With transcendent
genius the Sages formulated the systems of myths, allegories, fables, parables, numerological
structures and astrological pictographs such as the zodiac and the planispheres or uranographs to
supplement the central ceremonial drama. The whole structure was, however, fabricated with
such esoteric subtlety that, the keys once lost, the system has defied the best of medieval and
modern acumen to recapture its cryptic import. The divinity in man being a portion of the
ineffable glory of the sun, and necessarily therefore typified by it, the great scenic portrayal was built upon the
solar allegory, and the successive phases of man’s divinization were enacted around the solar
year in accordance with the significance of the orb’s monthly and seasonal positions. Ancient
religion was for this reason called solar religion or "sun-worship." Temples were built to the sun
and hymns to the sun written to extol its splendor as typical of man’s inner splendor. The
meaning of the drama thus interwoven at every turn with the movements of the great natural
analogue and type of our divinity, every detail of the ritual would receive an enormous
enhancement of impressiveness and meaning for celebrants, who would be subjected in this way
to the greatly magnified psychic power that was generated by the co-ordination of their highest
spiritual conceptions with the redoubtable truth of nature. Ancient sapiency linked spiritual law
and natural law together in a kinship and correspondence that endowed the former with all the
impregnable certitude of the latter. This link between the two aspects of truth was broken about
the third century, and religion has ever since been crippled by want of a reinforcement so
naturally strong. The modern religious consciousness has to make shift as best it can in almost
total privation of the vital sources of assurance and stability which flowed into the mind from the
correlation of its spiritual tenets with natural truth. Every theological presentment must
necessarily fall upon mental comprehension with a manifold strength if it is immediately seen to
be corroborated by the open facts of nature. Mystical experience will be vastly certified to
intelligence if it can be illuminated by the glow of meaning emanating from natural symbols. A
graphic representation of hidden meaning is always far more effective to stamp the mind with
living images than language of itself can accomplish. Hence the resort to drama in the first place,
and next to a drama that was based on and interwoven with the most obvious of all natural
phenomena--the rise and setting of the sun in the daily round and the larger counterpart of the
same routine in the seasonal cycle. These two daily and annual operations, the alternate victory
and defeat of the sun, typify of course the very gist of the whole human drama, the soul’s descent
into its "death" in mortal body and its recurrent resurrection therefrom. This is the core of the
central theme in all religious scripture. The daily sinking of the sun at eve in earth or ocean, and
its rising again in the east at dawn, or its yearly descent
to the south in the autumn and its succeeding return northward in the spring, all prefigure the
descent of the soul, a unit of God’s own conscious mind, into incarnation in its "night" or
"winter" of "death" and its subsequent resurrection from the tomb of the body. The fact that
ancient insight allied tomb and body in one meaning is astonishingly indicated by the identity of
the Greek words, soma, body and sema, tomb.
In this ceremonial drama the central figure was the sun-god, or Son of God, the Christos,
Messiah. He was likewise the Avatar, the Bodhisattva, the World-Savior. A generic term for him
was The Coming One, or "The Comer" in Egypt. And never until the decadent epoch that fell
like a pall upon early Christianity in the third century was the Messianic Messenger ever thought
of as "coming" in the sense of being born as a person in the world. This is a fact of momentous
significance. The many world saviors antecedent to Jesus were types and not persons born in
history. They were typical characters portraying that spirit of divine charity which should
transform and transfigure human life from the rapacity of the beast to the graciousness of
unselfish love. Its "coming" would be its gradual growth and its mounting sweep in the hearts
and minds of humanity as a whole. It would not be "born" until it came to overt expression in the
active lives of mortals. Its taking root and gradually expanding in world consciousness was
likened unto the planting and flourishing of the tiny mustard seed in the Gospel parable. No
Christos can possibly "come" into the world except it arrive on the waves of charitable impulse
that well up in individual and mass motivation. No Christ can bring godliness in his single
person. No Messiah can impart it to men in the mass by any other method than the transforming
of all hearts through the throb of Christly compassion and the exaltation of all minds into the
likeness of the Christly intelligence.
Treated cursorily already, the argument that for full inspirational suggestiveness humans must
have their faith fortified by the assurance that one man at least actually did attain to Christhood
and manifest the ideal of perfection, must receive somewhat fuller scrutiny. Its force was already
weakened by the consideration that the one character in history alleged to have furnished mortals
this assurance was not a man of our own evolution, and had not attained his divinity over the
same pathway that we must tread, but was an immaculate emissary from
inaccessible heavens, a guest from remote empyreans. It must be accentuated that this situation
introduces into the picture the negative depressing influence of man’s realization of his own
hopeless inferiority, the impossibility of his stepping up beside the Christ. In striking contrast to
this the method adopted by the Sages obviated any such disastrous negativism. It carried with it
the invincible certainty of attainment for every man. There was never a question of achievement,
but only of effort, method and perseverance. The very manner of the presentation of the ideal
figure carried the presupposition of final victory to the aspirant. The type was exhibited on no
other grounds than that it was the picture of what could be achieved by all. Obviously there could
be no sense or reason in holding before all men in all religions the type of what they could not
attain. Attainment was an inevitable implication of the representation from the outset. One man’s
superb attainment could only add evidence to what was already known. But the proclamation
that only one man had ever reached the goal would have thrown dismay into minds long assured
of the high destiny of all. Heraclitus’ discerning observation that "man’s genius is a deity" had
placed a god in potentiality deep within the heart of every life, and the envisaged prospect of
divinization was simply a long growth of latent into active powers and faculties, a process that
could be in no wise affected by the birth of any exceptional personage. That the eventual
deification of all humanity should be considered to depend upon such a birth would have been
received in ancient times with bewilderment and total incomprehension. When the true nature
and terms of the problem of human spiritual advancement were succinctly understood, there was
no way in which the Bethlehem event on the historical plane could be given a place of crucial
importance in the universal task.
It will be seen that the entire argument for the historicity on the grounds of its superior
psychological influence collapses finally under the force of the admission, which must be made
by all parties, that even if Jesus of Nazareth lived and is the Vicar of God on earth, every man
must work out his own salvation on exactly the same terms as though he had not existed! Since
Jesus can not come to any man and take his evolutionary problem off his shoulders and effect his
salvation for him, the only psychological value left to the fact of the historicity is reduced to the
mere force of a sort of hero-worship. The Jesus life and character, his sufferings and virtues, can stimulate devotion and desire to emulate.
His lofty moral preachment sets a norm for ideal human attainment. The very contemplation of
his pure life and radiant divinity inspires an answering nobility in millions of lives.
The power of a noble example, the more especially one enhanced in beauty by centuries of pious
glorification, is not questioned. But the same beauty and indeed the same lofty spiritual
preachment was afforded imitative devotion in the case of the sun-god figure. In the end the sublime figure of the type character was there purely for inspirational incentive, standing free
from any suggestion of vicarious salvation for the adorer. It moved to noble effort, but in not the
least hint did it delude the worshipper with the fatuous notion that any power save his own
consecrated struggle could win his salvation for him. The greater the claimed psychological
power of the historical Jesus over the devotee, the greater the tragedy of delusion thus wrought
upon millions, since this stimulating influence has never been detached from the concomitant
imputations of vicariousness inseparably linked with it in Christian theology. Thus the greater
part of the alleged beneficent force of the living example in the end evaporates into pure delusion
not unattended with disastrous consequences.A few sentences in the preceding chapter alluded to a situation brought to light by the study of
Comparative Religion and Mythology which adds further vast weight to the probability that the
whole enormous body of psychological prestige exerted by the belief in the historical Jesus is
grounded on a chimera and not on a fact. The events in the alleged life of Jesus are pushed closer
and closer to the point of myth by the astounding fact that, as the ever-clearer implications of
these studies show, they are seen to match with nearly perfect fidelity the similar cycles of purely
allegorical "events" in the dramatic and mythic representations of some sixteen or more--indeed
probably fifty or more--earlier type figures recorded in ancient sacred Bibles of the nations. It is
certainly to be regarded as more than passing strange that when the only-begotten Son of God
did descend to earth to implant the genius of the one true religion to save mankind, his life only
copied or matched in great detail the dramatized typal characters or sun-gods of antecedent
religions. And the earlier figures whose careers he repeated were definitely non-historical or at
best legendarily semi-historical, such as Zoroaster, Orpheus and Hermes. The Christians of the third and fourth
centuries were plagued to distraction by the recurrent appearance of evidence that revealed the
disconcerting identity of the Gospel narrative in many places with incidents in the "lives" of
Horus, Izdubar, Mithra, Sabazius, Adonis, Witoba, Hercules, Marduk, Krishna, Buddha and
other divine messengers to early nations. They answered the challenge of this situation with the
desperate allegation that the similarity was the work of the devil! The findings of comparative
religion and mythology constitute at this epoch a far more deadly challenge than they did in the
third century, for there is the massive body of the Egyptian religious literature to increase the
mountain of identities between Christian and antecedent pagan gospels and there is less of
Christian hypnotism to overcome now than at the earlier date. In more formidable form than ever
before the Christian proponents must face the open implications of the query that springs to mind
out of these comparative religion discoveries, why, if the model life had already been proclaimed
by numerous Avatars before Jesus and he therefore had nothing new to add, the need or occasion
for his passionate sacrifice at all? The model he displayed had already been on view in nearly
every ancient nation for centuries! So far from being the climax and grand consummation of a
series of ever fuller revelations, his advent was rather an anti-climax. The enlightened and
emancipated study of comparative religion, vitally reinforced by the discovery of the Rosetta
Stone, bids fair to become a veritable Nemesis to the exorbitant claims of Christianity. It was
these momentous disclosures of identity in the material of Christian and pagan literature that
gave impetus to the present undertaking, provided the data for proof and lent overwhelming
warrant to all the major conclusions to be reached. And it is this body of evidence that sweeps in
with crushing force to devastate every one of the arguments from psychology that have been
considered. In its totality it constitutes a bulwark of strength on the side of the non-historicity
that must be rated virtually inexpugnable.
It can now be stated with little chance of refutation that the Gospel "life" of Jesus had been
written, in substance, for five thousand years before he came. The record is in Egypt. An
Egyptian Jesus--Horus--had raised an Egyptian Lazarus from the dead at an Egyptian Bethany,
with an Egyptian Mary and Martha present, in the scripts of that an-
cient land that were extant at least five thousand years B.C. And a carving in relief, depicting
scenes of angels announcing from the skies to shepherds in the fields a deific advent, of an angel,
Gabriel, foretelling to a virgin that she should be the mother of the Christos, of the nativity in the
cave, and of three sages kneeling in adoration before the infant deity, had been on the walls of
the temple of Luxor at least seventeen hundred years B.C. The Virgin Mother had held the divine
child in her arms in zodiacs on temple ceilings for millennia before the Galilean babe saw the
light. What indeed becomes of the grandiose message he brought and the shining light of deific
perfection that he flashed on the world, if both were already here long before he came?
genius the Sages formulated the systems of myths, allegories, fables, parables, numerological
structures and astrological pictographs such as the zodiac and the planispheres or uranographs to
supplement the central ceremonial drama. The whole structure was, however, fabricated with
such esoteric subtlety that, the keys once lost, the system has defied the best of medieval and
modern acumen to recapture its cryptic import. The divinity in man being a portion of the
ineffable glory of the sun, and necessarily therefore typified by it, the great scenic portrayal was built upon the
solar allegory, and the successive phases of man’s divinization were enacted around the solar
year in accordance with the significance of the orb’s monthly and seasonal positions. Ancient
religion was for this reason called solar religion or "sun-worship." Temples were built to the sun
and hymns to the sun written to extol its splendor as typical of man’s inner splendor. The
meaning of the drama thus interwoven at every turn with the movements of the great natural
analogue and type of our divinity, every detail of the ritual would receive an enormous
enhancement of impressiveness and meaning for celebrants, who would be subjected in this way
to the greatly magnified psychic power that was generated by the co-ordination of their highest
spiritual conceptions with the redoubtable truth of nature. Ancient sapiency linked spiritual law
and natural law together in a kinship and correspondence that endowed the former with all the
impregnable certitude of the latter. This link between the two aspects of truth was broken about
the third century, and religion has ever since been crippled by want of a reinforcement so
naturally strong. The modern religious consciousness has to make shift as best it can in almost
total privation of the vital sources of assurance and stability which flowed into the mind from the
correlation of its spiritual tenets with natural truth. Every theological presentment must
necessarily fall upon mental comprehension with a manifold strength if it is immediately seen to
be corroborated by the open facts of nature. Mystical experience will be vastly certified to
intelligence if it can be illuminated by the glow of meaning emanating from natural symbols. A
graphic representation of hidden meaning is always far more effective to stamp the mind with
living images than language of itself can accomplish. Hence the resort to drama in the first place,
and next to a drama that was based on and interwoven with the most obvious of all natural
phenomena--the rise and setting of the sun in the daily round and the larger counterpart of the
same routine in the seasonal cycle. These two daily and annual operations, the alternate victory
and defeat of the sun, typify of course the very gist of the whole human drama, the soul’s descent
into its "death" in mortal body and its recurrent resurrection therefrom. This is the core of the
central theme in all religious scripture. The daily sinking of the sun at eve in earth or ocean, and
its rising again in the east at dawn, or its yearly descent
to the south in the autumn and its succeeding return northward in the spring, all prefigure the
descent of the soul, a unit of God’s own conscious mind, into incarnation in its "night" or
"winter" of "death" and its subsequent resurrection from the tomb of the body. The fact that
ancient insight allied tomb and body in one meaning is astonishingly indicated by the identity of
the Greek words, soma, body and sema, tomb.
In this ceremonial drama the central figure was the sun-god, or Son of God, the Christos,
Messiah. He was likewise the Avatar, the Bodhisattva, the World-Savior. A generic term for him
was The Coming One, or "The Comer" in Egypt. And never until the decadent epoch that fell
like a pall upon early Christianity in the third century was the Messianic Messenger ever thought
of as "coming" in the sense of being born as a person in the world. This is a fact of momentous
significance. The many world saviors antecedent to Jesus were types and not persons born in
history. They were typical characters portraying that spirit of divine charity which should
transform and transfigure human life from the rapacity of the beast to the graciousness of
unselfish love. Its "coming" would be its gradual growth and its mounting sweep in the hearts
and minds of humanity as a whole. It would not be "born" until it came to overt expression in the
active lives of mortals. Its taking root and gradually expanding in world consciousness was
likened unto the planting and flourishing of the tiny mustard seed in the Gospel parable. No
Christos can possibly "come" into the world except it arrive on the waves of charitable impulse
that well up in individual and mass motivation. No Christ can bring godliness in his single
person. No Messiah can impart it to men in the mass by any other method than the transforming
of all hearts through the throb of Christly compassion and the exaltation of all minds into the
likeness of the Christly intelligence.
Treated cursorily already, the argument that for full inspirational suggestiveness humans must
have their faith fortified by the assurance that one man at least actually did attain to Christhood
and manifest the ideal of perfection, must receive somewhat fuller scrutiny. Its force was already
weakened by the consideration that the one character in history alleged to have furnished mortals
this assurance was not a man of our own evolution, and had not attained his divinity over the
same pathway that we must tread, but was an immaculate emissary from
inaccessible heavens, a guest from remote empyreans. It must be accentuated that this situation
introduces into the picture the negative depressing influence of man’s realization of his own
hopeless inferiority, the impossibility of his stepping up beside the Christ. In striking contrast to
this the method adopted by the Sages obviated any such disastrous negativism. It carried with it
the invincible certainty of attainment for every man. There was never a question of achievement,
but only of effort, method and perseverance. The very manner of the presentation of the ideal
figure carried the presupposition of final victory to the aspirant. The type was exhibited on no
other grounds than that it was the picture of what could be achieved by all. Obviously there could
be no sense or reason in holding before all men in all religions the type of what they could not
attain. Attainment was an inevitable implication of the representation from the outset. One man’s
superb attainment could only add evidence to what was already known. But the proclamation
that only one man had ever reached the goal would have thrown dismay into minds long assured
of the high destiny of all. Heraclitus’ discerning observation that "man’s genius is a deity" had
placed a god in potentiality deep within the heart of every life, and the envisaged prospect of
divinization was simply a long growth of latent into active powers and faculties, a process that
could be in no wise affected by the birth of any exceptional personage. That the eventual
deification of all humanity should be considered to depend upon such a birth would have been
received in ancient times with bewilderment and total incomprehension. When the true nature
and terms of the problem of human spiritual advancement were succinctly understood, there was
no way in which the Bethlehem event on the historical plane could be given a place of crucial
importance in the universal task.
It will be seen that the entire argument for the historicity on the grounds of its superior
psychological influence collapses finally under the force of the admission, which must be made
by all parties, that even if Jesus of Nazareth lived and is the Vicar of God on earth, every man
must work out his own salvation on exactly the same terms as though he had not existed! Since
Jesus can not come to any man and take his evolutionary problem off his shoulders and effect his
salvation for him, the only psychological value left to the fact of the historicity is reduced to the
mere force of a sort of hero-worship. The Jesus life and character, his sufferings and virtues, can stimulate devotion and desire to emulate.
His lofty moral preachment sets a norm for ideal human attainment. The very contemplation of
his pure life and radiant divinity inspires an answering nobility in millions of lives.
The power of a noble example, the more especially one enhanced in beauty by centuries of pious
glorification, is not questioned. But the same beauty and indeed the same lofty spiritual
preachment was afforded imitative devotion in the case of the sun-god figure. In the end the sublime figure of the type character was there purely for inspirational incentive, standing free
from any suggestion of vicarious salvation for the adorer. It moved to noble effort, but in not the
least hint did it delude the worshipper with the fatuous notion that any power save his own
consecrated struggle could win his salvation for him. The greater the claimed psychological
power of the historical Jesus over the devotee, the greater the tragedy of delusion thus wrought
upon millions, since this stimulating influence has never been detached from the concomitant
imputations of vicariousness inseparably linked with it in Christian theology. Thus the greater
part of the alleged beneficent force of the living example in the end evaporates into pure delusion
not unattended with disastrous consequences.A few sentences in the preceding chapter alluded to a situation brought to light by the study of
Comparative Religion and Mythology which adds further vast weight to the probability that the
whole enormous body of psychological prestige exerted by the belief in the historical Jesus is
grounded on a chimera and not on a fact. The events in the alleged life of Jesus are pushed closer
and closer to the point of myth by the astounding fact that, as the ever-clearer implications of
these studies show, they are seen to match with nearly perfect fidelity the similar cycles of purely
allegorical "events" in the dramatic and mythic representations of some sixteen or more--indeed
probably fifty or more--earlier type figures recorded in ancient sacred Bibles of the nations. It is
certainly to be regarded as more than passing strange that when the only-begotten Son of God
did descend to earth to implant the genius of the one true religion to save mankind, his life only
copied or matched in great detail the dramatized typal characters or sun-gods of antecedent
religions. And the earlier figures whose careers he repeated were definitely non-historical or at
best legendarily semi-historical, such as Zoroaster, Orpheus and Hermes. The Christians of the third and fourth
centuries were plagued to distraction by the recurrent appearance of evidence that revealed the
disconcerting identity of the Gospel narrative in many places with incidents in the "lives" of
Horus, Izdubar, Mithra, Sabazius, Adonis, Witoba, Hercules, Marduk, Krishna, Buddha and
other divine messengers to early nations. They answered the challenge of this situation with the
desperate allegation that the similarity was the work of the devil! The findings of comparative
religion and mythology constitute at this epoch a far more deadly challenge than they did in the
third century, for there is the massive body of the Egyptian religious literature to increase the
mountain of identities between Christian and antecedent pagan gospels and there is less of
Christian hypnotism to overcome now than at the earlier date. In more formidable form than ever
before the Christian proponents must face the open implications of the query that springs to mind
out of these comparative religion discoveries, why, if the model life had already been proclaimed
by numerous Avatars before Jesus and he therefore had nothing new to add, the need or occasion
for his passionate sacrifice at all? The model he displayed had already been on view in nearly
every ancient nation for centuries! So far from being the climax and grand consummation of a
series of ever fuller revelations, his advent was rather an anti-climax. The enlightened and
emancipated study of comparative religion, vitally reinforced by the discovery of the Rosetta
Stone, bids fair to become a veritable Nemesis to the exorbitant claims of Christianity. It was
these momentous disclosures of identity in the material of Christian and pagan literature that
gave impetus to the present undertaking, provided the data for proof and lent overwhelming
warrant to all the major conclusions to be reached. And it is this body of evidence that sweeps in
with crushing force to devastate every one of the arguments from psychology that have been
considered. In its totality it constitutes a bulwark of strength on the side of the non-historicity
that must be rated virtually inexpugnable.
It can now be stated with little chance of refutation that the Gospel "life" of Jesus had been
written, in substance, for five thousand years before he came. The record is in Egypt. An
Egyptian Jesus--Horus--had raised an Egyptian Lazarus from the dead at an Egyptian Bethany,
with an Egyptian Mary and Martha present, in the scripts of that an-
cient land that were extant at least five thousand years B.C. And a carving in relief, depicting
scenes of angels announcing from the skies to shepherds in the fields a deific advent, of an angel,
Gabriel, foretelling to a virgin that she should be the mother of the Christos, of the nativity in the
cave, and of three sages kneeling in adoration before the infant deity, had been on the walls of
the temple of Luxor at least seventeen hundred years B.C. The Virgin Mother had held the divine
child in her arms in zodiacs on temple ceilings for millennia before the Galilean babe saw the
light. What indeed becomes of the grandiose message he brought and the shining light of deific
perfection that he flashed on the world, if both were already here long before he came?
No comments:
Post a Comment