A REBIRTH FOR

CHRISTIANITY

ALVIN BOYD KUHN, Ph.D.

* Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. This notice is not to be removed. I can be contacted at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net. I will be greatly indebted to the individual who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of the following: A. B. Kuhn’s graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn’s unpublished autobiography, The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis, The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and the Actual, Immortality: Yes—But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of the Four Elements, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy.

I also would welcome any contact with someone who has any letters of Kuhn or has any personal knowledge of him. Thank you.

Recently (January 15, 2005) I was contacted by a 15 year old student of Upton High (state and city to be determined) who wanted to interview me in regards to the life of Sir Francis Bacon (Lord Verulam). The interview was conducted and this student asked me if there was anything else. This is what I relayed:

There is a nationally and worldwide known issue of a disabled person in my state (Florida) who is being subjected to attempted murder. Her name is Theresa Marie Schindler-Schiavo. The courts say that she is in a Persistent Vegetative State when in fact she is not, they lie. Videos were shown on CNN during a live feed that prove she is not comatose. She sits up in a chair. Her husband who lives with another woman for over 9 years and who has two children with this woman is trying to say that Theresa wants to die when in fact he has been denying her rehabilitation and therapy so that she can have her own voice and be back on to the road to her recovery. He has been with several women since he caused Theresa's incident and this is his latest live-in concubine who is in collusion with him to make Theresa dead. His attorneys are attempting to accomplish a heinous starvation/dehydration death on her for the third time. One of his attorneys wrote a book in which he talks about tearing out peoples feeding tubes and says he speaks to them by "soul speak" asking them if they want to die and they tell him along the lines "Yes, I want to die! Please kill me." The Hospice of the Florida Suncoast is holding her hostage for over 4 years. This feeding tube yanker attorney was chairman of the board of this hospice. This is the worst case of domestic terrorism happening in our country right now. While we are off in other countries helping helpless and disabled people the government has been remiss to save a human life from terrorism here in my state. There is a cover-up of mass proportions and I have the evidence on a CD to prove it. This message is to you and all of your classmates and teachers who may be reading this. Please contact others if you know of others who care to stop this murder. Perhaps you, or others, including activist friends, know people who have the power to stop what is happening here in my state or bring greater attention to what is going on. Contact me at pc93@enlightenment-engine.net or call me at 407-925-4141 and I will get whatever information you may need. Help me and others to stop the return of Nazi T4 days in Florida, the rest of the United States of America and the world. We must take a stand and make our voices heard.

Please join my Alvin Boyd Kuhn Yahoo!Group and Gnosis284! http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AlvinBoydKuhn/join : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/gnosis284/join

In this powerful book the author confronts the reader with many challenges regarding the orthodox approach to the life of Jesus and the history of Christianity. He points his critical finger at many of the rigid dogmas as well as the literal interpretation of Biblical stories, which he asserts have created bigotry and mental servitude and stifled a real understanding of the Christian message.

For Dr. Alvin Body Kuhn the true meaning of Christianity is to be found in its mystical teaching. He calls for a revival of the effort to discover the esoteric significance of the Christian heritage, to understand the allegorical method of Biblical interpretation, and to find behind the myths, dramas, symbols and allegories, the spiritual vision which they embody. Then there will occur, he says, a new birth for Christianity and a new enlightenment.

This is a controversial work and not all readers will want to agree with the author's views on the historical aspects of Christian origins, although his statements are supported by a great deal of documentation and research. However, anyone who reads this book seriously will find himself re-examining his own beliefs and testing them at the bar of logic and reason.

Dr. Kuhn was a scholar of comparative religion for several decades, and his works reflect the depth of study and research which he spent in this field. This book was his last, having been completed just before his death. His earlier books include The Lost Light, Who is This King of Glory? and The Lost Key to the Scriptures.

This work was completed just prior to the death of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn in 1963. His manuscript, in the form it had reached, did not give all the sources from which quotations and references had been taken. Every effort has been made to check these, but it has not been possible to verify them all.

CONTENTS

Forward ix

1. Relighting an Ancient Lamp 1

2. Egypt's Wayward Offspring 10

3. The Breach Between Jew and Greek 18

4. A New Orientation, Not a New Revelation 25

5. Religion and the Illumination of Mind 31

6. Some Consequences of Esotericism 41

7. The Mirror of Truth 49

8. The Ghost of Ancient Egypt 55

9. The Divine Archetype 60

10. When Messiah Cometh 69

11. Jesus - Man or Myth? 81

Peter's Jesus and Paul's Christ 89

13. The Triform Messiah 100

14. Pre-Christian Christianity 116

15. Four Evangels 127

16. Are the Gospels Fictitious? 145

17. Jesus and Christos 157

18. The Witness of Allegory 172

19. History Robbed of Meaning 190

20. Gods Die for Men 197

21. Death Throes and Birth Pangs 206

Bibliography 217

FOREWORD

In the domain of religion and theology, the present age is witnessing a phenomenon of extraordinary character and significance. It is now being demonstrated that scholarly research in the field of Christian history and exegesis is at last beginning to be motivated by the spirit of truth-seeking. The amazing discovery in recent times of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other documents such as the Gospel of Thomas, has lifted a curtain of secrecy from the studies and counsels of Christian theology, and has brought out into the open the questions of Biblical history and interpretation. It is a happy circumstance that a scholar can speak out today and publish things relevant to the history, the doctrines and the scriptures of the Christian faith which would have brought upon him the sternest reprobation only a few years ago. It heralds the dawn of a fresh, clear conscience in the mind of Western man.

The most striking manifestation of this new orientation is the sharp, sudden about-face of the Roman Catholic hierarchy regarding Bible interpretation. Some leading Catholic universities and biblical institutes have scheduled courses in such previously banned subjects as Neoplatonic philosophy, Gnostic and Hermetic systems, and movements of theosophic esotericism. Individual Catholic scholars and Catholic journals are publishing pronunciamentos hailing the advent of a new era in Scriptural exegesis, in which, so to say, the Catholic cleric and lay mind alike may find themselves liberated from the shackles of a literal and historical dogmatism in searching the Scriptures for a message of blessed truth, and may range freely through the whole gamut of mystico-spiritual values to be appropriated from the scriptural context.

It is now becoming apparent that ancient religionists held a knowledge of many recondite truths; and com-

manded an expansive synthetic view of the principles of a science that related the life of consciousness on being's subjective side harmoniously with the life of nature on being's objective side, in something like Kant's predicated "synthetic unity of apperception." This comes close to saying that the sages of old had a clear picture of life as an organic whole in a synthesis of all its component parts. Modern philosophy has always regarded such a comprehensive view as a possibility and a goal of human intellectual attainment, but has been skeptical about its actual realization.

The recognition is dawning that the so-named sacred Scriptures or Holy Writ of past ages were the products of an effort to embody in terms and modes of expression this precious structure of understanding. A thing of such exalted revelation could be expounded only through the medium of poetic imagery, the forms and archetypes of which could be found in and drawn from an objective world which itself was the manifest expression of that soul of the universe in its creational effort. The burden of the message thus delivered was the endeavor to acquaint man with the basic principles of a universal science that would enable him to relate his life commodiously and harmoniously to the demands upon his intelligence and his will. The history of man's efforts to utilize this code of cryptic wisdom in the ordering of his life activity is the saga of world religion. And this story turns to tragedy when the posterity to which the heritage of arcane wisdom was transmitted proved obtuse to the divine message embodied in archetypal imagery, as well as to the perception of the underlying unity of the whole structure of truth. Thus there followed a general disintegration of this delicate structure, resulting in the weakening and the derationalization of religion, with the fateful results which humanity has been experiencing ever since.

The present break with two thousand years of a literal reading of the cryptograms of arcane wisdom is in every respect the esoteric significance of our scriptural heritage. Science has largely restored to the world the basic

knowledge of the constitution of real being, the fiery core of universal life. Now, to accompany this illumination there must come the restoration of the structure of an equally scientific synthesis of truth in the domain of religion and philosophy, revealing the ultimate unity of all knowledge.

The transition now in progress will push the human mind far ahead in its march toward illumination. It will be a stride toward the attainment of a stable balance between the realism of common experience and the fantasy with which man inevitably tends to apostatize the realities of the world conceived to be lying above the range of rational meaning. Man's happiness, his weal or bodily woe, hinges upon his ability to maintain a steady balance between the world of his bodily existence and the one he pictures so irrationally as enticing him into its glories.

Chapter 1

RELIGHTING AN ANCIENT LAMP

From many quarters of the religious field, there is resounding today the cry of a new age in Bible interpretation. There are substantial grounds for asserting that we are beholding the dawn of a brilliant new day in scriptural scholarship that does indeed harbinger the bright promise of a new enlightenment. All down the years there have been men individually or in groups who have spoken out in strong dissent from accepted orthodox codes of interpretation. Jesus challenged the strict legalism and formalism in Jewish religion, and incurred the hostility of the Sanhedrin for his courage. Then in Christianity itself there arose dissenters, both in the early years and in later times. In the fifth century, Scotus Erigena made a strong case for using the Platonic philosophy as the elucidative key to the Scriptures, and the seed he planted has borne fruit. Dionysius the Areopagite sounded a similar note. St. Paul's contribution is described as a widely variant approach to Bible meaning, stressing subjectivism and pure spirituality rather than the historical element in Christianity. Clement, Origen and even Augustine emphasized the allegorical nature of the writings and doctrines, taking their cue from the Jewish Philo. Even the climactic reconstruction of Christian systematization by the great Aquinas and the schoolmen in mediaeval times represented, in many respects, a departure from former codes and standards. Many of these movements, however, merely exchanged old orthodoxies for new, and carried no threat of revolt against fundamental positions or tenets.

It was Philo, in the first century, who brought out prominently the allegorical method in biblical exegesis. He had drawn it from its source in remote Egyptian crypticism. An eminent modern biblical scholar, Roger H. Pfeiffer, in his work, The History of New Testament Times, speaks

of "the amazing virtuosity with which Philo used the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures." The early Christian Fathers made a valiant attempt to apply the principles of the method to textual exegesis, and in the case of Clement and Origen it was by no means a futile endeavor. "Origen's allegories," as the historians refer to the exegetics of this most learned of the early Church Fathers, still stand as brilliant, illuminating revelations of the Holy Word. But the Church successfully warded off whatever disturbing force the effort carried, and the historical code of interpretation has prevailed down to the present. The life of the Christian system was so powerfully activated by sheer faith that anything like a cold intellectual scholarship, which would subject the Scriptures to dialectical criticism, was never able to gain a real hearing. Any such agitation was simply stifled by pietism. As a professor in Columbia University said in 1926, the Christian ecclesiastical power put a clamp upon the thinking mind of Europe for fifteen hundred years.

Now, however, that clamp is pried loose. For perhaps two centuries we have heard the hue and cry of scores of scholars as they have laid violent hands upon those venerable scriptures, to take them apart, study the mechanism of their structure, and discover their innermost motive and meaning. This work by now has progressed to the point where it puts in jeopardy the basic historicity of the entire scriptural corpus. Scholarly exegetes of the Gospels and the life of Jesus are bluntly declaring that the incidents of Gospel narrative can no longer be regarded as actual event, but must be taken as one or another form of literary artistry, legend, poetry, fiction, allegory, or Mystery play. The declaration of one writer as to the miracle of the feeding of five thousand with five loaves and two small fishes, that "whatever else this episode may be, it is assuredly not history," is applicable to scores of incidents narrated in the Gospels. Under the blows of this sort of textual criticism, delivered with the remorseless power of fact and logic, the edifice of historical interpretation is fast crumbling.

In proportion as the historical view weakens, the allegorical approach must be re-explored. Truth emanates from the supernal world of divine ideation, and, as Plato said,

comes forth in ideal forms. Man's feeble power to discern abstractions limits him to the effort to represent ideal forms by the imagery of concrete structures perceptible to his senses. Hence he must exotericize all esoteric truths. Having done so, he then faces the fatal risk of mistaking the objective representation for the ideal reality. When spiritual vision is blurred, the human mind sinks into idolatry. In the Gospels it is reported that in his questioning of Jesus, Pilate asked "What is Truth?" The canonical Gospels do not record Jesus' answer, but it appears in an apocryphal Gospel: "Truth is from heaven."

Truth does indeed emanate from the cosmic ideation and is brought down from that high source by the soul, for only the soul can grasp and carry it. Souls descend from on high, bearing the light of divine consciousness. But, says the profound Greek philosopher, this light is dimmed and nearly extinguished by being plunged into the darkness of the body. As Browning has put it, "Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in. St. Paul long ago stated the case: "For God, who hath caused the light to shine out of the darkness, hath shined in our hearts . . . but we have this treasure in earthen vessels." Well has the poet said that the glory of God is "imprisoned splendor" in man's being, "cribbed, cabined and confined" in the dungeon of the body. The weak vision of man has distorted the archetypal forms of divine truth, which he sees but dimly in the darkness of his earthly prison.

It has never been clearly perceived that the universal, immemorial symbol of light in religion represents mind. Mind is that light eternal that God caused to shine out of the darkness of unconscious being to generate consciousness. It was the projection of invisible reality into visibility, as the forms of the divine mind arose out of the darkness. A line from Whittier's charming winter idyl, Snow-Bound, felicitously expresses the concept. Describing the effect of pale moonlight falling upon the countryside all blanketed under snow, he speaks of the "unwarming light,"

That only seemed, where'er it fell

To make the darkness visible."

To make the primeval darkness visible, from its fathomless depths was generated the light of mind. And the images, the archetypal forms that arose in that mind, became the realities of all existent things. The whole process of creation can be envisaged as the generation of God's divine ideas and their being crystallized into the concrete visible objects of our world. Thus creation is the materialization of the noumenal world, the abstract made concrete. Even modern physical science discloses that all material things are crystallized sunlight. Every tree-leaf is produced by photosynthesis--and phos (phot) is the Greek world for "light."

Over the pattern of cosmogenesis we may discern the numberless archetypes embodied in ancient religious literature. If, to become manifest, God's truth assumed visible substantiality, likewise the lofty concepts of the celestial mind, if they were to be discerned in the lesser light of man's recognitions, had to be similarly made concrete. Divine ideation took material form, therefore intelligent men had to follow this creative process when they undertook the task of expressing truth for the apprehension of human minds. Every truth had to be externalized in some form sensually or imaginatively perceptible; and, beginning with basic words (even the letters of the alphabet and numbers, which are themselves miniature allegories) such devices of representation as myth, allegory, drama, figure, symbol, parable, apologue, and astrological typology were resorted to in order to portray the archetypal forms of "the wisdom hidden in a mystery." Inevitably the bibles were collections of allegories, myths, dramas and "such-like tropes," as Plato observes.

Doubtless the original formulators of the divine myths never dreamed that there would come a time so degenerate in reflective capacity that the products of their allegorical genius would be mistaken for the body of reality itself; that the diaphanous character of their imagery would fail to be apparent; that spiritual vision could not penetrate the symbols. They could not have guessed that the allegories and dramas would be taken for objective factuality and the dramatis personae for living humans, or that their ideal

world of living imagery would become frozen in ostensible history.

This development represents the wine and bread of an exalted conscious potential turned to stone. It offers us the archetypal forms of truth fixated in impossible "historical" events. Ancient Egypt's cryptic but luminous paradigms of spiritual truth were turned by Christian stolidity of mind into Hebrew miracles at the historic level. No one has seen this more lucidly than the English scholar and Egyptologist, Gerald Massey, as two passages reveal:

The human mind has long suffered an eclipse and been darkened and dwarfed in the

shadow of ideas the real meaning of which has been lost to the moderns. Myths and

allegories whose significance was once unfolded to initiates in the Mysteries, have

been adopted in ignorance and reissued as real truths directly and divinely vouchsafed

to mankind for the first and only time! The early religions had their myths interpreted.

We have ours misinterpreted. And a great deal of what has been imposed on us as

God's own true and sole revelation to man is a mass of inverted myths. . . . Much of

folklore and most of our popular beliefs are fossilized symbolism.

The lost language of celestial allegory can now be restored, chiefly through the

resurrection of ancient Egypt; the scriptures can be read as they were originally written,

according to the secret wisdom, and we now know how the history was first written as

mythology.

The world of scholarship which once repudiated Massey's contentions is now proving him right. When, however, he said that we have misinterpreted our Bible myths, it would have been nearer the truth to say that we have taken them without any interpretation at all. If we have progressed far enough beyond fundamentalism in its grossest forms to understand that the scriptural allegories of the Jonah-whale story have some recondite meaning, we still think that the ancients believed the myth unconditionally.

Massey has had corroboration from other astute investiga-

tors in the field of mythicism. Godfrey Higgins, in his monumental work, The Anacalypsis, says that "what are called early histories are not histories of man, but are contrivances under the appearance of history to perpetuate doctrines . . . in a manner understood only by those who had a key to the enigma."

The noted archaeologist, Professor A. H. Sayce, says, "I have amply demonstrated the fact that the myths were no mere products of ancient ignorance, but are the deposited results of a primitive knowledge; that they were founded upon natural phenomena and remain the register of the earliest scientific observation."

Surely a Christian should give heed when Origen, the most learned of the fathers of the Church, speaks as follows: "The priests have a secret philosophy concerning their religion contained in their national scriptures, while the common people only hear fables which they do not understand. If these fables were heard from a private man without the gloss of a priest they would appear exceedingly absurd."

The sad truth is that in those early centuries of the Christian upsurge even the "gloss" of the priests on the hoary fables and allegories lost its true luminosity, as the cryptic keys themselves were lost and never recovered. This tragedy comes home to us in the realization that the modern mind is so unacclimated to the rarer atmosphere of true mystical apperception that it is unprepared to grasp the recondite significance of the Jonah allegory even if the true "gloss" of the ancient priest were to be clearly expounded.

With the near-total extinguishing of the genius of the ancient interpretation--that fatal fading out of what was not only the luminosity but a still deeper numinosity of mystico-spiritual vision--the Dark Ages were born. The loss of the subtlety of mind that was able to devise and interpret the divine allegories committed the succeeding ages to a mental darkness so profound that it amounted to a veritable derationalization and a hypnotic paralysis of Western mentality. And no remedy can be found, no awakening from the delusion, until the whole body of our heritage of ancient literature and dramatic genius is re-examined and

re-interpreted through the lens of allegory.

The epic of the soul on earth, its battle of evolution on the horizon line between the heaven of spirit and the earth of sense, can again irradiate the lives of thinking men only if the paralyzing obstruction of the historical incubus is lifted. The symbols, graphs, images and devices for the expression of spiritual truth that were converted into alleged history must be turned back into their original purport. The figures personating the divine central Sun of Righteousness which is to rise in the collective consciousness of the race with healing in its wings, along with its retinue of attributes and qualities which were transposed into men and women, must be re-entified as conceptual forms. There is no incident or detail of narrative in the Scriptures that cannot be made to glow with a far more inspiring luminosity of meaning when taken allegorically rather than objectively. The content of the sacred literature, expressing the noumena of Nous, the God-mind, and the materialization of the divine ideas in the living world, must be re-oriented to the plane of its original conceptuality. The analogical genius of man must be sharpened once again to the acuity of reading back from the concrete image to the abstract conception of which it is a hieroglyph. The entire body of scripture must now be transfigured in our consciousness with the light which it was designed first to conceal, then to reveal. The task now confronting modern intelligence is to throw off the blinders of a shallow realism that have obscured mystical vision, and to awaken the long-stifled faculties of insight into noumenal verities. It will inaugurate finally a re-enlightenment and transfiguration of human society.

In ancient times, the principles of a lofty soul-science were the substance, the nub and the core of the Mysteries. Knowledge and instruction were not withheld from any who manifested potential capability and worthiness, as well as the desire and the will to attain the high goals. Thus began the tradition of secrecy. Only the reflective, discerning mind can see through and beyond the outer appearance and catch the spiritual counterpart in the noumenal world which remains hidden to the less thoughtful. This phenomena is well described by the philosopher Santa-

yana. In his The Life of Reason he writes, "Plato and Aristotle failed in spite of the immense and lasting influence of their work, for in both cases the after effects were spurious, and the spirit was smothered in the dull substance it strove to vivify. The Christian movement laid hold of the great body of imagery designed to depict spiritual truth and recondite wisdom, and transliterated it into "history."

Christianity never could have emerged out of Judaism if it had not deviated from previous and more general religious acceptances, to receive a separate character and identity. Its novelty lay in the fact that it had departed from former anchorage in the esoteric wisdom, which in certain of its forms and elements still activated and characterized the Hebrew religion. True, Hebraism itself had not maintained vital connection with the high, mystical esotericism manifested in Kabalism. It, too, had moved some distance in the direction of a literal reading of the sacred scripts, the Torah, the Law, and the prophets. The psychological pressures impelling Judaism to interpret the scriptural allusions to a spiritual Israel in the terms of an ethnic Israel, with a divine commission to implement God's purpose in history, were almost irresistible, and they prevailed in direct proportion to the waning and final obscuration of the purely spiritual or other-worldly reference of the Israelite tradition. Jewish orthodoxy had swung away from the primal revelation of divine truth to a distortion which was a concession to mass ignorance very much as the Christian leadership did in its turn.

The two great religions, Judaism and Christianity, represent two somewhat divergent defections from the ancient occult heritage emanating from the shades of remote antiquity, but transmitted out of historical darkness into historical day by the ancient Egyptians. There may not be scholarly unanimity on the question of the primeval divine illumination from which came our revered Holy Scriptures, but there is a weight of academic opinion that the wisdom emanated from Egypt, or at least that Egypt transmitted it to such nations as Greece and Palestine from some remoter source. Academic authority is not lacking in support of Egypt's claim, and we find such an eminent scholar

as Dr. Robert H. Pfeiffer of the Harvard Divinity School, in his exhaustive work, The History of New Testament Times, writing that "Sirach's teaching illustrates the growth of wisdom from its mundane origins in Egypt to its identification with normative Judaism." It is almost a universal tradition that the flowering of philosophical genius that gave the world the Platonic wisdom in Greece was fostered by contact with the Egyptian culture.

Chapter 2

EGYPT'S WAYWARD OFFSPRING

A better religious perspective might be gained if it were understood how both Judaism and Christianity developed as the product of two movements stemming from Egypt's heritage. It is not adequately realized that the central axis of religious ideology is the Messianic concept. This was an allegorization of the gradual coming to expression in human consciousness of the mind-soul-spirit of Christliness. But when it was travestied into the coming of a divine cosmic man-Christ in the flesh of one human body it became the nucleus for a complex theological superstructure. At this point, it is above all desirable to look at the two lines of divergence, which were taken, first by the Jews and later by the Christians, from the pristine concept of Messiah as the spiritual evolution of man.

Departing from the principles drawn from Egypt's basic lore, and cultivated for some time among the Hebrews by the Kabalists, Jewish theology veered away from the conception of Messianism as the advent of Christliness in all humanity. It interpreted the doctrine instead as a special manifestation of the destined rulership of the world by and through God's dealings with one particular group of people expressly chosen for such agency, this group being the Jews themselves, who had arrogated to themselves this function by dint of having identified themselves with the "Israelites" of the Old Testament. As outlined in the Mosaic books, the divine drama was to be consummated by the appearance of the long-prophesied and long-expected offshoot of the rod of Jesse and the "star out of David" foretold by Amos, Micah, and Isaiah. In the language of the Messianic allegory, this exalted personage, when he appeared, was to lead Israel in the fulfilment of God's marvelous design for the spiritualization of the nations through the Jewish people. The concept in this form necessarily carried the

implication of the coming of divine influence into the world, but it stressed primarily the appearance in human form of that shoot from the rod of Jesse, that "branch from the tree of Eden" which was to redeem humanity from the Adamic curse. So it is true that the Jewish conception humanized and personalized the Messiah, as did the later Christian.

The Christian diverged from the Jewish conception in deleting entirely its reference to the Jews as the chosen instrument of God's purpose. In the Christian form of the concept, the Messiah was personalized at the human level and his whole function was focused in his person. He was at the same time to come as the full and final embodiment of God's own nature, which the Father thus projected into the world for the salvation of the people. He was to be the sole bearer of the Messianic power and glory.

Presenting many facets in its entire scope of meaning, this analysis outlines sharply the basic distinction between the two schematic views. Had the Christian included the exaltation of Judaism along with the birth of the Galilean Son of Man, there would have been little to distinguish it from the Judean ideal. Christianity also preached the coming of the Messiah as fulfilment of the Old Testament prophecy. Possibly at the start there was no definite design to exclude the Jewish world from participation in the drama of world salvation. But it was inevitable that the Jews would refuse to accept the extension of the tradition to universal mankind, and the delimitation of Messianic function to a single personality, thus ignoring the role of the Israelites. These differences created the breach between the two positions which was destined to inundate Western history with rivers of blood. The Christian move stripped Judaism to abrogate its historical birthright as God's chosen people. This was an insufferable humiliation, a dismantling of Israel's national and racial epos. To have accepted the Christian concept would have destroyed the structure of Judaism itself.

Any scholar who examines the evidence can readily de-

termine that the name Israel, in its first connotation and usage, never carried any reference to any nation, tribe or race. It was a term, one among many, used to designate the heaven-born sons of God, the pure offspring of God's creative mind and spirit. Had the formulators of the Jewish religion ever looked at corresponding terms in Hindu religion--Manasaputras and Agnishwatta Pitris--they would have been warned away from the error of limiting the reference to their own little Palestinian tribe. In the sense in which Minerva is said to have sprung full-grown from the forehead of Jove, men can be conceived as generated from the cosmic power of mind. The term applied to no earthly beings, but when these spiritual monads of divine consciousness descended to earth to fulfill their mission, they thus became citizens of our mundane world. The evolution of their seed divinity could not be consummated save through union with the force locked up in the atom of matter, which they could utilize in the prosecution of their work in cooperation with the demiurgic oversoul of the universe. Thus arose the need for their incorporation in physical bodies. Their real birth out of spiritual potentiality into conscious power could come only through the intercourse of their spiritual fatherhood with the material motherhood, called by the Greeks physis or nature.

The heroes of ancient myth were all born of the union of a spiritual, heavenly or divine father and an earthly mother. The force of this typology carried over even to the legendary birth of such exalted mortals as Pythagoras or Plato. The latter was acclaimed as the son of Apollo. Hence the name attached to the monads, in the reconstruction of the archaic heritage by those sages who from remote Egyptian sources formulated the religion for the Palestinian tribes, was "Israelites" or children of Israel. Some eminent scholars have lent their dictum to the derivation of this name from the Hebrew verb Azor, to help, and El, God, declaring it to mean "God is my help." But no scholar is in a position to pronounce an apodictic judgment on the philology of this word. This etymology seems strained, and there is no warrant in the lettering for the introduction of the "my" in the rendition. It appears far move probable

that the word is a compound of three units, Is - Ra - and El. Is could well be an abbreviation or shortened form of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood. Even the Hebrew word for "woman" is isha (issa). The Ra comes direct from the great Egyptian father of spirit, Ra; and El is the Hebrew singular word for God. It would then read "Mother-Father-God," precisely what its generic character would make appropriate. The Hebrew heritage was drawn from Egypt, and in that land the name of the Divine Father-principle not associated with Ra was Osiris; significantly enough the original name of this deity was Asar (Azar). The Hebrews carried this very name forward in the title of their High Priest, who stood for the spiritual fatherhood, EL(e)azar and again Azariah. (It was the Greeks who made Azar into Osiris.) The spiritual progeny of this God were called the children of Azar, and with the addition of the Hebrew El, God, as "Azar-el-ites." This derivation may be speculative, but it is worthy of consideration.

Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar was a text previously in popular use in the academic world. Gesenius states that the Jews appropriated unto themselves both the terms Hebrews and Israelites in their token of their claimed descent from an illustrious ancestry. Virgil wrote The Aeneid to glorify the Caesar dynasty in Rome and to immortalize the glory of Rome itself by tracing the line of descent back to the goddess Venus. Most national epics were inspired by a similar intent to represent history as embodying the fulfilment of divine purpose.

But it remained for the Jews to interpret literally and to apply to themselves historically not only the three principal esoteric designations of the twelve celestial orders--Israelites, Hebrews, Jews--but to go to the extreme of identifying their own small ethnic group with these Israelite children of God. They took a name, in fact three names, originally designed to apply universally to collective humanity, endowed with the spark of the divine fatherhood. No tribe, group, nation or race of mortals could justly appropriate any of these names to itself exclusively.

Such an attempt at self-glorification brought upon them the inevitable opprobrium of the rest of mankind.

Having committed themselves to the notion that they were in fact those Israelites of Genesis and Exodus, having poured their intense national spirit into the mold of this conception, they paid the grievous penalty of having their national and racial consciousness imprisoned in the narrow sphere of a character and a destiny fixed by the explicit delimitations of the scriptural role. The Israelites were God's "chosen people," the special objects of his concern, his care, his favor. Just as they had stumbled over the meaning of the word "Israel," likewise they blundered in their reading of the word "chosen." The idea that God, the all-righteous ruler, would look out over the hosts of earth and select one small tribe of Palestinian herdsmen from among all mankind for special concern and favor, should have appeared unconscionable from the start. The inner implications of the word should have told them that this "choosing" of God was not made among ethnic groups on earth. It was his selection and deputation of twelve legions of angelry in heaven! Their divine assignment was to migrate to earth and there fulfil a commission appropriate to them in God's plan of creation as it touched his progeny at a given contingency in the process. They were chosen to come to earth to be humanity.

More than one ancient people had attempted to intertwine the divine allegory with their own history and geography. This impulse arose from the reflection that history in the small epitomizes history in the large, and that the career of a nation (as also the career of an individual) may closely follow the outline of general evolution. If lofty intelligence governed the undertaking, the result would be an epic of Homeric order, but if ignorance and self-righteousness prevailed, and the allegorical intent was replaced by credulous belief, the result would be a disastrous falsification of history. This blunder did occur, and as a result most biblical "history" is misinterpreted allegory and myth. The name "Israel" applied to no ethnic group. Its reference was wholly to the divine spiritual origin of humanity, said to be twelve legions of "angels" sent to earth bearing the seed germ of potential divinity, which, when planted, grown and fructified by evolution, would make

mankind the legitimate heirs of God's patrimony.

In a purely spiritual sense, all humanity is potentially Israel. Charles Guignebert, the outstanding modern exegete, in his work, Jesus, quotes Philo of Alexandria as saying that any man who forsakes the worship of idols for the true God is a member of the true Israel, which is not to be confused with "Israel of the flesh." St. Paul declares that merely being born in a Jewish family does not make one an Israelite. The criterion is spiritual unfoldment; an Israelite is one who is bringing his spiritual potential to birth, and he may be of any race.

Christian apologetics has found it dialectically necessary to accredit the distinctive claims of a divine status for Jewry, assumed to be the "Israel" of the Bible, in order to vindicate its claims for the divinity of its own Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, born to fulfil the Old Testament prophecy. In the Christian theological view, there would have been no gulf between the two religions had the Jews recognized Jesus as the Messiah, born of their own divinely commissioned race. But by denying him they forfeited the glory of having produced him for humanity. We find a typical expression of Christian support of the Jewish "Israelite" status in a work entitled Introducing the Old Testament, by a Catholic writer, Frederick L. Moriarty. Expounding the biblical-rabbinic view, he states that Israel is not a "natural" nation; it is not like other nations; it rates a "supernatural" status, having been called into being by God to serve his special cosmic purpose. God made a special covenant with Israel, first through Abraham as the progenitor of the race, then with the entire community of Israel at Mount Sinai. Only by God's gratuitous and gracious election of this race to a special place in his divine favor does Israel play its part in the scheme of world destiny; apart from this covenanted relation to God, Israel would be as nothing. The Catholic writer does not repudiate this Jewish evaluation of Jewish election and destiny, because it strengthens Christian claims as to the divinity of Jesus.

We have, then, these two streams, each diverging from the original connotation of "Israel." The Christians cher-

ished a misconception of the word "Messiah," which in later years drove them to the contradiction of believing that the love of the humanized Christ-child could sanctify the slaughter of non-believers. The Jews cherished the misconception of the words "Israel" and "chosen," which drove them to self-isolation and sequestration from other peoples. Never in human history could it be said that so great a tragedy eventuated from so seemingly trivial a cause as the misreading of a term in sacred literature. Yet the phenomenon is understandable if one considers that when a nation or culture takes a single book as the determining source and monitor of its entire psychic life, every chapter, every letter becomes crucial, and its misinterpretation can hold countless minds in bondage.

It is a significant fact of history that when Alexander the Great swept the near-East world with the besom of his Macedonian phalanx, it was Jewish Palestine that alone stubbornly resisted absorption into the Hellenic culture that followed in the wake of his conquest. The fact that Philip of Macedon engaged the philosopher, Aristotle, as tutor of the young Alexander is evidence that he dreamed of spreading Greek philosophical culture over the known world. Had the conqueror lived to age seventy and given his life to cultivation of the Greek influence in the area he had overrun, the course of ensuing history might have perpetuated "the glory that was Greece" for the blessing of mankind. Greek philosophy did spread its benign influence over much of the terrain of Alexander's conquest, but it fought a losing battle on the soil of Palestine, because the Jewish consciousness was sealed against any system that rested on pure rationalism. When every aspect of a nation's life is imbued with the conviction that it is inspired by God for the accomplishment of his divine will, all philosophy must be shaped to fit this conception.

Instead of melting into the broad universality of the Hellenic wisdom, therefore, the Hebrew theology remained unmodified and retained those elements which ultimately conduced to the eruption of Christianity. Had Judea been more receptive to the Greek influence, Judaism would have been so modified that the misconceptions as to the nature and

significance of the Messianic advent could never have taken form to derationalize the Hebrew consciousness. Hellenism looked for the glorification of the human spirit in a general and collective apotheosis of humanity, and it would have effectually debarred any concept of a personalized Avatar or Sun-God from displacing the spiritual and evolutionary interpretation.

Finally, the world would not have suffered the loss of any true religious motivation had Judaism not personalized the Messianic entity as a son of David, and had Christianity not existed at all. For its only excuse for divergence from Judaism was likewise its still more literal personalization of the Messiah. Would the world have suffered a religious loss had history taken this course? Many will answer yes, yet the record of Western history would have been spared its long chronicle of war and religious persecution had Judaism not restricted to itself the conception of Israelite, and had Christianity not personalized the Messianic light of deliverance, meant to shine upon the hearts of all men.

Chapter 3

THE BREACH BETWEEN JEW AND GREEK

Scholarship is almost universally agreed that the Christian movement created by the disciples of Jesus would have disappeared in a generation if St. Paul had not grafted on to it the essential substance of the Hellenic philosophy. Christianity was in effect saved from extinction in embryo when it incorporated in its Scriptures those documents known as the Epistles of St. Paul, which enabled it to rationalize its Messianic tenets. Later, under the massive pressure of an ignorant population which flocked into its fold by the third century, the Greek influence was suppressed. But later, finding that it would have to meet the problem of exegesis at the level of a more learned society, the Church was happy enough to accommodate its doctrines to the fundamentals of the much-despised Hellenic systematization, and by the twelfth century it had taken refuge entirely in the shelter of Aristotelianism. St. Paul was eulogized as the divinely appointed instrument for the conversion of the pagan world to Christianity; it was he also who, to make the Gospels acceptable to the Greek cast of thought, recast the figure of the Christian's personal Christ in the character of the Greek Christos, for the concept of Messiah personalized in a man of flesh was totally alien to the Hellenic ideology.

The first group of simple country folk, the am ha'arets of Israel, who comprised the personnel of the nascent Christian upsurge, could be content with their entified Christ-man, Jesus. But such an interpretation of the Messianic tradition was impossible for a Greek. For him the Christos was a spiritual consciousness, not a man. This is clearly the reason why Paul preached "Christ-in-you, the hope of glory" for mankind, and never mentioned Jesus as a man of flesh and the founder of the movement he is declared to have carried beyond the borders of Palestine to the

"Gentiles." It can even be affirmed that Paul was more truly a "Christian" than those with Jesus in Judea, for the agitation set in motion by the twelve "fishermen" had nothing to do with the name "Christian." "The brethren were first called Christian at Antioch." The name is wholly of Greek origin and connotation. Before its later adoption by followers of Jesus it never bore any reference to a man-Messiah. It is an anomaly, a contradiction of terms, to call any man the Christ, the Christos. To have said, in the hearing of a Greek, that "Christ" went to Cana and turned water into wine would have caused him mental pain, thus to identify and personalize the very spirit of Divine Being as a man of flesh. It would have been to him blasphemous, and degrading to his concept of transcendental deity. Even Judaism would not tolerate the conception of the Messiah as a man who could be killed ignominiously by the Roman power. An intelligent Greek would not have used the term "Christos" without the definite article "the," just as the Egyptians usually spoke of "the Osiris." The Hebrews, too, dignified the deific name with the article prefixed, which accounts for the el beginning or ending so many names, as Bethel, Israel, Eleazar. A fact of etymology which seems to have eluded scholarly recognition is that this little article "the" is itself basically the designation of deity, equivalent to "God" itself. El, Hebrew God, is the Spanish masculine singular word for "the," as el sombrero, the hat. The English "the" is the whole stem of the Greek word for God, theos.

Far from the truth is the commonplace idea that St. Paul, after his spiritual awakening through his Damascus road vision of shining light, threw himself in with the Galilean band about Jesus, espoused their cause, and then went out and preached their doctrine and founded a dozen "churches" of the movement. What the Apostle promulgated was the basic principia of ancient wisdom that belonged wholly to the Mysteries and to Hellenic philosophy of the Orphic strain. He himself characterized it as the "wisdom hidden in a mystery." It was indeed so incongruous with the Galilean's preachment that the party attached to Jesus menaced Paul's

life when, with Barnabas, he first visited Jerusalem. If the pupil of Gamaliel can be said to have preached Jesus Christ and him crucified, dead, resurrected, and ascended, it is an unwarrantable assumption that he was talking of Jesus of Nazareth. The germ of divinity implanted in the human constitution was crucified, went to its "death," was buried and rose again, even on the third day, and returned to the Father, according to all esoteric legendry. The Greeks did not need to hypostatize a man to yield them the understanding or to afflate the consciousness of the miracle-working power of the deific fire of soul in all mortals. Their definition of ho Christos was a psychological potency active in the human constitution that was itself the agent of their regeneration. The knowledge of its presence and psychic dynamism within the sphere of their own control was the cogent spur to self-realization.

It is a degradation of the human spirit to believe that one is subject to the impact of forces over which he has no control, to which in dire distress one is driven to implore help or mercy. It was the weakening of the tradition of esotericism (which raised man's endeavor and aspiration to a peak level by its predication of man's own divine capability) that caused Christianity to externalize the Christos in a living human. Turning from the God-seed within to a man-God without, Christianity drove the humanity it touched to the status of beggary. The ultimate criterion of a religious value is incontestably the degree to which the human being comes into a conscious recognition of the nature and value of his own activity. Is he a creature under the control of forces external to himself, or is he, and to what degree, master of his own life?

Religion has always clung to the possibility of man's attainment of an unimaginable glory. But there can be no glory for a creature that cannot direct its own career and destiny. The transforming glory can only come with the development of forces, energies, faculties, powers from within the being of self-conscious creatures themselves. There is warrant for the categorical pronouncement that all growth is an outward movement of forces emanating from an inner core of non-physical energy. The activity of life energies

invariably is in the movement from latency in germ or seed outward and upward to physical manifestation. The line of march is from seed to fruit. The seed once planted, there is set the tug of polarity between the vital fire latent in the seed and the opposite fire in the environment. The power without and the power within are thrown into tensional relationship with each other. The impact of exterior influences stirs the seed into activity, confronts it with the necessity of self-exertion and so brings it to the realization of its own nature.

As this realization deepens and clarifies, the procedure passes from implicit passivity to greater self-generated exertion. For every individual embodiment of life must ultimately be self-conscious, self-contained, and self-governed. Without this condition, no deification of life is possible. If the glory is not a product of growth in the consciousness within, it is no glory, for it represents no conquest. The transfiguration scene vividly dramatizes the glorification of man. It shows our Christhood, the divine figure in the myths and Mysteries, radiating a veritable flaming fire of spiritual light. "For his face did shine as the sun and his garments became white as light."

The instructive essence of all this is that a religion which shifts the center of man's conscious effort from development of the powers within, and focuses aspiration upon some saving power external to the self, will dissipate psychic energy in futile endeavor, while it lets the dormant divinity lie unawakened.

The clash of Jew with Greek was in itself one of the most fateful crises in the cultural history of our race. It arrayed the two forces in opposition in a battle which has been fought right down to the present. It was a tragic denouement, all the more so because the great break need not have occurred at all. One mind was brilliant enough to see how unnecessary it was, and he strove valiantly to prevent the breach or to heal it. This was Philo Judaeus, whose greatness and potential service to religious harmony and fraternity have not been adequately recognized. With philosophical insight he discerned the recondite principles of the archaic wisdom hidden under "glyph and symbol" in

the Mosaic Pentateuch and in the Hellenistic abstractions of myth, allegory, and drama alike. Beneath the symbols and representations he traced the graphs of one and the same occult philosophy, and effected a working synthesis. But his work encountered the same stolid incapacity to recognize truth which has ever been its defeat. It has to be said that his elucidations were not sufficiently authoritative and convincing to establish the esoteric theses, and although Clement, Origen and other early Church Fathers carried his methodology into their interpretative efforts, his work lapsed into desuetude.

Just as scholarship has reported different religions as worshipping different gods, when all the while they were worshipping essentially the same divinity under a wide variety of names, so the religious formulators of different cultural systems exploited the content of one set of allegories and arrived at a systematic codex of their faith conditioned by the particular semantic structures they had used in the process. Thus one religious system appeared to differ from another. Had Judaism and Christianity been discerning enough to probe deeply into the hidden significance of their literary symbolism, they would have found themselves standing on the same ground of meaning, developing the same truth under various tropes and figures. This immense variety of forms that meaning takes can be appreciated only if one surveys the myths of ancient peoples. Fully understood, the mythologies would be found to embody the same basic and still-living truths. In this light it seems evident that the Palestinian religious development caught up one thread of allegory and worked it into a fabric of creed and worship, while Greece fell heir to another line of typology and built upon its intimations of meaning. Had there been competent study of comparative religion in that early day, the identities hidden under dissimilar forms would have been caught, and the Hermetic wisdom would have come down in the life of Near East nations fairly intact.

Failing to find Hellenism compatible with its own religion, Hebraism conditioned itself to breed a daughter who was to turn against her parent almost from the start. This ungrateful daughter of Judaism was Christianity, and her

alienation from her parent source was the penalty Judaism had to pay for its failure to embrace the essence of Hellenism. For the presence of elements of Greek philosophy in Judean religion would have prevented the personalization of the Christos; hence Christianity would not have taken its present form. The self-questioning which presently engages Christianity may in part spring from doubt that the infinite magnitude of God could be compressed in the body of one single human being, no matter how spiritually noble. Taken abstractly, however, the doctrinal statement that God in the Logos aspect of his being became flesh and dwelt among us contains a profound truth. If one takes the noumenal instead of the physical connection of the word "flesh," signifying the corpus of humanity itself, then the idea of the incorporation of the Divine Being in man regains its universality and its spiritual message for all men.

A further principle of the arcane science, if retained, would have served to balance understanding of this recondite statement. This is the doctrine that the visible universe is the body of God, itself one vast organism whose order and coherence are the result of his ensouling consciousness.

In outline, then, we can perceive the currents flowing in Judaic religion which generated its offspring, Christianity. In Hellenistic philosophy the concept of the divine manifestation, epitomized so widely in the doctrine of the coming of the Messiah, was steadfastly held to the abstract level, connoting the presence in humanity as a whole of the spirit and consciousness of the divine Principle. But in the Judaic religion the concept had advanced a half-step away from philosophical abstraction toward human entification, the Messiah being conceived as the spirit of Jehovah animating the "Israelites," and destined to be embodied in a man-born son of David who should sit on the throne of Jerusalem and be God's vice-regent, for the execution of the divine will over the nations. Finally in Christianity the concept of Messiah came to be identified with the form of one babe, divinely endowed but born in a lowly stable among animals, representing the polar opposition of spirit and matter, the tension out of which the Christ-consciousness is born.

In summary, Hellenism preserved the Messianic concept in its purely noumenal and abstract form; Hebraism kept it half-spiritual, half personalized; Christianity completely personalized it. As already indicated, the primitive Christian movement swung away from its roots in both Hellenism and Judaism to take the path toward the full human entification of deity in one personality. Scholars are nearly unanimous in asserting that if it had held narrowly to that path it would have died after a brief upsurge, just as scores of other group movements in religion have flickered and died out. In a comparatively short time, however, the Christian movement was impelled to reach back to the original Greek mystico-spiritual concept of Christhood, joining that purely non-physical doctrine with its sarcolatrized, i.e. "fleshed" entification of the Messiah. This dichotomy of the Christ character has left Christian doctrine divided between the concepts of Christ as spirit and Christ as Jesus of Nazareth, both of which have, over the years, served the purposes of exegesis.

Chapter 4

A NEW ORIENTATION, NOT A NEW

REVELATION

Christianity has persistently claimed that it is the one true religion among all other faiths. Yet the sad fact is that more untruths have been promulgated in its name than by any other major religion in the civilized world. Over the centuries, the Christian church has enforced the acceptance of many dogmas which have since been discarded. Today Christianity is undergoing a self-reappraisal which is painful, even agonizing, to many of its believers. So deeply does an old and hallowed institution like the Christian Church become interwoven in the culture that it becomes sacrosanct and inviolable; its traditions, to its inheritors, are beyond criticism. Only the slow progress of reluctant recognition of the validity of criticism will at last bring recognition of past errors, and a willingness to change. Only when the pressure of cultural change becomes relentless do these believers evince any such willingness. The purpose of this volume is to assist in this process of re-evaluation by pointing to the torch of truth which has been almost totally extinguished, but which gave Christianity its birth and its genius.

The study of comparative religion and mythology, to which many scholars have contributed, discloses overwhelming evidence of the parallelism, unity and kindred origin and structure of all ancient systems of national, racial and tribal religious rite and belief. This evidence attests the homogeneity of Christianity with, and its obvious derivation from, a common source of religious expression in history. The study of the religions and the myths on a comparative basis reveals that not a single teaching of the Christian faith was new or unique. Without exception, every element of this "revealed" religion was extant before the first Christian century, in the traditions, practices and literature of many

other lands and peoples.1

One might even say that when Christian congregations celebrate Holy Communion, and thus "partake of the Lord's body till he come," they are perpetuating, in a refined sense, the aboriginal tribal custom of cutting up and eating the body of the local god, in order thus to incorporate his mana in their own nature. The distaste we feel for ancient barbaric practices, when primitive child-mindedness misjudged the profound intimations of a once high ritual, is paralleled by our dismay when we realize that the Christian practice of the Eucharist is also inspired by a misconception. In both cases the custom derived from the literalization and materialization of a mystical drama. The inner psychological dynamic of the allegory was lost, and only the outer enactment of the rite was sustained. It became an empty shell, due to the failure of the mind to pierce through the outer form of an ideal figuration, and discern the noumenal truth that dramatic genius had incorporated in it.

Herein lies the lost clue to the eclipse that has darkened the religious consciousness antecedent to Christianity in many lands and throughout Christianity itself. The religion that preached charity seized many a convenient opportunity to denounce paganism. Yet if humane standards and sentiment made the criterion, the history of Christianity is far from blameless. Christianity never offered up human sacrifices, and it advanced beyond the Judaic use of animal sacrifices on temple altars. But it did not scruple to torture and burn millions of people for their honest and courageous dissent from declared doctrine. Its victims can well be called sacrifices on the altars of Christianity, and it has often forfeited its right to spiritual leadership by permitting this killing in the name of the Prince of Peace, a cruel contradiction of its basic principles.

1 When, for instance l'Abbé Huc was the first Christian to enter the region of Turkestan, what was his consternation on finding the Tartary natives celebrating the Eucharist with bread and wine. Or the amazement of Pizarro and Cortez when they found Aztec and Mayan rites and beliefs similar to those of the Roman Catholic system.

However, since the motive of this essay is not to castigate Christianity, but to re-affirm its real message, nothing is to be gained by dwelling on the past. The attitude of the Church is already changing toward recognition of its own record. The past must be remembered and acknowledged, however, not to make the present generation feel guilty, but that we may thoroughly repudiate the causes of what we condemn. But if Christianity, in spite of so much good, has in the past inflicted so dire a dementia upon the West, is not this ample justification for a re-examination of its history, to discover the mistakes and chart a better course?

Religions are basically mankind's efforts to relate the content of human consciousness in both feeling and thought to the life of the world. They are man's endeavor to ascertain the meaning, the context and the laws of life, and to relate himself most harmoniously with what he can learn of these. The impact of his experience causes him to exert himself, to equilibrate his position in the midst of the forces, both physical and psychic, that he must seek to control. Defining soul for the moment as the synthesis of all psychic experience, religion may then be said to be the ultimate outcome of the effort of souls to harmonize themselves most felicitously with their world. What the senses experience, what the emotions feel, what the intellect cogitates in response to living, must precipitate in consciousness a sediment of integrated psychic elements. Whether the individual knows it objectively or not, this deposit is his religion.

Religion therefore embodies, in addition to its revealed truths, a loosely knit content of aesthetic, emotional and intellectual elements. The ancient sages, drawing upon the living mythos of their world and other ages, which Plotinus called the World Soul, formulated an organic integration of the principles governing the play of the living energies. This synthesis of knowledge was treasured as the priceless heritage of mankind from the gods. From time to time there arose societies, associations and brotherhoods which aimed to preserve, to cultivate and to practice the principles and techniques of this arcane science. Christianity developed out of the efforts of one group to exploit certain

elements of the archaic wisdom, elements which were common to many sectarian movements of that time. By placing special emphasis on certain of these (and, it must be said, by misinterpreting their significance) it produced a unique crystallization of religious force which strangely survived when so many others perished.

Such in fact was the new orientation of basic ingredients in this development that the groups concerned were persuaded that their production was an entirely new revelation, indeed the one true revelation, never known before. And such were the psychological repercussions from the impact of the dynamic elements in the compound, that there was generated a ferment such as had never been seen before. The rise of Christianity was marked by a release of pietistic fervor that swept reason aside and produced an afflation of religious zeal unique in world history. In his famous work on The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon states that the devotees of the new faith in many instances virtually badgered the Roman magistrates to sentence them to martyrdom, repeating an offence if the first one was pardoned. Precisely what were the constituents of the teaching that engendered perhaps the most passionate religious feelings in all history are, at this late date, difficult to determine. Yet it is clear that what was a blending of many incongruous elements already existent in Hebraism and other contemporary systems, was able to seize on the imagination and the hearts of its followers in an overpowering way. Today it is recognized that Christianity borrowed many of its rites and doctrines from earlier cultures, but Christian apologetics still largely contend that in every case a new and more spiritual rendering was substituted for the crude pagan interpretations.

This view, however, has been negated by the findings of numerous scholars, all men of unimpeachable integrity, many within the ecclesiastical system. It has required moral courage to publish these determinations of honest scholarship. But the action of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in legitimizing the allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures marks the dawn of their vindication. It will be a considerable time before the import of this epochal move will

be seen. It sharply reverses the policy of the Christian hegemony in an effort to correct a blunder perpetrated in its early history. During this period of anti-intellectualism when the darkness began to creep over the Western world, all things having to do with learning, erudition and philosophy were suspect. The Scriptures were held to be the literal, sole truth. The reaction against all scholarship grew so violent that it sent up in flames the invaluable library of the Serapeum in Alexandria, destroyed the priceless Hexapla of the Church's most learned pundit Origen, and posthumously anathematized him. It forced Jerome to recant and apologize for his unguarded expression of love of classical literature. It menaced Augustine with the same charge as caused Tertullian to shout, "What have Homer and Virgil to do with the crucified Jesus?" It murdered the brilliant Hypatia as she took refuge within the "inviolate" sanctuary of the altar. It compelled the Emperor Justinian to close the Platonic Academies and thus extinguish the light that, if suffered to continue shining, would have saved Europe from its fatal plunge into the Mediaeval Dark Ages.

When Rome declares that the divine voice out of the heavens at the baptism of Jesus was perhaps an "exteriorization" of an inner state of the divine mind, and not an objective historical event at all, the world should note it as a momentous event, unprecedented for many centuries. Once before Christianity had to reverse its position. Having earlier eliminated the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle from its doctrine, it was glad to call their works in to support its inadequate intellectual foundations, and to give back to Christian doctrine its philosophical roots in Greek rationalism.

As in the case of many an individual and many a nation, Christianity's path to future power and beneficence for humanity has had to run for a time through the valley of humiliation and contrition before it ascends again to the uplands and heights of a new vision. This new ascension is only possible if mankind's demand for the inner truth of Christian teaching and history is answered. "The hungry sheep look up," as Milton said, and will flock to the

hand that offers to feed them. But who is their rightful shepherd, and with what provender will he feed them? They flocked into the fold in those early times, and it was not long before the Christian leadership awoke to the realization of power which was thrust into their hands. But as always, power corrupted, and churches have never been free of this danger.

As religion arises out of this tension in the duality of man's nature between the animal-human and the divine, so it is inevitable that in the welding of the religious influence into institutionalized forms there will be a clash between the divine and human motives. Human interest, wayward and recalcitrant, as it is bound to be, must in the end bow in meekness and docility, if not in awe, before the mystery of the divine. And the divine must take what measures it can to maintain its supremacy. These two elements are inevitably interwoven in man's religious life.

Chapter 5

RELIGION AND THE ILLUMINATION

OF MIND

Religion is that sphere of thought and feeling in which the human being shows himself both at his heroic best and his tragic worst. It is the field in which man stands firmly for his ideal values, or surrenders himself to delusion, thus corrupting his innermost nature. When adversity, danger or tyranny challenge, he shows himself capable of the loftiest nobility, the most godlike self-sacrifice, the most loyal spiritual consecration. But in long periods of commonplace existence man may succumb to lethargy and let his spirit sink low. In such an inert state, he submits to orthodoxy. He has neither the incentive, the intelligence nor the courage to subject doctrinal impositions to robust criticism, and so determine his code of belief for himself. He relies on the competence and good faith of the priesthood. He feels a certain safety in keeping in line with communal sentiment. He thus ordains for himself and his children a mental or psychological subservience to established consensus in his religious life, and this amounts to a virtual abandonment of that which makes man unique--the faculty of reasoning and the hunger of the soul for understanding.

Mind is the primal, as it is the ultimate, creative force in the cosmos. Either in conscious operation or stored in man's unconscious mind is the governor of all organic life. To the ancients, mind was "the serpent charmer," the reptile symbolizing the fiery power (in Egypt, the "uraeus," a serpent of fire) locked up in the atoms of the body and its animal instincts. Intellect and reason must eventually "charm" these writhing serpents into harmlessness. In reverse symbolism, however, the serpent may charm the soul, the mind itself, under the symbol of the bird. Thus the reason and the sense can each dominate the other, so there

is a dual hypnosis. In the end, if the purpose of evolution is to be served, life will come fully under the governance of conscious mind. Science today supports the view that the drive of life is toward greater awareness. In men, each individual becomes in time what the nature and the contents of his mind make him. His thoughts will stamp upon him their true or false design. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

Plato outlined this view of man some four and a half centuries before the Christian era. Greek reflection had extracted it out of the more venerable Egyptian structure a millennium or two earlier. For this is what the hierophants of the Nile had meant by their gods. Those divinities were the archetypal Forms of the Noumenon of the creation, the living energies of matter and of mind. A Form was the shape, structure, and organic unity of a brooding cosmic ideation. When it hardened into matter it passed from aeriform to fluid, became concretized, and finally became the object of perception to sentient creatures.

The young germ of mind implanted in the creature--unfolding in ovo from first cell, reaching in millions of years the self-consciousness of the human order and groping toward the expression of that same power in itself which it had inherited from its Father Nous--began to think, act and create after the model and pattern of the cosmic archetypal Forms. The natural creation, being the projection and precipitation in matter of the divine ideation, held before its generated Sons, in every tree, stone, cloud, brook and lightning flash, those multitudinous concreted shapes of the celestial beauty and verity. Living among them daily, facing them at every turn, the minds of the children of God could not fail in time, in spite of ages of blinding nescience, to reflect in consciousness the Forms of the primal cosmic Logic. The son-mind must come in time to match the Father-mind. For the creature mind is a fragment, but at the same time a potential integer, of the Creator Mind. So St. Paul said that now we see in part, obscurely, dimly, but in the consummation of the cycle we shall see all things as integral and whole. And Kant's synthetic unity of apperception will end in synthetic unity

of understanding and vision.

The conceptual form and coherence which dominate any individual consciousness constitute for that individual his religion. It is also his philosophy, his psychology, his theoretical and practical ethics. It is his philosophy as far as it is intellectually formulated. It is his psychology to the extent that it gives him feeling and motivates conduct. It grounds his ethics in so far as he endeavors to adapt his conduct to the idealities it recommends to him. It is his religion in so far as the synthesis of all these elements engages his loyalty, his devotion, his deepest consecrations. The total involvement of a man's consciousness in the business of relating his life to his world would be the large and inclusive definition of his religion.

But it is the power of thought which becomes so crucial an element. The ideas, notions, fancies, intimations, yearnings that make up the endless stream of mental activity constitute for the individual the reality of what he is. He is thus mesmerized by them in the state in which they hold him. This is the strange truth of the assertion that all thought is mesmeric. And the only way by which the spell can be broken is through a change in the form and nature of the thought. Where can we look for help? Our Scriptures have given us the answer. "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." To be put to sleep by falsehood is tragedy. To be obsessed with the beauty, truth and goodness of life is to live in beatitude. One is hell, the other heaven. Well does the book of Proverbs exhort us, "With all thy getting, get wisdom, get understanding," assuring us that these are precious beyond all imaginable evaluation.

The philosophers have said with unanimity that there is no blessedness in life equal to that achieved by the mind that will lift itself to a synthetic view of all reflective ideas in an integrated structure of significance. The Greeks insisted that the life of reason was the divinest attainment of the human being. The word "meaning" is perhaps the key of all philosophy. A person who truly grasps meaning feels himself to be at one with the dynamic of the universe, in tune with the infinite. His mind pulsates with the uni-

versal life, it sweetly senses its harmony with the blessedness of being. Under divine spur, the soul of man, like a seed pushing upward toward the light of the sun, seeks for this bliss of self-illumination. It is Ajax crying for the light. True philosophy is more than intellectual ratiocination; it is beyond that, the complete irradiation of consciousness with the perception of truth and beauty and the beneficence of all things in harmony. Such union of thought and feeling brings, as Spinoza exulted in saying, the intellectual love of God, and produces the "God-intoxicated philosopher."

Each religion makes its own special appeal. Our particular task is to scrutinize the system known as Christianity to determine to what extent it has been salutary, and to what extent a deleterious influence. The task is difficult, because Christian origins are shrouded in a cloud of obscurity. There is not only a lack of basic historical data, but early Christian literature was not at all motivated to strict historical accuracy. Modern study discloses that ancient religious writing aimed always at a sort of mystical efficacy which might better be gained by means of allegory, myth, drama, or other mode of representation than by simple historical recital. A fanatical zeal for the propagation of the faith seemed to the scribes sufficient warrant for the production of a great quantity of literature of such doubtful authenticity that to it has been attached the designation of pseudepigrapha, "false writing." Books have been found which are thought to be in part or wholly spurious, including a Gospel of Pseudo-Mark, Gospels of Peter, James, Ignatius, Gospel of the Infancy (of Jesus), Gospel of Mary, Gospel of the Nativity, Gospel of Pilate, Letters of Paul and Thecla, Nicodemus, Seneca and others. One evident motive inspiring these books was that of enhancing the faith by accounts of such wonder events and miraculous tales as were designed to show the immediate agency of Providence in worldly events.

Many historians stress the fact that the Near East was full of the coming of the Messiah at the time when Christianity arose. Apocalyptic prophecies abounded. The stage was set, the psychological atmosphere tense with expectancy.

However, we shall never know precisely what influences, trends, forces and pressures came to a balance at that unique point in history, uniting to give the new movement its specific form, character and content. But one recognition now taking shape, after centuries, is that virtually every commonly accepted notion about the series of events that supposedly brought Christianity into being is no longer tenable. The tradition that has ruled Christendom is that, while all other religions were products of human origin, Christianity was ordained by God, who once and only once sent his only-begotten Son to institute this true and final code of faith, belief and conduct for all mankind. Perhaps it cannot yet be said that this is now widely questioned; nevertheless many thoughtful people are now attempting a reinterpretation of the long cherished legend.

Tradition held that if the Christian movement was not instituted by God himself, it was the work of men completely under divine supervision and inspired by the divine mind and will. Yet the evidence points to the conclusion that Christianity came into being when and because both the Judaic and the Hellenic world had sunk from the exalted peaks attained some four centuries earlier, to a state of philosophical vacuity. If it is not true that Christianity was born out of that darkness, it can truly be said that it was born when that darkness was densest. Christianity has never ceased to claim that it was the supreme revelation of true light to the world, decreed by God to end the reign of benighted paganism. Yet if it was that transcendent light, history itself poses a natural question. "Why was the night of pagan ignorance prolonged into the Dark Ages that held Europe in twilight for a millennium and a half, during which Christianity was the ruler of Europe's mind?" The logic of events and the development of history even suggest that the Christian religion must itself have generated much of the darkness that covered the lands it dominated. Christianity must accept the challenge that, having the light of divine truth, it failed to let that light shine forth upon Europe for fifteen centuries.

Christianity is now definitely known to have been an upheaval of religious pietism among the ignorant populace

of the Judean province, and for a considerable time it was shared by none of the intelligentsia. It is difficult to believe that there was enough intelligence and theological acumen in the unlettered, unschooled group of fishermen around Jesus to have launched the highest system of divine truth ever given out to humanity. Christian writers have extolled these twelve peasants as the most fitting agents for the propagation of divine truth precisely because they were simple and not intellectual. Humbleness of station does not presuppose ignorance, and erudition is no guarantee of wisdom and spirituality. Nevertheless, that a small group of Galilean fishermen (and they were fisherfolk only by virtue of Piscean allegory) and their humble associates should alone in all the world have possessed the keenness of spiritual vision to recognize the Logos of God when he "came eating and drinking" with the lowly is again hard to accept. We should remember that the central Sun-God character in ancient dramatic representations was always attended by twelve disciples, and that they were designated by a name connotative of each sign of the zodiac in turn in the precession of the equinoxes. They were shepherds in the sign of the Ram, and herdsmen in the sign of Taurus. Thus was repeated the basic symbolism underlying all ancient religious scriptures.

The fact that things of this sort had been lost sight of attests the decline of that genius for dramatization of abstract forms of truth which had enabled the Greek mind both to discern and then portray in vivid outlines those archetypal designs of cosmic thought. This was that failure of vision, that "failure of nerve," which Sir Gilbert Murray decried as the cultural tragedy of the ages, the paralysis that afflicted the Greek mind following its efflorescence in the Periclean epoch. In that bright day, the Hellenic spirit had faced life with a zest for its beauty and a sense of its infinite value and wholesome joie-de-vivre, because the Greeks had a deeper insight into the meaning of life than has been achieved at any other time in world history. When that insight dimmed, the prospect became confused, the perception of beauty and goodness vanished and men's souls sank into doubt, hopelessness and gloom. At the very nadir of this

depression, Christianity flowered. With earth's values all discredited, men's minds perforce turned to heaven for hope of beatitude. Interest in attaining the "good life" in this world ebbed away. The only salvation that might be expected was to be found in the promise of the coming of Messiah written in the Scriptures. Help must come from heaven, since the joy of earth had fled. Must we not admit the candid verdict of history itself that Christianity was the product of the Hellenic mind when its brightness was dimmed?

This judgment is affirmed by the fact that while Greek thought centered upon the positive interests of health, beauty, and sensual wholesomeness, the Christian conscience became almost at once submerged under the dark and morbid conviction of sin. Under the spur of Greek philosophy, a mortal might cherish the idea that he could, by the exercise of intelligence, self-discipline and wisdom, make steady progress toward the unfoldment of his divine potential. Christianity, however, afflicted consciousness with the sense of man's total depravity and the hopelessness of any effort of his own to redeem his fallen condition. This was the portentous change in outlook that swept over the peoples inheriting the Greek culture.

The modern mind is hardly prepared to credit the statement that the bitterest of human strife has come from sheer stupidity, the inability to appreciate poetic and mystical significance, and failure to discern the difference between allegory and history. Yet a mountain of evidence rises up to support this statement. It has to be said that our age seems to have lost the perceptive genius which a fresher, earlier age possessed, and which enabled the human mind to relate itself to life and nature in a closer intimacy of feeling and understanding than now appears possible. In the childhood of the race, when people lived intimately with nature, they intuitively sensed her forms and functions with a clarity which fades away when the sensibilities of childhood are replaced by less imaginative, if more rational, modes of consciousness. In youth the natural world impresses the psyche with a direct and naïve sense of the reality and the meaning of life. The world is seen as the

very picture and form of real being. The mind's effort to grasp and communicate the truth of things inevitably resorts to this natural world for all the types, figures, and images by which it essays to formulate ideas and concepts. Truth-telling becomes thus the art of poetry, the ideal representation of meaning through imaginative constructions suggested by nature. How could a concept be represented except by a symbol? But the symbol had to be itself a part of reality and truth if it were not to falsify the representation. To the ancient mind, the natural world was the lexicon of truth.

In childhood, this sense of the affinity of mind and nature is instinctive, spontaneous, and not consciously rational. At a later stage, when reason deploys into activity, the poetic rapport of mind with nature may fade, but if the mind is given to philosophical reflection there develops a faculty for the perception of its affinity with nature. This is through analogy, the discernment of similitude, parallelism and correspondence, suggesting a fundamental identity between the forms and phenomena of nature and the apprehensions of abstract thought. Children, like humanity in its youth, intuitively sense the truths of life as reflected in the face of nature; sage philosophers rationalize the affinity between the concrete world and the archetypal ideation that had in the beginning generated it. The books such wise men wrote in the past were designed to convey the truth of the ideal world to the human mind through forms of symbolism, for such was the most graphic device of communication. So the language of the great scriptures was that of allegory, drama, poetry, legend, myth and appropriate symbol.

Loss of the knowledge that the Scriptures were collections of ancient documents of this character precipitated the culture that was founded on religious literature into the darkness that cost humanity so dearly. Yet the catastrophe was avoidable, because the evidence that the writings were cast in the mold of allegory and expressed in symbolic language was everywhere abundant at Christianity's inception. That its promulgators appeared to be unaware of this traditional mode of expression, and made the unconscionable mistake

of reading the allegories as factual history, is testimony that they were ignorant and uncultivated people.

When Martin Luther came to the task of translating the Bible into fifteenth century German, he had to devise virtually a whole new vocabulary to express the concepts of the ancient Egyptian sages, which had already been recast in the phraseology of the Hebrews, and then again modified by their translation into Greek. So when the illuminati of an earlier time, with minds aglow with apprehension of spiritual verities, came to express in writing the principle of understanding of the loftiest spiritual science, we must stand in awe at their ingenuity in devising an alphabet, a lexicon and a language of such involved and abstruse technicality that it required a special training in its subtleties to render a mind alert to its significance. It was a code of semantic forms, drawn mostly from nature, but made more complex by artful devices of myth, allegory and drama. Plutarch speaks of Plato's methodology of portraying the profoundest mysteries by resort to tropes, figures, fables and similar modes of depiction. The truth the sages of old dealt with was indeed "the wisdom hidden in a mystery," and further concealed in an enigma.

Most students of ancient literature have known that the archaic writings were of this sort, but by some quirk have remained impervious to the implications of the fact. Failure to read the scripts in this special way has left the books of the arcane science still sealed in their original mystery. But we now at last have our finger on the key to the tragedy that consummated the long centuries of philosophic decline in the Hellenic world, with the conversion of the great occult Mystery drama and the Scriptural Gospels into the biography of Jesus of Nazareth.

One cannot be dogmatic about all aspects of this development, but there are substantial signs and intimations that the codices of understanding and the manuals of wisdom were turned into wraiths of alleged history. Two monumental works of the Egyptologist, Gerald Massey, The Natural Genesis and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World, have been largely ignored. With brilliant scholarship and insight he pierced Egypt's enigmatic scriptology,

and documented the provenance of both Old and New Testament literature from remote Egyptian sources. He forced us to ask how the four Gospels of the Christian canon could be the biography of any Messianic personality living in the first Christian century, when he traced their texts back to Egyptian documents that must have been venerable even in 3500 B.C. He has noted some one hundred and eighty points of similarity, parallelism and identity between the archaic figure--never mistaken for a living person--of the Egyptian Christ-type Horus and the Jesus personage in the Gospels. As one scans this table of identities there is no escaping the conviction that "Jesus" is just this Horus-model of our divinity presented under a new name--a name, however, that is found to have been attached to the Messianic character even before Jesus lived.

We are faced with the inescapable realization that if Jesus actually lived in the flesh in the first century A.D., and if he had been able to read the documents of old Egypt, he would have been amazed to find his own biography already substantially written some four or five thousand years previously. Tertullian, Justin Martyr and other writers have noted that the leaders of the Christian movement confessed that many of their doctrines, rites, creeds and symbols were identical with Egyptian antetypes. The late outstanding American Egyptologist, James H. Breasted, found evidence of such similarities between the Old Testament book, Proverbs, and addresses to the Pharaoh of Egypt dating as far back as 3500 B.C. All this confirms Massey's conclusions.

There are strong indications that Christianity today faces a time of crucial testing. But as broader studies of comparative religion are supported by fresh discovery of ancient documents and are sharpened by higher criticism, the position of Christianity in the whole religious world spectrum will emerge more truly and, we believe, with greater stature.

Chapter 6

SOME CONSEQUENCES OF ESOTERICISM

The catastrophe which befell the pagan world following the close of the glorious period of Athenian philosophy still casts its shadow over the human mind and spirit. It is evident that at times a combination of fortuitous circumstances lifts a people to surpassing heights of vision. And after every such peak of cultural achievement there seems to come a regression to mediocrity or worse. During these regressions there is little ability to appreciate the subtle refinements of art and the heights of philosophy achieved in that earlier period of grandeur. Perhaps it was because of their realization of the inevitability of such pendulum swings that the sages of old clothed their insights in allegory, poetry, drama and symbol, that these coins of mystical value might be preserved even in a period of cultural darkness, under the guise of myth and fable. Thus we have inherited a priceless legacy of truth and wisdom from the past, miraculously preserved in spite of ignorance and neglect. The world has possessed this treasure only to ignore it, and so to lose its benefits time and time again.

There is a fine Latin word, numinous, which is closely allied to "luminous." Numen means not a god in person, but the light of the mind of a god as present to, and sensed by, a human. It is the "presence of God," that which the Hebrews called the Shekinah, and which the Romans represented by their household gods, their Lares and Penates. It was what the palladium, the image of Pallas Athene, meant to Athens, and what Minerva meant to Rome. Athens had ignited the torch of enlightenment from the altar fires of ancient Egypt. Moses, too, was learned "in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," and made it a fundamental in the majesty of the Pentateuch, the prophets of Israel and the wisdom of Solomon. Persia, Babylon and Assyria shared the ancient light and, if only in allegory, sent its three Magi to wel-

come the King of Kings at his advent. But, melancholy as it now appears, the high tide ebbed, insight dimmed, the numen faded out, philosophy lost its metaphysical fire and became cold and empty. Yet Sir Gilbert Murray could only tell us of a "failure of nerve."

Macedon Phillip's dream of Hellenizing the world, surely did not entirely fail. His son's founding of Alexandria lighted a lamp which burned brilliantly for several centuries, and whose rays gave early Christianity its brightest light. Here Philo Judaeus developed the insight that enabled him to synthesize the heritage of Greek and Hebrew systems. Philo was born about the time of Jesus. One might say that the births of Jesus and Philo represented the beginning of the clash of the two forces that they launched into history. The Jewish philosopher's work went far to unite Hellenic philosophy with the Mosaic Pentateuch and the sacred Torah of Judaism, thereby opening the door to the entry of Greek enlightenment to the Eastern world. The reconciliation of Hellenic intellectualism with Hebraic theocracy and devout moralism in Philo's synthesis might have perpetuated something approximating Platonic-Aristotelian wisdom into the Christian era. In fact, in the second century A.D. the Neoplatonists launched their magnificent effort to restate the principles of the great Orphic-Hermetic tradition. Out of those systems both Judaism and Hellenism had taken their rise, and in them would have found the common elements that could have brought them into unity. But unfortunately this effort was short lived and destined to have little effect upon the course of European history.

A ferment was brewing among the peasantry of Galilee in Judea in the first century--a ferment that grew to proportions and power sufficient to block the marriage of Judaism and Hellenism. The anti-intellectualism natural to such unlettered and simple folk led to the tragic destruction of the Serapeum, the priceless library of antiquity at Alexandria, by a frenzied mob led by the notorious Cyril, Bishop of the East. When the flames of that fire died out, it symbolized the extinction of the light of the world for that time, and the beginning of the Dark Ages which lasted for fifteen

hundred years. The great Italian Renaissance of the 14th century lifted a corner of the shroud of ignorance in Europe; the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century let in a bit more light. But the first real promise of our emergence from mediaeval ecclesiastical tyranny came with the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799, and the discovery in this century of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It has been the sad fate of humanity, consistently demonstrated down the line of history, that the dream of a purely ideal state for mankind inevitably turns into the aspiration and then the determination of some one nation or people to realize the achievement itself. When a group has attained recognized supremacy, as in the ancient world Hellas had done, it entertains thoughts of a divine commission to dominate the earth. The Hebrews had similarly felt the sense of their mission. Each great religion has speculated on its special agency in the world's apotheosization. Greece experienced the perilous afflation at the time of the Platonic exaltation, and pressed toward its actualization through the might of its arms and ships, only to have the dream shattered by the destruction of Alcibiades' fleet in the siege of Syracuse. Hellenic philosophy went into decline with the fall of Athens' hopes for world hegemony, for man's inner life is inseparably bound in with and conditioned by his outer fortune. The Greek philosophy courageously postulated the possibility of man's realization of his innate divinity on earth, but instead of creating a Utopia wherein eternal values would guide human life, Greece reaped the harvest of human inadequacy in the devastation of a fratricidal war.

The sudden blasting of Greece's national hopes in military defeat, in conjunction doubtless with other causes not so clearly delineated, conditioned the Greeks to a favorable reception of another philosophy, the Zoroastrian system of the dualism of good and evil, heavily tinctured at the time with a still further Eastern philosophy, that of Hinduism. The Greek soul, its wings singed and its aspiring rationalism destroyed by a panic similar to that which destroyed Phaeton driving Apollo's chariot too close to the sun, sunk back wounded and confused. It was thus ready

to be caught up by the following wave, and Christianity, by virtue of influences inherent in the context of the age, chanced to be in position to be carried forward on its crest. This may be a poetical way of saying it, but the rhythmic upsurges and recessions of the spirit are indeed a historical fact. The Christian surge was the resultant of a convergence of many currents into a channel that proved viable enough to permit a steady flow, while other streams were diverted or arrested. Germane to this point is the cultural and intellectual background against which a new and rising statement of truth, beauty and goodness must be studied. This observation can be fittingly applied to the Christian movement. Christianity arose out of a momentary cultural vacuum, in a time of obscuration of the inherited tradition of religious truth.

Christian historians have always tended to ignore or pass over the previous existence of such bodies as the Essenes and the Gnostics, not to mention the Mandaites, the Elkasites, the Therapeutae, the Ebionites, Ophites, Mithraites, Sabaeans, Manichaeans, Orphics, Hermeticists, Mystery cultists, Hellenists and others. Yet the Mediterranean area in that epoch was deeply saturated with the spirit of religious esotericism. In pagan society, Mystery brotherhoods developed strict codes of behavior based on esoteric philosophy and refined rituals which were designed to effect a moral and spiritual catharsis. Notably, among others, Cicero has testified to the spiritual dynamic released by the ceremonies of these "initia," as being in truth the real beginnings of the activation of innate human divinity. These schools were secret because, to these ancients, truth must be guarded from desecration by the ignorant. With the right to possess goes the obligation to use aright, and in this view only those able to assume the obligations of knowledge could rightly claim title to its possession. The power of knowledge is a two-edged sword, like fire. It can construct, enlighten, vivify, and save mankind; it can also destroy. Therefore the ancients instituted drastic and rigid requirements for admission to the Mystery Schools.

This attitude persisted in early Christianity. Jesus himself distinguished between the deeper wisdom imparted to

the inner circle of his disciples and the simple parables given to the multitude. The early Church itself for some time was so steeped in the spirit of esotericism that it instituted a graded system of instruction, even to the point of conducting Lesser Mysteries and Greater Mysteries. Direct and significant testimony that doctrine was interpreted at two distinct levels is found in a statement of Synesius, Bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century: "In my capacity as bishop of the Church, I shall continue to disseminate the fables of our religion; but in my private capacity I shall remain a philosopher to the end."

The compulsion to conceal truths which might be misinterpreted or misunderstood by the ignorant is revealed in a declaration of the Church Father Gregor Nazianzen in a letter to Jerome: "A little jargon is all that is necessary to impose on the people. The less they comprehend, the more they admire. Our forefathers and doctors have often said, not what they thought, but what circumstances and necessity dictated." Here we have testimony to two facets of historical truth: the tendency of the ancient religions to practice their rites in secrecy, and the moral permissiveness which justified the "paternal deception" of the people. Perhaps there are legitimate grounds for deceiving the ignorant for their own good. History must pronounce judgment in such cases. But conscientious historians must confess that the early Christians carried secrecy to excess, even to the point of dishonesty.

It is possible to understand, however, that the esotericism of the pagan religions had come to be resented by the populace. The secrecy of the Mysteries came to be associated predominantly with the intellectual and social aristocracy of the ancient world; to the unlettered it appeared as a symbol of their inferior status and their exclusion from the higher ranks of society. Out of a situation of this kind is born a spirit of iconoclasm. The spectacle of a superior class of society engaging in elaborate rituals which are baffling because never understood, becomes in time a source of irritation and antagonism to those who are excluded. Thus the secret tradition of the Mysteries, while preserving the inviolate sanctity of esoteric wisdom, evoked a

smoldering hostility among the populace, and so prepared the ground for the new faith, which from the very first, stood out in strong reaction to paganism. The possession of secret knowledge tends always to detach its holder from the remainder of society and diminish his influence upon the community. Such knowledge carries its own dangers, and one of them is that the possessor is lured to labor at his own salvation, and let humanity as a whole flounder in its ignorance. Against this temptation the esotericist must constantly be on guard. Pagan mythicism, pantheism, polytheism, animism, had each its day. While they should be given credit for having at least provided the conditions that fostered so magnificent a product as the Greek philosophy, both Platonic and Neoplatonic, this was the pinnacle of their achievement. And the brilliant sunlight of intellectual eminence in that pagan world did not penetrate the dark valleys where the masses dwelt. Christianity can be justifiably proud that it valiantly struggled, to bring light and salvation to the downtrodden.

The history of the Christian movement underscores the problem of how cultural growth and knowledge are to penetrate mass ignorance and moral blindness. Truth and purity of life have little appeal to those whose way of life is vulgar and brutish. This has always been the reason and the excuse for secrecy. Pagan genius adopted a device which provided safeguards against the misuse of knowledge while giving access to the higher concepts of truth even to the ignorant. Life and nature deliver eternal images of truth to all men. If inertia blocks intellectual comprehension, the human mind will not be entirely impervious to the silent instruction of the omnipresent images and archetypes. Through fables, parables, myths, allegories and symbols, truth will seep into consciousness. In due time, developing capacity will bring rational understanding and enlightenment.

It could well be true that Christianity embodied some disastrous consequences of a breach in the esoteric code. It demonstrated what could happen to the loftiest concepts once the popular mind, with its materialistic predilections, gets hold of them. The English writer, G.R.S. Mead has

described the phenomenon clearly in Fragments of a Faith Forgotten:

"The new method was to force out into the open for all men a portion of the sacred Mysteries and secret teachings of the few. The adherents of the new religion itself professed to throw open everything; and many believed that it had revealed all that was revealable. This was because they were yet as children. So bright was the light to them that they perforce believed it came directly from the God of all Gods--or rather from God Above, for they would have no more of gods; the gods were straightway transmuted into devils. The 'many' had begun to play with psychic and spiritual forces let loose from the Mysteries; and the 'many' went mad for a time and have not yet regained their sanity."

This statement supports our proposition that Christianity was a product of the ancient arcane systems. Strangest of all, it is Christianity itself, which arose in large part from a revulsion against pagan esotericism, that has stamped the seal of verity and authority upon this same esoteric principle. In the first place, by breaking the tradition of inviolability and exposing hidden teachings to the multitude, it threw the minds of common people into a state of confusion that lasted for two millennia. And in the second place, having from its own seat of power observed, over the centuries, the disastrous consequences of letting ignorance degenerate into religious fanaticism, the Church has, in the end, itself wrapped up its inner codes of doctrine and interpretation in secrecy, forbidding to the laity the liberty of dogmatizing on its own account. In short, it has had to resort to that same esotericism which it originally repudiated.

Christian antipathy to paganism is ungrateful, since it derives every element of its theology, ritual and symbolism, along with its sacred scriptures, from that source; it reconstructed its entire dogma over the model of pagan, that is, of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy; it has perpetuated the celebration of most of the pagan religious festivals; and, finally, it has adopted, as its own policy, the pagan emphasis on esotericism. One distinctive new element it added, however; authoritarianism over the lives of its fol-

lowers, which has lasted almost down to the present time. It is only now that we are at last witnessing a questioning of absolutism within the Catholic Church. In the United States today, many priests and bishops are urging the revival of individualism, appealing for the growth of personal responsibility and spiritual assertiveness and resistance to the growing automation of social and intellectual life.

Such a robust awakening of robust individualism is needed to resist the pressure from groups that seek to impose organization programs and policies on their members. Uniformity of thought and supine loyalty to organization, be it the big industrial corporation, the labor union, or the political party, leads to the hardening of prejudice and the reduction of individual responsibility. It is a measure of the great changes that are taking place under contemporary social pressures that the religious organization which for some seventeen hundred years demanded blind allegiance from its followers is now loosening the rigor of many of its strictures. The long history of the Roman Catholic Church exemplified its dogma that salvation could only be won through such allegiance; and every move toward individual freedom was for centuries met with excommunication, and even with death. Thereby the Church tacitly postulated the dogma that allegiance to the Church is the highest form of liberty of the human spirit. So precious is the soul's right to this freedom that for centuries the Church considered it a holy act to save a soul from eternal perdition, if it rejected this pathway, by destroying its body.

Chapter 7

THE MIRROR OF TRUTH

The psychology of religion has not yet adequately analyzed the forces that play upon the human psyche when it succumbs to the influence of pietism. It is not that the religious man surrenders the authority of his senses, his feelings and his mind, but rather that, over and above these ordinary faculties, he feels the potency of divine forces which overshadow him as they do all else, and which can sanctify a life which is otherwise quite ordinary. In one form or another, from the earliest times, the man turned religious has become the object of a tacit belief that he is thus overshadowed or possessed by a measure of the divine power.

For some eighteen centuries the Christian mind has been trained in the conviction that the first promoters of the faith were people of extraordinary and unique spirituality, in fact the first holy worshippers of a true God. The Christian tradition has endowed the first scenes in the Christian drama with such an aura of sanctity that it has been impossible to study them objectively. Miracle, magic and marvel have colored the entire picture.

The decay of rationalism into superstition, the devaluation of learning, and especially of classic literature, were characteristics of the Christian movement for many centuries. They caused untold harm. For the revulsion against intellectualism led to the uncritical acceptance among Christians of a mundane and material interpretation of the Scriptures. The profound spiritual message of Jesus was degraded into the crudest of literalizations. The revolt against paganism early took a turn that was fated, not only to plunge Christianity into gross superstition, but also to inspire within it a tendency toward intolerance. Acceptance of the ancient myths did not lead to sectarianism, because a myth, an allegory, a drama leaves the spirit free to

digest its truth in terms of its own genius and experience. A myth can instruct, enlighten and inspire without binding. But when that same myth becomes a story which is believed to be actuality, freedom to evaluate its edifying power is gone. As an allegory of the soul's stressful imprisonment in the body, the story of the crucifixion can generate a variety of reactions which lead to spiritual insight. Regarded as a physical experience of one man, however, it becomes an alleged historical fact which one accepts or does not accept, according to what one regards as binding evidence. Scholars have never fully recognized, in religious history, that most of the virulence of sectarianism was bred by the transposition of Scriptural allegory into history. As one writer expresses it, "the same myth in cruel hands becomes a goad to fanaticism." Over a myth, people can compare their feelings and reflections, their sense of its meaning, without rancor; over an alleged event, however, one agrees or disagrees; and this leads to parties, movements, causes and all sorts of discord. In one case the outcome was tolerance, if not fraternity; in the other case it led to war and persecution.

If one were to proclaim that most of the troubles of Europe were caused by a mere misreading of some old documents and an insensibility to the intimations of their poetic and dramatic fancy, one would be dismissed as a fool. Yet this seems to be what history itself implies. The course of many events in the West has been affected by the position of the accent on a Greek word, the substitution of a plural for a singular noun, or the question as to whether Plato was merely punning, or hiding the most recondite wisdom in the etymology of words in The Cratylus. Origen, the most learned of the Christian Fathers, complained that he was not permitted to express the meaning of the resurrection in tropes and symbols, while the pagan commentators were able to indulge their fancy freely. The modern world is only now beginning to recognize the fact that the ancient and revered Scriptures of antiquity are not history, but rather spiritual truth dramatized and illustrated by some history.

The ancient world never wrote its religious books in the frame or the spirit of what moderns call "history." Not until Herodotus does there appear to have been any appreciable amount of history written at all, and even much of his work has seemed implausible as history. The literary objective of the ancient sages appears to have been simply to perpetuate the principles and archetypes of truth in such forms of imagery as would preserve their meaning and their potential. They aimed to illustrate, to dramatize, to pictorialize truth. Myth, allegory and drama were their main resources, but number significance, and, to an astonishing degree, astrological pictography and symbolism were also employed. Gerald Massey has taken us far toward the recognition that the dramas of the spiritual life of man had been inscribed on the night sky before they were copied on earth.

The zodiac was the first graph of cosmogenesis and anthropogenesis. The sages of old discerned that in the fact of three plus four equaling seven, and three times four equaling twelve, they possessed the key to a constructive cosmology. The number seven occurs ubiquitously in ancient scriptures and mythologies, because, as Pythagoras taught, the physical universe is built upon this number. It has been said also that man's evolution on this earth will unfold twelve facets of his potential divinity. The primacy of the number twelve in the ancient cosmogony led to the division of the year into twelve periods, the months into thirty days, and the week into seven days.

Christian scholarship has never considered the basic numbers which appear with such frequency throughout the Bible as of more than incidental importance. For example, the number forty recurs again and again in all sacred Scriptures, and there are at least four periods in the calendar of religious festivals of the year which extend over forty days, the Christian Lent being one of them. Yet no work on

Christian theology known to the present author has noted that the number forty occupies this place of prominence in symbolism because it signalizes the period of the incarnation of the spirit in matter: e.g., rain fell for forty days in the story of the flood; Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness for forty days; Lent was ordained for forty days; the Israelites wandered for forty days in the desert of Sinai; Hallowe'en and All Souls' Day fall forty days after the autumn equinox. To the theologian this is just a bit of odd coincidence, as it has to be if the Scriptures are to be taken as actual history. Yet the recurrence of this number forty in such diverse contexts strongly suggests an allegorical rather than a factual meaning. The fact that the dates of Christmas and Easter are clearly determined by winter solstice and vernal equinox--the more so because Easter is not even a fixed date, but shifts each year--should long ago have shaken faith in the purely historical view.

For many years, the adherence of Christians to the fundamentalist thesis blocked the evolutionary view of man's ascent. Another radical deficiency in scholarship that has been equally damaging has been the intransigence of Christian interpretation to the implications of the data encountered in the study of comparative religion, as well as in the study of its companion science of comparative mythology. Against overwhelming evidence of the fundamental relationship between various religions and their sacred books, which obviously point to some common origin, and the equally massive evidence of a primordial identity of structure and significance in all systems, Christian theology has stood obdurate. Since scholars failed to trace allegorical imagery back to its roots in the world of noumenal archetypes, the meaning and reference of the texts was located in the wrong world. Reading the Scripture in a way that distorted its significance, Christian sectarians have, for centuries, engulfed themselves and the Christian world in a delusion that persists to this day.

The open-minded investigator of comparative religion finds it difficult to excuse the obt