Ancient philosophy classed each kingdom or plane as masculine with reference to the plane below it, and feminine as related to that above it. Why was this? Simply enough; in the linked chain of progressive energy, each plane received life and power from the one above it and in turn propelled it outward and downward to the one below it. Receiving from above, it became feminine, passive; energizing from above onto the one below, it became masculine, active, generative. It was paternal to the subordinate grade, but maternal to the seed of higher life receivedfrom the plane above. Of whatever degree the fineness of its essence, it was "spirit" to the plane below, but "matter" to the plane superior to it. And it is the eternal function of matter (mater is Latin for "mother") to mother the seeds of spiritual life. Spiritual force is the power of the Father; matter is the maternal womb in which it is ever brought to birth. The Father's germinal seed must be enwombed in nature's material forms. Spirit must be incubated in matter if it is to have its next cyclical rebirth. Every God of mythology or theology had his goddess, his shakti, who was at once his wife and his sister, and eventually in his rebirth became his mother again. And here at last is unequivocal elucidation of the function of Mary, Isis, Tiamat, Ishtar (Esther), Semiramis, Cybele, Sophia, Achamoth, Parvati, Aditi and all the female characters of the archaic tomes. Every spiritual energy has to be implanted again and again in Mother Nature's physical body, for its second and ever recurring rebirth! And now at last we are able to read the long-hidden subtle meaning of Jesus's saying to Nicodemus, that a man (i.e., spirit, soul) must enter a second time into his mother's(matter's) body and be born again! Every living organic creature, from god down to moneron, is a compound of masculinity, or spiritual consciousness, and feminity, or physical form. It is next to unbelievable that modern science has been so crass as to ignore and miss this pivotal datum of all existence. Yet it is the formula on which depends the interpretation of every phenomenon of life in the organic kingdoms.
Incubation of spirit in the womb of matter is then the law of nature and the rationals of the union of life on the several planes much reach down, bind its energies with the receptive organism of the creature on the plane below and thus effect a bridging of the otherwise impassable gap between every successive grade of life and its immediate neighbors.A twofold purpose is subserved by this methodology, since the descending power not only enters upon its own next period of expansion, but becomes the agency of a "lifting up" of the order of life below it; "to develop its own powers and to adorn what is below it," Plotinus' striking phraseology.
The feminine or material energies being symbolized in ancient books by the (lower, not the higher) serpent, the meaning of Moses' "lifting up" the serpent on the cross in the wilderness (of this earthly life) at once becomes clear. And Jesus's statement that "if I be lifted up (from his lowly descent into matter) I will draw all men unto me." is another form of the representation of this meaning. And again, since this incubation of soul in body involved for it an experience paralleling that of the "death" and burial of the seed in the ground, incarnation is found to be the cryptic meaning of the word "death" as used in the scriptures. Therefore the "resurrection from the dead" is only the soul's final release in victory from the last of its physical embodiments!
In consonance with this general law and in confirmation of its exactitude, we see the seed of vegetable life embodied in the soil of the mineral kingdom to achieve its new growth; we see the animal life implanted in the body constituted of vegetable matter (since the animal •• ore were uncontrolled. They swept forth on the creative impulse in unrestrained freedom. They clashed in elemental fury and churned up the sea of primal matter until it was turned into a state of coagulation figured by the substance "curds" and "butter" of the ancient Hindu symbolical narrative of creation. They engaged in the primeval "war of the elements," which even modern science postulates as an inceptive stage of the world formation. The forces ran wild in the fiery convulsions of the mineral elements, in the untamed exuberance of vegetable life, and finally in most savage form in the war of tooth and claw, the internecine struggle for existence, in the animal kingdom. It is the wild raging of these six elementary forces that is typified by the storms on the sea in the Jonah story in the Old Testament and the stilling of the tempest by Jesus in the New Testament. These forces, having built up man's body, are still active in that segment of his life which lies below intellect, and there the war of elemental natures still rages, if not quieted and pacified by mind! How well St. Paul knew this is evident in many a passage in his Epistles. He finds in himself two opposing natures, a law in his members which wars against the law of his mind! The seventh principle in man's nature is the Christos, who came to bring peace to the warfare of the six mindless forces that had set raging the storm of instinctual ferocity and elemental passion upon the primal sea of life. The Christ is in man to quell this tempest and to bring the animal fierceness to peace, order and harmony "by that power,"as Paul describes it, "wherewith he is able to subdue all things unto himself."
Up to the advent of this Christly Messiah earth had no king. There was no Lord of life on the globe, for Lord etymologically means "Law-giver,"and how could a law-giver function without the faculty of mind, without knowledge, reason, intelligence? The natural order awaited its king. The true origin of this word "king" now comes to light. It is derived fromthe great Egyptian symbol for life, the ANKH. It means immortality, life and tie. Why "life" and "tie"? Because no life is possible until two energies, positive and negative, spirit and matter, are "tied" together.All living things are the resultant of the linking together of these two factors. The principle of intellect that is the ruler of energies below it, the king over life, is the product of the tying together of the mortal, or animal nature, and the immortal, or divine self in the evolutionary career of man. The six aeons had prepared life on earth to receive its king, and nature stood in awe awaiting his advent, his epiphany, his "showing forth in Israel." The "mess" of Messiah, the "mas" of Christmas, are from the same Egyptian root, "mes," to be born."The world in solemn stillness lay," to welcome the birth of its king, the Christ in man. And how magnificently we find just this meaning voiced in the words of the grand old Christmas hymn, Joy to the World, the first verse of which runs:
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her king!
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing!
The import of the first two lines we have already delineated. The significance of the truth in the third line is of such weight and scope that it may well hold in its meaning the future fate of Christianity.For it hints at the central truth of all dogma, that the Christ is an element in the psychological constitution of every son of man, and not an individual figure in history! Each evolved animal, standing at the threshold of human ordination, was to receive a divine guest, to share life with him under the same fleshly roof, in the same physical tabernacle. And his adoption of this guest as an integral element in his own nature was to humanize him first and divinize him later. His rejection of the guest would involve him in evolutionary consequences of the gravest moment. And the fourth line contains another most suggestive reminder of the arcane knowledge, as it speaks of the united jubilation of heaven and nature over the advent of deity to earth. It is not mere poetic accident that has so often joined the choirs of heaven and earth in Christmas and Easter chorals. The event of the incarnation of soul in flesh most intimately concerned the entire evolutionary destiny of both the citizenry of heaven and the denizens of earth. For the celestial hosts it was the cyclic opportunity to take their next step in the advance to higher reaches of divinity; for the animal orders it was the coming of the gift of mind, into a kingdom lying one whole grade higher than their own. A universal jubilee of song is not too great a paean ofexultation in view of the magnific import of this aeonial event. And the exhortation
Joyful all ye nations rise,
Join the triumph of the skies,
With the angelic host proclaim
Christ is born in Bethlehem,
is none too bombastic a call for mortal man to arise and hail his approaching divinity.
Veiled in flesh the God head see;
Hail the incarnate deity;
Born to raise the sons of earth;
Born to give them second birth;
Risen with healing in his wings,
Light and life to all he brings.
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace!
Significantly in relation to the characterization of deity as the Sun an ancient text from Egypt states: "The Framer made the creations six in number, and for the seventh he threw into the midst the fire of the sun."
Evolution was to receive its crown in the fabrication of a creature endowed with the seed of divine intelligence. Earth and heaven were summoned to "come hither" and exult together, for mind was sown for the first time on earth. The multitudinous seeds of collective human and divine capacity were scattered abroad among the inhabitants of earth. Affirms Jesus: "I came to send fire upon the earth," and the seven angels in Revelation poured out the fiery contents of their censers over the earth. Prometheus, Lucifer, the Messiah, came to bring the light (of mind) that was to lighten the Gentiles (the first Adamic men, not yet so enlightened) and to be the glory of his people Israel (those thus spiritually endowed); that true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.
But the legions of "junior gods" (Plato), Kumaras, Asuras, and Innocents, devas of the intellectual order, but untried in material embodiment, came down under an obligation, indeed a covenant, sealed with "broad oaths," we are told, to tutor an animal race. Only in thelight of the evolutionary situation here portrayed can the famous"covenant" between Jehovah and Israel in the Old Testament be clearly envisaged. We swore on our part to spiritualize the animal and return to our celestial home without becoming enmeshed in the mire of the animal sensuality. The lower life being typed by water, the Christ's ability to walk on the water without sinking into its clutching depths was allegorized by the Jesus miracle of sea-walking. On His part the Eternal promised that we "should never be dissolved"--(The Timaeus.) This is the pledge of our immortality, matching the rainbow sign of no further destruction after the Deluge.
So the King of Glory came in, to shed his intellectual light over the area of human consciousness. He was given dominion over the beasts of the field, the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air, or all the orders of life below his status. All things were put under his feet. But the true sense of our ruling the beasts of the field has never been set forth in theology. Literalism here, as elsewhere, has ruined anthropological meaning. If taken literally the statement would mean that we humans are to go out and establish governance over tigers, elephants, scorpions, boa-constrictors and cobras, not to forget trained seals and fleas. But this is childish, --though not more so than the bulk of interpretation based on ignorant literalisation of poetic figuration. What it means is an aspect of anthropology that brings the truth home to us with realistic force. The animal nature that we are to bend into harmony is the lower half of our own constitution. In ourselves is the tiger, scorpion, gnat that clawsand stings and torments. We are to govern the animal in ourselves!" After this Plato adds: 'He (the Demiurgus) likewise commanded them (us) to govern as much as possible in the best and most beautiful manner the mortal animal, that it might not become the cause of evil to itself. According to body it is an animal, but according to intellect a god. For this partial animal, which is suspended from an immortal soul, consists of soul and body.'" That which the psychologists call our sub-conscious mind is just the mind of the animal in whose fleshly house we are tenants!
Isaiah has a beautiful description of the Messianic nature. "For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God. The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end . . ." Why Wonderful? Because to the dull sense of the lower animal man the exhibition of the first use of mind, reason, inference and prediction by the new guest would appear marvelous beyond comprehension. Counsellor? Because the divinity came to tutor, and his position was advisory. Lurking in the background of consciousness, he was to advance the intimations of conscience and implant the "ought" sense. The mighty God? The beings on any upper plane are the "gods" to those beneath. We have seen the relevance of the term "Prince of Peace." Assuming responsibility under the covenant, he bore the government upon his shoulder; and once established in the human constitution the kingdom of spirit is everlasting. The Egyptians denominate this world "Tattu," "the place of establishing forever." Values established here in soul quality are never "dissolved." The soul is indestructible. It gives us immortality.
And now we face a fact of the most gaunt realism in the whole matter. To perform their work as commissioned it was necessary in nature's scheme that the souls of these angels should be incorporated in the physical bodies of the animal races they were to divinize. The phrase "I shall dwell with them" is to be taken in a sense far more physiologically literal than religionists have ever dreamed of. (The intimations of this situation for an intelligent study of Totemism will suggest themselvesto the discerning student.) The Greek "descent of the soul," the theological "fall of the angels," and the Biblical "going down into Egypt," (Egypt being a glyph for earth and body; also the "far country"of the Prodigal Son allegory), are not grasped in their interior sense until we accept the incarnation as the collective spiritual ensouling of the animal races on the globe.
We have assembled a body of data to substantiate this position that has not been gathered and focused on the point before. To begin with, we can see now why in the Gospel presentation Jesus was born in a stable among animals! Hercules, a Greek Jesus type, had to cleanse the Augean stables, a glyph for the body polluted by the filth of the animal nature. The Christ function is to wash clean the corruption of the lower self, the animal. "Washed in the blood of the Lamb,"--purgation! The Prodigal Son descended to the animal level, eating "the husks that the swine did eat." In Mark 1:13 there is a startling brief but unmistakable reference to the animal embodiment, when it is said in the condensed narrative of the "temptation" that during the forty days he was in the wilderness (another glyph for this earth!) Jesus "was with the wild beasts." Indeed that statement is the only item given to characterize the nature of the "temptation." The meaning of this allegorical figure of the "temptation" has been grossly misconceived, simply because it has not been known by exegetists that the word covers nothing but the incarnation itself. It in no sense differs from the meaning of the "trial" of Jesus. Our "trial" is the incarnation. It is our testing.
It would be difficult to speculate on the meaning of such a passage as in Ezekiel 32, in which it is said "I will fill the beasts of the whole earth with thee," unless it be taken to refer to the collective incarnation of the soul in animal beings. From the Chaldean Oracles we take this expressive hint: "The wild beasts of the earth shall inhabit thy vessel." In Egypt Osiris is addressed as the "lifter-up of wild animals." In the Apocryphal Gospel, The Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans, we find a remarkable passage, which is only redeemed from utter ineptness of meaning if we understand it in the light of our thesis:"Suffer me to be food to the wild beasts; by whom I shall attain unto God. For I am the wheat of God; and I shall be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ." Wheat, broken, bruised, crushed into flour, and reunited into bread, the nourishment of animal man, was a universal ancient symbol of the Christ nature, crucified, lacerated by its voluntary subjection to the lower personality; and the hint that the grinding was done between the teeth of wild animals is decisive as to the reference to incarnation. The declaration that we are sent forth as sheep among wolves is another allusion to our animal residence. Then the vivid allegorism of Daniel in the lion's den confronts us. The meaning is that if the soul holds true to its spiritual nature, we can dwell in the very same "den" or house of the animal, and the beast will not harm us! It would take pages, again, to elucidate the deep meaning behind the custom of the grotesque masks worn by roisterers on Hallowe'en. The masks were originally all animal faces or hides, and the buffoonery of the revelry was to portray, all too realistically, the distortion and disfigurement of the soul's features as it looked out through the eyes and body of the animal vesture! Then Tennyson has a strange verse which proves that he was conversant with this hidden knowledge:
God lent the house of a beast to the soul of the man:
And the man said, 'Am I your debtor?'
And God said, 'Make it as clean as you can,
And then I will send you a better.'
But the most astonishing asseveration of our dwelling in the body of a beast is to be found in the first five chapters of the book of Daniel. Its reference to the history of man generic has been missed because, as always, typology was mistaken for personal history. The soul in man was ever typed under the character of a king. Hence Daniel's address to King Nebuchadnezzar was not seen as spoken to the race, collectively. The prophet, as the mouthpiece of deity, says: "You, O king, are king of kings, to whom the God of heaven has given all dominion, power, strength and glory; and wherever the sons of men dwell he has put the wild animals, and the birds of the air, into your power and made you ruler over them all; you are the golden head." "The sons of men," it should benoted, are the lower segment of man's self, the animal-human, in sharp distinction from "the sons of God," the same classification as Gentiles and Israelites, already shown. This is important, for it yields the precise meaning which the evolutionary predicament postulates. Then Daniel, likening the soul in its descent into the limitation of body to a tree stripped of its leafage, branches and stem, in fact hewn down,says: "Still leave the stump of its root in the earth (for a renewal of its growth in the next cycle) . . . let the dews of heaven drench it, and let him share the herbage of the earth with the animals; let his mind cease to be human, let an animal's mind be given him, and let seven years pass over him . . ."--the last a reference to his running through seven planes of nature, each one an aeon (symbolized as a cosmic "year") to complete the ever-ordained sevenfold cycle. A moment later Daniel gives direct meaning to the metaphor by the declaration to the king, our soul: "The tree is yourself." And here is the intimation that in the soul's descent it is stripped of the outward evidences of its former growth, and starts each new cycle from seed, stump or inner nucleus in a fresh incarnation. Again in Chapter IV the God-voice pronounces the incarnational decree against the soul, the king: "O king, you shall be driven away from human beings to dwell with the wild animals, you shall be forced to eat grass like cattle (Cf. the Prodigal Son), you shall be drenched with the dews of heaven (the reference to water as the element of the lower life), and seven years shall pass over you till you learn that the Most High reigns over the realm of men." "The sentence was carried out instantly upon Nebuchadnezzar, he was driven away from human beings, he ate grass like cattle, and his body was drenched with the dews of heaven and his nails grew like the claws of a bird. When the time was over (the soul itself now speaking) I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, my reason returned unto me, and I blessed the Most High, praising himand honoring him for ever." And briefly again in Chapter V: "His mind was made like the mind of an animal and his dwelling was with the wildbeasts."
Disputants will rise to vociferate that this interpretation far overreaches itself and is sheer presumption on our part. It is enough to answer that Bible material is allegory and that such a sentence, if executed upon a historical Nebuchadnezzar becomes a laughable caricature of history. Also no such conversion of this mortal king into a bird, eating grass, is recorded in his objective career. As history the story is ridiculous; as a glyph of anthropological history it is a grand portrayal of the truth. The Bible can not be redeemed to a sense acceptable by intelligence until it is interpreted by the keys of the ancient arcana.
The soul principle, embodying intelligence and spiritual will thus came to earth to inaugurate a new order of life. It came to inject a new spirit, through the functioning of a higher faculty in those whom the Bible calls "the poor" and "the people," the Adamic generation that was to be lifted up and divinized by the gift of nascent divinity. It came to give evolution, crudely speaking, a "new deal." A racial rebuilding was undertaken, during which a cosmic announcement might have been displayed with the legend that evolutionary business was going forward as usual during alterations, with the transfer of the firm to new management. It came to revoke the old order; to end the chaotic reign of the six elementary powers; to curb the rule of tooth and claw in the animal part of man; to open blind eyes to see the advantage and blessedness of fraternity instead of devastating warfare; to still the storm of savage passion over the sea of life; to bring the natural forces to a basis of order and harmony in the universe of man, as had been done when the sun (the divinity of the solar system) was set in the midst of the chaotic whirl of the planets. It came to instill the law of love, fulfilling all other laws, into the nature of a race recently bestial and predatory. So the Messiah announced a new dispensation on the basis of the ordinance "that ye love one another." As animals we ate each other; now we were to love one another, the lion and the lamb (inus) to lie down in peace together. The Christly Voice announced:"Behold, I make all things new." And Paul echoes this proclamation when he writes: "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away; behold all things are become new." And the Voice of Deity in the Old Testament had declared: "For this is the covenant I will make with them; I will put my laws into their hearts and in their minds will I write them." And Paul adds: "Let us consider one another to provoke unto love and good works."
The race ever since has been trying to catch the force of this new"motif" in life. But its effort has been largely stultified by its blindignorance, since the third century, of the evolutionary status and the endowment of man. A knowledge of the problem and the vital elements involved in it is indispensable to the proper direction of effort to avoid abortive outcome. So Porphyry writes: "In the first place, indeed, it is necessary that he who intends to acquire this purification (by philosophy) should as the foundation and base of it know himself to be a soul bound in a foreign thing (the body) and in a different essence."The intellectual base of all wisdom is the knowledge that we are souls, or fragments of God's own fiery life, inhabiting the bodies of earth's highest animals. This is the starting point of all wisdom, sanity, religion.
But--our knowledge must be clarified in respect to another large item in the situation. We must not suppose, as theology has seemed to indicate, that the Christ principle came to the animal race in the exercise of its godly powers at their height. Far from it. Another law of life operates here. The clue to it is found in John's grain of corn that must die to regenerate the species and in Daniel's stump left in the ground to start a new tree. These symbols point to the fact that in them the renewal of the whole antecedent life of their parent organism is potential. The soul, be it known, has been in manifestation before. It has built up along series of previous embodiments, and with each such expression itgained an expansion of its latent nature. It has never ceased to swing through its cycles, passing from embodied actuality to latency in seed and back again, endlessly. But the important matter is to know that it begins each successive cycle at the point of first departure. It starts each round from seed. This does not leave us to hold the depressing belief that we go on repeating the same cycle each time, for this would break the heart and crush the hope of humanity. Nature deposits her gains from each period of growth in the seed, and though the organic life begins at bottom each time, the new seed of each round starts with a potentially higher endowment, more quickly recapitulates all its previous stages of development, and arrives at the point where new progress can be made in the cycle at hand.
So the Christ comes to man at the beginning of the human era on earth, not in his adulthood, but as the infant deity, the baby god. He is divine, but in potentiality. We introduce this datum because of its profound implications for theology. It is the key to the comprehension of a whole vast segment of theological meaning which has remained obscured because of the decay of esoteric study. Its republication will lift a fair portion of the great blanket of superstition that has lain heavily upon the human mind in the religious domain. It is the key to two considerable phases of scriptural symbolism never understood by theologians; the initial danger in which the Christs or Messiahs were involved; and their suffering and crucifixion. Any new-born life is in danger--from the elements. Enemies beset its tender existence on every side. Its survival is precarious. Its strength and stamina are not yet effective. So the infant Christ principle was beset with danger from the elementary natures. It begins the new turn as a helpless infant in deific possibility. Deity is present, but it is heavily involved in matter, buried deep in sense. Furthermore, it is assailed at once by the powers of evil, which are just those elementary natures. The Greeks mythologized them in the two giant serpents that Hercules had to throttle while an infant in his cradle. It will do much to rationalize theology if it is once understood, on the authority of discerning scholarship, that the much magnified powers of "evil" are nothing other than the traits and trends of the animal portion of our nature! They are at issue with the interests of the soul, and there is a warfare, which, however, is to end in amity. The Egyptians speak of them as "the adversaries" and "the enemies of my Father, Osiris," in the words of Horus, the Christ. Again be it known, they are in the Old Testament the seven nations occupying Canaan, the people whom the god had to overcome and dispossess, naturally, ere he could admit his Israelite children into the Holy Land of spiritual consciousness. Again they are the seven plagues of Egypt, and the seven devils that had to be expelled from Mary Magdalene. For they are always the characteristics of the sevenfold power that builds the forms in which life is embodied; and this is the feminine principle in ancient theology! In Greek mythology they are the seven beasts that Orpheus soothes to docility by the music of his lyre.They are the six elemental forces, taken as seven when synthesized by the seventh.