CASE OF THE MISSING MESSIAH
ALVIN BOYD KUHN, Ph.D.
Electronically typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. I can be contacted at pc93@bellsouth.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 works:
The Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, 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, Through Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at Chambersburg Academy "The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished autobiography, Great Pan Returns.
FOREWORD
In 1944 the author of this essay published his volume "Who Is This King of Glory?" It stood as perhaps the most forthright and uncompromising critique of the fundamental tenets of Christianity that has been put forth up to that time, or even to the present. It assembled and correlated a vast body of documentary and factual data which, if it could not be successfully confuted, rendered the verdict of the non-historicity of the Gospel narrative and its central figure, Jesus of Nazareth, final and no longer controversial. Its thousands of readers are almost unanimous in the conviction that it closed the case beyond debate and on the negative side. In the wide sweep of its searching survey, all that hitherto had, in the general mind of religionists, been assumed to stand as solid historical substantiation of the physical life and exalted preaching of the Nazarene personage disappeared completely from view; or at any rate was seen as incompetent to testify in the category of historical evidence. While on the other side, the more minute the examination of the data adduced, the higher the mountain of evidence piled up in disproof. In fact, when the question was canvassed with the lens of a discerning knowledge of ancient esoteric practice and schematism in the inditing of religious literature, it was found that there was virtually no evidence that could be accredited as factually historical in support of the existence of Jesus. And just as surprisingly it was seen that all the evidence that could rate as historically authentic was marshalled on the contra side. In fine, all the evidence bore heavily against the thesis, and what had been assumed to be evidence for it vanished into the mists of allegory.
This astounding determination of course found little acceptability in orthodox religious ranks. It seemed incredible that all Christian scholarship, all theological erudition, over some eighteen centuries could have been either unconscionably blind or hopelessly stupid, or consciously knavish, that it could either have totally missed the discovery of this glaring error, or could have successfully conspired to suppress the truth and permit the Christian system of beliefs based on the life of this dramatic character dominate the mind of the most progressive half of present humanity for nearly two millennia. There is no question but that this complication in what is undoubtedly the most significant and fateful item in the field of religious hypnotization in the Western segment of humanity is both supremely incredible and totally incomprehensible to the general mind. That one scholar, working almost alone and in obscurity, should now establish beyond dispute (though it will be disputed) what the learned gentry of the world had missed for so many centuries, is likewise a prediction that will not find credence anywhere. This observation, however, need not appear so exceptional a phenomenon, since the discoverer is ever the one who singly has come upon some secret, some great truth, that all the world has missed. It is the presupposition in all discovery.
The debate is one that could hold the fate of our world in the balance. It would be difficult to adduce a general theosophical concept more fateful for the world (or the Occidental half of it) than the idea that man must discount his own powers, indeed surrender them abjectly, and look for his salvation to a power exterior to his own proper endowment, and not integral with that endowment, in all the crises in his history. The question whether man is the architect of his own destiny under universal cosmic law, or must turn to an outside power to plead for his salvation, is ultimately the most crucial
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psychological determinant in the realm of his conscious being. It represents the difference between his acting in the first case resolutely on the highest knowledge and wisdom available to him, and in the second instance, defaulting in any action and cowering in craven spirit at the feet of the postulated saving power, begging for a blessedness he frankly confesses he does not merit.
The eminent psychologist Jung has now elucidated the disastrous psychological determent of holding the Messiah-Savior concept as presented by the religionists. It is the simplest of logical theses, that by as much as the human focuses his interest, his faith, his yearnings, his cries of distress upon a power extraneous to himself, by precisely so much does he commit to atrophy a power that all true religion has predicated as innately potential within himself. And it is as mathematically as precise in its operation as it is logically sound in theory. In proportion as you use a crutch you will lose a muscle.
Probably in the end the division of ancient religion into the two categories of exoteric milk for babes in wisdom and esoteric meat for stronger minds, was fundamentally one that made religion a matter of the science of personal development of the individual’s own inner spiritual capabilities; or made it a cultus of powers localized in gods or deific powers external to man’s own nature. The capable and the instructed were taken into the mysteries of the spiritual kingdom within; the less capable were taught "in parables", that is, regaled with stories that could be apprehended for initial benefit in their bald literal form, so framed as to carry obvious moral lessons. When Christianity made its appeal to the mass of the ignorant populace, it purveyed this sort of teaching, which shortly it permitted to be taken and canonized as the truth of the Gospels. Hence the religion of exoteric teaching that in popular conception reduces always to factual untruth, came to dominate the Christian world, the esoteric sense being sequestered with the few philosophers in their secret studios.
Therefore the question of the historicity of Jesus is for the West the most vital and critical one in the field of religious philosophy. It needs no abstruse psychological dissertation to establish the point that the fateful issues of history now as always hinges upon whether human groups are moved to resolute and forthright action on the knowledge that their problems must be met and solved by the best initiative they are capable of, or whether, though Sons of God in their own right, they can stand inert and helpless, while crying to their supernal deity to save them the trouble of saving themselves.
The cultus of an external divinity binds man’s hands tight in the pleading attitude of prayer. This form of religious expression certifies man’s surrender of his divine potential to an outside power. A digest of the whole argument can be put forth in the sharp and graphic statement that the issues of history depend upon the human choice in religion between our acting upon our own initiative in dependence upon our own powers, and our running in prayer to an overlord of life localized somewhere in the cosmos. The running to God with all our problems in prayer, as Jung says, keeps the potential divinity within ourselves in the weakness of its childhood. By ignoring it we leave it unexercised and undeveloped; we give it no chance to exert its fledgeling energies and thereby grow.
It is true to the last degree of verity that mankind will never rise to the status of conscious lordship over its destiny until it turns from the worship of gods exterior to itself and cultivates the deific forces all too latent within its own nature. Shocking as it is going to be to the pious, but psychologically true past debate, it must be stated that it is precisely this
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hypostatized figure of the historical Jesus that stands between man and his own divinity, and blocks the path of each human to his God. For while he fills all their vision and receives the full meed of their devotion, they, as Jung says, neglect to make real the divine power needing attention and cultivation within themselves. Not until "he" is removed out of the way will Western man come at last to the realization that whatever salvation is available to him will be that released by the birth of the Sun of Righteousness, rising with healing in his wings, from out the depths of his own combined human and divine natures.
An errant religious bent that turned the heart and mind of the West to seek sanctification from a power localized outside the human individual, gave rise to the cult of miracle, evinced strongly in most religions, but excessively in Christianity. Not the power at work in the natural order, but a power able and disposed to manifest supernatural phenomena became the focus of religious unction. It was along this path that religion proceeded from the grounds of a sound and efficacious spiritual science to the overweening eccentricities of a pseudo-magic. In this diversion from true line it transferred the seat of spiritual culture from the inner courts of the human nature and endowment to the outer thrones of a power always dubiously localized. The most succinct form in which this disastrous transfer can be expressed is to say that it caused man to look for "miracle" outside himself and not within himself. From the limited purview of the human it is no overworking of poetic or mystical propensity to aver that life is all miracle. The mortal who does not find ground of eternal and ever-deepening wonder at the stupendous magnitude, order and majesty of nature and the cosmos, is lacking in all the rudiments for any culture. There is no end of marvel as well outside man’s little sphere of personal being as in the depths of his own selfhood. Both should elicit his adoring reverence.
But it is ever the miracle within the human soul that religion, as distinct from secular human physical science, must cultivate and place in living control of life, if human life is to be harmoniously related to the world, to the body, to the orderly course of evolutionary progress. There is not observable any power in the world of physical nature, such as it is asserted the ancient uncivilized tribes of the forest and the sea isles personalized djinns, kobolds, salamanders, pixies, gnomes, dragons, elves and nature sprites, wood nymphs, dryads, oreads and Pan-Gods, that in any direct way co-act with or effect the conscious ordering of the individual human life. The final initiative and the responsible authority in the shaping of our life reside deep within, proceeding from an inner core of consciousness.
Even the most unbending Fundamentalist orthodoxy must see that its basic concept of sin, through which man forfeited his right to any divine consideration and made his salvation dependent only on cosmic "mercy", is itself disqualified dialectically if it is asserted at the same time that the power that alone can save man is a power outside and beyond his own range of control. For sin is not sin if it is not perpetrated in violation of conscious control and responsibility. And responsibility can be charged only against an agency that is in conscious control of the order and process infringed. The error and illegitimacy of the sin theology reside in the fact that it at one and the same time charges the human (and from the very first moment of his creation) with the responsibility of obedience to divine law and amenability to the penalties of its violation, yet refuses to commit into his hands the crucial and final power to save himself from sin. In the same breath it asserts that man will be punished for sin, but that the saving power is not in his hands, but in God’s. Christian theology has ever held this anomalous, this self-conflicting doctrinism, which indeed makes indigestible hash of all its vaunted message
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of salvation. Out of one corner of its mouth it threatens its devotees with the horrendous penalties of sin; yet from the other corner it protests that no power within themselves can save them from sin, that they are in fact doomed to sin, and must cast themselves on the mercy of a power immeasurably beyond their reach, in the hope that their pleadings may chance to be favorably countenanced by an arbitrary and, from the record of his dealings with his people in the Old Testament, a whimsical, capricious, jealous and vengeful Deity.
The inherent absurdity in all this arises, however, from the same stupid blunder, the wretched failure of esoteric genius in the first Christian centuries, the mistaking of outward representations of inner deific powers in man for outer deities themselves, which gave rise to the idea of man’s sinning against a power outside himself.
The ancient exalted arcane science of the soul rested on the principles of knowledge underlying the origin, constitution and destiny of the divine essence of spirit incorporated successively in mortal bodies. It dealt primarily with the interrelations subsisting between the four basic elements of his conscious existence, sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual aspiration, for out of these interrelations came the evolution of his inner bodies making possible the expansion of his conscious being. The deeper intricacies and involvements of this science were the secret teaching of the arcane spiritual brotherhoods, and were perforce confined to men of the highest development.
The point of great moment is that nowhere was there in the manuals of this great science the predication of the need of any item, element or factor of force, in any form or degree essential to the perfect operation of the telestic technique, for which the aspirant had to look outside himself. All the agencies necessary for the normal perfection of the theurgic unfoldment were in man’s own hands, innate elements in his own constitution. Nowhere was there the postulation of the need for the human to reach out beyond his own endowment, to grasp at a power whose extraneous aid would be decisive or in any way crucial for his success. It was the science of man himself, soul and body, and the soul itself being the God-potential lodged within the area of his own range of consciousness, and needing only to be cultivated to its growth to glory. For the injection of any exterior influence to modify or implement the transaction, there was no need, there was indeed no place. The idea of his having to plead with a God without, when he already sheltered the god within, was a development only made disastrously possible by the fatal debacle of sense and sanity that turned sublime esoteric truth into a reason-devastating theology.
In the true soul science there is, therefore, no place for the concept of salvation through any force, potency or agency impingeing upon man from outside, and above all from a radiation engendered by and in the physical body or life of any one man in history. The predication of such a force has afflicted the mass consciousness of the Western world with the most direful of all tragic delusions ever to derange the human reason. Those who contribute to the perpetuation of this delusion do but prolong the crucifixion of the Christos still nailed on the cross of low human grossness, bestiality and ignorance.
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PROLOGUE
The "present writer" has no wish to be considered an iconoclast, much less an "anti-Christ", nor even an anti-Christian. He has no fell purpose to smash sacred images, either physical or mental, that have dominated, whether for good or evil, the minds and hearts of humans.
But--since many of the readers of this essay will be those who look to the stars in the heavens for the rationale of human actions and character traits--he may state that he was born in the last moments of the sun’s occupancy of the sign of Virgo,--September 22--and that the ordinary account of the characteristics of the Virgo native as found in any authentic work on the zodiacal significances, positively reads like a description of his mental traits and qualities. Being a pronounced Virgo, then, he will not shrink from the imputation of being powerfully influenced or motivated by the pronounced flair of the Virgian, the passion to have things as exactly right and true as it is humanly possible to get them. When, of course,, this predilection is not exercised with proper intelligence and balance, the Virgo person can become a meddling, nagging, censorious dog-in-the-manger sort of critic and snarler at everything. But--if the general principles of astrology can be relied upon to point to true intimations--even here he has the ground for presumptive defense against the charge of scurrilous and crass criticism that will seem almost sacrilegious to many, in the odd fact that his birth moment fell almost precisely on the cusp between the sign of the critical mind and the sign of Libra, the Balance. So that it may be presumed that he has the natural proclivity to exercise the function of meticulous logical analysis with due and rightful balance of all factors entering into any problem. Virgo is "ruled" by Mercury, god of the swift and nimble mind, and all in all, this brand of intellectual quality is quite likely to discern alike both the massive aberrancies of common thought (and in certain things the mass-ideation is always wrong!) and the subtle fallacies that persist in traditional obsessions of belief.
The statement in the Upanishads of India referring to the great universal mind-principle of the Atman pervading all things, that "by sharp and subtle intellect is He beheld", must allude to the Mercurial mind. It has unfortunately to be said, with only too much historical testimony to corroborate it, that in particular the religious life of mankind, where the forces of even the most consecrated devotion, faith and loyalty are predominantly in play, has been tragically twisted all awry by lack of the balance that should have been supplied by keen functioning of the intellectual faculty. The sapient Sages who laid down the canons of wisdom for the ancient Egyptians called the Christ-mind, which they prefigured as the seed power of our divine nature implanted in the very flesh of humanity, to germinate, grow, blossom and flower to glorious beauty in the course of evolution, the "Lord of the Balance", a configurated representation of one of the twelve radiations of his power. For his advent and eventually full release of power is to bring "peace" to the chaotic turbulence of the lower sensual, emotional and irrational elements that cause
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the Biblical "tempest" on the sea of human life and which can be subdued to beneficent function by the superior intellectual principle. This is St. Paul’s war of the "law which is in my members" against the law of the mind, and only with the coming in every life of the kingly rulership of the diviner reason over the seven "elementary powers" that generate the "seven deadly sins" will "peace" spread its benign mantle over the confused and disorderly human scene.
The tragedy of the debacle which ensued in that fateful third century and laid its palsy upon the mind and soul of Western man ever since, lies in the fact that the splendor of truth and the beauty and glory of illuminated consciousness that inhered potentially in the creeds, doctrines, rituals and the Scriptures of the ancient world only to be perpetuated in frightful distortion in the Christian upsurge, have been lost or turned into inane senselessness for the millions in the ensuing centuries. The extent of this loss and tragedy is beyond all calculation. The birth of that genius of grace and charity that will well up and set the human heart athrob to the impulses of love and beauty, and which, as old Egypt averred, comes continuously, periodically ever more and more, might have by now been far advanced if stolid ignorance had not held in thrall the surgent forces of the spirit, and turned the brilliant semantic ideographs of divine truth into the absurdities of alleged "history".
The transformation, the transfiguration of man can take place only through the marriage of soul and sense within the inner core of the human consciousness. As the Christian creed--an ancient formulary taken over from old Pagan runes and rituals--so well says, speaking of the descent of the son-units of God-soul into the life of the human body, the Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit in heaven, and born of the Virgin Mary, mother-matter, body, on earth. "Begotten, not created" the creed says; i.e. begotten in heaven "before all worlds", but created on earth, as indeed all things are. They are conceived in mind, then created in matter. Where and where only must it be seen that this father-conception and mother-birthing of the Christ can be consummated? The answer sets irrevocably the seal of truth on every word of this essay: it can be consummated only within the heart, mind and body of every human being on earth individually and consciously.
The idea that it could be accomplished by one-only Son of God, a man not of our human order, vicariously for us all--and we needing only to "believe" this theorization to win its full efficacy for ourselves--must be written down as close to the crowning fatuity of all religious maundering. No god was ever sent to earth to transfigure man by saving him the evolutionary work of transfiguring himself. And no man will be rightfully, happily, efficiently oriented to this task unless and until he knows that within his own mind and in his very body of flesh resides that Christ-child who is in fact his own sonship from his Father. Through that realization, and through it only, can and will his entire dynamic of psychic energy be focused, like the sun’s rays through a lens, upon the seed-power of Christly consciousness and cause it to burst into flame. How sagely the ancient Egyptians spoke of the soul of Christhood coming to earth "to kindle a fire in the underworld".
The ancient Sages and Seers depicted the Christ-nature as a living flame dampened and often almost extinguished by the water of the fleshly corpus, or as a unit of divine soul shut up here in the body as in a prison, grave or tomb. In the Greek language body (soma) and tomb (sema) are the same word. These knowing philosophers represented the soul as a bird in a prison or a cage beating its wings ineffectually against its clammy dungeon walls. How is it to be freed, how is the imprisoned splendor to be released? In the Bible
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allegory it is declared that the soul must convert its gaoler, who with a change of heart will then let it out. This is the task of the outer man, the human, who alone and in the domain of his personal life can liberate the deity whose benignant rays of living love will transfigure him.
The infinite tragedy of the West’s religion is that, by directing the eyes and the devotion of its millions of believers to the image of a carnalized dramatic figure of two thousand years ago, he is all too likely to be missing from his place in their lives, in their hearts and minds.
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THE CASE OF THE MISSING MESSIAH
In the swirl of the confusion still prevalent in human society it is tragically true that the unenlightened human mind conceives and fastens upon its plastic substance images believed to be the shapes of truth, which it worships as idols in its addiction to the propensity to follow hallowed ideals. It turns its ideals into idols. Much is owed in our modern day to the eminent psychologist C. G. Jung for his astute discernments in the consciousness of the human psyche of the presence and dominance of such "images" in the directional life of the world. These type-forms are for the most part the psychic deposit in mass mind of formulated and set immemorial traditions, generally alleged to have been derived from some divine source and in time fixated in tribal or national life by hoary custom. An almost universal legend of the provenance of a body of supernal wisdom vouchsafed to early humanity by beings rated as gods or celestials of superhuman order has prevailed in the consciousness of the ancient world as a whole. The sources of this world-wide persuasion of a divine heritage of human wisdom have been by modern savants consistently attributed to the childish imagination of primitive people, grasping in infantile ignorance at a comprehension or explanation of natural phenomena by anthropomorphic analogies. Thus thunder was conceived to be the roar of God’s angry voice, and lightning the fiery blaze of his wrath. But unless the time called ancient is pushed vastly farther back than the three to five thousand years at which we place it in current supposition, the "primitive" view of the origins of religious customs must be abandoned.
Possibly as much as ten thousand years B.C. there were already extant some of the world’s "sacred Scriptures", and the theoretical characterization of these revered tomes as documents of primitive child-mindedness is rebuffed by their obvious quality of philosophical, spiritual and ethical profundity and sagacity, expressed in the sublimest forms of literary beauty. They have won and held right down to the present the almost universal reverence of the most cultured elements of mankind. Indeed the homage paid to them has passed the bounds of regard for any work of assumedly purely human production and has taken on the psychological character of worship of a thing considered superhuman and hence called divine.
It is extremely likely that the best present sagacity in attempting to determine the origins of mundane culture-systems has not at all rated at its true interpretative value the challenging fact that the races of the earth have with virtual unanimity in past ages considered human life to be overshadowed, and in a more or less overt fashion ruled by the intelligence or intelligences of a world "above" that of the earth. Could human life on the planet have been generated and given initial push to self-dependence by the grades of divine beings standing next above man in the evolutionary hierarchy? In animal orders the young generation is parented and reared through youth by its progenitors, then cast adrift to fend for itself, with little knowledge of its connection with ancestry. Speaking from the large implications of analogy, it could well have been that the race of mortal men was thus fathered by the lower orders of the hierarchies of the gods, given rudimentary codes and formularies of wisdom by them, and then sent out to battle the elements of an evolutionary career
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with their own inherent capabilities. The accredited wise Scriptures were in all likelihood devised by our progenitors of a higher race as moral and spiritual primers for us, their children of a new creative cycle on this planet. Children of God, or of the gods, we are called in those Scriptures. And these Scriptures also refer to themselves as books expressing the diviner wisdom of gods, even hinting at their dictation by gods to "holy men of old", men high enough in culture at any rate to have been able to transcribe their sapient codes.
One of the Chaldean Oracles proclaims, with the human soul as the speaker: "I am a child of earth and the starry skies, but my race is of heaven alone." Since to be here on earth at all the soul must consider itself as the product of both a heavenly unit of spiritual essence and a physical earthly body, it has to include earth in its dual parentage. But since it can belong to no permanent line of being by virtue of its physical body, which disintegrates at death, it must assert that its true racial home is in celestial worlds, where its evolutionary gains in lives in lower worlds are garnered in imperishable "spiritual" bodies, as the ancient wisdom asserts.
SOULS MIGRATE TO EARTH
But, precisely as happens in the case of the individual human child, the youthful race of potential divinities had not at the start developed maturity of either consciousness or knowledge to enable it to utilize the codes of primal wisdom given it by its godly parents, and instead plunged into the adventure of bodily life in nearly complete oblivion of its celestial home ties and in initial incomprehension of the manuals of instruction handed to it by its progenitors. Wayward youth, faced with the enticing delight of bodily existence under its own power, turned at first almost wholly extrovert to enjoy the Lila of conscious life, paying little heed to the astute prescriptions for a well-ordered, restrained philosophical governance of its activities. In the exuberance of sensuous existence and the incitements of the physical procreative function and earthly interests, the young souls, as Plotinus tells us, "swung away as far as they were able", forgetting their origin in the palaces of the cosmic King of Life in worlds above. Like wild youths bent on adventure they plunged headlong into the exercise of their divine prerogative of creation at their own level, being young gods (junior gods, Plato calls them) sent forth from their Father’s house to try their hands at building a world of their own.
Only, said the Demiurgus, or Father-power, you must build your own little world in the image of the one I have created. You must not let errant fancy carry you off into the creation of bizarre worlds irrationally conceived. "See that thou build it after the pattern I have shown thee in the Mount, the pattern of the heavens." If you observe the modes and fashions of the physical universe in which I have sent you to grow into the mastery of life, you will detect the order and frame of the minor universes you are to fabricate.
In his great doctrine of the "oblivion of souls" and the consequent necessity of recovering the lost memory of celestial archetypes--oblivion and then "reminiscence"--Plato has presented the basic paradigm of human knowledge. Man has lost his Paradise and must recover it. However, it is a prime principium of all understanding of this basic element of knowledge that the descending Children of God do not exchange, as it were, the real gold of conscious bliss for the vile dross of earth. They lose nothing that they had ever intrinsically won by their own conscious exertion, which is now and eternally the
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only condition under which power or blessedness can be won. As babes and children of God in the heavenly kingdom, they lived only the dreamy life of yet unconscious felicity, as children do here. Bliss, to be enjoyed in all the fulness and sweetness of ecstatic delight, must have been consciously won in a polarized balance against opposition. The Christ consciousness must have been brought to birth in the soul’s battle against the Satanic tempter and tester. It must undergo on earth the trial by water, air and fire, the four grades of sensible experience. It must come forth tempered to finest mettle from the ordeal in the fiery furnace of human bodily passions, lusts of the flesh and desire and pride of life. Old Egypt’s books speak of the weighing of the soul in the balance of polarized energies here on earth--mistaken for some locale in the post-mortem state--and calls the place of judgment "the lake of flame and the sea of fire."
Thus, through the immaturity of youth and their translation from the unconscious potential of heavenly felicity to the initial stages of conscious existence, the incarnating souls found themselves confronting the world at the beginning of their active life in self-consciousness with no knowledge of the fundamental archai, or fixed principles ordained by their cosmic Father for the course of all conscious life. The pattern to which they would have to conform their creative operations within the sphere of their individual and collective activity, was at the start unknown to them. By virtue of their progenation from their Father and their inheritance of his nature which had been germinally imprinted upon the inner core of their constitution, they carried within themselves the seed potential of all possible knowledge of the pattern to be unfolded. But since this inner core was deeply buried under a series of coarser vestures, which soul had to put on as proper garments to meet the changed conditions of energic life on each lower level in their descent from "pure" being into conditioned modes of lower existence, the clarity of the primordial pattern was obscured to their vision. Greek philosophy in particular and with the clearest voice speaks of this obfuscation of our potentially divine vision by the soul’s descent into the "dark meadow of Ate" and the gloomy realms of a Plutonic underworld, wherein, as in the Proserpina myth, souls have to spend the half of each cycle of existence. The soul wanders long through the dim hall and darksome corridors of this benighted underworld, guided only by the Ariadne’s thread of the inherent instinct for truth, which speaks always more surely as experience brings greater knowledge.
GROPING AMID SHADOWS
A philosophical preamble of this sort has been necessary to clarify at the start the situation in reference to which alone it is possible to understand how and why the codes and majestic formulae of primordial truth, embodied in myth, drama, allegory, symbol, number graph, constellational pictography and finally in the sacred Scriptures, have become distorted in meaning, and from being helpful manuals guiding humanity safely along its evolutionary road, have been corrupted into the most calamitous misconceptions in all the history of human groping for knowledge. And beyond challenge as to its truth there stands in the historical record of our mundane culture the most horrendous of all misconceptions, the sad outcome of a decline of literary genius and philosophical sagacity about the second century of the Christian era, the incredible but actual confusion of the central character representing the potential divinity in our human nature with a supposititious man of flesh, the Christ in one physical body. The central figure of our innate godhood and type of our even-
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tual evolutionary glorification as Christs, had been in all the ancient Mystery cult dramatizations, indeed was never absent from the ritualistic representations, nor was it misconceived in its reference to our own divinity. No one, even the most ignorant, ever mistook it, or "him" to be a historical person. Not until there had fallen on the collective mind of the near-Eastern world that incredible blight of philosophical genius which alone made possible the perpetration of the most fatuous and fatal blunder ever to obsess the human intelligence,--the mistaking of the dramatic-ritualistic figure of our potential Christliness for one man asserted to have lived in the period that was later fixed as the beginning date of recorded historical time.
How the truth of this direful episode in the course of the race’s history is ever to be brought convincingly home to the sober sense of the Western world is a question of the utmost gravity. So great will be the shock to traditional thought, so stern and rebuking will be the blow to our pride of knowledge, so severe the condemnation of our stupidity in our failure to discern the difference between allegory and history, so stinging the realization that the scholars of seventeen centuries could have been duped by a ruse of esoteric methodology employed by the Sages of antiquity, that the task of bringing the academic world to recognize and admit its colossal error will seem hopeless. Human life is largely a conflict between fixated persuasions, indoctrinations, established norms and dispositions of the collective mass-mind, on the one side, and sound reason on the other, and the latter often remains bound in subservience to the sway of the former for ages in spite of obvious considerations to the contrary. Those overriding predilections throttle the rational operations of the mind and hold it in bondage to the power of irrational elements that are fixed in sensual and emotional habitudes, or subject to the sheer automatism of custom. It will seem preposterous that such unconscionable ineptitude as was necessary to originate and then perpetuate so stupendous and tragic a mistake as was that of turning a spiritual principle or grade of consciousness into a man of flesh could have gained the day at any time and have completely subverted the profound spiritual-mystical sense of the Scriptures into ridiculous travesty of truth. That this is what has in fact occurred becomes positively clear and overwhelmingly demonstrated to any mind that will go deeply enough into the extant evidence to see its inevitable truth.
The rebuke to the crass stupidity of so many centuries of theological scholarship, great and incredible as it really is, will be as nothing in comparison with the fatality of the blow which it will administer to the basic tenets of the Christian faith. It will demonstrate that Christianity was originated in ignorance and was exploited and perpetuated by ignorance. A writer of obvious high status, Allan Upward, actually was impelled on the evidence to write that Christianity has the unenviable distinction of being perhaps the only religion that was founded completely on the fraudulent exploitation of false premises. The fine Swedish scholar, Georg Brandes, published a book entitled Jesus a Myth. Some forty years or more ago a coterie of capable investigators, J. M. Robertson, W. B. Smith of Tulane University, Arthur Drews in Germany, Dupuis in France, and others, put out books aiming to present the case for the allegorical interpretation of the Gospels and other Biblical books. The famous work of D. F. Strauss, published in 1835, The Life of Jesus, advanced the same thesis and threw the theological world into a stir of excited controversy. Renan’s equally famous Life of Jesus further embroiled the situation in turmoil. Possibly a hundred scholars of great learning have been led by their studies and researches to put out books questioning and many overtly denying the existence of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Their aggressive essays have carried sufficient weight of data and argument to have elicited books
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from the orthodox ecclesiastical side in efforts at refutation. And in reading these one really begins to be aware of the want of solid evidence, or even of convincing argumentative material to assure us of the historical authenticity of the Gospels. The case against the historical truth of the New Testament grows ever stronger, its defense grows ever less convincing. And in our own day we have a declaration from an authority within the Christian scholastic ranks whose utterance can not fail to command both attention and respect from all parties. Dr. Albert Schweitzer is justly rated as among the most eminent theologians of the Christian Church. His statement is put forth near the end of a work which demonstrates to any reader the stupendous range and thoroughness of its author’s survey of the whole field of literary criticism of the New Testament. Indeed his book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, stands as unquestionably the most searching, as well as the most perspicacious, work ever produced on this vast and complicated subject. We give his declaration for its startling significance and the weight of its incontestable authority. Taken from page 398 of his book, it reads thus:
"The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached
the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon
earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence.
He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism and
clothed by modern theology in a historical garb."
This, then, is the grand upshot of the life study of one of the most consecrated, learned and respected Christian theologians. Yet it will be disregarded in ecclesiastical circles as if it had never been uttered. And the hierarchical power of the Christian Church will continue broadcasting the legend of its origination by the physically born Son of the Creator of the Universe, dispatched to earth in the year 1 A. D.
But beyond cavil the scholar who has presented the most telling body of evidence in the case for the non-historicity of Jesus and the non-historical basis of virtually all Bible books, is one whose monumental writings assemble such a prodigious mass of data of the most overwhelmingly conclusive character that the vested interests of the ecclesiastical world have had to put the stamp of official disapproval and repudiation upon his challenging books. Too dangerous to publicize his data by public refutation, his books have been given the treatment of silence. This scholar is Gerald Massey, and his six great volumes under the titles of The Book of the Beginnings, The Natural Genesis, and, greatest of all, Ancient Egypt, The Light of the World, each work in two volumes. When one goes studiously through these truly revealing tomes, the mass and character of the data presented leave only one conclusion possible: the existence of the Gospel figure of Jesus, considered as a man human born, is not a predication that can be accepted by a rational mind.
Considered from many points of view, these books of Massey are among the most strategically important ever written, since they establish beyond cavil the baselessness, the complete falsity of the claims and basic theses on which the historical edifice of the great Christian religion is grounded.
THE VOICE OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Rated as a minor poet in any history of English literature, Gerald Massey devoted forty years of his life to the study of the Egyptian backgrounds of the
5
Jewish-Christian Scriptures. While never gaining the recognition due him as a great Egyptologist, it is obvious to any open-minded reader that he came many percentage points closer to understanding what the sage tomes of ancient Egyptian religious literature were really talking about than the greatest of the reputed savants in that field. With a mind emancipated by his discoveries from the inveterate persuasion of all previous study that ancient religious documents were childish mythology or crudely reported history, he was the first scholar to pierce through the veils of Egyptian nature symbolism to descry the forms of cosmic truth and spiritual law adumbrated by living naturographs. Finding here the lost keys to recondite significance in constructions that had been mistaken for outlandish history, he was able to redeem the great mass of Egyptian lore from imputed infantilism of primitive thought to the sublimest of esoteric formulations.
The picture of real history portraying the unfoldment of Christianity from antecedent religious and philosophical backgrounds, as it came out in ever clearer outline to his discerning mind, was one of the most thrilling and portentous that it was ever the lot of a scholar to envisage. The Christian hierarchy had for some seventeen centuries cried aloud the legend of the provenance of their religion from the life and teachings of the cosmic Logos, who was declared to have appeared for the first and only time (with hints of a second appearance proclaimed by many groups to be impending in the always immediate future) about the year one of the new era that was later dated from this alleged event. But the English scholar, scanning the great field of ancient literary production, was amazed to discover that virtually the entire body of extant documents in which the tradition of the birth and life of this Logoic personage was recorded, was to be found in the newly recovered and translated literature of old Egypt, dating back to as much as five thousand years B.C. One can imagine the shock and consternation, tempered by the thrill of discovery, experienced by this scholar, as piece by piece, book by book, the volume of literature asserted to have been first written by a half dozen men between the years forty to eighty of this first Christian century turned up under his eye in the vast mass of writing that had lain for some twenty-five centuries buried out of sight in ancient Egyptian tombs, temples and pyramids. We can vividly relive his experience, his amazement, his overwhelming sense of having brought to light a secret that would shatter a tradition that had gripped a third of the world for two millennia, that might shake kings loose from their thrones and overthrow the reign of an ecclesiastical system that had dominated the lives, both personal and political, of some billions of human beings by a baseless fabrication of historical assertion. What a sense of isolation must have been his as he stood in contemplation of the evidence which for the moment he and he alone held in his hands! For one has only to read those massive works of scholarly erudition to realize that at some one moment of his lifetime of research and brooding over the wondrous revelation of Egypt’s forgotten wisdom, Gerald Massey stood face to face with the realization, and with the positive evidence, that it was finally and conclusively impossible that he could be wrong in his deductions. A towering mountain-heap of solid facts had by then crushed out all possibility of his having arrived at an erroneous judgment. The case stood before him clear and indubitable; every item that might still support and save the Christian claims was closed off and ruled out. The whole Christian fortress lay in ruins before him. How was he to tell this story to the Christian world, that would regard it as a scholar’s madness? How could he make the world see it? His heart must have sunk under the recognition that he could never bring other men to see what he had seen so clearly. All, too plain was the fact that the mighty power of an established religious tradition and the terrible grip of a sanctified ecclesiastical system on the stolid mental inertia of the masses under the hypnotic control of a venerated priestcraft,
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all would block the reception of his epochal and revolutionary pronouncement. He would be the great modern Cassandra, doomed to be greeted by dumb unbelief when he announced his world-shaking discovery.
And so it has been. His fearsome apprehensions have been more than fulfilled. For its own very life the entrenched ecclesiastical system had to let his books relapse into desuetude. Yet, as affairs stand in the world today, the only chance for the survival of sane religion may be contingent upon their renaissance.
It has always been that when truth affronts the settled mores or dominant mental idols of the great human masses, it has to stand, as the Christians allege their personal Messiah stood before those who blindly disregarded his message, a helpless Lamb of God led to the sacrifice. Nevertheless it will in time be registered on the tablets of mundane history,--this shame of the failure of a world of potentially great sagacity to sense and profit by the epochal revelations of submerged truth in Gerald Massey’s prodigious labors and brilliant discernments, possibly surpassing for momentous significance the work of any scholar in centuries. Such has ever been the blighting power of indoctrinated religious fixations upon the common human mind. It is nothing to the Church of Christ that this great student of religion (and others in lesser degree) confronted it with a crushing array of incontestable facts, with a mass of documentary evidence tracing ninety percent of all its alleged first-century literature directly back to ancient Egyptian sources. When pietism becomes vested in gold and power and fixed habitudes of belief, an unwelcome and disturbing truth will knock in vain at its temple doors. And so it has been that the invaluable gift of truth and light made by this devotee of conscientious scholarship haunts only the dark recesses of second-hand bookshops and from that obscure academy seeks to spread its hidden radiance of truth out to a few stray researchers, who themselves lack the time, the patience or the insight to rediscover his brilliant legacy.
It is no rebuttal of this estimate of Massey’s greatness and depreciation of the immense value of his contribution, to specify that he committed two blunders, or formulated two misconceptions, in his vast reconstruction of the sagacious ancient Egyptian wisdom. He had gone so incredibly far in his repudiation of Christian theological orthodoxy that he could not dream that his negation of old beliefs had to go still farther to complete overthrow of practically all the fundamentals of Christian dogma. He therefore clung to two determinations of Christian systematism, the first of these being the mistaken meaning of the words "death", "the dead" and "to die"; the second being also the Christian mislocation of the Greek "Hades", the Christian "hell", the Hebrew "Sheol" and the ancient Egyptian "underworld", or "nether earth" of "Amenta". He never quite came to the perception that would have thrilled him all afresh, that this fabled "underworld" of mythology and religious drama was all the time this good earth of ours; and that the "dead" are those souls that inhabit these tombs of a living "death", our familiar physical bodies. (In Greek body is soma and tomb is sema, essentially the same one word, implying that the body is the tomb of the soul incarnating in it). The body is the "grave" of the soul in the ancient philosophical sense that souls descend into mortal bodies and there lie long in a seed-like torpidity--or "death"--until they are resurrected in a new "germination" (as the Egyptians called it) and renewal of growth.
The discovery of the recondite significance of these two basic items of ancient dramatic ritualism was missed by Massey, and is the achievement of
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only very recent studentship. While his apprehension of them would have lifted his books to a still loftier pinnacle of brilliance and lucidity, it is quite true to say that his failure to discern them does not too materially reduce the value of his splendid work. Never, perhaps, can his contribution be surpassed in the service it renders in demonstrating that all the Christian documents asserted to have been written about the hypothecated Jesus personage in the years shortly following his "life" in the first century A.D. were all the while extremely ancient literature of Egyptian religion. If scholarship finds that the "life", the acts, the sayings, the date of personal existence ascribed to a character claimed to have lived in the first century A.D. were all written down in documents of a remote antiquity, there is but one conclusion open to fact. The merit of the demonstration, the proof of this stupendous realization belongs to Gerald Massey above all others, though his work has had a vast supplementation by other writers, notably Godfrey Higgins in his monumental work, The Anacalypsis. If the world was not asleep in a vast hypnotization under the power of a tradition sanctified by time alone, it would recognize and repay its inestimable debt to Massey. It is a felt obligation of the present scribe to emphasize it to all who have a prime concern for truth.
Theologians have gone on for all these centuries speculating, controverting, wrangling over a thousand points of interpretation that arise in the study of the "life" of the predicated Jesus figure in the Gospels, when all the while Massey’s gigantic contribution held the keys to the resolution of every question. His voluminous work supplied a formula, the use of which would quickly have ended every debate. The line of the studious (mostly) German Bible exegetists from Reimarus to Albert Schweitzer in the course of their unwearied and sleuth-minded investigations into the whole body of Bible and even Apocryphal literature, have done a really thorough job of analysis, sifting and comparing of data, weighing fact against fact, canvassing possibilities or probabilities, building or demolishing theses on conjecture, surmise, presumption, straining the imaginative faculty to reconstruct situations outlined or projected by the narrative, hinting at scribal errors or the fraudulent machinations of copyists and redactors in the manipulation or mutilation of Gospel texts, seeking with often remarkable mental ingenuity to introduce rational order and acceptable understanding into the whole of the literary corpus on the basis of which Christianity was erected,--and in the end they virtually one and all confess that the entire predicament remains the more entangled, confusing and insoluble the deeper it is gone into. They find the problem grows ever more complex and indeterminable the more exhaustively it is explored. It ends in a vast mass of pure speculation (as Schweitzer has said) and virtually resolves into a guessing contest, the award of merit, but no decision, going to the cleverest guesser.
The more honest of the scholars admit at the outset that they have no firm ground of historical data to build upon, and that the whole effort must rest on the ingenuity of the speculative mind to discover some principles under which the scant facts of "history" can be subsumed with fair plausibility. Most, if not all, have found the task a hopeless one. A mind of conscientious integrity like Schweitzer’s was forced in the end to throw up the whole matter in despair, declaring that the Jesus personage was a creation of the imagination of theologians. Jesus’ alleged life, its acts and influence, Schweitzer saw all too clearly, were a web spun out of the theological spider’s body. He had the courage to say so. It was the same despairing outcome that led another eminent German exegetist, Baur, to fling out in the height of his mental impasse over the problem the really honest conclusion to which he had been forced:
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"There was no Jesus of Nazareth."
And all this is what needs to be said now, what honesty should have led all investigators to say, and what nothing but a blind stupidity bred by the hallucination of a complete false indoctrination has prevented the thousand of scholars over eighteen centuries of Christian dominance from seeing and proclaiming. It can be said with full truth that every Christian exegetist who set himself the task of writing a "Life of Jesus" or a "Life of Christ" over all these centuries proceeded from and built his work upon the sheer assumption that the Gospels were factual histories written in the first century A.D., and that the historical existence of the man Jesus was a fact established beyond question or debate. Not a single one of them ever questioned his right to speak of this character with the designation of the third personal singular pronoun "he", which of course is applicable legitimately only to a known living person, when as a matter of simple fact, now more and more demonstrable, the existence of the man of flesh to whom the pronoun was made to refer had never been established on grounds of historical factual evidence. None of the host of biographers has ever had the perspicacity to discern that all proper reference to the Christ character and function, whose activity in the life of mortals was the theme of all ancient religious literature, could justifiably only speak of this power with the pronoun "it", or "It," if the capital was needed to carry the deific significance. Never had the mind of one of these writers opened to the discernment of the actual fact that the entire difficulty of the whole exegetical problem sprang from the terrible mistake, perpetrated by an age of ignorance, of mistaking the impersonal divine "It" for the personalized "He".
Massey was perhaps not alone in sensing this mistake, but he stands virtually alone in having buttressed the proof of it with impregnable scholarship in more than sufficient quantity. The full, free and frank threshing out of the vast contribution of his studentship could have led to the final insights that would have provided the only rational and unchallengeable principles of solution. He had discovered the one formula, the one prescription that alone resolves all confusion into clarity, all inconsistency and contradiction into rational agreement, all incomprehension into lucid understanding. And that key datum is the simple fact that the Gospels of the New Testament are not, and never were intended to be, veridical histories of first century events, were never the biographies of a living man, whether divine-human or human-divine, of that first century period; and that the Jesus figure was just the dramatized, ritualized type-character of our divine nature, mistaken after centuries of gross ignorance for a man of flesh.
When the mass mind has been long obsessed by an indoctrinated persuasion in the aura of religious sanctity, it remains impervious to all considerations from the side of reason. Had a stultification of this sort not occluded the mentality of the Western world under the influence of Christianity over the centuries, one item alone must at some time have broken into the perspective of studentship and demonstrated in a startling way the non-historical, the non-biographical character of the Gospel books. The convincing evidentiality of this one item, if sagaciously envisaged, can best be seen in the light of its relation to a supposititious modern eventuality. Let it be supposed that tomorrow’s newspapers should publish the announcement of the discovery in some near-East land of a "fifth Gospel", clearly related to and supporting the four of the New Testament, and apparently genuine and authentic. What would be the value of such a document discovered today? It would arouse the thrilled interest of all the Christian world; it would be held to be of priceless value;
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and it would be studied to the last syllable for additional new light and new clues to the life of Jesus. It would outvalue the Rosetta Stone and would be sequestered in some great museum.
Yet from Irenaeus, first Bishop of the early Christian faith in France, writing as early as the second century A.D. we have the statement that there was a "multitude of Gospels" extant in his day, and not only the four chosen for special reasons to go into the Canon at the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. Some fifteen thereabouts of these have come down to us, but they have been held to be of little consequence, and have been thrust aside as "Apocrypha." These were held in such slight estimation of value that they have been suffered almost to disappear and some such have undoubtedly been lost, the "Gospel of the Egyptians" being one of them. (It may be well to clarify the meaning of this word "Apocrypha". It has come to mean books that were not considered sufficiently in line with orthodox doctrine to be accredited or sponsored by the Church. Its true original meaning was quite different: it designated books that portrayed the profoundest esoteric truth in forms too recondite for the masses and that consequently were designedly held back from the people at large).
This situation, on reflection, presents such anomalies as to provoke in any thinking mind a critical observation that is of potential menace to all Christian claims based on the Gospels as reputed histories,--and all Christian claims are so based. It at once inspires the serious question, why, out of a large number of Gospels, only four were considered to tell the real story of the Savior’s life and were chosen for canonization, while the others were disregarded as not even worth saving. The answer is obvious and it is full of grave portent for the Christian claims as to the divine origin of the faith. For it proclaims in the most voluble, if tacit terms, that "Gospels" in those early centuries were not considered to be the biographies of one, or of any, living earthly person, but were held as the literary forms of a universal dramatical representation of the experience of our divine souls in the mortal body here on earth, ritualistic Mystery scenarios of mystic imagery and poetic pageantry, depicting the descent of our units of divine Sonship into the dark underworld of physical existence, their immersion in the deep dungeon, pit, grave and tomb of the fleshly body, their temptation, trial, suffering and "death" on the cross of matter’s opposition to spirit, and their eventual purgation, glorification (transfiguration), resurrection out of these bodily "graves" and ascension to their Father, who in the first place sent them forth to win the crown of conscious immortal life in their own right.
The "multitudes of Gospels" afloat in the world of the near-East in Irenaeus’ day were certainly not supposed to be the factual chronicle of the life of the Galilean peasant-God, or they would have been treasured in every last word and verse. And reflection brings us face to face with the next item that logically emerges from this discernment, the fact that on every open presumption in the case, the four which received the vote of certification for the Christian Bible were picked for the reason that in them the allegorical character of the dramatization was less openly, less patently discernible as it was in most of the others, being presented in a form which simulated a historical narrative. When it is remembered, or at any rate once succinctly determined as fact, that the very methodology of ancient religious writing of "holy Scriptures" employed the aid of semantic devices, nature symbolism (as in the New Testament parables), ingenious mythicism, adroit number graphologies (as three, seven, twelve and forty), and in some instances concealed the profoundest truths under the guise of legends, fables and paralogues, in short
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aimed to depict the deepest and most occult recognitions of spiritual truth and the realities of a higher conscious exaltation of our human nature, all under the construction of a human narrative, which also was then enacted either as a mystery play or as ritual, then and only then will the stupefied Christian mentality awaken from its childish enchantment to recognize that the Gospels are not histories of first century people and their actions. They will realize, as Massey so "massively" proves, republications, rescripts, reeditings of clusters of very ancient documents of wholly allegorical-ritual character, with the scenes and actors standing as the several type-models of the divine-human elements in the constitution of nature. For this determination, which many have often, but never with adequate evidence, surmised, Massey has assembled his gigantic volumes of indefeasible proof. He thereby merits almost the rating of potential savior and redeemer of the Western mind from an aeonial obsession of error which has in fact derationalized its intellectual sanity.
WISDOM HIDDEN IN A MYSTERY
In and under the lethal power of the mental hypnotization of the West by the historical interpretation of the Gospels, even the clearest statements, not to mention the covert, but plain hints at their allegorical character found in the Scriptures themselves, have signally failed to open blind mental eyes to the representative methodology of the ancient writings. In his Epistle to the Galatians (Chap. 4), St. Paul declares outright that the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar-Isaac-Ishmael story in the Old Testament "is an allegory". In Revelation (11:8) the mystic seer makes the staggering statement that "our Lord" "was crucified" in a "city spiritually called Sodom and Egypt", thus, if true, overtly contradicting the whole narrative of the trial and crucifixion of the personal Jesus in Jerusalem. In II Timothy (2:18) St. Paul states that the brethren should "shun profane and vain babblings" of such false teachers as Hymenaeus and Philetus, "who, concerning the truth have erred, saying the resurrection is past already," when, according to the very corner-stone assertion of the Christian faith, who at another place says that the whole Christian System of belief is vain and empty "if Christ be not risen," would write to the brethren warning them to give no heed to vain babblers who claim that the resurrection has already occurred and is now a past event! Likewise can we look to them to explain why the "beloved disciple" John, writing on the isle of Patmos (as alleged) in his age, should so far have forgotten the events of Passion Week, in which he had himself participated as the dearest friend of the crucified Galilean, as to have written that our Lord was not crucified in Jerusalem, but in a city named Sodom and Egypt, and a city to be thought of only "spiritually",--another translation giving it as "mystically"? Only rarely does any exegetist venture to glance, and then only tangentially, at such verses in their own Christian Scriptures. Never do they sense or face the patent implications as verifying a non-historical rendering of the writings. However, they display shamelessly their duplicity, when confronted with situations in which a historical literalness is too egregiously absurd, or involves elements of flat self-contradiction, by taking refuge from the obvious untenability of their position in recourse to admitted allegory. Yet the claims of allegory are denied when it seems possible to avoid the admission. Had they scanned the ancient field as thoroughly as Massey has done, they would have learned that in the remote time when spiritual Scriptures were conceived
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and put in literary form, allegory, along with myth, drama and ritual devices, was the method universally employed by the "inspired" originators of these venerable tomes of a transcendent wisdom and knowledge.
Writers among the ancient learned rabbins of Jewry state the case for the esoteric nature of Scriptural compositions when they specify three distinct levels at which the sacred graphs may be read, roughly described as the physical, mental and the anagogical (highest mystical), and that he who reads them only literally and factually is of all men the greatest "fool and simpleton". Only such men, they assert, attempt stupidly to read them thus. It is clear that the refusal of the Jewish party to go along with the early Christian sweep toward the new religion based on the "carnalized" Christ (as Massy calls it) was simply due to their knowledge that these misguided ignorant people were taking their venerated Scriptures wrongly by reading them literally. The Jewish haggada, the halaka, mishna and gemara, the Talmud and the Torah, were never taken historically until ignorance in time overtook the Jewish mentality as it had the Christian. The Encyclopedia Britannica in its article on the Essenes says of them that "they preserved in their libraries the writings of the ancients and read them with great reverence, but not without an allegorical interpretation." This is a tremendously significant datum, the importance of which is going to loom larger on the horizon of Scriptural science, more particularly perhaps as the consequence of an amazing new discovery of ancient documents which may vindicate the Essene approach to Biblical literature.
The academic world of the West is at this moment agog with interest both expressed and suppressed over the astounding discoveries of obviously pre-Christian documents running into the hundreds in caves some short distance back from the waters of the Dead Sea in Jordania. Through this discovery, the result of a Bedouin shepherd boy’s fortuitous impulse to toss a stone into the mouth of a cave near which one of his goats had wandered, we now actually have in our possession the great bulk of one at least of those Essene libraries. The books are in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic and Iranian. All that is wanting in our ability to turn these almost incredible discoveries to the fullest profit for our enlightenment is our willingness, or our genius, to read these hoary documents "not without an allegorical interpretation". (The books already put out by the most eminent scholars investigating the scrolls stand as a sad attestation of their blindness to the allegorical method. If this does not give way to a more esoteric conception of ancient sacred writing, we may lose the entire value of the sensational discovery.) But the scrolls at any rate introduce a totally new force of evidence that holds the possibility of compelling a most radical revision of the postulated foundations of Christianity. As one scholar expresses it, the appearance from out the remote past of these antique documents carries with it the potentiality not only of enforcing a great revolution in the traditional assumptions of Christianity, "but a whole torrent of revolutions".
There is not space here to enter into any comprehensive dissertation on these remarkable finds, but a summary of the stronger implications in the case might be condensed in the general statement that the books found in the great jars in the Dead Sea caves add close to overpowering testimony to the thesis that Christianity owes less and less to occurrences allegedly taking place in the early part of the first Christian century, and more and more to literary units that were extant certainly antecedent to "the time of Christ". If one might seize upon the phrase just used to present the new situation epigrammatically, it might be said that if the first thirty-three years of the first
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century A.D. may be legitimately dubbed the "time of Christ", certainly the period reaching back as far as the third century B.C. might just as justifiably be termed the "time of the Christos".
Fully equal in calamitous consequences for world religion with the transposition of the pronoun "It" to the pronoun "He," was the similar transposition of meaning from the prior use of the Greek term Christos (rather always ho Christos, the Christos) over to the Anglicized "Christ". For the shift of terms eventuated ultimately in a shift of the meaning, with practically the fate of millions of Europe’s best people determined by the issue, from the Christos as a spiritually immanent principle of divine consciousness germinating in the hearts and minds of all humanity, over to "Christ", the man of Galilee. The first meaning sanified, rationalized and exalted all human understanding of the significance and value of our earthly life, as the nursery bed of an experience that would birth the Christ(os) in all mankind; the second demeaned, derationalized and depressed all such human conceptions by depriving all humanity save one lone individual of the divine potential. For the exaltation and apotheosization of one solitary man to cosmic grandeur and exclusive Godhood inevitably reduced all others to spiritual poverty. His exaltation to celestial status and unique relation to the Father debased all other humans, for none could rise to stand beside the solitary paragon. The wretchedly bungled translation of the Greek monogenes as "only-begotten", in reference to the Christos principle, became, when that immanent principle was transmogrified into the carnalized man of Judea, the bond of a mental hypnotization that crucified all afresh the divine initiative and prerogative of man’s inalienable intellectual genius.
The transplantation of the meaning from an immanent Principle (fully deserving the capital P) to a man of flesh is the nub and core of the history of Western religion for the centuries since the third. That it has eluded the discernment of the whole of Christian studentship until Massey’s eye caught it, is a story of incredible opacity of intellectual vision that has now to be told. Quite independently of Massey’s illuminating revelation, however, and in this case without the same profound support of Biblical research and exegesis, the same great fact has been brought to light through purely psychological insight by our age’s most eminent psychoanalyst, the now venerable Carl G. Jung, of Zurich, Switzerland. His statements lifting the veil of misguided pietism from off the face of Christian misconception and exposing the psychiatric weakness of the orthodox Jesus-of-Nazareth thesis, are set forth in several of his most recent books. One briefer excerpt from these states the matter trenchantly and can be cited as the gist of the discernment:
"The Imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) will forever have this disadvantage;
we worship a man as a divine model, embodying the deepest meaning of life, and
then out of sheer imitation we forget to make real the profound meaning present in
ourselves.
"If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he
leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the
other hand, that God is a mighty activity within my own soul, at once I must
concern myself with him."
Here is the heart, the gist and digest of what might be called the psychology of the whole religious history of the West since the Christian movement swept over its terrain. The Pagan world was motivated religiously by the spirit of Pantheism or Deism, which through common stolidity of the masses became warped badly into forms of animism and undue veneration of symbolic images,
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approaching fetishism in the crudest tribal civilizations. "By sharp and subtle intellect is He beheld," avers a Hindu Upanishad. And where intellect is not sharp and subtle--unfortunately this condition is all too ubiquitous--the popular mind shifts meanings always from a true inner or esoteric form of apprehension and experience out to the more objective periphery of sensual interpretation and produces the grossly unspiritual exoteric versions. Ancient theological sagacity distinguished between the two forms or levels of human recognitions of truth, so that the more capable initiators of religious systems organized religious teachings in two modes of presentation, namely the Greater and the Lesser Mysteries. Paul distinguishes the "milk for babes" from the "meat for strong men" in mental capability.
For a brief first epoch of its existence even Christianity had its inner and its outer schools, and kept even such a document as the creed in secrecy from the laity for the first centuries. Later, as is so dramatically stated by the Theosophical scholar, G. R. S. Mead, the whole mass of the plebeian population that (largely from the hope of economic and political deliverance from the oppression of Rome) had flocked into the Christian movement, overwhelmed the minority esoteric influence in the Church, broke open all the spiritual treasure-chests of occult teaching and scattered their sacred revelations abroad to the multitude, which, true to the Biblical allegory, became the swine that trampled the precious pearls of wisdom in the mire of ignorant fanaticism. The decay of philosophical insight that the Periclean Age of Greece had sharpened to such acuity and subtlety had progressed downward to such abject incomprehension of the allegorical representations of high mystical truth by the time of the third century A.D., that the few upholders and transmitters of the occult hierarchical teachings in the early Church could no longer hold ground against the pressure of exoteric unintelligence, and so it came about that the Christian movement was torn completely away from its original rootage in Pagan esotericism, and was swept far out on the sea of crude popular and always ignorant misinterpretation of august antique documents.
This, in fine, stands as the greatest cultural catastrophe in world history. Its incidence virtually blinded all later Christian view and negatived all possibility of discerning the primal spiritual verity of the Scriptural constructions. For it achieved the fatal goal of focusing all spiritual and psychological insight upon the one primary "Exhibit A" of the Christian system, the man of Galilee, as the locus of all value in the Christian life. With its gaze centered completely on him, the institution of the Christian faith became blinded, like a horse with blinkers, to the presence and blessing of deity around it on every side, and particularly within the individual himself. Jesus, so to say, blocked out of sight, hid from view, the occult truth of the Christos power in common man; he obstructed all view of the inner world, since to ignorance any idol of physical form can occlude all vision of the noumenal abstraction which it may legitimately be intended to depict. So it has come about, as Jung sees so clearly now, that when Christianity condensed all deity in the Carpenter-paragon of divine virtue, it destroyed its chance to develop its keener vision of the Christos immanence.
A GHOSTLY VOICE FROM THE PAST
Prof. Edmund Wilson, brilliant scholar and author of one of the books dealing with the Dead Sea Scrolls, notes with keen sense of its significance the reluctance of all the prominent religious parties, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, to face up to the possible implications of these new-found antique
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documents, and to admit the ostensible evidence of their age. All are in fact trembling with fear of the outcome of the impact of these books on their traditional basic claims. Having a quite realistic sense of the unsubstantial historical foundations of their systems of faith, they stand in fear of such documents, because the very dating of their existence throws a potential monkey-wrench of veridical historical fact into the fragile machinery of their almost wholly supposititious origination. Prof. Wilson analyzes the substance of their fears in saying that "these new documents have thus loomed as a menace to a variety of rooted assumptions, from matters of tradition and dogma to hypotheses that are exploits of scholarship." "One feels," he says again, "a certain nervousness, a reluctance to take hold of the subject and to place it in historical perspective." The Jewish side is afraid, he intimates, that the books will impair the authority of the Masoretic text, which dates from as late as the ninth century A.D., and would not welcome the appearance of evidence that the "religion of Jesus" could have grown in a natural way out of certain trends and "pressures" in Judaism itself.
On its side the Christian wing fears "that the uniqueness of Christ is at stake," quoting a Dr. Brownlee. The essence of this concern is very simply the dread that it may now be demonstrable that Christianity arose out of the development of trends having their motivating root causes in actual historical and quite human situations in the realms of both outward physical conditions and inward esoteric philosophies, without the need of assuming the miracle of a special gratuitous and magnanimous act of God to implement the salvation of the human race in that particular epoch. In short the menace and the alarm grow in face of the possible outcome of the testimony the books will present to prove that the entire context of the Gospels, on which documents alone Christianity stands--or falls--may be found traceable to extant antecedent literature of Judaic or Egyptian origin. What a horrendous and devastating denouement it would be if these documents establish beyond dispute that Christianity can be completely accounted for in every item, aspect and feature of its composition without the presence or the contribution or the driving incentive furnished by the alleged only-begotten Son of God! How shattering to all Christian assumption it would be if it can now be demonstrated that the religion this Son of God is claimed to have founded on a completely new revelation of truth unknown before, probably drew its every fundamental tenet, doctrine and rite from a religious culture immediately antecedent and environmental to it! How staggering the blow it must receive when every "new truth" he is claimed to have uttered as unique wisdom from the skies, every new principle of ethic and maxim of mystic power he is declared to have enunciated as the new dispensation to supplant the old order of evil for evil, is found to have been recited in the Mystery dramas by the character representing the Sun-God Messiah in many lands centuries ahead of him! And how inexplicable the stunning realization that if he was the immaculately born and only Son of the cosmic God, when he did come to earth to lift the "curse" off humanity’s destiny, and to inject a new evolutionary force into the aura of the earth to inoculate the lower nature of man with a sanctifying healing potency, the best literary tack he could think of, the highest eloquence he could command, was to repeat the already extant verses of antique rituals and the dramatic speeches of figures in the ancient Mystery plays which had been recited from immemorial antiquity in Egypt and other lands!
The Essene library books are now available to clinch the proof of many a surmise, many a conviction that has taken hold of the intelligence of more than one honest scholar, that Christianity owes nothing to special divine events of the first thirty-three years of the "Christian" era, and that it owes
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everything to a natural development, under the particular circumstances prevailing at that epoch in the religious situation. In fine, they now stand at hand with possibly inexpugnable evidence that Christianity was not a product of a unique missionary effort of God’s only Son on this earth, but arose out of forces extant in the religious world of that time. They are ready to establish the fact that, not only was his presence and his message not necessary for the launching of the "first true religion"; they were not even essential to the event. It is clear that this religion could and would have been what it has become, as well without him as with him. So far from being the creator of this religion, its formulator and promulgator, it could have, and with practical certainty did, come forth without him.
It is a world-shaking revelation the Dead Sea Scrolls promise to bring to light. Yet it will merely add corroboration to what Gerald Massey has already revealed. The difference is that the work of Massey can be ignored, slighted, misrepresented and kept from the concentrated focus of general attention, and so suppressed or committed to desuetude. Not so the new-found Essene library. Scholarship is so alerted en masse to the implications of the new study that they will not be able to be concealed. (This is not to say that the parties menaced by the texts of the old books will not be found resorting to all subtle measures either to destroy actual portions of the scrolls or to twist the translations, or otherwise evade the issues of an honest scrutiny. This is to be expected, as past history confirms its likelihood).
The eye of scholarship is eagerly scanning the Essene scrolls as they are read for mention of the man Jesus. The presence or absence of his name in the books is a point about which many questions and decisions would center. If their dating is accepted as of the last centuries B.C., there would be no expectation of finding him mentioned, and his non-appearance in the volumes would constitute no argument against his existence in the first century A.D. Naturally the life of a person is hardly expected to appear in histories written before his time. (Yet this astounding phenomena is precisely what Massey has proved to be the case with the Jesus Character,--his words and deeds are actually found in the oldest Egyptian books long antedating his day). But much speculation is already being ventured as to the relevance of certain characters found in the Old Testament books, such as the "Suffering Servant" of 53 Isaiah, and similar figures which are claimed to be the prophetic prototype of Jesus, who was to be their fulfillment in history. All this leads into abstruse and involved problems with which scholarship will have to wrestle long and in the main fruitlessly.
A frank discussion of the great question of the actual existence of Jesus of Nazareth would have to handle the case in its large aspects so as to meet and counter the claims and postulations of the whole Christian theology and Christian Biblical exegesis, Old and New Testaments alike. A critique of the subject, however, would have to resort to some quite exceptional considerations if it is to take into account and meet certain points of view advanced by that special segment of religious study which might be called the esoteric or occult view. Cult groups such as Rosicrucians, Theosophists, Anthroposophists and others more or less imbued with the same basic philosophy, approach the question of the historical Christ from the background of certain premises of understanding or of ancient teaching which condition their quest of a proper answer in specific ways that need to be scrutinized. Although this perspective is different from that of Christian orthodoxy, it is to be feared that it, too, has involved itself in certain anomalous and untenable commitments and conclusions, and needs drastic reconsideration.
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CRITIQUE OF THE ESOTERIC VIEW
This view, in the main, is not committed to a completely historical interpretation of the Scriptures, as is orthodoxy. But, on the other hand, neither is it completely assured of the allegorical nature of their composition. Its position is thus a sort of compromise between the historical and the allegorical methodology. And it is this indecisiveness that puts its exegetical theses and conclusions in jeopardy of both inconsistency and illogicality.
While the orthodox view holds that the Old Testament recites ancient Jewish history and the New gives early Christian history, there has always been a murmur of dissenting opinion from a minority line of scholars who claim that the Bible is only properly read as allegory. This dissent has waxed strong enough at times to draw rebuttal from the ecclesiastical side. Strauss’ famous Life of Jesus in 1835 threw so much consternation into the ranks of the churchly forces because he put forth a vigorous case for the allegorical character of the sacred literature. Orthodoxy has been able to fight off the attack from this angle; or at any rate it pursues its even course and maintains its historical position mainly by ignoring the proddings of the allegorists. The latter have never been able to marshal convincing force behind their contention, because they have, until now, lacked the keys of philosophical and theological exegesis by which they could have released the full power and weight of their assault. Those decisive keys were lying rusting in the tombs and temples of old Egypt for two and a half millennia. But now with Massey’s prodigious clarification and the correction of his two pardonable oversights referring to the "deadness of the soul in the body, and not the demise of the body itself"--those keys are now refurbished for use in opening the doors to admit into the dark labyrinth of the Bible’s cryptic signification the full light of clear understanding. With the application of these keys to the present Jewish-Christian Bible, to the Apocrypha and to the now recovered books of the Essene monasteries, a new day of rational religion is about to dawn upon the world.
Esotericism, too, in much the same way, but considerably less disastrously, is, like orthodoxy, hung up midway between the history and the allegory of Scriptures. It has to a great extent been pushed into this anomalous position by the writings of H. P. Blavatsky, founder of the modern movement to revive the ancient theosophical philosophy. She has with apparent full commitment declared for the allegorical rendering of the Bibles, and she has even gone some distance into the province of their reinterpretation on the allegorical basis. Yet she speaks of the "time of Moses", when, if the Old Testament stories are allegories, there could have been no Moses as a man. Likewise she compromises, though still diverging in ways from the orthodox view, on the historicity of a Jesus personage. Stating at one place (The Esoteric Character of the Gospels, p. 2) that "Christ, the true esoteric Saviour, is no man, but the divine principle in all humanity", she elsewhere posits the historical existence of a Judean Adept, of the Jesus name, and rates him among the minor Boddhisatvas, or at any rate a human Master spiritually evolved. Theosophical leaders, and in their wake the Theosophical membership (likewise the Rosicrucian and Anthroposophical bodies and other esotericists) have followed this presentation in the large. So that the general consensus of the so-called occult religions must be said to hold a divided opinion on the subject, maintaining that the Scriptures are in their literary form allegorical productions, yet rest on at least a basis of historical fact.
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How much of the narrative is history and how much is allegory thus becomes the nub of the whole question. But little do the esotericists seem to realize that the entire power, utility and influence of the Bibles as moral and spiritual guides hinge upon our having some dependable determinations resting upon specific data in the case. The matter indeed stands much as the American nation stood when Lincoln declared that it could not exist half slave and half free; the Theosophical conception of the deity that is dramatized in every Bible likewise can not exist half subjective and half objective in human consciousness. Ambiguity impairs the dynamic potential of a moral-spiritual system.
And, after all, the point at issue is not one that can support a divided opinion. Some questions can have a choice of alternative, yet tenable solutions. Not this one. The matter of the existence or non-existence of a certain man in human history is not dual in nature. Either Jesus, the Gospel Figure, was a person in human body, or he was not. "He" can not be both a man and a purely typal character in a literary production. Oddly enough, religious opinion, both orthodox and occult, maintains the singular position that "he" was both these. There seems to be no difficulty in either camp of accepting "him" in the role of our divine model, the dramatic representation of the god-nature in our constitution. But, the claim is, "he" was this living divine model in a fleshly body, born in Palestine about the year 1 A.D., and ostensibly the carpenter in the Gospels. It is stoutly maintained that nothing less than the embodiment of the divinity in an actual human personality could carry dynamic effectiveness for the uplift of the world. Thus esoteric philosophy has constituted "him" both the typal dramatization and the living embodiment of our divinity. Christianity declared "him" to be the only mortal ever to embody this divinity; esotericism does not assent to this exclusive limitation of the Christ power which is to deify all men. Christianity grounds its claim to being the world’s supreme religion of dynamic efficacy on the thesis that it alone presents to the world this one and only divine model in our own human form. It asserts that no model of our perfection but a living one could exert saving power in our lives.
Precisely at this point and directly on it, the ancient philosophical Pagan and the Christian worlds differ and diverge. It is of the utmost momentousness that the issue here outlined and at stake be delineated and envisaged with the sharpest clarity. Be it stated, then, that never had there been a time in at least some thousands of years immediately prior to the "time of Christ" in which the great mystico-spiritual religions did not present to their millions of votaries the dramatic figure of our immanent potential of sonship of God. Never--contrary to all ignorant Christian assertion--had the precise model, type and picture of our inner divinity been absent from religious ritual and worship, or wanting in doctrinal formulations. The Sages of old, men of the stature of those who structuralized the ancient systems of theology in the Scriptures, had been at the utmost pains in the exercise of a veritable superhuman dramatic genius to put into every myth, every apologue, every rite, ceremony and stage drama the characteristics, the nature and the experience of the divine segment of God’s own potential glory that he had implanted as seed in the bodies of the superior animal races, to be his own children and eventually gods in their right. "Ye shall be as gods," he assured them.
Concerned the ancient seers and "prophets" were, then, that no man seeking knowledge of his nature and destiny should miss it if he was earnest enough to knock at the doors of the Mystery Brotherhoods, or enter the cult associations that were functioning in the various Near-East lands. These
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abounded in associations of the kind, the just-discovered Essenes being among the best of them. The list of such spiritual enterprises runs into scores, from distinctly ritualistic orders to schools and academies of philosophical bent. There were the Orphic Mysteries, the Eleusinian, the Dionysian Mysteries, the Mithraic, the Manichaean, the cults of Osiris, Isis, Serapis in Egypt, of Sabazius, Atis, Cybele, Adonis, Zagreus in the Syrian world, of Ishtar (to whom even Solomon built a temple), Marduk (Ishtar and Marduk becoming Esther and Mordecai in the Hebrew rendering) in Judea; the schools of Pythagoras, Plato, Mandaism and Therapeutism of varied orders, the outstanding colonies of the Essenes, whose libraries have now tumbled down out of antiquity upon our very heads. Search deeply enough into the profundities of the teachings and ceremonials of these groups and one will find at the heart of all of them the glorified type-figure of our divinity-to-be. Utterly a base and baseless canard it is, then, that the Christians bandy about, of mankind’s having had no ensampler or true picture of its divinity until God awoke to the needs of his world about the year 1 A.D. and sent his only Son to put on exhibit for the first time a model of our perfected life.
Ah but,--cry the orthodox--these were only images, lifeless representations, powerless to inspire mortal men to strive for the attainment of the virtues of the living Christ. Jesus showed us by his life in the flesh how our path to divinity was to be trod. His life is true, it is realistic, it is actual; it generates our love, our loyalty, our worship, our yearning to measure up to the beautiful ideal. And, be it succinctly stated, in this express sentiment rests all the claim that the Christian faith advances to elicit the devotion of the world to its tenets. This is, in fact, its one sole point of appeal sharply different from those of other religions. It alone possesses and offers to mankind the historical Son of God.
How will the cult of the non-historical Jesus meet this claim and this asserted postulate of Jesus’ existence? The Pagan world antecedent to the year 33 A.D. of course, can have no voice in the debate, because the subject of the debate, either historically real or not, had not then come to earth. The question is no question, has no pertinence, at least until after the first claims of a nascent Christianity came to expression. And these claims were first heard only after about the second century A.D.
THE COMING OF MESSIAH
It may be a fairly sobering consideration for religionists of all segments of Christianity that, although the ancient world had for ages predicted and anticipated the advent of Messiah--it was indeed the main element in a universal religious doctrinism, veritably the hope of the world--it never took the form of a belief of its fulfillment in the birth of a human babe from mortal mother until well onto three centuries after the alleged date of the Jesus birth in "Bethlehem". (Bethlehem is, at any rate, as the "house of bread", a figurative designation of the human body, in which of course the divine "babe" of our infant divinity must have its birth--where else?). When one wonders, will the religious mentality be brought to see the telltale significance of the fact that not until the grossest ignorance had overridden the surviving esotericism in the early Christian movement was the advent of the Messiah traduced into the terms of a human birth?
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Messiah was to come; yes, never was the idea absent from ancient expectation. But never until a decadent third century of Christian fanaticism had stultified the mass mind of the Judean world was Messiah’s appearance expected in the form of a mortal babe. Many myths, legends, the occult tradition portrayed under varied but appropriate forms of imagery the birth of the Christos in a stable or a cave, amidst the animal orders, the child of virgin matter (mother, mater, Mary). But it remained for purblind exoteric misconception from about the third century to supplant the spiritual Christos, as an inner light coming to its shining in all humanity, with the human babe in the Bethlehem cowstall. It was only the abject default of ordinary intelligence in handling the old books of occult truth that precipitated the catastrophe, that fatal blunder of taking beautiful poetry-drama for eccentric actual occurrences. It gives us an idea of the deplorable depths to which general philosophical discernment had sunk some four hundred years after its peak of glorious flowering in Plato’s day. As long as the capable genius of Pagan philosophy prevailed and dominated the general consciousness, there was never a thought that the Messianic advent would be historicized in the person of a son of man, or indeed of its occurring as an overt event at any specific time. The sagacious Egyptians always spoke of it as "ever coming", "coming continuously and periodically", "coming daily", "coming each year", referring of course to the gradual evolution of the Christ consciousness in the minds and hearts of all mankind. So it is quite the truth to assert--and history supports it--that the particular elements of belief which gave birth to Christianity were a rank growth out of the soil of ignorance.
Christianity challenges the world since the third century at least to accept its claims as to the existence of this unique historical personage, the carpenter of Galilee. And it bases its egregious claims to being the one true and dynamic religion in the world because it injects this personage, as God’s only Son, into the stream of history. Does the non-Christian world have an adequate rebuttal to the Christian argument for the unique psychological power of this personalized God in our human life? On a surface view the Christian asseveration that Jesus as a living embodiment of our divinity exerts a psychological dynamism for the exaltation of human life that no merely dramatic model could ever do is a strong one; it has won the assent of the millions of Christian followers over these centuries. It has seemed reasonable to their grade of intelligence. Can the Pagan position be supported which, in lack of any such living incarnation of God in the flesh, asserted that the dramatic but non-living example of our divine nature was as efficacious for motivating the divine aspirations of humanity as the life of any man could be? The Pagan philosophical answer to the question would have had to be a positive "yes", for its answer was formulated before "Jesus" had become an element in the debate, before there was any debate about it. And its answer was as good after the alleged "life" of the Jesus personage as before it.
If the redemption of humanity from animal grossness to divine graciousness was in any degree contingent upon the human birth of a babe in Judea in the year 1 A.D., there is no need, no warrant, no utility in religion as a science of soul development implemented by mankind itself. For this throws the redeeming force outside man’s initiative, places it beyond his control, except in the narrow and inadequate sense that he must "accept" it. If the salvation of the race was to be effectuated by one personal human, all the inner self-initiated resources of the mind and heart of all humanity would be rendered of no avail, in fact superfluous and irrelevant. Such indeed is the never-failing affirmation of the cult of the Christian Jesus, since it declares unequivocally that there is no other way under heaven whereby a mortal
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may be saved than through the intermediary offices of the physically born man of Galilee. The fervent assertion of this cult is that man’s best righteousness is as filthy rags in the estimation of the great All-Father of the universe. If Jesus does not intercede to save us, we are not saved, is the authoritative preachment of this Western religion.
C. G. Jung, the top-most psychologist of our day, has reported the answer and it has been given here. The utmost that a mortal can do in the presence of a paragon of the virtue and divine perfection of man in God is to imitate the model as best he may, says this eminent authority. But in the very effort at imitation, he makes clear, the devotee slants the psychological efficacy of his effort directly away from the locale where it needs focusing, namely, in the inner core of the individual’s own consciousness, where--rather than in ancient Judea--lies the seed-power of incipient Christhood awaiting development. The postulates of the Christian system, if not by immediate instruction, then surely by the direct implications of its theology, expressly disengage the implementation of man’s salvation from any dependence upon man’s own exertions, or even from his achievement of an evolution of his own powers. In point of fact it positively asserts that man’s own efforts, faculties and human powers stand blocking the way to his divinization and must be surrendered and eliminated before the Christ power can become dominant and exert its saving grace. In terms of the most uncompromising and unequivocal decisiveness, Christian doctrinism positively puts human salvation outside the area of man’s own initiative, or his own accomplishment. Without the Judean personage man can not be saved, for he can not save himself. And if Christian doctrinal statements, reiterated a thousand times and never rescinded, do not bind the system to what they assert, the faith should close its doors.
Ah, but, it is rejoined, the human heart must "believe on" this man and his function, if the power of this Christ is to be made available and effective for his salvation. Here, certainly, the Christian theology runs out in the unsubstantiality of a mere word. For if the eternal destiny of the members of a whole race on a planet is contingent upon a mere mental pose, an attitude of mind that may be nothing much more than a sudden rush of feeling, persuasion of an idea or even a play of fancy, then again its shallowness, its insufficiency, its ineptness is glaringly obvious. If eternal salvation is to be won for the price of a mere turn of mental assent in the direction of a propagated theological persuasion, the thing affronts man’s budding instinct of divinity, slaps his own intellectual integrity in the face, insults his divine faculty of reason, and cuts the root of any and all motive to self-advancement in the scale of being. It stamps the seal of worthlessness, of futility, of negation on all self-initiated effort at uplift.
And, if the crucial efficacy in human salvation is this "belief" on the power that was manifested in and through this one man, why would not the same efficacy to transform human life be released by the belief, whether or not the power had been manifested through him? The nub of the debate seems at this point to narrow down to the question of whether the operative efficacy of the Christ-power is contingent upon the recipient’s psychological attitude--belief--or upon the once-upon-a-time manifestation of the power through the one man Jesus. Christianity asseverates that it depends upon both its manifestation in Jesus and the belief of Christian devotees. If this power is to be rated as a psychological influence of a given character, frequency, wave length, and, like any other such radiation, able to be brought to manifest expression when an instrument of requisite nature and construction is developed to register it, what, it must be asked, stood in the way of its manifest-
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ation at any time in the cognitive or mystical sensibilities of any mortal the moment his apparatus of brain, nerves and inner bodies became sufficiently sensitized to vibrate to the impact of that radiation in consciousness? Why could the power not become effective for human uplift until it had first manifested in this one man? Christian theologism, caught in the dilemma of this predicament, weakly protest that to be sure there could have been and doubtless were "good men" before the year 33 A.D., but still no one had quite achieved the divine life before Jesus opened the door into the Christian sheepfold. Does Christianity maintain still that the power of righteous life, divine aspiration, selfless love and regimes of self-discipline and moral rectitude would not generate their natural product, a spiritualized and so-far divinized grade of consciousness if the alleged events in Galilee had not happened two thousand years ago? Obviously, to be consistent, it would have to stand on a straight "no", in answer, because it has without end declared that all man’s best righteousness is as filthy rags in the sight of God. But logic can lay hold of no principle which would make the efficacy of righteousness dependent upon its having been--only once--channeled through a carpenter in Judea.
It seems to have remained for Jung also to voice the verdict of rational intelligence on this Christian theology, and it is a most negative verdict indeed. If Christianity offered the world the only historically personalized Christ in our flesh, it at the same time and by the very gift disinherited common humanity of its divinity. For it sequestered man’s single divine agency in a far-off event and in a wholly inaccessible locale, and paradoxically it asked its following to imitate a paragon which it simultaneously declared none could ever hope to equal. If Christianity offered a real world-savior in our flesh, it offered him in such form that all chance of man’s attainment of the ideal was precluded. A far-away imitation, as Jung states, left man leagues short of equating the exalted ideal. The devotee was in fact discouraged even from attempting, yes, even from hoping to match the idolized model.
The Pagan, on the contrary, while it offered mankind the purely pictured, allegorized and dramatized ensampler, did at least foster the positive presumption that indeed the figure of human perfection was put before men as the idealization of what man could become, and not what he never could hope to match. It was put forth with every incitement to the devotee to identify himself with it. For the restoration of the power of a Christian religion, it will have to be seen that Jung is right: the point of crucial importance is not whether the ensampler’s typal figure is dramatized or personalized, just a picture of our perfection or a living personal demonstration of that perfection. For the deification of the worshipper its virtue and efficacy are wholly contingent upon our ability to make the living demonstration ourselves. The ultimate question in the debate is and always must be the birth of the Christos in us. Its birth under any other circumstance or anywhere else than in the life of all humans is a matter of insignificance and irrelevance. Anything less than that, if not a deception, is at best a futility, the teasing of man with an impossible vision in the skies.
The anomaly in the case comes to view in the paradoxical operation of the two directions of the incentive. The orthodox view still insists that the living model--Jesus--exercises a greater driving power than any non-living picturization could do, because of our sympathy with a man of our own humanity, which incites us to aspire to be like him, while the mere type-figure in
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the abstract leaves us less moved. Yet the effect actually works out in almost contrary fashion. For Christian dogma steps in and puts up the impassable bars between us and that dream of being like him. It asserts that we can not even be worthy of receiving his grace; we must simply cling to the hope that he will stretch forth his hand and save us.
On the contrary, the Pagan, who was never enticed with the alleged example of a one and only Christ in the flesh, lived in the constant understanding that he could, and in the due course of earnest endeavor, would become a duplicate of the exalted divine type. In the case of the Christian the divine model absorbed the whole of the worshipper’s adoration, and the latter was rendered negative and made, as it were, static and immobile inwardly. With the philosophical Pagans the model was made abstract, a typal representation; but the living dynamic that could exalt the human participant was focussed in the worshipper himself.
And, furthermore, the psychology generated in the two cases needs study for the discernment of still another divergent outcome. Again it is a corroboration of Jung’s courageous delineation to consider that the greater moral effect is bound to flow from a dramatic figurism to that locale where the personal meaning is understood to become relevant. Say what Christians will, the comparison between the mental-emotional reactions of a Christian and his Pagan forebear, will accentuate in unmistakable vividness the greater moving power of the Mystery ceremonials and initiations than that released in Christian worship, from the observation of the effects of both forms. It was the actual experience in the Mystery rituals that the candidates and initiates were thrilled to the profoundest depths of their sensible natures in undergoing the dramatic run of the scenic representations. One must ask why this was so. The answer gives us the decisive determinant in the whole argument: it was because the instructions given by the hierophants in these Brotherhoods left never a doubt in the mind of any participant that the dramatized experience of the model divine figure was at every step and turn of the play exactly typal of his and of our living experience.
In Christian worship the body of sensible afflations, the feelings and the sympathy go quite in the opposite direction; that is, they go out from the consciousness of the worshipper to the figure of the Galilean Christ. All our burdens of feeling, thought, sympathy and love go out from the hearts of devotees and are concentrated upon the person of Jesus. If one questions this let him go through the services of any Christian Church during Passion Week. In the Pagan worship there was no such figure haunting the thought or consciousness or imagination of the participant. Therefore there was no diverting image, no distraction from the one and only focus of meaning and pertinence which the rituals were designed to accentuate,--the consciousness of each member himself.
From the accounts of such men as Cicero, Plato and others, it seems warrantable to make the claim that the psychological efficacy of these ancient Mystery ceremonials exercised a salutary moral purification and a spiritual catharsis upon the lives of the sharers of the ceremonies which were far and away more dynamic than what one sees--or fails to see--accruing to the pew occupants in the Christian services. The basic reason, that should truly startle all Christian theologism, is obviously that the worship-forms were enacted in the never-absent realization that they depicted most movingly the experience of the Christos in the actors themselves, the meaning being never referred to the figure of any man outside in the historical scene. It must
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be seen as beyond all debate and cavil that a ritual whose every feature strikingly adumbrated and by the subtlest of dynamic suggestiveness touched the inner consciousness of the actors as being their own intimate experience, must exercise a far more potent psychological effect than any amount of sentimental sympathy or adoration poured out upon a person outside in history.
The ancient world of philosophy and religion consistently asserted that it was a blasphemy of the holiness of life for man to worship any power outside himself. This did not preclude what we would in rebuttal declare to be the mighty transcendent power manifesting in the universe exterior to our life. But ancient sapiency discerned that all being and power manifesting universally were of one kind, comprehending both his life and that of infinite magnitudes of being outside him in the one same totality and unity. If ancient man centered upon his inner selfhood the adoration of heart and mind, it was because he knew himself to be integrally in and of that all-embracing Oneness, but that the germ of consciousness innate within his own core of being was for him the one avenue of access to the magnified core of the universal being. He focused his attention upon that inner unit of total being. He knew that within himself and there alone were the instrumentalities and the directive agency that could integrate his unit life with that of the Whole. The sweep and swirl of the external universe in its vast reaches and magnitudes beyond his little sphere would be of intimate relevance to him only as he reverenced, cherished and fructified the tiny fragment of the Whole which constituted his area of supervision. No amount of veneration directed outward upon the cosmos could impregnate the individual life and make it productive, if at the same time the consciousness within the unit creature did not flower beautifully within its own garden. Adoration of the mighty works of the cosmic Deity will hardly arise until a reverence for the divinity ensconced within the single unit has been brought to birth.
WAS JESUS THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTIANITY?
It has ever been considered an unanswerable and clinching argument of "occult" students that it would have been impossible for Christianity to take its rise and run on to great growth and expanding power without the historical presence of some outstanding personage, some man, who had been there to give it an impetus and focus interest to a point of specific unit strength to make it a movement able to generate wide interest and gather following. How are we to account for the rise and sweep of such a mighty current of force without the initial push of some dominating figure? Religions do not take form out of the air without human agency. It seems impossible to these people that a new religion could have been launched, inaugurated, solidified and stabilized for growth, as it were, gratuitously, with no great figure present to furnish driving force to its movement. It must have been the work of some great man.
The specious force of this argument has been cogent enough to hold the minds of esotericists to the affirmation of the existence in Galilee of the figure accredited by nearly universal Christian belief as Jesus the Nazarene. It is to be shown here that the position not only rests on pure theory, wholly wants evidence to support it, is completely untenable from more than one angle, but is entirely and directly controverted by a series of facts and considerations which overthrow it at every turn.
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Christianity, the occult theorists assert, was a new religion; it was neither Judaism, Gnosticism (in spite of the fact that its first and most intelligent promoters were Gnostics!), Manichaeism, Essenism, Platonism, Orphism, Mithraism, Hermeticism, Chaldean Magism or any of the existing and environing cult religions of the Time. It was a new and totally unique expression of religious pietism and doctrinal systematism. It must therefore have been the formulation of some prominent person or agency that came forward with a totally new and different body of truth-teaching to promulgate. This is the thesis behind the argument under discussion. Almost it might be reduced to the self-proving theorem that if it for the first time in world history proclaimed the preachment that the Deity sent his only-begotten Son down into the world to save it by the magical power of the only message ever transmitted from heaven to man, it could not have assumed this form unless indeed it had been brought and disseminated by that divinely commissioned Son himself. For who else would know about a heaven-initiated mission and purpose of the sort but the One sent with the message? It has thus ever seemed to be a matter of stating the case in such a way that it could not have been conceived and so stated unless it was true. The elucidation and analysis here set forth indeed constitutes the basic psychology on which the great Christian religion rests. Since the framework of the theology could not have been the sort of thing humans would invent of themselves, there must have been the messenger from the superworld to have originated it.
The first counterblast to this seemingly indubitable conclusion comes forth in the form of a shocking fact that flatly contradicts the nub element in the theorization just propounded. It has by now been more than abundantly demonstrated as a fact, provable to any one who will compare Christian with pre-Christian literature of Judea, Chaldea, Egypt and other ancient lands, that in blunt truth, Christianity introduced to the world not one single item, doctrine, revelation of moral and spiritual truth that had not already been in the cult religions and the sacred books of antiquity for long antecedent time! Some change of expression there is, and variation in modes of representation of the old truths, but it is still true to say that there is not one single presentment of ancient spiritual light and wisdom in the Christian literature that is not matched by, and obviously taken from, pre-extant books, rituals or liturgies of the old Pagan religions. This will sound like arrant and scurrilous blasphemy in the ears of orthodoxy. Therefore we repeat: it is demonstrable and provable to any one who will go into it and survey the extensive ground where lies the massed evidence. And denial of its factual truth by one who has not examined that great body of evidence is not admissible in the case. It rests on evidence; opinion based on no acquaintance with the evidence is disqualified.
Madame H. P. Blavatsky accentuates the force of this datum in a singularly strong passage, in which she says that we have the sorry spectacle of a grandiose anti-climax to the whole Christian drama in the fact that when, at the apex of history’s sublime culminatio