The threat to the life of Jesus from the side of Herod in the Gospels is a poor redaction of the Egyptian story of the menace to the "Hamemmet beings" from the Herut reptile, another name for the great serpent Apap (Apep). (Scholars are not in disagreement as to the date of Herod's death in the year 4 B.C.) In astrological pictography the same "evil" power is drawn in the planispheres in the form of the great snake Hydra ("water," as emblem of the lower life), whose head is directly under the feet of the Virgin as she holds the Christ child in her arms, ready to devour him if she should let him fall. The Hamemmet beings, or Innocents, rejoice later that the serpent Apap has not eaten their eggs from the nest.
All this typology means that the Christ spirit in animal man is at first in danger of being overborne, drowned out and swallowed up by the surging waves of animal sensuousness. Such a mishap is the more likely because the gentle Jesus nature comes into the body in order to stand in the breach and check and bridle the outflowing force of animal propensity. It therefore has to bear the full brunt of the attack from below. Hence, like the sheep in a wolf-pack, it is clawed and lacerated, wounded and bleeding, bruised and suffering. And this gives us the picture of the Christ as one who was tortured and crucified. Theology has never been able to understand why he who came to be a victor, vanquishing the powers of darkness, had to be mangled and disfigured. The answer at last is here. St. Paul gives us the rationale when he says that as it was in the beginning so it is now; "he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the spirit." The lower self for long cycles crucifies the higher. Who fails to see that the Christian man is crucified as long as selfish animal assertiveness rules in the individual life?
While we keep the gentle Jesus "standing outside the fast-closed door," as the Christian hymn sings it, we keep him nailed on the cross of suffering, instead of seating him on the throne of our conscious rulership. The Bible, particularly in the famous chapter of "the suffering servant" (Isaiah 53), puts this condition in beautiful language. He was bruised for our sins, wounded for our transgressions.He was smitten and afflicted, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. For he was led as a sheep to the slaughter, dumb before his persecutors. Says Isaiah: "His visage was so marred, more than any man,and his form more than the sons of men. Disfigured till he seemed a man no more, deformed out of the semblance of a man." And Gerald Massey, the great Egyptologist, adds: "This was the Horus of the incarnation, the god in flesh in the imperfect human form, the type of voluntary sacrifice, the image of suffering, being an innocent little child, maimed in his lower members, marred in his visage, lame and blind and altogether imperfect." And not only crippled and deformed, but actually cut to pieces, dismembered, as in the case of Sarasvati, Bacchus, Osiris and other gods. Indeed it is a fact never quoted that several of the most austere of the early church fathers, misled by these allegorical descriptions as applying to an earthly man-Jesus, are actually on recordas affirming that Jesus of Nazareth was not comely and beautiful in feature or figure, but was ugly and deformed!
Destined by cosmic and karmic machinery to incarnate, the deva intelligences a bit unwillingly, we are told, made the adventure and entered the animal bodies. They despised not the virgin's womb, a statement which can only secondarily be taken to be a reference to their repeated rebirth from mothers or saintly maidens, since its primary meaning is that they entered the womb of matter, always typed by feminine personages. They took upon themselves our nature, having linked their higher vibrational capacities with the nervous mechanism of our bodies. They became like unto us, seeing that they had become merged with us in person.In their sphere or plane we are to strive to live and have our being. They gave up the freedom, repose and bliss of their empyrean home to enter the realm of a lower range of life, to be stripped of their radiant glory and at our low level "live their own death," as an ancient phrase has it. Indeed the body was called in archaic symbology their grave, tomb, mummy-case, and the mummy figured this life in death. Their incarnation was likened unto a burial and was commemorated as such in the autumn festivals of olden religion. They counted it not loss to befound in the form of a servant; they became the servants of evolution.They stooped to conquer, for they tenanted with the lowly, incarnating in bodies at all stages of development. This is the meaning of that verse in Isaiah 53, in which it is said that the suffering servant "hath made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his deaths, "translators having tried to maim the meaning by rendering the word "deaths" (i.e. incarnations) in the singular number. (See the authorized version of the Bible.) They announced that he who would be greatest in the spiritual kingdom must become the servant of all, even the least of these "sons of men." They ate with the outcast, sinners and harlots.
Finally they came "under the law," as Paul so often states. What law? This is a point of mighty significance for religion. The law dealt with here is a phase of the ancient wisdom that theology has discarded. But it is basic for all understanding. It is that great law that brings unevolved, untested spiritual power into relation to matter in order to lead forth its hidden capacity through exercise against the resistance of the inertia of matter. The Greeks called it the kuklos anagkes, the Cycle of Necessity, or the wheel of birth and death. Hinduism called it the Law of Karma. We might call it the law of evolution, which brings the positive or spiritual node of cosmic polarity periodically into embodied relation with the negative or material node, for the regeneration of the hidden forces of life. By its commands we, as souls, came and will repeatedly come into the life of these bodies. Our entry into body is our "death." For St. Paul says: "When the command came home to me, sin sprang to life and I died. The command that meant life proved death to me." And when the Kumaras, innocent of material contact, came by the law into relation with flesh, they further "came under the law" in the sense that incarnation subjected them to the laws of chemistry and physics, heat and cold, pleasure and pain, affecting the organism.The god suffered mortal anguish.
In the following notably theosophic passage from Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (IV) we would ask the theologians what other connotation could possibly be ascribed to his characterization of the souls as "children" than the one posited in this lecture: "But I say that as long as the heir is a child, he differeth nothing from a bondservant, though he is Lord of all; but is under guardians and stewards until the day appointedof the Father. So we also when we were children were held in bondage under the elements of the world. But when the fulness of time was come God sent forth his Son (collectively, sons), born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem them that were under the law (theGentiles, the sons of men), that they might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons God sent forth the spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father. So that thou art no longer a bondservant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir through God. Howbeit at that time, not knowing God, ye were in bondage to them that by nature are no gods . . . But as then, he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the spirit; so also is it now."
Christian theology can offer no excuse for having so utterly missed the meaning of its own ancient formulations when Paul, the Platonist, had so clearly set forth the rudiments of truth in a passage like this. Our elaboration has supplied the comment necessary to carry enlightenment into the language he uses. However it is impossible to refrain from dilating upon the straightforward corroboration of our exegesis in Paul's utterance, in which he declares that until we humans have elevated our consciousness to the level of that of the indwelling god, we are still in bondage to "them that by nature are no gods." We are still under the law, not yet in enjoyment of "the liberty of the sons of God." Orthodox parties that scoff at students of ancient esotericism for predicating the existence of Paracelsus' "elementals" and nature spirits, will find their attitude rebuked by Paul, who twice in his letters admonishes us that we fall not under the power of the "elementals of the air" and the "elementals of the earth." For the deva Innocents, when thrown into a dark vale of Lethe or oblivion in the animal bodies, were in a very real danger of forgetting that they were divine by intrinsic nature and mistaking themselves for the animals into which Circe, the enchantress of the time cycle or cycle, had converted them in incarnation. When we were given "an animal's mind" we fell under the spell of forgetfulness, and, as Plotinus tells us, "then it was we lost the memory that we sprang of that divine estate. Smitten with longing for the lower, rapt in love of it, we grew to depend entirely upon it, so that we swung as far away as we were able." This is for humankind knowledge of the first magnitude. It should enable us to align human conduct with the demands of the racial problem, the terms, means and ends of which we can not know until we envisage the data of the sages.
The ancients spoke of the Messiah, not as he who was born once in history, but as "he who comes regularly and continuously," or in another phrase, "he who comes periodically." Christian ideology should well consider these phrases, for they state the forgotten truth of theology. The coming of Christ is to be thought of as the gradual growth of an element or faculty of consciousness, and as taking place over the whole extent of the human aeon. He comes during the whole continuance of the cycle, a little at a time, a little each day, year, incarnation. He is not yet born in our hearts, for he is only in gestation in our bodies.His birth will occur when he is delivered from the flesh in his last confinement. Socrates declared that the true function of the philosopher was that of the "midwife," for he presided at the birth of truth, its delivery from the confinement of ignorance. Paul writes that he suffers the pangs of childbirth "until Christ be formed within you." The greatest single truth that a mortal man can realize is that his animal body is the matrix in which the Christ is being gestated for its Easter delivery. Humanity is mother to deity.
The gentle Jesus speaks from the inner heart of our lives with that still small voice which is all too constantly drowned out by the raucous din of earthly distraction. But only to the extent that humanity learns to heed that voice will it advance its position in the order of being.
The ground has now been prepared for planting the first clear determination of the rationale of what is called culture in the world. It can now be stated to be the gradual humanization of the lower animal portion of man. To "let the ape and tiger die" in our nature, and to convert the ferocity of the beast into the gentle and loving habitudes of the Christ is the essence of culture. To change a brute of a man into a gentleman is the purpose of human evolution. Jesus said he would give us power to tread down the serpent and the scorpion that in the first part of the cycle had stung his divinity into lethal coma. The referenceto serpents and scorpions can be understood only in connection with Egyptian myths and the legend of Scorpio in the zodiac, which stung Ra, the solar god, to "death" in the fall of the year. As the sun, symbol ofour divinity, succumbs to a submergence of its power in the fall of the year, so the soul, our actual divinity, goes into obscuration of its intellectual light in the autumn of its incarnational cycle!
But for mankind in the mass there is far more romantic sentimentality in idolizing the portrait of a Jesus of Nazareth, haloed by its remoteness in time and its historical unreality, than in curbing the animal nature in the drab drama of every day. A dreamy ideal is ever more alluring than any hum-drum task, especially one involving self-control. In this particular disposition of human psychology is perhaps to be found one of the reasons why the early Church Fathers gave their followers the man Jesus to supplant the Christos in the heart and the solar deity of the mythos.
Nourished on the Jesus gospel for sixteen centuries, pious faith has become weakened in its robust fortitude by a habit of dependence on a power allegedly localized in another man of flesh, or in a wraith-like Holy Ghost outside the individual himself. And while the legend ruled the mass mind, the true doctrine of the immanence of Christhood languished. Worship of an externalized deity almost resents having the Christ linked too closely with our nature in its commonplace expression on the plane of secular tawdriness. It does not respond with spiritual fervor to the ancient Hindu conception of the divine influence as"closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet." Yet all traditionsof the spiritual lore of the world point the moral that after aspiring sainthood and heroic consecration has crusaded the world over in vain for the Holy Grail, the weary seeker found it on his return home, broken and dispirited, in the cup which he offered, in plain unheroic sympathy, to the beggar at his own doorstep. The lesson of these myths is indeed amighty preachment to humanity. For eventually, after long delusion in pursuing the coveted divinity in distant idealisms, the heart finds that in tutoring the wild instincts of the animal self, in putting an end to the persecution of the spiritual soul by "the one born after the flesh, "in giving freer play to the charitable nature of the Christos within, there is the only true romance that life offers! And we would do well to keep fresh in mind Paul's urgent reminder that the Christ is nowhere but within us. Nature implanted the very self of the god deep within our own constitutions, like a seed in the soil, to make sure that we could never miss recognizing and cultivating it. Yet priestcraft has practically deadened that sense of recognition by supplanting the teaching of the Emanuel presence with the personality of a historical man of flesh. But very clearly has C. G. Jung, the eminent psychologist, seen and stated the lurking harm in this psychological subterfuge: "The Imitatio Christi 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 within 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." These are words of the weightiest import and require some courage in the speaking. They should be warmly welcomed, for they hold a possible hope for the awakening of a decadent spiritual sense and the salvation of the race from present evils.
With all our voluminous Bible "study" we have not yet even mentally caught the meaning of the light that came to illumine the darkness ofevery man; the little leaven (of righteousness) in the lump of animal sense life; the tiny grain of mustard seed in the earth; the money invested with the usurers (the "users," in the real sense); the oil in the virgins' lamps; the gold in the fish's mouth. We have missed the day-to-day meaning of it all. We have so far abstracted the reference of the mythological and doctrinal structures from the plane of actual relevance that we have created for them a sort of detached compartment in some rarified realm of our life called the "supernatural," the"magical" and the "miraculous." We have associated religion with this remote area, and left it without dynamic applicability to secular living. So that the sincere and intelligent segment of modern people, indisgust and revulsion, have rejected the whole of the religious presentation, as being irrational, the product of an unenlightened and unreliable mystical tendency. And the concept of a super-natural element in life has been repudiated with perhaps justifiable bitterness. Yetwisdom is needed here, a wisdom based on a true knowledge ofanthropology. For, inconceivably strange and fanatical to the humanistsas must sound the declaration now to be pronounced, it must be decisively reaffirmed that the proper concern of true religion was, is and must ever be with just those repudiated elements, the "supernatural," the "magical" and the "miraculous"! For with the advent of the Christos into mortality there was introduced into life a power ofa distinctly higher order, that from the limited vision of the Adamic man, of natural endowment only, was in every sense of the term supernatural. Quite literally the natural man was linked with the light and life of a being decidedly above his rank. Remember, his name was called "Wonderful." His divine presence and influence was to astonish the lower man with the continued working of things that would seem "miraculous" to him. The healing of the wounds and infirmities of the self below by the interposition of his grace would appear to be no less than "magic" to him. The humanistic revolt against supernaturalism in religion is fully warranted as a rebound from a caricatured and distorted theology. Ecclesiasticism must censure itself for the defection of secularist support. But humanism and sheer human ethical culture are themselves to be reminded that they have erred no less egregiously in failing to see that their scorn of the "super-natural" is not justified. Their mistake has been in attacking the "super-natural" where it has been erroneously mis-located--in the heavens; and not affirming it when correctly localized in the spirit immediately within man. It is idle to haggle about the corrected definition of the word. To be sure, it must be used in a distinctly relative sense, for in a broad sense nothing in the whole realm of life can be super, beyond or outside the natural. But surely in relation to the capacities of the animal self that constitutes the human part of man, the life of the indwelling spirit is legitimately affirmed to be supernatural. Paul tells us that first comes that which is natural, then that which is spiritual, in the order of unfoldment. Our task, as Plato says in the Timaeus, is to bring the supernatural down onto the plane of the natural, and to wed the two together in the finale in a new union. The "weaving together of mortal and immortal natures" is the chart of our enterprise.
Reverting, in conclusion, to our starting point, it may now be said that the restoration of religion to its primal basis in anthropology is the only likely mode of saving its institutes from the devastating attack of the left-wing radicals. The latter can thus be made to see that no scheme of social and economic betterment, no matter how mechanically perfect it may seem to be, can operate to expected perfection so long as humanity in its continued ignorance of the terms of the life problem, will remain in subjection to the motivations of the lower carnal mind, actuating to selfishness. This does not for an instant absolve us fromthe necessity of establishing a more equitable economic order. The point is that it must be seen that such an aim can not ignore, flout, much less destroy, the program of the cultivation of true values in that area of life called religion--and hope to succeed. The leftist leaders cannot be so blind as to miss the fact that life has essential values on planes other than those of physical well-being, and that a philosophy must be twisted to falsity which links the success of an economic system at man's merely physical level with the destruction of the cultus of spiritual values ultimately the hunger of life itself. The material has now been presented which will enable them to distinguish true from false appraisals in religion, and to conserve the one while dropping the other. Religion, seen again as based on anthropology, must be replaced by all parties on its ancient throne as the "king of sciences." Philosophy is the "meaning" of life, and though it sounds almost blasphemous in the ears of a mechanistic age, it must nevertheless be asserted courageously than ever an age that deifies mechanical genius will find it a fatuity to attempt to devise a workable mechanism for the happy ordering of life so long as it does not know what that life consists of and what it "means." And religion is philosophy, or"meaning," emotionalized.
The historical Jesus, as a civilizing influence, has now been tried for some sixteen centuries. With weird irony, not only has it not in large measure elevated mankind in the West above earlier barbarisms, but it has in fact been used as a cloak for the worst atrocities and inhumanities that history records. The foulest cruelties were perpetrated in the very name of the gentle Nazarene! It behooves man in the West now to try the concept of the indwelling Christ, the hope ofour glory
Religion, as sentiment merely, will not find acceptance with the economic radicals; but religion, as anthropology, must do so. After all, life is lived in consciousness; the localization of all realities is found there. Man's conscious, or psychological, reaction to life can be ignored only at the cost of fatality to the scheme which so flouts it. A Prince of Peace did being his entry into the human heart and consciousness when man was fabricated. He is struggling to assert his lordship over the elements of a conscienceless tumult of blind energies of our animal childishness.The destiny of humanity, for weal or woe, is inwrought into the fabric of these interwoven living powers. As needful as is technical knowledge to an engineer who has a complicated mechanism to handle, is the restoration to mankind of the body of the ancient theology, the knowledge concerning the deity that is linked with our physical forms.
The impending fate of civilization hangs upon the answer we give to the question: Can it be restored in time to save the West from another plunge into centuries of spiritual darkness? Apparently so far have we failed to raise the brute to manhood that the only criterion of "advance" of the present epoch over medieval inhumanity would seem to be the substitution of the machine gun and poison gas for the more gentle rack and the iron maiden! All the while our Savior is at our elbow. Butso long as we look externally for his benignant ministrations we shall not be able to give effect to his miraculous efficacy in healing the imperfections of our nature. The stability of human society was in olden times, and again must be, grounded on knowledge that deep within us is a truly superhuman agency, a seed-portion of eternal Being, which will link us securely with imperishable reality. This deific Presence has promised that he will guide us into all truth, and in association with him we shall find that "his ways are ways of pleasantness and all his paths are peace."