Chapter XI
The answer to the riddle of the generally feeble pulse of
religion in the modern age has been compounded out of the material adduced in
the preceding chapters. But there are many distinct doctrinal items the
corruption of the significance of which is a strong ancillary cause of the
reduced power of ancient faith, and one of these can now be enunciated. In the
light of extended exposition we shall be able to see why it was that the gods’
descent into our realm, heralded by angel hosts as the event of supreme omen
thus far in the history of the globe, has failed to bring to every mortal the
climactic joy it was designed to release. It will be seen why the celestial
tidings proclaimed of old to bring an era of peace and good-will to all men have
stirred us so faintly. A false theology has stepped in between the supernal
messengers and the minds of the sons of earth to dull the thrill of the “good
news.” On the day of the Advent heaven’s arches rang with the proclamation
of peace and amity among men on the basis of the fact that a fragment of
divinity had been lodged in the holy of holies of the temple of each human body.
Emanuel had come to dwell with man. But the exuberant joyousness of all mortal
hearts over the event has been clogged. No longer the substance but only the
shadow of the truth remains to kindle Yuletide ecstasy. The allegory of the
birth in the stable or cave was devised to keep mankind in exultant memory of
its divinity. Alas! It speaks no more of our divinity. It extols the godly
nature of but one. The paeans of sacred hilarity that are raised for the birth
of our Savior are appropriate and efficacious only as that Savior stands as
symbol of the glorious birth within ourselves. Long ago Angelus Silesius, a
Christian mystic, admonished Christendom:
“Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn;
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The cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain
Unless within thyself it be set up again.”
If the birth of the god in each individual heart is not
the interior meaning of the Nativity, then we celebrate the event to no purpose.
No amount of adoration accorded to a newborn king in Judea will avail to redeem
a single wayward heart if the Christ Child is not eventually domiciled in the
breast of the individual. The King of Righteousness must be cradled in the
manger of each human self ere the myth can work its magic in the world.
This miscarriage of the vital significance of the event
has come about entirely through the desuetude of the doctrine that may be
denominated by the Greeks’ philosophical term, the god’s dismemberment. The
reconstruction of pristine wisdom can not be encompassed without the
rehabilitation of this great doctrine. Sunk entirely out of sight, its
restoration to its integral office in the body of theology will enable that
science to function again with the semblance of its former power.
For the god came to earth not in his entirety, not in his
single deific unity, but torn into hosts of fragments, grouped in twelve
principal divisions. How could he hope to enter every mortal life, to tabernacle
in every breast, if he came as one unit? This is just the mistake that Christian
doctrinism made, fatal to humanity at large. It is a matter of simple logic. To
be the divine guest in every human life he had to suffer fragmentation into as
many portions as there were to be mortal children for him to father, in order
that each might possess a share of his nature. This procedure was necessitated
by the conditions extant. The terms under which the law of incubation operates
require that the forces of life on any plane must take rootage in the soil of
the kingdom below, as the sheer seeds of their own capabilities, and fragment
their unity by division to accommodate their higher potencies to the lesser
capacities of the lower organisms. These could not carry the heavier voltage of
life in its unitary volume on the plane above. Man on earth could never
implement and incorporate the full power of heaven. The embodiment of superior
force in less capacious vehicles is accomplished by the partition of that upper
unity into fragments, after the analogy of the oak tree in its annual production
of a thousand embryonic units of its potential nature, each of which, when
incubated in the mothering womb of the soil below it, is capable of regenerating
its dying
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parent. And so every divine son of God raises his Father
from the dead, as did Jesus and Horus. The god in man can not move across the
dividing line between the kingdoms, stepping from the divine level down into the
human, without suffering a dismantling of his integrity and a partitioning of
his “body” into a multitude. He must experience a diminution of his
intellectual genius analogous to what a human mind would suffer if it was to be
incorporated in the brain of a dog. And Daniel does say this very thing! “An
animal’s mind shall be given unto him.” Only a portion of the god’s
intellectual light, and that reduced in strength and luminosity, could function
in the brain mechanism of animal man. In short, the gods could not transplant
their full and mature selfhood into man, but only the seeds of its next cycle of
growth. Indeed all projection of deity outward into matter is in embryonic form.
Divine thought is sent out to take root in matter, there to have its cycle of
new growth. The analogy of the oak and its acorns leaves nothing wanting for
understanding of the evolutionary method. And it clarifies for us the
incarnation, as being the planting, germinating, budding and flowering in mortal
life, of the seed-germ of divinity. Jesus is the embryonic deity, born in the
crib or crypt of man’s mortal nature.
Clement of Alexandria, describing the sacra of the
Mysteries, speaks of those who ignorantly worship “a boy torn to pieces by the
Titans.” This was Bacchus, in a part of whose Mystery ritual the body of the
god was represented as torn into pieces by the Titans and scattered over the
earth! It is significant that in the drama the god is cut into pieces while
enticed into contemplating his image in a mirror. Greek philosophy spoke of the
soul’s projecting a similitude of herself into matter. She was to reproduce a
likeness of herself in flesh, for the lower must be formed in the image of the
higher. Man is to reproduce, as the acorn the oak, the image of his maker. This
detail is an intimation that it was the god’s inclination toward a life of
sense, depicted by his bending down (Cf. the fable of Narcissus) to gaze
delightedly at his reflection in the water of generation, that preceded his fall
and divulsion into fragments. Jupiter, hurling his thunderbolts at the Titans,
the forces of elementary nature, committed the members of Bacchus to Apollo, the
Sun-god, that he might properly inter them. The god’s heart, which had been
snatched away by Pallas (the higher mind) during the laceration, and preserved
for a new generation, emerges,
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and about it as a nucleus the scattered members are
reassembled, and he is restored to his pristine integrity!
Turning to Egypt there is found an exactly parallel
mythos, which has the god Osiris in place of the Greek Dionysus. Says Budge:
“Throughout the Egyptian texts it is assumed that the
god suffered death and mutilation at the hands of his enemies; that various
members of his body were scattered about the land of Egypt; that his sister-wife
Isis ‘sought him sorrowing’ and at length found him; that she fanned him
with her wings and gave him air; that she raised up his body and was reunited
with him; that she conceived and brought forth a child (Horus); and that he (Osiris)
became the god and king of the underworld. In the legend of Osiris as given by
Plutarch (De Iside et Osiride) it is said that he was murdered at the
instigation of Typhon or Set, who tore the body into fourteen pieces, which he
scattered throughout the land; Isis collected these pieces. . . .”1
It is hard to think that this legend or glyph of our
evolutionary history has stood in the books for five thousand years and failed
eventually to illuminate the race’s understanding of its own cosmic situation.
Osiris was not the only sun-deity whose body suffered
dismemberment in the Egyptian pantheon, for Ptah, an earlier god, shared the
same mythic fate. Under his name of Ptah-Sekari he underwent fragmentation as
did Osiris. For “Sekari is the title of the suffering Ptah, and sekar means to
cut; cut in pieces; sacrifice; or, as we have the word in English, to score or
scarify.”2 Ptah was said to be the earliest form of God the Father, who became
a voluntary sacrifice in “Egypt,” and who, in the name of Sekari, was the
silent sufferer, the coffined one, the deity that opened the nether world for
the Manes. As a solar god he went down into Amenta. There he died and rose
again. Atum, son of Ptah, also became the voluntary sacrifice as the source of
life to mortals. As the “silent Sekari” Ptah was an earlier type of the
figure of Jesus, who was as a lamb dumb before his shearers, and opened not his
mouth against his accusers. The title of Sekari is in fact added to Osiris, as
well as to Ptah, and as Osiris-Sekari he is the dismembered and mutilated mummy
in his coffin. The Speaker in the Ritual cries: “The darkness in which Sekari
dwells is terrifying to the weak.” The Egyptian festival of the resurrection,
celebrated every year in the
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month Choiak (Nov. 27 to Dec. 26, Alexandrian year) was
devoted to the god Osiris-Ptah-Sekari, “who had been dead and was alive again;
cut to pieces and reconstituted with his vertebrae sound and not a bone of his
body found to be broken or missing.” (Cf. the Gospels: “And they brake all
his bones.” This was the form of the dismemberment, to be followed by the
reconstitution.)
That which applied to the Osiris-god also applied to
“the dead in Osiris.” (Cf. the Gospels: “Dead in Christ.”) “They were
figuratively cut in pieces as the tangible image of abstract death.”3 “When
the mortal entered Amenta it was in the likeness of Osiris, who had been bodily
dismembered in his death, and who had to be reconstituted to rise again as the
spirit that never died.”4 It is certain that the Manes was considered to have
suffered dismemberment like his ensampler Osiris, because it is written that
before the mortal Manes could attain the ultimate state of spirit in the image
of Horus the immortal, he must be put together part by part like Osiris, the
dismembered god. From a divided being he had to be made whole again as Neb-er-ter,
“the god entire.” In one phase of the drama the deceased is put together
bone by bone after the model of the backbone of Osiris. The backbone was an
emblem of sustaining power, matching indeed the Tat cross of stability. In the
Ritual (Ch. 102) Horus says: “I have come myself and delivered the god in his
dismembered condition. I have healed the trunk and fastened the shoulder and
made firm the leg.” Horus, entering the lower world to seek and to save that
which is lost in the obscurity of matter, says (Ch. 78): “I advance
whithersoever there lieth a wreck in the field of eternity.” On their drop
into matter, the first episode in the gods’ mutilation was the loss of their
intellectual unity, typified by the figurative cutting off of their heads.
“And the god Horus shall cut off their heads in heaven where they are) in the
form of feathered fowl, and their hind parts shall be on the earth in the form
of animals. . . .” It is even directly stated that “Ra mutilates his own
person” for the benefit of mortals. Thoth later came and healed the
mutilations. As Thoth was the god of knowledge, it can be seen on what plane of
comprehension the mutilation and healing are to be given meaning. The
dismemberment was only the division of unified intellect into partial vision.
The reconstitution of the torn divinity is referred to in the address to Teta,
the “dead” king on earth: “Hail, hail! Rise up, thou Teta! Thou hast
received thy head,
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thou hast embraced thy bones, thou hast gathered together
thy flesh.”
In far India the Lord of Creation, Prajapati, was
represented as having undergone dismemberment. Likewise Sarasvati. There is no
question as to the wide prevalence of the symbol.
Nothing is more shattering to our modern sense of
superiority and condescension with regard to early nations believed to have been
“primitive” and ignorant, than to find in their literary relics the outlines
of some of the grandest conceptions of Platonic or other high philosophic
theory. In a Mexican legend we come upon the idea of the god’s dismemberment
in a striking form. A story portrayed the union of physical man with a higher
spirit under the imagery of mixing a bone with blood. The tale runs to the
effect that the Great Mother of the gods instructs them, in the creation of man,
to go down to Mistlanteuctli, the Lord of Hades, and beg him to give them a bone
or some ashes of the dead, who are with him. These would represent the lower
natural body. Having received this, they were told to sacrifice over it,
sprinkling the blood from their own bodies upon it. This would typify the
impartation of their own divine natures to the mortals. After consultation they
dispatched one of their number, Xolotl, down to Hades. He succeeded in procuring
a bone six feet long (a certain identification with the human body) from
Mistlanteuctli and started off with it at full speed. Wroth at this, the
infernal chief gave chase, causing Xolotl a hasty fall, in which the bone was
broken in pieces. The messenger gathered up in all haste what he could, and
despite the stumble made his escape. Reaching the earth he put the fragments of
bone into a basin and all the gods drew blood from their bodies and sprinkled it
into the vessel. On the fourth day there was a movement among the wetted bones
and a boy lay there before all, and in four days more of blood-letting and
sprinkling, a girl came to life. If the Bible student is inclined to disdain
this myth as profitless, let him turn to Ezekiel (37) and reflect on what he
finds there. For the Biblical fable of the valley of dry bones contains five or
six distinct points of identity with this legend: the operation of the gods upon
the lifeless bones, a noise, a stirring and movement among the bones, a coming
together and eventual constitution of them into living bodies, with flesh and
sinew, and their creation as humans, male and female, as in Genesis.
The early Egyptians laconically dramatized the doctrine
of dismem-
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berment, but the intellectual Greeks wrote elaborate
disquisitions upon its import. It is set forth by the Platonists with
dialectical precision. The doctrine grows out of the very laws of thought. It is
no whimsical speculative fancy. It rests on a logical necessity. For if life is
to proceed from primal unity to manifest multiplicity and diversity, there is no
way for the One to multiply itself save by an initial division of itself. Life
proceeds from oneness and identity of nature into number and differentiation,
and the structure of thought requires that multiformity arise from unity by
partition of that unity. The One must break himself into pieces, tear himself
apart, and this is the meaning of the mutilations and exsections of the gods.
The One must give himself to division. And with division comes addition of
forms, multiplication of units and combinations, but subtraction of deific power
in the divided parts.
Each wave of creative impulse quivered outward from the
central heart of being and, like falling water, body-blood and tree-sap, was
fragmented by the resistance of matter. From plane to plane the dispersion
continued. Wholes were broken into parts, which as wholes on their own plane
went into further partition to plant the field of the next lower level. With his
own inseparable being torn into multiple division, and each part an integral
unit of the total, his life is seminally distributed in each. He lives in the
parts and the parts live in him. The fragments are the cells of his body. “We
are the members of one body, and Christ is the head.” So Greek philosophy
states that “each superior divinity becomes the leader of a multitude,
generated from himself.” And at last there is the basis for comprehensible
sense in the phrase “the Lord of Hosts.” Each deity is the lord of a host,
who are the fragmented children of his own body.
Each unit of division, when incubated in the lower realm,
begins to renew its father’s life. It must arise and return unto the
father’s estate. The son must restore the parent who has died in him to his
former greatness, with something added. He must raise that which has fallen and
redeem that which has been lost. No one shall see the father save him to whom
the son revealeth him. This was the typical function of Horus in relation to
Osiris in Egypt, as it was that of Jesus to God his Father in the Gospels.
Buried within the heart of each fragment, then, is the
hidden lord of divine life, and from no one is he absent. He dwells there to be
the
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guide, the guardian, the comforter and informing
intelligence of the organism. He is the holy spirit, the flame, the ray, the
lamp unto our feet. Says St. Paul (I Cor. 4:7): “For God, who commanded the
light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts . . . but we have this
treasure in earthen vessels.” The ancients oft termed this presence the daemon
or guardian angel, as in the famous case of Socrates. He is that attendant
monitor who stands behind the scenes of the outer life, instant to bless, ready
to save, a never-failing help in trouble. His counsel is never lacking, if one
seeks it or has not previously stilled its small voice. It reasons with us until
many times seven. It abides within our inner shrine, patiently awaiting the hour
of our discovery and recognition of its presence.
We must take time to hear the voice of Greek wisdom anent
the dismemberment:
“In the first place, then, we are made up from
fragments (says Olympiodorus), because, through falling into generation, our
life has proceeded into the most distant and extreme division; and from Titanic
fragments, because the Titans are the ultimate artificers of things, and stand
immediately next to whatever is constituted from them. But furthermore, our
irrational life is Titanic, by which the rational and higher life is torn to
pieces. Hence when we disperse the Dionysus, or intuitive intellect contained in
the secret recesses of our nature, breaking in pieces the kindred and divine
form of our essence, and which communicates, as it were, both with things
subordinate and supreme, then we become the Titans (or apostates); but when we
establish ourselves in union with this Dionysiacal or kindred form, then we
become Bacchuses, or perfect guardians and keepers of our irrational life; for
Dionysus, whom in this respect we resemble, is himself an ephorus or guardian
deity; dissolving at his pleasure the bonds by which the soul is united to the
body, since he is the cause of a parted life. But it is necessary that the
passive or feminine nature of our irrational part, through which we are bound to
body, and which is nothing more than the resounding echo, as it were, of soul,
should suffer the punishment incurred by descent; for when the soul casts aside
the (divine) peculiarity of her nature, she requires her own, but at the same
time, a multiform body, that she may again become in need of a common form,
which she has lost through Titanic dispersion in matter.”5
“Now we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when
that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done
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away.” Had we held our culture closer to the heart of
Greek philosophy we should have seen the whole of things more clearly. We are
the Titans who tore the divine philosophical fire away from the central altar in
the empyrean and scattered it like sparks amongst the race of mortals. And these
Titans, or Satanic hosts, were those apostates who compounded the felony of
stealing divine fire by further carrying its dispersion into remote depths of
matter. Yet they were the agents of deity to bring salvation, or the purifying,
cleansing fire, to man on earth. They distributed the divine life in fragments
among mortals, administering the cosmic Eucharist of the broken body and shed
blood of the gods for a benison to all humanity. The divine intellectual power,
the mind of the god, was divided amongst us, not, however, with the loss of the
total unity of the godhead on his own plane. Only his lower fragments in body
felt their reduction to poverty. Says Taylor:
And thus much for the mysteries of Bacchus, which, as
well as those of Ceres, relate in one part to the descent of a partial intellect
into matter, and its condition while united with the dark tenement of body; but
there appears to be this difference between the two, that in the fable of Ceres
and Proserpina, the descent of the whole rational soul is considered; and in
that of Bacchus the scattering and going forth of that supreme part alone of our
nature which we properly characterize by the appellation of intellect.”6
In Proclus’ Hymn to Minerva we have a spirited
statement of the unified god-mind, Bacchus, fragmented:
“The Titans fell against his life conspired;
And with relentless rage and thirst for gore,
Their hands his members into fragments tore.”
Olympiodorus unfolds the dialectical thesis in three
propositions: (1). It is necessary that soul place a likeness of herself in
body. (2). It is essential that she should sympathize with this image of
herself, as it tends to seek integration with its parent. (3). “Being situated
in a divided nature, it is necessary that she should be torn to pieces and fall
into a last separation,” after which she shall free herself from the
simulacrum and rise again to unity. The gods impart their divided essence to
mortals and then the fragments seek to rejoin their parents and be united again
with them in nature. Bacchus pursued his image,
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formed in the mirror of matter, and thus was carried
downward and scattered into fragments. But Apollo collected the fragments and
restored them to union in the heavens.
If the Bible student judges all this to be foreign to his
interpretation of his Book of Wisdom, let him consult the nineteenth chapter of
Judges, and read the story of the rape and destruction of the concubine of a man
whose name is not given, but described as “a Levite . . . in the remote
highlands of Ephraim,” which would seem to identify him with some higher
spiritual principle. The concubine, who left for her father’s house in a fit
of rage, would perhaps correspond to Proserpina, the detached incarnating soul.
The man sought her, and after long dallying with her reluctant father, started
home with her, “from Bethlehem to the remote highlands of Ephraim.” At
Gibeah, among the Banjaminites, they lodged over night, and there the unruly
citizens, “certain sons of Belial” (our lower propensities) attacked the
house, forcing the man finally to send out his host’s virgin daughter and his
own concubine to be ravished by the crowd. In the morning he lifted the
concubine’s body on his ass and took her home. Here “he took a knife and cut
up the concubine’s body, limb by limb, into twelve pieces, which he sent all
over the country of Israel, telling his messengers to ask all the inhabitants,
‘Was ever such a crime committed since the Israelites left Egypt?’” Twelve
baskets of fragments in the New Testament miracle; twelve legions of angels
ready to come to Jesus’ assistance in the garden of Gethsemane; twelve stones
set in the midst of the Jordan when Joshua led the Israelites from Amenta into
the Promised Land; twelve fragments of the soul’s dismembered life in the
story in Judges! If the literalist insists that Judges is talking about a
concubine in the flesh, and not a principle of divided intellect in Greek
philosophy, the all-sufficient answer is that he thus keeps the incidents of his
Book on a level where they mean nothing and hold no instruction or appeal for
the mind of man. And the proof of this is that on the level on which he keeps
them nobody pays any attention to them. Only through Greek philosophy can we
lift such neglected allegories to a height of impressive significance.
In the “miracle” of the Lord’s feeding the five
thousand with the loaves and fishes in the Gospel narrative we have a repetition
of the dramatization of the Eucharistic rite minus only the accompanying
statement from the Christ himself that the loaves were his own body,
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broken for the multitude of humans. We have set the stage
certainly however, for the first full and clear comprehension of the meaning of
the disciples’ “gathering up” (the Egyptian reconstitution) twelve baskets
of fragments. In multiplying the bread, he dramatized the doctrine of the
dismemberment, which was in twelve main sections or groups.
But Christian intelligence is not aware that in the very
heart of its own chief rite of formalism this great doctrine lives in
unsuspected completeness. St. Paul makes a specific announcement of it in I
Corinthians (11:23):
“I pass on to you what I received from the Lord
himself, namely, that on the night he was betrayed the Lord Jesus took a loaf,
and after thanking God he broke it, saying, ‘This means my body broken for
you; do this in memory of me.”
Here is the fragmentation of the god announced at the
heart of the Christian Eucharist! The body of the Messiah broken for us! The
main symbol in all Christian ritual is the breaking of a piece of bread into
fragments and distributing them out among the communicants! And all theological
acumen has missed the relation of this to Greek Platonism just because the
recital was not explicit enough to state that the Lord’s body was broken into
pieces.
Scholars have long quarreled over the word translated
“broken,” and will do so again, doubtless more violently than before, when
the attempt is made to relate its meaning to the Greek doctrine of dismemberment
here suggested. But the quarrel is gratuitous. There may be dispute about the
word, but there can be no dispute about the act of breaking the bread, which
dramatizes the meaning. For Jesus dismembered the bread as the indisputable
outward symbol of the cosmic truth of his fragmented body of spirit; and to
avoid the use of the participle “broken” in the verse would be a faithless
betrayal of the obvious meaning of the text. Here then is Greek esoteric
philosophy functioning on the innermost altar of the Christian faith!
The entire temple of Christian theology would be
beautified and strengthened if this cardinal doctrine could once more be
adequately envisaged and included in living presentation. But, the true meaning
lost, and the spiritual signification deeply buried under the outer debris of
the myths, the Church has nothing more sublime to offer its devo-
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tees than the picture of a physical body suffering
alleged laceration on a wooden cross! Such a body could not rise and be
reconstituted. But the unit body of deific virtue, distributed out into myriad
earthly vessels of human life, broken thus and buried piecemeal in the soil of
mortal flesh, could be reassembled and reunited in the increasing brotherhood of
humanity. There is no truth in ancient scripture outside of a spiritual
rendering of the material. As soon as the Church returns to the true original
meaning of the “broken body of our Lord,” it may take up again its prime
function as nourisher of the souls of men.
Incarnation brought dismemberment; but this was not the
only form of diminished power and beauty incurred in the process. The god also
suffered many kinds of disfigurement. Dead and buried in matter, he was typed
under a variety of figures representing his suffering and deformity. The
depictions included those of a decrepit old man, a wizened babe (the
mummy-Christ), a maimed, crippled, wounded, dumb, deformed, disfigured,
demoniac, deaf, naked and ugly little child! He was bereft in every particular.
Several of the early Church Fathers, misled by the change from drama to alleged
history, actually described the person of Jesus as not comely and radiant, but
ugly and deformed! This is but one of the many absurdities that came to light
when allegorism was converted over into realism. Some of the disfigurement
material from the Scriptures must be presented here briefly:
“In the Egyptian mysteries, all who enter the nether
world as Manes to rise again as spirits, are blind and deaf and dumb and maimed
and impotent because they are the dead. Their condition is typified by that of
the mortal Horus who is portrayed as blind and maimed, deaf and dumb, in An-ar-ef,
the abode of occultation, the house of obscurity . . . where all the citizens
were deaf and dumb, maimed and blind, awaiting the cure that only came with the
divine healer, who is Horus of the resurrection in the Ritual, or Khnum, the
caster out of demons, or Iu-em-hetep, the healer, or Jesus in the Gospels,
gnostic or agnostic. This restoring of sight to the blind man, or the two blind
men, was one of the mysteries of Amenta that is reproduced amongst the miracles
in the canonical Gospels.”7
When Horus, the deliverer, descends into Amenta he is
hailed as the Prince in the City of the Blind; that is, of the dead who are
sleeping
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in their prison cells. He comes to shine into their
sepulchers and to restore spiritual sight to the blind on earth. Horus is
designated “he who dissipates the darkness and gives eyes to the gods in
obscurity.”8
“The typical blind man in Amenta is Horus in the gloom
of his sightless condition, as the human soul obscured in matter, or groping in
the darkness of the grave. Sut has deprived him of his faculties. This is Horus
An-ar-ef in the city of the blind.”
What becomes of the Gospel healings and miraculous cures
in the light of this antecedent material in the Egyptian scripts? It is a
question momentous for the future of orthodoxy. There seems to be but one answer
open to sincerity: the New Testament “miracles” are the reproductions of
ancient Egyptian religious dramatizations in the Mysteries, and not actual
occurrences.
Horus, prince in the city of blindness, as his father was
king in the realm of the dead, comes to reconstitute his father whole and
entire, and to give lost sight to all those dead as and in Osiris. The Manes
were all blind, and the god had to work a magical operation on them to restore
their sight. We have the Gospels dramatizing the god’s opening up of
intellectual faculty when at the typical age of twelve years he makes his
transformation into the adult. The Egyptian emblem of the hawk’s head given
him at that epoch betokens his restored sight. His eye, stolen from him by Sut,
is then restored. Under the astrological sign of Orion Horus was typed as the
god of the night or dark, the blind god who received sight at dawn. He describes
himself as the mortal born blind and dumb in An-ar-ef, the abode of occultation,
but who in regaining his own sight will likewise open the eyes of the prisoners
in their cells. The circle of the gods rejoices at seeing Horus take his
father’s throne and scepter and rule over the earth, replacing blindness with
spiritual sight.
A most suggestive portrayal of this condition was hinted
at in a calendar published in 1878 at Alexandria, in which there is recited a
tradition that on December 19 “serpents become blind,” and that on March 24
they “open their eyes.” (A. Nourse, p. 24). As the serpent typed here the
divine soul, the imagery is readily grasped. One must connect the story with the
yearly astrology to see its full appropriateness. We read that three months of
the year were assigned to the blind serpent or dragon in the abyss. The three
months, as elsewhere three
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days and the three kingdoms below the human, figured the
period of the god’s burial in the material worlds. “As Jonas was three days
in the whale’s belly, so must the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of
the earth.”
Jesus after his baptism announces his messianic
commission to preach “recovery of sight to the blind,” and healing to them
that are bruised. And St. Paul writes that we wait for the coming of the Lord
Jesus Christ, “who shall fashion anew the body of our humiliation.” Of Jesus
it is written that “to many blind he gave sight,” not physical but
spiritual.
The story of Samson, the luni-solar hero, does not omit
the feature of loss of sight, when, as the god in incarnation, he is shorn of
his power and bound helpless. He is eyeless in Gaza, pitiful and forlorn, like
“the blind Orion hungering for the morn”—the return of the lost light. The
Hebrews have a Talmudic tradition that Samson was lame in both his feet, which
was also the status of the child-Horus, who was pictured as maimed and halt in
his lower members, the crippled deity, as he is called by Plutarch.
Isaiah’s chapter (61) in which the Manes announces that
the Lord has sent him to bind up the broken-hearted and to open blind eyes, has
been noted. But Isaiah has a far more touching portraiture of the suffering
servant in reference to his disfigurement in chapter 53:
“His visage was so marred, more than any man, and his
form more than
the sons of men.
Disfigured till he seemed a man no more,
Deformed out of the semblance of a man.”
Horus bewails the loss of his eye to Sut who has pierced
it, or stolen it. He cries: “I am Horus. I come to search for mine eyes.” In
the spring Sut restores the god’s sight.
The mouse, the mole and the shrewmouse were all employed
as symbols of the soul shut up in darkness, in the crypt of the body. Yet only
by such burrowing in the dark underworld could the soul be transformed into a
new and higher stage of life.
Harpocrates, the Greek-Egyptian god of healing, is
traceable to the Egyptian Har-p-khart, who as a crippled deity was said to be
begotten in the dark. The term “khart” signifies a deformed child, and
includes also the idea of speechless. It should not be overlooked that our own
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word “infant,” from the Latin, means
“speechless!” Har(Horus) -p(the) -khart(speechless child) was the character
depicting the god just born into matter, and not yet able to manifest or utter
“the Word made Truth.” One of the supreme features of Horus’ mission was
to open dumb mouths, or to give mouths to the dumb. This was to cause their
lives to express the words of power and truth. Isaiah sings that “the dumb are
to break forth into singing and the lame to leap for joy.” Jesus was silent
when accused. This is all to typify the infant god in the flesh, who has not yet
learned to articulate the living reality of spiritual truth. As the human infant
is speechless for an initial period of some two years, so the god is silent in
the expression of his divine nature for a corresponding period at the beginning
of his incarnate nature for a corresponding period at the beginning of his
incarnate sojourn. At the judgment trial vindication for the Manes was assured
if he could assert that he had given bread to the hungry, speech to the
speechless, drink to the thirsty, clothes to the naked and a boat to him that
had suffered shipwreck on the Nile—of life.
A further anthropological reference of great importance
is suggested by the typology of the dawn of speech, in that it carries an
allusion to the opening up of the faculty of speech by the race with the coming
of the gods. Psychology reveals that speech was necessary for the development of
thought. But it is just as rational to say that the power to think made speech
possible.
Deprivation of breath was another form of typology for
“the dead.” And with breathing stopped, there was also the motionless heart.
The Osiris says:
“I am motionless in the fields of those who are dumb in
death. But I shall wake, and my soul shall speak in the dwelling of Tum, the
Lord of Annu.”
For it was in Beth-Annu (Bethany) in Egypt, the place of
weeping, that Osiris lay in his coffin inert and motionless. Hence Osiris is
portrayed in the likeness of the mummy called “the breathless one”; also
“the god with the non-beating heart.” Mummification set the seal of
indestructability on the soul. The god in his advent announces:
“I utter Ra’s words to the men of the present
generation, and I repeat his words to him who is deprived of breath”—the
Manes in Amenta. (Rit., Ch. 36).
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Multitudes of crippled people followed Jesus into the
mountains and cast themselves at his feet to be healed. “And he healed them;
insomuch that the multitude wondered when they saw the dumb speaking, the maimed
whole, the lame walking and the blind seeing.” (Matt. 15:29 ff.).
A festival known as the Hakera was celebrated in Egypt.
The name means “fasting” and the festival terminated the fasting with a
feast. It was for the benefit of those who had been deprived of breath, who were
dumb and blind, motionless and inert—in short, the deceased lying helpless
like “wrecks” in the fields of Amenta.
Upon the Gnostic monuments in the Roman catacombs Jesus
is portrayed in one of his two characters, matching Horus, as the little, old
and ugly Jesus; in the other he corresponds to Horus of the beautiful face. The
first is the suffering infant Messiah, the man of sorrows and acquainted with
grief, the despised and afflicted one. As Jesus in this character was never more
than twelve years of age, “Old Child was his name.” In the Pistis Sophia
Jesus is again pictured in his two characters, the first being that of the puny
child, the mortal Horus, born of the virgin mother (nature) as her blind and
deaf, her dumb and impubescent child. It was the human Horus again who was
pierced and tortured by Sut in death until the day of his triumph, when he rose
to become king and conqueror in his turn. We are by this exposition permitted to
see the mythical character of Job, the assailed one, subjected to the assaults
of Sut (Satan). Practically all the central figures of the Old Testament enact
the role of the Manes, the soul of buried deity.
In the Orphic Tablets the dead person is thus addressed:
“Hail, thou who hast endured the suffering, such as thou hadst never suffered
before; thou hast become god from man!” One portion of the Mystery ritual
recited the sufferings of Psyche in the underworld of Pluto and her rescue by
Eros, as described by Apuleius (The Golden Ass), in the cult of Isis. “Almost
always,” says Dr. Cheetham, speaking of the Mysteries, “the suffering of a
god—suffering followed by triumph—seems to have been the subject of the
sacred drama.”9 The minds of the neophytes were prepared for the glorious
breaking of the light by the preliminary ordeal of darkness, fatigue and
terrors, typical of this earth life. Carpenter10 compares with the wounding of
the side of Jesus an Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and communicating
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it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human
victim, celebrated every fifty-two years, when the constellation of the Pleiades
is at the zenith. (Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, Ch. 4).
In the Ritual the Manes cries: “Decree this, O Atum,
that if I see thy face, I shall not be pained by the signs of thy sufferings.”
In Luke (24:26) it is asked: “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things
and enter into his glory?” And John declares that in the world we shall have
tribulation.
Budge describes a form of the suffering Messiah:
“Thus the great god Ra, when bitten by the adder which
Isis made, suffered violent pains in his body, and the sweat of agony rolled
down his face, and he would have died if Isis had not treated him after he
revealed to her his hidden name.”11
The serpent formed by the goddess is the lower nature
which is made to sting the life of the god into a coma upon his incarnation. A
prayer in the Ritual pleads that the divine beings do away with the sorrow of
the Osiris-Nu, his sufferings and his pains, and that his ills be removed.
Massey draws a composite picture of the god beset with material limitation:
“This was the Horus of the incarnation, the god made
flesh in the imperfect human form, the type of voluntary sacrifice, the image of
suffering; being an innocent little child, maimed in his lower members, marred
in his visage, lame and blind and dumb and altogether imperfect.”12
But the most appealing portrayal of this phase of the
Christ experience, save that of the crucifixion of Jesus, is the picture of the
“suffering servant” in Isaiah (Ch. 53). It is so striking that we must make
space for it, in the beautiful language of the Moffatt translation:
“He was despised and shunned by men,
A man of pain who knew what sickness was;
like one from whom men turn with shuddering,
he was despised, we took no heed of him.
And yet ours was the pain he bore,
the sorrow he endured!
We thought him suffering from a stroke
at God’s own hand;
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yet he was wounded because we had sinned;
‘twas our misdeeds that crushed him;
‘twas for our welfare that he was chastised;
the blows that fell to him
have brought us healing.
.
. . . . .
And the Eternal laid on him
the guilt of all of us.
He was ill-treated, yet he bore it humbly,
he never would complain;
Dumb as a sheep led to the slaughter,
dumb as a ewe before the shearers.
They did away with him unjustly;
and who heeded how he fell,
torn from the land of the living,
struck down for sins of ours?
They laid him in a felon’s grave,
and buried him with criminals,
though he was guilty of no violence
nor had he uttered a false word.
.
. . . . .
he shall succeed triumphantly,
since he has shed his life-blood,
and let himself be numbered among rebels,
bearing the great world’s sins
and interposing for rebellious men.”
This is a graphic depiction of the nature and office of
the Christos, and written long before the appearance of any historical Jesus!
The Gospel “life” of Jesus, Isaiah’s account of the suffering servant, the
chronicle of Job’s afflictions, the pre-Christian Gnostic story of the
suffering Christ-Aeon and the description of the pierced, wounded, crucified
Horus of antique Egyptian records, match each other with unmistakable fidelity.
The diminished glory of descending godhood is also
portrayed under the figure of disrobing. As the soul descends from one plane to
another she is represented as being divested of one of her robes of glory at
each step. The student of esotericism will see at once the meaning of this. Each
plane clothes the soul with a body of its proper matter, pneumatikon, psychikon,
physikon, or spiritual, psychic, physical. As the
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soul steps down the grades of being she takes on a
coarser body, which is equivalent to her losing a more ethereal one, at each
landing. And the incubus of each heavier one yields her a less and less vivid
contact with reality. At last she descends virtually disrobed into the prison
and tomb of the gross body.
In the Ritual (Ch. 71) we are told that in his
incarnation Horus, or Iu, the Su, (Iusu, Jesu, or Jesus) “disrobes himself”
to “reveal himself” when he “presents himself to the earth.” The
Babylonian goddess Ishtar is said to have made her descent through seven gates,
at each of which she was stripped of one of her robes of glory.13 Massey gives
us an important point in Comparative Religion in the following:
“The mutilation of Osiris in his coffin, the stripping
of his corpse and tearing it asunder by Sut, who scattered it piecemeal, is
represented by the stripping of the dead body of Jesus whilst it still hung on
the cross, and parting his garments among the spoilers. ‘For they stripped him
and put on him a scarlet robe.’”14
The god sinking into earthly embodiment is stripped of
his finer robes and covered with the scarlet, red-blooded body of flesh!
In the Ritual (Ch. 172) the text runs:
“Thou puttest on the pure garment and thou divistest
thyself of the apron when thou stretchest thyself upon the funeral bed. Thou
receivest a bandage of the finest linen.”
Which is to say, that on the return, the coarse bodies
are thrown off and the robes of radiant light resumed. And what more apt symbol
of the fleshly body than an apron? It is a garment put on to fend off the grime
of earth, to hang between the purity of spirit and the smudginess of matter!
It is of the utmost significance that in the Genesis
account it is twice said that Adam and Eve knew they were naked, and that they
felt no shame the first time, but were overcome with shame after their fall into
nakedness. The sense is that their first nakedness came while they were still in
the “garden,” the celestial paradise, and probably intimates their freedom
from coarse garments of the lower natures. Their later nakedness came when they
had been spiritually stripped, though clothed with coats of skin, or fleshly
vestures. The “shame” arose from the god’s recognition of his having
fallen into a state of comparative
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degradation in which he would have to resort to sexual
methods of procreation, when hitherto his life had been renewed by the sheer
force of divine will, called kriyashakti in the East. Paul speaks of this body
of our shame, as do Plotinus and the Neo-Platonists generally. It is the main
basis of the widespread ascetic inclination in history. And the Jesus of the
Pistis Sophia tells Salome that his kingdom shall come when “thou hast
trampled under foot the garment of shame” and restored the soul, split into
male and female segments here on earth, to its pristine whole, or androgyne
condition.
In the Ritual the judgment is designated as that of the
clothed and naked. If the Manes appeared naked before the judges, it meant that
he had not overcome the grossness of his physical nature and robed himself in
more radiant spiritual garb. To appear clothed was to have resumed the shining
vestments of light. There is comment on this in Revelation (16:15): “Blessed
is he that watcheth and keepeth his garments lest he walk naked and see his
shame.” The seductions of earth and flesh were strong enough to cause many of
the Manes to lose the luster of their inner vestures. Thus disrobed of their
finer garments, they presented the evidence of their poor condition to pass the
ordeals of the judgment. What further light do we need to interpret Jesus’
parable of the man ejected from the marriage feast because he came in without a
wedding garment? Massey comments:
“The Manes in the Ritual consist of the clothed and the
naked. Those who pass the judgment hall become the clothed. The beatified
spirits are invested with the robe of the righteous, the stole of Ra, in the
garden.”15
In the resurrection ceremony of Osiris, the god is
divested of his funerary garment and receives a bandage of the finest linen from
the attendants of Ra (Rit., Ch. 172).
It is notable in this light that in Revelation the angel
discerned in flight toward the earth came with outstretched wings “and veiled
face.” And what Exodus says of Moses has meaning in this connection (Ch. 34):
“Whenever he went into the presence of the Eternal to
speak to him, he took the veil off, till he came out again; and when he came out
and gave the Israelites the orders he had received, the Israelites would notice
that the face of Moses was in a glow; whereupon Moses drew the veil over his
face again till he went into the presence of the Eternal.”
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In this symbolic fashion the wise seers of old
represented the incarnational going in and out before the Lord, the adventuring
of the immortal soul out into body where it put on the veils of matter and
flesh, and its retiring again into the holiest shrine of spirit where it dropped
its heavier outer bodies and again became “clothed in light as with a
garment.”
In the Hindu, Egyptian and Greek Mystery rites the
ceremony of indicating the soul’s pilgrimage round the Cycle of Necessity was
performed over what was called the “Snake’s Hole,” and the “Inevitable
Circle.” It was imaged by a coiled snake. A part of the rite was to strip the
snake in token of its sloughing, a symbol of the divestiture of the soul to be
clothed anew in bright raiment. Proclus states that in the most holy Mysteries
the mystae were divested of their garments to receive a new divine nature, or
vestment of salvation.
Horus covers the naked body of Osiris with a white robe
when he comes to raise the inert one. This act is paralleled in the Hebrew
scriptures when Shem and Japheth go in backward to cover the nakedness of their
father Noah. The drunkenness of Noah here betokens the swooning which
accompanies the descent, as already set forth.
A number of verses in the Bible yield new and impressive
evidence if read in the sense here indicated. The “coats of skin” made for
Adam and Eve by God would be taken as the outer physical vehicles. The Psalms
entreat that “thy priests be clothed with righteousness.” Proverbs states
that “drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.” Isaiah speaks of the joyful
ones being clothed with the garments of salvation and the robe of righteousness.
Jesus’ declaration that he was naked and “ye clothed me” would be
inconsequential if taken as a historical fact. But in II Corinthians (Ch. 5)
Paul gives strong confirmation of the higher sense:
“(For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be
clothed upon with our house which is from heaven. If so be that being clothed we
shall not be found naked. For we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being
burdened; not for that we should be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality
might be swallowed up of life).”
“It makes me sigh, indeed, this yearning to be under
the cover of my heavenly habitation, since I am sure that once so covered I
shall not be ‘naked’ at the hour of death. I do sigh within this tent of
mine with heavy anxiety—not that I want to be stripped, no, but to be under
cover of the
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other, to have my mortal element absorbed by life . . .
Come what may, then, I am confident; I know that while I reside in the body I am
away from the Lord (for I have to lead my life in faith without seeing him); and
in this confidence I would fain get away from the body and reside with the
Lord.”
This is direct and eloquent confirmation of Greek and
Egyptian philosophy in the Christian Book. Here is the soul conscious of its
alienation from heaven, miserably exiled in the flesh, made poor in spirit, yet
striving resolutely to carry the mortal burden up the hill to its summit.
Revelation (3:17) has a passage hardly less germane:
“Thou knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable
and poor and blind and naked; I counsel thee to buy from me gold refined in the
fire, that thou may be rich, white raiment to clothe you and prevent the shame
of your nakedness from being seen, and salve to rub on your eyes that you may
see.”
Revelation (19:8) gives a definition of our spiritual
clothing, when referring to the soul, the bride: “And to her was granted that
she should be arrayed in fine linen, dazzling white; (the white linen is the
righteousness of saints).” For those who rebel stubbornly against the mythical
interpretation of the Bible, let it be noted that here the writer of holy gospel
positively states that a physical thing, linen, is a spiritual quality.
And he that rode on the white horse is described as
“clothed with a vesture dipped in blood; (his name is called THE LOGOS of
God).” And here a Bible personage is merely a figure of an item of Greek
philosophy! Will we not be instructed by such things?
It needs but to make the transfer in meaning from
material to ethereal or spiritual clothing to discern the depth of practical
significance in these allusions. The revelation will be lost only for those who
persist in the assumption that Oriental imagery was so much fanciful froth, and
not an endeavor to delineate by poetic figure a veridical basis of fact and
phenomena. Instead of vaunting ourselves in superiority over presumed primitive
crudity, we may have to demonstrate even our own good rating as pupils of sage
wisdom when that is presented. The ancients had more to conceal than we yet seem
capable of grasping.
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