Mount Athos and in the Desert of Nitria, for instance--among certain
monks, and with learned Rabbis in Palestine, who pass their lives in
commenting upon the _Talmud_. They say that not all the rolls and
manuscripts, reported in history to have been burned by Cæsar, by
the Christian mob, in 389, and by the Arab General Amru, perished as
it is commonly believed; and the story they tell is the following:
At the time of the contest for the throne, in 51 B.C., between
Cleopatra and her brother Dionysius Ptolemy, the Bruckion, which
contained over seven hundred thousand rolls, all bound in wood and
_fire-proof_ parchment, was undergoing repairs, and a great portion
of the original manuscripts, considered among the most precious,
and which were not duplicated, were stored away in the house of one
of the librarians. As the fire which consumed the rest was but the
result of accident, no precautions had been taken at the time. But
they add, that several hours passed between the burning of the fleet,
set on fire by Cæsar’s order, and the moment when the first buildings
situated near the harbor caught fire in their turn; and that all the
librarians, aided by several hundred slaves attached to the museum,
succeeded in saving the most precious of the rolls. So perfect and
solid was the fabric of the parchment, that while in some rolls the
inner pages and the wood-binding were reduced to ashes, of others
the parchment binding remained unscorched. These particulars were
all written out in Greek, Latin, and the Chaldeo-Syriac dialect, by
a learned youth named Theodas, one of the scribes employed in the
museum. One of these manuscripts is alleged to be preserved till
now in a Greek convent; and the person who narrated the tradition
to us had seen it himself. He said that many more will see it
and learn where to look for important documents, when a certain
prophecy will be fulfilled; adding, that most of these works could
be found in Tartary and India.[36] The monk showed us a copy of the
original, which, of course, we could read but poorly, as we claim
but little erudition in the matter of dead languages. But we were
so particularly struck by the vivid and picturesque translation of
the holy father, that we perfectly remember some curious paragraphs,
which run, as far as we can recall them, as follows:--“When the Queen
of the Sun (Cleopatra) was brought back to the half-ruined city,
after the fire had devoured the _Glory of the World_; and when she
saw the mountains of books--or rolls--covering the half-consumed
steps of the _estrada_; and when she perceived that the inside was
gone and the indestructible covers alone remained, she wept in rage
and fury, and cursed the meanness of her fathers who had grudged the
cost of the real Pergamos for the inside as well as the outside of
the precious rolls.” Further, our author, Theodas, indulges in a joke
at the expense of the queen for believing that nearly all the library
was burned; when, in fact, hundreds and thousands of the choicest
books were safely stored in his own house and those of other scribes,
librarians, students, and philosophers.
No more do sundry very learned Copts scattered all over the East in
Asia Minor, Egypt, and Palestine believe in the total destruction
of the subsequent libraries. For instance, they say that out of
the library of Attalus III. of Pergamus, presented by Antony to
Cleopatra, not a volume was destroyed. At that time, according to
their assertions, from the moment that the Christians began to
gain power in Alexandria--about the end of the fourth century--and
Anatolius, Bishop of Laodicea, began to insult the national gods, the
Pagan philosophers and learned theurgists adopted effective measures
to preserve the repositories of their sacred learning. Theophilus,
a bishop, who left behind him the reputation of a most rascally and
mercenary villain, was accused by one named Antoninus, a famous
theurgist and eminent scholar of occult science of Alexandria, with
bribing the slaves of the Serapion to steal books which he sold to
foreigners at great prices. History tells us how Theophilus had
the best of the philosophers, in A.D. 389; and how his successor
and nephew, the no less infamous Cyril, butchered Hypatia. Suidas
gives us some details about Antoninus, whom he calls Antonius, and
his eloquent friend Olympus, the defender of the Serapion. But
history is far from being complete in the miserable remnants of
books, which, crossing so many ages, have reached our own learned
century; it fails to give the facts relating to the first five
centuries of Christianity which are preserved in the numerous
traditions current in the East. Unauthenticated as these may appear,
there is unquestionably in the heap of chaff much good grain. That
these traditions are not oftener communicated to Europeans is not
strange, when we consider how apt our travellers are to render
themselves antagonistic to the natives by their skeptical bearing
and, occasionally, dogmatic intolerance. When exceptional men like
some archæologists, who knew how to win the confidence and even
friendship of certain Arabs, are favored with precious documents,
it is declared simply a “coincidence.” And yet there are widespread
traditions of the existence of certain subterranean, and immense
galleries, in the neighborhood of Ishmonia--the “petrified City,”
in which are stored numberless manuscripts and rolls. For no amount
of money would the Arabs go near it. At night, they say, from the
crevices of the desolate ruins, sunk deep in the unwatered sands of
the desert, stream the rays from lights carried to and fro in the
galleries by no human hands. The Afrites study the literature of the
antediluvian ages, according to their belief, and the Djin learns
from the magic rolls the lesson of the following day.
The _Encyclopedia Britannica_, in its article on Alexandria, says:
“When the temple of Serapis was demolished ... the valuable library
was _pillaged_ or destroyed; and _twenty_ years afterwards[37] the
_empty shelves_ excited the regret ... etc.” But it does not state
the subsequent fate of the _pillaged_ books.
In rivalry of the fierce Mary-worshippers of the fourth century,
the modern clerical persecutors of liberalism and “heresy” would
willingly shut up all the heretics and their books in some modern
Serapion and burn them alive.[38] The cause of this hatred is
natural. Modern research has more than ever unveiled the secret. “Is
not the worship of saints and angels now,” said Bishop Newton, years
ago, “in all respects the same that the worship of demons was in
former times? The name only is different, the thing is identically
the same ... the very same temples, the very same images, which were
once consecrated to Jupiter and the other demons, are now consecrated
to the Virgin Mary and other saints ... the whole of Paganism is
converted and applied _to Popery_.”
Why not be impartial and add that “a good portion of it was adopted
by Protestant religions also?”
The very apostolic designation _Peter_ is from the Mysteries. The
hierophant or supreme pontiff bore the Chaldean title פתר, _peter_,
or interpreter. The names Phtah, Peth’r, the residence of Balaam,
Patara, and Patras, the names of oracle-cities, _pateres_ or
_pateras_ and, perhaps, Buddha,[39] all come from the same root.
Jesus says: “Upon this _petra_ I will build my Church, and the
gates, or rulers of Hades, shall not prevail against it;” meaning by
_petra_ the rock-temple, and by metaphor, the Christian Mysteries;
the adversaries to which were the old mystery-gods of the underworld,
who were worshipped in the rites of Isis, Adonis, Atys, Sabazius,
Dionysus, and the Eleusinia. No _apostle_ Peter was ever at Rome; but
the Pope, seizing the sceptre of the _Pontifex Maximus_, the keys of
Janus and Kubelé, and adorning his Christian head with the cap of
the _Magna Mater_, copied from that of the tiara of Brahmâtma, the
Supreme Pontiff of the Initiates of old India, became the successor
of the Pagan high priest, the real Peter-Roma, or _Petroma_.[40]
The Roman Catholic Church has two far mightier enemies than the
“heretics” and the “infidels;” and these are--Comparative Mythology
and Philology. When such eminent divines as the Rev. James Freeman
Clarke go so much out of their way to prove to their readers that
“Critical Theology from the time of Origen and Jerome ... and the
Controversial Theology during fifteen centuries, has not consisted in
accepting on authority the opinions of other people,” but has shown,
on the contrary, much “acute and comprehensive reasoning,” we can but
regret that so much scholarship should have been wasted in attempting
to prove that which a fair survey of the history of theology upsets
at every step. In these “controversies” and critical treatment of the
doctrines of the Church one can certainly find any amount of “acute
reasoning,” but far more of a still acuter sophistry.
Recently the mass of cumulative evidence has been re-inforced to an
extent which leaves little, if any, room for further controversy. A
conclusive opinion is furnished by too many scholars to doubt the
fact that India was the _Alma-Mater_, not only of the civilization,
arts, and sciences, but also of all the great religions of antiquity;
Judaism, and hence Christianity, included. Herder places the cradle
of humanity in India, and shows Moses as a clever and relatively
_modern_ compiler of the ancient Brahmanical traditions: “The river
which encircles the country (India) is the sacred Ganges, which
all Asia considers as the paradisaical river. There, also, is the
biblical Gihon, which is none else but the Indus. The Arabs call it
so unto this day, and the names of the countries watered by it are
yet existing among the Hindus.” Jacolliot claims to have translated
every ancient palm-leaf manuscript which he had the fortune of
being allowed by the Brahmans of the pagodas to see. In one of his
translations, we found passages which reveal to us the _undoubted
origin of the keys_ of St. Peter, and account for the subsequent
adoption of the symbol by their Holinesses, the Popes of Rome.
He shows us, on the testimony of the _Agrouchada Parikshai_, which he
freely translates as “the _Book of Spirits_” (Pitris), that centuries
before our era the _initiates_ of the temple chose a Superior
Council, presided over by the Brahm-âtma or supreme chief of all
these _Initiates_. That this pontificate, which could be exercised
only by a Brahman who had reached the age of eighty years;[41] that
the Brahm-âtma was sole guardian of the mystic formula, _résumé_ of
every science, contained in the three mysterious letters,
=A=
=U= =M=
which signify _creation_, _conservation_, and _transformation_. He
alone could expound its meaning in the presence of the initiates
of the third and supreme degree. Whomsoever among these initiates
revealed to a profane a single one of the truths, even the smallest
of the secrets entrusted to his care, was put to death. He who
received the confidence had to share his fate.
“Finally, to crown this able system,” says Jacolliot, “there existed
a word still more superior to the mysterious monosyllable--A U M, and
which rendered him who came into the possession of its key nearly the
equal of Brahma himself. The Brahm-âtma alone possessed this key, and
transmitted it in a sealed casket to his successor.
“This unknown word, of which no human power could, even to-day, when
the Brahmanical authority has been crushed under the Mongolian and
European invasions, to-day, when each pagoda has its Brahm-âtma,[42]
_force the disclosure_, was engraved in a golden triangle and
preserved in a sanctuary of the temple of Asgartha, whose Brahm-âtma
alone held the keys. He also bore upon his tiara _two crossed keys_
supported by two kneeling Brahmans, symbol of the precious deposit
of which he had the keeping.... This word and this triangle were
engraved upon the tablet of the ring that this religious chief wore
as one of the signs of his dignity; it was also framed in a golden
sun on the altar, where every morning the Supreme Pontiff offered
the sacrifice of the sarvameda, or sacrifice to all the forces of
nature.”[43]
Is this clear enough? And will the Catholics still maintain that it
was the Brahmans of 4,000 years ago who copied the ritual, symbols,
and dress of the Roman Pontiffs? We would not feel in the least
surprised.
Without going very far back into antiquity for comparisons, if we
only stop at the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and contrast
the so-called “heathenism” of the third Neo-platonic Eclectic School
with the growing Christianity, the result may not be favorable to
the latter. Even at that early period, when the new religion had
hardly outlined its contradictory dogmas; when the champions of the
bloodthirsty Cyril knew not themselves whether Mary was to become
“the Mother of God,” or rank as a “demon” in company with Isis; when
the memory of the meek and lowly Jesus still lingered lovingly in
every Christian heart, and his words of mercy and charity vibrated
still in the air, even then the Christians were outdoing the Pagans
in every kind of ferocity and religious intolerance.
And if we look still farther back, and seek for examples of true
_Christism_, in ages when Buddhism had hardly superseded Brahmanism
in India, and the name of Jesus was only to be pronounced three
centuries later, what do we find? Which of the holy pillars of the
Church has ever elevated himself to the level of religious tolerance
and noble simplicity of character of some heathen? Compare, for
instance, the Hindu Asoka, who lived 300 B.C., and the Carthaginian
St. Augustine, who flourished three centuries after Christ. According
to Max Müller, this is what is found engraved on the rocks of Girnar,
Dhauli, and Kapurdigiri:
“Piyadasi, the king beloved of the gods, desires that the ascetics
_of all creeds_ might reside in all places. All these ascetics
profess alike the command which people should exercise over
themselves, and the purity of the soul. _But people have different
opinions and different inclinations._”
And here is what Augustine wrote after his baptism: “Wondrous depth
of thy words! whose surface, behold! is before us, inviting to
little ones; yet are they a wondrous depth, O my God, a wondrous
depth! It is awful to look therein; yes ... an awfulness of honor,
and a trembling of love. Thy enemies [read Pagans] thereof I _hate_
vehemently; Oh, _that thou wouldst slay them_ with thy two-edged
sword, that they might no longer be enemies to it; for _so do I love
to have them slain_.”[44]
Wonderful spirit of Christianity; and that from a Manichean converted
to the religion of one who even on his cross prayed for his enemies!
Who the enemies of the “Lord” were, according to the Christians, is
not difficult to surmise; the few inside the Augustinian fold were
His new children and favorites, who had supplanted in His affections
the sons of Israel, His “chosen people.” The rest of mankind were
His natural foes. The teeming multitudes of heathendom were proper
food for the flames of hell; the handful within the Church communion,
“heirs of salvation.”
But if such a proscriptive policy was just, and its enforcement was
“sweet savor” in the nostrils of the “Lord,” why not scorn also
the Pagan rites and philosophy? Why draw so deep from the wells of
wisdom, dug and filled up to brim by the same heathen? Or did the
fathers, in their desire to imitate the chosen people whose time-worn
shoes they were trying to fit upon their feet, contemplate the
reënaction of the spoliation-scene of the _Exodus_? Did they propose,
in fleeing from heathendom as the Jews did from Egypt, to carry off
the valuables of its religious allegories, as the “chosen ones” did
the gold and silver ornaments?
It certainly does seem as if the events of the first centuries of
Christianity were but the reflection of the images thrown upon
the mirror of the future at the time of the Exodus. During the
stormy days of Irenæus, the Platonic philosophy, with its mystical
submersion into Deity, was not so obnoxious after all to the new
doctrine as to prevent the Christians from helping themselves to its
abstruse metaphysics in every way and manner. Allying themselves with
the ascetical theurapeutæ--forefathers and models of the Christian
monks and hermits, it was in Alexandria, let it be remembered, that
they laid the first foundations of the purely Platonic trinitarian
doctrine. It became the Plato-Philonean doctrine later, and such as
we find it now. Plato considered the divine nature under a three-fold
modification of the _First Cause_, the reason or _Logos_, and the
soul or spirit of the universe. “The three archial or original
principles,” says Gibbon,[45] “were represented in the Platonic
system as three gods, united with each other by a mysterious and
ineffable generation.” Blending this transcendental idea with the
more hypostatic figure of the _Logos_ of Philo, whose doctrine was
that of the oldest Kabala, and who viewed the King Messiah, as the
metatron, or “the angel of the Lord,” the _Legatus_ descended in
flesh, but not the _Ancient of Days_ Himself;[46] the Christians
clothed with this mythical representation of the Mediator for the
fallen race of Adam, Jesus, the son of Mary. Under this unexpected
garb his personality was all but lost. In the modern Jesus of the
Christian Church, we find the ideal of the imaginative Irenæus, not
the adept of the Essenes, the obscure reformer from Galilee. We see
him under the disfigured Plato-Philonean mask, not as the disciples
heard him on the mount.
So far then the heathen philosophy had helped them in the building
of the principal dogma. But when the theurgists of the third
Neo-platonic school, deprived of their ancient Mysteries, strove
to blend the doctrines of Plato with those of Aristotle, and by
combining the two philosophies added to their theosophy the primeval
doctrines of the Oriental _Kabala_, then the Christians from rivals
became persecutors. Once that the metaphysical allegories of Plato
were being prepared to be discussed in public in the form of Grecian
dialectics, all the elaborate system of the Christian trinity would
be unravelled and the divine prestige completely upset. The eclectic
school, reversing the order, had adopted the inductive method; and
this method became its death-knell. Of all things on earth, logic and
reasonable explanations were the most hateful to the new religion of
mystery; for they threatened to unveil the whole ground-work of the
trinitarian conception; to apprise the multitude of the doctrine of
emanations, and thus destroy the unity of the whole. It could not be
permitted, and it was not. History records the _Christ_-like means
that were resorted to.
The universal doctrine of emanations, adopted from time immemorial
by the greatest schools which taught the kabalistic, Alexandrian,
and Oriental philosophers, gives the key to that panic among the
Christian fathers. That spirit of Jesuitism and clerical craft, which
prompted Parkhurst, many centuries later, to suppress in his _Hebrew
Lexicon_ the true meaning of the first word of _Genesis_, originated
in those days of war against the expiring Neo-platonic and eclectic
school. The fathers had decided to pervert the meaning of the word
“_daimon_,”[47] and they dreaded above all to have the esoteric and
true meaning of the word _Rasit_ unveiled to the multitudes; for if
once the true sense of this sentence, as well as that of the Hebrew
word _asdt_ (translated in the Septuagint “_angels_,” while it
means emanations),[48] were understood rightly, the mystery of the
Christian trinity would have crumbled, carrying in its downfall the
new religion into the same heap of ruins with the ancient Mysteries.
This is the true reason why dialecticians, as well as Aristotle
himself, the “prying philosopher,” were ever obnoxious to Christian
theology. Even Luther, while on his work of reform, feeling the
ground insecure under his feet, notwithstanding that the dogmas had
been reduced by him to their simplest expression, gave full vent to
his fear and hatred for Aristotle. The amount of abuse he heaped
upon the memory of the great logician can only be equalled--never
surpassed--by the Pope’s anathemas and invectives against the
liberals of the Italian government. Compiled together, they might
easily fill a copy of a new encyclopædia with models for monkish
diatribes.
Of course the Christian clergy can never get reconciled with a
doctrine based on the application of strict logic to discursive
reasoning. The number of those who have abandoned theology on this
account has never been made known. They have asked questions and
been forbidden to ask them; hence, separation, disgust, and often a
despairing plunge into the abyss of atheism. The Orphean views of
ether as chief _medium between_ God and created matter were likewise
denounced. The Orphic Æther recalled too vividly the _Archeus_,
the Soul of the World, and the latter was in its metaphysical
sense as closely related to the emanations, being the first
manifestation--Sephira, or Divine Light. And when could the latter be
more feared than at that critical moment?
Origen, Clemens Alexandrinus, Chalcidius, Methodius, and Maimonides,
on the authority of the _Targum_ of Jerusalem, the orthodox and
greatest authority of the Jews, held that the first two words in
the book of _Genesis_--B-RASIT, mean _Wisdom_, or the _Principle_.
And that the idea of these words meaning “_in the beginning_” was
never shared but by the profane, who were not allowed to penetrate
any deeper into the esoteric sense of the sentence. Beausobre,
and after him Godfrey Higgins, have demonstrated the fact. “All
things,” says the _Kabala_, “are derived from one great Principle,
and this principle is the _unknown_ and _invisible_ God. From Him a
substantial power immediately proceeds, which is the _image of God_,
and the source of all subsequent emanations. This second principle
sends forth, by the _energy_ (or _will_ and _force_) of emanation,
other natures, which are more or less perfect, according to their
different degrees of distance, in the scale of emanation, from the
First Source of existence, and which constitute different worlds,
or orders of being, all united to the eternal power from which they
proceed. _Matter is nothing more than the most remote effect of the
emanative energy_ of the Deity. The material world receives its form
from the immediate agency of powers far beneath the First Source of
Being[49].... Beausobre[50] makes St. Augustine the Manichean say
thus: ‘And if by _Rasit_ we understand the _active Principle_ of the
creation, instead of its _beginning_, in such a case we will clearly
perceive that Moses never meant to say that heaven and earth were
the first works of God. He only said that God created heaven and
earth _through the Principle_, who is His Son. It is not the _time_
he points to, but to the immediate author of the creation.’ Angels,
according to Augustine, were created _before_ the firmament, and
according to the esoteric interpretation, the heaven and earth were
created after that, evolving from the _second_ Principle or the
Logos--the creative Deity. “The word _principle_,” says Beausobre,
“does not mean that the heaven and earth were created before
anything else, for, to begin with, the _angels_ were created before
that; but that God did everything through His Wisdom, which is His
_Verbum_, and which the Christian _Bible_ named the _Beginning_,”
thus adopting the exoteric meaning of the word abandoned to the
multitudes. The _Kabala_--the Oriental as well as the Jewish--shows
that a number of _emanations_ (the Jewish Sephiroth) issued from the
_First_ Principle, the chief of which was _Wisdom_. This Wisdom is
the Logos of Philo, and Michael, the chief of the Gnostic Eons; it
is the Ormazd of the Persians; _Minerva_, goddess of wisdom, of the
Greeks, who emanated from the head of Jupiter; and the second Person
of the Christian Trinity. The early Fathers of the Church had not
much to exert their imagination; they found a ready-made doctrine
that had existed in every theogony for thousands of years before
the Christian era. Their trinity is but the trio of Sephiroth, the
first three kabalistic _lights_ of which Moses Nachmanides says, that
“_they have never been seen by any one_; there is not any defect in
them, nor any disunion.” The first eternal number is the Father, or
the Chaldean primeval, invisible, and incomprehensible _chaos_, out
of which proceeded the _Intelligible_ one. The Egyptian Phtah, or
“the _Principle of Light_--not the light itself, and the Principle
of Life, though himself _no_ life.” The _Wisdom_ by which the Father
created the heavens is the _Son_, or the kabalistic androgynous
Adam Kadmon. The Son is at once the male _Ra_, or Light of Wisdom,
Prudence or _Intelligence_, Sephira, the female part of Himself;
while from this dual being proceeds the third emanation, the Binah or
Reason, the second Intelligence--the Holy Ghost of the Christians.
Therefore, strictly speaking, there is a TETRAKTIS or quaternary,
consisting of the Unintelligible First monad, and its triple
emanation, which properly constitute our Trinity.
How then avoid perceiving at once, that had not the Christians
purposely disfigured in their interpretation and translation the
Mosaic _Genesis_ to fit their own views, their religion, with its
present dogmas, would have been impossible? The word Rasit, once
taught in its new sense of the _Principle_ and not the _Beginning_,
and the anathematized doctrine of emanations accepted, the position
of the second trinitarian personage becomes untenable. For, if the
angels are the _first_ divine emanations from the Divine Substance,
and were in existence _before_ the Second Principle, then the
anthropomorphized _Son_ is at best an emanation like themselves,
and cannot be God _hypostatically_ any more than our visible works
are ourselves. That these metaphysical subtleties never entered
into the head of the honest-minded, sincere Paul, is evident; as
it is furthermore evident, that like all learned Jews he was well
acquainted with the doctrine of emanations and never thought of
corrupting it. How can any one imagine that Paul identified the _Son_
with the _Father_, when he tells us that God made Jesus “a _little
lower_ than the angels” (_Hebrews_ ii. 9), and a _little higher_ than
Moses! “For this MAN was counted worthy of more glory than Moses”
(_Hebrews_ iii. 3). Of whatever, or how many forgeries, interlined
later in the _Acts_, the Fathers are guilty we know not; but that
Paul never considered Christ more than a man “full of the Spirit of
God” is but too evident: “In the _arche_ was the _Logos_, and the
Logos was adnate to the Theos.”
_Wisdom_, the first emanation of En-Soph; the Protogonos, the
Hypostasis; the Adam Kadmon of the kabalist, the Brahma of the Hindu;
the Logos of Plato, and the “_Beginning_” of St. John--is the
Rasit--ראשית, of the _Book of Genesis_. If rightly interpreted it
overturns, as we have remarked, the whole elaborate system of
Christian theology, for it proves that behind the _creative_ Deity,
there was a HIGHER god; a planner, an architect; and that the former
was but His executive agent--a simple POWER!
They persecuted the Gnostics, murdered the philosophers, and
burned the kabalists and the masons; and when the day of the great
reckoning arrives, and the light shines in darkness, what will they
have to offer in the place of the departed, expired religion? What
will they answer, these pretended monotheists, these worshippers
and _pseudo_-servants of the one living God, to their Creator? How
will they account for this long persecution of them who were the
true followers of the grand Megalistor, the supreme great master
of the Rosicrucians, the FIRST of masons. “For he is the Builder
and Architect of the Temple of the universe; He is the _Verbum
Sapienti_.”[51]
“Every one knows,” wrote the great Manichean of the third century,
Fauste, “that the Evangeliums were written neither by Jesus Christ,
nor his apostles, but long after their time by some unknown persons,
who, judging well that they would hardly be believed when telling of
things they had not seen themselves, headed their narratives with
the names of the apostles or of disciples contemporaneous with the
latter.”
Commenting upon the subject, A. Franck, the learned Hebrew scholar
of the Institute and translator of the _Kabala_, expresses the same
idea. “Are we not authorized,” he asks, “to view the _Kabala_ as
a precious remnant of religious philosophy of the Orient, which,
transported into Alexandria, got mixed to the doctrine of Plato, and
under the usurped name of Dionysius the Areopagite, bishop of Athens,
converted and consecrated by St. Paul, was thus enabled to penetrate
into the mysticism of the mediæval ages?”[52]
Says Jacolliot: “What is then this religious philosophy of
the Orient, which has penetrated into the mystic symbolism of
Christianity? We answer: This philosophy, the traces of which we find
among the Magians, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Hebrew kabalists
and the Christians, is none other than that of the Hindu Brahmans,
the sectarians of the _pitris_, or the spirits of the invisible
worlds which surround us.”[53]
But if the Gnostics were destroyed, the _Gnosis_, based on the
secret science of sciences, still lives. It is the earth which
helps the woman, and which is destined to open her mouth to swallow
up mediæval Christianity, the usurper and assassin of the great
master’s doctrine. The ancient _Kabala_, the Gnosis, or traditional
_secret_ knowledge, was never without its representatives in any age
or country. The trinities of initiates, whether passed into history
or concealed under the impenetrable veil of mystery, are preserved
and impressed throughout the ages. They are known as Moses, Aholiab,
and Bezaleel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, as Plato, Philo, and
Pythagoras, etc. At the Transfiguration we see them as Jesus, Moses,
and Elias, the three Trismegisti; and three kabalists, Peter, James,
and John--whose _revelation_ is the key to all wisdom. We found them
in the twilight of Jewish history as Zoroaster, Abraham, and Terah,
and later as Henoch, Ezekiel, and Daniel.
Who, of those who ever studied the ancient philosophies, who
understand intuitionally the grandeur of their conceptions, the
boundless sublimity of their views of the Unknown Deity, can hesitate
for a moment to give the preference to their doctrines over the
incomprehensible dogmatic and contradictory theology of the hundreds
of Christian sects? Who that ever read Plato and fathomed his Το Ὀν,
“_whom no person has seen except the Son_,” can doubt that Jesus was a
disciple of the same secret doctrine which had instructed the great
philosopher? For, as we have shown before now, Plato never claimed to
be the inventor of all that he wrote, but gave credit for it to
Pythagoras, who, in his turn, pointed to the remote East as the source
whence he derived his information and his philosophy. Colebrooke shows
that Plato confesses it in his epistles, and says that he has taken
his teachings from ancient and sacred doctrines![54] Moreover, it is
undeniable that the theologies of all the great nations dovetail
together and show that each is a part of “one stupendous whole.” Like
the rest of the initiates we see Plato taking great pains to conceal
the true meaning of his allegories. Every time the subject touches the
greater secrets of the Oriental _Kabala_, secret of the true cosmogony
of the universe and of the _ideal_, preëxisting world, Plato shrouds
his philosophy in the profoundest darkness. His _Timæus_ is so
confused that no one but an _initiate_ can understand the secret
meaning. And Mosheim thinks that Philo has filled his works with
passages directly contradicting each other for the sole purpose of
concealing the true doctrine. For once we see a critic on the right
track.
And this very trinitarian idea, as well as the so bitterly denounced
doctrine of emanations, whence their remotest origin? The answer is
easy, and every proof is now at hand. In the sublime and profoundest
of all philosophies, that of the universal “Wisdom-Religion,” the
first traces of which, historical research now finds in the old
pre-Vedic religion of India. As the much-abused Jacolliot well
remarks, “It is not in the religious works of antiquity, such as the
_Vedas_, the _Zend Avesta_, the _Bible_, that we have to search for
the exact expression of the ennobling and sublime beliefs of those
epochs.”[55]
“The holy primitive syllable, composed of the three letters A--U--M.,
in which is contained the Vedic Trimurti (Trinity), must be kept
secret, like another triple Veda,” says Manu, in book xi., sloka 265.
Swayambhouva is the unrevealed Deity; it is the Being existent
through and of itself; he is the central and immortal germ of
all that exists in the universe. Three trinities emanate and are
confounded in him, forming a Supreme _unity_. These trinities, or the
triple _Trimurti_, are: the Nara, Nari, and Viradyi--the _initial_
triad; the Agni, Vaya, and Sourya--the _manifested_ triad; Brahma,
Vishnu, and Siva, the _creative_ triad. Each of these triads becomes
less metaphysical and more adapted to the vulgar intelligence as
it descends. Thus the last becomes but the symbol in its concrete
expression; the necessarianism of a purely metaphysical conception.
Together with Swayambhouva, they are the ten _Sephiroth_ of the
Hebrew kabalists, the ten Hindu Pragâpatis--the En-Soph of the
former, answering to the great _Unknown_, expressed by the mystic A U
M of the latter.
Says Franck, the translator of the _Kabala_:
“The ten Sephiroth are divided into _three classes_, each of them
presenting to us the divinity _under a different aspect_, the whole
still remaining an _indivisible Trinity_.
“The first three Sephiroth are purely intellectual in metaphysics,
they express the absolute identity of existence and thought, and form
what the modern kabalists called the intelligible world--which is the
first manifestation of God.
“The three that follow, make us conceive God in one of their aspects,
as the identity of goodness and wisdom; in the other they show to us,
in the Supreme good, the origin of beauty and magnificence (in the
creation). Therefore, they are named the _virtues_, or the _sensible
world_.
“Finally, we learn, by the last three Sephiroth, that the Universal
Providence, that the Supreme artist is also _absolute Force_, the
all-powerful cause, and that, at the same time, this cause _is the
generative element of all that is_. It is these last Sephiroth that
constitute the _natural world_, or nature in its essence and in its
_active_ principle, _Natura naturans._”[56]
This kabalistic conception is thus proved identical with that of the
Hindu philosophy. Whoever reads Plato and his _Dialogue_ Timæus, will
find these ideas as faithfully re-echoed by the Greek philosopher.
Moreover, the injunction of secrecy was as strict with the kabalists,
as with the initiates of the Adyta and the Hindu Yogis.
“Close thy mouth, lest thou shouldst speak of _this_ (the mystery),
and thy heart, lest thou shouldst think aloud; and if thy heart has
escaped thee, bring it back to its place, for such is the object of
our alliance” (_Sepher Jezireh_, _Book of Creation_).
“This is a secret which gives death: close thy mouth lest thou
shouldst reveal to the vulgar; compress thy brain lest something
should escape from it and fall outside” (_Agrouchada-Parikshai_).
Truly the fate of many a future generation hung on a gossamer
thread, in the days of the third and fourth centuries. Had not the
Emperor sent in 389 to Alexandria a rescript--which was forced from
him by the Christians--for the destruction of every idol, our own
century would never have had a Christian mythological Pantheon of
its own. Never did the Neo-platonic school reach such a height of
philosophy as when nearest its end. Uniting the mystic theosophy
of old Egypt with the refined philosophy of the Greeks; nearer to
the ancient Mysteries of Thebes and Memphis than they had been for
centuries; versed in the science of soothsaying and divination,
as in the art of the Therapeutists; friendly with the acutest men
of the Jewish nation, who were deeply imbued with the Zoroastrian
ideas, the Neo-platonists tended to amalgamate the old wisdom of the
Oriental _Kabala_ with the more refined conceptions of the Occidental
Theosophists. Notwithstanding the treason of the Christians, who
saw fit, for political reasons, after the days of Constantine, to
repudiate their tutors, the influence of the new Platonic philosophy
is conspicuous in the subsequent adoption of dogmas, the origin
of which can be traced but too easily to that remarkable school.
Though mutilated and disfigured, they still preserve a strong family
likeness, which nothing can obliterate.
But, if the knowledge of the occult powers of nature opens the
spiritual sight of man, enlarges his intellectual faculties, and
leads him unerringly to a profounder veneration for the Creator,
on the other hand ignorance, dogmatic narrow-mindedness, and a
childish fear of looking to the bottom of things, invariably leads to
fetish-worship and superstition.
When Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, had openly embraced the cause
of Isis, the Egyptian goddess, and had anthropomorphized her into
Mary, the mother of God; and the trinitarian controversy had taken
place; from that moment the Egyptian doctrine of the emanation of
the creative God out of Emepht began to be tortured in a thousand
ways, until the Councils had agreed upon the adoption of it as it
now stands--the disfigured Ternary of the kabalistic Solomon and
Philo! But as its origin was yet too evident, the _Word_ was no
longer called the “Heavenly man,” the _primal_ Adam Kadmon, but
became the Logos--Christ, and was made as old as the “Ancient of the
Ancient,” his father. The _concealed_ WISDOM became identical with
its emanation, the DIVINE THOUGHT, and made to be regarded coëqual
and coëternal with its first manifestation.
If we now stop to consider another of the fundamental dogmas of
Christianity, the doctrine of atonement, we may trace it as easily
back to heathendom. This corner-stone of a Church which had believed
herself built on a firm rock for long centuries, is now excavated
by science and proved to come from the Gnostics. Professor Draper
shows it as hardly known in the days of Tertullian, and as having
“_originated_ among the Gnostic heretics.”[57] We will not permit
ourselves to contradict such a learned authority, farther than to
state that it _originated_ among them no more than their “anointed”
Christos and Sophia. The former they modelled on the original of
the “King Messiah,” the male principle of wisdom, and the latter on
the third Sephiroth, from the Chaldean _Kabala_,[58] and even from
the Hindu Brahma and Sara-âsvati,[59] and the Pagan Dionysus and
Demeter. And here we are on firm ground, if it were only because it
is now proved that the _New Testament_ never appeared in its complete
form, such as we find it now, till 300 years after the period of
apostles,[60] and the _Sohar_ and other kabalistic books are found to
belong to the first century before our era, if not to be far older
still.
The Gnostics entertained many of the Essenean ideas; and the
Essenes had their “greater” and “minor” Mysteries at least two
centuries before our era. They were the _Isarim_ or _Initiates_,
the descendants of the Egyptian hierophants, in whose country they
had been settled for several centuries before they were converted
to Buddhistic monasticism by the missionaries of King Asoka, and
amalgamated later with the earliest Christians; and they existed,
probably, before the old Egyptian temples were desecrated and ruined
in the incessant invasions of Persians, Greeks, and other conquering
hordes. The hierophants had their _atonement_ enacted in the Mystery
of Initiation ages before the Gnostics, or even the Essenes, had
appeared. It was known among hierophants as the BAPTISM OF BLOOD, and
was considered not as an atonement for the “fall of man” in Eden,
but simply as an expiation for the past, present, and future sins of
ignorant but nevertheless polluted mankind. The hierophant had the
option of either offering his pure and sinless life as a sacrifice
for his race to the gods whom he hoped to rejoin, or an animal
victim. The former depended entirely on their own will. At the last
moment of the solemn “new birth,” the initiator passed “the word” to
the initiated, and immediately after that the latter had a weapon
placed in his right hand, and was ordered _to strike_.[61] This is
the true origin of the Christian dogma of atonement.
Verily the “Christs” of the pre-Christian ages were many. But they
died unknown to the world, and disappeared as silently and as
mysteriously from the sight of man as Moses from the top of Pisgah,
the mountain of Nebo (oracular wisdom), after he had laid his hands
upon Joshua, who thus became “full of the spirit of wisdom” (_i.e._,
_initiated_).
Nor does the Mystery of the Eucharist pertain to Christians alone.
Godfrey Higgins proves that it was instituted many hundreds of
years before the “Paschal Supper,” and says that “the sacrifice of
bread and wine was common to many ancient nations.”[62] Cicero
mentions it in his works, and wonders at the strangeness of the rite.
There had been an esoteric meaning attached to it from the first
establishment of the Mysteries, and the Eucharistia is one of the
oldest rites of antiquity. With the hierophants it had nearly the
same significance as with the Christians. Ceres was _bread_, and
Bacchus was _wine_; the former meaning regeneration of life from the
seed, and the latter--the grape--the emblem of wisdom and knowledge;
the accumulation of the spirit of things, and the fermentation
and subsequent strength of that esoteric knowledge being justly
symbolized by wine. The mystery related to the drama of Eden; it is
said to have been first taught by Janus, who was also the first to
introduce in the temples the sacrifices of “bread” and “wine” in
commemoration of the “fall into generation” as the symbol of the
“seed.” “I am the vine, and my Father is the husbandman,” says Jesus,
alluding to the secret knowledge that could be imparted by him. “I
will drink no more of the fruit of the vine until that day that I
drink it new in the kingdom of God.”
The festival of the Eleusinian Mysteries began in the month of
Boëdromion, which corresponds with the month of September, the time
of grape-gathering, and lasted from the 15th to the 22d of the month,
_seven_ days.[63] The Hebrew festival of the Feast of Tabernacles
began on the 15th and ended on the 22d of the month of Ethanim, which
Dunlap shows as derived from Adonim, Adonia, Attenim, Ethanim;[64]
and this feast is named in _Exodus_ (xxiii. 16) the feast of
_ingatherings_. “All the men of Israel assembled unto King Solomon at
the feast in the month Ethanim, which is the _seventh_.”[65]
Plutarch thinks the feast of the booths to be the Bacchic rites, not
the Eleusinian. Thus “Bacchus was directly called upon,” he says.
The _Sabazian_ worship was _Sabbatic_; the names Evius, or Hevius,
and Luaios are identical with _Hivite_ and _Levite_. The French name
Louis is the Hebrew _Levi_; Iacchus again is Iao or Jehovah; and Baal
or Adon, like Bacchus, was a phallic god. “Who shall ascend into the
hill (the high place) of the Lord?” asks the holy king David, “who
shall stand in the place of his _Kadushu_ קדשו”? (_Psalms_ xxiv. 3).
Kadesh may mean in one sense to _devote, hallow, sanctify_, and even
to initiate or to set apart; but it also means the ministers of
lascivious rites (the Venus-worship) and the true interpretation of
the word Kadesh is bluntly rendered in _Deuteronomy_ xxiii. 17;
_Hosea_ iv. 14; and _Genesis_ xxxviii., from verses 15 to 22. The
“holy” Kadeshuth of the _Bible_ were identical as to the duties of
their office with the Nautch-girls of the later Hindu pagodas. The
Hebrew _Kadeshim_ or galli lived “by the house of the Lord, where the
women wove hangings for the grove,” or bust of Venus-Astartè, says
verse the seventh in the twenty-third chapter of 2 Kings.
The dance performed by David round the ark was the “circle-dance”
said to have been prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries. Such
was the dance of the daughters of Shiloh (_Judges_ xxi. 21, 23 _et
passim_), and the leaping of the prophets of Baal (_1 Kings_ xviii.
26). It was simply a characteristic of the Sabean worship, for it
denoted the motion of the planets round the sun. That the dance was a
Bacchic frenzy is apparent. Sistra were used on the occasion, and the
taunt of Michael and the king’s reply are very expressive. “The king
of Israel uncovered himself before his maid-servants as one of the
_vain_ (or debauched) fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself.” And he
retorts: “I will play (act wantonly) before יהוה, and I will be yet
more vile than this, and I will be base in my own sight.” When we
remember that David had sojourned among the Tyrians and Philistines,
where their rites were common; and that indeed he had conquered that
land away from the house of Saul, by the aid of mercenaries from their
country, the countenancing and even, perhaps, the introduction of such
a Pagan-like worship by the weak “psalmist” seems very natural. David
knew nothing of Moses, it seems, and if he introduced the
Jehovah-worship it was not in its monotheistic character, but simply
as that of one of the many gods of the neighboring nations--a tutelary
deity to whom he had given the preference, and chosen among “all other
gods.”
Following the Christian dogmas seriatim, if we concentrate our
attention upon one which provoked the fiercest battles until its
recognition, that of the Trinity, what do we find? We meet it, as
we have shown, northeast of the Indus; and tracing it to Asia Minor
and Europe, recognize it among every people who had anything like
an established religion. It was taught in the oldest Chaldean,
Egyptian, and Mithraïtic schools. The Chaldean Sun-god, Mithra, was
called “Triple,” and the trinitarian idea of the Chaldeans was a
doctrine of the Akkadians, who, themselves, belonged to a race which
was the first to conceive a metaphysical trinity. The Chaldeans
are a tribe of the Akkadians, according to Rawlinson, who lived in
Babylonia from the earliest times. They were Turanians, according
to others, and instructed the Babylonians into the first notions of
religion. But these same Akkadians, who were they? Those scientists
who would ascribe to them a Turanian origin, make of them the
inventors of the cuneiform characters; others call them Sumerians;
others again, respectively, make their language, of which (for
very good reasons) no traces whatever remain--Kasdean, Chaldaic,
Proto-Chaldean, Kasdo-Scythic, and so on. The only tradition worthy
of credence is that these Akkadians instructed the Babylonians in
the Mysteries, and taught them the sacerdotal or _Mystery_-language.
These Akkadians were then simply a tribe of the Hindu-Brahmans, now
called Aryans--their vernacular language, the Sanscrit[66] of the
Vedas; and the sacred or Mystery-language, that which, even in our
own age, is used by the Hindu fakirs and initiated Brahmans in their
magical evocations.[67] It has been, from time immemorial, and still
is employed by the initiates of all countries, and the Thibetan lamas
claim that it is in this tongue that appear the mysterious characters
on the leaves and bark of the sacred Koumboum.
Jacolliot, who took such pains to penetrate the mysteries of the
Brahmanical initiation in translating and commenting upon the
_Agrouchada-Parikshai_, confesses the following:
“It is pretended also, without our being able to verify the
assertion, that the magical evocations were pronounced in a
particular language, and that it was forbidden, under pain of death,
to translate them into vulgar dialects. The rare expressions that
we have been able to catch like--_L’rhom_, _h’hom_, _sh’hrum_,
_sho’rhim_, are in fact most curious, and do not seem to belong to
any known idiom.”[68]
Those who have seen a fakir or a lama reciting his mantras and
conjurations, know that he never pronounces the words audibly when
preparing for a phenomenon. His lips move, and none will ever hear
the terrible formula pronounced, except in the interior of the
temples, and then in a cautious whisper. This, then, was the language
now respectively baptized by every scientist, and, according to his
imaginative and philological propensities, Kasdeo-Semitic, Scythic,
Proto-Chaldean, and the like.
Scarcely two of even the most learned Sanscrit philologists are
agreed as to the true interpretation of Vedic words. Let one put
forth an essay, a lecture, a treatise, a translation, a dictionary,
and straightway all the others fall to quarrelling with each other
and with him as to his sins of omission and commission. Professor
Whitney, greatest of American Orientalists, says that Professor
Müller’s notes on the _Rig Veda Sânhita_ “are far from showing that
sound and thoughtful judgment, that moderation and economy which
are among the most precious qualities of an exegete.” Professor
Müller angrily retorts upon his critics that “not only is the joy
embittered which is the inherent reward of all _bona fide_ work, but
selfishness, malignity, aye, _even untruthfulness_, gain the upper
hand, and the healthy growth of science is stunted.” He differs “in
many cases from the explanations of Vedic words given by Professor
Roth” in his _Sanscrit Dictionary_, and Professor Whitney shampooes
both their heads by saying that there are, unquestionably, words and
phrases “as to which both alike will hereafter be set right.”
In volume i. of his _Chips_, Professor Müller stigmatizes all
the _Vedas_ except the _Rik_, the _Atharva-Veda_ included, as
“theological twaddle,” while Professor Whitney regards the latter
as “the most comprehensive and valuable of the four collections,
next after the _Rik_.” To return to the case of Jacolliot. Professor
Whitney brands him as a “bungler and a humbug,” and, as we remarked
above, this is the very general verdict. But when the _Bible dans
l’Inde_ appeared, the Société Académique de Saint Quentin requested
M. Textor de Ravisi, a learned Indianist, ten years Governor of
Karikal, India, to report upon its merits. He was an ardent Catholic,
and bitterly opposed Jacolliot’s conclusions where they discredited
the Mosaic and Catholic revelations; but he was forced to say:
“Written with good faith, in an easy, vigorous, and passionate style,
of an easy and varied argumentation, the work of M. Jacolliot is
of absorbing interest ... a learned work on known facts and with
familiar arguments.”
Enough. Let Jacolliot have the benefit of the doubt when such very
imposing authorities are doing their best to show up each other as
incompetents and literary journeymen. We quite agree with Professor
Whitney that “the truism, that [for European critics?] it is far
easier to pull to pieces than to build up, is nowhere truer than in
matters affecting the archæology and history of India.”[69]
Babylonia happened to be situated on the way of the great stream
of the earliest Hindu emigration, and the Babylonians were one of
the first peoples benefited thereby.[70] These Khaldi were the
worshippers of the Moon-god, Deus Lunus, from which fact we may
infer that the Akkadians--if such must be their name--belonged to
the race of the Kings of the Moon, whom tradition shows as having
reigned in Pruyay--now Allahabad. With them the trinity of Deus Lunus
was manifested in the three lunar phases, completing the quaternary
with the fourth, and typifying the death of the Moon-god in its
gradual waning and final disappearance. This death was allegorized
by them, and attributed to the triumph of the genius of evil over
the light-giving deity; as the later nations allegorized the death
of their Sun-gods, Osiris and Apollo, at the hands of Typhon and the
great Dragon Python, when the sun entered the winter solstice. Babel,
Arach, and Akkad are names of the sun. The _Zoroastrian Oracles_ are
full and explicit upon the subject of the Divine Triad. “A triad of
Deity shines forth throughout the whole world, of which a Monad is
the head,” admits the Reverend Dr. Maurice.
“For from this Triad, in the bosoms, are all things governed,” says
a Chaldean oracle. The Phos, Pur, and Phlox, of Sanchoniathon,[71]
are Light, Fire, and Flame, three manifestations of the Sun who is
_one_. Bel-Saturn, Jupiter-Bel, and Bel or Baal-Chom are the Chaldean
trinity;[72] The Babylonian Bel was regarded in the Triune aspect
of Belitan, Zeus-Belus (the mediator) and Baal-Chom who is Apollo
Chomæus. This was the Triune aspect of the ‘Highest God,’ who is,
according to Berosus, either El (the Hebrew), Bel, Belitan, Mithra,
or Zervana, and has the name πατηρ, “the Father.”[73] The Brahma,
Vishnu, and Siva,[74] corresponding to Power, Wisdom, and Justice,
which answer in their turn to Spirit, Matter, Time, and the Past,
Present, and Future, can be found in the temple of Gharipuri;
thousands of dogmatic Brahmans worship these attributes of the Vedic
Deity, while the severe monks and nuns of Buddhistic Thibet recognize
but the sacred trinity of the three cardinal virtues: _Poverty_,
_Chastity_, and _Obedience_, professed by the Christians, practiced by
the Buddhists and some Hindus alone.
The Persian triplicate Deity also consists of three persons, Ormazd,
Mithra, and Ahriman. “That is that principle,” says Porphyry,[75]
“which the author of the _Chaldaic Summary_ saith, ‘_They conceive
there is one principle of all things, and declare that is one and
good._’” The Chinese idol Sanpao, consists of three equal in all
respects;[76] and the Peruvians “supposed their Tanga-tanga to be one
in three, and three in one,” says Faber.[77] The Egyptians have their
Emepht, Eicton, and Phta; and the triple god seated on the Lotos can
be seen in the St. Petersburg Museum, on a medal of the Northern
Tartars.
Among the Church dogmas which have most seriously suffered of late
at the hands of the Orientalists, the last in question stands
conspicuous. The reputation of each of the three personages of the
anthropomorphic godhead as an original revelation to the Christians
through Divine will, has been badly compromised by inquiry into its
predecessors and origin. Orientalists have published more about the
similarity between Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Christianity than was
strictly agreeable to the Vatican. Draper’s assertion that “Paganism
was modified by Christianity, Christianity by Paganism,”[78] is being
daily verified. “Olympus was restored but the divinities passed under
other names,” he says, treating of the Constantine period. “The more
powerful provinces insisted on the adoption of their time-honored
conceptions. Views of the trinity in accordance with the Egyptian
traditions were established. Not only was the adoration of Isis under
a new name restored, but even her image, standing on the crescent
moon, reappeared. The well-known effigy of that goddess with the
infant Horus in her arms has descended to our days, in the beautiful
artistic creations of the Madonna and child.”
But a still earlier origin than the Egyptian and Chaldean can be
assigned to the Virgin “Mother of God,” Queen of Heaven. Though Isis
is also by right the Queen of Heaven, and is generally represented
carrying in her hand the Crux Ansata composed of the mundane cross,
and of the Stauros of the Gnostics, she is a great deal younger
than the celestial virgin, Neith. In one of the tombs of the
Pharaohs--Rhameses, in the valley of Biban-el-Molouk, in Thebes,
Champollion, Junior, discovered a picture, according to his opinion
the most ancient ever yet found. It represents the heavens symbolized
by the figure of a woman bedecked with stars. The birth of the Sun is
figured by the form of a little child, issuing from the bosom of its
“Divine Mother.”
In the _Book of Hermes_, “Pimander” is enunciated in distinct and
unequivocal sentences, the whole trinitarian dogma accepted by the
Christians. “The light is me,” says Pimander, the DIVINE THOUGHT. “I
am the _nous_ or intelligence, and I am thy god, and I am far older
than the human principle which escapes from the shadow. I am the
germ of thought, the resplendent WORD, the SON of God. Think that
what thus sees and hears in thee, is the _Verbum_ of the Master, it
is the Thought, which is God the Father.... The celestial ocean, the
ÆTHER, which flows from east to west, is the Breath of the Father,
the life-giving Principle, the HOLY GHOST!” “For they are not at all
separated and their union is LIFE.”
Ancient as may be the origin of Hermes, lost in the unknown days of
Egyptian colonization, there is yet a far older prophecy, directly
relating to the Hindu Christna, according to the Brahmans. It is,
to say the least, strange that the Christians claim to base their
religion upon a prophecy of the _Bible_, which exists nowhere in
that book. In what chapter or verse does Jehovah, the “Lord God,”
promise Adam and Eve to send them a Redeemer who will save humanity?
“I will put enmity between thee and the woman,” says the Lord God to
the serpent, “and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy
head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
In these words there is not the slightest allusion to a Redeemer,
and the subtilest of intellects could not extract from them, as they
stand in the third chapter of _Genesis_, anything like that which
the Christians have contrived to find. On the other hand, in the
traditions and _Manu_, Brahma promises directly to the first couple
to send them a Saviour who will teach them the way to salvation.
“It is from the lips of a messenger of Brahma, who will be born
in Kuroukshetra, Matsya, and the land of Pantchola, also called
Kanya-Cubja (mountain of the Virgin), that all men on earth will
learn their duty,” says _Manu_ (book ii., slokas 19 and 20).
The Mexicans call the Father of their Trinity Yzona, the Son Bacab,
and the Holy Ghost Echvah, “and say they received it (the doctrine)
from their ancestors.”[79] Among the Semitic nations we can trace the
trinity to the prehistorical days of the fabled Sesostris, who is
identified by more than one critic with Nimrod, “the mighty hunter.”
Manetho makes the oracle rebuke the king, when the latter asks, “Tell
me, O thou strong in fire, who before me could subjugate all things?
and who shall after me?” And the oracle saith thus: “First God, then
the Word, and then ‘the Spirit.’”[80]
In the foregoing lies the foundation of the fierce hatred of the
Christians toward the “Pagans” and the theurgists. Too much had
been _borrowed_; the ancient religions and the Neo-platonists
had been laid by them under contribution sufficiently to perplex
the world for several thousand years. Had not the ancient creeds
been speedily obliterated, it would have been found impossible to
preach the Christian religion as a New Dispensation, or the direct
Revelation from God the Father, through God the Son, and under the
influence of God the Holy Ghost. As a political exigence the Fathers
had--to gratify the wishes of their rich converts--instituted even
the festivals of Pan. They went so far as to accept the ceremonies
hitherto celebrated by the Pagan world in honor of the _God of the
gardens_, in all their primitive _sincerity_.[81] It was time to
sever the connection. Either the Pagan worship and the Neo-platonic
theurgy, with all ceremonial of magic, must be crushed out forever,
or the Christians become Neo-platonists.
The fierce polemics and single-handed battles between Irenæus and the
Gnostics are too well known to need repetition. They were carried on
for over two centuries after the unscrupulous Bishop of Lyons had
uttered his last religious paradox. Celsus, the Neo-platonist, and a
disciple of the school of Ammonius Saccas, had thrown the Christians
into perturbation, and even had arrested for a time the progress of
proselytism by successfully proving that the original and purer forms
of the most important dogmas of Christianity were to be found only in
the teachings of Plato. Celsus accused them of accepting the worst
superstitions of Paganism, and of interpolating passages from the
books of the Sybils, without rightly understanding their meaning. The
accusations were so plausible, and the facts so patent, that for a
long time no Christian writer had ventured to answer the challenge.
Origen, at the fervent request of his friend, Ambrosius, was the
first to take the defense in hand, for, having belonged to the same
Platonic school of Ammonius, he was considered the most competent
man to refute the well-founded charges. But his eloquence failed,
and the only remedy that could be found was to destroy the writings
of Celsus themselves.[82] This could be achieved only in the fifth
century, when copies had been taken from this work, and many were
those who had read and studied them. If no copy of it has descended
to our present generation of scientists, it is not because there is
none extant at present, but for the simple reason that the monks of a
certain Oriental church on Mount Athos will neither show nor confess
they have one in their possession.[83] Perhaps they do not even know
themselves the value of the contents of their manuscripts, on account
of their great ignorance.
The dispersion of the Eclectic school had become the fondest hope of
the Christians. It had been looked for and contemplated with intense
anxiety. It was finally achieved. The members were scattered by the
hand of the monsters Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, and his nephew
Cyril--the murderer of the young, the learned, and the innocent
Hypatia![84]
With the death of the martyred daughter of Theon, the mathematician,
there remained no possibility for the Neo-platonists to continue
their school at Alexandria. During the life-time of the youthful
Hypatia her friendship and influence with Orestes, the governor
of the city, had assured the philosophers security and protection
against their murderous enemies. With her death they had lost their
strongest friend. How much she was revered by all who knew her for
her erudition, noble virtues, and character, we can infer from the
letters addressed to her by Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, fragments
of which have reached us. “My heart yearns for the presence of your
divine spirit,” he wrote in 413 A. D., “which more than anything else
could alleviate the bitterness of my fortunes.” At another time he
says: “Oh, my mother, my sister, my teacher, my benefactor! My soul
is very sad. The recollection of my children I have lost is killing
me.... When I have news of you and learn, as I hope, that you are
more fortunate than myself, I am at least only half-unhappy.”
What would have been the feelings of this most noble and worthy
of Christian bishops, who had surrendered family and children and
happiness for the faith into which he had been attracted, had a
prophetic vision disclosed to him that the only friend that had been
left to him, his “mother, sister, benefactor,” would soon become an
unrecognizable mass of flesh and blood, pounded to jelly under the
blows of the club of Peter the Reader--that her youthful, innocent
body would be cut to pieces, “the flesh scraped from the bones,” by
oyster-shells and the rest of her cast into the fire, by order of the
same Bishop Cyril he knew so well--Cyril, the CANONIZED Saint!![85]
There has never been a religion in the annals of the world with
such a bloody record as Christianity. All the rest, including the
traditional fierce fights of the “chosen people” with their next
of kin, the idolatrous tribes of Israel, pale before the murderous
fanaticism of the alleged followers of Christ! Even the rapid
spread of Mahometanism before the conquering sword of the Islam
prophet, is a direct consequence of the bloody riots and fights
among Christians. It was the intestine war between the Nestorians
and Cyrilians that engendered Islamism; and it is in the convent of
Bozrah that the prolific seed was first sown by Bahira, the Nestorian
monk. Freely watered by rivers of blood, the tree of Mecca has grown
till we find it in the present century overshadowing nearly two
hundred millions of people. The recent Bulgarian atrocities are but
the natural outgrowth of the triumph of Cyril and the Mariolaters.
The cruel, crafty politician, the plotting monk, glorified by
ecclesiastical history with the aureole of a martyred saint. The
despoiled philosophers, the Neo-platonists, and the Gnostics,
daily anathematized by the Church all over the world for long and
dreary centuries. The curse of the unconcerned Deity hourly invoked
on the magian rites and theurgic practice, and the Christian
clergy themselves using _sorcery_ for ages. Hypatia, the glorious
maiden-philosopher, torn to pieces by the Christian mob. And such
as Catherine de Medici, Lucrezia Borgia, Joanna of Naples, and the
Isabellas of Spain, presented to the world as the faithful daughters
of the Church--some even decorated by the Pope with the order of the
“Immaculate Rose,” the highest emblem of womanly purity and virtue,
a symbol sacred to the Virgin-mother of God! Such are the examples
of human justice! How far less blasphemous appears a total rejection
of Mary as an immaculate goddess, than an idolatrous worship of her,
accompanied by such practices.
In the next chapter we will present a few illustrations of sorcery,
as practiced under the patronage of the Roman Church.