The Lost Light

Chapter XV

NOXIOUS FUMES AND LURID FLARES

It has been necessary to anticipate the substance of this chapter in one or two places in the preceding one, because many important statements so closely link the two fires, the supernal and the infernal, that it was impossible to present the one in entire disseverance from the other. The background for the clarification of this aspect of the interpretation has therefore already been set up. Yet the whole doctrine of "hell-fire" has fallen so infinitely remote from even the outskirts of true understanding that it must be grappled with in good earnest. The deplorable state of modern exegesis in this segment of theology impels one to a vehement expression of that disgust at the harrowing grotesquerie of rendering which a comparison of ancient esoteric meaning with current superstition so readily excites. But this situation must be evident by now as a general matter, and should need but little reinforcement beyond the continued revelation of gaping chasms of difference between the old and the present readings. Yet this theology of a hell of fiery torment has suffered such an unconscionable distortion from its primary bearing, and has afflicted the mind of mankind with so outrageous a delusion, that every consideration points to the necessity of a vigorous handling in the interests of sanity and social benefit. The perversion of original teaching regarding the lower fire has cast over the collective mind of the Western world the foulest hypnotic obsession which it has ever suffered. The strangling tentacles of this theological devil-fish have spread over the whole of Christendom and have compressed the spiritual genius of that segment of mankind into the coldest and most inhuman bigotry known to history. For ages the doctrine in its misconceived form has deprived the Christianized world of its reason, and opened doors to the entry of every superstition. It has snuffed out the native spark of human brotherhood and brought between man and man the lurid glare of its own devilish mischief.

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For the fiercest fires of persecution and fiendish cruelty ever lighted upon earth flared out under the impulsion of the fantastic theological teaching that the acts of one’s brother may be the impious machination of "the devil." It is too gruesome and ghoulish a chapter of horrors to linger upon; yet the same philosophical benightedness out of which this atrocious monster of diabolism and demonism has emerged has never to this day been dispelled by the light of wisdom. A more sensitive humanity of the present, sickened by the ghastly spectacle of past tortures and holocausts inspired by fiendish zeal, has tried to drop the subject as far as possible out of sight, and has imposed a taboo upon its exploitation in religious quarters. But the darkness has not been dissipated, and the monster is still capable, on provocation, of glaring fiercely out of the murks. The light that would have enabled the Christian world to descry the Beast in his true outlines and character has never been rekindled since it was extinguished about the third century. Had that light been available it would have revealed that the fiery dragon of the pit was none other than the god himself, his face begrimed with smoke, his features distorted by the grimaces of the Beast through whose eyes he looked out upon this strange world, and his countenance luridly alight with the smudgy flare of the earthly furnace. Milton’s lakes of seething fire in Paradise Lost are a travesty of truth, unless taken purely as the symbology they are. For Satan is the god himself--on earth! This broad assertion is incontestable. It is proven by the very name. The descending god was the Light-bringer, Lucifer, the bright and morning star, which is precisely the character assumed by the Jesus of the Biblical Revelation! The Christian devil, the hated serpent of evil, Satan, is Lucifer, the god of light on earth, Prometheus, the "benefactor of mankind,"--"the god" himself.

Indoctrinated orthodoxy may rise to protest the identification. Some ghastly mistake will be alleged in the philology. It will be in vain. Erudite theology has at times perhaps known the truth, but has kept an advised silence. The general mind has lost the key to the mystery. By dropping the name Lucifer and clinging to that of Satan alone, the mischief has been bred and perpetuated. That Satan and Jesus are identical is as true as that Sut and Horus in Egypt are twins! The god and devil are kindred. They are full brothers. Their mother is one. They are the two aspects or manifestations of the same force. It may be said that the evil character is the good seen in reversed reflec-

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tion on earth. For an ancient esoteric adage in Latin ran: DEMON EST DEUS INVERSUS, "the devil is the god turned upside down." Satan is the god in incarnation; or he is the god as he appears after his nature has been diffracted in its passage through the blurred medium of earth life. The devil is the god transformed into a being of reduced power, blunted moral sense, befogged intellect and forgotten glory. He is the god bemired with the slime of carnal generation, beset with the strong sensuous and sexual urge of the brute. In short, he is the divine soul entangled in the bestial nature and himself lending more fiery intensity to the impulses of the body by his vitalizing presence!

The genesis of what is called "evil" may perhaps be dialectically derivable from the fundamental premises of thought. But the origin of evil in reference to man’s specific cosmic situation is a particular problem, only to be determined by full knowledge of this situation. As the world does not possess such knowledge in full measure, the great problem is enveloped in some obscurity.

But the sages of the early dawn vouchsafed a portion of this knowledge deemed sufficient to yield to reflection an intelligent comprehension of the issues involved and a philosophic attitude toward them. The rank of the gods sent to earth, their endowments and capabilities, their attitude toward their mission, their obligation in relation to past dereliction, and the implications of their tenanting the animal bodies assigned to them, were broadly revealed to the initiates and theodidaktoi of an early period. With all these interests and relations the connotations of the term "evil" are intimately concatenated. This knowledge, elaborated to much detail, was the treasure of the Mystery Societies and Brotherhoods, and formed the esoteric motivation of their regimes of discipline, instruction and consecration. The modern revival of interest in this mine of truth has not yet recovered all that has slipped away. The uncertainty about some of the major premises is supplemented by the additional difficulty of determining which of the two phases of the representative figures, Satan, Lucifer, Apap, Sut, Typhon, the serpent, the dragon, the beast, is being emphasized in the numberless myths and legends. And there is the ever-present doubleness of the meaning of the symbols, making it difficult to know whether the higher or the lower aspect is meant. But enough hints are provided usually to enable scholarship to work with intelligence upon the material.

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The origin of evil is indeed the mystery of our life. It is inwrought with the key situation of humanity. The arising of evil in a system of total and absolute good is indeed a riddle that taxes the best effort of brain and heart. The difficulty, however, has been made by the mistaken common assumption that Good is absolute, that is, good as conceived in human ideation, good in its specific human relevance. The Supreme God has been called the Good, and this has been misleading. Good can only be absolute if evil is also absolute, and this can not be, since there can not be two different and opposing absolutes. The absolute is beyond good and evil alike. There is an abstract and detached conception of good which the mind can predicate of the entire scheme of things, to posit which, however, would require our saying that that which is beyond both good and evil is the good. Yet such a declaration is dialectically impossible, because that which we would characterize as good is beyond all character. Descriptive statements about it are empty sound. It is not within the scope of any predication whatever. The ultimate is neutral to us always.

It only becomes either good or bad to us when it ceases to be absolute and relates itself to itself as spirit and matter, positive and negative, male and female, light and dark. And, be it proclaimed in clarion tones, the whole matter of the theological bogie of the devil, or incarnate evil, arose solely from the miscarriage of the dramatic necessity of ascribing an adverse, opposing and relatively evil character to the negative or material pole of life force! The bifurcation of the Unmanifest into the two nodes of being to become manifest threw both poles in contrariety and opposition to each other. The spiritual, or active and conscious end came to be represented as the "good" and the inert and negative material end carried the dramatic imputation of the "evil." The two can never step out of their poised interrelation with each other, since they have existence only in the terms of such relation. They are only and always relative to each other. Good and evil have no human meaning outside the terms of a counterpoise with each other. Each gets its characterization by virtue of its being not what the other is, being its diametric opposite. Each gains what it possesses of substantiality and character from being the reflex of the other. Good is Not-evil and evil is the Not-good.

Manifestation of life comes only through the tension between the

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two modalities, because it requires just such a stress to awaken latent consciousness to open awareness. Actuality comes to birth only at the central point of contact between the subjective and the objective worlds. If life does not establish the countervalence between its two opposite aspects, it remains unconscious. The friction between spirit and matter is the ground of life’s ultimate or at least increased self-consciousness. So the soul comes to this earth to partake of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Evil is therefore one of its two essential conditions for normal growth and expansion. A sagacious view of philosophical archai, therefore, perceives "evil" in its true light, and once and forever lifts from off its imputed entifications in religion all stigma and bad odor. At the same time it apprehends its role in the drama, in which it plays the part of the "adversary," "the opposer," of the active building power of life. This is the role that has all to easily become misunderstood for one of absolute evil, when it should have been judiciously envisaged as but relative, and as conducive to the awakening of the positive energies of life itself. For without the necessity of exerting itself and deploying its as yet unawakened powers to overcome the opponent’s resistance and inertia, the divine seed would continue to slumber on in unconscious ignorance of its own capabilities. It awakes its dormant giant potentialities by "overcoming the adversary."

This is the heavy role of the villain in every play. He is the foil. He acts as the stepping-stone over which the hero strides to victory. His dark designs make the hero’s virtue shine out the brighter by contrast. He furnishes the dark background against which the conqueror’s exploits stand out in relief.

Hence that which in human and worldly affairs wears all the outward appearance of evil--defeat, disaster, loss, crime, treachery--is to be seen only as good under a disguise. It subserves a karmic purpose,--the challenging of some hidden power to come awake and rouse itself to function. Later on, its hidden beneficence is seen, and we say: Now I know why that happened; without it I would never have gained what I now possess. So "evil" is good under a mask. The villain is our other self in masquerade. If we could at the moment tear off his false face, we would see him as the lovely fairy, ready to transform us into something nobler.

It is the antithesis of good and evil, our experience with both wings

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of the bird of life, and the resultant deposit of wisdom in our own interior vehicle of consciousness, that gives us ultimately our cognition of values. And in the finale this valuation overleaps mere characterization as either good or bad. We are balanced between the two in order to transcend them both. The child unites characteristics of both its parents and carries life forward one step higher.

The gist of the matter is that value--which should not be thought of as good in contradistinction to evil, but as evolutionary gain--can not be brought to birth unless good is opposed by evil; and evil is just this opposition. It is in every sense except that of immediate human estimate of it entirely necessary, salutary and beneficent. But no one can calculate the untold volume of wretchedness that has been heaped up in world history by the frightful miscarriage of this basic understanding. For the mass mind was overridden by the assignment to "evil" of a positive character, reifying it into a living bogie, and was in the last stage of gross literalization devastated by its personification in an actual "devil." The transmogrification of this dramatic personage into the realistic bogieman to harass millions of earth’s simple-minded children by Christendom is perhaps the crowning disservice which a distorted theology has rendered its unenlightened devotees.

Our sense of evil only arises because of our imperfect vision. As Paul said, we now see life in part and through a glass darkly. If we could see it whole, we would see all things in their proper place in the large picture, and hence in their beneficence. More piercing vision would penetrate the mask of evil and reveal it as good. But our sense of evil, and our reactions to it, are part of the cost of our growth. They are the terms and conditions under which we advance to larger appreciations. The apparent evil is part of the path we must tread to reach values beyond. Evil may be said to be episodical, an incident along the way, as life marches on. Seen out of proportion and relation it assumes its grim aspect.

And what is sin? Again has a baleful theology terrorized the minds of millions with an apparition that is as unsubstantial as the bugaboo of evil. Again it is a normal and natural phase of the evolutionary situation which has been wrested from its balanced meaning in the dramatic typology and turned into a thing of psychological terrorism. Sin is in brief nothing but the "lust for life" itself, and the appetency and zest of the higher soul for the life of flesh and sense, through

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which alone it can become creative in new generations. Sin is the entangling of the entified spirits in the laws and nature and motivations of the flesh, not to add the world and "the devil," and its free indulgence in the play of its creative powers through and upon these elementary forces. Sin is the spirit’s subjection of itself to the dominance of these proclivities to an inordinate or disproportionate degree. The Cycle of Necessity draws it down into their domain and makes it for a time and in a measure subject to their sway. Whether duly or unduly influenced by them, its submergence under their power is what the ancient drama pictured as sin.

At least one philosopher has kept his vision of this portrayal true and steady. Plotinus declares that if the soul keeps her eye fixed steadily on the star of her higher self, "she need not regret having become acquainted with evil or knowing the nature of vice," and having had the opportunity of manifesting her creative faculties through her conjunction with the body. This is grandly refreshing amid the welter of corrupted philosophies berating and belaboring the life of sense with the stigma of evil and the curse. The latter have grown up in the wake of a morbid religionism turned ascetic when the lighter play of drama was burdened with the lugubrious weight of misconceived ideas of sin and the devil.

A portion or degree of cosmic divine spirit was to become creative in man, and was sent here to try its intellectual powers upon a formative work. It had thence to show its lordship over the elements and the matter with which creative intelligence had to work. It had to be thrown in strategic relation to the world of matter at its appropriate place and station. Like both Jesus and Jonah, it had to be thrown into the "sea," to subdue its ungoverned raging. It had then to take charge of the seven lower furies and range them under its higher command. The unregulated play of these subordinate and irrational forces of sense in the field of life, once the god had plunged into their milieu, is sin. It is powerful at first and for a long time, until the soul gradually rises to assert its kingship over the seven heads of the Beast. It is only admissibly evil--and then still in a relative sense--when it usurps the prerogatives of the lord, unhinges the balance between the two forces, and becomes grossly immoderate and libertine. Only when the soul, still not wide awake and vigilantly in control, permits the

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lower animality to rule inordinately, is it sin in the mawkish theological sense of shame and remorsefulness.

To help a world lift itself out from under the darksome shadow of gloomy moroseness, induced by twisted theologies, into the brighter day of clearer comprehension, it may be said that the general mind must grasp once again the basic deific motif in creation, to begin with. As set forth just now, "sin" has its rise in the desire of life to become parent of each new cycle of recurrent creation. Spirit and matter must woo, win and wed each other; and their copulation, envisaged through the medium of a diseased human view of sexual relation, became tinged with the stains of moral baseness. This is the psychological genesis of the interpretation so long foisted upon the "fall" of Adam and Eve "into carnal sin." Physical parenthood has long borne the stigma of some remote spiritual transgression, and still the shadow of social and universal shame clings to it. A great modern cult, and some of its offshoots, have expressly stressed the possibility of regaining the Edenic spiritual creation of human beings without resort to the physical mode of procreation. And of course the Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth doctrines have been haloed about with intimations of the same sort. This is all, however, the result of incomprehension turning charming and luminously suggestive typology into crass realism.

Why does God create? Why is he not content to enjoy his exalted position in endless contemplation of his own perfection? As far as human cognition can rise to conceive of it, God’s motive in creation announced in the old books, is Lila, translated "the sport of the gods," "the delight of God." The highest joy and sweetest preoccupation of work. As man reflects deity, it may be known from this datum that God’s highest pleasure comes from his creative labors. He creates for the sport and the joy of it. He first thinks out (in Plato’s "archetypal ideas") what sort of universe he will build, and then proceeds to reap the delight of seeing it grow under his hands. "The sea is his for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land." His reveling in creation does not stop at his ideal conception of prospective worlds; like the true artisan, he must realize the satisfaction of seeing them take form in the concrete. Plastic matter, susceptible to every breath of creative impulse, is his potter’s clay. God comes out of his noumenal world

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to enjoy a period of activity in the realm of sense. Having thought long enough of his projected creation, he now wills to emerge onto the field of physical activity and bring it into substantial reality. He longs to feel the play of elemental energies through his vast physical frame. Any man yearning to rise from sedentary occupation and brain work to experience the "feel" of muscular activity outdoors, is a sufficient analogue. The opposition, tension and zest for the game are provided by the playing forces on the two teams of matter and spirit. The game or battle will yield him adequate thrills, since in it he will find coming to function still unevolved latencies of his own measureless being. Each act will enhance his sense of power and glory. That he may live again and enjoy a new joust with matter he must plunge his nucleated units of consciousness into a state of "death" and burial in material inertia. Paul asks if this is evil; and his own answer, overlooked and never understood, must become the keynote of a new world attitude to life: "Never! The law was holy, just and altogether righteous."

There is evidence that the word "sin" has derivations and connections of the most momentous import. Some of these are astonishing. In the first place "Sin" was a name for "the mount of the moon." Arcane books speak of the incarnating souls as having fallen into the moon, and earth is still called the "sublunary sphere." This has immediate links with pertinent meaning, since the lower aspects of man’s nature, his two lower bodies, the "astral" and physical, have been built up over the "astral" molds left by the retreating race of men on the moon chain of evolution. Since the spirit plunges into the lower man, the belly of death, it may aptly be said to fall into the mount of the moon. The soul fell into "Sin" or landed on "Mt. Sin."

But another etymology falls in here with unexpected force. The lower physical and emotional half of man’s constitution is, in its relation to physical nature, typed in ancient tomes by "the woman." The lower nature, that holds the soul in material bondage, is specifically dramatized by the character of Hagar, the concubine of Abraham, significantly dubbed "the bond-woman." To "her" we are in bondage. There is very definite connection between this name Hagar and the Agar, or Akar, or Aker, which was the name for the tunnel of the underworld through which incarnating souls had to pass from the rear (material) end of the Sphinx forward to the front (spiritual) end or

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head. The materials are now ready for St. Paul to use in making for us a startling weaving of the several etymological strands into a thread of great strength. For in Galatians (4:24 ff) he makes a positive identification of Mt. Sinai with Hagar (Agar): "Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children." To call a woman a mountain, and that localized in a specific country on the map, for once clearly shatters all possible literalism or historicism in the verse. But beyond that it throws into relation, likely that of identity, the two mountains Sin and Sin-ai. Sinai is derived (by Massey) from the Egyptian senai, sheni, meaning "point of turning and returning," and almost surely refers to that point where life strikes a balance between the forces of involution and evolution in the cosmic "solstice." In its descent spirit reaches the nadir point in the depths of matter, is held in a state of exact equilibrium with it--the "pool of equipoise" of the Egyptians--experiences its new birth of life from this relation, and then turns to return to the Father above. The name Sinai, then, is most revelatory. All communication with deity, all revelation of deity to man, must occur on this Mount Sinai, when the feet of the woman clothed with the sun rest upon the moon, or lower part of man’s organic structure. So Moses (man) ascends into the mount to receive the commandments of the law and the dicta of the Lord. And Jesus ascends into the same Mount to deliver his sermon unto mortal men. This whole situation is of strategic importance for the entire theme and must be unfolded at length in later connections.

Evil and sin must be cleared of their theological accretions of gruesomeness and morbid sentimentalism. They were involvements of the evolutionary predicament which, under the ruses and resources of dramatic representation, became tinged with darksome psychological hues and inspired a volume of unnatural effort to mortify the human part of our nature. Whole generations of children, taught by literal-minded parents and tutors, imbibed the idea that in the universe there was a deity, dividing power equally with God, who was wholly bent on defeating the good, and who must be resisted, if life is to be "saved." Back of this miscarriage, as back of all absurd popular religious notions, lurks the great truth, that Life has divided its powers between

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spirit and matter, and that all growth is the outcome of the "war" between these two energies. Clearly apprehended in a philosophical view, this is knowledge of high verity, knowledge that stabilizes the mind with a grasp on the ultimate beneficence of the scheme. On the other hand the popular distortion of it is a horrendous fallacy, devastating to faith in the salutary operation of cosmic law. Between the two there is the whole vast gulf of the difference between sanity and composure and the practical certainty of a monstrous dementia.

The devil is just the god on earth; and how the radiant son of the morning, bright angelic Lucifer, became transmogrified into the dour person of Satan is a matter of deepest concern for religion and for humanity. This problem could have been solved readily enough if the Western mind had not lost the data for thinking. Logic can not proceed when the due premises are wanting. These lie buried in forgotten books dealing with cosmology and anthropology. To supply them again to modern reflection is a major purpose of this work.

The basic item is the duality of man as the result of the incarnation. Evil arises from the union in one organism of brute and god. When the god stepped in, the potentiality of evil was engendered. Evil could not arise from animal alone; paradoxically, it awaited the coming of the god. The animal is unmoral, incapable of either morality or immorality. He has no sense of good and evil. He has not eaten of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. The "god" in man is the first being in evolution who steps out from under the law of natural automatism and periodical regularity, and assumes his training in the art of balancing consciously discerned forces of evil and good. He came into the flesh for the very purpose of opening his eyes (Cf.: "and their eyes were opened" in Genesis) and seeing consciously how to weigh his action in the balance between the two poles of life. He came to eat of the fruit of the tree. While the beast was unmoral, the god was morally capable, but innocent. He had to learn grace by contacting guilt. He had to win his right to the enjoyment of good by overcoming evil. "To him that overcometh shall all things be given," but not to divine souls that would rather dream away their existence in mystical bliss in the empyrean. Without warfare with evil the soul would never come into cognition of its own capacities. As Plotinus affirms, "she would not know what she possesses," and her faculties would never receive their development. Nature could not become productive until it had

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thrown its opposing forces into the duality of spirit and matter, positive and negative, and provided thus the basis for experience. Consciousness can not come to self-consciousness unless the subjective aspect is confronted with the objective. Spirit and matter are helpless, or rather, as Plotinus adds, are really non-existent, until they interact in "opposition." It is this "opposition" that stabilizes them in relation to each other. Monism is a true philosophy applicable only before and after the worlds are! It takes both Nux and Lux to make life conscious. And virtue can not be won except as the laurel wreath for victory over vice.

The opening of the eyes in the creation allegory is the dramatic typing of man’s awakening to his first glimpse of self-consciousness. It marks the distinguishing insignium of man’s superior position above the beast. It marks the line of his evolutionary passover. At this point man stepped over the greatest boundary line in all the universe of life. He passed out of the sway of the unconscious mindless energies of nature, the "sub-conscious mind" of cosmic deity, and became, albeit at the lowest level, a sharer with God in his conscious creative intelligence. He stepped across the line from the kingdom of bondage to the natural mindless forces into potential rulership of them. He ceased being the son of Hagar, the bond-woman, and became the son of Sarah, the free-woman. He became, collectively, children of the promise and of the adoption, sons and heirs of the Father. He stepped from bondage under the law to the possible "liberty of the sons of God." Liberty! The animal can not sin; man can. He has this freedom! He may choose--good or evil. But he must face the consequences. These are the terms of his evolutionary education. The good or evil consequences would instruct him. Choose he well or badly, karmic compensation would advise. But his new freedom was his highest prerogative, his badge of incipient divinity. That he was prone, of necessity, to make many bad choices until his karmic education had sobered and enlightened him is indicated from a most significant passage from Plotinus:

"They began to revel in free will; they indulged in their own movement; they took the wrong path. Then it was that they lost the knowledge that they sprang from that divine order. They no longer had a true vision of the Supreme or of themselves. Smitten with longing for the lower, rapt in

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love of it, they grew to depend upon it; so they broke away as far as they were able."

This tells the whole story of whatever there is intrinsic in the perverted idea of the "fall." It was just the fall of the child learning to walk! It was nothing but the floundering of ignorant innocence before it has grown wise through trial and error. It was inherent in the very conditions of the evolutionary situation. It was more or less inevitable. And its "evil" consequences were to be absorbed in the vicissitudes of later experience, as the follies of youth are ironed out in subsequent larger vision and more steady conduct.

The god brought the possibility of "evil" with him on his arrival. He came to suffer many things, because his coming threw a stable and orderly evolution temporarily into an unstable one. The animal was bound to a fixed order in nature, whose unvarying laws left him no choice, no freedom to deviate. The god came to get practice in the use of freedom to break through this order and win independent creative facility for himself. And he was incidentally to impart to the animal in whose body he lived that part of his new found knowledge that he managed to make habitual, or transferred by the force of repetition over to the sub-conscious, which is the animal’s highest conscious self. For he was, along with his own education, to help the animal bridge the gulf between its kingdom and the human.

But he threw a disturbance into a condition that had previously been equilibrated and stable. He introduced free choice and variant procedure into the hitherto inerrant course of the animal’s behavior. He could break natural routine, initiate new tentative and note the result. A god who could not do evil is a marionette, not a god. There is no merit in compulsory good. Reward must come with victory. Trial and error was to result in knowledge, which therefore could not be its antecedent or concomitant at the start.

Wisdom is a resultant, a deposit, a crystallization of fluid elements. Freedom began with ignorance in order to end in wisdom. Freedom and blunder were means to an end. The smooth harmony of natural law was bound to be thrown, for a time, into discord. This is the meaning behind the rebel angels’ breaking in upon the harmony of the great God’s festival song with raucous shouts, which may be seen

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possibly as their riotous exultation at the prospect of a new freedom never enjoyed before, like schoolboys let out for a holiday, as Plotinus paints it.

While the god was thus to be buried in the very belly of the great Abtu fish, his immunity from complete drowning and loss of his deific life was provided for. It is hinted at in various typographs. He was to be protected, as Plato says, like an oyster in its shell. He was as the fish in the water, that would be able to breathe even under the water. Again he was shown as learning to walk on the water without sinking into its depths. The Ritual of Egypt speaks of his being immersed in the water of the underworld, but hovering over, the water; or in it as to his body, but aloof from it as to his soul. The latter is especially prominent in the Ritual for the "dead." More than one passage repeats that while "my dead body lies in the grave, my soul is in heaven." "Thy material body liveth in Tattu and in Nif-urtet, and thy soul liveth in heaven each day." "Heaven holdeth thy soul, O Osiris Auf-ankh, and earth holdeth thy form" (Ch. 163). "Thy soul is in heaven, and thy body is under ground" (Ch. 169). "Ra grasps his hands, a spirit in heaven, a body on earth." "Thy water is in heaven; thy solid parts are on the earth." "The Sun-god," writes Massey, "whether as Atum-Iu or Osiris-Ra, is a mummy in Amenta and a soul in heaven."

These passages are of great value. Particularly should the one be noted which says that "thy material body liveth in Tattu" while the soul lives in heaven. This forestalls, the likely argument that these passages refer to the ordinarily deceased person, whose body is in the ground (if not cremated) while his soul has gone to heaven. The deeper meaning here is that man actually inhabits two worlds at once. He is in heaven by virtue of his divine consciousness; he is on earth through his physical body.

All this situation was part of a larger divine plan. The god was to touch the tip of the head or inchoate mental faculty of the animal with the flame of his intellect, but not further embrace the animal’s life. He was to light the wick of intelligence for the lower being. He was to kindle a fire in the body, but not be burned thereby. But it is said that the waywardness of the gods pretty badly marred the progress of the work. As a group they had bound themselves under a covenant to do the work promptly and return. But earth currents overwhelmed

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them, swept them into forgetfulness, and they truly lost their divine heads and were carried down into sensuous life and sexual procreation. The passage from Plotinus tells why the first essay of Phaëthon to drive the chariot of the Sun resulted in a wild orgy of uncontrolled movement. The seven charges drawing the chariot proved unmanageable for the untested powers of the young god. He gave himself to the delight of a wild revel in the sensual enjoyment of life, and the thrill of adventure tingled through his blood as he indulged his fancy in free creational direction of energies. His drive was outward, and he threw himself into the interests of the lower vehicle. And here lurks the rationale of his changed character from Lucifer to Satan. In drama he was pictured as in part the author of evil when he lent his own superior forces and faculties to the virile energies of the beast. He threw the added power of his own dynamism into the life of animal man. This is the evil aspect of his kindling a fire on earth, or in the sea around the earth. He in fact kindled a fiercer fire under the caldron containing the water of life and the animal ingredients of the lower human constitution, and raised the potentials of all the elemental appetencies. Into the hellish brew went the qualities of the creatures of earth, of the water and of night--the bat, the owl, the toad, the lizard, the newt, the snake; of herbs gathered under the light of waning moon; of every noxious and venomous thing; and under it all burned the fire of the god! Around flitted the three witches, the masquerading earthly forms, feminine and material, of the three divine principles of mind-soul-spirit, the solar triad, poking the fire. And as they revel around the eerie scene, the fire burns and the caldron bubbles, brewing the double toil and trouble for god and man; but all the while the broth is being transformed into its spiritual sublimation, so that it returns to heaven as vapor, in the midst of which the geni can be seen taking form. So the animal ingredients are transformed and lifted up in the burning lake.

In mutual interplay god and animal accentuate each other’s potential energies. In a sense the god makes a worse hell of this nether pit of Tophet, for he plays a part in the degradation of the beast. An excerpt from the Codex Nazareus seems to confirm this delineation:

"He himself will captivate the sons of men by the allurements of cunning delusions and will imbue them with blood and monthly pollution."

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Yet both parties find an enhancement of their range and powers of consciousness through the struggle. But traditional figures of the Satanic personage have taken form and clung to popular fancy out of the allegorical depictions of the cosmic scene. The god, plunged into the hell of body, was painted as plying his fierce labor in mingling his higher fire with the lower elementary fury, stoking the furnace with the fuel of his pride, rebellion and lust for sense, and enjoying with the animal the mutual exchange of their polarized forces. Fantasy sets up the portrait--his body reeking with sweat (Cf. the bloody sweat of Gethsemane), his countenance grimy and lurid in the glare of the fire made murky with the commingled smoke, steam, ashes and soot (Sut) arising from his effort to "burn" the damp green material. This is the ancient picture drawn by high poetic fancy to convey the recondite philosophical principles actually involved; and the failure of heavy ignorant zealotry to catch its fanciful import has cost a crass civilization centuries of woe. The Logia speak in no uncertain terms of this tradition:

"There was one who reigned over them all, even the Star of the Morning, which had fallen upon the earth, Lucifer, but they named him Abaddon, for he was the Destroyer."

Here was in fact proud Lucifer, rebel against the too long protracted passivity of life in the higher worlds, come to earth, baptized in the waters of the Jordan River on the boundary between the two kingdoms, kindling a fire in the water itself, throwing his reed or rod into the Nile of earth and turning it into blood, injecting his own fiery energies into the sluggish life of the beast, himself torn and distracted, abased and crucified, disfigured out of all semblance of his divinity. Let us recall here Isaiah’s account: "How was his visage marred, more than any man!" The figure of intoxication used by the mythicists to betoken this phase of the god’s condition is by no means inapt. This was indeed the "riotous living" in which the Prodigal Son spent his substance. And St. Paul helps us understand the depth of degradation into which the innocent souls fell by his statement that the sweep of lower motivation caused them to change "the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own

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hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves: Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator . . ." This is also the story of Ichabod, from whom "the glory" had departed.

With its roots winding deeply into the heart of this theological depiction, there has sprung up the growth of a gigantic excrescence on the psychological life of mankind that has found no explanation, and can find none, outside the purview of the background just presented. Here lies the key to one of the most inexplicable and redoubtable phenomena in the domain of sociology, for which sociological science can provide no material for a formula of understanding,--the sense of shame appertaining to the sexual organs and functions. From instantaneous creation in the noumenal world by projection of thought energies, the god found himself thrust into lowly physical bodies and reduced to the sensuous procedure of sexual progenation. Swooning into the "deep sleep" that attended his descent from the higher planes, he awoke on the plane of earth to find himself forced to procreate physically like the animals. From deep within his most real self sprang that sense of revulsion at the change, the shadow of which has clung to his consciousness in spite of all rationalization or sophistication. The soul sensed its degradation. Ancient scriptures reflected this feeling in their naming the physical body, as the agent of this debasement, "the garment of shame." In the Pistis Sophia Jesus tells Salome, in answer to her question, that his kingdom shall come "when you shall have trampled underfoot the garment of shame" and returned from the divided life of sex to androgyneity.

If the sense of shame was not inherent in the anthropological situation at the beginning, it was developed and strengthened by the wild license or "Harlotry" in which the first groups of the Sons of God indulged with the females of the higher animal species after reaching earth. There seems to have been a long period of sexual miscegenation, the experience of which would have imprinted the reaction of shame lastingly upon the sub-conscious psyche of early humanity. This is perhaps the "evil concupiscence" against which Paul crusades in his Epistles. And it is significant that in a later passage in the first chapter of Romans, in which Paul states that God gave them up to a reprobate mind to do the things "which are not convenient," he adds as their final description that they were "covenant-breakers." We protest that

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this takes his preachment out of the rank of mere pious homiletics and makes it referable to the racial predicament we are dealing with. Greek philosophy speaks of the violation of "broad oaths fast sealed."

Reverting for a moment to the philosophic analysis of evil, it is highly desirable that the view of Platonic systematism should be gleaned from a few pointed excerpts. Near the end of his two great volumes on the theology of Plato Proclus dilates at length upon the nature of evil in grand fashion. There is not such a thing, he says, as

"unmixed evil or evil itself, or an eternal idea, form and essence of evil; but moral evil is mixed with good, and so far as it is good, it subsists from divinity; but so far as it is evil, it is derived from another cause which is impotent. For evil is nothing else than a greater or less declination, departure, defect and privation from the good itself . . . in the same manner as darkness from (want of) the sun. It is debility and absence of power. And that which is evil to partial natures, is not evil to the universe."

Christian aberrancy from high philosophy can be seen in the erection of evil into a positive, active force and personifying it in a semi-deity.

Evil is only a by-product of the good on its march to full development. Proclus has further enlightenment for us, which should not be missed:

"Evil in souls is a debility of not always and uniformly adhering to better natures and to the good. Hence arises their descent to things subordinate, their oblivion, their malefic inclination to things conversant with body, and their dischord with reason. According to some, matter is that which is primarily evil, and is evil itself, and the debility of souls arises from their lapse into matter."

But we owe to Thomas Taylor a reminder that it is error to impute evil gratuitously to matter:

"This Proclus denies and says that both body and matter originate from deity and that both are the progeny of divinity. He adds . . . that souls sinned before they were thrust into matter; that there are not two principles (matter and deity); and that matter is neither good nor evil, but a thing necessary, and distant in the last degree from the good itself."

Here is balance and sanity, so sorely needed in an age overrun with cults of the "spiritual" raving against the "evil" nature of matter,

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making it a theological "devil." This declaration should be advanced to prominence in the philosophic treatment of the place and function of matter in evolution and systematic thought. Modern spiritual cultism needs to be enlightened with the assurance that matter is in itself neither good nor evil, but neutral. It has no moral quality in itself, but receives such from the good or evil use made of it, as any mechanical invention. It is to become the implementation of the good, and is therefore vitally necessary, as Proclus declares. Cult diatribes against matter as evil are at last seen to be beyond the mark, and the orthodox hypostasization and personification of evil is discovered to be equally inane.

Whatever seems evil exists indeed for the sake of the good:

"To divinity, therefore, nothing is evil, not even of the things which are called evil. For he uses these also to a good purpose . . . For he [the demiurgus] concealed evil in the use of good." Evil "consists in the privation of symmetry between form and matter."

The last statement is a detail which is doubtless most relevant. The god and the animal being conjoined in one organism, evil arose from the want of harmony between them. This is at the base of those Platonic discussions on harmony and symmetrical allotment of function in the Greek thought. Two widely diverse and in a sense antagonistic elements were thrust into a marriage in one body. A conflict was inevitable. Paul’s war of the flesh against the soul was on. The animal could no longer drift in his course of unintelligent natural instinct; and on his part the god was erratic in his incipient lordship over lower forces. What measure of human wretchedness, instability and recklessness does not flow from these factors operative in the situation?

Hence Lucifer became transformed into Satan. Without his intrusion the animal would have known no evil, no aberrancy, no contravention of cyclic order, with consequent pain and distress. But he would have purchased the continuance of his halcyon blissfulness at the cost of--remaining an animal! He could not step across the gap between beast and sentient man without awakening the knowledge of good and evil. The god stepped into the beast’s own province and brought that disturbing influence that began the harrowing process, for both, of learning through suffering. By the god’s stripes we are healed, and both he and his pupil suffer many an anguish before the

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healing is effected. Fittingly the Logia are found saying: "The Beast that was, that is, and that is soon to be cast down into the bottomless pit, is the mystery of iniquity by whose power the world hath been made full of sorrow."

The Beast that was chained in prison or cast down into the lake of fire that burned with brimstone is to be found, along with the lake, in the Ritual (Ch. 17). He is called Baba, the eternal devourer, whose dwelling is in the lake of fire, the red lake, the pool of the damned, in the fiery pit of the recess or "bight" of Amenta. It is to be pointed out that this Baba, called "the lord of gore," extracts the hearts and viscera from the corpses doomed to be consumed at his banquet and "eats the livers of the princes." This personation is identical with that of the Beast in Revelation (10) who makes war on the "Logos of God," but is defeated and cast into the lake that blazes with brimstone. The angel invites all the "birds that fly in mid-heaven to gather for the great banquet of God," at which "the flesh of kings" was devoured. In the Promethean myth the bird, vulture or eagle, comes daily to consume the liver of the king of heaven, bound helpless to the rock, or the cross. The bird typifying generally the soul, coming to devour the liver of the god, unquestionably has some reference to the purificatory offices of the spiritual nature in the evolutionary process, though a more subtle knowledge of the function of the liver in vital economy would probably enable us to read further astonishing significance in the symbology. The myth may perhaps simply signify the soul’s periodical visitation to earth to pluck the fruits of the purgative and purificatory experience, by which through bodily suffering evil is transmuted into good, as the liver cleanses impurities of the body.

Paul in Ephesians (2) and elsewhere sets forth the forces in conflict in the arena of the human breast:

"You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you moved as you followed the course of this world . . . when we obeyed the passions of our flesh, carrying the dictates of the flesh and its impulses, when we were objects of God’s anger like the rest of men."

Again this use of the word "anger," often elsewhere "ire" or "wrath," must be carefully delimited in meaning, since it refers to nothing like human vindictiveness, but just the "fire" of deity working its natural

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efficacy in and upon the elements of the body. "Ire" is "fire" with the Greek diagamma dropped off, and "wrath" is the original fire of creative force.

Paul’s admonition was to "abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul." He speaks of the deadly enmity between the two natures, as does Plato, and pleads with the disciples to strive for the victory of the spiritual man over the carnal. He puts sexual vice at the head of a list of corrupt practices, and sexual continence at the head of a list of virtues.

Through the diversion of dramatic meaning into false channels, the god, then, became regarded as the instigator of all evil in the moral situation. It is noteworthy that in the Jonah legend, the god, asleep in the hold of the storm-tossed vessel, is found, by casting lots, to be responsible for the storm. Two features here deserve elucidation. He was asleep. The god, who should have been awake and alert to control the sweeping urges of sensual thought (water agitated by air, mind, symbolically) was asleep. While he lay inert the storm of air and water raged. He was thus responsible, for he was sent to be the master of these very elements. He waked in time and his destiny demanded that he be thrown into the midst of the waters, to take charge and still them. The storm then quieted.

Next, he lay in the hold. This was called Akar (Agar, Hagar), a region of Amenta. It types the lower self, the lower part of the organism, the natural, carnal man. He had been captivated and his divine genius and memory were narcotized by the oblivion-producing influences of incarnation. He lay in a torpor in the hold of the ship, the belly of the mortal man.

So the god, rendered at first sluggish, beastly, brutalized, became the evil one. And the alteration of character from benefactor to demon, has wrought ghastly mischief in religious machination. Spurred on by the imaginary hypostatization of an Evil Spirit in the world, men have by the very force and contagion of a fixed obsession wrought themselves into the likeness of this malignant demon and dramatized in actual history their conception of his diabolical role. Swept on by the inculcated theory of his presence in personal form in the world, bigots everywhere found in the assumption a ready subterfuge for persecution and cruelty. Since embodiment had to be found for the Evil

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Spirit, every unacceptable act or idea of one’s brother or one’s enemy could be charged to demoniac possession. Thus there was provided an easy channel for a terrible outpouring of man’s inhumanity to man, and there was let loose an orgy of vicious despotism in religion that has stained the record of Christianity almost past repair. Nothing but philosophical understanding of the real issues involved will clarify the error in religious attitude on this matter. Nothing but the realization that Satan was and is himself the angel of light, our heavenly benefactor, will restore sober sanity to a race rendered next to demonical by an infernal theology.

There is documentary evidence to indicate that this figure was not at first regarded as the evil genius of man at all, but was rated as the Agathodaemon, or Guardian Spirit. On Massey’s authority it may be stated that "the Serpent in Egypt, Chaldea, India, America and Europe is the Good Serpent generally, the Agathodaemon." The Ritual (Ch. 83) affirms that "The Great One shining with his body as a God is Sut." Sut was strictly not the evil one. He was the seven-headed serpent or dragon. And the seven Uraei, or serpent-headed gods, are typical not of death, but of life. Another voice concurs in this estimate.

"Like Satan himself, even as the Rev. Dunbar Heath has shown (The Fallen Angels), the serpent had not, indeed, a wholly evil character among the early Hebrews."1

The same authority (p. 57) goes further:

"Whatever may be the explanation of the fact, it is understood that, notwithstanding the hatred with which he was afterwards regarded, this god Seth, or Set, was at one time highly venerated in Egypt. Bunsen says that up to the thirteenth century before Christ, Set ‘was a great god universally adored throughout Egypt, who confers on the sovereigns of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties the symbols of life and power.’ He adds: ‘But subsequently, in the course of the twentieth dynasty he is suddenly treated as an evil demon, inasmuch as his effigies and name are obliterated on all the monuments and inscriptions that could be reached.’ Moreover, according to Bunsen, Seth ‘appears gradually among the Semites as the background of their religious consciousness’; and not merely was he ‘the primitive god of Northern Egypt and Palestine,’ but his genealogy as ‘the Seth of Genesis, the father of Enoch (the man), must be considered as originally running parallel with that derived from the Elohim, Adam’s father.’"

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This is effective corroboration of the claim advanced herein that the father of intelligent man was the Titanic host, typified by the fiery serpent. Once revered by infant humanity as the bestower of light and life, this collective being later suffered a transformation of imputed character and became thought of as the father of all ill. Some of the dramatic implications worked over into popular belief, and the dramatic character of the Adversary overbore the true understanding of the hidden beneficence of the son of the morning.

The doctrine of hell-fire has drifted from the original connotation far away from intelligible meaning. It must be reduced again to rational sense.

Chemically all life processes are a burning. Oxidation is a slower burning, as in rust. All decomposition is a burning. Disintegration of a composite by operation of a superior potency is a burning. Hence all energic activity among the elements of life is thought of as the work of fire. Man’s whole life, then, is cast in the midst of a veritable welter of fiery forces, and so Egypt described the world as the lake of fire, or again "the crucible of the great house of flame" and "the Pool of the Double Fire." "Higher" fires and "lower" fires, or the rays of cosmic thought and the purely chemical energies embosomed in matter, called by the Egyptians "the seven Uraeus divinities," unite on earth in a combat and interfusion which constitutes indeed "the fiery furnace" of theological myth. The god came here, to transmute both himself and his animal protégé into higher natures. He was to burn out the dross and refine the material of the coarser sheaths, those of "earth" and "water," to make possible the unfoldment to function of the principle of mind. This type of spiritual combustion is all that was originally meant by the purging by fire and the winnowing by air. To purify is to make clean by fire. Burning out, or blowing out, the chaff of the animal compound in us by the divine fire of soul, or the divine afflatus of spirit, was the universal mythical symbol of our divinization. Coming with his fan in his hand "he will thoroughly purge his floor." The floor is the physical base of life. The higher potency will cleanse the lowest. More than once the Egyptian Ritual harps on the soul’s "acquiring dominion over his feet." The rite of feet-washing can be immediately divined as a type of cleansing the lowest nature. Texts in the Ritual state that he who has won control over his feet has done all he needs to do to insure salvation.

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Says Isaiah (I:25): "And I will turn my hand upon thee and purely purge away thy dross and take away thy tin." After purging his floor, "he will gather his wheat into the garner; but the chaff he will burn with fire unquenchable" (Matt., Luke). We are in hell because the lower segment of us needed the burning, and the upper segment the winnowing, or both segments needed both operations, according to the application of the figure.

To be consumed in the lake, or the furnace, of fire, then, is not, as theology has mistaught a harrowed world, to writhe in flames of torment piled by a vengeful god to satiate a thwarted wrath. There are seven-league-boot strides of distance and difference between this insufferable product of a fiendish theology and the august philosophical conception of primal wisdom. The latter is instinct with dignity and truth; the other a frenzy of inhuman weakness goaded by ignorant fear. Some semblance at least of the hidden truth should have been conceived from the fact that even in the distorted rendering, the souls in hell burn, but do not burn up. Their torment, says orthodoxy, is eternal; and the true and sane original meaning of this whole doctrine went awry because "eternal" was substituted in the translation for "aeonial." The stress of anguish of the fiery experience was to last through the aeon or cycle of incarnation. This rendering yields instruction and intelligence; the other mocks the reason.

The souls burn, but are not extirpated. They die, but live on, eventually transfigured. "I died yesterday, but I am alive today," cries the Manes. "In one of the hells the shades (Manes) are seen burning, but they were able to resist the fire, and consequently it is said: ‘The shades live; they have raised their powers.’"

The lower fires burn with smudge and murk; they must be transmuted to pure flame. Fire there will be; its quality is the vital concern. Says Isaiah (9:17):

"For wickedness burneth as a fire. It shall devour the briars and thorns, and shall kindle in the thickets of the forests."

The briars, thorns and thickets are the dense undergrowth of coarse sensualism, which will burn themselves out, by conversion into gentler flames.

In Egypt the goddess Sekhet is made to play the part of the avenger of the wicked with hell fire. She is the fiery energies latent in matter,

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generating the various forms of burning and purification to which the Kumaras will be subjected. The release of her powers upon the god will search and purge his nature. She is typed by the lioness, material consort and counterpart of Shu, the lion-god, astrologically the hot July sun of the lion sign. Nature’s typology is most striking in this relation. In the incarnation cycle, symboled as well by winter as by night, the fire of soul immersed in earthy and watery body, absorbs, as it were, an excess of the two lower elements. In the inter-life periods, when the soul is out of body, and figuratively in its summer time, the heat of July drives out the water and its earthy admixture in sweat! But life in the empyrean then runs to an excess of fire and heated air, and the soul has to escape from this menace by a retreat again to earth and water--incarnation. Even this intimation has its appropriate and very suggestive summer emblemism; for, as in winter fire and heated air stand as the types of salvation for man from menace of earth and water, in the summer water and earth, and even darkness (shade), offer salvation from the menace of air and fire. The seasonal swing, with all its concomitant conditions, can be taken as an exact duplication of the evolutionary pendulum, which swings the soul from an excess of mind and spirit over to the opposite excess of sense and feeling, and back again. In embodiment the water struggles to quench the fire; in heaven the fire expunges the water. It is an axiom of occult and esoteric study that the world shall be alternately destroyed by fire and water. This has been accepted in a literal way, so that the legend is that the continent of Lemuria some millions of years ago was destroyed by fiery convulsions and the later continent of Atlantis submerged by water. If continents sink both fire and water must of necessity play a part in the development. It is true that living factual history, of men and of universes and planets, does in general carry out the outline of symbolism. Yet it may be suggested that perhaps in this instance it is possible that sheer typology became once more too directly historicized. As Horus and Sut alternately vanquish each other in endless repetition, so fire and water eternally dominate in turn.

As Sekhet is linked with the Lion sign, so Serkh, or Heh, is instructively seen as related to Scorpio. We can see this better through Massey’s studies:

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"The serpent-goddess Heh especially represents the element of Fire that was first symbolized by the lightning of the serpent’s sting. But the serpent itself was recognized before the goddess of fire or heat was personified. She is called the ‘Maker of Invisible Existence Apparent.’ But it was the serpent that first revealed and made manifest in pain and death the fiery power that existed invisibly. The fury of the solar fire suggested the fang-sting. The name of the Sirocco, the very breath of fire, identifies itself with Serkh, the (Egyptian) name of the Scorpio, which further shows the hard form of Serf, the blast of burning breath."2

Before dilating upon the Scorpion typology, a moment’s attention must be paid to the remarkable name given to the serpent-goddess of fire: The Maker of Invisible Existence Apparent. The whole program of incarnation is designed to enable incipient divinity to bring out into manifestation all its latent powers. All manifestation is to effect an Epiphany. There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed, as evolution throws out upon the screen of concrete existence the deeper things of God. And the sculpturing tool that molds in matter the forms of archetypal conception is the burning flame of material energy in the veins of substance, guided by intelligence. To impale a cosmic thought in a fixed structure of matter, to imprison it in inert substance, required the deadly sting of the Scorpion-goddess Serkh, which threw the invisible existence into motionless stability in the arms of matter.

The allegorical function of the sign of Scorpio is most impressive. The god in his autumn descent into body to make his hidden existence visible is stung into lethal sleep by the Scorpion-goddess. This is a most striking natural emblem of the swooning noted in connection with the downward march toward body. God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam when he was to be bifurcated into duality in earthly life. The entire progression into flesh involved the soul’s "death," as from a sting of poison. The baser fires of sense, permeating his more ethereal bodies, injected noxious elements into it, rendering it lethal and sluggish. The foreign substances of the lower man poisoned the god. He was stung to death as he descended. This is in keeping with the position of Scorpio in the zodiac, which falls in the October-November date, when the sun likewise is going to death in winter. He comes with power to tread on serpents and scorpions and put all things under his feet; but his victory is not won at the start; it will

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come at the end. Like Jesus, Job and Samson, he must first come under the power of the adversary. He first becomes the helpless infant attacked by the serpent, the Herut menace; he becomes Sekari, the silent sufferer. The Scorpion sign in the autumn of the year is the intimation of the fatal sting of spirit by the serpent of the lower nature, the asp or Uraeus of Egypt, "a serpent of fire."

The sense is more directly to be apprehended in connection with several myths that represent Isis (nature) as scheming to extract from Ra his mighty secret of wisdom. She arranges to have Ra pass a certain place at which he would be bitten by a snake or scorpion. In the ensuing coma the secret could be wrested from him. This is a mighty glyph of incarnational truth. It is only when the god is bound in oblivion in the lap of matter that he imparts to matter (Isis) the qualities of his mind. She must reduce him and his intellectual fire to inertness so that she may abstract from him his living intellectual essence and impregnate her body with the seed of his mind after his death, which is exactly the substance and gist of another of the great Egyptian myths of the gods. This one has given ignorant Christian scholars and priests paroxysms of affected revulsion against the imputed sacrilege and obscenity of pagan "beliefs." So Serkh, a form of Isis characterized as the Scorpion-goddess, causes the descending god of pure intellect to be struck and paralyzed by the sting of bodily sense.

It is hardly less than astonishing that one can turn to the field of natural phenomena and find there a living duplication of the death of the Christos on the cross of matter. A number of species of insects resort to a stinging of the male by the female, as the result of which the former is thrown into a state of coma, and the mother takes advantage of his helplessness to deposit her eggs in the fleshly portion of his body, so that when they shortly come into larva form they may have his body to feed upon until able to find food elsewhere. Jesus commanded us to eat his body. He was laid in the manger, where the animals eat. The god goes to his death, and from his dying body and shed blood the young generation draws the nutriment that sustains life. Job and Isaiah refer to the sting that poisons the god.

Budge seems to have become so entangled in the dual relevance of the serpent symbol that he gave up the effort to grapple with it in despair:

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"In short, the serpent was either a power for good or the incarnation of diabolical cunning and wickedness."3

He did not know it was both. But the matter is complicated and his distress is easily comprehended. There is the dragon of wisdom guarding the tree of knowledge, and there is the Apap monster, the crocodile of the waters. The latter is the "villain" of the play. But there is light in many statements that the serpent of evil is to be transformed into the serpent of good. There is the "lifting up of the serpent," which, however, again may have a twofold interpretation, denoting either the lifting up of the elementary powers (the lower serpent) to a higher condition through transformation; or the lifting up of the fiery serpent of the god-nature, after it has fallen into degradation. When Moses lifted up the brazen serpent on the cross in the wilderness, it can mean either that the Israelites should lift up the fallen god to his fiery purity, or that they should raise up the baser nature to a higher place through linkage with their exalted status. Both meanings at any rate eventually merge into one. For as the higher self had intertwined his nature with that of the lower self, the lifting up of the one must involve the redemption of the other. In the famed caduceus of Mercury the two serpents intertwined around the staff or wand are united at the bottom, because spirit and matter are joined in man’s physical life.

Moses’ raising the serpent is paralleled in Egyptian lore by the saying of the Speaker: "I am raised up to (or as) the serpent of the sun." The influence of the Christly deity lifts up the lower self. Moses stands for man, and Jehovah ordered Moses to build a tabernacle in which he (Jehovah) should be raised up. It may fall with surprise and incredulity upon most readers to be told that the Jehovah character of the creation legend is by no means the Supreme Lord, but merely one of the seven Elohim, or builders of the physical universe. He is one of the seven Uraeus "deities"; another one of the seven bears the name of Oreus, which is a form of Uraeus. So man is to raise up the natural order to the spiritual, and he is to do it in the "tabernacle" which he is engaged in building. This is that body of spiritual radiance which every man is steadily formulating out of the fiery essence of the very matter of his body, as lower fires are transmuted to higher. This transformation is made by man here on the cross of material life. The seven

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Uraeus deities, of whom Jehovah was one, were the powers that lay embosomed in matter, the forces that built the physical universe, all below the level of mind. They were the Apap or Hydra monster swimming in the water of the lower Nun; and man had to transmute them into solar fire. Uraeus, the name, evidently derives from Ur, the original creative fire, and aei, meaning in Greek "ever, always." They were the "eternal fires" that forged the various creations. They create life below the level of mind, but must be lifted up to be changed into spiritual intelligences. They begin around the feet of the gods and goddesses, and end on their foreheads. In man physiologically they are brought up from the base of the spine and crown the human development by opening up the latent faculties of divine intelligence locked up in the pineal gland and pituitary body in the head. A line from the Ritual dispels all doubt as to their higher or lower rating and nature. It reads: "The seven Uraeus divinities are my body." They are the fiery formative energies of matter, not of mind. They are the energy in the atom, seven blind forces, which, however, draw the chariot of creation and must therefore be directed by intelligence.

One form of the serpent of the water is the great Hydra monster of the uranograph, Apap or Herut. He swims alongside the ship of Horus crossing the Lake of Putrata, or water of the bodily life, ready to devour any careless sailor who may fall overboard. In the planispheres his elongated body stretches across seven signs of the zodiac, and his head, with open mouth, comes directly under the feet of the Virgin. Her feet are over his head, fulfilling the Biblical promise that her heel should bruise his head. He is the serpent or dragon of many myths.

The manner in which this monster is to be overcome or beaten off is of great interest. The Speaker (Ch. 108) exclaims triumphantly: "I understand the mystical representation of things and by that means I repulse Apap." By "mystical representations of things" is meant something that modern insight does not discern and with which it is not conversant. It indicates the ancient use of spiritual typology, carried to a high degree of subtlety and artistry that engendered dynamic forms of psychological reaction. The cathartic virtue of Greek drama has been fairly well envisaged by students. But the practice of handling symbolic formulae of profound truth was in olden time a high art, used as a means of exalting and purifying the entire life. We note this

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often in the directions appended to the Ritual chapters as Rubrics. To put it tersely for modern skepticism, symbols can be used aright to exert a positive and salutary magic. Certain potencies in nature are released to play in the individual by the habitual contemplation of truth on the analogy of natural and other images. Much ancient ceremonial in religion was repetition of magical formulae of the sort. In the mind’s grasp of subtle correspondence between physical phenomena and hidden truth there was liberated a psychic dynamism which was cathartic of the whole nature. To repulse Apap, to transform bestial desire into love and brotherhood, demands the skillful handling of subtle forces. Thought, will and feeling must be harmonized in a delicate balance. Theurgic magic and spiritual therapy were closely bound up with "the mystical representations of things."

To prevent the serpent from stinging, to meet this massive brute force of primal instinct and tame it to reason, required that the god-soul should learn to "charm the serpent." The significance of this "charming’ is profound. "These are the gods who charm for Har-Khuti (Horus) in Amenta. They, the masters of their nets, charm those who are in the nets." In the scene portrayed in this chapter of the Ritual men walk before Ra to charm Apap for him. They chant: "O impious Apap, thou art charmed by us through the means of what is in our hands!" The first star in Ophiuchus is called "the head of the Serpent-Charmer."

"Who is Manitou?" an Algonquin chant asks. "He that goeth with the Serpent"--the god who lives with and tames the lower self. The widespread use of such terms as Manitou, Mana and Manna to indicate a spirit power in man and things is indicative of much. The words connote "magical power" as believed to be possessed by every tribal medicine-man. The probability is that the term is of kindred root with the word "man" itself, and Manas (Sanskrit), "mind." For mind constitutes man what he is, and it is the mind principle in man that was sent precisely for the purpose of charming the animal propensities into culture. A "mantram" is a Vedic word for a magical incantation. The god’s action upon the brute self was likened to a charming, and the word "charm" is itself from the stem that gives us "Christ" and "Eucharist" and "charity." For the god to "charm" the beast was to lull the animal nature to docility, the while it lent ear to the sweet strains of a higher melody which transformed it magically.

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The great potent serpent-charmer is mind, thought. Man is the thinking magician, rendering impotent the baleful sting of the serpent. The Christos tramples underfoot the serpents and scorpions, whose lethal sting endangers him.

Singular verification of these interpretations is found in the mythical episodes of Orpheus, the Greek hero-god. He is shown seated amidst eight animals (the elementary seven powers, counted as eight with their Lord) playing upon his lyre of seven strings. Massey traces the name Orpheus to the Egyptian Uarp, "the harper." The word is from the root signifying "to delight, charm or be charmed." He enchants the wild beasts and overcomes with the charms of his music all the powers of Hades. Circe’s charming was at once followed by a transformation, but in this case from men into beasts, marking the god in his descent charmed by matter, and it had to be followed by a countertransformation back to men. In most legends of classical mythology in which the solar hero faces the task of rescuing a maiden (the soul) from the cave in which she is guarded by a dragon, he is represented as first lulling the dragon to sleep or charming him by some potent talisman.

Immediately after Jesus said to his disciples that he beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven he subjoined: "Behold I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy." And when the seventy returned with joy from their mission, they exclaimed: "Lord, even the devils are subject unto us in thy name." The power to tread on serpents and scorpions was the power to rule--not necessarily to crush--the elementary nature. They were in Egypt the Sami and the Sebau and the minions of Sut. The latter was assigned the scorpion as the type of evil.

The power to charm a dangerous serpent by silent concentration was so evidently a demonstration of the efficacy of some invisible magic that mind, thought and magic were named after the serpent. It, too, was seen to possess this strange power. And the (higher) serpent became the type of occult control, wisdom, sagacity, for this reason. It even was one of the chief symbols of deity itself. The Greek drakon, "dragon," denotes the keen-eyed seer, as does the Sanskrit Naga, "serpent."

The dual aspect of the serpent symbol is graphed in the heavens in an ancient Egyptian planisphere. The great crocodile (dragon, ser-

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pent) appears at the place of the autumn equinox, close to the Scorpion, yet stretches across six signs to the spring equinox. It is the power that reaches from sense to soul. Likewise there is found in the northern sky the (former) pole star Alpha Draconis, and in the southern heavens the star Eta Hydri. On this dual pivot of the dragons the starry skies revolved. As in the uranograph between the two Dragons was run the line of the axis of stability for the planet, so the axis of stability in man’s life is the line of force running between the upper serpent of spiritual wisdom and the lower one of animality. All cosmic stability is fixed upon a line of force playing between the two poles of vital affinity, positive and negative, the two serpent fires. Man exists only because spirit and body were united in one organism and the reciprocal play of currents of force between them sustains his life. The seers of old wrote the signs of this relationship in the skies. There was the serpent of heaven and the snake of earth. And man is the compound of their two energies.

Apap, the water monster, grasps at souls to devour them. The souls on board Horus’ ship exult at having escaped his jaws. Appropriately he is also called the "eater of the heads" of the dead in Amenta. He subverts the intellect of man. But even his nature is finally changed and exalted, and he, along with the seven Uraei, is lifted up. They all become the servants of the god of light in the sun-cults. They at first war in fierce opposition to man as the Seven Adversaries; later they fight for Ra against every manifestation of evil. The Scorpion eventually stings "on behalf of gods and men." Serkh, Scorpion-goddess, becomes the guardian of the sun and keeper of the chained Apap. "I have come," says the Manes, "like the sun through the gates of the Sun-goer, otherwise called the Scorpion." (Rit., Ch. 147.) This puts Scorpio at the place of the autumn equinox, where it was in remote times,--the eagle, one of the four cardinal guardians.

When the seven Uraei were raised to be worn on the foreheads of the gods, that which had been most deadly was transformed into that which was divine. It is said of each serpent emitting jets of fire in Hades, "Its flame is for Ra." The death-darting dragons became the watchers of the gates of heaven and guardians of the tree of knowledge, the three golden apples (mind-soul-spirit) and every treasure of light. The seven elementary powers first described as Wicked Spirits are promoted from that character to become the "Seven Great Spirits

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in the service of their Lord," and the seven attendants of the solar Ra in Egypt. This transformation is matched in Persia and India. In the planisphere they stand behind the constellation of the Thigh or Meskhen, Ursa Major, in the north. They are called "the Followers of Osiris," who "burn the wicked souls of his enemies," and "the givers of blows for sins." Four of these are Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef and Kabhsenuf, prominent in Egyptian lore as the "Four Chieftains of the Four Corners," and Sons of Horus. They were emblemed by the four Canopic jars at the corners of the mummy-case.

The gist of all this is that the first seven-ply creation was elementary and chaotic, and that the advent of mind in creation in the person of man put these wild forces for the first time under rational control in an organic being. From the status of enemies and opponents, the first principles were tamed to man’s service. As a reward of service they will be lifted up to partake of man’s higher nature. The text (Ch. 85) has the Osirified dead saying: "I pass through substance. I pierce the darkness. Hidden reptile is my name. The soul of my body is a serpent of life." Chapter 87 of the Ritual carries the expressive title "of making the transformation into the serpent Sata." Allusion to the danger encountered by the god in the underworld is found in the "chapter by which a person is not devoured or bitten by the eater of the head, which is a snake."

The frequent early figure of a serpent coiled seven times round the summit of a hill or a cone (seen in the serpent mounds of America) types the fiery energy of life circling the round of the seven cycles in all creations. There was a sevenfold movement in each of the creations, the stellar, the solar or planetary, and the human, both racial and individual. The Beast had seven heads. The Ritual gives: "O the very high hill in Hades! the heavens rest upon it. There is a snake on it, Sati is his name. He is about twenty cubits in his coil." He is also called "the Serpent of Millions of Years," which indicates that he is a type of the cyclic revolutions of life force about the globes. The crocodile-god Sevekh (seven) is said to be on the hill of the Lord of Bata.

The serpent laying its eggs and coiling about them for incubation was the true type of natural gestation, which brought forth fixed cycles of revolving life arising out of the primal chaos. By shape the egg itself is a symbol of revolution. Each seven coils or revolutions of the mother life engender a new creation. The seven non-intelligent powers

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--monsters, giants, blind adversaries--are the breeding force of a new life that is intelligent. The powers that swirled and swarmed in the abyss of darkness become the nursery of the sun of intellect in the kingdom of man, who is so far the crown of earthly life. The great old giant dragon was simply a type of primordial darkness and chaos. It gave birth to seven powers which fought blindly until they were subdued and synthesized under the last and highest of them, the Christ mind. This great dragon was pictured with its tail in its mouth. The figure betokened the cycle returning into itself or back to source, or the parent life reabsorbing its own products. Kronos, Father Time, in the great myths devoured his own children. The Oriental expects his individual consciousness to be drawn back into the universal Nirvana. The dragon of the original abyss later came to be the dragon of mother earth herself, who swallowed up her children one by one as the grave closed over them. Also she swallowed the sun each evening and the stars as they set.

Sut, as a later representative of evil, became the opponent of the god both in the physical and the moral order. He waged war with the sun-god and was defeated, but never slain. Horus attacked him and fought with him for three days, and though wounded, he escaped with his life. He suffered rout periodically and perpetually, but was not destroyed, or only figuratively so. He lived to fight again. The sun-god cast a spell on him every day and rendered him powerless for evil. He was chained down for the aeon. All this was the natural expression of the moral conflict in man’s soul, as it is of all other conflict, for life subsists in manifestation only by virtue of the pull, tension or struggle between the two nodal forces. Now one, now the other, is conqueror. The original mother of life, represented variously as the crocodile dragon, the hippopotamus, cow, sow, lioness, water-horse and finally woman, "the great harlot," who all meet in Kep, or Kefa (Heva, Chavvak, Eve), "the mother of the living," was the gestator of Sut and Horus, who are born twins! They typify the two aspects of life’s expression, activity and passivity, positive and negative force, light and darkness. The story of life is a story of unending conflict between the two "hostile" powers. The legends paint but a single cycle of growth, but the cycles repeat themselves endlessly. Any cycle is emblematic of every other one, and hence of all movement or all truth. If man knows

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his own life in its cycle, he knows all. The arcane wisdom exhorted man to know himself.

In Egypt the conflict was first waged between the sun-god Ra and Apap. It was symboled variously by the death and rebirth of sunshine daily and seasonally, by the waxing and waning moon, and by the setting and rising stars. In the realm of spiritual activity it was carried on by Sut and Horus. Astrologically the Dragon in the northern sky was the good serpent of Ra, or Horus, while the elongated Hydra was the evil serpent of Sut or Satan. Lastly the two were depicted as twin brothers fighting over their birthright! Their conflict took place, be it noted, in Amenta, where they fought upon the mount and were constellated as the Twins contending in Gemini. We shall see them as Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau and other pairs.

The Bible offers first the warfare between Cain and Abel, the first two sons of Adam (Atum). Research brings to light the little-known fact that Abel is feminine in gender! This would seem to put Cain in the role of the conqueror of material nature and darkness. Massey states that Abel represents the waning light of evening or autumn, the god descending into incarnation or entering upon his "feminine phase." Cain then would be the one who puts an end to this cycle, and rises to victory in a new birth. Cain may be a type of Khunsu, Egyptian god, son of Atum-Ra, but Khunsu obtains his victory under the typology of the moon’s phases, rather than those of the sun. He is the lunar light, victorious over the dark phase.

In the struggle between Horus and Sut over the succession the two were parted by the intervention of Taht, the moon-god, who assigns each to his domain, the one north, the other south. This marks the bifurcation into spirit and matter, or male and female potency, by the instrumentality of matter, represented by the moon. It is allegorized in the fairy princess stories by the awarding of one half of the father’s kingdom to the hero-rescuer of the king’s daughter who had been captured by the dragon. In the kingdom of man it meant the placing of the god’s intelligence in the upper portion of the body and the animal soul or Sut below the diaphragm, in Jonah’s "belly of death." The significance of Taht’s mediatorship is that the moon is the agency of effecting an intermediate relation between the hidden solar light and the dark power of night, by its reflection of the sun-god’s rays in the darkness. The moon is thus the perfect type of the mediatorial function

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of that principle in Plato’s philosophy which stands midway between the higher Nous, or spiritual intelligence, and the doxa, or sense mind of the animal self. The bee gets some of its character as type of soul because it is the active agent of marrying the male and female elements of the flower. In Roman religion this principle was the Pontifex or Bridge-builder between the two natures, since it spans the gap between them and makes communication possible. And in human history it grandly types the situation in which, when the soul in body is quite cut off, like the earth at night, from the direct rays of heavenly light, and gropes in darkness, there comes to its aid the principle of Manas, the hidden intellect, to intervene, like the moon that relays light from an unseen source, between man and the god who seems to have deserted him. The moonlight is the symbol of that spiritual light that shines not directly in full power, but refracted through intervening media, into our prison of darkness. Cut off from our full solar light in the darkness of incarnation, we still have the divine light by reflection upon our physical lives. The moonlight is not that true light, but it bears witness to that light.

Beside the pairs of contending brothers, mythology presents the many pairs of the two women, whose representative functions are somewhat more difficult to discern. The solar heroes have ever two mothers, a heavenly and an earthly one. The one conceives the son, the other bears him. "The Two Daughters of the king of the north gave birth to thee, the great ladies of his head." It is added, significantly: "Heaven beareth thee up on thy right side, earth on thy left side." The intent here is to tell us that we are upheld by the opposite action of the positive and negative strands of primal force, the powers of "heaven" and "earth," or, for the individual, mind and body. The two women are elsewhere described as the "Two Goddesses who conceive and do not breed"--until fructified by the germ of mind.

But it is said that Sut opens and Horus closes up the two mothers. There is abstruse meaning hidden under this typing. It seems to use the imagery of opening and closing the womb in impregnation and childbirth. The opening was ascribed to Sut because it signals the coming forth of conscious life into and under his domain, matter. As St. Paul has told us, sin and evil sprang to life when the soul came into incarnation. Sut opened the womb of being and began the phase of manifestation in all the lower realms. Horus, spirit force, led the life

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of nature back from matter to the noumenal worlds, and thus closed the womb of the universal mother. As the "Bull of his Mother," he impregnated her again and again, closing her womb until the birth. The sons of intelligence must reproduce through union with natural and material forms in each generation. Matter, the mother of life, is the Great Harlot, ever fecund, yielding her bosom to spirit to embody its forms. Horus closes the womb with fertile seed; Sut opens it again to let the new birth escape into darkness and death. If this is not the sense of the typology, it hides something else profound indeed.

The two brothers were typed by white and black birds, respectively. The golden hawk pictured Horus, the black vulture Sut. Eagle and crow, dove and raven, hawk and blackbird, pigeon and bandicoot are often paired. The stars Sothis (Sirius) and Canopus likewise carry the characters in the sky. In India Krishna and Bala-Rama do the impersonation. Krishna asks the other: "Do you know that you and I are alike the origin of the world?" Krishna came from the black hair of Vishnu and Bala-Rama from the white. Krishna comes (Massey) from a word meaning "waning moon"; Bala means virile male force. There are the two brothers in the Babylonian books, the one ousting the other each night. It is the younger of the twins that always slays the dragon with seven heads, rescuing the soul. Ultimately he marries the princess, which is to say that the two natures merge into one; and he inherits half the paternal kingdom.

On one occasion when Horus and Sut were battling, Sut cast filth in the face of Horus and blinded him; Horus retaliated by tearing away Sut’s genitals. If incarnation entails the god’s being blinded by having the "mire" of earth cast in his face, he at least wins the use of the procreative powers of matter for the time. His release finally from the dominance of carnal instincts and his graduation from sexual generation back to spiritual creation would be the general significance of his circumcision.

In the resurrection of the dismembered Osiris, "Horus, who loves him, brings him his Eye; Set, who loves him, brings him his testicles, and Thoth, who loves him, brings him his arm and shoulder." Set (Sut) is here painted in friendly colors. So in another text: "Nut gives thee to be a god unto Set in thy name of God. . . . Horus seizes Set, he places him under thee; Set bears thee up, he is beneath thee as earth is beneath thee. Rule thou him, therefore, in thy name of Ta-tcheser.

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Horus makes thee to grasp Set by his middle; he shall not get out of thy hand." Here is evidence that the elementary powers were to be taken in hand by the god and utilized in support of his life. The subordination of the beast under divine faculty is surely indicated in this material. The eye definitely identifies Horus as the deity of spiritual vision, the testicles relate Sut to the realm of generation, or flesh.

Sut is definitely made the upholder and servant of Horus in some passages. "Hail, Osiris (deceased), wake up! Horus hath made Thoth to bring thine enemy to thee. He places thee on his back; he cannot throw thee off. Thou makest thy seat upon him. Come forth, sit upon him, he escapes not from thy hand. Hail, be thou master of him."

"He sets thee on thy throne; Horus makes thine enemy to bow beneath thee. When he would have union with thee, thou escapest his member."

Here is further and unquestioned confirmation of the claim that the seven lower powers are later drawn into the service of the soul. The god was to "put all things under his feet," to have dominion over the beast, bird and fish of the worlds lying below his plane. The allusion to escaping Sut’s member bent on intercourse would dramatize the idea of the soul’s escape from being drawn into defilement and pollution by full immersion in the animal nature on its low plane.

Roman classicism presents the fable of Romulus and Remus, and again one kills the other. A common early tradition in the world is the founding of a city by a fratricide.

A Greek version of the twins is seen in Eros, Love, and Ant-Eros, the latter being the opposing phase. He avenged unrequited love and contended with Cupid (Eros).

The natural man and the spiritual son were charactered most peculiarly by another set of symbols. The former became the uncouth "lad from the country," au naturel, and the latter the "gilded youth from the town." Grotesque as this may seem, it attests the invincible studiousness of the ancients for suggestive symbols borrowed from nature and life. A companion pair was the King in the city and the Chief in the bush.

Astrally the twins are given places in opposite quarters of the sky, as gods of the north and south. Then they are distinguished as the setting and rising sun, waning and waxing moon. Sometimes the character of Sut is assigned to a double of Horus, who is the ugly old man,

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fading in his dotage, or the crippled deity, or the immature and impubescent child. He is being worsted and supplanted by the young solar Horus, born anew and come to pubescence (type of the rebirth of his lost power) at the age of twelve, when his wisdom confounds the old men and he leaves his mother. This second and virile character is also taken by Jesus, as the Christ of the catacombs, the "blooming boy" Bacchus of the Greek Mysteries, the youthful Mithras of the Persians, and the fair Apollo of Greece. Also there was an elder and a younger Horus, the one born to suffer and die ignominiously, the other to rise crowned with light. So the Hindu Prajapati was one-half mortal, the other half immortal, and in his mortal life he feared death. There was a double Horus, a biune Bacchus, a two-faced Janus and the two-sided Jesus, the little mummied child and suffering servant, as well as the risen and glorified Lord.

A very important facet of the myth of the Two Brothers is to be envisaged through the story of another pair of twins, Jacob and Esau. They struggle for supremacy in the mother’s womb. In the womb of the abyss of matter the two forces struggle before they come to manifestation. We have seen that hair, as in Samson’s case, stands as the type of solar radiance or power. Esau is the "red, hairy one." Jacob (Egyptian Hak, Hakh, or Hakekh) is the dark twin. When Rebecca found that "twins were struggling in her womb," she was terrified and consulted the Eternal. She was told:

"In your limbs lie nations twain,

rival races from their birth;

one the mastery shall gain,

the younger o’er the elder reign."

Esau emerged first and Jacob came out grasping the other’s heel. Much the same story comes to light in the delivery of the twins of Tamar, who had been impregnated by Judah, her father-in-law. During labor a hand appeared, and the midwife tied a red thread around it. But the hand drew back and the other babe was born first. The first-born was Perez (Breach: his untimely birth a breach of order). The brother’s name was Zerah (Scarlet).

It is, however, in a well-preserved tradition of the Rabbins that we find the pointed significance of the Jacob and Esau birth. The grasping of Esau’s heel by Jacob can not be seen in its full import without com-

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pleting the story by means of the tradition. It says that on Esau’s heel there was the likeness of a serpent! Again we have the heel of the god treading the head of the serpent and being marked with its imprint. If the two natures, one higher, one below it, are conjoined in man, obviously the foot, or heel, of the upper man will be just over the head of the lower, and vice versa. And at the point where the two contact there would be localized the whole friction and alternate bruising between them. The god would trample on and eventually crush out the nature, the head, of the brute elementary forces; but he would not come off unscathed. He would bear the mark of the beast on his heel. Esau is thus identified as the higher or spiritual twin.

The vulnerability of the gods in one point, the heel, was not confined to Hebrew literature. Osiris was wounded in the feet and had to recover the use of them. The classical example of Achilles, whose mother Metis held him by the heel while she dipped him in the waters of the Styx, leaving him vulnerable in the heel which was untouched by the water, occurs to every mind. The mother, nature, holds the god in her realm with her grasp only on his lowest part, the heel. If he is stung, it must be there. We are dipped in the river Styx of this life to render us invulnerable to further attack.

The serpent fulfilled his prophesied mission of enmity against the woman’s seed, the Christ nature in man. He pursued the woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and with twelve stars in her diadem, down to earth and went away to make war with her offspring on the border of the sea that encompassed the earth. The divine sun pours its rays upon the soul and "clothes it with light as with a garment." The moon is the generator of the forces that constitute the nature below, and so the moon is under her feet. And the topmost output of the whole cycle will be the twelve shining powers of intellectual light that man is to evolve. Every impact of the carnal nature of man against the rule of pure intellect in his mundane life is a skirmish in the serpent’s warfare against the soul. The war in heaven was transferred to earth and is still going on. It is the Battle of Armageddon. The two wings of a great eagle that were given the woman to transport her to a place prepared by God, where she should be nourished for three and a half cycles, until the time of her delivery of the Christ child, very probably refers to the sign of Scorpio, coming in the late autumn, the time of the soul’s descent. For the Scorpion

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was in its higher of two aspects the eagle, and it is still taken in that character by astrologers. The waterflood poured out by the Dragon to overwhelm her evidently types the release of the strong sweep of karmic and evolutionary forces which drives about one-third of the "stars of heaven" into incarnation. But earth helped the woman and swallowed up this flood. This is our assurance that mundane life is beneficent. The hard experience on earth tamed and subdued the wild energies of elementary nature and became indeed a place of refuge and safety. And here in the crypt of earth, the "bight of Amenta," mother nature brings up her Man-child.

But finally at the judgment, which is held on the highest mount of resurrection glory, the great old Mother and her seven earth-born spirits are judged, rejected and cast down out of heaven. Apt, as the primordial mother of life, is succeeded by Hathor, and the Sevekh dragon by Horus. What this sheaf of events seems to imply is that the powers that had at first functioned cosmically, came in the course of aeons to operate in the building of physical man, a miniature replica of the cosmos, and when finally converted to a higher level, received a new name and nature. The harshness of the details of being judged and cast out is purely a dramatic blind to cover the fine meaning astutely. Deity works out of its system in the fires of earth life the debilitating and paralyzing effect of its initial poisoning by the seven influences of Seb. The text of Revelation says that "fire descended from heaven and consumed them"; but consumption must be read as conversion into natures of finer purity. The Christ then moves out of the control of his mother nature and seeks the things of his father, spirit, at the perfection of his twelve facets of intelligence.

It is of the utmost significance that the new heaven and new earth, in which the tree of life was to bear twelve fruits upon its branches, was to be formed according to "the measure of a man." Man means "thinker," fundamentally; and so thought, intelligent mind, was to rule the new dispensation. It would establish life finally in its spiritual kingdom of twelve divisions, superseding the natural order which was founded on a basis of seven divisions. The mother’s number, seven, was to be supplanted by the father’s number, twelve. Man was to go on to evolve his twelve divine faculties. The twelve signs of the zodiac depict the twelve segments of the nature of man when all have been perfected. No ancient religion can be understood without reference to

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them. The coming of the twelvefold spiritual hierarchy ended the reign of the seven elementary powers, from bondage to which Paul says we must be freed. The Dragon of seven heads is overthrown, and on the head of the Woman, saved by earth experience, is placed the diadem of divinized humanity, studded with twelve stars, or spiritual fires.

The statement in Revelation is that the fifth angel poured out his bowl upon the throne of the Beast in his kingdom of darkness, overthrowing the reign of that power which had filled many with sore disease and made them cry out against the Most High. Occult books reveal that we are now in the fifth race of the fourth round of life energy on this globe, and are developing the fifth principle, Manas, the intellect. The reasoning mind, then, is destined to put an end to the reign of bestiality.

When the seven angels had poured out upon the earth the fires of "the seven bowls of the judgment of him that lives for ever," it is said that the temple (St. Paul assures us that the temple is the body) became filled with the smoke from the seven bowls, so that the power and the glory of God could no more be seen, nor could anyone enter the temple again until the seven angels had poured out the fires of judgment upon the earth. This is clearly an occult reference to what we have described as the smudge, smoke, vapors, soot and murk arising when the powers of god and beast first mingled in the body. It may also cover the unnatural intermixture and miscegenation of god-men and animals that seems to have been a fact of history. The "temple" had of course to be purified before the true Ego of the individual could enter and rule. Hence the whole earthly experience is the purgation, beyond question.

Matching the splendid imagery of Revelation, the Ritual of Egypt presents "the woman clothed with the sun," who says: "I am the Woman, an orb of light in the darkness; I have brought my orb to the darkness; it is changed into light. I overthrow the extinguishers of flame. I have stood. The fiends have hidden their faces." The seven elements were the powers of material darkness; the Christ power was that of light. The unevolved soul goes into darkness to become irradiated with light. The lower passions would extinguish the flames of deity and must be overthrown. They are the fiends, the minions of Sut and

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Satan, who turn and flee as the light of virtue shines forth, like the host of Midianites when Gideon’s three hundred broke their clay pitchers and revealed the lights hidden within.

In the Arabic Gospel of the Infancy, when the boy had been bitten by the serpent, the Lord Jesus says to his playmates, "Boys, let us go and kill the serpent." He proves his power over the reptile by making it suck the venom from the wound. Earthly and Satanic influences poison the descending soul; yet experience in overcoming their power in the milling grind of life extracts the poison in the end. "God sends down to death; he also lifts up," says the New Testament. In the same Gospel it is related that a damsel was afflicted by Satan, the cursed one, in the form of a huge dragon which from time to time appeared to her and prepared to swallow her up. He also sucked out all her blood, so that she remained like a corpse. She is cured by a strip of clothing from a garment worn by the child Jesus (Ch. 33). This is obviously another form of the story of the woman with an issue of blood who touches the fringe of Jesus’s garment. In the Gnostic version it is Sophia who suffers from an issue of blood, and is sustained by Horus when her life is flowing away. The Christ principle fecundates Nature and closes her unfruitful womb to make her give birth to the glory of an intellectual delivery.

As Joseph takes charge of the virgin mother and the infant fleeing to Egypt for safety, so in the Egyptian mythos the earth-god Seb becomes the protector of Isis and the foster-father of the child Horus when they are forced to hide in the marshes till the threat of Herut is passed. And as "the earth helped the Woman" in the Revelation version, so Seb, the earth deity, helped the woman and child in Egypt. The dragons issue from a cave on the roadside, but Jesus appears, according to the Gnostic story, and they adore him. So the demons cringe before him in the New Testament. In the Ritual Horus saves his father from the four crocodiles. "I am the Son," he says, "who saves the great one from the four crocodiles." He orders them to go back one by one and they obey him. For Ra has given him sovereignty over Lower Egypt, with power to tread down serpents, scorpions and dragons. But there is much hidden value in the legend that the serpent stings the child on its way into "Egypt," and that the earth-god heals the wound. It is a mighty item of philosophy, this assurance that mundane experience for the god-soul is the only antidote for certain imperfections in-

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hering even in celestial beings. It is evolution’s cure for lack of development, the prime cause of all that is named evil. The god needed further tempering and purification in "the crucible of the great house of flame" of flesh and sense. He was carried far down toward dissolution in the fiery test, but was re-welded into finer temper by the ordeals of earth, water, air and fire, and rebuilt to more perfect wholeness. The goose portrayed on the head of Seb in an Egyptian planisphere (according to Kircher) types the earth as "the goose that laid the golden egg daily." If this be but a poetograph for the new-born daily sun of golden light, that sun in turn is the everlasting symbol of the rise of a golden egg of new divinity from out the confines of earth or the "sea." The god is the divine egg laid in humanity, for he is the heavenly foetus in the womb of the body. As he is destined to burgeon out, like the flower, into a burst of golden glory, it is by no means mere poetic fiction to call him the golden egg. And earth lays this golden nugget. The earth being our common mother, we have before us the Egyptian source of "Mother Goose," and the mysterious sagacity concealed in her catchy jingles.

The Goliath story is but an embellishing of the original glyph of a dragon in its conflict with the young deity in man. A dragon is always exchangeable with a giant. The fabled giants and those mentioned in the sixth chapter of Genesis, the Nephilim (the "fallen ones," by etymology) were early beings produced by the intermixture of the Titans with the largest animals in the miscegenation, and are therefore the most literal or historical embodiments of the dragon-monster idea, and they were the prototypes of the ogres of children’s books. Egypt shows us fables, more than one, in which the giant-ogre was killed by the blow of a small egg (of the pigeon, dove or other bird) in the middle of the forehead. The significance of slaying the beast or dragon of mental darkness by sinking the symbol of incipient mind and light into its forehead should need little elaboration. The elemental giant or ogre in us is killed when the egg or pebble of intellect (