Chapter XII
Theological confusion over the ancient use of bread and
wine and various foods as types of spiritual nourishment makes necessary a
chapter to clarify these matters. All such figures—heavenly manna, bread,
wheat, ambrosia, nectar, meat, corn, wine, honey, barley—are forms of typology
suggestive of the deific life ordered to mortals for their immortal nutriment.
The body of spiritual intellect, Ceres, which was the true “cereal” food for
man, was crushed into bits and then welded into cake so that it might be
“eaten” by mortals. The body of Christ was the intellectual bread broken to
be made edible and assimilable by our lower range of digestive capacity. We
could not eat the god in his wholeness, or his rawness. The golden grain of
life-giving wheat had to be crushed, ground, lacerated, before it could be
rendered fit food for our consumption, in the Eucharistic cake and the
sacrificial meal on the altar. Jesus says that we must “eat” his body, and
the Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans (Apocryphal) says that the wheat of God
must be ground between the teeth of wild animals, our animal bodies, to be made
the pure bread of Christ.
The breaking of the bread and the libation of the wine
are now clearly seen to be emblematic of the partition of the unified energy of
the god’s life for distribution to the races of men. The banquets of the gods,
the Passover feasts, the funerary meals, the last suppers and the Totemic
repasts were all forms of a primary Eucharist. Man was given the transcendent
privilege of feeding upon the life of the gods! And it can be freely admitted
that nowhere is the necessity of transferring a literal physical meaning over to
a spiritual one more definitely apparent than here.
The final definitive meaning of the great Eucharistic
rite is bound up in the reconstitution of lost significance in this doctrine.
The entire debate as to the matter of transubstantiation, transfusion, the
partaking
232
of the material body and blood or their inner essence,
finds its resolution in the premises of this interpretation. Strangely enough it
is now seen to be possible to give up the physical meaning of the sacrament and
yet take it as a thing of literal reality. Man is literally to eat his Lord’s
body; only it is not a physical body. The eating is literal and real enough, but
neither it nor the body eaten is physical. Stout human good sense has revolted
at a rite of swallowing a physical body, but theology has failed to picture how
we can partake of a spiritual essence or body of divinity. The absorption and
transmutation of currents of deific life in our own nature is as possible as our
digestion of food. The physical rite was only a symbol and, its higher meaning
once apprehended, its efficacy is secured. The eating of bread and drinking of
wine outwardly dramatize the inner reality, a transubstantiation which can be
literally, though not physically, true.
Says St. Paul:
shun idolatry, then, my beloved [doubtless the material
sense of
the symbols.]
I am speaking to sensible people: weigh my words for
yourselves.
The cup of blessing which we bless,
is that not participating in the blood of Christ?
The bread we break,
is that not participating in the body of Christ?
(for many as we are, we are one Bread, one Body, since we
all
partake of the one Bread).”1
But the nauseous ecclesiastical wrangling over whether
the bread and wine were the body and blood of a historical Jesus, or merely
symbols of them, points to the frightful desecration of the wholly spiritual and
figurative nature of the drama. The inner sense of this mighty typology passed
out of ken with the submergence of Greek wisdom under canonical literalism. The
body of Christ, emblemed by bread, wheat, ambrosia, meat, flesh or other forms
of solid food, can mean nothing but the substantial essence of divine nature;
the blood, wine, nectar, ichor, honey and liquid forms of nourishment can mean
only that same divinity when liquefied to be poured out in streams of
nourishment for man. The cutting of meat is to render it macerable; the grinding
of grain is to render it edible; the crushing of the grape for wine is to
liquefy it for drinking. In every case there is the destruc-
233
tion of the bodily integrity of the food, and a
fragmentation for better assimilation. The ritualism of Christianity thus still
dramatizes the principles of Greek spiritual philosophy, which it persists in
denying as part of a true religious system. If we were to eat the body of
Christos and drink his blood, the first had to be macerated and the second
liquefied.
Briefly, solid food typified divine essence on its own
high plane, the more ethereal states being the more substantial! Liquid forms
emblemed the same divine nature poured out in streams, “rivers of
vivification,” for the feeding of “secondary natures.” Also in its descent
godhood became admixed with the “watery” elements of the life down here and
were further liquefied thereby. Solid food was the emblem of stability; liquid
food the sign of that mobile essence which was to run out in blessing.
The several symbols must be looked at more minutely, for
they cover deep suggestions of vital meaning. We take first that of bread. There
is in all literature no more direct and compelling statement of the spiritual
significance of bread than the verses of John’s Gospel (6:47 ff). Says Jesus:
“I am the bread of life. Your fathers did eat Manna in
the wilderness and have died; such is the bread that comes down from heaven,
that a man shall eat of it and shall not die.
“And in truth the bread which I shall give for the life
of the world is my flesh.
“Verily, verily I say unto you, Unless you eat the
flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you have not life in you. He that
eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up
at the last day.
“For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink
indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me and I in
him.”2
The bread is, then, the radiant divine principle of light
and life. The blood is the pledge of the same life poured out for man’s behoof.
But Jesus was not the only divine personage who offered his body and blood for
the nourishment of mortals. Says Massey:
“Horus was not only the bread of life derived from
heaven and the producer of bread in the character of Amsu, the husbandman; he
also gave his flesh for food and his blood for drink.”3
234
Horus says (Rit., Ch. 53A): “I am the possessor of
bread in Annu. I have bread in heaven with Ra.” Again the deceased says: “I
am the lord of cakes in Annu; and my bread is in heaven with Ra, and my cakes
are on the earth with the god Seb.” The distinction here between bread in
heaven and cakes on earth is perhaps of vast significance, matching, as it does,
many assertions that the soul is in heaven and the body on earth. The cake form
of the divine pastry must have been regarded as a state of soul more highly
advanced or refined by organic evolution. Many texts carry out the two types.
The soul continues: “I eat of what they [the gods] eat there; and I eat of the
cakes which are in the hall of the lord of sepulchral offerings”—or bread
with the gods in heaven and cakes with the “dead” on earth. And in the
Rubric to the 71st chapter of the Ritual this meaning is confirmed:
“Sepulchral bread shall be given to him and he shall come forth into the
presence of Ra day by day, and every day, regularly and continually.”
Sepulchral bread, like the funerary meals, undoubtedly refers to the “bread of
Seb,” or food of earth, earth and body being the sepulcher of the soul.
Wheat is much employed as a symbol. The law of divine
incubation in matter is expressly intimated in Budge’s account of the
Resurrection in Egypt:
“The grain which is put into the ground is the dead
Osiris, and the grain which has germinated is the Osiris who has once again
renewed his life.”4
The resurrection of Osiris is closely interwoven with the
germination of wheat. Jesus announces: “My father giveth you the true bread
out of heaven and giveth life unto the world.” And as Jesus was the divine
bread out of heaven, the consubstantial essence with the Father, so Horus: “He
is Horus, he is the flesh and blood of his father Osiris.” Horus in his
Christological character says: “I am a soul and my soul is divine. I am he who
produceth food. I am the food that perisheth not—in my name of
self-originating force, together with Nu”—the Mother Heaven. (Rit., Ch. 85).
The body of Christ could not be mystically eaten in its
wholeness and unreduced power. It had to be crushed and bruised, broken and
mutilated, so that from its deep gashes would flow out the living streams. If
taken literally and materially, the wounded side is not only
235
gruesome, but carries only a feeble suggestion of its
grand meaning. And herein lies the spiritual meaning of all blood sacrifice and
“shed blood.” There is no truth found in it until for “blood” (of the
gods) we read “divine intellect.” Had early theology made it clear, in a
word, that the “shed blood” of God connoted spiritual force, which we must
embody in our lives, there would have been a vastly less amount of actual
“bloodshed” in European history! The god shed his life essence for us out of
his earth-bruised body of deific mind.
On this divine wheat, it is said, Osiris and his
followers lived. It was a form of Osiris himself, as the god who brought it from
heaven, and those who are it and lived upon it nourished themselves upon their
god. As he came to feed them, he is declared to have “provided them with food
and drink as he passed through the Tuat.” How the partaking of the divine body
would affect man is set forth by Budge:
“Eating and drinking with the spirits raised man’s
nature and ‘made his spirit divine,’ and destroyed the feeling of separation
which came with the appearance of death . . . And it must always be remembered
that the altar was the place to possess the power of transmuting the offerings
which were laid upon it and of turning them into spiritual entities of such a
nature that they became suitable food for the god Osiris and his spirits.”5
But we are those spirits, the living men or Manes in this
underworld. The recovered Logia, or “sayings of the Lord,” give a most
direct allusion to the dismemberment doctrine of the Eucharist in the line:
“the flesh of the Son of God, broken for all souls.”
By a slight shifting of the symbol, the ceremony
performed in the rites of many lands, of eating the serpent and drinking the
dragon’s blood, was a replica of the Eucharistic festival. For the serpent was
universally a type of supernal wisdom—“wise as serpents”—or the
intellectual nature of the gods.
Horus, we find, was the Kamite prototype of Bacchus, Lord
of Wine. Like Bacchus and Jesus, Horus is the vine, whose season was celebrated
at the Uaka festival, with prodigious rejoicing and a deluge of drink. The
divine mania, declared by Plato to be better than laborious reason, was the
heady transport resulting from the imbibing of the spiritual liquor of life. The
Bacchic feast of intoxication was, however sensual in later performance, a token
of the legitimate and blessed ecstasy of the soul upon partaking of the heavenly
wine. The
236
vine and the mixing bowl were constellated as celestial
symbols, the latter as the cluster called the Crater (Latin: bowl) or the
Goblet, the sacramental cup or grail. The juice of the grape was the blood of
Horus or Osiris, in the Egyptian Eucharist.
The Manes in one of the chapters in the Ritual prays that
he may have possession of all things whatsoever that were offered
ritualistically for him in the nether world, the “table of offerings which was
heaped” for him on earth, “the solicitations that were uttered” for him,
“that he may feed upon the bread of Seb,” or food of earth experience.
“Let me have possession of my funeral meals.” A fact that should loom large
in any valuation of Eucharistic meaning is that the flat surface of the coffin
lid of the mummified Osiris constituted the table of the Egyptian Last Supper.
It was the board whereon were served the mortuary meals. This unmistakable
connection of the Eucharist with the burial, which is only the passing of the
god into the mummy or incarnate form, speaks volubly as to the hidden relation
of the two symbolic operations. For the god, about to be buried in body, was to
be eaten by the mortal nature.
Ancient tribes indulged in the rite of a symbolic feeding
upon the body of their god. At times when spiritual symbology had passed into
the literalism of ignorance and barbarity, a living victim was cut to pieces and
actually eaten by the celebrants. In very early periods of the matriarchate,
when the mother was the only known giver and fount of life, a living mother was
dedicated to the office of hostia or victim, and her body cut up and eaten as a
token of the distribution of her fecund life. “The primordial Eucharist was
eating the Mother’s flesh and drinking her blood!6 A converted phase of this
custom exhibits the idea of the “disrobing” combined with the Eucharistic
rite:
“A young girl called (significantly) the Meriah, was
stripped stark naked and bound with cords to a maypole crowned with flowers, and
ultimately put to death . . . torn to pieces and partly eaten.”7
Human sacrifices were later commuted to animal offerings.
And when crude natural instincts were softened by humane ideals, bread and wine
were substituted. Thus one can see how an original spiritual conception, passing
from hand to hand in the lapse of time and changing mores, reverts at one time
to a brutal literalism amongst untamed
237
peoples and again rises to symbolism in more cultured
races. Through all stages, however, can be seen the lineaments of the germinal
high spiritual idea back of each rite.
One of the Egyptian texts reads: “Shesmu cuts them in
pieces and cooks them in his fiery cauldrons.” Another line runs: “O,
Osiris-Pepi, the Sma-Bull is brought to thee cut in pieces.”
Expressing a phallic significance to the ritual, it is of
interest to note that in very remote tribal celebrations of the Eucharist the
female participants invited the fecundating offices of the males. The two
sisters, or wife and sister, of Horus plead with the still recumbent god to
arise and come and embrace them. There are two women in the Biblical
resurrection scene. And when Isis and Nephthys invite the young lord to come to
them, Isis says: “Thou comest to us from thy retreat to . . . distribute the
bread of thy being, that the gods may live and men also.” This is of
transcendent importance as pointing to the verification of the basic thesis of
our study, that the dip into incarnation is an avenue of evolutionary advance
for both the god and the animal-human in their linked lives. It is striking that
in this context both Jesus and Horus are themselves raised up from death, and
both raise up in turn those below. Two far separate streams of evolution are
confluent in man, and both are going onward as the result of their co-operative
life in one body. The Manes pleads:
“May I go in and come out without repulse at the pylons
of the lords of the underworld; may there be given unto me loaves of bread in
the house of coolness, and offerings of food in Annu (Heliopolis) and a
homestead forever in Sekhet-Aarru (paradise), with wheat and barley therefor.”8
And the Rubric to this chapter recites that if the
chapter be known by the Manes he shall come forth in Sekhet-Aarru, “and he
shall eat of that wheat and barley and his limbs shall be nourished therewith,
and his body shall be like unto the bodies of the gods.” Here is perfect
matching of Egyptian script with Paul’s statement that Christ shall “change
our vile body into the likeness of his glorious body.”
Holy Thursday was especially consecrated by the Roman
Church to a commemoration of the Last Supper, and the institution of the
Eucharistic meal was fixed, at which the corpus of the Christ, already dead, was
laid out to be eaten sacramentally. In the Gospels the Last
238
Supper, with Jesus present, is eaten before the
crucifixion has occurred. There is obviously confusion of ancient ritualistic
practice here, yet strangely enough no grave violence is done to the inner
significance either way, since the Christ was “dead” in the one sense, and
alive in the other. The whole of incarnation is the “crucifixion, death and
burial” of the Lord.
After the raising of Osiris Taht says: “I have
celebrated the festival of Eve’s provender,” or the meal which came to be
called the Last Supper. The raising of Lazarus is likewise commemorated by a
supper. “So they made him a supper there” (John 12:2).
In the Greek Mystery play the candidate for initiation
underwent the taurobolium or bull’s-blood bath. He stood under a grating and
received upon his naked body the dripping blood of the sacrificial bull, in
token that his nature was being suffused with the shed blood of the god emblemed
by the astrological sign of Taurus, as in Christian practice it was the blood of
the ram or lamb, the zodiacal Aries. The sign of the sun in the spring equinox
determined the zodiacal type under which the Christos was figured. Elsewhere
animal blood was actually drunk as a more literal partaking of the emblem of
divine life.
In the Ritual the evening meal depicted the absorption of
the higher nature into and by the lower, and the occasion was called the
“Night of Laying Provision on the Altar.” Not in a given moment of time, but
in the total course of the cycle, each physical body was to be transubstantiated
into spirit. The whole round of human incarnations was provided to this end. As
the physical was converted into sublimated essence, we have an explanation of
the strange disappearance of the physical body in all resurrection scenes. In
one of the texts cited by Birch concerning the burial of Osiris at Abydos, it is
said that the sepulchral chamber was searched, but the body was not found.
“The ‘Shade’ it was found.”9 In Marcion’s account of the resurrection
no body is found in the tomb; only the phantom or shade was visible there. So in
the Johannine version (Ch. 20:17) the body of Jesus is missing; the “Shade”
is present in the tomb. But this was of a texture which forbade it being
touched.
The night of the evening meal was called also “the
night of hiding him who is supreme of attributes” (Rit., Ch. 18). We have seen
that
239
the descent into the tomb of body was considered a
hiding, and the period of incarnation was called the night of the soul.
The Eucharistic emblems are many and varied. The deceased
in the Ritual prays: “Grant unto me ale, and let me cleanse myself by means of
the haunch and by the offerings of cakes.” In Chapter 65 cakes of white grain
and ale of red grain are mentioned. The juxtaposition of the statements in the
following citation is noteworthy, as identifying the emblems with their
non-material references: “Thou descendest under protection; are given unto
thee breed, wine and cakes . . . thou art endowed with a soul, with power and
with will.” “he hungers not, for he eats bread-cakes made of fine flour . .
. He lives on the daily bread which comes in this season”—of incarnation.
“He shall have offered wine and cakes and roasted fowl for the journey . .
.” The bird was a universal symbol of the soul, and its descent into the lower
fires of earth and hell provided the basis of the allegory of “roasting.” In
Chapter 106 the Manes says: “Give me bread and beer. Let me be made pure by
the sacrificial joint, together with white bread.” Horus is both the bread of
life and the divine corn (Rit. Ch. 83). In I Corinthians (37:38) Paul has a
remarkable imagery of divine food:
“And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body
that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain.
But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own
body.”
The remarkable passage from the Apocryphal Epistle of
Ignatius to the Romans, already quoted should be recalled at this point, as it
definitely states that the soul comes to be food to the wild beasts, by whom it
will attain its new godhood. The figure of the soul as wheat, ground between the
teeth of the wild animals to be made the pure bread of Christ, is a most pungent
typograph,--of the incarnation. And this passage prepares the ground for
understanding the relevance of the manger symbolism in the Nativity scene. The
Christ, at birth, was laid in a manger, the place where animals eat! He came to
be eaten by the lower, animal nature.
In the Ritual the soul entreats: “Give thou bread to
this Pepi, give thou beer to him, of the bread of eternity, and of the beer of
everlastingness.” “This bread which can not go mouldy is brought to Pepi,
240
and this wine which can not go sour.” What sublime
imagery for states of spiritual immortality, and natures that change not!
A special feature in connection with the Eucharistic
bread is seen in several passages from the Ritual, which are of great weight in
stabilizing the general position of the purely figurative nature of the symbols.
It is found in the chapter “of not eating filth in the underworld.”:
“Let food come unto me from the place whither thou wilt
bring food, and let me live upon the seven loaves of bread, which shall be
brought as food before Horus, and upon bread which is brought before Thoth . . .
Let me not eat filth and let me not trip up and fall in the underworld.”
Again in the “chapter of not letting a man perform a
journey being hungry” we read:
“Let me live upon the seven cakes which shall be
brought unto me, four cakes before Horus, and three cakes before Thoth.”
Four is the number of the lower physical world of the
body, three the number of the soul as the triad of mind, soul, spirit. Horus was
the soul in matter, Thoth the cosmic spirit.
Massey writes that a three-days fast was ended by the
feeding of the multitude on what the Ritual terms “celestial diet,” i.e.,
the “seven loaves” of heavenly bread that were supplied as sustenance for
the risen dead in Annu, “the place of multiplying bread.” In this phrase
descriptive of Annu (Anu), one of the cities named as both the place of death
and resurrection of the sun-god, we find the open sesame to the New Testament
“miracle” of Jesus feeding the multitude. But in the Gospel “miracle,”
instead of the seven loaves we have the five loaves and the two small fishes,
the latter being introduced evidently to bring in the Piscean house along with
Virgo, the house of bread.
Hebrew symbology closely matches Egyptian. In Exodus (29)
one reads that
“With the former lamb you must offer about seven pints
of fine flour mixed with nearly three pints of beaten oil, and nearly three
pints of wine as a libation . . . This is to be a regular burnt-offering made,
age after age, at the entrance of the Trysting-Tent before the Eternal, where I
meet you and speak to you.”
If it was known that this Trysting-Tent is the human
body, where alone God can meet man and speak to him, and that the three pints of
241
oil and wine stand for the three elements of divine
consciousness that are to be mixed with the seven elementary powers of nature or
physis, the brotherhood of man might not so fearfully have miscarried. The human
body is the place where the two lovers, spirit and matter, or body and soul,
make their tryst, and that they are to make their libation to the Eternal before
the entrance to the tent indicates that the higher and lower partners to the
coming marriage compound their elements as they enter into incarnation. One
stroke of symbolism tells us more than volumes of theology.
Divine food is called sometimes simply “meat.”
“Thou hast in great abundance in the Fields of the Gods the meat and drink
which the gods live upon therein.”
Even butter comes in as a type of representation, and
coming from a female source, indicates the material foundation of life. The
seven cows of Hathor produce the divine butter. As the formation of primal
matter out of the primeval undifferentiated essence was pictured as a kind of
curdling, the butter symbolism has a profound cosmical significance.
The Manes’ life is fed upon divine food throughout its
sojourn in Amenta; Horus and Jesus, Jonah and Ioannes of Babylonia, all came as
the zodiacal Pisces, or the Fish, offering themselves as food for man while he
is immersed in the sea of generation! The Egyptians saw in the tortoise, which
lived half in water and half on land, the sign of Libra, the Balance, and took
it as another type of divine nourishment, when the two natures, divine and
human, are in equilibration in the body.
When the Manes have sufficiently cultivated the fields of
Aarru, Ra says to them: “Your own possessions, gods, and your own domains,
elect, are yours. Now eat. Ra . . . appoints you your food.” They have labored
at cultivation and at last they collect their harvest of corn. Their seeds are
warmed into germination by the sunlight of Ra at his appearance. The radiance of
the god in human life causes the divine seed buried in us to sprout and grow as
the sun fructifies plants in any earthly garden. The elect, enveloped in light,
are fed mysteriously with food from heaven. Milk is one of the types used and is
called “the white liquor which the glorified ones love,” and it was supplied
by the seven cows, of course, providers of plenty in the meadows of Aarru. The
seven cows, of course, emblem the seven modifications of cosmic en-
242
ergy which create and sustain the worlds of life, the
appropriate counterparts of which irradiate man’s being and formulate his
basic constitution. The uplifted Manes says: “I eat of the food of
Sekhet-Hetep and I go onward to the domain of the starry gods.” The zodiacal
twelve supply food to the gods and the elect in two groups, seven reapers and
five collectors of corn (Book of Hades). The spiritualized Manes live on the
food of Ra, “and the meats belong to the inhabitants of Amenta,” a possible
reference to the animal bodies on earth. The divine food is apparently repeated
in the quails and manna that were sent from heaven in the Biblical account. The
Osiris-Nu asserts: “I am the divine soul of Ra proceeding from the god Nu;
that divine soul which is God. I am the creator of the divine food . . . which
is not corrupted in my name of Soul.” This soul “comes to him and brings him
abundance of celestial food, and what the god lives on he also lives on, and he
partakes of the food and drink and offerings of the god.” At another place we
are told that the Manes “maketh his purificatory substances with figs and wine
from the vineyard of the god.”
As the living rivers flow forth out of the heart of
eternal matter, the womb of all life, the godly nutriment is again proffered to
man streaming from the breast of the Mother Isis or Hathor. “She giveth him
her breast and he suckleth thereat.” Paul (I Corinthians 10:1, 2) writes that
all those in Christ have eaten “the same supernatural food and all drank the
same supernatural drink (drinking from the supernatural Rock which accompanied
them—and that Rock was Christ).” Revelation (2:17) enlightens us with the
following: “To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden manna.”
When the deceased is making his way through Amenta, Hathor, the Egyptian Venus,
goddess of Love, emerges from the trees and offers him a drink of fruit juice,
which she prepared to woo him with. By accepting this gift he is bound to remain
the guest of the goddess and return no more to the world of the living, unless
by her permission. This fruit is not that which is sent down gratuitously from
heaven, but the fruit of the soul’s living experience on earth, yet it is the
same thing in the end. For it is sent down as seed, and bears its fruit on the
ends of the branches of the Tree of Life and Knowledge, of the taste of good and
evil here on earth. And this is the same tree which in the last chapter in the
Bible is declared to bear twelve fruits upon its branches. These
243
twelve fruits are the completed unfoldment of the twelve
original types of Kumeric infant deity that will be brought to their maturity by
cultivation on this planet. The bread of Seb becomes metamorphosed eventually
into the divine food. Eve and Hathor are identical figures. They offer to virgin
spiritual units and to animal man the opportunity to live, grow and create, out
of which cycle they will emerge as gods, through knowledge of good and evil. And
the temptation is baited with the promise, “yet shall not surely die.” The
fruit of earthly life is divinization. Says Massey:
“Hathor was the goddess draped in golden vesture, who
drew men with the cords of a love that was irresistible.”
“Instead of being damned eternally through eating the
fruit of the tree, the Manes in Amenta are divinized piecemeal as the result of
eating it.” (Rit., Ch. 82).10
Again pause must be made to reflect that had these two
items of theology been known in clear light, as here presented, whole centuries
of human bigotry and hate might have been painted in brighter colors.
Red as the color of blood, and white, the color of milk,
emblem the two natures of man, his bodily birth through the mother’s blood,
and his later nourishment through her milk. Red is connected closely with the
first Adam, whose name means in one interpretation, Red Earth, that is, physical
matter mixed with red blood. In this character he would be the answer to the
Bible’s query, “Who is this that comes from Edom, with his garments crimson
in Bozrah?” Edom was this man Adam, red earth, mortal clay mixed with the life
essence of divinity typed by the blood, in which the Old Testament affirms
several times the life of the soul is to be found. And he who comes out of Edom
may be taken as the Christ, the Son of Man. For the first Adam is to give birth
to the second Adam. Blood here types the divine part of man, as contrasted with
earth or with water. Jesus emblems the two births as those of “water and the
blood.” But when the blood is used to typify the lower natural man then it is
contrasted with the white essence, the mother’s milk, a higher nutriment than
her blood, or with the father’s seminal essence. White universally types that
which is spiritually highest, up to the shining white raiment of the redeemed.
Perfection being the synthesis of all lower or divided natures in original
unity, white represents that perfection, as it is the synthesis of the
244
colors. Ra says to the god: “Light the earth up bright!
My benefits are for you who are in the light.” The food he promised them is
itself of the nature of intellectual light. “The immortal liquor is the Solar
Light.”11 No utterance surpasses this for sublime import. A Chaldean Oracle
asserts that “the Intelligible is food to that which understands.” And the
solar light is intelligence, shining abroad.
Looking now at wine, many phases of meaning not commonly
considered are brought to view. The grape and the vine share in the symbolism.
There is first the significant detail, brought out by Massey, that the Egyptian
Garden of Aarru, or Allu (the Islamic Garden of Allah!) has in the Ritual the
same essence as the substance of that celestial life itself in the Paradise
above. The wine offered by the gods for man’s uplift is their celestial
nature.
Horus came as the lord of wine and is said to be “full
of wine” at the Uaka festival. The old “festival of intoxication” is the
prototype of all later communal rites that celebrate the outpouring of lofty
deity. The form of this festival has become universally popular, but as usual
its interior meaning has been lost. The Christian Agape and Eucharist are
moderate demonstrations of the same old effort to commemorate the perpetual gift
of divine afflatus to mankind. Horus achieved the sub-title of “the Jocund”
when he rose up “full of wine,” and was astrologically typed as Orion, with
the constellation of the Crater or bowl for his cup. The fable said that this
cup held seven thousand gallons of intoxicating drink and that Horus brought the
grapes to make the wine. “Thou didst put grapes in the water that cometh forth
from Edfu.” The seven thousand had no explicit numerical significance beyond
the number seven itself, the thousands only adding the idea of multiple division
and diffusion. Horus came to distribute to the thousands of mortals the divine
essence in its seven-fold expression in the full gamut of its nature. Who shall
prove that the Jesus of the canonical Gospels, who gained notoriety as a
wine-bibber and came eating and drinking, is not a frayed copy of this Kamite
original? For Greece in her Bacchus repeated the same type. Christ came to
intoxicate man with the divine wine.
In the Assyrian account of the Deluge those who came out
of the ark poured out a libation of seven jugs of wine. And they built an
245
altar on the peak of the mountain, or set up contact
between man and god at the summit of man’s spiritual being. Likewise after the
Deluge Noah planted the vine and became intoxicated. This vine may be seen in
the decans of Virgo, where the star Vindemeatrix denotes the time of the vintage
in Egypt, a symbol of the infusion of the higher nature into the lower.
The Christ treading the grapes in the winepress is all
very like the portrait of Har-Tema (Horus), the mighty avenger of his despoiled
father, and he came at the end and the re-beginning of the cycle of incarnation,
which is called the year of redemption. Careful research discloses that Edom is
another name for Esau, the Red; he had asked to be fed with pottage, translated
in one text “red.” Edom, not identical with Eden, seems to refer to earth as
the “red land.” In all its Biblical usages Edom refers to the lower kingdom
of human nature, not the celestial sphere in any case. Edom was heavily punished
by the Eternal, David put garrisons in it and reduced its people to servants,
and they later revolted. It refused passage to the Israelites, as the lower
nature refused entry to the godly part. In Obadiah (I:6) we read: “But what a
ransacking of Edom! What a rifling of her treasures!” Edmonites were Esau’s
descendants. The avenging god’s anger (dramatization merely, of course) is
apparently vented upon the lower propensities of human nature, which are the
foes of his incarnating enterprise, the obstructors of his path and mutilators
of his father Osiris. The figure of treading the winevat is a noble one and
definitely points to the earth as the great winepress wherein the essence of the
mortal nature is crushed and trampled by deity into a liquor to reinforce the
god’s dying life. That the god trod the winepress alone is evidence of the
loneliness of his mission. Jesus’ loneliness is accentuated in the Gospel
drama. That the god comes from the underworld stained with the blood of his foes
is an allegorical way of saying that he had not kept himself entirely
“unspotted from the world” in his wrestling with the flesh. Greek philosophy
asserts that his garments were badly stained by terrene contacts.
Plutarch tells us that the Egyptian priests conceived
vines to have sprung from the blood of those fallen deities mixed with the
earth. A Babylonian legend sets forth that the blood of the god Belus was mixed
with the earth in the same way. Man is compounded of the mud
246
of earth for his body, and the blood of the gods for his
animating soul. He is Adam, red earth.
Hathor, the great mother of the living in Egyptian
mythology, pours out the heavenly drink made from the fruit of the sycamore-fig
tree, a most prominent ancient form of the tree of life. Hathor was the Shekhem,
or shrine of the child, figured as the bearing tree, the genetrix, the womb,
bird-cage and significantly the tomb, not that of final death, but of buried
life about to germinate. The word Shekhem, hidden shrine, is from sekh,
“liquid,” “drink.” Teka means “to supply with drink.” The fig, like
the pomegranate, is an emblem of the womb. The Persea fruit is the fruit of the
sycamore-fig tree. Sycamore is from sykos (sukos), the Greek for the fig-tree,
from the fruit of which a powerful beverage was made. The root means latent
power unfolded, as by fermentation; to fill with aeriform spirit force, as by
the bubbles of air in fermentation. It becomes possible now to sense the meaning
of Jesus’ pronouncement (Luke 17:6):
“If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed ye would
say unto this sycamore tree [Moffatt: ‘mulberry’], Be thou rooted up and be
thou planted in the sea; and it would have obeyed you.”
As Revelation and the Book of the Dead both describe the
entry of divine fire into the “sea,” causing a fermentation in it to
spiritualize or divinize it, the sycamore’s removal into the sea to lodge
inspiriting power in it at last comes to clear significance. To have faith as a
grain of mustard seed, so tiny, is for the soul, buried in the deep soil of the
mortal self, to have an instinctive assurance that, like the life in any seed,
it will rise out of death to live again.
Who can fail to trace the Genesis story in the following
legend preserved among the Hottentots? The deity, Heitsi Eibib, tells his son
Urisip, the whitish one, not to eat of the raisin trees in the valley. Heitsi
Eibib in his travels came to a valley (the earth) in which the raisin trees were
ripe. There he was attacked by a severe illness. Then his young second wife (Eve
is often called Adam’s second wife, Lilith being the first) said: “This
brave one is taken ill on account of these raisins; death is here at the
place.” The old man told his son: “I shall not live, I feel it.” And he
spoke further: “This is the thing which I order you not to do: Of the raisin
trees of this valley ye shall not eat, for if ye eat of them I shall infect you;
and ye shall surely die in a
247
similar way.” So he died. When they moved to another
place, they heard always from the side whence they had come a noise as of people
eating raisins and singing. The song ran:
The raisin tree gave dysentery, and
this natural detail was used to prefigure the sickness, swooning, distress and
intoxication that came over the gods upon their plunge into this life, or their
eating of the fruit of the tree whose juice made them drunk with a mixture of
spiritous and sensuous ingredients. This is, in short, to type the effect of
incarnation upon the god as a bewildering, befuddling, stupefying drunkenness,
as from a semi-poison injected into his blood; and such indeed the Platonists
have ever described it.
"Heaven is pregnant with
wine" is an Egyptian fragment.
In the Book of Judges (Ch. 6)
Gideon, the son of Joash, is found beating out some wheat inside the
winepress to save it from Midian, when the angel of the Lord comes down to
entrust him with the commission to redeem Israel. What appears here like a mixed
metaphor is perhaps only a close mingling of several customary symbols. Beating
out the chaff was a kindred figure with that of stamping out the wine.
Greek philosophy, rising sphinxlike
out of the Orphic Mysteries, proclaims a hidden meaning of the grapes in the
winepress. Thomas Taylor says that the pressing of grapes is as evident a symbol
of the dispersion of divine energy into humanity as could well be devised.12 The
grape was for this reason consecrated to Bacchus, who personalized empyreal
intelligence flowing out in divided streams. Previous to its pressing it aptly
represented that which is collected into one; when pressed into juice it aptly
represented the diffusion of the same. Hence wine-pressing symbols the crushing
and division of unity to flow into multiplicity and spiritize divided creatural
life. What is most singular is that Taylor likens this process to another
oft-used typology, that of fleece, stating that the Greek word for
"wool," lenos, is practically identical with that for a
"winepress," lenôs. The tearing and carding of wool matches
the liquidation of the grape for purposes of typism. Should it be deemed
248
strange, then, that Gideon, found
threshing wheat in the winepress, should immediately ask the Eternal to
authenticate his commission to him by the test of the dew on the fleece? It need
hardly be pointed out what strength these symbols of wine and fleece, along with
flour, bring to the theory of dismemberment. And there is also the obvious
suggestion of the fruitful rendering of the symbolism of the mythological Golden
Fleece (Aries of the zodiac), as typing the Christ avatar who came under that
sign. Fleece, says Taylor, is the symbol of laceration or distribution of
intellect, or Dionysus, into matter; and he adds that Isidorus traces lana (Latin:
"wool") from laniando, "tearing," as vellus (Latin:
"fleece") from vellendo, also "tearing." "Delano,"
"to tear asunder," he uses "in relation to Bacchic
discerption." So succinctly and integrally is the history of ideas
preserved in the amber of words.
Massey explains:
"The typical tree of life in an
Egyptian-Greek planisphere is the grapevine. This is the tree still represented
by the female vine-dresser and the male grape-gatherer in the decans of Virgo
[W. H. Higgins, Arabic Names of the Stars]. Orion rose up when the grapes
were ripe to represent the deliverer who was coming ‘full of wine.’"13
The birthplace of the grapes was
figured in or near the sign of Virgo, the mother of the child who was to rise up
out of death to bring salvation to lower man under the symbol of the vine. He
was also typed as the rising Nile, bringing a new birth to the parched land of
Egypt. And the grape ripened with the rising inundation! In ways that astonish
us with the fidelity of the parallelism, both natural and astronomical phenomena
reflect man’s inner history.
The vine and sycamore tree were two
types of producing life in the Kamite Paradise. In the Papyrus of Nu the
Manes prays that he may sit under his own vine and also beneath the refreshing
foliage of the sycamore-fig tree of Hathor. The Garden of Aarru is the garden of
the grape, and the god Osiris is sometimes seated in a Naos, under the vine,
from which branches of grapes are hanging. Moreover Osiris was charactered as
the vine and his son Horus the unbu or Branch. Need we pause to point out
the identity of this with the Biblical sentence (I Kings 4:25): "And
Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his
fig-tree"?
249
Jesus was the true vine of the Logos
and we are his branches, destined to bear the fruit. Horus bore the same
representative character in Egypt. The American Indians have traditions of
tribes climbing to safety across the Mississippi, or up out of the interior of
mother earth to the land of light, by means of trees with overhanging branches
and grapevines. (Schoolcraft: VI, 14). Jack climbing the bean stalk to overcome
the ogre is a variant of the aboriginal type-legend.
The Eucharist easily lends itself to
characterization as a festival of intoxication if it is viewed in the light of
the following lines from the Ritual: "Are not all hearts drunk
through love of thee, O Un-Nefer (Osiris), triumphant?" The entire body of
mystic testimony from St. Augustine to St. Francis of Assizi and on through to
the modern revivalist, is to the effect of the spiritual intoxication of the
supreme love frenzy or mania, as Plato terms it. It needs no descanting to
enhance it further. There is every warrant for the ancient imagery. Only it must
be seen as working at both ends of the gamut. The meaning covered by
intoxication, a swooning and giddy stupefaction after his entry into mortal
body; while mortal man undergoes a more positive intoxication, an exaltation and
marvelous giddy expansion of his faculties when he becomes filled with the power
of divine intellect and begins to feel its influence expanding the whole range
and vividness of his consciousness. The one is to be thought of as a scattering
of wits, the other as an overpowering afflatus. Yet incarnation is the open door
to both god and animal for the advance into higher life, and their opposite
elements finally so merge in the new expansion that the intoxication is the same
for both in the end. The god, drunk with animal sensual enjoyment, and the
animal mind, intoxicated with undreamed-of delirium, reel onward together in the
dance of life, and who shall sharply distinguish where intoxication ends and
ecstasy begins? All this is germane to the understanding of the symbolism and
the irrefragible factuality behind it.
The Delaware Indians put into effect
an outward demonstration of the intoxicating imagery when in one of their
festivals an old man threw handfuls of tobacco on heated stones in a tent, and
the sitters, narcotized by the fumes, were carried in a swoon. The ceremony
typed the inhalation of spirit, producing a delirious rapture. Vapor has ever
been a mode of representing spirit, and the smoke of the Indian’s
250
pipe was suggestive of allaying the
fierce nature of rude forest children to mildness and peace.
The Egyptian typology placed a Lake
of Sa in the northern heavens. Sa was the name of a sort of ichor that
circulated in the veins of the gods and perfected mortals. This they could
communicate to men on earth and give them health, vigor and new life. This datum
will be of significance when we come to study the Egyptian spirit body, the Sahu.
Honey, as symbol, shared place with
the Greek nectar served at the tables of the Olympian gods. Its plain suggestion
is of the sweetness of the divine life as sustenance for starving mortals, and
as bestowing immortality. Some of its relevance of course can be traced to its
origin from the bee. There is a tradition that bees alone of all animals
descended from Paradise. Virgil (Georgics IV) celebrates the never-dying
bee that ascends alive into heaven. The faithful diligent insect is thus an
image of the immortal soul, or the god. Egyptian typology makes the Abait, or
bird-fly, the guide of the souls of the dead on their way to the fields of Aarru,
the land of celestial honey. The "beeline" directness of travel
betokens the unerring sense of the soul, lost afar in Amenta’s fields, to go
straight home. This Aarru is, of course, "Jerusalem the Golden, with milk
and honey blest" of the Christian hymn. The "ba" name
of the astral or ethereal body of man in Egypt may be related to
"bee." For ba is also a word for "honey." Honey was
used in embalming. It is suggestively entwined with the imagery of the
"meads of amaranth." The soul is as the bee gathering sweet honey of
immortality from the flowers of life experience on earth. Also the bee
reproduces the new life in plants by acting as the intermediator between male
and female flower elements; and the divine soul likewise links male spirit and
female body and marries them in man.
The myth represents the sun, eternal
type of divine generative source, as "letting water fall from his eyes; it
is changed into working bees; they work in the flowers of each kind, and honey
and wax are produced instead of water." Shu and Tefnut give honey to the
living members. Divine emanations, falling as tear drops, diffuse their power of
blessing over the earth, like Shakespeare’s "gentle rain from
heaven."
The Samson story in Judges bears
on the meaning of honey. "Out
251
of the strong came forth
honey." The honey was found by the solar god (Samson means
"solar") in the decaying carcass of the lion upon his return. The
return types evolution, as the outward journey, involution. The god, as the
lion, is "slain" on the outward arc or descent, overcome by matter.
But in evolution, the bees (the soul) have built their nest of sweet honey in
the very midst of the old decay, in the very body of corruption. In the Persian
myth we see the lion depicted with a bee in his mouth.
There are, however, intimations of
involved astrological reference in the linking together of the bee and the lion.
Massey thinks that the bee typifies the sweet refreshing waters of the
inundation in Egypt, which came to its fullest outpouring in the month of July,
the sign of the lion. His elaboration of the point is lengthy and the reader is
referred to his Lecture on Luniolatry. The lion, or lioness, he claims,
types the fiery solar heat (Cf. the lioness in heat) and the bee the cooling
influence of the waters. For the hero, Samson, fairly immersed in symbols of the
number thirty, obviously is a soli-lunar character, and the full moon in the
lion sign rose in conjunction with the sign of Aquarius, the Waterman. The moon
brought the cool waters that conquered the solar heat. The application of the
typism may hint at the god’s bringing the force of cool intellectual judgment
to allay the fierce heat of sensual passion of the lower self. The types of
divinity in the summer season are the reverse of those appropriate to the
winter. Salvation comes to man in the heat of summer in the form of shade,
coolness and water. Earth and water type the lower self and the evil side under
winter’s symbolism. But they spell salvation under reversed conditions. The
duality and reversibility of the symbols must be constantly borne in mind.
The most meaningful aspect of the
wine symbolism is perhaps that of fermentation. This arises from the development
in the liquid of a potent energy at first latent. Hidden and buried, silent and
inert, the dynamic fiery spirit rises to activity and exerts an influence that
yields to mortals a semblance of divine inspiration and glorious liberty. As a
symbol it is far-reaching and vivid. The "spirit" in wine and the
spirit in man are not inaptly related even as a pun. The Greeks indulged in such
puns, as in the Cratylus of Plato, and yet have covered the most majestic
significations under these light touches. The "spirit" in wine is a
graphic figure of the other spirit. Wine is water that has
252
in it the fire of spirit, and in
American pioneer days it was often called "fire-water." Fire
universally typed spirit. Grape juice is just water of earth that has had
injected in it a power engendered by the sun, again the type of spirit, as it
passed through the length of the vine to be deposited in the berry at the end.
The sun, like the Christ it symboled in his "miracle" at Cana, turns
water into wine in any vineyard!
The Egyptian goddess who represented
the "spirit" of alcoholic fermentation was Sekhet, and her pictures
show her carrying the sun-disk on the head of a lioness. Her name is also, says
Massey, the name for the Bee. As a goddess Sekhet is the fiery energy of Mother
Nature, which engenders the ferment out of which comes the soul, the bee. For
she is also the goddess of sweetness or pleasure, literally "goddess of the
honeymoon." She is designated the "force or energy of the gods,
astonisher of mankind." (Birch, Gallery, p. 17.) She was the
inspirer of the male, his Sakti, or creative force. The Egyptian sakh means
"to inflame," "to inspire," and Sekhet is the double force
personified as female. This sakh brings us close again to the syc- of
the sycamore fig, whose juice bred spirit intoxication, and the Greek psyche hovers
close in the background of this etymology. The soul is, or causes, the divine
ferment in the body of life, developed there, as in the vine, by the sun of
man’s spiritual self. Drink and divinity are thus found under one name, as
were fleece and grape, seven and peace, star and soul.
Isis, whose original variant names
were Hes, Hesit, Sesit, Sesh, etc., also carries this element of Sekhet’s
function. Sesh means primarily "breath," which is the inspirer (Latin:
spiro, I breathe) in the sense of imparting the gift of higher life of
spirit to a creature "dead" in matter. Man was not finished until God
had breathed into him divine breath. Ses, Sesh is "breath,"
"flame," "combustion"; also "the spirit of wine."
From it Massey traces the "svas" from which we have the
Swastika, the sign of vivifying fire,--"tika" meaning
"cross."
Another root yields meaning along
the same line. Kep means "to light," "kindle,"
"heat," "cause a ferment." And from it Massey derives the
Greek fire-forger of the gods, Vulcan or Hephaestus, who is Kep and the
Greek root of the Latin aestas, summer heat. He forges for the gods
whatever needs to be shaped by fire. Vapor produced from water by heat was the
primitive illustration for breath which gave a creature its soul. It was a
natural marvel, this emergence of a principle of fiery
253
energy in vapor form, so likely a
type of soul engendered in man out of the mixture of his lower earth and water
elements.
Horus and Jesus, both turning water
into wine, represented this transforming power of the god, maturing the inert
elements of sense and feeling into spiritual character. Horus put grapes into
the water, and "the water of Teta is as wine even as that of Ra." The
Jewish Feast of the Tent or Tabernacle was a ceremony embodying the turning of
water into wine.
There are many instances of rivers
and seas being turned into blood, Revelation reports that at the sound of
the angel’s trumpet a mountain, around which lightning played (symbol of the
divine emanations, Jove’s thunderbolts), went down into the sea and changed
its waters into blood. As the first forms of life were generated in sea water,
their initial body plasms were just that water. In eras of evolution this
primitive life fluid was gradually transmuted, by the operation upon it of even
higher voltages of life force, into that which eventually in man became human
blood! Sea water has been turned into blood in man’s constitution! Blood is
the fluid containing the living dynamic, and the Bible states that the soul
dwells in the blood. Now, astonishingly, chemical analysis reveals that sea
water and human blood are identical in elementary composition. It has remained
for science and ancient symbolism to combine in this latter day to tell us the
hidden meaning of one of the greatest spiritual allegories that theology failed
to interpret for eighteen centuries.
Blood is the last of the Eucharistic
signs to be dealt with. Few Christians can tell capably why it was that the
human race had to be redeemed by the blood of an innocent victim poured out for
its guilt. There is so glaring an inference of vicariousness here that common
sense has halted long before giving credence to this dogma. It seems to
contravene all natural justice and leaves an unstudied laity incredulous and
unconvinced. There could be found no ground of fitness in the necessity that
made a being of a higher rank, a god, come down and suffer gratuitously for sins
of ours. With its linkage to evolution and anthropology cut totally away from
it, there was no way to connect the doctrine with elucidative reference. Even
Massey revolts in horror from the Biblical verse, in the words of the Son:
"My father! This day shalt thou refresh thyself in blood." The picture
of a blood-lustful deity terrifies us. But such revulsion is gratuitous. The
primal
254
implications hold nothing to cause
us horror. The Son is only reminding the Father that the descent of his germinal
essence into the blood of this human body would give him his next cycle of
rebirth and renewal. "Day" is one of the glyphs for cycle, aeon, round
of incarnation, as in Genesis with its seven "days" of
creation. The god finds fresh experience and new conquest in each life; he
renews himself like the phoenix or the eagle, when bathed in new blood-bodies in
incarnation. In our cycle he does this in the blood of man. But what might well
cause Massey and the whole world abhorrence is that blood as symbol should have
been taken for blood as substance, and that a whole millennium and a half of
alleged civilized history has been deluded with the picture of a human personage
buying unearned redemption for a race by the gruesome act of pouring out the
blood of his physical body on a wooden cross! Rational reaction from religion is
largely, if not overwhelmingly, justified. To a degree distressing to
contemplate religion has befogged the mind of the world by converting the forms
of ancient tropism into a sense repugnant even to the intelligence of children.
The entire theological theme of
blood sacrifice, so literalized in the Old Testament rites, reduces
itself to the one simple meaning of divine life poured out to circulate vitally
through the mental and spiritual veins of man on earth. Mortal man underwent a
transfusion of deific "blood." Divine energies of consciousness course
and thrill through our life. This higher infusion regenerates us, makes us new.
The lamb slain on the altar was but the ceremonial token of this meaning. The
bull-bath of Mithraic rites was the washing away of sin in the blood of the
Tauric emanation of deity. On the other side, however, the consuming of the
animal on the altar by fire that flashed down from heaven was the token of the
transfiguration of the animal nature in man into immortal purity by the aeonial
"burning" of the godly fire in life after life. Man was nourished in
the substance of animal life, as the candle flame feeds upon the animal tallow
below it, converting it from gross substance into divine flame. That a race of
people could for centuries believe that God demanded the killing and burning of
actual animals on actual altars for his sensuous delight of sniffing the odors
of roasting flesh--a sweat savor unto his nostrils--well nigh destroys faith in
human intelligence. The imputation of gory sensualism to
255
supreme deity, the unconscionable
assumption that he would delight in the slaughter of billions of his own
creatures, and that he would discharge man’s sins by accepting the suffering
of a lower order of his creatures as yet incapable of sin, form a list of
theological aberrations that have gone far to throw the general mind into nearly
barbarian besottedness.
The cleansing power of the blood was
in part at least borrowed from the fact of the menstrual process. The ancient
allegorists did not hesitate to employ the generative functions in the way of
cosmic analogues. It is outwardly easy to fasten the charge of phallicism on the
symbolic religion of the past. But man’s creative processes are typical
of all creative process, and the sages did not scruple to use the known
functionism to depict the unknown cosmic procedures. There is no taint of ill in
this until sordid sensuality invades the realm of pure depiction. Each
incarnation in earthly bodies subjected the soul to a sort of menstrual
purification, working, so to say, a lot of bad blood out of the system of
god-man. It linked him with a body of flesh which came "under the law"
of periodicity and purgation. Books on primeval religious customs tell of men
dressing as women and laboring to manifest the menstrualia, in token of the
entry of the god into his feminine phase, becoming a child of Mother Nature. In
Egypt Tefnut (the Greek Daphne) was a name formed from the root tefn, tebn, "to
shed, drip, drop." The same root means also to "rise up, spread,
illumine," as the dawn. The dawn of womanhood came with the cleansing by
blood.
However theology might like to
disown the connection, this background looms as essential for our interpretation
of the Gospel "bloody sweat" of the savior in the Garden of
Gethsemane. The menstrual purification of the god in Egypt was in Smen! Legends
of Tem, Atum and Ra portray them as shedding drops of their blood, under male
symbolism, to fall on the earth and create mankind, or man and woman, Shu and
Tefnut, Hu and Sa. The relation of Smen to the essence of the male blood is
obvious. The gods poured out their vital life to fecundate matter, their mother
and sister, to give creation a new birth. This general typism is all that could
ever have been hinted at under the figure of the bloody sweat. The emission of
life-fluid is accompanied by sweating. The male and female aspects of the
meaning enter side by side. Smen, says Massey, was the place appointed for the
256
purging, purifying and cleansing of
souls. It is the place of pain and torment, the birthplace of the new moon,
symbol of the infant birth of solar light in humanity. Hesmen is the
Egyptian name for the rhythmic purgation. It is the voice of matter, the woman,
saying in the Ritual: "I am the woman, the orb in the darkness; I
have brought my orb to darkness where it is changed to light." The bloody
sweat of the god in Smen is described as "the flux emanating from Osiris,"
when Osiris is the god in his feminine or material expression. It is the
divine "shedding of blood," without which humanity would have no
cosmic opportunity to escape the eternal weight of karmic "sin."
Where the outpouring of deific power
was not as yet linked with Mother Nature’s body, was not yet implemented by
its proper Shakti, or force in matter, the god was figured as
"masturbating." Kheper-Ra was the Egyptian deity fulfilling this
function. His type was the beetle or scarabaeus, which, according to Egyptian
belief, created its young by itself alone, without the female. There was hidden
in this symbolism the truth that would have settled the famous "filioque"
dispute that split the early Church into Greek and Roman Catholicism.
Chapter 17 of the Ritual runs:
"O ye gods who are in the
presence of Osiris, grant me your arms, for I am the god who shall come into
being among you. Who then are these? They are the drops of blood which came
forth from the phallus of Ra when he went forth to perform mutilation upon
himself. They sprang into being as the gods Hu and Sa." [In another legend
Shu and Tefnut.]
The Ritual states that
"the sun mutilates himself, and from the streams of blood all things come
into existence." Here is so-called phallicism, yet with sublimity.
Matching the Assyrian and Egyptian
jugs of wine and pitchers of mixed drink, the Hebrews (Leviticus 4) were
ordered to sprinkle some blood seven times before the Eternal in front of the
curtain of the inner sanctuary. This was for a sweet savor and soothing
fragrance to deity. In their sacrifices they were instructed never to consume
the blood of any animal: "The soul of any creature lies in its blood . . .
blood expiates by reason of the soul in it."
Esau was called "red"
because he sucked his mother’s blood before his birth. He is said to have sold
his birthright for a mess of "red." Tradition shows him to have been a
divinity imaged by the solar
257
hawk, which symbolized blood
"because they say that this bird does not drink water but blood, by which
the soul is nourished" (Hor-Apollo, Bk. I, 6). The soul lives on natural
forces, its Mother’s blood, before it is born into Christhood in man.
One of the marvels in Exodus that
were to persuade the reluctant Egyptians to let the Israelites go was the
turning into blood some water that Moses poured on the ground. The pouring it on
the ground would point to the necessity of making the transformation on
earth. A Mexican legend sets forth the vivification of the dead remains of
former races by the blood of the gods.
As the sun of spirit descending into
the darkness of matter, in the evening or autumn, the god was suggestively
depicted as the woman, suffering, becoming ill, wasting her substance
unproductively. The god linked with Mother Nature was as a woman not yet
impregnated by spirit. It required the passage of "virtue" from the
Christ to stop her wastage.
A further aspect of the
red-and-white symbolism comes to view here. If the red types the mother’s
blood giving generation, the white types the seminal life of spirit. The union
of the white of divinity with the red of nature produces the new birth. Nor did
the sages overlook the meaningful fact that it is the white creative essence of
the father’s blood that releases the stream of the mother’s white
nourishment for the new child. So the first or natural man, born of the blood,
the first Adam or "red earth," is raised to his status of spiritual
new birth by "the white liquor which the glorified ones love." And
both the mother’s and the father’s condensation of white creative and
sustaining essence is distilled out of the natural red blood. Our
divinization turns us from red to white. Under Christmas tropism, the red
stands for the divine; the green--universal color of nature--for the physical.
The red color of the evening sun,
sinking into his feminine phase, and the red color of the morning sun, when for
a brief space of his infancy he is still close to his Mother Earth, like the
human child tied through the first years to his mother, again beautifully
adumbrate the feminine connotation of red; while the white blaze of the sun
throughout the day suggests the male or spiritual power.
In the Ritual (Ch. 37A) the
Speaker is told he shall make four troughs of clay and shall "fill them
with milk of a white cow." The four containers of the divine ichor are the
physical, etheric, emotional
258
and concrete mental natures in
man’s lower self. An instructive picturing of the human creation is given in
this Kamite description: the basis of the oblation in the Egyptian sacrifice is
"the blood of beings that have been destroyed."
"Said by the majesty of the
god, Let them begin with Elephantine and bring to me the fruits in quantity. And
when the fruits had been brought they were given . . . (Lacuna).
"The Sekti (miller) of Annu was
grinding the fruits, while the priestesses poured the juices into vases; and
those fruits were put into vessels with the blood of the beings, and
there were seven thousand pitchers of drink.
"And there came the majesty of
the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the gods, to see the drink after he had
ordered the goddess to destroy the beings in three days of navigation."
The Assyrian seven jugs and the
Egyptian seven thousand pitchers of drink are brewed from the blood of the
massacred beings (the dismembered incarnating gods) mingled with the juice of
the fruits of earth. This is vastly significant. Massey comments instructively:
"Blood and the fruit of earth
were the two primitive forms of the offering, and these are blended together in
a deluge of intoxicating drink."14
The plain inference here is that the
mingling in one drink of the juices of the fruits of earth and the blood of the
"beings," is a type of the blending in one composite nature of the
life of the gods and that of animal-man--the base of all religion.
An exactly similar depiction is
found in the Berosan account of the Babylonian creation. The deity Belus cut off
his own head; whereupon the other gods mixed the blood as it gushed out with the
earth, and from the mixture men were formed. "On this account it is that
men are rational and partake of divine knowledge."
The Beast in Revelation is to
be overcome by the blood of the Lamb. The lower sense creature in us is to be
raised up by the infusion of godlike quality from above.
We are now in possession of much of
the multifarious data which will enable proper judgment to be exercised in
interpreting the central significance of the Eucharistic meal. We commemorate
our partaking of the Lord’s body and blood to remind our sluggish sense that
there dwells in us a god, whose nature is compounded with that of a beast.
259
In the drama the Lord assigned
immediately a pointed reason for his institution of the rite. And in this reason
we come upon one of the pivotal elements of the Platonic philosophy, the loss of
which out of Christian theology has contributed to our generally palsied grasp
of fundamental truth. Little is it dreamed that the Lord himself announced the
great Platonic doctrine of "reminiscence" in the midst of his
ordination of the Eucharist. The world’s astutest students have been puzzled
and perplexed over the great Academician’s principle of regained memory for
the soul, and they have labeled it a philosophical fantasy, a finely spun
poetization. That it bears direct relation to our earthly history has not been
discerned by scholars.
When the Christos concluded
his injunction to eat the broken fragments of his body and to drink the flowing
stream of his life-blood with the command: "Do this in memory of me,"
he set Plato’s great doctrine at the very heart of Christianity. But
Christianity could not catch the relevance of the statement because it did not
have the correlative tenets of the dismemberment and disfigurement. The
restoration of memory can have understanding only in relation to a previous loss
of it. Paradise regained must follow Paradise lost. So "rememberment"
is the repairing of the dismemberment. Reminiscence is the recuperation of
shattered memory. Death must have its resurrection. Divine intellect, dispersed
into all forms of divulsion and enfeeblement, torn into fragments, with the
links of connection lost, condemned to wander blindly in murks and shadows, must
be reintegrated in the end. "My reason returned unto me," says the
reconstituted Nebuchadnezzar. The Prodigal Son remembered his forgotten
Father’s house on high. Away off in that "far country," the Vale of
Lethe and Land of Oblivion, the exiled soul begins to recover from its amnesia,
and the divine nostalgia sets in to lead it back home.
A Chaldean Oracle states that
the "paternal principle" of higher intellect "will not receive
the will of the soul till she has departed from oblivion; and has spoken
the word, assuming the memory of her paternal sacred impression."
Immersed in scattered and partial images of reality, the soul can not regain her
former unity of vision until she has restored some semblance of her former
integrity of intellection. She must weave the tangled strands of mental fleece
again into a garment with pattern matching archetypal ideals.
The figures of both Jesus and Jonah,
fast asleep in the holds of their
260
respective ships in the storm are
variant types of this oblivion of the god in his mundane journey. In a similar
episode in the career of Horus, "there was deep slumber within the
ship."
Iamblichus paints a beautiful
picture of the gods gathering up the loose shreds of memory and weaving them
again into the design of original loveliness, to escape their dire condition of
forgetfulness:
"Neither is it proper to say
that the soul primarily consists of harmony and rhythm. For thus enthusiasm
would be adapted to the soul alone. It is better . . . to assert that the soul,
before she gave herself to body, was the auditor of divine harmony; and that
hence, when she proceeded into body and heard melodies of such a kind as
especially preserve the divine vestiges of memory, she embraced these, from them
recollected divine harmony, and tends and is allied to it, and as much as
possible participates of it."15
Amid her distraction the soul
catches faint and feeble glimpses of former felicity and these stir her latent
recollection of harmonies known before. Through them she strives to integrate
her former bliss and grandeur. And this states the whole office of ritual
religion!
Plato’s esoteric principle,
grounded in segments of recondite anthropology lost out of modern consideration,
is one vital to all theory and practique of education. Subtle principles of
cultural technique are involved in the incarnational situation which make
learning not at all the acquiring of something new and alien to the soul, but
the remembering or recollecting of scattered fragments of things
inherently kin to consciousness itself. Culture is reintegration, not the
acquiring of a collection.
Of the nine Muses of classical
mythology Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory, and memory is thus indicated as
one of the nine paths by which we return to our divinity. Mercury also shared
the function of rehabilitating the memory. A note by Thomas Taylor reads:
"Hermes disperses the sleep and
oblivion with which the different herds of souls are oppressed. He is likewise
the supplier of recollection, the end of which is a genuine intellectual
apprehension of divine natures."16
As man is a rational soul thrust
into an irrational life, the province of Mercury is to impress upon the mind,
distracted by the shifting flux of this world’s dream images, the beauty of
the stable principles
261
of Universal Mind that were visioned
by the soul in her own world. Chapter 90 of the Ritual gives a prayer in
these words:
"O thou who restorest memory in
the mouth of the dead through the words of power which they possess, let my
mouth be opened through the words of power which I possess."
The title of Chapter 25 is itself
convincing: "The chapter of making a man possess memory in the
underworld." This again is the whole office of religion. Of what, be it
asked, could a man on earth be expected to have memory, if not of a former life
which he had forgotten?
If religion is to be animated and
inspired by its most forceful significance, it must be practiced with a view to
awakening in earthbound souls lost divine memories. This is the import of all
its song, its ritual, its rhythms and prayers. A powerful reinforcement of
spiritual unction and dynamic life would well up out of its decadent forms if
this motif were revived. Salvation, the aim of religion, is by way of rekindled
memory of slumbering divinity.
In an address to Pepi it is written
that the god "setteth his remembrance upon men and his love before the
gods." Indeed the Ritual records the fact that the deceased in
Amenta was shown his Ka (higher soul body) and assured that it accompanied him
through the lower earth in order that he might not utterly forget his divine
moorings, or as he says, "that he might not suffer loss of identity by
forgetting his name." Man is on earth like one stricken with amnesia.
Showing him his Ka bestirs the Manes to recall his divine name and nature. Also
the passage of Osiris through the underworld is effected only by means of his
preserving all the mystical names in memory. Ra has 75 names, Osiris 153. As the
"name" stood for one of the higher spiritual principles, to call upon
the name of the Lord, or to know the deity’s name, was to have come en
rapport with his higher nature. This presupposed the restoration of all the
soul’s higher metaphysical faculties. This is given elsewhere as knowing the
names of all the gates and their god keepers, past whom the voyaging soul had to
go.
In the Orphic Mysteries of Greece
the phrase occurs more than once: "I am a child of earth and the starry
sky, but my race is of heaven alone." The "dead" man is
instructed to address these words to the guardian of the Lake of Memory, while
he asks for a drink of water from the lake. In our highest flights toward divine
consciousness we
262
drink from that Lake of Memory and
regale ourselves anew with aboriginal harmonies. If it holds true to its prime
purpose the persistent vogue of religion in human society is abundantly
warranted.
Max Müller gives an important link
of philology when he derives the Sanskrit word Smara, "love,"
from Smar, "to recollect"!17 He states that the German Schmerz,
"pain," and the English "smart," come from this root.
Love, then, like learning, is only the memory of former transports and ecstasies
of the glory the soul once had with the Father before the worlds.
When, therefore, Jesus breaks the
bread and sips the wine in token of his death till he come--his discerption and
dismantling--he is dramatizing the necessity of their "remembering"
his scattered selfhood in their lives. The Ritual of Egypt assigns a name
to the ship of Horus as it passes across the sea of this lower life, which name
shows the archaic origin of the sage philosophy of Greece: "Collector of
souls is the name of my barque"! Recollection is the soul’s office on
earth. We are to gather up in the boat of our life the twelve baskets of
scattered fragments and restore the broken body of our Lord "whole and
entire."
Out of the dissertation on divine
food here elaborated there should accrue to the modern mind a new and grander
sense of the Christ’s ordinance: "Do this in memory of me." And an
elevated consciousness arising from the double sense of the word
"remember" should lift humanity once more to an awareness of its
mission, which is to bind up the broken and dismembered body of the Lord of
Hosts, by welding together the nations in the spirit of a lofty fraternity. In
the light of restored sublimity to the doctrine, every individual will know that
the appeal to remember his deity comes not from an isolated figure in ancient
Judea, but from the living god within, begging all to drink the cup of communion
with him and thus hasten to forge that recollection of him which alone will
effect his release from the dreary grave of the body.