Chapter VII
To begin with there is that vast mass of Medieval legend
that became focused in Milton’s grand epic. The tradition of man’s having
lost a Paradise, having been cast out of heaven and thrown into a prison, a
dungeon, a pit, a lake of pitch, a dark cavernous underground where suffering
was intensified by fire, was almost universal in the background of theological
belief over a long period. This wide possession might have remained highly
instructive had not Milton, in common with all save isolated groups of
Hermeticists in Europe, lost in signal knowledge that the fallen angels, the
rebel hosts, the armies of Satan-Lucifer were, collectively, man himself, and
that the fiery lake into which they were hurled was just our good earth! This
tradition was the far-trailing descendant of the ancient Mysteries, in which the
entire drama of man’s evolution was enacted at the great annual festivals.
Says Thomas Taylor, perhaps the most understanding of all Plato’s
interpreters:
“I now proceed to prove that the dramatic spectacles of
the Lesser Mysteries were designed by the ancient theologists, their founders,
to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with the
earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical nature: . . .”1
Cocker in his Greek Philosophy says that Plato in the
Phaedrus, under the allegory of the chariot and the winged steeds, represents
the lower or inferior part of man’s nature as dragging the soul down to earth
and subjecting it to a slavery under corporeal conditions. Taylor says2 that
“the descent of the superior intellect3 into the realms
of generated existence becomes, indeed, the greatest benefit and ornament which
a material nature is capable of receiving; for without this participation of
intellect in the lowest department of corporeal life, nothing but the irrational
soul and a brutal life would subsist in the dark and fluctuating abode of the
body.”
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The whole design of the Mysteries, according to the great
Plato himself, was “to lead us back to the perfection from which, as our
beginning, we first made our descent.” One of the mysterious significations of
the Thyrsus or reed used in the Mysteries was connected with the descent of the
soul, for, “as it was a reed full of knots,” it became “an apt symbol of
the diffusion of the higher nature into the sensible world.” Bacchus (the
divine self) carried a reed instead of a scepter, and it betokened the god’s
“descent into our partial nature.” “Indeed the Titans are Thyrsus-bearers;
and Prometheus concealed fire in a Thyrsus or reed; after which he is considered
as bringing celestial light into generation, or leading the soul into the
body.”
The Greeks allegorized the descent of the soul again in
the fable of Ceres and Proserpine. Ceres is the higher intellect, Proserpina
being her daughter, the soul. Edward Carpenter says
“that there were ritual dramas or passion plays [in the
Mysteries], of which an important one dealt with the descent of Kore or
Proserpine into the underworld, as in the Eleusinian representations, and her
redemption and restoration to the upper world in spring.”4
No less applicable to the same fundamental situation is
the Greek fable of Eros and Psyche. Love, the divine Eros, descends into the
mortal sphere to redeem the human soul, or Psyche, from suffering in its animal
habitat by marrying her. In the Mystery celebrations lasting nine days, Taylor
tells us that on the eighth day the “fall of the soul into the lunar orb”
was commemorated,
“because the soul in this situation is about to bid
adieu to everything of a celestial nature; to sink into a perfect oblivion of
her divine origin and pristine felicity; and to rush profoundly into the region
of dissimilitude, ignorance and error. And lastly, on the ninth day, when the
soul falls into the sublunary world and becomes united with a terrestrial body,
a libation was performed such as is usual in the sacred rites.”5
Proclus, the great Neo-Platonist of the fourth century,
expounding Plato’s theology, says that it is the peculiar function of
“heroic souls” (an order above daemons) to express “magnitude of
operation, elevation and magnificence,” but that this order “descends indeed
for the benefit of the life of man, as partaking of a destiny inclining
downwards.”6
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Iamblicus corroborates Plato as to these grades of the
hierarchy:
“Angles above dissolve the bonds of generation. Daemons
draw souls down into nature; but heroes lead them to a providential attention to
sensible works.”7
Iamblichus makes an unequivocal statement of the descent
when he says:
“But from the first, divinity sent souls hither in
order that they might again return to him.”8
He reiterates the idea (p. 68) when speaking of the gods:
“These, therefore, descend with invariable sameness for
the salvation of the universe, and connectedly contain the whole of generation
after the same manner.”
“magnitude of the epiphanies [or manifestations] in the
Gods, indeed, is so great as sometimes to conceal all heaven, the sun and the
moon; and the earth itself, as the Gods descend, is no longer able to stand
still.”
Greek philosophy, as we have seen, embodies the
traditions of the descent in several molds. In the cycle of the twelve mystic
operations of Hercules, the hero is ordered to go down into Hades (our world)
and bring up the three-headed Cerberus. His journey is a symbolic tracing of the
experiences undergone by the soul on earth, not in some mysterious underworld
below it. Orpheus descends to the underworld to recover his lost Eurydice, the
soul. In Virgil’s epic Aeneas finds the gate to Avernus and descends for the
inspection of the Tartarian regions. It is instructive to note the etymology of
this word “Avernus.” It is the Greek ornos, a bird, and alpha (@insert greek
alpha) privative, meaning “un-“ or “not” or “-less.” The “v” is
thrown in for euphony between the two vowels, and the “o” is shortened to
“e.” It would therefore read “not birds” or “no birds,” with the
implication of “not a good place for birds.” When it is known that in all
arcane systems the bird was the universal symbol for the soul, the meaning comes
clear that this earth was regarded as the place where souls were poisoned by the
noxious fumes arising from the carnal life, since the birds were lethalized by
the vapor rising from the mouth of the pit of Avernus, became stupe-
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fied and fell into the underworld. The allegory tells the
story of our descent with a force that no philosophical descanting could match.
So deftly has ancient philological skill woven a theosophical meaning into the
structure of language.
Dante’s tour of Purgatory and the deeper Inferno is a
treatment of the old myth, with political and other connotations. Ulysses’
visit to the cave of Polyphemus is again a form of the representation, and
Theseus and his labyrinthine adventure underground is another rendering of it.
From Herodotus we have an account (II, 122) of the descent into Hades of King
Rhampsinitus, in whose honor the priests of Egypt instituted a rebirth festival.
The Rig Veda parallels this story with an account of the boy Nachiketas, who
descended into the realm of Yama, the deity of the earthly underworld, in
Yama-Loka, the kingdom of the dead, and then returned to the world of life.
Needless to say, neither Egyptians nor Hindus took their theological myths for
history.
A number of utterances in the Chaldean Oracles point to a
quite complete harmony with Orphic Platonism and Neo-Platonism. Indeed opinion
veers strongly to the conclusion that Pythagorean, Platonic and Greek philosophy
generally was formulated out of the principles of theology promulgated through
the powerful agency of the Orphic Mysteries, and that those principles were
brought by the Orphics into Greece from Chaldean sources. The Oracles agree with
Greek doctrine that higher deific energies emanated outward from a spiritual
focus into the material worlds. One of them runs: “For all things thence begin
to extend their admirable rays downwards.” The life of the gods rays outward
into corporeal beings and becomes the animating principle or soul of living
things.
A passage from the Tibetan Book of the Dead (p. 130)
warns devotees to “be not attracted towards the dull blue light of the brute
world,” under penalty of falling into that kingdom of nature. It asserts (p.
125) that the predilection of our immortal nature toward animal grossness will
cause it to “stray downwards.” The text represents the human soul as
beseeching the “Knowledge-Holding Deities” not to let it drift further down,
but to lead it to the holy paradise. The soul exults that “These
Knowledge-Holding Deities, the Heroes and the Dakinis have come from the holy
paradise realms to receive me.” The text traces the descent of these
divinities who, false to their oaths, fall
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from lower to still lower stages of the Bardo, or world
of dark embodiment.
A cuneiform tablet in the British Museum holds a legend
of the rebellious angels who broke into the Lord’s song with impious shouts,
destroying the harmony, and who, for punishment, were cast down out of heaven.
They are referred to in the Book of Jude (Ch. 6) in the line: “They kept not
their own habitations.” These in the Book of Enoch are the seven stars which
“transgressed the commandment of God and came not in their proper season”
(Enoch 18, 21, 22). It is said in the cuneiform text, “May the God of divine
speech expel from his five thousand those who in the midst of his heavenly song
shouted evil blasphemies.”
Of tremendous significance to the thesis that early
Christian doctrine was intimately allied with and influenced by the prevalent
esoteric wisdom of environing cults, is a fragment called the Naasene Hymn,
preserved by Hippolytus (Haer. V. 5). After describing the woes and sufferings
of the human soul during its wanderings on earth, the hymn continues:
But Jesus said: Father, Behold
A war of evils has arisen upon earth;
It comes from thy breath and ever works;
Man strives to shun this bitter chaos,
But knows not how he may pass (safely) through it;
Therefore, do thou, O Father, send me;
Bearing thy seals I will descend (to earth);
Throughout the ages I will pass;
All mysteries I will unfold,
All forms of Godhead I will unveil,
All secrets of thy holy path
Styled Gnosis (knowledge) I will impart (to man).
The Jesus character alluded to here is, it seems certain,
the Gnostic Jesus, or Ieou, whom we shall see is traceable to Egyptian origins
many centuries B.C. Scholars will haggle over the question of the date of the
hymn, whether A.D. or B.C. The possibility that it dates B.C. has already been
repudiated with great speciousness.9 The name Naasene, of apparently Ophite
connection, seems to have etymological relation to both the names of Essene and
Nazarene. If an Essene production it could
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readily be given a B.C. placing without violent
improbability. There is evidence that cults of Nazarenes (Nazaraioi) teaching
Egypto-Gnostic Christolatry antedated the coming of the Gospel Jesus. The
Ophites (serpent-symbolizers, not serpent-worshipers) were a Gnostic sect of
early Christianity, later persecuted as heretics, who believed in a spiritual
Christ-Aeon that descended into the material chaos to assist Sophia (Wisdom) in
her efforts to emancipate the soul from the bondage of the flesh.
Turning to the material of Egypt we find the descent
traced unmistakably in a thousand references. The conception is so pervading
that all three persons of the Egyptian Trinity, Isis, Osiris and Horus, are
represented as descending to the nether earth. Osiris, the Father God, descends,
is cut to pieces by Sut (Satan) and the fragments of his body scattered over the
earth. Isis, the Mother, descends to earth to search for the fragments. Horus,
the Son, comes down in the identical character as the Christian Jesus in the
advent at Christmas as the bringer of peace. As Jesus descends into hell
(Apostles’ Creed), so Horus came from heaven into the realm of darkness as the
light of the world. It is said that he descends into the funeral land, the abode
of darkness and of death. The Speaker in the Egyptian Ritual (representing
always the human soul) says: “I have come upon this earth, and I take
possession of it with my two feet.” It is said that Osiris goes down into
Tattu (another name for Amenta) and finds there the soul of the sun, and is
united thereto. The Manes (again the human soul) says: “I am he that cometh
forth by day . . . I descend upon earth and mine eye maketh me to walk
thereon.” It is said of him: “Thou enterest in to the place where thy Father
is, where Keb [Seb, the god of earth] is.” Again: “Thou descendest under
protection. Ra ferries thee to Amenta.” In the Ritual (The Book of the Dead)
it is said: “This is he who in his resurrection says, ‘I am the Lord on high
and I descend to the earth of Seb that I may put a stop to evil.’”
Such references to the advent of divinity in the scripts
of Egypt could be multiplied to great length. Likewise the religious lore of
scores of aboriginal tribes in all continents hold multitudinous corroboration
of the fact and confirm its status as the basic datum of all religious
construction. A hundred folk-tales begin with the coming of some hero from
heaven to earth, or with the flinging down of some object em-
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blematic of divinity. The variety of symbols used is
wide, and to one lacking the keys of interpretation, bewildering. It is enough
to say that in all such legends the idea of the descent is central.
Looking now at the Christian Bible we shall find in
plenty the features of the same myth. Bible students are not generally aware of
the directness with which the descent of the gods to earth is there told. There
is first the well-known declaration of God himself (distorted into a reference
to the historical Jesus) that he sent his only-begotten son into the world that
all believers might have everlasting life. Then there is the remarkable
pronouncement in the Gospel of John (3): “No man ascendeth into heaven but he
that cometh down from heaven.” From Luke (19:10) we have: “The Son of Man is
come to seek and to save that which is lost.” Then there is Jesus’ direct
statement to his disciples: “Ye are from beneath; I am from above.” The
Lord’s affirmation that he laid down his life for his sheep surely means not
that he was immolated on a wooden cross, but that he resigned his celestial life
to endure the burden of the cross (of flesh and matter). The Apocalyptist’s
vision of the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven is a reference to
the descent of divinity in its fragmented form. The line that
follows—“Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with
them . . . and God himself shall be with them and he shall be their God” (Rev.
21:1), is to the same effect. Jesus declares that he came from the Father into
the earth.
Lifting from the term Christos the Christian limitation
of its personification in the body of the historical Jesus, and reading for this
distorted meaning the idea of the gods incarnated distributively in all men, it
is possible to discern allusions to the descent all through the Bible. Though
not so immediately obvious, the Lukan account which states that Jesus came down
from the mount and “stood on a level place” (Ch. 6:17) before he delivered
the Sermon, is another indirect allusion to the same fact. For the Pistis
Sophia, the Gnostic Gospel, states that Jesus preached his discourse to his
disciples “in the midst of Amenta”! Later comparison of many texts discloses
the surprising fact that both the mount and the level plain, whereon the Sermon
was delivered in the Gospels, are diverse forms of the same symbolism! Both
refer to our earth, under the terms of equinoctial symbolism. The “mount” in
the mythos was never in any sense an earthly elevation. Paul in one passage
propounds the logical problem, which should have
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been given consideration, analogically, by our
scientists,--how we can envisage the resurrection without the postulation of a
previous descent from heaven. He asks (Ephesians 4:9): “Now he that ascended,
what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth?
He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all heavens. . . .”
The pertinence of this material for science is that science has studied life as
in evolution without having postulated a necessary involution antecedently!
Science must meet Paul’s significant query. Likewise must theology restore to
its high place the doctrine of the descent.
Symbolizing the divine nature as bread for man, John
gives Jesus’ announcement of his descent (6:47, 48) : “I am the bread of
life . . . such is the bread that came down from heaven, that a man shall eat of
it and shall not die.” The general allegorism of scattering or sowing seed is
employed to depict the Platonic “distribution of divinity” among men. In the
parable of the sower we have a portraiture of the partitive incarnation of
divine natures in mortal bodies. The falling of the seed into various types of
soil is a natural version of the diversified embodiments the descending souls
might have apportioned to them. This interpretation raises the parable to
infinite heights of dignity and meaning above the feeble and ineffective
rendering of uncomprehending thought, which is able to see in the figured
situation nothing higher than the sowing of the “word,” that is, the Sabbath
droning from pulpits, impinging upon different grades of mental acumen or moral
character! The “Word” is in no case the written Bible, even, but the Logos,
or form of divine ideation, powerfully stamped upon the physical universe by the
deific utterance. No student is in position to grasp the significance of the
Logos doctrine until he has mastered the principles of Platonic theology, as
outlined by Proclus10 or Plotinus. Christian interpretation has merely shuffled
along in the darkness without a light. “Like the streams in the circle of
heaven I besprinkle the seeds of men,” runs a text in the Records of the Past
(Vol. III, 129).
The angels in Revelation pour out the contents of their
censers over the earth, granting a nucleus of solar “fire” to each mortal to
divinize him. As the Timaeus of Plato reports, the deity was to furnish the
collective seed of what was to be immortal in humanity.
In Old Testament allegorism the doctrine is found most
unexpectedly to be the core of meaning in the Abraham story. Like the Prodigal
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Son of the New Testament he was sent out from his home,
country and kinsfolk (in the heavenly Eden) to go to a strange land
(incidentally to the West, where was the Tuat, or gate of entry to the earth!).
There his seed was to multiply until it filled the earth with his children, the
heirs of supernal grace.
But the hidden sense of the name Abraham or Abram has
escaped notice, and it is of great moment, as are all Bible names. Scholars may
protest, but it seems obvious that the word is simply A-Brahm, (Hindu), meaning
“non-Brahm.” Abraham, the Patriarch or oldest of the aeons or emanations,
was not Brahm, the Absolute, but the first emanation from Brahm; the first ray,
the first God, perhaps equivalent to Ishwara of the Hindus. He was the first
life that was not Absolute, yet from the Absolute. He was to go forth into the
realms of matter, divide and multiply, and fill the world with his fragmented
units. To return to Abraham’s bosom would be just to complete the cycle of
outgoing and return, to rest in the bosom of the highest divinity close to the
Absolute. Also he came out of Ur, of the Chaldees (or Kasadim), which is another
key word, since Ur is the Chaldean word for “fire,” the celestial empyrean,
out of which all souls, as fiery sparks, are emanated. Kasadim, or Kasdim, was a
term given to the highest celestial spirits, who fathered the production of the
divine sparks of soul. It is practically equivalent to “Archangels.”
Then Abraham went straight to Egypt from the land of
Canaan, and his descendants were to suffer bondage in that lower country. It is
a crushing blow to the historical rendering of Bible narrative to declare, on
evidence that is incontrovertible, that the “Egypt” of the scriptures is not
the country on the map. It is the term used in the allegories to designate the
plane, state or “land” of embodied life, life on earth. “Egypt” is just
this earth, or the state or locale of bodily life on it. It even at times
connotes the physical body itself, as in “the flesh pots of Egypt.” Hence
the descent of Abraham, and later of the twelve sons of Jacob, into “Egypt”
are again the fable of the soul’s adventure here. If the term Egypt is taken
as the geographical unit, many passages in which it occurs will be found to read
as sheer nonsense. Had theology known that “the strange land” and “the far
country” were glyphs for this earth of ours, greater sanity would have marked
the counsels of ecclesiasticism down the centuries. If the “bondage in
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Egypt, that slave pen,” as the Eternal repeatedly calls
it (in the Moffatt translation), has been in some way interlocked with an
historical servitude (as may have been the case), it still does not prove that
the allegory intended to recount the bondage of a nation. It was a bondage of
spirit under sense that was thus portrayed. Many passages from the Old Testament
books refer to the Israelites as captives, outcasts, expatriates and exiles,
matching Greek, Egyptian and Gnostic terminology, and alluding of course to the
expulsion of the angelic hosts from a celestial Paradise to a bleak earthly
exile. The sons of God had to go to Egypt also in order that fulfillment might
be given to the hoary scriptural line from the Mystery drama: “Out of Egypt
have I called my Son.” For resurgent deity in the wandering exiles would
eventually lead them back to their home on high.
In Luke (10:18) Jesus says that he “beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven.” As Satan is identical with Lucifer, the bringer
of deific light, or the god (collectively), and the hosts of angelic souls (distributively),
Jesus’ utterance is readily seen as another affirmation of the descent of the
spiritual principle, eternally symboled by “fire” from heaven. Again, in the
resurrection scene “an angel of the Lord descended from heaven.” Once more
this is not a fragment of veridical history, but another brief figuration of the
descent. In an Egypto-Gnostic fragment the same ideograph is repeated under the
double representation,11 when “the heavens opened and two men descended thence
with great radiance,” and both the young men entered the tomb. The seer in
Revelation descries an angel in flight toward the earth and also sees the holy
city of Zion, radiant with the glory of God, descending from the skies.
One of the Old Testament allegories has to do with the
Lord’s reminding Israel that he had “opened the doors of heaven” and
“rained down manna upon them to eat.” As bread is the Johannine symbol of
divine nature on which the mortal race was to feed, so manna in the Mosaic
narrative stands in the same usage. There is reason also to suppose that manna
is cognate by derivation with the Sanskrit “manas,” the principle of
intelligence, which was the gift of deity to “man.” Its distribution over
the ground in a thin layer like frost and glistening white is a symbolism of the
spirit, which comes to us in the form of a distillation over the ground of our
concrete experience out of the brood-
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ing atmosphere of divine super-intelligence. And all
deity is described as shining with radiance.
A frequent figure for the descending spirits of light is
the falling star. In the Egyptian Records of the Past (Vol. II, p. 16) the
Speaker says: “The place is empty into which the starry ones fall down
headlong upon their faces and find nothing by which they can raise themselves
up.” In the same thought the Chinese have a venerable proverb which runs:
“The stars ceased shining in heaven and fell upon earth, where they became
men.” That the star as an emblem of the divine soul is not altogether a sheer
poetic fancy, is shown by the fact that, as Massey points out,
“The Elementaries or brute forces of nature may be said
to have obtained their souls in the stars. Hence, as Plutarch says, the Dog-Star
is the soul of Isis, Orion is the soul of Horus, and the Bear is the soul of
Typhon,--Soul and Star being synonymous in the Egyptian word Seb.”12
In one of the addresses to King Pepi it is said to him:
“Thy soul is a living star at the head of his brethren.”13 In the texts of
Egypt the evil crocodile, typifying Paul’s “carnal nature,” is said to
swallow the sinking stars,” the souls that fall into the darkness of
incarnation. Among the ancients the stars that dipped beneath the horizon were
emblematic of souls in physical incarnation, in contradistinction to those that
never set, which typed the non-incarnating gods. Souls in incarnation were
dubbed by the Greeks “moist souls,” since they were immersed in the body,
which is seven-eighths water by composition. The redeemed souls rejoiced in the
Egyptian Ritual (Ch. 44) at being lifted up “among the stars that never
set.” Those condemned to descend were represented as falling stars in danger
of being devoured by the open jaws of the dragon (of mortal life). This reptile
lurked in the “bight of Amenta” or the bend of the river “where the starry
procession dipped down below the horizon.” The Swabian “Lindwurm” was
another form of the dragon that “swallowed the setting stars.” Indeed the
entire myth of the casting down of Saturn and his hosts was figured under the
symbolism of falling stars. The dragon that “made war with the woman drew down
into his kingdom many of the stars of heaven.” One of the phenomena of the
Crucifixion mentioned in Revelation along with the darkness over the earth, the
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veiled sun, the blood-stained moon, is that “the stars
from the heavens fell.” In the same place we read that “when the message of
the third angel was sounded forth, a great star went down from heaven and it
fell upon the earth.” Another star fell at the sounding of the trumpet of the
firth angel. The various legends, then, of falling stars become invested with
unexpected significance as being disguised allusions to the descent of the
angelic myriads to our shores,--to become our souls.
But nowhere is the statement of the descent of soul made
more explicitly than in the very Creed of the Christian Church, wherein the
second person of the Trinity is described as he “who for us men and for our
salvation came down from heaven . . . and was made man.” Our material will
show that the idea was common to many early nations, in whose literature it is
stated with more definiteness than in the Christian.
If the descent was in partial degree a karmic punishment
for sin, an enforced expiation of evolutionary dereliction in past cycles, as is
hinted in Greek philosophy, it was also pictured as a seeking of refuge or a
hiding for safety. Some contingency or crisis in celestial affairs, not fully
divulged, made it both obligatory and advantageous for the angel hosts to flee
heaven and find on earth, or in “Egypt,” an escape from danger involved in
some evolutionary impasse. It is not customary to think of hell as a haven, but
certain implications in the old theology require us to do just that. At all
events the legend of the hiding away of the young divine heroes is too general
to be without deep significance. Adam hid himself when the Eternal walked in the
garden. Moses as an infant was hidden in the papyrus swamps of “Egypt”;
later he was hidden by the Eternal in a cleft of the rock as the majesty of the
Lord swept by. Jonah ran and hid from the Eternal when first commanded to
execute a mission to the Ninevites. The child Jesus had to be hidden away from
danger in “Egypt”! The Old Testament Joseph went down to “Egypt” to be
saved from danger. Jotham preserved his life from his murderous brother
Abimelech by hiding. Saul was found in hiding among the baggage when he was
chosen to be king in Israel. In Egypt, Buto, the nurse, concealed Horus, the
analogue of Jesus, in Sekhem, “the hidden shrine and shut place,”—our
earth. Horus’ birth was in a secret place. A similar legend is related of the
mythical Sargon in the cuneiform tablets. He says: “My mother, the Princess,
conceived me; in a secret place she brought me forth.” The
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supreme Egyptian Sun-God, the mighty spiritual divinity
Ra, says to the earth: “I have hidden you.”14 He says that in the
“Egypt” of this lower world he had prepared a secret and mysterious dwelling
for his children. This divine dwelling created by Ra as the place of protection
for the elect, is called “the Retreat.” Amen, an aspect of Ra, was termed
“The Master of the Hidden Spheres”; and Amen itself means “the hidden
god.” In the Ritual (Ch. 22) Osiris cries: “I rise out of the egg in the
hidden land.” Under another name, Qem-Ur, he addresses the earth (Aukert, the
underworld) as the land “which hidest thy companion who is in thee.” The god
again speaks of “hiding himself to cast light upon his hidden place.” This
is the typical Lucifer character of the descending god, the Light-Bringer. He
hides himself in order, it is said, to perform there the “mysteries of the
underworld.” “These things shall be done secretly in the underworld.”
(Rubric to Ch. 137A of the Ritual.) Under the title of Unas he “gathers
together his members which are in the hidden place.” He says that he has
“made Horus enter into the Hidden Shrine to vivify the heart of the god.”
It is desirable to search a little more closely for the
rationale of this hiding in the secret place of earth, as the bases of the whole
theological situation are involved in this dark background. Two causes can be
assigned for the descent, a normal evolutionary one, and another rising out of
the motives for karmic punishment for error, stubbornness, pride or wrong. As to
the first, the Greeks postulated the Cycle of Necessity, which required that all
souls or fragments of divine being must pass through the round of all the
elements, in order to embody in their finished perfection the qualities of every
modification of life. The second cause is less philosophically rationalized
and—hints are given us—grew out of a special situation involving the
recalcitrant behavior of twelve legions of angels, who, in retribution for
evolutionary irregularities on their part, were forced into an earthly
incarnation distasteful to them. In the character of King Teta, Osiris is made
to say: “This Teta hath detestation of the earth, and he will not enter into
Seb” (god of earth). There are also references to the anger of the higher
gods, enkindled against them. Plato (Phaedrus) speaks of those souls who were
“subject through the ancient indignation of the Gods in consequence of former
guilt” to severe penalties on earth. In the Cratylus he concurs with the
doctrine of the Orphics that the soul is punished through its union with body.
Iamblicus (Mysteries of the
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Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 133) states that a
partial motive in the celebration of the Mysteries of Sabazius was the appeasing
of “the ancient divine anger.” Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, III)
preserves a passage from a celebrated Pythagorean, Philolaus, which runs: “The
ancient theologists and priests also testify that the soul is united with body
as if for the sake of punishment.” The Book of Enoch points to a motive for
this punishment in that the deities “came not in their proper season.” It is
given that they were ordered to incarnate at an earlier period, when the bodies
of the animal race were of a requisite preparedness to receive the principle of
intelligence, but that they refused and in consequence were forced to descend
much later, when the animal vehicles were far gone in a state of degeneracy.
Proclus in his Hymn to Minerva prays to the goddess:
“Nor let these horrid punishments be mine,
Which guilty souls in Tartarus confine,
With fetters fastened to its broken floors,
And locked by hell’s tremendous iron doors.”
Dante in the Inferno alludes to the souls in bondage:
“Hither for failure of their vows exiled.”
There is ground for connecting all this allusion to the
penal character of our adventure on earth with the oft-cited “rebellion of the
angels.” Theological students should be more familiar with Plato’s version
of the Demiurgic speech to the hosts about to incarnate, the “junior gods,”
in the Timaeus. The Creator covenants with them to insure their immortality, to
support them with his power; and then charge them to come to earth and “weave
together mortal and immortal natures.” It is said they rebelled,
procrastinated and, when finally forced to descend by virtue of karma, missed
the crest of a wave of evolution that would have carried them more smoothly
forward past a crucial point. As it eventuated, their delay brought them to the
earth when the lower race they were to uplift had sunk back into brutal
degradation, and their penal infliction became the greater by the enhanced
grossness of the bodies they were to inhabit. Their proper season had passed, as
say Jude and Enoch.
Strangely we find in an old Egyptian inscription called
“The De-
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struction of Mankind” a parallel to this somewhat
anomalous situation in Platonic systematism. There is a rebellion against Ra,
the Sun-God, followed by a great destruction and a deluge. Atum-Ra had been
established as the king of gods and men, the God alone. There is a revolt
against his supremacy. He calls the elder gods around him for consultation and
says to them:
“You ancient gods, behold the beings who are born of
myself; they utter words against me. Tell me, what would you do in these
circumstances? Behold, I have waited and I have not destroyed them until I
should hear what you have to say.”15
The elder gods advise that he permit them to go and smite
the enemies who plot evil against Ra, and let none remain alive. The rebels are
then destroyed by being cast down for three days. Here is the distinct clue to
true meaning, for the three days are a glyph for the time spent by evolutionary
consciousness in the three lower kingdoms beneath man, the mineral, vegetable
and animal. And “destruction” in this usage can not be taken as equivalent
to actual annihilation or extirpation. This latter point is an extremely
important one, as it saves many a Biblical allegory from utter perversion of
meaning. After the exaction of the penalty, the “majesty of Ra” declares
that he will now protect men on this account. “I raise my hand (in token) that
I shall not again destroy men.” The similarity of this description to more
than a score of such narratives of the almighty anger against “a stiff-necked
and rebellious people,” their being cast out from celestial court and favor,
and the eventual divine relenting and restoration of them to his providential
care, must strike any fair-minded student who has read the Old Testament.
It is charged that Job, when cause is sought for his
trial, had added “rebellion unto his sin.”16 It does not seem to be well
known that the Old Testament contains an account of the “rebellion of the
angels” in the guise of alleged Hebrew history. It is the rebellion of the
“Sons of Korah,” given in the Mosaic books, and recalled to the attention of
the Israelites several times by the Eternal. It is told that at the rebellion
the Lord caused the earth to open and swallow them up. It should be noticed that
they were engulfed by the earth. It is known that two different groups of
Psalms, thirteen to forty-nine, and eighty-four to eighty-eight, are specialized
as “Psalms of the Sons of Korah.” It is to
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be remarked as significant also that while swallowed up
by earth, they were not destroyed! The rebel hosts, cast out of heaven, were not
annihilated! What can this mean but that the term “destruction” is purely a
glyph for the enforced descent to earth? Here they could expiate their contumely
by sojourning in the untoward conditions of animal embodiment. Milton in the
Paradise Lost, expresses Adam’s surprise to find that his sentence of
“death” for disobedience is a long, living death, not extinction. The
account of the Korahitic rebellion expressly states that they were swallowed
alive.
Happily Chaldean as well as Hindu records reaffirm the
correctness of our interpretation, for Massey says:
“The Chaldean and Hindu legends know nothing of a human
sin as a cause of the deluge. The sin against the gods, however, is described as
the cause of the deluge in the so-called ‘destruction of men.’ . . . But
these beings in the case were elemental, not mortal, and the sin was not
human.”17
This is quite important. The beings were pre-human and
angelic, not elemental in the theological sense. Their rebellion, in short,
occurred in heaven, not on earth, though indeed it has been prolonged into the
earthly life. They carried their rebellious attitude down with them and exhibit
phases of it to the present!
An Egyptian text says of the god Anhur that he had seen
the malice of these gods who “deserted their allegiance to raise a
rebellion,” and “he refused to go forth with them.” Other texts contain
references to “the children of impotent revolt,” and tell of their “inroad
into the Eastern part of heaven, whereupon there arose a battle in heaven and in
all the earth.” And another passage alludes to the “carrying out of the
sentence upon those who are to die,” and says it is “the withholding of that
which is so needful to the souls of the children of impotent revolt.” The
meaning here is obviously their expatriation and consequent cutting off from
participation in the life of their celestial estate.
In general summary of this point, it may be said that the
implications and the moral of these traditions of rebellious and outcast angels
are these: our divine souls (for we are those rebellious deities) fled under
karmic pressure from heaven to earth, and we have carried the same
refractoriness down in our racial history. We refused at first to incarnate in
the animal forms, and we still are rebellious in our refusal
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to take full charge and assume complete mastery over the
“animal” segment of our composite nature. Hence the frequent injunctions in
old scriptures to “kill out” the lower elements in us, and such a statement
as that in the Egyptian text of Unas to “slay the rebel” in consummating our
work of redemption.18 Angels indeed were despatched to this realm, and their
presence in the human constitution accounts for the divine element apostrophized
in all religion. In the Epistle to the Hebrews (1:14) it is asked: “Are they
not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who should be heirs
of salvation?”
The next step in the unfoldment of the theme is to
establish beyond dispute that it was to our earth that the descent was made.
This is tremendously vital to true interpretation.
In Egyptian scriptures we encounter the promise that
“if Pepi falleth on to the earth, Keb [Seb] will lift him up.” Pepi here
stands for the divinity in man, the god come to earth. To him in another place
it is said: “Thou plowest the earth . . . Thou journeyest on the road whereon
the gods journeyed.” Here is identification of the earth as the place to which
the gods were sent to travel the road of evolution.
One of the most conclusive statements of this fact in
Christian scriptures is that memorable passage in Revelation (12:7-9), where we
have a succinct rehearsal of the “war in heaven” and the casting down of the
angel hosts in the character of Satan, as the dragon or serpent.
“There was war in heaven. Michael and his angels went
forth to war with the dragon; and the dragon warred and his angels; and they
prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great
dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is called the Devil and Satan,
which deceiveth the whole world; he was cast down into the earth and his angels
were cast out with him.”
It is of prime interest to note that the war in heaven
was continued on earth, as has been intimated before. For after the dragon had
been cast down to earth, he “waxed wroth with the woman and went away to make
war with the rest of her seed.”
This can be seen as the confirmation of the narrative in
Genesis, wherein the Lord swore to place enmity between the serpent, or dragon,
and the seed of the woman.
In the Egyptian Ritual, in the “chapter by which one
cometh forth by day,” the spirit of the descending god pleads:
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“Let me have possession of all things soever which were
offered ritualistically for me in the nether world. Let me have possession of
the table of offerings which was heaped up for me on earth.” He asks “that
he may feed upon the bread of Seb [the earth god] or the food of earth.”
Proceeding he urges: “Let the Tuat be opened for me. Here am I.”
This is an announcement of his advent upon earth, for the
Tuat is the gate of entrance to Amenta. He is coming to this world to feed upon
that type of concrete experience which the conditions here alone afford, under
the name of “the bread of Seb.” Later, following his resurrection, he says:
“The tunnels of earth have given me birth.” “I rise as a god among men,”
he exclaims. If there are men elsewhere than on earth, they are not those
referred to in the old scriptures. He is described again as “Thou who givest
light to the earth” (Rit., Ch. 15). Again he says: “I come that I may
overthrow my adversaries upon earth.” It is on earth that his opposition is to
be met and hither he must come to conquer it, for his undeveloped divinity must
grow by overcoming opposition. He is spoken of again as “he who has caused the
authority of his father to be recognized in the great dwelling of Seb,”—earth.
Another passage (Ch. 64) describes the lower self in man as saying: “I draw
near to the god whose words were heard by me in the lower earth.” As the
god-soul descends he says: “My body shall be established and it shall neither
fall into decay nor be destroyed upon this earth.” His mission to earth is
proclaimed as being to “vivify every human being that walketh upon the regions
which are upon the earth.” In another place we have a combined reference to
the earth both as the “hidden place” and as the globe where the young gods
came to progress. It is said of Isis that “she suckled the child in
solitariness, and none knew where his place was, and he grew in strength and his
arm increased in strength in the house of Keb,” or the earth. Egypt will offer
us in later connections a superabundance of testimony to the thesis under
discussion, the relevance of which can not be so well appreciated until other
phases of the mundane journey of the god can be presented. The localization of
the place where the gods fell when ejected from heaven in the mythos as being
our earth is one of the three or four major postulates of the ancient theology
which this work is undertaken to establish, and its implications must alter all
religious construction drastically.
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The point was once known, but was obscured by ignorant
handling of the Gnosis and was lost. It is almost unthinkable that it could have
met such a fate when the Church had constantly before its eyes the legend of
Christmas, with its clear imputation of the incarnation of the children of
spiritual skies on earth. But the distributive nature of the Christhood had been
submerged, and the tradition of the fall of the angels had been wrenched out of
all relation to the Nativity at the winter solstice.
The passage in Revelation (22:16) that has left
theological thought in such deep obscurity, may find acceptable rendition of its
meaning in the light of the thesis of the descent: “I, Jesus, have sent mine
angel to testify unto you these things in the churches.” To apprehend the
statement clearly we are required to read the name “Jesus” in the light of
its Gnostic meaning as an Aeon, or emanation of divine spirit, an interpretation
that is not at odds with its usage in the Book of Revelation. Students have been
impressed with the evident resemblance of the Apocalypse to Gnostic literature,
and one writer has ventured the opinion that it could have been written only by
a Platonist versed in Mystery and Magian symbology. It bears quite pointed
resemblances to such a Hermetic book as the Enoch. The Jesus referred to in it
obviously has no identic relation to the Jesus personalized in the Gospels. His
figure here is of cosmic proportions and equates the stature of the Logos. His
dispatching of his angels to testify unto the churches can mean only that the
Demiurgus, or Cosmic Intelligence embodied in an exalted being of the hierarchy,
ordered the incarnation of the legionary hosts in the interests of the human
evolution on earth. The “churches” can by no possible sophistry be distorted
into a reference to the early Christian congregations. This would be to bring
the dignity of cosmic operations down almost to the level of the monthly meeting
of the Ladies’ Auxiliary! The “churches” were groupings or gradations of
spiritual beings at or near the completed state of human development, if not the
“ecclesia” or “assembly” of the divinized mortals.
Theology has never adequately traced the course of the
evolutionary processes by which the simple fact of the descent of the angels for
incarnation took on the character of a “fall,” with the implication of
disaster. Says Cocker: “The present life is a fall and a punishment.”19 Many
passage from the Bible could be adduced to show that the
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incarnation was held to have resulted in a fall or
debasement of pristine angelic virtue. The Revelation apostrophe to the fallen
Babylon, the mighty, whose ancient glory had departed, giving place to the glory
of the Beast, whose courts had become the habitation of devils, and whose
fornicatory wines had made the nations drunk, is doubtless an allusion to the
situation here envisaged. To what else could St. Paul conceivably be referring
when, speaking of the Gentiles, he says:
“And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God
into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of
four-footed beasts, and of creeping things.”
An earlier paragraph has corrected the miscomprehension
of the meaning of the term “Gentiles,” which has beset the theological mind
for centuries. It would be illogical to ascribe so dire an evolutionary
degeneration to the mere accident of non-membership in a religious caste, or
nation of allegedly “chosen” people. The Gentiles were the as yet
undivinized “sons of men,” as distinct from the “Sons of God,” or
Israelites, and it was their unpurified natures that dragged down the gods who
incarnated in their bodies and dimmed their glory. The Gentile is the man
“from beneath”; the Israelite is “from above,” as Jesus affirmed. “The
first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven,” says
St. Paul. The immersion of the latter in the bodies of the former reduced their
originally vivid intelligence to such a point of stultification that they sank
by degrees under the dominance of the sensual disposition. And here is found the
conversion of the evolutionary “descent” into the theological “fall.”
The two terms Gentiles and Israelites can not be attached to any historical
nationals. Their employment by several nations was at first only an allegorical
flourish. The Greek use of the term “barbarians” and our own recent literary
use of the word “Philistines” somewhat parallel this treatment of the word
“Gentiles.” The Gentiles were the party of the first part in evolution, who
drew down the gods and changed their glory into the semblance of grinning
hyenas, chattering apes, braying asses and rapacious wolves, in spite of
“broad oaths fast sealed” and a covenant with deity.
The advent of the Prometheans to earth was the oblation,
the divine sacrifice, the sacrifice “for sin.” Yet it is only a perverted
connotation of the word “sacrifice” that has caused this act of cosmic
policy to be
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taken in the light of a self-privation on the part of the
Luciferian hosts. Few words of noble meaning have not been touched by the
disfiguring hand of low human understanding. Sacrifice (Latin: sacra and facio)
means “to make sacred,” and has no immediate correlation with the denial to
oneself of benefits. If privation came in the process of incarnation, it was
incidental, not inherent. The angel legions descended to make a lower order of
life holy—“to adorn what was below them,” as Plotinus puts it. Their labor
was to the end of “sacrifying” a merely natural kingdom of life. It was to
sanctify with the gift of divinity the mortal race, and make it immortal and
divine.
This is not to assert that the enterprise did not entail
hardship. The labor of evolution especially when self-consciousness had been
awakened and the Ego became aware of his failures, and knew that he bore
responsibility for his conduct, is more likely to be a Via Dolorosa than a path
of roses. The reason for the accentuation of the denial aspect of the sacrifice
is to be found in the fact that the upliftment of the lower grade entailed a
long relinquishment of paradisiacal blessedness for the spirits of light, and a
quenching of their deific fire in the moist humors, or “water,” of the body.
The adventure brought privation, torture, woe. It was an exile from a home of
beatific happiness. To be plunged from a state of dreamy blissfulness into a
state of dull realism and concrete objectivity, where the golden glow of
idealism faded from every sight, was for them a dimming of the bright lamp of
life. It was indeed a plunge from lively consciousness into partial
unconsciousness. It was an ostracism from heaven into a long, hard and
unattractive migration. They were to become colonists of a strange, distant
land, if not castaways on its unfriendly shores. Cocker, already quoted,
comments, in reference to Plato’s Cave Allegory: “Their sojourn on earth is
. . . a dreary exile from their proper home.” Earth life is only a shadow of
reality. In Egyptian scriptures the holy city of Aarru-Hetep (Salem) was to be
built up by “the outcasts or the colonists from Egypt.” St. Paul states that
“we are a colony of heaven” (Moffatt translation). This is a clear Biblical
intimation that we are expatriates from a higher world. Greek philosophy and
mythology are replete with allusions to souls wandering on earth, exhiles from a
diviner sphere. Most of the semi-divine heroes had long journeys and crusades
assigned to them. And the Prodigal Son is of course the unquestioned
representative of the exile’s role in Bible lore. From the
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Greek philosopher Empedocles comes the echo of the
sentiment that the soul has migrated to a foreign country:
“For this I weep, for this indulge my woe,
That e’er my soul such novel realms should know.”
Moses’ son was Gershom, which the Moffatt translation
gives as meaning “Stranger,” with the parenthetical explanation: “For I
have been a stranger in a foreign land.”
In this connection there is the possibility of a rational
solution of the meaning of a text in the Bible which, in its conventional
reading, has proven a perplexity and a “hard saying.” It appears to be a
stroke at the fundamental integrity of human kinship, family affection. In Luke
(14:26) Jesus tells the multitude that no one can be his disciple unless one
hate father, mother, brother, sister and all kin. In the great Gnostic-Christian
work, the Pistis Sophia (Bk. 2, p. 341) a text runs to nearly the same effect:
“For this cause have I said unto you aforetime, ‘he
who shall not leave father and mother to follow after me is not worthy of me.’
What I said then was, ye shall leave your parents, the rulers, that ye may all
be children of the first, everlasting mystery.”
In the light of the additional explanatory material given
in the Pistis Sophia and omitted from the Gospel account, it is possible to see
that this necessity of the disciple’s leaving father, mother and kin and
breaking all home ties in an apparently ruthless disruption of the most
commendable of earthly loves, bore no original reference to human parents and
kindred, but was another of the many illusions to the expatriation of the
angelic orders. This breaking of home ties occurred in the celestial paradise,
which in all portrayal is called “the Homeland.” To be a follower of Jesus
in his mission to a submerged humanity was to accompany him in his descent to
earth from heavenly Father and empyrean home. If religion had kept its original
knowledge of our cosmic errand, we could have been saved the perennial
perplexity of wondering why the Lord’s disciples are commanded to flout the
tenderest of human ties.
Many of the allusions to the children of Israel as
exiles, captives in a foreign land, hostages and outcasts, are made during
periods when the historical Hebrews were not in either the Egyptian or the
Babylon-
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ian or Assyrian captivities, and were not in any mundane
sense exiles. Empedocles describes mortals as “Heaven’s exiles straying from
the orb of light.” In line with our thought are the words of the Christian
Advent hymn:
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Nor less grandly true are the lines of the “Gospel”
hymn:
I’m but a stranger here;
Heaven is my home.
The various exiles, captivities and wanderings of the
children of Israel were not historical. They were symbolic accounts of the
descent of the twelve “tribes” of angelic spirits, “chosen” by the
higher Lords in heaven to come to earth and divinize incipient humanity.
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