross of suffering.
Of the Holy Spirit they say that it “converts” matter
to its own likeness; “is converted” by matter to its next higher estate; and
finally “returns.”
What, then, is the Holy Spirit, the Third Person? It is
the first Ray of divine life, undergoing its final conversion into active
creative agency. It is latent power of God’s mind, transformed into working
efficacy. It is static divinity become kinetic. It is God’s Logos, or Word,
carrying the command of his creative Voice, now converted into an energy that
moves matter and builds worlds. It is, finally, God’s spirit at work; no
longer static, or merely potential, but released upon matter in moving
force—kinesis.
It may be helpful to present a diagrammatic sketch of
this formulation, as it is a brief but complete graph of the entire rationale of
all incarnation, or involution of life in matter, and its evolution back to
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spirit. It is thus a concise formula comprehending all
that ancient scriptures have been designed to elucidate.
LIGHT .......... SON ................. PROCEEDS.
{{CONVERTS (Matter).
{{IS CONVERTED (By Matter).
{
{ RETURNS
All “history” takes place at the point where the
light, or latent radiation of divine force, comes in contact with matter, earth,
the mother. For there involution is brought to a halt and, spirit being
implanted within the heart of matter and awakening its slumbering potencies,
there is begun at that point a new growth of life, actuated by the union of
intelligence with sheer energy. And this new growth begins the evolutionary
stage, or the return unto the father, or parent, status.
When Trinities are given as Father, Mother and Son, the
aspect here characterized as the Holy Spirit is the “Son,” the product of
the union of Father and Mother. When given as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the
Mother is implicit, being the material element necessary at all times.
The Son’s, or the ray’s, impregnation of Mother
matter begins a new process of growth from seed to adulthood, which through a
cycle of “conversion” and “being converted” lifts up the new form of
Sonship of deity to the stage which the Father had reached in its last previous
cycle. The cycle is completed with the “return”; but after aeonial rest life
gets ready to make its next rhythmic movement outward to unite again with the
Mother.
Having set forth in the most compact form the outline of
the structure of ancient evolutionary knowledge, it is incumbent on us now to
trace the origin and fix the place of every single doctrine of theology in the
draft. It is requisite also that sufficient space be granted to present as much
as is permissible of the vast body of data supporting each phase of the
exegesis. The “descent” is the first feature of the chart that relates
heavenly creation to earthly life, and is logically the first aspect of divine
activity to be taken up. Its groundwork and presuppositions having been laid
down, its presence in ancient religion must be demonstrated with sufficient
fullness.
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