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MANS TWO BIRTHS
ZODIACAL SYMBOLISM IN THE
GOSPEL OF LUKE
ALVIN BOYD KUHN, PH. D.
Three ancient and long-discredited sciences have experienced a
surprising renaissance in the modern day: symbolism, alchemy and
astrology. The last particularly has come into widespread vogue, but on a
basis which still inclines conservative positivism in science, scholarship
and orthodox religion to regard it as closely allied with "popular
superstition." In its predictive or "fortune-telling" aspect it is
generally looked upon askance. But there is another facet of it in which
it has pertinence and value that has not been recognized in its modern
revival and on which perhaps its most legitimate claim to consideration
should properly rest. This is its function as symbolic theology.
It is beyond question that the great ancient design of the zodiac is a
wondrously conceived graph aimed to depict the structure of the Logos, the
pattern or creative evolution, the essential constitution of the universe
and the course of the current of life in the cosmos, and by analogy in man
the microcosmic replica of the macrocosm. Almost infinite nuances of
significance have been adumbrated in those twelve signs or houses of the
zodiac and the thirty-six other constellations, as well as in the semantic
pictorializations which ancient sagacity and an ingenuity born of a
sapient understanding of the profounder truth of life conceived and drew
around those star clusters in the heavens. The uranograph, or chart of the
skies, was incontestably the first of all Bibles, pictorially edited. Not
quite simply and patently, but still most luminously for the initiated who
held the recondite keys to the symbolic lexicon of ancient writing, it can
be affirmed that all Bibles are but amplifications and elaborations of the
original volume of ideography that was first written on the open slate of
the sky, then charted in the zodiac and the planispheres carved on the
ceilings of ancient temples and later transferred to earth and inscribed
in scrolls, tablets and parchments. Man, adjured the old Scriptures, was
to fashion his new body of spiritual glory "after the pattern of the
heavens," the frame of the heavenly or zodiacal man, the primal Adam
Kadmon. And a cryptic graph of the nature and history of this celestial
Personage was sketched by the enlightened Sages in the configurated star
groups. Zodiac comes from the Greek word zodion, meaning a
small animal zootype, or living symbol of the microcosmic life of man, who
is indeed made in the image and likeness of the Divine Man pictured in the
cosmic heavens. Man’s little physical body is a miniature copy of the
universal body of God. The illimitable frame of cosmic Man was outlined in
the scroll of the skies, the solar systems and galaxies being living cell
clusters in his immeasurable organism.
The almost endless intimations of vital significance inwrought into
the structure of these Gestalt configurations carry the essence of the
esoteric import of the Scriptures. But there is one group of zodiacal
items that strikes so deeply into the heart of general theology that its
constituent particulars are assembled here as a striking and challenging
exemplification of the methodology of the archaic science which is in
truth the "lost key to the Scriptures." This presentation will serve as
introduction to a vast body of evidence which will prove beyond
controversy that Biblical theology rests more completely on astrological
symbology than has been discerned in any age since the ancient day. The
republication of this outline will come as a matter of the greatest
momentousness, enforcing as it must a new approach through a new avenue of
technology to the proper interpretation of the Bibles, yielding a quite
new and revolutionary orientation of their true meaning. These items trace
the unsuspected and crucial significance of two of the twelve signs, Virgo
and Pisces, in the heart of the New Testament narrative. Let the reader
picture before him the circle of the zodiac, with the house of Virgo at
the western or right end of the equatorial meridian line drawn
horizontally through the center and intersecting the circle on the east
and west, and with the house of Pisces directly opposite it on the left
and eastern end. The simple fact that they stand opposite to each other
and six months apart will presently be seen to dramatize cosmological and
anthropological truth of the most basic and, in our present state of
ignorance, astonishing pertinence and importance.
THE TWO MOTHERS OF THE CHRISTS
The exposition must begin with the perplexing and hitherto unexplained
item of ancient religious myth that the Christs, the Sun-Gods, the
Messiahs were generally allegorized as having had two mothers! How, one
asks, can there possibly be rational significance in such a predication?
It has been put out of serious consideration as just another of the
extravagant conceptions of ancient primitive unintelligence, just some
more of the rubbish of fantastic Pagan superstition. It will therefore
come as a surprise and shock if an intelligent re-examination forces us to
realize that in profundity of knowledge and semantic skill in portraying
it ancient perspicuity so far surpassed our own in this field of
anthropological science that we are found to be the ones still immersed in
primitive superstition, not the ancients.
This dual maternal parentage of the Messianic characters should not
have appeared so outlandish and bizarre, seeing that the Gospel Jesus
himself, dramatic figure of the divine principle in man, categorically
announced this very feature in declaring to Nicodemus that "you must be
born again." The startled Nicodemus asks if this means that he must enter
a second time into his mother’s womb and experience a second birth in the
natural manner. Jesus, implying that this idea would be preposterous,
replies that you "must be born of water and the spirit." It must be noted
here that the Latin word spiritus, translated "spirit" in many
passages, means also "air," "breath" or "wind." Taken in connection with
the great basic usage in Scriptural symbolism of the four primary
elements, earth, water, air and fire, this "air" symbol at once assumes a
position of the deepest revelatory moment.
The body of the physical, natural first man, of the earth, earthy, was
symbolically conceived as being composed of the two lower, or coarser of
these four elements, earth and water; while air and fire, representing
mind and spirit, commingled to constitute the higher, or spiritual man,
the second Adam, or the Christ. Jesus’ statement to Nicodemus could then
as meaningfully have been phrased "born of water and air." Thus we can see
a new signification in the statement of John the Baptist, in which he uses
three of the four elements to symbolize his meaning when he said that he,
the forerunner of the greater Christ, baptizes us with the two lower
elements, water and earth (but omitting earth, which should have gone with
it); but that the mightier power of spirit that is to supervene after his
preparatory work has been accomplished, will baptize us "with the Holy
Spiritus (air) and with fire."
Jesus thus affirms that we have two births, necessitating two
mothers, and John adds the corroborating datum that we have two
baptisms.
Since man’s spirit-soul is an indestructible fragment of God’s own
eternal spirit, truly a tiny spark of that cosmic Intelligence and Love
which we call the Mind of God, the ancient symbologists typified the
divine element in man by fire, and in contrast, emblemed the lower human
elements by water. The fiery essence of soul is housed in a
tenement of flesh and matter, which is seven-eighths water by
actual composition. The crossing of rivers and seas and the immersion of
solar heroes in water in the olden mythologies, and the rite of baptism in
organic religion signified nothing beyond the fact of the soul’s immersion
in a physical body of watery composition in its successive incarnations.
Under the terms of this evolutionary condition man is distinctly a
creature compounded of two natures, a "higher" spiritual and a "lower"
sensual, a divine and a human, a mortal and an immortal, and by symbolism
a fiery and a watery, the two being conjoined in a relationship of mutual
beneficence, in the organic body of the lower physical self. Says
Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of
earth and water." Describing man, Plato wrote: "Through body it is an
animal; through intellect it is a God." In creating man God implanted the
germ of a fiery spiritual principle of conscious being in the watery
confines of physical bodies. This is the truest description of man that
anthropology can present. All problems spring from that foundation and for
solution are referable back to it.
Man is, then, a natural creature and a god in combination. Our natural
part administers to our spiritual part the rite of baptism by water; our
nascent spiritual self is to give us the later baptism by (air and) fire.
We are born first as the natural man; then as the spiritual, the latter
crowning the former. Or we are born first by water, then by fire. Of vital
significance at this point are two statements by St. Paul: "That was not
first which is spiritual, but that which is natural"; and "First that
which is natural, then that which is spiritual." Again he says: "For the
natural man comprehendeth not the things of the spirit; neither can he."
Of course he can not; for he is not yet at that higher mount of evolution,
and he must be transformed, transfigured, lifted up into a superior world
of conscious dimension before he can cognize spiritual things. Evolution
will thus transform him, and nothing else will.
Utilizing astrological ground facts for the depiction of cosmic
truths, the ancient astrologers localized the birth of the natural man in
the zodiacal house of Virgo, and that of the spiritual man in the opposite
house of Pisces. These, then, were the houses of the two mothers of life’s
progeny. The first was the Virgo (Virgin) Mother, the primeval symbol of
the "Virgin Mary" thousands of years before Christ. Virgo gave man his
natural birth by water, and became known as the "Water-Mother;" Pisces,
the Fishes by name, gave him his birth by the "fish," or in the sign of
the Fishes, and was denominated the "Fish-Mother." The Virgin Mothers are
all identified with water as symbol, and their various names, such as Meri,
Mary, Myra, Myrrha, Miriam, Moira, Venus (born of the sea-foam stirred up
between the knees of Jupiter as he waded through the seas), Tiamat and
Thallath (Greek for "sea.") are designations for water or the sea. On the
other side there are the Fish Avatars of Vishnu, such as the Babylonian
Ioannes, or Dagon ("fish" in Hebrew is dag); and the goddesses
Atergatis and Semiramis were actually called "fish-Mothers." Virgo stood
as the mother of birth by water, or the birth of man the first, earthy, in
a watery body. Pisces stood as the mother of birth by the spirit, or by
fire, or the birth of man the second, described by St. Paul as "the Lord
from heaven." Man’s physical body is the high product of a biological
evolution that actually started in the ocean water! And the blood in man’s
veins is still identical in chemical composition with sea water. Virgo was
poetized as the Water Mother of the natural man; Pisces as the Fish Mother
of the spiritual man. So Virgo was the first of the two mothers of the
god-to-be in the life of mankind; Pisces was the second.
CONCEIVED IN HEAVEN--BORN ON EARTH
In spite of
the presence of these significant data standing for all to read in
mythology and the Scriptures, any profound grasp of the interior
intimations was missed because the true relevance of the symbolic sense of
both water and the fish had never been glimpsed. Prominent as the fish
symbol has been in Christian literature of the inceptive period, no one
has seemed to divine its enlightening cryptic import. It is of astonishing
revelatory character. Water is the type of natural birth because all
natural birth proceeds in and from water. All first life on our globe
originated in sea water, and all vegetation must have water to maintain
its life. The fish is a birth in and from water, and it therefore stands
patently as the generic type of organic life issuing out of the inorganic!
The fish typifies life embodied in a physical organic structure,
subsisting in a sea of inorganic matter. Organic life is born out of the
inorganic just as the fish is born out of the water. It is the child of
the water-as-mother. And if organic life (the "Fish") is in its turn to
become mother, its child will be mind and spiritual consciousness, son of
the Fish Mother. Water is thus the mother of natural physical life, and
organic physical body becomes the mother of later evolving divine mind.
Now, strangely enough, water is the type of another essence, which is
even more than water a universal mother of life, namely matter. Matter is
the virginal mother of all life in the aboriginal genesis. All things are
generated in the womb of primordial matter, the "first old genetrix" of
the Egyptians, Apt, Hathor, Meri, Isis. And it is by a consideration of
the nature of matter and its evolution that we are enabled at last to
arrive at a true comprehension of the double motherhood of the god nature.
For this universal matter-mother is now known to exist in two vastly
different states, at each of which, at two different levels, it generates
its child. Primordial matter, the sea of (to us) empty space, is the first
mother of all living forms. This is the primal "abyss of the waters" in
Genesis. The Latin word for "mother" is our very word "matter," with
one "t" left out--mater. And how close to "matter" is "water!" And
matter organized and structuralized over patterns of divine conception is
the second mother, genetrix of spiritual mind.
In the sagacious dramatism of arcane writing the two mothers were
always presented in pairs. They were designated the "two mothers," or
sometimes the "two divine sisters" of the god character. Or they were the
wife and sister of the central deity, as Juno was wife and sister
of Jupiter, and Isis was wife and sister of Osiris. Others were Venus,
Ishtar, Cybele, Mylitta. In ancient Egypt they were first Apt and Neith,
later Isis and Nephthys. Gerald Massey relates Neith to "net," the device
to catch fish! Clues to their function are found in the great Egyptian
Book of the Dead, and there it was that the mystery of this double
motherhood of life was solved. For here it is revealed that the function
of motherhood was, so to say, bisected into two phases, so that, of the
two mothers, Isis and Nephthys, each was seen to have performed but
one-half of the function of motherhood of the infant god, thus requiring
the two of them to consummate the birth. For the text reads: "Isis
conceived him; Nephthys gave him birth." Again, with a shift of the
suggestive symbolism, it is said: "Isis bore him; Nephthys suckled him."
Even with these elucidative data the full sweep of the true import was not
caught until a further clarification was found in another verse, which
ran: "Heaven conceived him; the Tuat brought him forth." With this came
the brilliant flash of clear insight into the mystery. For "heaven" is
precisely the place, or the state of the first matter-mother, the
"firmament" of empty space, and in the bosom of this first mother form the
unit potential of the seed of divine mind-to-be is conceived. All later
potency of a godly mind is latent in the depths of sub-atomic matter. "The
shape of things to come" in the evolution of universal life is
archetypically conceived at the arc of the cycle when spirit and matter,
as yet undifferentiated, are identical and homogeneous. Spirit yet
slumbers in dreamless unconsciousness, and matter exists only as what the
Hindus call Mulaprakriti, the "root of matter." All things are initially
conceived in the innermost heart of primordial Being, where spirit as
Father and matter as Mother are yet One. Being is then Father-Mother, not
Father and Mother.
This is mirrored in the Egyptian statement that Isis conceived Horus,
the Christ-to-be. Matter was the womb of the first conception, and
Nephthys was to give birth to what Isis conceived. Isis is therefore the
true Virgin of the world, because she is matter in its virginal state,
matter still subsistent, and not yet existent, unable to be paired off as
the opposite pole of spirit and hence unwed. As virgin, she has not yet
given birth to the Christ. That role will be performed by Nephthys, matter
impregnated by spirit. Cosmically and evolutionarily speaking, Isis is the
young girl who can not marry and bear the Christ; Nephthys is that same
young girl grown to womanhood and able to produce her child. In the same
sense in which we say that the child is father of the man it can be said
that Isis is the mother of Nephthys. And we shall see that this legend of
the two mothers, the second being the daughter of the first, is found
intact in the New Testament Gospel story.
If heaven, in the sense of virginal matter, conceived the divine
consciousness principle, what is the "Tuat" that brought it forth? It must
be equivalent to Nephthys. This locality is the Egyptian designation for
earth, or matter in its substantial evolved form which can finally bring
spiritual consciousness to manifest expression. It is matter in its
physical form. Isis was matter subsistent in the form of "empty space;"
Nephthys was atomic matter, existent as visible structural form, or the
"fish." The fish is seen to be the type of organic matter floating in the
sea of inorganic first matter, the "waters of the firmament." We see the
physical worlds floating about in the sea of empty space like fish in the
water. The physical universe is that Great Fish in the sea of infinite
Being which contains the germ of the Jonah consciousness (for Jonah is
another figure of the Jesus or Christ consciousness) and which will
transport it across the sea of evolving life and spew it out on the
farther shore of higher Mind. This great universe is the second form of
matter and hence is the second mother, Nephthys. It is the developed
bodies of organic matter that give birth to the Logos in the macrocosm and
to the Christos, a seed unit of that same Logos, in man the microcosm.
Man’s physical body, with brain and nervous system organized to give
expression to that grade of mind denominated the Christ consciousness, is
the divine Fish of the mythologic tradition of early Christianity. One
needs only to refer to the Greek designation of the Christos of the
precessional period of Pisces as Ichthys the Fish to be amazed at the play
of the symbolism in the ancient day precisely when Christianity was being
formulated. For the sun had entered the sign of the Fishes about 255 B.C.
So under the conception of the divided function of motherhood it can
be said that man’s future Christhood is conceived in the womb of
Isis and brought to birth from the womb of Nephthys, the second mother,
the immediate incubator and gestator of the Christly power in the world.
One might analogize the situation by thinking of a human child as first
conceived in the minds, or in the love of its parents and later born from
the womb of its physical mother. For this life has two births and
must have a mother for each. It is conceived by the mother and born by the
daughter. Life is spiritually conceived and physically born. Man is born
first as man, by water, the sea of primordial matter, in whose depths he
is conceived; then he is reborn later as god, by the fire of spirit,
emerging with biological life out of the womb of the sea, the
Water-Mother.
The two mothers can be sharply distinguished as these two forms of
matter in the following delineation: the first or virgin mother is matter
in its first creative form; invisible, inorganic, unsubstantial (in
our sense) and subatomic. The second mother is matter in its later
evolved form as visible, organic, substantial and atomic.
The first mother, virgin though she is, generated her child, organic
matter, who by virtue of her "immaculate conception" was confusedly still
called "virgin." And this daughter, grown to adulthood by evolution,
became the second, or "Fish Mother," and in her turn produced, not now a
daughter, but her Son, the masculinity indicating a spiritual and
not a further physical progeny, the birth of Mind from matter.
As hinted a moment ago, this genealogy or divine lineage is found in
the New Testament of Christianity. The first mother, corresponding to Isis
is Anna, and the second mother is her daughter Mary, who bears the
Christos, Jesus. Anna and Mary are the Isis and Nephthys of the Christian
dispensation. And it is a question whether the Christian Anna and the
Hebrew Hannah are not immediate derivatives from the Egyptian An, Ani,
Anu. An was an alphabetical glyph for existent being. Ani was
the name of the human entity evolving to deity in the Book of the Dead.
Anu will come to astonishing significance a little farther on.
THE HOUSE OF BREAKING BREAD
The first, or virgin birth was depicted as taking place on the western
side of the zodiac, in the house or womb of the Virgin Mother, Virgo. This
allocation was due to the fact that it is in the west that the sun,
universal symbol and embodiment of the fire of spirit, descends each
evening into the earth and water that represented the body in which the
soul incarnated, this body itself being composed of those two elements,
earth and water. So man is, zodiacally, born in the water, as natural man,
on the western side; and is to be reborn, or regenerated, as spiritual
man, at the end of the cycle, on the eastern side. Spirit’s descent into
water (of the body) on the west makes it man physical; its later
resurrection on the east makes it man spiritual, man deified. Says the
text of old Egypt: "Pepi saileth with Ra to the eastern side of heaven,
where the gods are born." This is the death and resurrection of the god,
the basic theme in all religions. It is simply incarnation and return to
heaven. It is the descent of Messiah into "Egypt" and his exodus back to
spirit, historicized in the Scriptures as "Canaan."
Further browsing in the ancient tomes brings to light links of
connection between the zodiacal pictorialization and the Bible. The chief
one is found in the symbol of bread in connection with both Virgo
and Pisces. Pisces is the house of the Fishes by name, but it is not
commonly known that in the astrological portraiture Virgo was the house of
Bread. This is indicated by several items of the typology. Many centuries
ago in the precession of the equinoxes the end of the year was marked by
the position of the great Dog Star Sirius, brilliant heavenly symbol of
the divinity in man. Precisely at midnight of December 24 this bright sun
stood on the meridian line running from the zenith to the south. At the
same moment there was rising on the eastern horizon the constellation of
the Virgin, bearing in her left arm the Christ child, symbol of the
Christhood coming to function in man; and in her right hand she clasped
the great star Spica (Latin: a head or "spike" of wheat), symbol of that
same deity coming as the celestial food for man. It must be remembered
that the Gospel Christ told us that, if we would have eternal life, we
must virtually eat his body as our divine food, and drink his blood. Hence
typism represented him as coming in the form and nature of man, the human
babe; and com- ing as spiritual food emblemed by wheat. The Gospel
Christos describes the supernal gift of the spirit in the words: "This is
that bread which came down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall
hunger no more." Jesus took the same symbol, a loaf, and, breaking it into
fragments, gave a morsel to each of his disciples, saying it was his
(spiritual) body, broken for them.
We now have Virgo established as the House of Bread and Pisces as the
House of the Fishes. The characterization of the two houses can now be
brought along to a more specific evolutionary reference. Just what are
these "houses"? What do they represent? As already set forth, they are
poetic graphs for the two states of matter. But now they are to be shown
to stand for something in immediate relation to man’s life. It should not
appear too extravagant a declaration if the evidence warrants our
assertion that in the ultimate resolution of their meaning, they are in
the allegory to be considered as the human body itself! For these physical
bodies of ours consist of matter in both its visible and invisible forms.
As St. Paul tells us, we have a natural and a spiritual body. Man’s body
itself houses the two mothers. The human body is this double house of
Bread and of Fish.
The next link is seen when it is considered that the physical body is
for the soul the house of death and in its regenerative phase, the house
of rebirth. It is the house into which the spirit descends and in which it
suffers a more or less complete obscuration of its powers in the darkness
of its tomb of matter. It is the house in which for an initial period it
lies in a state of relative "death," out of which it is to arise in a new
birth, or resurrection, on the opposite side of the cycle. A significant
passage from the Book of the Dead recites, alluding to the Horus
(Christ) principle: "Who cometh forth from the dusk and whose birth is in
the house of death." This applies to the incarnating soul. In the
recondite esoteric sense of the archaic Scriptures the soul "dies" on
entering the body in incarnation, but has a resurrection from this "death"
and its rebirth, or the tomb of the crucified Christ and the
womb of his second birth.
As we could expect, the Egyptians had a name for the body as the locus
of these evolutionary transactions, which carry the central meaning of all
theology. This name now rises out of the dim mists of ancient Egyptian
religious lore to enlighten all modern Biblical studentship. This city of
the body, wherein the sun of soul sank to its death on the cross of matter
to re-arise in a new generation, was called the city of the sun, which in
Greek became Heliopolis, but was in the Egyptian Anu. The name was,
of course, given to an actual Egyptian town, where the rites of the death,
burial and resurrection of Osiris, or Horus, were yearly enacted. But the
name bore a theological significance before it designated a geographical
city,--as indeed did most Biblical names of localities.
The significant name is obviously composed of Nu, the name for
the Mother-Heaven, or empty space, or the abyss of nothingness out of the
bosom of which creation emanates. The A (alpha privative) means, as it
does in thousands of words, "not." It is prefixed to a host of words to
negate an affirmative meaning, as a-theistic, a-moral, a-symmetrical, a-mnesia.
A-nu would then mean literally "not-nothingness," or a world of concrete
actuality. The negation of a negative posits an affirmative. It refers
thus to our world of physical manifestation. Precisely such a world it is
in which units of virginal consciousness go to their "death" and again
rise out of it. Says God in the Old Testament: "I cast down to death and I
raise up again." Anu is then the physical body of mortals on earth. The
soul descends out of the waters of the abyss, or the Nun, which is
simply space in its primordial undifferentiation. So Nu (neuter),
Nun (masculine), Nut (feminine) is the cosmic negative, the
name and sign of all non-being. When life is reintegrated at the end of
each cycle of out-going and return in the completeness of its restored
unity, it is negative. It is the Nun. When it is undifferentiated
as spirit and matter, it is neuter. To manifest its
potential life it must disintegrate its unity, segregate itself into the
duality of spirit and matter, establish positive-negative tension and from
that split up into infinite multiplicity.
Here we are brought face to face with the important Biblical sense of
the word "multiply." To exhibit its infinite creative resources, life must
multiply itself endlessly. The unitary life of deity must break itself up
into infinite fragments if it is to fill empty space with a multitude of
worlds and beings of diversified natures. The primal sea, or Mother must
engender a multitudinous progeny, to spawn the limitless schools of
organic "fish-worlds." This is the meaning of the promise given to Abraham
that his seed should "multiply" until it filled the earth with offspring
countless as the sands and the stars. And if the life divine was
symbolized by bread as the type of the first birth, and by fish as the
type of the second, then we might expect to find in old religious typology
the allegory of a Christ personage multiplying loaves and fishes to
feed a multitude! Should we be astonished then, when we do find
that the Gospel Jesus does this very thing? The leads to the significance
of the two numbers woven into the story are not too clear. But since the
bread symbol pertains to Virgo, mother of the natural man, the five loaves
may have been intended to refer to man’s five senses, while the two fishes
could have represented the two natures unified by the second birth.
This is astonishing enough in all conscience. But even it yields in
wonder to the next item of comparative religion data, which came to our
notice as a further tie between the Bible and antecedent Egyptian
mythology. Who can adequately estimate the seriousness of the challenge
which this finding of scholarship throws down to Gospel historicity? For a
thrilling discovery indeed it was which brought to notice a passage in the
Book of the Dead that referred to Anu as "the place of
multiplying bread!"
Here, then, in the long-silent tomes of old Egypt was found the
original, the prototype, of the "miracle" of the loaves and the fishes in
the Gospels of Christianity. In the light of this correlation of material
it is seen that a new and enlightening meaning must be read into this New
Testament episode. The revelation indeed makes it necessary to lift the
incident quite out of the realm of history and orient it into that of
allegory. For at last we are given a lens of proper focus through which to
read aright, for the first time in centuries, the hidden sense of the
Gospel narrative. We see that Anu, as the physical body, is the place
wherein the unity of the Christly power is broken into an infinite number
of fragments, which are distributed out among a multitude of God’s
children enhungered after a three-days fast. This latter detail can
readily be taken as referring to the deprivation of spiritual food
suffered by souls in their sojourn in the three elemental kingdoms,
mineral, vegetable and animal, before attaining to the plane of mind. St.
Paul lends authority to this rendering in saying that before we develop
the Christ-mind, we are in bondage to the elements (in several passages
the "elementals") of the world, meaning the powers of nature as yet
unillumined by mind.
Here are all the components of the inner meaning of the Christian
Eucharist: the broken, but multiplied fragments of the body of the god,
distributed to feed hungry humanity. And as humanity is com- posed of
twelve groups of conscious units struggling on the road to divinization,
there were gathered up twelve baskets of fragments. For in the
synthesis of all powers to be evolved in the process of deification, the
twelve aspects of the Christ consciousness are finally reintegrated, or
"gathered up" in one climactic unity.
One must ask what it can mean to the future of Christianity to realize
now that this episode of the ostensible life of Jesus is found to be the
Judean republication of an antique Egyptian allegory, completely
unhistorical in character.
THE HOUSE OF FISH
But new involvements arise and take us on into still more startling
disclosures. The Hebrews fell heir to the Egyptian wisdom and appropriated
Egyptian material. They picked up the name Anu, and, fitting it back into
its zodiacal setting as Virgo, they called it the House of Bread. This led
to their adding to the name Anu their word for "house," which is beth.
This yields us Beth-Anu. It is a fact of common philological knowledge
that when the ancient Greek and Egyptian "u" in a word is transferred into
English, it is invariably rendered as "y." For instance, the Greek word
for "water" is hudor. In all English words it becomes hydro.
Shifting the "u" of Anu to the "y", Anu becomes Any, so that Beth-Anu now
stands before us as Bethany of the Gospels! Bethany, then, is just the
sign of Virgo, as "the House of Bread," the home of the great star Spica,
the head of wheat!
But let us say "House of Bread" in ordinary Hebrew. What further
amazement strikes us here as we find this reads Beth-lehem. For
"bread" in Hebrew is lehem. The Christ had the first of his two
births in Bethany, or Bethlehem, the astrological "House of Bread,"--the
human body! And this, be it noted at last, is the only place where it can
be of any benefit to humanity.
Later it seems that the two signs, Virgo and Pisces, and their
symbols, bread and fish, were almost interchangeably confused or
commingled in symbolic imagery. This was likely, in fact almost
inevitable, since the two signs represented the same human body as the two
houses in which soul died and was reborn, and the two processes are just
the two phases of the one operation.
If Pisces is, then, the "house" in which the Christ in man comes to
his birth, it is altogether pertinent to ask if there are evidences in the
Bible or Christianity that Jesus was represented under any of the
characteristics of the fish typology. Here we encounter material enough to
provide another nine-days wonder. For Jesus is decorated and haloed by the
Piscean symbolism on every hand. His twelve disciples were "fishermen!" In
earlier Egyptian depiction the twelve were at one time or another
carpenters, reapers, harvesters, fruit gatherers, sailors, rowers,
builders, masons, potters or keepers of the twelve treasures of light.
Jesus instructed Peter to find the gold in the fish’s mouth; his last
"miracle" was the net-breaking draught of fishes; he declared that he
would make them "fishers of men." Also astrological ingenuity had
delineated the River Eridanus (Jordan) as issuing from the mouth of the
constellation of the Southern Fish and flowing north to the very feet of
Orion, starry symbol of the Christ, intimating that the stream of life
issues forth from the organic physical life of man and runs right up to
the foot of divinity. The Bishop’s mitre in Christianity is in the shape
of the mouth of a fish. In the catacombs under Rome the symbol of the two
fishes crossed in the "X" form was displayed on the forehead of the Christ
image, at its feet, or on a plate on the alter before it. And the Romans
for several centuries dubbed the early Christians Pisciculi,
"Little Fishes," members of the "Fish-Cult." Augustine and Tertullian both
likened the Christian laity to "little fishes" in the sea, Christ being
the Great Fish, or Whale. And perhaps the crowning datum in all this
piscatorial Christianity is the fact that the Greeks denominated the Jesus
Avatar figure as Ichthys, the Fish. They would doubtless have
alluded to any claimant at that time for the mantle of Messianic
messengership under the title of Ichthys, even if the Christian
movement had not thrust on the world the Gospel character of Jesus as
humanized Savior. For ancient arcane science, resorting ever to subtle
types of representation, and all grounded on the circle of the zodiac,
attached to the Messianic figure the name, title and features of the
zodiacal house in which the sun stood at the time, its sojourn in each
sign being two thousand one hundred and sixty years. When the sun was
entering Pisces ancient astrological observance would in any event have
saluted the embodiment of the coming god-power as Ichthys.
Still other startling correlations come to view. As has been here
delineated, the Christ is the offspring or creation of Divine Mind, first
in the innermost bosom of Spirit-Matter, then entified in organic bodily
structure. Primeval space, as has been seen, was in Egyptian terms the
Nun, the "waters of the Nun." What Bible student does not know
of "Joshua, son of Nun"? But so far has ignorance and obscurantism gone
with its deadly work in Biblical literalism that hardly any one knows with
definiteness that Joshua is just a variant (one of some ten or twelve)
form of "Jesus." The phrase has actually been found written in ancient
texts as "Jesus, son of Nun." At any rate there is no question and there
can be none, that Joshua is Jesus, no less. This asserts that both names
in various versions of the Messianic legend stood for the one same typal
figure representing man’s coming deity. But the wonder increases when we
turn to the Hebrew alphabet and find that, while "M" is called and spelled
"Mem," and means "water," "N" is called and spelled "Nun," and means, of
all astound- ing things, "fish." Jesus, then, is son of Pisces, the
Fish-sign; as indeed he is in the Gospels themselves.
And Horus, the Egyptian Christ, who is identical with the Jesus of the
Gospels in some one hundred and eighty particulars, performed at Anu a
great "miracle." He raised his father Osiris from the dead, calling unto
him in the cave to rise and come forth, intimating that he was not dead
but only sleeping. Anu, as has been seen, became Bethany of the Gospels;
and it was at Bethany that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead! And we run
into another amazing link when, through Egyptian sources, we are enabled
to establish the identity of Lazarus. This is close to the greatest of all
the marvels in this chain of comparative data. For we find that the
ancient designation of Osiris was Asar. Now the Egyptians
consistently expressed reverence for deity by prefixing the definite
masculine article, "the," to the name of the chief of their gods. This was
Osiris. Just as the Christians say, or should say, the Christ, they
said the Osiris. And there applies here another point of language
usage not discovered by scholars, but pertinent to our elucidation. It is
that the definite masculine article, "the," connoted deity in ancient
writing. Our definite article, "the," is the root of the Greek word for
God, the-os, to which the Greeks prefixed their masculine article,
ho theos. The Spanish article masculine, el, is the Hebrew
word for God. And the Greek masculine article ho, is a Chinese word
for deity. To say "the Osiris" was equivalent to saying "Lord Osiris."
So when the Hebrews took up the Egyptian names and titles they
converted the name of "the Osiris," or "Lord Osiris," directly into their
own vernacular, with the result emerging as "El-Asar." Then in turn the
later Romans, speaking Latin, took up the same material that had come to
them through Hebrew hands and to "El-Asar" they added the common Latin
termination of the second declension masculine nouns in which most Roman
men’s names ended, namely "us;" and the result was now "El-Asar-us."
In time the initial "E" wore off, as the scholars phrase it, and the "s"
in "Asar" changed into its sister-letter "z," leaving us holding in our
hands the "Lazarus" whom Jesus raised from the dead at Bethany! So the
allegorical raising of the Egyptian Osiris from death by his son, the
Christ of Egypt at the Egyptian Anu became the raising from death of the
Hebrew Lazarus by the Palestinian Christ at the Judean Bethany, and what
was sublime spiritual dramatism became incredible "history."
To support the contention that this derivation is not a fanciful
invention or sheer coincidence, we find the Egyptian "Azar" reappearing in
the names of two of the Hebrew Priests in the Old Testament,
Azar-iah and El(e)azar. The -iah
(or -jah) appended to deific names substantially equated the
prefixed El in Hebrew usage. But a further and far more
authoritative confirmation of the linkage was found in one place in
Renan’s famous Life of Jesus (page 308). The French theologian
displayed an extraordinary knowledge of Judean history, geography,
sociology and religion, and in connection with the elucidation here
presented this citation from his great book confronts the Christian
exegesis with a challenge which it may be difficult to fend off. We quote
the passage as follows:
"The village of Bethany, in particular, situated at the summit of the
hill upon the incline which commands the Dead Sea and the Jordan, at a
journey of an hour and a half from Jerusalem, was the place especially
beloved by Jesus."
Following this a numeral directs us to the note appended at the bottom
of the page, in which the reference is to Bethany:
"Now El-Azerie (from El-Azir, the Arabic name of Lazarus)
in the Christian texts of the Middle Ages, Lazarium."
On the next page (309), speaking of Mary he states:
"Her brother Eleazar, or Lazarus, was as much beloved by
Jesus."
Here is indisputable evidence that the Egyptian connection with the
name of Bethany clung to the town up to the Middle Ages. Since it is
agreed widely that John’s Gospel is far more mystical and spiritual
and less historical than the other three, it is quite apparent that this
reprint of an ancient Egyptian allegory would be more likely to be
included in John’s Gospel and omitted from the three synoptic ones.
What can it mean to Christian theology that the story of the raising of
Lazarus was extant in Egyptian papyri possibly 5000 years B.C.?
Nor was Osiris, masquerading under the name of Lazarus, the only
Egyptian personage present at the scene of this supposed Christian
"miracle." Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, under her ancient
designation of Meri, was present also. As the feminine counterpart
of the male deity was dualized to match the doubling of Horus as Horus the
Elder (otherwise Osiris) and Horus the Younger, so the Meri name
was sometimes pluralized, becoming Merti. In Latin feminine form
this became Mertae. But in Hebrew it resolved into what in English
was rendered as Martha. So even in the ancient Egyptian transaction
there were present the two Maries, or Mary and Martha, the sisters of
"Lazarus."
A SIGNIFICANT SIX MONTHS
All this
sets the stage for the crowning item in the correspondence. In the Gospel
drama John the Baptist enacts the role of the first-born or natural man,
coming first to prepare the physical ground of evolution for the advent of
the second Adam, or Christ. He would therefore stand in the allegory as
the son of the Water Mother, Virgo, and under the astrological symbolism
would be born at the autumn equinox, or in his mother’s house, which
stands as that station in the zodiac. On the other side of the cycle of
descent, "death" and resurrection, would stand Jesus, the Christos, son of
the Fish Mother, born in his mother’s house of the Fishes. These houses
are six months apart on the zodiacal chart!
Hence the whole edifice of Gospel historicity trembles under the
impact of the strange dramatic circumstance, given in the first chapter of
Luke’s Gospel, that the Annunciation to Mary of her conception of
the coming Christ by the Holy Spirit came in the sixth month of
Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist. So we can see what the
myth-makers devised for discerning intelligence in the allegory in
Luke. The natural man, having covered the zodiacal "six months"
between his conception and the date of his quickening into spiritual
status in his evolution, was dramatized as being "quickened" at a point
exactly opposite from the point of the beginning of his life. Six months
on the chart would mark the end of an epoch begun opposite it. Six months,
speaking purely zodiacally, would terminate the period of mortal life and
bring the natural man to the place of his deification. At that point he
would be represented as being quickened from natural to spiritual life. So
then, according to the Lukan account, when the mother of the true
spiritual Christ, who had just been impregnated by the Holy Ghost, came
into the presence of the first mother, carrying her child at the
figurative completion of his cycle of physical evolution, and awaiting
only the advent of the spiritual Lord to be quickened into a new order of
exalted being, he was dramatized as manifesting this reawakening by the
statement that "he leaped in his mother’s womb." The Luke narration
makes it clear that the conception of Jesus had just taken place when Mary
visited her cousin Elizabeth and found her at the six months stage of her
pregnancy. Mary’s coming into the presence of Elizabeth is made the
occasion of the natural man’s leaping in his mother’s womb. When the
Christos comes to the natural man the latter leaps into the higher kingdom
of spirit.
It is but a simple matter of arithmetic to note that the last three
months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John coincided with the first three
of Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus, bringing the birth of Jesus just six
months after that of John! So Luke has it. But it was in the
zodiacal chart some thousands of years before it could have "happened" in
Judea. It had occurred zodiacally long before it could have occurred
historically. And the implication is overmastering that the supposed
historical occurrence is but a presumption of ignorance based on the
zodiacal when that became circulated as history among the
unintelligent masses.
The final link of significant data, now to be presented is by no means
a minor one. St. Paul declares that we come to birth spiritually only as
we die carnally, meaning that the quantum or quality of divine character
in us grows in proportion as the quantum of raw nature decreases. We
increase deifically as we decrease humanly; the god gains in power as the
animal dies. So the structure of the allegory depicted the spiritual man,
Jesus, son of Nun, the "Fish," as increasing, while John, son of Virgo,
the Water Mother, decreases in stature. Astrologically, as a star or
constellation sinks below the horizon in the west, its opposite star or
constellation would be rising in the east. As John, type of the first, the
natural man, went down (having completed his mission of preparing the way
for his greater successor), Jesus, type of the spiritual birth, rose on
the world. So the narrative has John saying: "I must decrease, but he
must increase." In the descent of soul into the body spiritual power
decreases as physical life increases. But on the reverse arc of the cycle,
or evolution, the physical (John) decreases as the Christ power increases
in its new round of growth.
THE CHALLENGE TO CHRISTIANITY
No
intelligent reader can peruse this assemblage of semantic data without
being profoundly impressed by at least two considerations of the most
momentous gravity. He will see first that the great principles of theology
were presented, rather are concealed, it would be permissible to say,
under the cryptographic forms of astrological symbolism. Then he will be
impressed beyond measure by the incontestable evidence of the fact that
Biblical events he had assumed were historical occurrences in the first
century A.D., were already written in time-worn books of the ancient
Egyptians thousands of years before, and that they were there not as
objective history but as spiritual allegory. And in the train of
reflection that would follow upon these recognitions, how could he avoid
asking of his intelligence the question fraught with critical moment for
the Christian faith: were then the Gospels and Epistles of the Christian
New Testament compositions originally written between the years 40
to 80 of that first Christian century? In the face of the evidence here
assembled, can there be much doubt that these Gospels and Epistles were
republications of old Egyptian religious scripts, revamped and redacted
doubtless by Judean influences, in the first century of our era? Does
Christian history make any authoritative pronouncement that would throw
light on the question? In spite of fanatical zeal to obliterate all trace
of the derivation of its literary heritage from antecedent Pagan sources,
there has been permitted to survive for us a statement made by the man who
himself was chiefly instrumental in founding the Christian ecclesiastical
system, the Christian historian and bishop, Eusebius. In his famous
Ecclesiastical History, chapter 17 of Book II, treating of the Essenes,
called Therapeutae in northern Egypt, he wrote:
"These ancient Therapeutae were Christians and their writings are our
Gospels and Epistles."
As if to corroborate this declaration of the fourth-century Christian
protagonist the Dead Sea scrolls now rise out of the mists of
pre-Christian time to certify beyond cavil that the New Testament
documents were products of the antecedent Pagan religions.
If Eusebius’s statement and the evidence of the scrolls (and much
other data) point to the ancient origin of the Scriptures, there would
then arise the further crucial question: for what reason were ancient
Egyptian documents of secret esoteric and occult spiritual lore, embodying
the innermost teachings of the Magian and Sabean astrological science,
brought forth from their age-long sacred custodianship of the heirophants
of the Mysteries and spread broadcast to the world in that first Christian
century? The answer to this query is many-sided and complicated. But among
other influences there was one certainly that can be traced with
considerable distinctness. This was the work of a philosopher too little
credited with importance. Philo Judaeus was born at or about the year 1
A.D. He labored in the early and middle portions of the first century to
effect a syncretism of Greek Platonism, Egyptian Hermeticism and Mosaic
Hebraism on occult theosophical bases. His work could have given a
powerful stimulus to the cultism of mystico-spiritual science throughout
the mid-Eastern countries, as it apparently did lay the foundations for
the great Alexandrian philosophical center which, under the headship first
of Pantanus, then Clement and Origin, introduced these elements into
Christianity. In the conjunction of his effort with the currents of
spiritual force emanating from such groups as the Essenes and the
Gnostics, we are as near to a correct answer as we perhaps ever shall be
to the question of the origin of Christianity and the publication in the
first century of documents long in existence, but never disseminated
beyond secret guardianship in the occult societies until that time.
It therefore seems certainly to be within the bounds of distinct
plausibility, indeed of imminent probability, that the rise of
Christianity is to be explained on the truly human and rational grounds of
a movement that was galvanized into momentum as the result of the first
wide republication of the secret and sacred books of the hierarchy of very
ancient Egypt. Many astute investigators of the provenance of the Gospels
have been driven to the conclusion that the four included in the New
Testament canon were traceable to and based upon what they are pleased to
call a "common document," which obviously must antedate those building
upon it. Almost to a certainty this hypothesis points in the direction of
a true solution of the problem of Gospel origins. Irenaeus, first
Christian Bishop of Gaul (France) in the second century, states that there
was a multitude of Gospels afloat in his day. It would be in accord with
some positive data and many other well-grounded assumptions if one were to
posit the thesis that the four Gospels of the canon were based not
necessarily on any one "common document," but on the collective esoteric
tradition coming down from old Egypt and found extant in Irenaeus’
"multitude of Gospels.
The historical fact that Christian scholarship has for seventeen
centuries spent itself in the effort to account for Christianity’s upsurge
and character formation entirely without reference to this mass of
literary lore of the antecedent world, out of whose very womb it actually
was born, is to be seen now as one of the most fantastically eccentric
phenomena in all the religious history of mankind. It is only to be
accounted for by the factual circumstances that the Christian movement was
from the start motivated by a psychology of faith, emotional unction,
pietistic zealotry of the most ignorant and fanatical sort, gullible
expectation of miracle and the supernatural, apocalyptic revelation with
the cosmic "end of the world," the ignorant literalization of Biblical
allegorism,--all which element bespeak the wholly unintellectual,
unphilosophical character of the mentality and the psychology that
launched the faith, to which after a considerable time the name of the
Greek deific principle, the Christos, was attached. Beyond all
contradiction this list of prime psychological factors in the incipient
push of Christianity explains its ignoring the whole great corpus of
esoteric literature which was unquestionably the garden bed of its growth.
Furthermore the invincible repugnance which the movement manifested to
this body of the lore of a spiritual science at once too intellectual and
philosophical for the simple and uncritical folk who promulgated the
Christian faith, attests volubly the plebeian status of the movement and
its personnel.
Let the modern mind essay to diagnose with an accuracy that these
outer symptoms amply guarantee the motif of a movement to promulgate a
claimed divine revelation from the universal All-Father himself, and it
will see on what low and unworthy bases the system of Christianity does
indeed rest. Completely flouting the noblest and most authoritative
characteristic of man’s finest culture, his most piquant afflations of
aesthetic refinement, scorning the intellectual delight in the classical
poetry and philosophy of the great Graeco-Roman exaltation, including the
two great Homeric and the Virgilian epics, the rabid pietism of the early
communicants of Christianity so filled its devotees with hatred of the
Pagan cultural treasures that they forced Jerome to recant his earlier
statements of his addiction to the classical literature, tore Augustine
away from his interest in the philosophy of Plotinus and the esoteric
theosophy of Manichaeism, led Tertullian to shriek "What has Homer to do
with the Gospels?", burned in a frenzy of wild rage the great Alexandrian
library and murdered the esoteric lecturer Hypatia as she took sanctuary
at the altar and scraped the flesh off her bones with oyster shells.
Deeply inwrought in the texture of this anomalous aberration of good human
intelligence are to be found, still weaving the somber thread of the
tragic story of the victory of mass ignorance over sage wisdom, the true
causes of the rise of Christianity.
The elucidation, then, of a large section of Scriptural text such as
is here presented must be seen as valuable and precious beyond all
calculation. It reveals how the pietistic fanaticism that bred a hatred of
poetry, music and art, and a scorn of wholesome human pleasure which has
held pretty solidly to the present day, was generated by the twisting of
the normal human mind into forms of weird hallucination by the
literalizing of myth, allegory, drama and natural and astrological
symbolism in the mind of the uncultured masses. This episodic debacle of
religious culture that befell the ancient world in the first three
centuries of the Christian era (treated in full in the author’s major
work, Shadow of the Third Century) is the crucial key to the
understanding of the religious complication in the world today. It is an
odd, but a challenging reflection that one can not well escape on reading
this assemblage of amazing data of semantic significance, that half the
world, and the half boasting more or less justly of leadership in modern
intelligence, has been thrown for over seventeen centuries under the spell
of a mental and psychological dementia that has given birth to the foulest
superstition, bigotry and inhuman savagery recorded in all history, and
that this tragic outcome has ensued as the result of the stupidity of a
group of Galilean peasants in mistaking zodiacal history for veridical
history. |