Lost Light

Chapter XX

SUNS OF INTELLECT

As the human eye recoils before the overpowering splendor of the solar disk in the sky, so the human mind strives in vain to realize the marvel of sublime grandeur in the ancient religious myth of the sun-gods. This was no curious faith of a diminutive Parsee sect; it was the universal form and dress of religion. The sun-myth was the heart’s core of all religion and philosophy everywhere before the Dark Ages obscured the vision of truth. And world religion will not fulfill its original function of dispelling from the soul of mankind the dark earth-born vapors that envelop it until the mind once again is irradiated with the light of that transcendent knowledge. Christianity forsook its high station on the mount illuminated by solar radiance when it submerged the Christly sun-glory under the limitations of a fleshly personage and dismissed solar religion as "pagan." In converting the typical man into a man of history, it forswore its early privilege of basking in the rays of the great solar doctrine. Light, fire, the sun, spiritual glory--all went out in eclipse under the clouds of mental fog that arose when the direct radiance of the solar myth had been blanketed. Christianity passed forthwith out of the light into the dreadful shadows of the Dark Ages. And that dismal period will not end until the bright glow of the solar wisdom is released once more to enlighten benighted modernity. Ajax crying for the light is still the appropriate heraldic figure on the modern shield, and until the myth of the sun-gods is restored to its place in knowledge, there will be no response to the cry but the echo.

Near the end of November, 1932, the public press reported the announcement of Dr. George W. Crile, noted scientist of the Cleveland laboratories, that he had discovered in the heart of every cell of protoplasm tiny centers or foci of energy which he called "hot points" or "radiogens," with estimated temperatures of from 3,000 to 6,000 degrees

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of heat. Protoplasm emitted radiations of various wave lengths, "some as powerful as those emitted by the sun." "The sun ‘shines’ in the protoplasm of animals and plants, and therefore animals and plants can confer on atoms chemical affinities such as are conferred by the sun."

"Who would think that there are ‘hot points’ in man and animals on the order of the temperature of the surface of the sun? . . . If one could look into protoplasm with an eye capable of infinite magnification, one might expect to see the radiogens spaced like stars as suns in infinite miniature . . . Without exaggeration the concept may be taken to mean . . . that within the very flesh of man burns the fierce fire of the sun, and that within man’s body glow infinitely small counterparts of the stars."1

This report, which fell more or less unheeded upon millions of minds racked with economic fear, at last marks the discovery of the direct point of contact between "science and religion," of which the world has so long stood in such desperate need. It provides that common ground of a mutual datum on which both can meet with perfect accord at last. For this discovery of modern science posits, after sixteen or more centuries of obscuration, the fundamental authenticity of the solar myth, out of which all religions took their rise. Science has now restored to religion its basic principle, of which it had been bereft by nearly two millennia of ignorance. Religion now returns to its place in the sun, because the sun returns to its place in religion. Sunlight builds all things that are the subjects of scientific scrutiny; sunlight is also the Christly excellence in man’s life and body. Science and religion meet at last in the happy glow of sunlight. The Christ in man is a god of solar energy.

One is permitted to wonder what would be the amazement of Dr. Crile and his fellow-moderns if it was shown to them that in an old book on the Rosicrucians published about 1872 the following brief sentence has stood in the silence of scientific scorn for nearly seventy years:

"Every man has a little spark of the sun in his own bosom . . . A spark of the original light is supposed to remain deep down in the interior of every atom."2

The secret purpose of the "Fire Philosophers," whom modern savants still like to class with imbeciles and children, was to release that

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spark of solar flame from its trammels of the flesh and unite it once again with the radix or point of emanation in "heaven." This was the mysterious aim of the alchemical science, whose "gold" was that Lux or Light of the Ineffable Source, into which all baser forms of conscious manifestation had to be transmuted. The sun was typed as gold and the moon as silver, a poetization to which nature has been a party in the coloring of the two orbs. For the gold was the radiant energy of the sun embosomed in man’s interior being. It was his spiritual fire, that true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world; while the silvery moon typed the feminine or bodily nature which was to be raised by the alchemy of spiritual vibration into the golden glow.

A spark of the sun in the inner heart of every human! That is the center of light about which all religion and philosophy can again rally their disconcerted forces of interpretation. That is the point of gravity toward which all meanings can be seen to tend with perfect constancy. This is the radiant gleam of mental light, by which mankind may again see to read aright the ancient books of wisdom. And this is the torch that will in our day illumine the darkened portals of the temple of religion, so that the menacing hordes of materialistic devastators will see its beauty in time to stay their impious hands. It is only because a benighted ecclesiasticism permitted religion to be divorced from its basic principle which roots it in science, that the partisans of a modern "scientific" interpretation of life have been able to see no beauty or utility to it. To them religion has seemed a delusion of fancy, a hallucination thrown over feebler minds. To them it is not basically or structurally related to nature. On the whole their repugnance to the system was legitimate, for religion had been distorted into the unnatural thing it has come to be. But with the restoration of religion and philosophy to their ancient bases in true science, and the god seen as the solar fire within man’s bosom, resentment against it can no longer find apology. For science now finds itself on bended knee before this tiny glint of solar light at the heart of every atom; and when religion finds that it, too, worships the counterpart of the same fire in man’s heart, the two estranged brothers, science and religion, will find themselves kneeling side by side at the same altar at last.

Not only is there a spark of solar fire in every particle of matter, but every higher organism partakes of the empyreal largesse in proportion

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to its grade of being. Thus every man harbors a solar god or fiery spirit within him! Above man, the planets are cosmic beings with resplendent souls of unimaginable glory. The suns are the glowing hearts of the bodies of gods!

The sun was the center of religious ideology because it was the center of all life. Religion was once organically constructed about a nucleus of profound teaching directly related to the phenomena of life. It was no detached scheme of emotionalism. It was an alignment of devotion and conduct in relation to knowledge of the elements and facts of life itself. The central fact was the presence of a solar fragment, a spark of deity, in the inner soul of every being, unintelligent below man, intelligent for the first time in Atum, the Man. The immortal soul was a beam from the eternal Sun, a spark of divine fire, an irradiation of the essence of God’s own being. This spark of cosmic intelligence was, as shown, the seventh emanation crowning the elementary six, and summing their powers all in itself. Man, in whom this spark was for the first time made local in nature, was the crown and summation of all precedent expression. All lower kingdoms are in him, the three sub-mineral, the mineral, vegetable, animal and human thus far evolved. They are comprehended in him in the constituency of his four lower vehicles, which make him the composite being he is. His physical form is from the earth, his emotion body from the moon, his mind from the race evolved on Venus, and his spiritual soul from the sun. The sun-spark was then the guiding intelligence, the king, within him. By his body and his senses he was linked with the earth, with nature; by his mind and soul he was tied to the stars of heaven. Head in heaven, body on the earth, said Egypt. "I am a child of earth and the starry skies, but my race is of heaven alone," seconded the Orphic philosophy. By virtue of the two lower creatures within him he is a mortal being, doomed to temporal extinction; by the higher two he is constituted an immortal entity, facing a future of endless glorification. The lower rose from the earth by the force of the expansion of powers elemental in the atom of matter, and was a product of "natural" evolution. The higher was "the Lord from heaven," as Paul names it. And the union of the two in one organism gave to humanity a local habitation and a name, a form, a character and a cosmic stage for its activities.

But the ancients knew that the history of each fragment of solar

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light impounded in a corral of flesh on earth was a reflected miniature of that of the great solar orb itself. And the growth and progress of the tiny spark that had got individualized in each man was studied in the light of its parental analogue in the heavens. Hence the basis of religion was the course of the sun through the solar year, which course again reflected the round of the sun through the 25,868 years of the Great Year of precession, and both were marked by the orb’s passage through the twelve stages of zodiacal meaning. He who will interpret the zodiac with full intelligibility will depict the life of man in all its reaches. The knowledge of this stellar script, this book with seven, then twelve great seals, was imparted in full or in part in the sacred Mysteries of old. It is gravely doubtful if anyone now living knows the import of the entire wheel. We catch fragmentary glimpses of its meaning, but the deeper connotation of the structure eludes the mind. Its profundity is next to fathomless. We can but follow the hints given us by the archaic sages in their writings.

It is clear, in outline, that the solar year is a marvelously precise reflection in outer nature of the spiritual life of man the individual and man the race. It is particularly a vivid typograph of the history of the soul in and out of incarnation. The two groups of upper signs, three air and three fire (symbolically), represent the life of the soul when out of body in the empyrean. The six lower signs, dubbed the six "water" signs, cover the life of the soul in the watery physical body. The lower six are a reflection or image of the upper six, as water reflects what is above it in the air and the light! That is to say that the life of man below is a reflected counterpart of his life in spirit above. And the soul’s journey round the wheel through the alternate realms of incarnate and discarnate life comprises its cyclical history in this aeon. As nature sets the norm in her life-method by her alternations of day and night in the physical and astronomical domains, these are seen to be typical of the experience undergone by the soul in its successive sojourns in the realms of spiritual "day" and material "night." The systole and diastole of the heart’s action, the inhalation and exhalation of breath, are but the common evidence and confirmation of the universal modus of living procedure. The conscious immortal spirit in man swings endlessly through the two phases of the zodiac, upper and lower, of which circulation the daily and annual phenomenon of the sun’s movements is an exact miniature copy. Solar

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religion was based solidly on the ground fact that the sun was not only the type, but the essential essence of the divine soul of man, and that its annual course was graphically pictorial of the soul’s cyclical history. The sun’s annual round is typical, first, of a single life history; secondly, of the entire series of single lives making up the complete experience of the human cycle. Like the stars, the galaxies and the super-galaxies now seen by astronomy, many individual life cycles constitute a larger cycle, and many of those a still larger one. It is futile for the little mind of man to quarrel with the limitless expansiveness of the Universe of Life. Such quarrel has already cost us the loss of our clearest understanding of cosmic processes, which by reflection open our minds to the meaning of the lesser processes of our life here. Life is vast, and its vastness would crush our thinking if philosophy did not fortify us with the consideration that the little repeats the immense and is identical with it. Each man is a solar universe, a planetary system, comprised of infinite cells or minor systems, and the spiritual light glowing at the center of his being is the central sun of his system. And if he learns to control this universe, he will be put in charge of larger spheres. "My mind to me a kingdom is," and if one be found faithful in the governance of that world of self, one will be made ruler over many things. "The Framer made the creations six in number and for the seventh he threw into the midst the fire of the sun," is ancient truth. Likewise the seventh outgush of creative force threw the sun of intellect into the midst of the six lower natural energies, to become their head and ruler. This was the work of the divine Father implanting the seminal seed of his fiery spiritual consciousness into the body of Mother Nature, and so closing her unfruitful womb and stopping her wastage to make her pregnant with Christ child. Hence the antipathy, detected in ancient texts, between the menstruating woman and the sun or fire. A verse in the Shayast La-Shayast (Ch. 2:29) runs:

"A fiend so violent is that fiend of menstruation" that "where another fiend does not smite anything with a look (akhsh) it smites with a look," so that "the sun and other luminaries are not to be looked at by her, and conversation with a righteous man is not to be held by her. She must not look on fire, and a fire must not be kindled in the same house that she is in."

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Wilson in his Parsee Religion (p. 224) writes:

"The flow was looked upon as the Azi-damp by which the devil desired to extinguish the fire that Zarathustra brought from heaven."

This is in the realm of symbolism, of course, intimating the general significance of the divine soul, as fire, being extinguished by the water of the body. It may not be utterly fantastic to suggest that the fire of spirit that dries up the "red sea" of the menstrual flow in the allegory may be the subtle meaning behind the Exodus story of the drying up of the Red Sea, alleged to be on the map. As we have seen, however, modern translation has made it the "Reed Sea."

Leprosy was spoken of as the result of an offense against the sun. Amenta, the realm of the six elementary powers, both in nature and in the human body, was a land of chaos and darkness until lighted up by the nocturnal sun, or the spirit buried in the flesh. Hor-Apollo observes that the star which bears the name of Seb signifies, amongst other things, the soul of the male or virile adult. "This is the star of soul," they said; "let us keep it pure and bright and shining star-like."

"This is the sun within us, the seminal source of life; do not dim its lustre or cause it to suffer eclipse. Save your soul (seminal) and do not sin against the sun of light."

And it is said of Osiris in the Ritual:

"Give ye glory as to the Sun; he is the chief, the only one ever coming from the body, the head of those who belong to the race of the Sun."

In the Clementine Gospel the Christ is portrayed in the character of the sun-god. This eastern Christ says:

"I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day; the night cometh when no man can work. When I am in the world I am the light of the world."

The world was represented as being created from the drops of bloody Gethsemanic sweat, or male seminal essence which fell from the phallus of Ra, Tem, Atum or Khepera onto the earth. The male creative fluid became the type of spiritual creative power. It is the concentrated essence of the blood, which in turn is highly charged with the electric soul of spiritual energy. It was the seed of the gods’

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creative essence. It was therefore held to be a condensation of solar energy. It is said that the holy emanation which proceeds from Osiris vivifies gods, men, cattle and creeping things, and that in his season he flows forth from his cavern in order to "pour out the seed of his soul which produces offerings in abundance for his Ka, and vivifies both gods and men." The expulsion of the seeds of deity into lower realms of matter was a part of the dismemberment or mutilation. In the case of Bata, the younger brother of Anup, in the tale of the Two Brothers, the phallus is torn away and thrown into the water and devoured by a fish. The "masturbating deity" matched on the male side the virgin mother and the immaculate conception on the female side. He was Khepera, and his symbol was the male beetle, which produced new life from his own body without conjunction with the female.

"To denote an Only Begotten," says Hor-Apollo, "the Egyptians delineate a Scarabaeus, because the Scarabaeus is a creature self-produced, being unconceived by a female. The Scarabaeus also symbolizes generation and a father, because it is engendered by the father solely." Massey adds: "Khepr, the beetle, buried himself, with his seed, in the earth; there he transformed, and the father issued forth as the son."

The sun was the type of the male creative power in the universe, but he was portrayed with feminine attributes to indicate his subjection under matter when involving his energies in creation. He was a kind of male-mother. His growing weak in the autumn was likened to the feminine weakness in menstruation. "When the sun becomes weak, he lets fall the sweat of his members and this changes to a liquid; he bleeds much." Then he was called the sun bound in linen, and wrapped as a woman. He was known as Osiris Tesh-Tesh, in his bloody sweat in Smen. The male as sole reproducer was spoken of in female terms. He is god the mother. Num, Egyptian deity, was the Mother of Mothers as well as the Father of Fathers. "In like manner Jove is designated by Orpheus ‘the mother of the gods.’ He was Ju-matter, or Jupiter creatress." Proclus in Timaeus says: "All things are contained in the womb of Jupiter." Brahm is likewise feminized. "The great Brahm is the womb of all those forms which are conceived in every natural womb." "The great Brahm," says Krishna, "is my womb and in it I place my foetus and from it is the procreation of all nature"

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(Moor’s Pantheon: Krishna, p. 211). Baal and Astarte exchange genders in the Assyrian books. Nu was the original mother-heaven, the feminine celestial firmament. Yet she is masculinized: "It is the water or Nu who is the father of the gods. I am the great God creating himself." Creative power was conceived as feminine during the first creations. But when the sun, Helios, came to govern planetary revolutions, the gender was conceived as male. Life was androgyne before the bifurcation. The only quarrel in ancient religions was over the question whether deity was male or female in its first manifestations. Deity frequently had to carry the functions of both sexes.

The hidden purport back of the Egyptian symbolism of the beetle and the self-begetting god was that which was really the nub of the dispute in the early Christian Church over the creedal rendering of the Greek term monogenes (Latin: unigenitus), translated "only-begotten" in the Bible. It led to the great Arius-Athanasius controversy which rent the early Church into factions, which have not yet united. Had Egyptian symbolism been envisaged understandingly, that grievous dispute could have been avoided. The god who poured out and mixed his life blood with earth, and the beetle that goes underground to come forth renewed, are two vivid symbols of bright angelic spirit incarnating in human life. Life buried itself to be born anew. It is quite possible that Onan’s sin was a reference to the first group of five legions of angels who, as it were, poured out their spiritual substance in the direction of incarnation, but who nevertheless failed to plant their seed fully in the soil of mortal flesh. Their effort proved abortive. The old books recite the story.

It is possible to see that the monogenetic theory was current in early Christian times and could have been comprehended by Christian exegetists if they had not already begun to look with scorn upon all things pagan. Irenaeus alludes to the belief in an excerpt from his book Against Heresies (I, Ch. 2:1, 4, Ante-Nicene Library): "It was also taught by the Egyptian Valentinus that the father produced in his own image without conjunction with the female." Had a little analogical penetration been displayed by the somber Fathers of the Church, there might have been intelligence enough extant to save the translators from perpetrating the damaging rendering of monogenes as "only-begotten." The term meant, of course, simply born of the father or male principle alone, without birthing in the womb of matter. Yet it

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was at the same time the story of the father or spirit incarnating in matter and reissuing on the opposite horizon as his transformed son. The fatality of the incorrect translation can not be seen until it is realized that the term "only-begotten," misapplied to a single man in history, has operated to dispossess every mortal in Christendom of the consciousness of his own inborn divinity, the one inestimable boon that religion was designed to extend to all the race.

The famous Litany of Ra describes Atum as the supreme sun-god in man. In his descent into Amenta, which is at sunset, "his form is that of an old man," while later in his resurrection it is that of a lion. He sets as Ra; he rises again as Horus. Atum in Amenta is the hidden soul of spiritual life, imaged by the nocturnal sun, buried in darkness. He suffers dethronement and exile in material darkness in order that he may "cause the principles to arise." He brings the new generation of solar power to birth, as in dying he is reborn from himself.

There is involved herein the secret of one of the most inexplicable and, at first sight, most irrational customs, the explanation of which has baffled anthropologists without end. This was the couvade. When the student or casual reader encounters the historical evidence establishing the fact that many tribes in different parts of the world in archaic times observed the strange custom of sending the father, instead of the parturient mother, to the bed of confinement at childbirth, the impression is that human mental processes had gone sadly awry. But it is only necessary to keep ever in mind that the sages and formulators of conventional practice were before all else typologists, to see that the eccentric custom was only an outward ritual of a very high spiritual commemoration indeed. The practice was only a symbolic act to dramatize the fact that in the birth of a son or daughter the father had injected his seminal spirit into the bosom of matter, had buried his seed in incarnation in the body of the babe, or had himself gone into confinement or "under cover" of flesh in the new babe! It only adumbrated the eternal fact of the incarnation. The sun went into retirement each evening, to be reborn on the morrow. Couvade means "going under cover."

The Litany of Ra contains an apostrophe to the great sun-god:

"Homage to thee, Ra, the beetle (Khepr), that folds his wings, that rests in the Empyrean, that is born as his own son!"

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Khepr is designated "the Scarabaeus which enters life as its own son." Ptah, who was an embodiment of Khepr-Ra, is thus addressed:

"O God, architect of the world, thou are without a father, begotten by thine own becoming; thou art without a mother, being born through repetition of thyself."

In another text we read:

"O divine Substance, created from itself! O God, who hath made the substance which is in him. O God, who hast made his own father and impregnated his own mother."3

Some accompaniments of the couvade are of great interest. In the custom, as carried out by some Carib tribes, the father ate neither fish nor fowl for six months. Here we have a direct reference to the god, or father, as being deprived of water and air, or any higher element than that of earth, during its incubation period.

Hor-Apollo interestingly observes again: "They say also that the beetle lives six months underground and six above." If he does, nature surely has cast him in the role of Proserpina, not to say that of the human soul, figuratively. The six lower signs typify incarnate life.

But the beetle has further instruction for us. He observes that the beetle deposits its ball of eggs rolled in dung in the earth for the space of twenty-eight days--a lunar cycle--during which the moon passes through its smaller round of the twelve zodiacal signs. But on the twenty-ninth day, the day of the resurrection according to lunar markings, there occurs the baptism of the beetle. The Scarabaeus then casts his ball into the water. It opens to give birth to the young beetle. This immersion and baptism leads to renewal and regeneration. So Taht, the lunar god, was always declared to be self-created, never born.

The egg, as a primitive type of birth and rebirth, finds intriguing relation to this exegesis. As the couvade figured the return of the father’s powers in the embryo of his child, incarnation betokened the return of the soul to its egg state. "Oh! Sun in his egg!" is an exclamation in the Ritual. The image used represented the return of "the sun or the dead" (Massey) to the egg-state in the underworld for the rehatching, or the couvade. And this furnishes the answer to Nicodemus’ question: the soul must return again and again to the egg-

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state, to be rehatched--which is what has again been intimated in the ark symbolism. Man--the god in man--is as it were a grub worm hatched in the earth, and, expanding his wings of spirit as he emerges like the chrysalis, flies away with body glistening in the golden light of morning. The sun-god arising is thus addressed: "Adoration to thee, who arisest out of the golden and givest light to the earth!" The sun was emblemed as the winged scarab. And the beetle follows the sun, keeping in the angle of its direct rays, from morning till evening. The Christ is the "sun of righteousness."

In Gnostic iconography the child Horus reappears as the mummy-babe wearing the solar disk. The sun is again typified by the hawk, with a disk encircled by an uraeus on its head. Seven apes stand, four in front and three behind, denoting that the sun has put under or behind him three of the elementary powers, but faces the conquest of the other four in man.

The "Ur" from which Abraham, the first emanation from the Father, came forth, means the original sea of elemental fire. And when the emanation has gone to its death and rebirth in matter, it has become a new creature and is given a new name. The injection of the solar principle into material creation lends to mythology or primitive theology its most striking analogies and types. This is confirmed by Max Müller, who writes (Selected Essays, Vol. I, 604): "As soon as Suryas or Helios appears as a masculine form, we are in the very thick of mythology." Suryas or Helios is the sun. Mythology deals with the presence of this kingly force in life, its fight for sovereignty and its dominance over the lower powers. It is the central personage in all earthly myth and drama. The phoenix, dying and being reborn from its own ashes, depicts the death of the sun power in mortality and its renaissance from the grave.

The Egypto-Gnostics affirmed: "Seven powers glorify the Word." These were the seven nature spirits, which out of gratitude to the Propator, had each contributed of his best gift to the production of the most perfect being, the Christ aeon. Like the golden bough and the star atop the Christmas tree, he became the beauteous flower at the summit of creation, comprehending and synthesizing all lower elements in himself. He was thus the King of Glory.

After this consummation the heaven of seven divisions is described as rolling up like a scroll and passing away. Then the new heaven

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and the new earth are inaugurated. When the contents of the seventh bowl are poured out, the book of life is sealed with the seven seals, and the angel announces: "Behold I make all things new." A zodiac of twelve signs was then requisite to portray the life experience of the god in man. In the Book of Exodus we see the one God Ihuh superseding all the other gods, El-Shadai and the Elohim, when he assumes the suzerainty and orders that a sanctuary be built in which he shall be lifted up. This shrine or tabernacle was to be the hitherto unknown body of solar glory, or body of the resurrection, that temple not to be built with hands, eternal in the heavens of consciousness. "He subdues the dwellers in the darkness and there is none who can resist his power in the horizon." "He shineth like a new king in the East." "The great god who is there is Ra himself . . . the water of Maati is the road by which Atum-Ra goes to traverse the fields of divine harvest."

The Book of the Dead is primarily a sketch of the journey of the solar spark through the underworld across the Pool of Pant, or Lake of Maati, by night. The soul follows the track of the all-conquering sun, who is the cleaver of the way or opener of roads through the tangled thickets of sense life. He builds a dwelling of light for those who dwell in the darkness. The "Egyptians" are in gloom, but the "Israelites have light in their dwellings." The home of light for the glorified is Ammah, the place of no more night. When we realize that the Israelites were not an earth race, but a host of sun-fragments of intellect in incarnation, we can catch the sublime imputations in these figurative details of scripture.

The six (later seven) supplanted powers that come under the sway of the central sun of mind become the "attendants" or "companions" or "associates" of the sun-god. They are depicted as seven doves that hover around Jesus in utero, the seven solar rays that flash about his head, the seven lambs or rams with him in the mount, the seven as stars with Jesus in their midst, the seven as fishers in his boat, and finally the seven who as communicants solemnized the Eucharist with the loaves and fishes in the mortuary meal of the Roman catacombs.

The Pistis Sophia, furnishing much valuable material deleted from the Gospels, describes Jesus, after superseding the seven foundation pillars of the world, as passing through the twelve signs of the zodiac, mentioning each by name, and gathering a portion of the light from

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each to incorporate in his own person. He says that he took the twelve saviors of the treasure of light and bound them into the bodies of your mothers. This is to say that he circumscribed the operation of the twelve deific powers in bodies of mortal flesh. He was thus to judge the twelve "tribes of Israel," or twelve segmentations of divine intelligence; those rays of cosmic mind which figure as the twelve tribes, sons, stars, brothers, kings, reapers, rowers, fishermen, sowers, and twelve voices and teachers. All these had begun as powers of light in the physical domain, and were in the end endowed with spiritual status with Jesus in the Father’s kingdom. The Christ became the rose in the center of twelve knights. And, says Paul, the whole creation groaneth and travaileth to bring forth these twelve Sons of God, or powers of spiritual light.

The Rig-Veda asks:

"Who has seen the primordial at the time of his being born? What is that endowed with substance, which the unsubstantial sustains? From the earth are the breath and blood, but where is the soul? What is that one alone who has upheld these six spheres in the shape of the unborn?"

And the answer is given by Egypt in the person of the solar deity who was at last made the base and support of the six spheres. When the fire that enlightens supplanted the powers of Seb and Sut, there was present a new type of power as soul or Sol. This unborn power was personalized as Ptah, in the form of an embryo that transformed like the beetle to reproduce itself. It is the sun-god performing his couvade to raise up both the six spheres and himself. He is the hidden light, Amen-Ra, the unborn god, the support and rock of the whole creation. He is the unsubstantial, that nevertheless sustains substance.

Massey well expounds that "the Savior who came by spirit was the soul of the sun." "This suffering deity was the god in matter." When plunged into matter and ensouling creation, he became Osiris. In this phase he was the stricken one, the dead, lying inert in his mummy-case. He is figured as the "little old child," with finger at mouth, wizened, impotent, decadent, as the sun-god losing his power. He is the Jack of nursery legends, the Scottish Assiepet, the Danish Askepot, the German Aschenpüttel, who pokes in the ashes and blows up the fire, the solar fire which he has to rekindle from dying embers. He is the male Cinderella, the ash or ember maiden.

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Before descending below the horizon of incarnation these souls are denominated in Egypt the Hamemmet Beings. They originated as the germs of souls emanating from the sun, whence Scipio saw them abstracted in his vision. "Hamemmet" signifies "that which is unembodied," not yet incorporated in material bodies. This matches the "virgins" and the "Innocents" of Biblical terminology. They are the embryonic souls of future beings, children of the sun or Ra. They were the "children of Israel." If the monster Apap or Herut could slay them "in the egg" he would avert his later doom of having his head crushed under their heel. At enmity with the sun, the dragon of darkness seeks to devour the new-born sons of the light-god who are destined to overthrow his rule in nature. So he lies in wait at the bight of Amenta until the woman clothed with the sun shall give birth to them. They are called, in addition to other names already given, "the issue of Horus." Their slaughter is to be prevented, as is indicated by the title of Chapter 42 of the Ritual: "Chapter by which one hindreth the slaughter which is in Suten-Khen," the birthplace. The Manes at this stage is the child-Horus himself, and he says four times over: "I am the babe." As the child of the incorruptible sun, no power can harm him, and so "he steppeth onward through eternity," gathering up all the manifold powers of ineffable Light. "Not to be seen is my nest. Not to be broken is my egg." "I have made my nest in the confines of heaven" (Rit., Ch. 85).

Lower Egypt was called "the desert in which the flocks of Ra were shepherded and fed." Horus says to them:

"Protection for you, flocks of Ra, born of the great one who is in the heavens. Breath to your nostrils, overthrowal of your coffins" (Book of Hades, 5th Div., Legend D).

Horus indicates how he steps onward through eternity in the statement: "I live in Tattu and I repeat daily my life after death, like the sun."

It need hardly be repeated that the Christos was represented under a different title and character during each 2155 years of a cycle of precession. In Leo he was the lion of the house of Judah (Iu-dah), and his whelp; in Cancer he was the "Good Scarabaeus," ever renewing himself, the crab emerging from the water onto the land; in

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Gemini he was the twins, the two opposite phases of life contending in the womb of being for supremacy; in Taurus, the shining bull and golden calf; in Aries, the ram, the lamb of God and the golden fleece; in Pisces the great whale and the little fish with the gold in its mouth, the fisher of souls, the food in the water; in Aquarius the emanator of the water of life in two streams; in Capricorn the dual god again, half goat or land animal, half fish or sea animal, duplicating the sign of Cancer opposite, only that the crab is emerging from the water and the goat is in the water; in Sagittarius again double as the Centaur, half man and half horse, the archer aiming at the eye of Horus to put it out on the downward course of the autumnal sun, when deity is going blind; in Scorpio, double again as the scorpion that stings divine power to "death" and the eagle that soars aloft again; in Libra as the god of the two horizons holding the scales of the balance between spirit and matter in exact equilibrium; in Virgo double as the divine child of the mother and the wheat for the bread of Christ, as well as the branch of the true vine that was constellated in Virgo.

The Ritual states that Horus "is united at sunset with his Father Ra, who goeth round the heavens" in the zodiacal cycles. Perhaps the Gospels retain a parallel to this in the life of Jesus in his retirement each night to the mountains to commune with his Father. Horus says: "I see my father, the lord of the gloaming, and I breathe." Horus again is called "the Lord of the Staircase, at the top of which his father sat enthroned." He is lord of the evolutionary ladder, the planes by which the soul mounts up to godhead. Again he says: "I seek my father at sunset in silence and I feed on life." Be it noted that he feeds on life after his descent into embodiment, or in this world. And once more the Ritual dispenses wisdom of transcendent importance in the statement: "Thou settest as a living being within the dark portal; . . . thou becomest a divine being in the earth. Thou wakest as thou settest . . ."

The declarations of ancient wisdom that we are divinized on earth and that the soul awakes as it sets, or incarnates, are mighty items of knowledge for benighted mortals. But it has been set forth that the descent is a swoon and a going into oblivion, the very sleep of "death." Now it is pictured as an awakening. Here again is exemplified the doubleness of esoteric methodology in picturing the two aspects and movements of being. But the paradox in all these reversals of imagery

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is readily resolvable. The soul does fall under a spell of Lethe when enshrouded in dense body; nevertheless it finds in that very state the beginning of its true awakening to a higher sense of reality than ever before. This world is "the place of establishing forever," of bringing purely latent capacity to dynamic realization. There is involved here the ultimate mystery of life, which is the necessity of the soul’s "death" in matter to gain a new birth.

The Egyptians, observes Plutarch, offer incense to the sun three times a day: resin at its rising; myrrh when it is at midheaven; and kyphi about the time of its setting. Here is the "gold, frankincense and myrrh" of the later Hebrew myth, brought by the solar triad of Atma-Buddhi-Manas, the three Magi or knowledge-principles. The trident of Neptune was a Greek symbol of the three-forked spiritual sun-power. The sun at mid-day zenith is Ra; at the evening is Tum (Atum); at rising on the morrow he is Khepr, renewing himself.

The three most celebrated emblems used in the Greek Mysteries were the Phallus (I), the Egg (O) and the Serpent, symboled by the Greek letter Phi, being the O bisected by the I. These are the male symbol, the female and the two united. The union of the two yields the great "serpent power" or the driving force of life itself. It was this serpent power that the Ophite sect of early Christianity elevated to dominant place in their system, paying homage thus to the creative energy and power of endless renewal, the serpent in this conception being by no means the malefic principle "with the vulgar downward literal meaning that we ascribe to it." Ra tells Seb to "be the guardian of the serpents which are in thee," referring to the swirling elementary life principles enwombed in the earth and matter.

The sun’s might as Jupiter was triform: Jupiter in the heavens, Neptune in the sea, and Pluto in the underworld. Sunlight itself has three primary colors, before it breaks into the seven. The gods are male, but the three regions are made female, holding the shakti powers that implemented their activity. The great Hindu Mother Mahadevi divides into three colors, black, red and white, to become Sarasvati, the shakti of Brahma; Lacksmi, that of Vishnu; and Parvati, the consort of Siva. There is the Hecate triad in Greece. The three Parcae or Fates of Greece are matched by the Egyptian Neith, spinner of the web (net), and her two sisters, Isis and Nephthys, and by the three Norns of the

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Norse pantheon. Of the three Fates Atropos conferred the solar power of generation; Clotho was lodged in the moon, as she who joins, mingles and unites the light with the dark, spirit with flesh; Lachesis is on the earth supervising the flow of mortal events, "and with her does fortune very much participate."

The ancients conjoined the twin male and female triads and from the union produced the interlaced triangles, or Solomon’s Seal, the six-rayed star which is a perfect numerical typograph of the linking of the three spiritual with the three physical principles, the apices pointing in opposite directions. Their inextricable interlinking bespeaks the incarnation or entanglement of soul with body.

The Clementine Homilies set forth that the body of man consists of three parts and derives its origin from the female; the spirit consists of three parts and derives its origin from the male. The sperm-cell of the male creative fluid is three-ply. The union of the two triads in man makes him the sextuple being he is. His life has six facets and manifests in a world where any object has six faces, as a cube. The seventh principle is that which subsumes the six of the cube in a higher synthesis, which is achieved, however, on the plane of the dimension above it. The seventh principle always lifts a creation up to the next plane above it. It resolves the formation of the six into soul and meaning. Its day is the Sun-day, crowning the natural or secular operations with their apotheosis into spiritual being. The mystic AUM is a concealed glyph of the trinity, we are told. Our word "triumph," seen particularly well in its French form, triomphe, is composed of the root tri, "three"; om, the shortened AUM, the triple Logos; and phe, from the Greek, meaning "spoken." Our cry of triumph will then be our ability to unify again the "thrice-spoken word," or bring the three primary rays of divine mind back to unity.

The two sexes are not only marked in man by the division into male and female persons; there is another segmentation into sex which is one of the great keys in theology. The division of humanity into male and female is only an outward mark of an inner sacrament which is the main theme of religion. The most important sex division is that which inheres in man’s individual life, whereby everyone is male on the spiritual side, and female on the physical. The diaphragm is the horizon line in man physiologically, for the individual is male above it and female below it. The marriage of the Bride and the Lamb is to

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take place between these two parties. The dividing wall is to be broken down and the two united. The great Sphinx of Egypt depicts this duality in man, proclaiming under the zodiacal sign of the Lion that each human is spirit-male and matter-female in himself, facing the evolutionary duty of wedding the two. The three psychic centers below the diaphragm are concerned with the reproduction of body; the three above deal with spiritual destiny, and the crowning one in the head will unify all seven. Mythology teems with half-man, half-animal creatures, male in front and female behind. And says the Hebrew Psalmist (Ps. 139:5): "Thou hast fashioned me Behind and Before." This must be translated to say that we are humans in our upper half and beast in the lower. This is the incontestable reading of the symbology. The female is assigned the creation of the animal body of man. The female’s interests are infinitely more directly centered in the body than are the male’s. Man is, in the large, the intellectual creator; woman the physical.

The ancients in their stellar configuration represented the great Divine Man as facing the south, his back to the north. Hence the south was male, the north female. The constellation of the Great Bear the lower, hinder part, the thigh or womb, of nature. The gods of the four quarters, the bases of the human pyramid, the four "Sons of Horus," "are they who are behind the thigh in the northern sky." They are the hind quarter of the heavenly man and are the four lower elements in man’s constitution. The haunch of the lion that is carried on the head of Anhur is a sign of natural fecundity. The fore part, the face and head of the lion, denotes the glory of solar radiance. "The Lord God is a sun and shield," says the Psalm; and man is made in his image. The rear material part shields mortal eye from the too great effulgence of solar glory. But Samson sets fire to the tails of 300 foxes, as a suggestion that the fire of soul must light up and transform the rear or lower half of our nature.

In the Ritual chapter "of making the transformation into the god that giveth light in the darkness," the Manes says he is the robe of light that dispels the darkness, "which uniteth the two fighting deities that dwell in my body through the mighty spell of the words of my mouth." Two fighting deities in our bodies! The robe alluded to is called elsewhere "the garment without a seam," since the marriage obliterates the seam or dividing line. The unification of these two war-

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ring elements is each individual’s specific task, the main reason for his incarnate existence and a pursuit worth all its hardship.

In one of the hymns to Osiris the god is greeted:

"Hail to thee, Osiris, Lord of Eternity! When thou art in heaven thou appearest as the sun, and thou renewest thyself in the moon."

The soul of life, we have seen, renews itself by eternal rebirth following cyclical death in matter. The moon is ancient symbol for the physical half of human nature, since the two lower elements and man’s two lower bodies, the physical and emotional, were the products of a precedent evolution on the moon. And sun and moon, in their interaction each lunar month, enact the whole drama of human evolution with such graphic fidelity that the delineation of it becomes a perpetual marvel. No graphology of mythicism has excelled nature herself in vivid portrayal of the dual history of the human being upon the very face of the moon, where the story, endlessly repeated, has been enacted before the eyes of successive generations of mortals, but never read since the days of ancient Egypt. In the various phases and aspects of the registration of the sun’s light upon its body, the moon stages the entire symbolic drama of the blended physico-spiritual life of mortal man with a precision so astonishing that a mind which once follows the analogies can hardly escape the conclusion that Intelligence presided at the ordering of the movements of the three bodies, sun, moon and earth, in their interrelation. As seen from the earth, the sun and moon together depict in the heavens each month the record of man’s typical life so fully that it becomes a prime enigma to account for the loss of the wisdom to interpret this sky-book after it had once been known. The rejection of paganism by Roman Christianity cost the world the forfeiture of its ability to read this elementary textbook and its story written in characters of light and darkness.

As spirit was reborn periodically in matter, so the sun was reborn monthly in the moon, matter’s planetary symbol. Both Horus and Khunsu, two characters representing the renewed solar deity, as well as Taht, were depicted in the disk of the full moon. The planisphere of Denderah shows the two in this position. Khunsu’s father is Amen, the hidden god, the youthful Khunsu being his visible representative reborn in the new moon. Horus was the renewed Ra, Osiris or Atum. That divine self which in solar symbolism was reborn in the vernal

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equinox or the eastern rim of morning, was re-dramatized in lunar symbolism as finding its rebirth in the young crescent moon. Osiris, Atum or Ra, sinking to feebleness and death in the cycle of waning moon, came to their renaissance between the two horns of the crescent in the west at nightfall. The moon repeated thirteen times the death and resurrection story while the sun traced it once. Ages of intelligence have gazed upon this monthly drama without once descrying its tacit narrative. Yet the Egyptians discoursed about the meaning of this phenomenon in chapter after chapter. Must we conclude, therefore, that ancient eyes penetrated deeper into nature’s secrets than modern? The evidence is before us. This datum may become again the bulwark of religion, rendering it impregnable to materialistic or agnostic assault. For while sacred Bibles may be brushed aside with scorn, the chart of man’s spiritual constitution, written ineradicably on the open sheet of the nightly sky, can not be gainsaid. Here is an indelible scripture whose ever-turning pages the atheist must read alike with the theist. Here is a book which no mind dare flout. Here are the heavens themselves preaching a sermon and reciting a gospel narrative that no mortal can contemn.

The story is by no means easy in the telling. It must be lived with and be given time to mellow in the mind, ere it will bestir the profoundest psychic intuitions. Only the groundwork for the structure of beautiful meaning can be given in a series of facts, relations and phenomena. Each one must in the end be his own poet.

We have seen the sun-god pictured as passing through the dark underworld at night. His voyage is made amid spiritual darkness. The body is the soul’s dark prison, grave and tomb. The god is then the sun in the dark underworld. Therefore it is a light in the darkness. His mission is to bring light into this dark region. Come to earth, his light ceased shining in heaven, as the Chinese said, and shone only in the underworld for the benighted inhabitants thereof. Jesus is the light of the world by night.

Yet it is by no means his true full splendor that shines on our darkness. It is a sadly diminished light that he shows, his full radiance being dimmed by the veil of matter which is thrown between it and our eyes. It is therefore a light, which, itself hidden from sight, shines through an intermediary body, or shines by reflection or indirect transmission. Now in the first chapter of John’s Gospel there is that note-

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worthy statement that there was a man sent of God to bear witness to that "light that shineth in the darkness." "He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light." He was himself not the full or true light, but only the harbinger of it. This was John the Baptizer, or leader of souls into the waters of generation in the dark lower half of evolution. He was typed as Anup, and again as Taht-Aan, the dark phase of the moon, or the moon itself as the sun’s witness when it is not itself shining on us. So the Christ-light within us is that secondary or transmitted radiance which shines into our prisons when the full glory of divinity is cut off from us and out of our sight. If God is the full ineffable Sun of Divinity, then the Christos is, as it were, the reflected radiance from that Sun coming second-hand to us from the surface of bodies of matter.

In the interpretation, this intermediary is the physical human body, with its emotion apparatus. In the realm of astronomy it is the moon. The lighted moon, then, is the symbol, representative, vice-regent, of the sun when the orb is buried in darkness. It holds the proxy of its power. It is the transmitter of solar light when that itself is out of sight. It is the only witness and evidence of the sun’s light when that luminary is unable to shine on the world. It is the sun’s lower or secondary self. The moon is the sun by night. So the Christos is that reduced and reflected ray of the Father’s infinite glory. When the sun is in full panoply in the heavens of day, the moon is eclipsed. It is man’s "noon." But she comes into her glory in the night. The moon stands between man and total darkness, yet she has no light to give of herself. She but transmits the brightness of one higher than herself. So the body stands between man and his god and transmits what can not be received directly.

Here, then, we have the two great characters in the drama, with man the spectator and interpreter, and as he finally realizes to his amazement, the ultimate actor. Meaning begins to rise as soon as we have fixed the two chief dramatis personae and their roles. The sun and moon play the parts of man’s soul and his body respectively, and their interaction will be found to depict in detail the connected history of the two on earth in the world of the body.

These determinations lead to the second great fact, which opens wide the door into a world of new meaning. If the sun represents spirit and the soul body, the deduction is that the sun is male and the moon

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female. The stage is then set to register the play of the two great interacting forces of life, the positive and negative poles. The evolutionary conflict between the two, the battle between Sut and Horus, the twins, which is reproduced everywhere in nature, is transferred now to the lunar surface and re-enacted there for man’s eternal behoof. As the moon encircles her lord in monthly course, she traces a stream of significant interrelations. From dark to full moon, it is the story of man’s deification and glorification, his en-light-enment, through repeated life in body; the nightly increase of the area of light is the sealed promise of our ultimate divinization. By analogy, the increase night by night endorses the postulate of the soul’s reincarnations. It is the cycle of evolution. From full moon to total obscuration it writes the record of involution, or the spirit’s descent into matter. The following tabulation is suggested for the readier tracing of the analogies:

Sun Moon

Spirit-soul-mind. Body.

Consciousness. Flesh.

Intellect. Sensation.

Male. Female.

Light-giving. Light-receiving.

Upper body. Lower body.

Fire. Water.

The god. The animal.

In its complete cycle the moon analogizes the conception, birth, growth, perfection, decline, death and rebirth of the sun-god in his incarnating cycle. The moon records the progress of the rebegettal or divinization. Hence the principal moon-deity of Egypt, Taht-Aan, is known as the recorder or scribe for Horus. He keeps the record of the advance or decline of spiritual light. And the moon’s function of bearing witness to the sun when the latter was out of sight, constitutes Taht-Aan and Anup the "two witnesses" for the hidden Christ. In the court of life the body holds the record and bears witness of the character of the deity who is buried out of sight within us!

The Greeks regarded the moon as "the self-revealing emblem of nature." As bringer of the hidden sun to light the moon was named the goddess Diana, who, says Proclus, "presides over the whole of generation into natural existence, leads forth into light all natural reasons,

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and extends a prolific power from on high even to the subterranean realms."4 And we are told that "the sexual parts of this god are denominated by theologists, Diana," for no more subtle reason apparently than that it is sex which brings all things to outward birth. The moon is Diana because the orb brings all to light, as the woman who reflects, regenerates and reproduces the hidden germ of life. Spirit would be inchoate and lost to view if some matrix did not give it birth as concrete form. That the moon is in affinity with the natural creation rather than with the spiritual world is also attested by the Chaldean Oracles, one of which recites that "the moon rides on every thing generated, and all these terrestrial natures are manifestly governed by her, as the Oracle says." She is the nature power, the woman, who becomes clothed with the sun of intelligence, which lights up her head finally with twelve facets of divine radiance.

The moon, then, is the register of solar or spiritual history, and the fact of crowning pertinence for us is that the nightly increase of light area on her dark surface is nature’s cosmic hieroglyph recording our growth toward full divinization. It marks to what extent divine light has spread over and through the physical body. From total darkness the sun-god begins to impregnate the lunar body with his bright power, until finally her whole body becomes irradiated with his glory. So the sun-deity of mind meets the physical man, first Adam, at the dawn of racial history, and finds no spiritual light in him. He then implants his tiny seed, and life after life he adds to the growth until at the end of the aeon the whole being of physical man is irradiated with intellectual light. He lights the darkened prison from within with that shining power that Jesus said his disciples had in themselves. Each night of incarnation increases the area of light. And the material body, like the moon, records the measure of the god’s occupancy of the vehicle. Even in ordinary social judgment, that countenance is most beautiful through or upon which the most of soul shines forth.

The nightly spectacle of the waxing moon should impress every mortal that nature bears incontestable evidence of the gradual divinization of humanity. "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light," is the Biblical assurance to this effect. The supreme message of lunar symbology to man is that divine light is measurably spreading over our whole being. At the fullness of his perfection the Manes cries: "There is no part of me that is without a god. I am the god entire."

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In phallic terms it would be said that the moon, female, being impregnated by the active germ of solar, masculine, light, registers the growth of the babe of the sun in her womb by the swelling of the gestating foetus night by night, till its birth at the full moon. Then the child is delivered, and the mother returns to normal condition.

A most striking series of analogies extends further this parallelism between the moon and the mother, body, nature. The bodily world of incarnation, is, as has been demonstrated by the table of the four elements, typed by the two planes of earth and water, which two are often generalized under the one, water. The body is chiefly water, and this is the first unassailable confirmation of the legitimacy of the symbol. Its life of sensation and emotion is most aptly pictured by the shifty, ceaseless mobility of water. All bodily processes are in constant flux. Therefore if the sun is typified by fire, the moon is just as fitly emblemed by water. Is it by "coincidence" then, or by an amazing natural endorsement of the meet character of the symbol, that there is found to be that mysterious affinity between the moon and the water of earth? For it is the moon that draws the seas of earth toward it in the daily tides!

But even that remarkable vindication of the analogies involved is dwarfed by the magnitude of another natural relationship,--that between the moon and the female. It need hardly be elaborated that it is the physiological function of the female, and not that of the male, that is rendered periodic by the cycle of the moon! Does it need any smart juggling of poetic fancies to relate the woman to the moon, when the very periodicity of her bodily functions is fixed by the twenty-eight days’ cycle of the orb? And the function energized by the moon has everything to do with body and procreation, nothing directly with the woman’s mind or higher nature. The moon affects the woman, not the man; and her body, not her spirit.

Together moon and woman repeat each month in identical manner the story of descent, incarnation and rebirth of the soul. From the night of the full moon the light of the sun-god visible on its face begins to wane, going down again into darkness. Its movement is downward across the sphere, as the direction of its increase is from the under surface to the upper. At the lowest ebb of the cycle the light is totally hidden for three days! While in this dark underworld which lies below the horizon, the virgin moon is met by the sun, who has

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entered the underworld with it at early evening, or the time of his descent! Let this fact be noted carefully, since it is of great import. The sun and moon meet and are conjoined in wedlock while both are buried out of sight in the west below the horizon, or in the dark of night. Transposing this situation to the kingdom of man, we find that nature has reproduced the story of incarnation and its collateral values once more. For here again nature records that it is in the dark underworld of this nether earth that the only conjunction of spirit (soul) and matter (body) takes place. This world is that place of darkness wherein alone the sun of spirit and the moon of matter can meet and copulate for reproduction. Says Massey: "It is only in the darkness of Amenta that the two ever meet." Sun and moon meet and embrace just at the end of her dark period, and while both are in the nether earth. Man’s soul and his body meet in the same dark period in the lower world of earth. Immediately the mother, impregnated, begins to swell until she delivers the sun’s child on the fifteenth day.

The Egyptians said that Osiris copulated with the dead body of Isis and impregnated it and that the touch of his sperm revived it--all in the dark, out of sight. Another version is that Isis drew the seed from Osiris’ dead body and impregnated herself, giving birth to Horus. The Egyptians were not evil-minded pagans, but beautifully pictured truth and need not be defended against the charge of a revolting sacrilege. Nor do we need to ascribe posthumous sexual rapacity to their favorite god and goddess. Isis, typed by the dark moon, was nature unspiritualized, unfructified, barren, dead. It required the touch of the sun-god’s vivifying rays, the implantation of the germinal light of spirit in her inert body, to awaken her to fruitfulness. The other version reads that Isis was fecundated by the god dead and buried in matter. He fructifies her when he has gone to his "death" in matter.

With incredible exactness human biology matches this procedure of sun and moon. Each month during the "dark" period of the female cycle, when nature runs to waste unchecked by male fecundation, there descends from the "upper room" of the Fallopian tubes the ovum, or foetal nucleus, which falls, as does the unfertilized earth soul, into the belly of darkness in the lower body, the prison, cave, tomb or womb. What then happens? Hither, also descending into the dark cavern, but from outside, is projected the seed of the male, the

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seminal essence, typical ever of the solar light, threefold like the solar triad; and once again in nature’s economy "sun" and "moon" copulate in the dark cave of the underworld to engender a new birth.

The seed is placed in the ground, its underworld, and lies there inert until the sun penetrates into that hidden womb and warms it to life.

The tale of the Sleeping Beauty is but a form of this tropology. The beautiful maiden is the moon-goddess, waiting in a state of negativity until awakened to reproductive life by the lover’s kiss--the sun’s rays.

Tracing analogies further, we find that the new moon is born in the west, and, like the "Innocents" which it types, it is immediately threatened with extinction by the power of darkness. Each night it becomes more able to combat and outlive the assaults of the enemy. The west is the place of entry into lower life, and the soul was endangered at the beginning of its immersion in the body. But what about the fully-divinized sun-child at full moon? Where is he born as the finished mortal made immortal? Surely at a place where danger lurks no more for him. Majestically he rises in the east! No longer now is he subject to the attack of darkness, for he rides in full glory across the sky by night. He is not plunged into the earth, but is the "sky-runner," the ancient term for a god. Born as man on the west, he is now born anew as god on the east, "where the gods are born," and reincarnation is over.

Some of the legends poetize the moon as seducing the sun in the darkness of night to be impregnated with his light. Some say the sun was in love with the moon. A kiss in mythical language was a euphemism for copulation. Judas betrayed his Lord with a kiss, which is the Gospel’s continuation of former Egyptian imagery by which the betrayer, seducer--matter--the woman, lured the sun or soul into her darkened realm to give her the seed of light. The allegory was later applied to the resurrection, in which the slumbering soul was awakened by the kiss of Horus. The Prince awakens Snow-White with a kiss.

The great Egyptian symbol, the Eye, stands for the solar light. Sut, who swallows it at evening, restores it at morning. Nature, earth, the mother, all of whom absorb the sunlight, are made to reproduce it again in new beauty! Says Massey:

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"Thus the lunar orb was the consort of the sun; his Eye by night as the reproducer of his light when he was in the underworld; and in reproducing the light she was the mother bringing forth her child"--his child, he might have said.5

The "Cow-Goddess" Hathor is portrayed with the solar disk between her horns, the imagery denoting the mother-moon as bearer of the sun, or rebegetter of his light. The eye reproduces objects by reflection; the moon reproduces the sun. Here indeed is the woman clothed with the sun, bathed in its splendor, and periodically bringing forth her man-child, with the great dragon of darkness ready to devour him, re-enacting endlessly the type of that Christ-birth that occurs to man once. For three days the father’s dwindling light disappeared in the belly of the great fish. Jonah issues from the great fish, constellated in Pisces, in the form of the Christ, who stills the storm on the sea of carnality. As the moon retired out of sight of men in her dark period to copulate with the sun, so woman, the moon’s human counterpart, was made by early religious usage to retire from the sight of men during her period. Nor was she to come into the presence of the sun or fire, a restriction perpetuated in some quarters to this day.

The Egyptians, it will have been noticed, manifested an uncanny penchant for discerning in the characteristic traits of animals many striking analogies with spiritual or creational verities. If their work was restored to religion, it would revitalize the latter by establishing a knowledge of the fundamental affinity between man and his environing universe. In no one respect, perhaps, have they revealed a more astonishing correspondence between animal trait and cosmical philosophy than in the case of the cynocephalus or dog-headed ape. This animal, be it recalled, is the zoötype of the moon-god Taht-Aan. To avoid faulty presentation of this parallel it is desirable to quote the datum from its ancient source in the writing of Hor-Apollo, as cited by Massey:

"Hor-Apollo says of the cynocephalus, the personified speaker, singer and later writer, that the Egyptians symbolized the moon by it on account of a kind of sympathy which the ape had with it at the time of its conjunction with the god. ‘For at the exact instant of the conjunction of the moon with the sun, when the moon became unillumined, then the male cynocephalus neither sees nor eats, but is bowed down to the earth with grief, as if lamenting the ravishment of the moon. The female also, in addition to

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its being unable to see, and being afflicted in the same manner as the male, ex genitalibus sanguinem emittit;6 hence even to this day Cynocephali are brought up in the temples, in order that from them may be ascertained the exact instant of the conjunction of the sun and moon. And when they would denote the renovation of the moon, they again portray a cenocephalus in the posture of standing upright, and raising its hands to heaven, with a diadem on its head.’"7

Any attempt to add point to this natural fact seems inadvisable. It speaks volumes of rebuke for those who blatantly decry the suggestion of astrological influences upon our earth and its citizenry. Plutarch, it will be remembered, stated that the "astral" or emotion body of man came from the moon, as the spiritual one came from the sun. These counterparts in man retain an affinity with their source, as they are of kindred essence with their progenitors. Hence powerful currents from the parent bodies must vitally affect their offspring even down here. Distance imposes little obstacle to such forces as cosmic rays.

The ape sets mankind another singular example of harmony with nature which we will be amazed to ponder. There is a widespread ancient tradition that certain species of apes assemble at the time of sunrise on an elevation or river bank facing the east, and with cries, prostrations and "clicking" salute the lord of day as he appears above the horizon. Biologically the ape heralded the coming of the man with the sun of intellect, and with ability to express the motions of thought by speech. How astonishing that nature has dramatized this event in the matutinal hailing by the apes of the physical symbol and embodiment of that intellect! The advent of divinity gave man speech; the rise of the solar lord sets the apes to clicking!

The ibis, sacred to Taht, the moon-god, emblemed the dark and light aspects of the moon in its two colors of white and black. The dark of the moon types the unspiritualized state of the first Adam, the Gentile, Sut, Anup, Krishna and the little Bambino or Italian Christ-child, were depicted as black.

The Biblical narrative of Samson and his consort Delilah seems quite definitely to be a growth from lunar typology. With the sun (in Hebrew) for his name, Samson is the sun-god; Delilah is traced (by Massey) to mean the feeble, waning, drooping aspect of lunar light, or the dark of the moon, its obscuration, and the menstruation. Conjunction with the woman during the dark period meant negation,

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abortion, waste of virile power, as in Onan’s case. Delilah represented the wretched sun-god in his reduced and fallen state of incarnation. As with Horus, Samson’s eyes are put out, his light is lost. Delilah causes his ruin, as her allurements lead to his being bound and shorn of his hair (a general type for solar rays). Ishtar is also the ruin of her solar lovers, and is charged with being an enchantress, a poisoner, a destroyer of male potency. Izdubar, the sun-god, reproaches her with witchcraft and seductive murderous lust, and saves himself by refusing to be her lover. The havoc wrought by Aholah and Aholibah, the two unholy sisters in harlotry portrayed in Ezekiel (23), upon the mighty sun-men of "Egypt" and "Babylon," is depicted without restraint of language. They, like Delilah, lure young men to their "destruction," that is, to union with matter and descent into it.

In old texts the date on which Osiris is affirmed to descend into the underworld is given as the seventeenth of the month Athor or Athyr. This was to match the date of the autumn equinox. Zodiacally it was the time of his entering the six lower signs for the "three days of navigation." Significantly the ark in which he was to be borne across the waters was a boat in the shape of the crescent moon. Then on the nineteenth of the same month, or after two (i.e., three) days, the priests proclaimed that he was re-found, or that his bark had come to view after being lost sight of.

The lunar phase of the meaning back of the term "Bull of his Mother," applied to Horus, is readily glimpsed. As the growing light of the new sun-child spreads over the body of the moon, his mother, he is said to impregnate her and fill her body with his virility. The old light re-begets itself on its own mother. The horn is a type of male power, as witness the rhinoceros (nose-horn) and the unicorn. The "horned moon" represented the virile young sun-god exercising his function of begetting light on his mother. Horus impregnated his mother Isis.

The context makes it appropriate to introduce here the figure of another animal used by the ancients in symbolism--the ass. His mythical usage has brought much of his own reputed quality, asininity, into the interpretations. Much, if not all, of his typical significance can be seen in relation to lunar imagery. Anup, the god of the dark moon, was figured by the ass, as well as by the jackal. As the lunar orb becomes illumined with light, the mythicists framed the allegory of

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the sun-god’s riding into full glory on the back of the dark moon, Anup, the ass, or ass-headed god, as he is depicted on the tomb of Rameses Sixth. Hence Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the city of heavenly glory, is only a fabulous construction of the mythicist to portray the final triumph of the sun-god or soul in man over his lower world. The climactic act in mundane life is the departure from mortal flesh and the entry into the kingdom of spirit, the Aarru-Salem or Fields of Peace. And nothing so decisively betrays the befuddlement into which exoteric literalism has thrown Christian practice than the Church’s placing the triumphal entry of Jesus chronologically ahead of the crucifixion, death and burial. The victorious entry into spirit, to join the glorious company of the gods, ends all earthly crucifixion. By no jugglery of sense can the triumph precede the crucifixion, in the same cycle.

The god rides into glory on the back of the lower animal self. The Ritual has told us that Horus would be set on Sut’s back, to be upborne safely by him. The spiritual world rests upon the physical, which fact let idealists never forget. Without being carried patiently by these ascetically despised bodies of ours we could never reach the gates of the celestial city.

That the ass-riding legend is purely a mythical drama past all contradiction on the basis of the Biblical context is evident from the fact that the Gospels state Jesus would be found "sitting on an ass and a colt, the foal of an ass." Impossibilities that can pass as myth prove ruinous when myth is turned into history. Picture Jesus physically astride the two animals at once! And this is a fair sample of the ludicrousness which the entire theology has taken on in modern presentation from the sheer despoiling of the mighty allegories of past wisdom. Nothing but the derided pagan mythology can eradicate the buffoonery of this scene and restore it to dignity. Theology has gone far to reduce the mind of Western humanity to imbecility; let mythology be called upon to restore it to sanity.

In this connection the linking of the symbol of the palm branch with the triumphal entry also indicates the luni-solar path to meaning. For, says Massey, the palm branch was an ancient type of time and periodicity. And Hor-Apollo avers that it was adopted as a symbol of a month or "moonth," because it alone reproduces an additional branch at each renovation of the moon. One might call a lunar month the

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period of a palm branch. In the degree of subtlety and refinement to which the sages carried the art of natural portrayal of truth, they seem to have far overshot the capacity of later, even modern, mind to evaluate their constructions.

We have Balaam riding the ass, and Samson slaying the Philistines with the jaw-bone of an ass. The jaw is the lower and moveable part of the head, working up and down against a stable unmoved counterpart. In this bit of anatomy nature has typed again our duality and the deep truth that over against a stable and unmoved eternal nature within, an activity in the lower levels of life moves out and back, to and fro, to nourish and express life’s inner attributes. Only by the activity of this lower part can the inner soul slay its adversaries.

Another revelation of hidden Bible typology comes to light through lunar representation. The jackal of Anup and the cynocephalus of Taht-Aan, which figured as types of the dark lunation, were conceived as having stolen the light from the bright moon. As the dark period before and that after the illumination, they stood on either side of the Christ light on the moon. They were dubbed "thieves of the light," in contrast to the twelve solar characters who were guardians of the treasure of light. Hermes, cognate with Anup, was in Greek mythology the thief. In the zodiac of Denderah just where Horus is shown on the cross or at the crossing of the vernal equinox, these two thieves Anup and Aan are drawn on either side of the sun-god. Here would appear to be the authentic pre-Christian prototype of the Gospel crucifixion between two thieves. Incarnation steals away the divine light--only to add to its brightness.

Orion, the mighty hunter, type of the sun-god, is represented as pursuing the moon which leaps ahead one hour’s jump each night, like a hare. In his chase of the hare he is accompanied by his two dogs, constellated as the stars Cyon (Greek kuon (cyon), "dog") and Procyon. On emerging from the darkness of Amenta Osiris says: "I come forth as a Bennu (the Phoenix-type of the Dog-star Sirius) at dawn. I urge on the dogs of Horus." These again may be Anup and Aan, the dog and the dog-headed ape, symbols of man in his early evolutionary state as animal, then as half animal and half man, the ape, before becoming full man. The god in man urges on in his evolution the animal part of himself.

We are now in position to understand a detail of Sut’s dismember-

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ment of Osiris passed over before. The dark power cut the god’s body into fourteen pieces! The meaning is under our eye in the lunar symbolism. To reduce full moon to dark moon, the Sut power must cut off the light in fourteen separate pieces, one each night! The lunar phenomena likewise dramatize the companion idea of the disrobing of the soul at each step of her descent into matter, as she loses a portion of her robe of light at each of fourteen steps.

The moon phases and periods furnish the actual origin of ancient and some modern festivals in a manner known to few. If not entirely a growth out of lunar periodicities, our Sabbath on the seventh day and the Jewish one on the sixth day, are traceable to origins in identical ancient festivals commemorating the sixth and seventh days of the lunar month. The early civilizations marked off three dates in the lunar cycle as worthy of celebration, the first, the sixth (or seventh) and the fifteenth. These were apparently all festivals in honor of Ra (or Osiris), though in conjunction with Luna. The feasts on the first and fifteenth were lunar festivals corresponding to the solar Christmas and the solar Easter, or the sun-god’s birth and resurrection. The new moon might be thought of as born on the first day. He completed his conquest of darkness in full light on the fifteenth (fourteenth). But there was a feast day set for the sixth and seventh days of the lunar month. This was the Feast of the Tenait. The word denotes a measure of time, a division, week or fortnight. It was primarily associated with the seventh day of the month. The Ritual recites (Ch. I): "I am with Horus on the day when the Festivals of Osiris are celebrated, and when offerings are made on the sixth day of the month, and on the Feast of the Tenait in Heliopolis" (city of the sun). The significant basic datum here is that, according to the old texts, "Osiris entered the moon on the sixth day of the month."

Now a great quantity of material could be adduced to support the contention that the sixth day was named as the date of the god’s entrance into the moon, picturing his entry into earthly body, because the implantation of the seed in the material womb could not be made until the day after the completion of the five days of menstruation! A lunar dark period was three days; but the reckoning was made on the basis of the woman’s actual period of five days. This five-day period of female non-productivity looms large in primitive number types of meaning. Indeed some African creation legends set a secular creation

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of five days with a Sabbath on the sixth. The five days signifying negation, it is curiously found that the Egyptian Nun, the abyss of nothingness, is written with five successive N’s. We have seen how ancient law insisted on woman’s playing the part of negation, disappearance, retirement, during the five days. In Parsee law even a woman who became clean in three days was not to be washed until the fifth day. On this account five became considered the evil or untoward number, and the five intercalary days injected into the year at the end to make the difference between the 360 days of twelve solar months (of 30 days) and the 365 (364) of the thirteen lunar months of 28 days each, were charactered as the unlucky days of ill and darkness. They came at the winter solstice, the era of yearly darkness.

Hence it was that the sixth day, the first succeeding the five days of taboo, was the time of a new impregnation, connoting new birth and renewal. Hence the first five days of the moon cycle were made memorial of the preliminary natural cycles of life in the kingdoms of darkness before the advent of the mind principle, solar intelligence, in the world. The sixth was considered to have deified the early five as later the seventh deified the first six. At any rate this was the figure of representation when the female period was the norm of typing and measurement. Thus Osiris, the seminal seed of divinity, entered the womb of matter to fecundate life on the first day after the dark period, which is incidentally the most fertile period of the month’s cycle. And this is indeed notable, for it is undoubtedly the origin of the Jewish eve. The commencement of the Sabbath at sunset is attributable to the symbolism of the setting sun, which figuratively marked the time of the god’s descent into the underworld for the night--of incarnation. This gave a Sabbath beginning on the evening of the fifth day, but covering mainly the sixth day, Saturday. This was the true Sun-day under lunar typism, because it marked the birth of the new sun in the moon.

But the festival of the full moon came on the fifteenth, bringing another Sun-day eight days later,--if on the fourteenth, then seven days later. But if the seventh was a solar day, the sixth was dedicated to Saturn, and on the night of it the love-feast or Agapae began at six o’clock to commemorate the conjunction of the sun and moon, or

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Horus with Hathor-Isis. This day was a phallic festival celebrated in symbolic appropriateness by the conjunction of male and female, the basis of the Saturnalia. Merely typical significance was given concrete dramatization in the actual union of males and females; for it is said that "couplings did abound." It was Saturn’s day to conjoin with his mother. From being held once a month, the two-day soli-lunar celebration was later repeated every seven days, or weekly.

Annu was the Egyptian city where festivals were held in honor of Osiris. One of these was kept on the sixth day of the month. The Speaker in the Ritual says that he is with Horus on the festival of Osiris on the sixth day of the month. As Annu became Beth-Annu (Bethany), it is instructive to compare with this the following from the Gospels (John 12): "Jesus, therefore, six days before the Passover came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus raised from the dead. So they made him a supper there," at which were present the two women, Mary and Martha, as the two Meri’s or Merti (Mertae) were present at Beth-Anu in Egypt. This was the mortuary meal at Annu, corresponding to the supper at Bethany.

The festival of the sixth day is clearly the one known as the Hakera (as well as the Tenait), that was solemnized on the sixth night of the Ten Mysteries. At this great festival was commemorated the resurrection of Osiris. This one of the Ten Mysteries was celebrated "before the great circle of the gods in Abydos [city of death and rebirth] on the night of the Hakera when the glorious ones are rightly judged; when the evil dead are parted off and ‘joy goeth its rounds in Thinis’" (Ch. 18, Renouf). This was the festival of "Come thou to me," or the resurrection. On this day the solar healer and deliverer of the Manes in Amenta rides in glory as the "divine one that dwelleth in heaven and who sitteth on the eastern side of heaven" (Rit., Ch. 25).

The goddess-mother Ishtar (the Hebrew Esther!) of Akkad was, like Venus and Hathor, designated "the Goddess Fifteen": being named from the date of the full moon or her productive heyday. The Egyptian goddess exclaims (Ch. 80): "I have made the eye of Horus when it was not coming on the festival of the fifteenth day." This is perhaps a reminder that at an early day the moon revolution was more definitely known than the solar cycle, and the fourteenth was counted as the date of the full moon. Ishtar is described as ascending and descending the steps of the moon, fifteen up and down in consonance

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with her title of Goddess Fifteen. In Pseudo-Matthew (Ch. 4) we learn that when the Virgin was an infant, just weaned, she ran up the fifteen steps of the temple at full speed without once looking back. In the History of Joseph the Carpenter Jesus says that Mary gave him birth in the fifteenth year of her age, by a mystery that no creature can understand except the Trinity. And Mary is the Egyptian Meri, who was Hathor, the Goddess Fifteen.

The Pistis Sophia dates the Transfiguration of Jesus on the fifteenth day of the month Tybi, the day of the full moon. The resurrection, or new birth, was always reckoned in Egypt on the full moon of this month, and as it came close after the winter solstice, about December 27 (Massey), it points to the Christmas nativity as being either ignorantly confused or knowingly identified with both the Transfiguration and the Resurrection. An address to Isis in the Ritual runs:

"I have come to see thee and thy beauties within the Utcha in thy name of Heb-enti-ses (i.e., the sixth-day festival). Thou hast conquered heaven by the greatness of thy majesty in thy name of ‘Prince of the festival of the fifteenth day!’ . . . Gods and men live at sight of thee. Thou risest to us . . ."

In the Ritual the Mother is she who "gives thee water on every first and every fifteenth day of the month."

A considerable amount of mythic construction has grown up around the poetic conception of the crescent moon as shaped like a tortoise shell, across which seven strings were drawn to form a lyre or harp. Many gods and goddesses play upon a harp of seven strings, Orpheus notably. Man must learn to draw consummate music from his evolutionary instrument of seven keys.

The moon is the source of much numerology, especially that dealing with the quantity: four times seven equals twenty-eight. The circuit of twenty-eight days found a natural division into four weeks of seven days each, the basis of a thirteen-month lunar year, or 364 days. Here was the meat for a veritable feast of mythological and numerological revelry. Man is founded, we have seen, on a natural basic structure composed of the four elements, each of which provide the substrate for one of his four bodies. His upper three principles rest on these four. Man is a spiritual triangle resting on a natural quadrilateral--the Pyramid. Each one of the four elemental strata is itself subdivided

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into seven sub-planes. Hence man’s foundation is numerically a fourfold seven, or four times seven, or twenty-eight. In Hindu literature one finds this distinctly confirmed in a statement which says "the last of the Buddhas advanced by 28 steps, seven toward each of the four quarters." Man has thus far established himself on four of the total seven platforms of the mount, with seven sub-steps to each.

But when the solar reckoning had supplanted the lunar there was a new basis of division. Thirty days were taken to the month and these were divided into three decads, or 3 X 10 = 30. This was in conformity with the new constitution of man, presided over, as he now was, by the solar light as a trinity or triad. The sun of intellect added its three crowning rays to the seven lower forces, making the tenfold man, the perfect type. A week on this basis would be composed of ten days, and three would make the month. Spiritual light is amenable to the same decomposition as is sunlight in passing through a three-sided medium, and it goes into seven divisions, which, united with the three primal ones, make the ten.

The study yields a sudden and unexpected return on effort expended by revealing to the world at last the true origin of the superstition of ill luck or sinister influence attaching to the number thirteen. It was the number of lunar months in the solar year. This was the year as founded on lunar or feminine determination. When the father’s part in parenthood came to be known, and the moon’s light was discovered to come from the hidden father of lights, the great differentiation between the two sexual hemispheres of humanity became established, with the ascription of every high and favorable, right and propitious influence to the spiritual male side, and the ominous, unfavorable, sinister and left-handed (Latin: sinister means "left-handed") to the material or female. Hence a thirteen-month year, as the final numerical basis of the new heaven in man’s constitution, was the accepted sign of everything desirable. Thirteen is sinister, then, because it was governed by luni-feminine influence, always redolent to the mythicist of the baser elements of the human frame. "Left" in Latin is "sinister," in French it is "gauche," which works into gaucherie, awkwardness.

The moon sent the hare to tell mankind that as the lunar god died and rose again, so should mortals also be renewed and rise again. So

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runs a tribal tradition of the Khoi-Khoi. They regarded the moon as the deity that promises man immortality. We would do well to keep a hold on that Khoi-Khoi suggestion. As with obvious design and precise calculation of times and cycles, the silvery orb is set in the sky as a perpetual object-lesson to the human race, a reminder to man that in the darkness of the night of his earthly burial, the solar light of divinity is still shining gloriously upon him, and shining more brightly unto the day of perfection. So comprehensive is that allegory that twenty pages have scarcely sufficed to outline the main facts involved. When the history written in soli-lunar language on the sky of night is read once again, a race distracted by loss of fontal wisdom may gain a foothold for peace and sanity on the ground of the knowledge there revealed.

The light of the sun on the moon shows spirit transfiguring body. And this nocturnal stage-play is far from being merely allegorical. The final word of crowning moment in the whole presentation of solar symbolism has not yet been spoken. At the heart of every living organism is a nucleus of solar light and energy. That is the sublime beginning of knowledge. Half of the task of liberating the modern mind from its hangover of medieval darkness will be achieved by the propagation anew of that fountain truth. But the still unuttered word that will complete the enfranchisement of thought from its present shackles has been hidden away amid the neglected pages of Neo-Platonic literature. From that grave of oblivion we drag it forth and set it beside the other luminous fact so that the two may be seen as the twin lights of the modern renaissance of wisdom. The light of the sun has been proclaimed as the essence of the deity within us. The sunlight on the moon has been heralded as the symbol of our growing godhood. How infinitely more it is than essence and symbol, and how much closer sun-worship has been to truth than modern superciliousness has ever dreamed, is disclosed in the short but mighty sentence of Proclus:

"The light of the sun is the pure energy of intellect."8

Here is the vital link of knowledge, long missing, that has been needed to join matter with spirit, nature with God, science with religion, and mind with the universe. For if, then, there is a nucleus of radiant light at the core of every life, the long puzzle as to how

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mind became introduced into body is indeed solved. That unquenchable spark of intense light glowing at the center of all life is itself the pure energy of intellect! The body does not generate intellect; intellect is the force that generates the body! The Faerie Queen has intimated that soul shapes the body’s form over its own inner model. Matter and mind are never found disjoined, for mind is the primal energy and builds a body to be its instrument in this arena of life. The substance, or body, of any organic unit is only an accretion of matter about a fiery nucleus, itself non-physical, which is mind itself. Mind is the energy of solar light; or solar light is the effect of mental energy. Can we imagine the stupendous power of that thinking energy of cosmic Mind which engenders a light like that of the sun! Mind is the core and cornerstone of every creature. Its light is blinded in lower orders, but shines forth in men and gods. Here is the beginning of wisdom and the re-beginning of religion. Could Christians have been persuaded to understand and accept their own Bible, this matter would have been established long ago. For the Psalms (84) stated this truth to an uncomprehending world centuries ago: "The Lord God is a sun. . . ." Nor less has the New Testament given witness to the same truth, for it has proclaimed that the son of the Father of Lights is the "sun of righteousness, risen with healing in his wings." The face of Jesus did "shine as the sun" in his transfiguration; and the ultimate promise given to sincere mortals is that at the end of earthly struggle, with victory won,--"then shall the righteous shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father."

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