“Nothing better than those MYSTERIES, by which, from a
rough and fierce life, we are polished to gentleness
(humanity, kindness), and softened.”--CICERO: _de Legibus_,
ii., 14.
“Descend, O Soma, with that stream with which thou lightest
up the Sun.... Soma, a Life Ocean spread through All, thou
fillest creative the Sun with beams.”--_Rig-Veda_, ii., 143.
“... the beautiful Virgin ascends, with long hair, and
she holds two ears in her hand, and sits on a seat and
feeds a BOY as yet little, and suckles him and gives him
food.”--AVENAR.
It is alleged that the _Pentateuch_ was written by Moses, and yet
it contains the account of his own death (_Deuteronomy_ xxxiv. 6);
and in _Genesis_ (xiv. 14), the name Dan is given to a city, which
_Judges_ (xviii. 29), tells us was only called by that name at that
late day, it having previously been known as Laish. Well might Josiah
have rent his clothes when he had heard the words of the Book of the
Law; for there was no more of Moses in it than there is of Jesus in
the _Gospel according to John_.
We have one fair alternative to offer our theologians, leaving them
to choose for themselves, and promising to abide by their decision.
Only they will have to admit, either that Moses was an impostor,
or that his books are forgeries, written at different times and
by different persons; or, again, that they are full of fraudulent
interpolations. In either case the work loses all claims to be
considered divine _Revelation_. Here is the problem, which we quote
from the _Bible_--the word of the God of Truth:
“And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name
of God Almighty, but by my name of JEHOVAH was I not known to them”
(_Exodus_ vi. 3), spake God unto Moses.
A very startling bit of information that, when, before arriving
at the book of _Exodus_, we are told in _Genesis_ (xxii. 14) that
“Abraham called the name of that place”--where the patriarch
had been preparing to cut the throat of his only-begotten
son--“JEHOVAH-jireh!” (Jehovah sees.) Which is the inspired
text?--both cannot be--which the forgery?
Now, if both Abraham and Moses had not belonged to the same holy
group, we might, perhaps, help theologians by suggesting to them
a convenient means of escape out of this dilemma. They ought to
call the reverend Jesuit Fathers--especially those who have been
missionaries in India--to their rescue. The latter would not be for
a moment disconcerted. They would coolly tell us that beyond doubt
Abraham had heard the name of Jehovah and _borrowed_ it from Moses.
Do they not maintain that it was they who invented the _Sanscrit_,
edited _Manu_, and composed the greater portion of the _Vedas?_
Marcion maintained, with the other Gnostics, the fallaciousness of
the idea of an incarnate God, and therefore denied the corporeal
reality of the living body of Christ. His entity was a mere
_illusion_; it was not made of human flesh and blood, neither was it
born of a human mother, for his divine nature could not be polluted
with any contact with sinful flesh.[287] He accepted Paul as the
only apostle preaching the pure gospel of truth, and accused the
other disciples of “depraving the pure form of the gospel doctrines
delivered to them by Jesus, mixing up matters of the Law with the
words of the Saviour.”[288]
Finally we may add that modern biblical criticism, which
unfortunately became really active and serious only toward the end
of the last century, now generally admits that Marcion’s text of the
only gospel he knew anything about--that of Luke, is far superior and
by far more correct than that of our present Synoptics. We find in
_Supernatural Religion_ the following (for every Christian) startling
sentence: “We are, therefore, _indebted to Marcion for the correct
version even of ‘the Lords Prayer_.’”[289]
If, leaving for the present the prominent founders of Christian
sects, we now turn to that of the Ophites, which assumed a definite
form about the time of Marcion and the Basilideans, we may find
in it the reason for the _heresies_ of all others. Like all other
Gnostics, they rejected the Mosaic _Bible_ entirely. Nevertheless,
their philosophy, apart from some deductions original with several
of the most important founders of the various branches of Gnosticism
was not new. Passing through the Chaldean kabalistic tradition,
it gathered its materials in the Hermetic books, and pursuing its
flight still farther back for its metaphysical speculations, we
find it floundering among the tenets of Manu, and the earliest
Hindu ante-sacerdotal genesis. Many of our eminent antiquarians
trace the Gnostic philosophies right back to Buddhism, which does
not impair in the least either their or our arguments. We repeat
again, _Buddhism is but the primitive source of Brahmanism_. It
is not against the primitive _Vedas_ that Gautama protests. It is
against the sacerdotal and official state religion of his country;
and the Brahmans, who in order to make room for and give authority
to the castes, at a later period crammed the ancient manuscripts
with interpolated slokas, intended to prove that the castes were
predetermined by the Creator by the very fact that each class of men
was issued from a more or less noble limb of Brahma. Gautama-Buddha’s
philosophy was that taught from the beginning of time in the
impenetrable secresy of the inner sanctuaries of the pagodas. We need
not be surprised, therefore, to find again, in all the fundamental
dogmas of the Gnostics, the metaphysical tenets of both Brahmanism
and Buddhism. They held that the _Old Testament_ was the revelation
of an inferior being, a subordinate divinity, and did not contain a
single sentence of their _Sophia_, the Divine Wisdom. As to the _New
Testament_, it had lost its purity when the compilers became guilty
of interpolations. The revelation of divine truth was sacrificed by
them to promote selfish ends and maintain quarrels. The accusation
does not seem so very improbable to one who is well aware of the
constant strife between the champions of circumcision and the “Law,”
and the apostles who had given up Judaism.
The Gnostic Ophites taught the doctrine of Emanations, so hateful
to the defenders of the unity in the trinity, and _vice versa_. The
Unknown Deity with them had _no name_; but his first female emanation
was called Bythos or Depth.[290] It answered to the Shekinah of the
kabalists, the “Veil” which conceals the “Wisdom” in the _cranium_
of the highest of the _three_ heads. As the Pythagorean Monad, this
_nameless_ Wisdom was the _Source_ of Light, and _Ennoia_ or Mind,
is Light itself. The latter was also called the “Primitive Man,”
like the Adam Kadmon, or ancient Adam of the _Kabala_. Indeed, if
man was created after his likeness and in the image of God, then
this God was like his creature in shape and figure--hence, he is the
“Primitive man.” The first Manu, the one evolved from Swayambhuva,
“he who exists unrevealed in his own glory,” is also, in one sense,
the primitive man, with the Hindus.
Thus the “nameless and the unrevealed,” Bythos, his female
reflection, and Ennoia, the revealed Mind proceeding from both, or
their Son are the counterparts of the Chaldean first triad as well as
those of the Brahmanic Trimurti. We will compare: in all the three
systems we see
THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE as the ONE, the primordial germ, the unrevealed
and grand ALL, existing through himself. In the
INDIAN PANTHEON.
Brahma-Zyaus.
THE CHALDEAN.
Ilu, Kabalistic En-Soph.
IN THE OPHITE.
The Nameless, or Secret Name.
Whenever the Eternal awakes from its slumber and desires to manifest
itself, it divides itself into male and female. It then becomes in
every system
THE DOUBLE-SEXED DEITY, The universal Father and Mother.
IN INDIA.
Brahma.
Nara (male), Nari (female).
IN CHALDEA.
Eikon or En-Soph.
Anu (male), Anata (female).
IN THE OPHITE SYSTEM.
Nameless Spirit.
Abrasax (male), Bythos (female).
From the union of the two emanates a third, or creative Principle--the
SON, or the manifested Logos, the product of the Divine Mind.
IN INDIA.
Viradj, the Son.
IN CHALDEA.
Bel, the Son.
OPHITE SYSTEM.
Ophis (another name for Ennoia), the Son.
Moreover, each of these systems has a triple male trinity, each
proceeding separately through itself from one female Deity. So, for
instance:
IN INDIA.
The Trinity--Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, are blended into ONE, who
is _Brahmä_, (neuter gender), creating and being created
through the Virgin Nari (the mother of perpetual fecundity).
IN CHALDEA.
The trinity--Anu, Bel, Hoa (or Sin, Samas, Bin), blend into
ONE who is Anu (double-sexed) through the Virgin Mylitta.
IN THE OPHITE SYSTEM.
The trinity consisted of the Mystery named Sigè, Bythos,
Ennoia. These become ONE who is _Abrasax_, from the Virgin
_Sophia_ (or _Pneuma_), who herself is an emanation of Bythos
and the Mystery-god and emanates through them, Christos.
To place it still clearer, the Babylonian System recognizes first--the
ONE (Ad, or Ad-ad), who is never named, but only acknowledged in
thought as the Hindu Swayambhuva. From this he becomes manifest as Anu
or Ana--the one above all--Monas. Next comes the Demiurge called Bel
or Elu, who is the active power of the Godhead. The third is the
principle of Wisdom, Hea or Hoa, who also rules the sea and the
underworld. Each of these has his divine consort, giving us Anata,
Belta, and Davkina. These, however, are only like the _Saktis_, and
not especially remarked by theologists. But the female principle is
denoted by Mylitta, the Great Mother, called also Ishtar. So with the
three male gods, we have the Triad or Trimurti, and with Mylitta
added, the _Arba_ or Four (Tetraktys of Pythagoras), which perfects
and potentializes all. Hence, the above-given modes of expression. The
following Chaldean diagram may serve as an illustration for all
others:
⎧ Anu, ⎫ Mylitta--Arba-il,
Triad ⎨ Bel, ⎬ or
⎩ Hoa, ⎭ Four-fold God,
become, with the Christians,
⎧God the Father, ⎫ Mary, or mother of these three Gods
Trinity ⎨God the Son, ⎬ since they are one,
⎩God the Holy Ghost,⎭ or, the Christian Heavenly Tetraktys.
Hence, Hebron, the city of the Kabeiri was called Kirjath-Arba, city
of the Four. The Kabeiri were Axieros--the noble Eros, Axiokersos,
the worthy horned one, Axiokersa, Demeter and Kadmiel, Hoa, etc.
The Pythagorean ten denoted the Arba-Il or Divine Four, emblematized
by the Hindu Lingham: Anu, 1; Bel, 2; Hoa, 3, which makes 6. The
triad and Mylitta as 4 make the ten.
Though he is termed the “Primitive Man,” Ennoia, who is like the
Egyptian Pimander, the “Power of the Thought Divine,” the first
intelligible manifestation of the Divine Spirit in material form,
he is like the “Only-Begotten” Son of the “Unknown Father,” of all
other nations. He is the emblem of the first appearance of the divine
Presence in his own works of creation, tangible and visible, and
therefore comprehensible. The mystery-God, or the ever-unrevealed
Deity fecundates through His will Bythos, the unfathomable and
infinite depth that exists in silence (Sigè) and darkness (for our
intellect), and that represents the abstract idea of all nature, the
ever-producing Cosmos. As neither the male nor female principle,
blended into the idea of a double-sexed Deity in ancient conceptions,
could be comprehended by an ordinary human intellect, the theology of
every people had to create for its religion a Logos, or manifested
word, in some shape or other. With the Ophites and other Gnostics
who took their models direct from more ancient originals, the
unrevealed Bythos and her male counterpart produce Ennoia, and
the three in their turn produce Sophia,[291] thus completing the
Tetraktys, which will emanate Christos, the very essence of the
Father Spirit. As the unrevealed One, or concealed Logos in its
latent state, he has existed from all eternity in the Arba-Il, the
metaphysical abstraction; therefore, he is ONE with all others as a
unity, the latter (including all) being indifferently termed Ennoia,
Sigè (silence), Bythos, etc. As the revealed one, he is Androgyne,
Christos, and Sophia (Divine Wisdom), who descend into the man Jesus.
Both Father and Son are shown by Irenæus to have loved the beauty
(_formam_) of the primitive woman,[292] who is Bythos--Depth--as
well as Sophia, and as having produced conjointly Ophis and Sophia
(double-sexed unity again), male and female wisdom, one being
considered as the unrevealed Holy Spirit, or elder Sophia--the
_Pneuma_--the intellectual “Mother of all things;” the other the
revealed one, or _Ophis_, typifying divine wisdom fallen into matter,
or God-man--Jesus, whom the Gnostic Ophites represented by the
serpent (Ophis).
Fecundated by the Divine Light of the Father and Son, the highest
spirit and Ennoia, Sophia produces in her turn two other emanations--
one perfect Christos, the second imperfect Sophia-Achamoth,[293]
from חכמות hakhamoth (simple wisdom), who becomes the mediatrix
between the intellectual and material worlds.
Christos was the mediator and guide between God (the Higher), and
everything spiritual in man; Achamoth--the younger Sophia--held the
same duty between the “Primitive man,” Ennoia and matter. What was
mysteriously meant by the general term, _Christos_, we have just
explained.
Delivering a sermon on the “Month of Mary,” we find the Rev.
Dr. Preston, of New York City, expressing the Christian idea
of the female principle of the trinity better and more clearly
than we could, and substantially in the spirit of an ancient
“heathen” philosopher. He says that the “plan of the redemption
made it necessary that a mother should be found, and Mary stands
pre-eminently alone as the only instance when a creature was
necessary to the consummation of God’s work.” We will beg the right
to contradict the reverend gentleman. As shown above, thousands of
years before our era it was found necessary by all the “heathen”
theogonies to find a female principle, a “mother” for the triune
male principle. Hence, Christianity does not present the “only
instance” of such a consummation of God’s work--albeit, as this
work shows, there was more philosophy and less materialism, or
rather anthropomorphism, in it. But hear the reverend Doctor express
“heathen” thought in Christian ideas. “He” (God), he says, “prepared
her (Mary’s) virginal and celestial purity, for a mother defiled
could not become the mother of the Most High. The holy virgin,
even in her childhood, was more pleasing than all the Cherubim and
Seraphim, and from infancy to the maturing maidenhood and womanhood
she grew more and more pure. By her very sanctity she reigned over
the heart of God. _When the hour came, the whole court of heaven was
hushed, and the trinity listened for the answer of Mary, for without
her consent the world could not have been redeemed._”
Does it not seem as if we were reading Irenæus explaining the Gnostic
“_Heresy_, which taught that the Father and Son loved the beauty
(_formam_) of the celestial Virgin?” or the Egyptian system, of
Isis being both wife, sister, and mother of Osiris--Horus? With the
Gnostic philosophy there were but _two_, but the Christians have
improved and perfected the system by making it completely “heathen,”
for it is the Chaldean Anu--Bel--Hoa, merging into Mylitta. “Then
while this month (of Mary),” adds Dr. Preston, “begins in the
paschal season--the month when nature decks herself with fruits and
flowers, the harbingers of a bright harvest--let us, too, begin for
a golden harvest. In this month the dead comes up out of the earth,
figuring the resurrection; so, when we are kneeling before the altar
of the holy and immaculate Mary, let us remember that there should
come forth from us the bud of promise, the flower of hope, and the
imperishable fruit of sanctity.”
This is precisely the substratum of the Pagan thought, which, among
other meanings, emblematized by the rites of the resurrection
of Osiris, Adonis, Bacchus, and other slaughtered sun-gods, the
resurrection of all nature in spring, the germination of seeds that
had been dead and sleeping during winter, and so were allegorically
said to be kept in the underworld (Hades). They are typified by the
three days passed in hell before his resurrection by Hercules, by
Christ, and others.
This derivation, or rather _heresy_, as it is called in Christianity,
is simply the Brahmanic doctrine in all its archaic purity. Vishnu,
the second personage of the Hindu trinity, is also the Logos, for
he is made subsequently to incarnate himself in Christna. And
Lakmy (or Lakshmy) who, as in the case of Osiris, and Isis, of
En-Soph and Sephira, and of Bythos and Ennoia, is both his wife,
sister, and daughter, through this endless correlation of male
and female creative powers in the abstruse metaphysics of the
ancient philosophies--is Sophia-Achamoth. Christna is the mediator
promised by Brahma to mankind, and represents the same idea as
the Gnostic Christos. And Lakmy, Vishnu’s spiritual half, is the
emblem of physical nature, the universal mother of all the material
and revealed forms; the mediatrix and protector of nature, like
Sophia-Achamoth, who is made by the Gnostics the mediatrix between
the Great Cause and Matter, as Christos is the mediator between him
and spiritual humanity.
This Brahmano-Gnostic tenet is more logical, and more consistent with
the allegory of _Genesis_ and the fall of man. When God curses the
first couple, He is made to curse also the earth and everything that
is on it. The _New Testament_ gives us a Redeemer for the first sin
of mankind, which was punished for having sinned; but there is not a
word said about a Saviour who would take off the unmerited curse from
the earth and the animals, which had never sinned at all. Thus the
Gnostic allegory shows a greater sense of both justice and logic than
the Christian.
In the Ophite system, Sophia, the Androgyne Wisdom, is also the
female spirit, or the Hindu female Nari (Narayana), moving on the
face of the waters--chaos, or future matter. She vivifies it from
afar, but not touching the abyss of darkness. She is unable to do
so, for Wisdom is purely intellectual, and cannot act directly on
matter. Therefore, Sophia is obliged to address herself to her
Supreme Parent; but although life proceeds primally from the Unseen
Cause, and his Ennoia, neither of them can, any more than herself,
have anything to do with the lower chaos in which matter assumes its
definite shape. Thus, Sophia is obliged to employ on the task her
_imperfect_ emanation, Sophia-Achamoth, the latter being of a mixed
nature, half spiritual and half material.
The only difference between the Ophite cosmogony and that of
the St. John Nazarenes is a change of names. We find equally an
identical system in the _Kabala_, the _Book of Mystery_ (_Liber
Mysterii_).[294] All the three systems, especially that of the
kabalists and the Nazarenes, which were the _models_ for the Ophite
Cosmogony, belong to the pure Oriental Gnosticism. The _Codex
Nazaræus_ opens with: “The Supreme King of Light, Mano, the great
first one,”[295] etc., the latter being the emanation of Ferho--the
unknown, formless LIFE. He is the chief of the Æons, from whom
proceed (or shoot forth) five refulgent rays of Divine light. Mano is
_Rex Lucis_, the Bythos-Ennoia of the Ophites. “_Unus est Rex Lucis
in suo regno, nec ullus qui eo altior, nullus qui ejus similitudinem
retulerit, nullus qui sublatis oculis, viderit Coronam quæ in ejus
capite est._” He is the Manifested Light around the highest of the
three kabalistic heads, the concealed wisdom; from him emanate
the three _Lives_. Æbel Zivo is the revealed Logos, Christos the
“Apostle Gabriel,” and the first Legate or messenger of light. If
Bythos and Ennoia are the Nazarene Mano, then the dual-natured, the
semi-spiritual, semi-material Achamoth must be Fetahil when viewed
from her spiritual aspect; and if regarded in her grosser nature, she
is the Nazarene “Spiritus.”
Fetahil,[296] who is the reflection of his father, Lord Abatur, the
_third_ life--as the elder Sophia is also the third emanation--is
the “newest-man.” Perceiving his fruitless attempts to create a
perfect material world, the “Spiritus” calls to one of her progeny,
the Karabtanos--Ilda-Baoth--who is without sense or judgment (“blind
matter”), to unite himself with her to create something definite out
of this confused (_turbulentos_) matter, which task she is enabled to
achieve only after having produced from this union with Karabtanos
the seven stellars. Like the six sons or genii of the Gnostic
Ilda-Baoth, they then frame the material world. The same story is
repeated over again in Sophia-Achamoth. Delegated by her purely
spiritual parent, the elder Sophia, to create the world of _visible
forms_, she descended into chaos, and, overpowered by the emanation
of matter, lost her way. Still ambitious to create a world of matter
of her own, she busied herself hovering to and fro about the dark
abyss, and imparted life and motion to the inert elements, until she
became so hopelessly entangled in matter that, like Fetahil, she is
represented sitting immersed in mud, and unable to extricate herself
from it; until, by the contact of matter itself, she produces the
_Creator_ of the material world. He is the Demiurgus, called by the
Ophites Ilda-Baoth, and, as we will directly show, the parent of the
Jewish God in the opinion of some sects, and held by others to be the
“Lord God” Himself. It is at this point of the kabalistic-gnostic
cosmogony that begins the Mosaic _Bible_. Having accepted the Jewish
_Old Testament_ as their standard, no wonder that the Christians were
forced by the exceptional position in which they were placed through
their own ignorance, to make the best of it.
The first groups of Christians, whom Renan shows numbering but from
seven to twelve men in _each church_, belonged unquestionably to the
poorest and most ignorant classes. They had and could have no idea of
the highly philosophical doctrines of the Platonists and Gnostics,
and evidently knew as little about their own newly-made-up religion.
To these, who if Jews, had been crushed under the tyrannical dominion
of the “law,” as enforced by the elders of the synagogues, and if
Pagans had been always excluded, as the lower castes are until now
in India, from the religious mysteries, the God of the Jews and
the “Father” preached by Jesus were all one. The contention which
reigned from the first years following the death of Jesus, between
the two parties, the Pauline and the Petrine--were deplorable. What
one did, the other deemed a sacred duty to undo. If the _Homilies_
are considered apocryphal, and cannot very well be accepted as an
infallible standard by which to measure the animosity which raged
between the two apostles, we have the _Bible_, and the proofs
afforded therein are plentiful.
So hopelessly entangled seems Irenæus in his fruitless endeavors to
describe, to all outward appearance at least, the true doctrines of
the many Gnostic sects of which he treats and to present them at the
same time as abominable “heresies,” that he either deliberately,
or through ignorance, confounds all of them in such a way that
few metaphysicians would be able to disentangle them, without the
_Kabala_ and the _Codex_ as the true keys. Thus, for instance, he
cannot even tell the difference between the Sethianites and the
Ophites, and tells us that they called the “God of all,” “_Hominem_,”
a MAN, and his mind the SECOND man, or the “_Son of man_.” So does
Theodoret, who lived more than two centuries after Irenæus, and who
makes a sad mess of the chronological order in which the various
sects succeeded each other.[297] Neither the Sethianites, (a branch
of the Jewish Nazarenes) nor the Ophites, a purely Greek sect, have
ever held anything of the kind. Irenæus contradicts his own words by
describing in another place the doctrines of Cerinthus, the direct
disciple of Simon Magus. He says that Cerinthus taught that the world
was not created by the FIRST GOD, but by a virtue (virtus) or power,
an Æon so distant from the First Cause that he was even ignorant of
HIM who _is above all things_. This Æon subjected Jesus, he begot him
physically through Joseph from one who was not a virgin, but simply
the wife of that Joseph, and Jesus was born like all other men.
Viewed from this physical aspect of his nature, Jesus was called the
“son of man.” It is only after his _baptism_, that _Christos_, the
anointed, descended from the Princeliness of above, in the figure of
a dove, and then announced the UNKNOWN Father through Jesus.[298]
If, therefore, Jesus was physically considered as a son of man, and
spiritually as the Christos, who overshadowed him, how then could
the “GOD OF ALL,” the “_Unknown_ Father,” be called by the Gnostics
_Homo_, a MAN, and his Mind, Ennoia, the SECOND man, or _Son of
man_? Neither in the Oriental _Kabala_, nor in Gnosticism, was the
“God of all” ever anthropomorphized. It is but the first, or rather
the second emanations, for Shekinah, Sephira, Depth, and other
first-manifested female virtues are also emanations, that are termed
“primitive men.” Thus Adam Kadmon, Ennoia (or Sigè), the _logoi_ in
short, are the “only-begotten” ones but not the _Sons_ of man, which
appellation properly belongs to Christos the son of Sophia (the
elder) and of the primitive man who produces him through his own
vivifying light, which emanates from the source or _cause_ of all,
hence the _cause_ of his light also, the “Unknown Father.” There
is a great difference made in the Gnostic metaphysics between the
first unrevealed Logos and the “anointed,” who is Christos. Ennoia
may be termed, as Philo understands it, the _Second_ God, but he
alone is the “Primitive and First man,” and by no means the Second
one, as Theodoret and Irenæus have it. It is but the inveterate
desire of the latter to connect Jesus in every possible way, even in
the _Hæresies_, with the _Highest_ God, that led him into so many
falsifications.
Such an identification with the _Unknown_ God, even of Christos,
the anointed--the Æon who overshadowed him--let alone of the man
Jesus, never entered the head of the Gnostics nor even of the direct
apostles and of Paul, whatever later forgeries may have added.
How daring and desperate were many such deliberate falsifications was
shown in the first attempts to compare the original manuscripts with
later ones. In Bishop Horseley’s edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s works,
several manuscripts on theological subjects were cautiously withheld
from publication. The article known as _Christ’s Descent into Hell_,
which is found in the later Apostles’ Creed, is not to be found in
the manuscripts of either the fourth or sixth centuries. It was an
evident interpolation copied from the fables of Bacchus and Hercules
and enforced upon Christendom as an article of faith. Concerning it
the author of the preface to the _Catalogue of the Manuscripts of
the King’s Library_ (preface, p. xxi.) remarks: “I wish that the
insertion of the article of _Christ’s Descent into Hell_ into the
Apostles’ Creed could be as well accounted for as the _insertion_ of
the _said_ verse” (_First Epistle of John_, v. 7).[299]
Now, this verse reads: “For there are three that bear record in
Heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost; and these three are
one.” This verse, which has been “appointed to be read in churches,”
is now known to be spurious. It is not to be found in any Greek
manuscript, save one at Berlin, which was transcribed from some
interpolated paraphrase between the lines. In the first and second
editions of Erasmus, printed in 1516 and 1519, this allusion to
these three heavenly witnesses is _omitted_; and the text is not
contained in any Greek manuscript which was written earlier than the
fifteenth century.[300] It was not mentioned by either of the Greek
ecclesiastical writers nor by the early Latin fathers, so anxious to
get at every proof in support of their trinity; and it was omitted
by Luther in his German version. Edward Gibbon was early in pointing
out its spurious character. Archbishop Newcome rejected it, and the
Bishop of Lincoln expresses his conviction that it is spurious.[301]
There are twenty-eight Greek authors--Irenæus, Clemens, and
Athanasius included, who neither quote nor mention it; and seventeen
Latin writers, numbering among them Augustine, Jerome, Ambrosius,
Cyprian, and Pope Eusebius, who appear utterly ignorant of it. “It
is evident that if the text of the heavenly witnesses had been known
from the beginning of Christianity the ancients would have eagerly
seized it, inserted it in their creeds, quoted it repeatedly against
the heretics, and selected it for the brightest ornament of every
book that they wrote upon the subject of the Trinity.”[302]
Thus falls to the ground the strongest trinitarian pillar. Another
not less obvious forgery is quoted from Sir Isaac Newton’s words by
the editor of the _Apocryphal New Testament_. Newton observes “that
what the Latins have done to this text (_First Epistle of John_, v.),
the Greeks have done to that of St. Paul (_Timothy_ iii. 16).” For,
by changing ΟΣ into ΘΣ, the abbreviation of Θεος (God), in the
Alexandrian manuscript, from which their subsequent copies were made,
they now read, “_Great is the mystery of godliness_, GOD _manifested
in the flesh_;” whereas all the churches, for the first four or five
centuries, and the authors of all the ancient versions, Jerome, as
well as the rest, read: “Great is the mystery of godliness WHICH WAS
_manifested in the flesh_.” Newton adds, that now that the disputes
over this forgery are over, they that read GOD made manifest in the
flesh, instead of the _godliness which was_ manifested in the flesh,
think this passage “one of the most obvious and pertinent texts for
the business.”
And now we ask again the question: Who were the first Christians?
Those who were readily converted by the eloquent simplicity of Paul,
who promised them, with the name of Jesus, _freedom_ from the narrow
bonds of ecclesiasticism. They understood but one thing; they were
the “children of promise” (_Galatians_ iv. 28). The “allegory” of
the Mosaic _Bible_ was unveiled to them; the covenant “from the
Mount Sinai which gendereth _to bondage_” was Agar (Ibid., 24), the
old Jewish synagogue, and she was “in bondage with her children”
to Jerusalem, the new and the free, “the mother of us all.” On the
one hand the synagogue and the law which persecuted every one who
dared to step across the narrow path of bigotry and dogmatism;
on the other, Paganism[303] with its grand philosophical truths
concealed from sight; unveiling itself but to the few, and leaving
the masses hopelessly seeking to discover who was _the_ god, among
this overcrowded pantheon of deities and sub-deities. To others,
the apostle of circumcision, supported by all his followers, was
promising, if they obeyed the “law,” a life hereafter, and a
resurrection of which they had no previous idea. At the same time
he never lost an occasion to contradict Paul without naming him,
but indicating him so clearly that it is next to impossible to
doubt whom Peter meant. While he may have converted some men, who
whether they had believed in the Mosaic resurrection promised by
the Pharisees, or had fallen into the nihilistic doctrines of the
Sadducees, or had belonged to the polytheistic heathenism of the
Pagan rabble, had no future after death, nothing but a mournful
blank, we do not think that the work of contradiction, carried on
so systematically by the two apostles, had helped much their work
of proselytism. With the educated thinking classes they succeeded
very little, as ecclesiastical history clearly shows. Where was
the truth; where the inspired word of God? On the one hand, as we
have seen, they heard the apostle Paul explaining that of the two
covenants, “which things are an allegory,” the old one from Mount
Sinai, “which gendereth unto bondage,” was _Agar_ the bondwoman; and
Mount Sinai itself answered to “Jerusalem,” which now is “in bondage”
with her circumcised children; and the new covenant meant Jesus
Christ--the “Jerusalem which is above and free;” and on the other
Peter, who was contradicting and even abusing him. Paul vehemently
exclaims, “Cast out the bondwoman and her son” (the old _law_ and the
synagogue). “The son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son
of the freewoman.” “Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith
Christ hath made us free; be not entangled again with the yoke of
bondage.... Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised,
Christ shall profit you nothing!” (_Gal._ v. 2). What do we find
Peter writing? Whom does he mean by saying, “These who speak great
swelling words of vanity.... While they promise them _liberty_, they
themselves are servants of corruption, for of whom a man is overcome,
of the same is he brought in bondage.... For if _they have escaped_
the pollution of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and
Saviour, they are again entangled therein, and overcome ... it had
_been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness_,
than after they have known it to turn from the holy _commandment
delivered unto them_” (_Second Epistle_).
Peter certainly cannot have meant the Gnostics, for they had never
seen “the holy commandment delivered unto them;” Paul had. They
never promised any one “liberty” from bondage, but Paul had done so
repeatedly. Moreover the latter rejects the “old covenant,” Agar the
bondwoman; and Peter holds fast to it. Paul warns the people against
the _powers_ and _dignities_ (the lower angels of the kabalists); and
Peter, as will be shown further, respects them and _denounces those
who do not_. Peter preaches circumcision, and Paul forbids it.
Later, when all these extraordinary blunders, contradictions,
dissensions and inventions were forcibly crammed into a frame
elaborately executed by the episcopal caste of the new religion,
and called Christianity; and the chaotic picture itself cunningly
preserved from too close scrutiny by a whole array of formidable
Church penances and anathemas, which kept the curious back under the
false pretense of sacrilege and profanation of divine mysteries;
and millions of people had been butchered in the name of the God of
mercy--then came the Reformation. It certainly deserves its name in
its fullest paradoxical sense. It abandoned Peter and alleges to
have chosen Paul for its only leader. And the apostle who thundered
against the old law of bondage; who left full liberty to Christians
to either observe the Sabbath or set it aside; who rejects everything
anterior to John the Baptist, is now the professed standard-bearer
of Protestantism, which holds to the _old_ law more than the Jews,
imprisons those who view the Sabbath as Jesus and Paul did, and
outvies the synagogue of the first century in dogmatic intolerance!
But who then _were_ the first Christians, may still be asked?
Doubtless the Ebionites; and in this we follow the authority of
the best critics. “There can be little doubt that the author (of
the _Clementine Homilies_) was a representative of Ebionitic
Gnosticism, which _had once been the purest form of primitive
Christianity_....”[304] And who were the Ebionites? The pupils
and followers of the early Nazarenes, the kabalistic Gnostics. In
the preface to the _Codex Nazaræus_, the translator says: “That
also the Nazarenes did not reject ... the Æons is natural. For of
the Ebionites who acknowledged them (the Æons), these were the
instructors.”[305]
We find, moreover, Epiphanius, the Christian Homer of _The Heresies_,
telling us that “Ebion had the opinion of the Nazarenes, the form
of the Cerinthians (who fable that the world was put together by
angels), and the appellation of Christians.”[306] An appellation
certainly more correctly applied to them than to the orthodox
(so-called) Christians of the school of Irenæus and the later
Vatican. Renan shows the Ebionites numbering among their sect all
the surviving relatives of Jesus. John the Baptist, his cousin and
_precursor_, was the accepted Saviour of the Nazarenes, and their
prophet. His disciples dwelt on the other side of the Jordan, and
the scene of the baptism of the Jordan is clearly and beyond any
question proved by the author of _Sod, the Son of the Man_, to have
been the site of the Adonis-worship.[307] “Over the Jordan and beyond
the lake dwelt the Nazarenes, a sect said to have existed already at
the birth of Jesus, and to have counted him among its number. They
must have extended along the east of the Jordan, and southeasterly
among the Arabians (_Galat._ i. 17, 21; ii. 11), and Sabæans in the
direction of Bosra; and again, they must have gone far north over the
Lebanon to Antioch, also to the northeast to the Nazarian settlement
in Berœa, where St. Jerome found them. In the desert the Mysteries
of Adonis may have still prevailed; in the mountains Aiai Adonai was
still a cry.”[308]
“Having been united (conjunctus) to the Nazarenes, each (Ebionite)
imparted to the other out of his own wickedness, and decided that
Christ _was of the seed of a man_,” writes Epiphanius.
And if they did, we must suppose they knew more about their
contemporary prophet than Epiphanius 400 years later. Theodoret,
as shown elsewhere, describes the Nazarenes as Jews who “honor the
Anointed as a just man,” and use the _evangel_ called “_According to
Peter_.” Jerome finds the authentic and original _evangel_, written
in Hebrew, by Matthew the apostle-publican, in the library collected
at Cæsarea, by the martyr Pamphilius. “_I received permission from
the Nazaræans_, who at Berœa of Syria used this (gospel) to translate
it,” he writes toward the end of the fourth century.[309] “In the
_evangel_ which the _Nazarenes_ and _Ebionites_ use,” adds Jerome,
“which recently I translated from Hebrew into Greek,[310] and which
is called by most persons the _genuine Gospel of Matthew_,” etc.
That the apostles had received a “secret doctrine” from Jesus, and
that he himself taught one, is evident from the following words of
Jerome, who confessed it in an unguarded moment. Writing to the
Bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, he complains that “a difficult
work is enjoined, since this translation has been commanded me
by your Felicities, which _St. Matthew himself, the Apostle and
Evangelist_, DID NOT WISH TO BE OPENLY WRITTEN. For if it had not
been SECRET, he (Matthew) would have added to the _evangel_ that
which he gave forth was his; but he made up this book sealed up in
the Hebrew characters, which he put forth _even in such a way_ that
the book, written in Hebrew letters and _by the hand of himself_,
might be possessed _by the men most religious_, who also, in the
course of time, received it from those who preceded them. But this
very book they never gave to any one to be transcribed, and its
_text_ they related some one way and some another.”[311] And he adds
further on the same page: “And it happened that this book, having
been published by a disciple of Manichæus, named Seleucus, who also
wrote falsely _The Acts of the Apostles_, exhibited matter not for
edification, but for destruction; and that this book was approved
in a synod which the ears of the Church properly refused to listen
to.”[312]
He admits, himself, that the book which he authenticates as being
written “_by the hand of Matthew_;” a book which, notwithstanding
that he translated it twice, was nearly unintelligible to him, for
it was arcane or _a secret_. Nevertheless, Jerome coolly sets down
every commentary upon it, except his own, as _heretical_. More than
that, Jerome knew that this _original Gospel of Matthew_ was the
expounder of the only true doctrine of Christ; and that it was the
work of an evangelist who had been the friend and companion of Jesus.
He knew that if of the two _Gospels_, the Hebrew in question and the
Greek belonging to our present Scripture, one was spurious, hence
heretical, it was not that of the Nazarenes; and yet, knowing all
this, Jerome becomes more zealous than ever in his persecutions of
the “Hæretics.” Why? Because to accept it was equivalent to reading
the death-sentence of the established Church. The _Gospel according
to the Hebrews_ was but too well known to have been the only one
accepted for four centuries by the Jewish Christians, the Nazarenes
and the Ebionites. And neither of the latter accepted the _divinity_
of Christ.
If the commentaries of Jerome on the Prophets, his famous _Vulgate_,
and numerous polemical treatises are all as trustworthy as this
version of the _Gospel according to Matthew_, then we have a divine
revelation indeed.
Why wonder at the unfathomable mysteries of the Christian religion,
since it is perfectly _human_? Have we not a letter written by one
of the most respected Fathers of the Church to this same Jerome,
which shows better than whole volumes their traditionary policy?
This is what _Saint_ Gregory of Nazianzen wrote to his friend and
confidant _Saint_ Jerome: “Nothing can impose better on a people
than _verbiage_; the less they understand the more they admire. Our
fathers and doctors have often said, not what they thought, but what
circumstances and necessity forced them to.”
But to return to our Sophia-Achamoth and the belief of the genuine,
primitive Christians.
After having produced Ilda-Baoth, Ilda from ילד, a child, and Baoth
from בויץ, the egg, or בהות, _Baoth_, a waste, a desolation,
Sophia-Achamoth suffered so much from the contact with matter,
that after extraordinary struggles she escapes at last out of the
muddy chaos. Although unacquainted with the pleroma, the region
of her mother, she reached the middle space and succeeded in
shaking off the material parts which have stuck to her spiritual
nature; after which she immediately built a strong barrier
between the world of intelligences (spirits) and the world of
matter. Ilda-Baoth, is thus the “son of darkness,” the creator of
our sinful world (the physical portion of it). He follows the
example of Bythos and produces from himself six stellar spirits
(sons). They are all in his own image, and reflections one of the
other, which become darker as they successively recede from their
father. With the latter, they all inhabit seven regions disposed
like a ladder, beginning under the middle space, the region of
their mother, Sophia-Achamoth, and ending with our earth, the
_seventh_ region. Thus they are the genii of the seven planetary
spheres of which the lowest is the region of our earth (the
sphere which surrounds it, our æther). The respective names of
these genii of the spheres are _Iòve_ (Jehovah), _Sabaoth_,
_Adonai_, _Eloi_, _Ouraios_, _Astaphaios_.[313] The first four,
as every one knows, are the mystic names of the Jewish “Lord
God,”[314] he being, as C. W. King expresses it, “thus degraded
by the Ophites into the appellations of the subordinates of the
Creator; “the two last names are those of the genii of fire and
water.”
Ilda-Baoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses, was
not a pure spirit; he was ambitious and proud, and rejecting the
spiritual light of the middle space offered him by his mother
Sophia-Achamoth, he set himself to create a world of his own. Aided
by his sons, the six planetary genii, he fabricated man, but this one
proved a failure. It was a monster; soulless, ignorant, and crawling
on all fours on the ground like a material beast. Ilda-Baoth was
forced to implore the help of his spiritual mother. She communicated
to him a ray of her divine light, and so animated man and endowed him
with a soul. And now began the animosity of Ilda-Baoth toward his
own creature. Following the impulse of the divine light, man soared
higher and higher in his aspirations; very soon he began presenting
not the image of his Creator Ilda-Baoth but rather that of the
Supreme Being, the “primitive man,” Ennoia. Then the Demiurgus was
filled with rage and envy; and fixing his jealous eye on the abyss of
matter, his looks envenomed with passion were suddenly reflected in
it as in a mirror; the reflection became animate, and there arose out
of the abyss Satan, serpent, Ophiomorphos--“the embodiment of envy
and of cunning. He is the union of all that is most base in matter,
with the hate, envy, and craft of a spiritual intelligence.”[315]
After that, always in spite at the perfection of man, Ilda-Baoth
created the three kingdoms of nature, the mineral, vegetable,
and animal, with all evil instincts and properties. Impotent to
annihilate the Tree of Knowledge, which grows in his sphere as in
every one of the planetary regions, but bent upon detaching “man”
from his spiritual protectress, Ilda-Baoth forbade him to eat of its
fruit, for fear it should reveal to mankind the mysteries of the
superior world. But Sophia-Achamoth, who loved and protected the man
whom she had animated, sent her own genius Ophis, in the form of a
serpent to induce man to transgress the selfish and unjust command.
And “man” suddenly became capable of comprehending the mysteries of
creation.
Ilda-Baoth revenged himself by punishing the first pair, for man,
through his _knowledge_, had already provided for himself a companion
out of his spiritual and material half. He imprisoned man and woman
in a dungeon of matter, in the body so unworthy of his nature,
wherein man is still enthralled. But Achamoth protected him still.
She established between her celestial region and “man,” a current of
divine light, and kept constantly supplying him with this _spiritual_
illumination.
Then follow allegories embodying the idea of dualism, or the
struggle between good and evil, spirit and matter, which is found in
every cosmogony, and the source of which is again to be sought in
India. The types and antitypes represent the heroes of this Gnostic
Pantheon, borrowed from the most ancient mythopœic ages. But, in
these personages, Ophis and Ophiomorphos, Sophia and Sophia-Achamoth,
Adam-Kadmon, and Adam, the planetary genii and the divine Æons, we
can also recognize very easily the models of our biblical copies--the
euhemerized patriarchs. The archangels, angels, virtues and powers,
are all found, under other names, in the _Vedas_ and the Buddhistic
system. The Avestic Supreme Being, Zero-ana, or “Boundless Time,” is
the type of all these Gnostic and kabalistic “Depths,” “Crowns,” and
even of the Chaldean En-Soph. The six Amshaspands, created through
the “Word” of Ormazd, the “First-Born,” have their reflections in
Bythos and his emanations, and the antitype of Ormazd--Ahriman and
his devs also enter into the composition of Ilda-Baoth and his six
_material_, though not wholly evil, planetary genii.
Achamoth, afflicted with the evils which befall humanity,
notwithstanding her protection, beseeches the celestial mother
Sophia--her antitype--to prevail on the unknown DEPTH to send down
Christos (the son and emanation of the “Celestial Virgin”) to the
help of perishing humanity. Ilda-Baoth and his six sons of matter
are shutting out the divine light from mankind. Man must be saved.
Ilda-Baoth had already sent his own agent, John the Baptist, from the
race of Seth, whom he protects--as a prophet to his people; but only
a small portion listened to him--the Nazarenes, the opponents of the
Jews, on account of their worshipping Iurbo-Adunai.[316] Achamoth
had assured her son, Ilda-Baoth, that the reign of Christos would
be only temporal, and thus induced him to send the forerunner, or
precursor. Besides that, she made _him cause_ the birth of the _man_
Jesus from the Virgin Mary, her own type on earth, “for the creation
of a material personage could only be the work of the Demiurgus, not
falling within the province of a higher power. As soon as Jesus was
born, Christos, the perfect, uniting himself with Sophia (wisdom
and spirituality), descended through the seven planetary regions,
assuming in each an analogous form, and concealing his true nature
from their genii, while he attracted into himself the sparks of
divine light which they retained in their essence. Thus, Christos
entered into the _man_ Jesus at the moment of his baptism in the
Jordan. From that time Jesus began to work miracles; before that, he
had been completely ignorant of his mission.”[317]
Ilda-Baoth, discovering that Christos was bringing to an end his own
kingdom of matter, stirred up the Jews against him, and Jesus was put
to death.[318] When on the Cross, Christos and Sophia left his body
and returned to their own sphere. The material body of the man Jesus
was abandoned to the earth, but he himself was given a body made
up of _æther_ (astral soul). “Thenceforward he consisted of merely
_soul_ and _spirit_,” which was the reason why the disciples did not
recognize him after the resurrection. In this spiritual state of a
_simulacrum_, Jesus remained on earth for eighteen months after he
had risen. During this last sojourn, “he received from Sophia that
perfect knowledge, that true Gnosis, _which he communicated to the
very few among the apostles_ who were capable of receiving the same.”
“Thence, ascending up into the middle space, he sits on the right
hand of Ilda-Baoth, but unperceived by him, and there collects all
the souls which shall have been purified by the knowledge of Christ.
When he has collected all the spiritual light that exists in matter,
out of Ilda-Baoth’s empire, the redemption will be accomplished and
the world will be destroyed. Such is the meaning of the re-absorption
of all the spiritual light into the pleroma or fulness, whence it
originally descended.”
The foregoing is from the description given by Theodoret and adopted
by King in his _Gnostics_, with additions from Epiphanius and
Irenæus. But the former gives a very imperfect version, concocted
partly from the descriptions of Irenæus, and partly from his own
knowledge of the later Ophites, who, toward the end of the third
century, had blended already with several other sects. Irenæus also
confounds them very frequently, and the real theogony of the Ophites
is given by none of them correctly. With the exception of a change
in names, the above-given theogony is that of all the Gnostics, and
also of the Nazarenes. Ophis is but the successor of the Egyptian
_Chnuphis_, the Good Serpent with a lion’s radiating head, and was
held from days of the highest antiquity as an emblem of wisdom, or
Thauth, the instructor and Saviour of humanity, the “Son of God.” “Oh
men, live soberly ... win your immortality!” exclaims Hermes, the
thrice-great Trismegistus. “Instructor and guide of humanity, I will
lead you on to salvation.” Thus the oldest sectarians regarded Ophis,
the Agathodæmon, as identical with Christos; the serpent being the
emblem of celestial wisdom and eternity, and, in the present case,
the antitype of the Egyptian Chnuphis-serpent. These Gnostics, the
earliest of our Christian era, held: “That the supreme Æon, having
emitted other Æons out of himself, one of them, a female, _Prunnikos_
(concupiscence), descended into the chaos, whence, unable to escape,
she remained suspended in the mid-space, being too clogged by matter
to return above, and not falling lower where there was nothing in
affinity with her nature. She then produced her son Ilda-Baoth,
the God of the Jews, who, in his turn, produced seven Æons, or
angels,[319] who created the seven heavens.”
In this plurality of heavens the Christians believed from the first,
for we find Paul teaching of their existence, and speaking of a man
“caught up to the _third_ heaven” (_2 Corin._, xiii.). From these
seven angels Ilda-Baoth shut up all that was above him, lest they
should know of anything superior to himself.[320] They then created
man in the image of their Father,[321] but prone and crawling on
the earth like a worm. But the heavenly mother, Prunnikos, wishing
to deprive Ilda-Baoth of the power with which she had unwittingly
endowed him, infused into man a celestial spark--the spirit.
Immediately man rose upon his feet, soared in mind beyond the limits
of the seven spheres, and glorified the Supreme Father, _Him that is
above Ilda-Baoth_. Hence, the latter, full of jealousy, cast down
his eyes upon the lowest stratum of matter, and begot a potency in
the form of a serpent, whom they (the Ophites) call his son. Eve,
obeying him as the son of God, was persuaded to eat of the Tree of
Knowledge.[322]
It is a self-evident fact that the serpent of the _Genesis_, who
appears suddenly and without any preliminary introduction, must
have been the antitype of the Persian Arch-Devs, whose head is
Ash-Mogh, the “two-footed serpent of lies.” If the _Bible_-serpent
had been deprived of his limbs before he had tempted woman unto sin,
why should God specify as a punishment that he should go “upon his
belly?” Nobody supposes that he walked upon the extremity of his tail.
This controversy about the supremacy of Jehovah, between the
Presbyters and Fathers on the one hand, and the Gnostics, the
Nazarenes, and all the sects declared heterodox, as a last resort, on
the other, lasted till the days of Constantine, and later. That the
peculiar ideas of the Gnostics about the _genealogy_ of Jehovah, or
the proper place that had to be assigned, in the Christian-Gnostic
Pantheon, to the God of the Jews, were at first deemed neither
blasphemous nor heterodox is evident in the difference of opinions
held on this question by Clemens of Alexandria, for instance, and
Tertullian. The former, who seems to have known of Basilides better
than anybody else, saw nothing heterodox or blamable in the mystical
and transcendental views of the new Reformer. “In his eyes,” remarks
the author of _The Gnostics_, speaking of Clemens, “Basilides was
not a heretic, _i.e._, an innovator as regards the doctrines of the
Christian Church, but a mere theosophic philosopher, who sought to
express _ancient truths_ under new forms, and perhaps to combine
them with the new faith, the truth of which he could admit without
necessarily renouncing the old, exactly as is the case with the
learned Hindus of our day.”[323]
Not so with Irenæus and Tertullian.[324] The principal works of the
latter _against the Heretics_, were written after his separation
from the Catholic Church, when he had ranged himself among the
zealous followers of Montanus; and teem with unfairness and bigoted
prejudice.[325] He has exaggerated every Gnostic opinion to a
monstrous absurdity, and his arguments are not based on coercive
reasoning but simply on the blind stubbornness of a partisan fanatic.
Discussing Basilides, the “pious, god-like, theosophic philosopher,”
as Clemens of Alexandria thought him, Tertullian exclaims: “After
this, Basilides, the _heretic_, broke loose.[326] He asserted that
there is a Supreme God, by name Abraxas, by whom Mind was created,
whom the Greeks call _Nous_. From her emanated the Word; from the
Word, Providence; from Providence, Virtue and Wisdom; from these
two again, Virtues, _Principalities,[327] and Powers_ were made;
thence infinite productions and emissions of angels. Among the lowest
angels, indeed, and those that made this world, he sets _last of all_
the god of the Jews, whom he denies to be God himself, affirming that
he is but one of the angels.”[328]
It would be equally useless to refer to the direct apostles of
Christ, and show them as holding in their controversies that Jesus
never made any difference between his “Father” and the “Lord-God” of
Moses. For the _Clementine Homilies_, in which occur the greatest
argumentations upon the subject, as shown in the disputations alleged
to have taken place between Peter and Simon the Magician, are now
also proved to have been falsely attributed to Clement the Roman.
This work, if written by an Ebionite--as the author of _Supernatural
Religion_ declares in common with some other commentators[329]--must
have been written either far later than the Pauline period,
generally assigned to it, or the dispute about the identity of
Jehovah with God, the “Father of Jesus,” have been distorted by
later interpolations. This disputation is in its very essence
antagonistic to the early doctrines of the Ebionites. The latter, as
demonstrated by Epiphanius and Theodoret, were the direct followers
of the Nazarene sect[330] (the Sabians), the “Disciples of John.”
He says, unequivocally, that the Ebionites believed in the _Æons_
(emanations), that the Nazarenes were _their instructors_, and that
“each imparted to the other out of his own wickedness.” Therefore,
holding the same beliefs as the Nazarenes did, an Ebionite would not
have given even so much chance to the doctrine supported by Peter in
the _Homilies_. The old Nazarenes, as well as the later ones, whose
views are embodied in the _Codex Nazaræus_, never called Jehovah
otherwise than _Adonai_, _Iurbo_, the God of the _Abortive_[331]
(the orthodox Jews). They kept their beliefs and religious tenets
so _secret_ that even Epiphanius, writing as early as the end of
the fourth century,[332] confesses his ignorance as to their real
doctrine. “Dropping the name of Jesus,” says the Bishop of Salamis,
“they neither call themselves _Iessaens_, nor continue to hold the
name of the Jews, nor name themselves Christians, but _Nazarenes_....
The resurrection of the dead is confessed by them ... but concerning
Christ, _I cannot say_ whether they think him a _mere man_, or as the
_truth is_, confess that he was born through the _Holy Pneuma_ from
the Virgin.”[333]
While Simon Magus argues in the _Homilies_ from the standpoint of
every Gnostic (Nazarenes and Ebionites included), Peter, as a true
apostle of circumcision, holds to the old Law and, as a matter of
course, seeks to blend his belief in the divinity of Christ with his
old Faith in the “Lord God” and ex-protector of the “chosen people.”
As the author of _Supernatural Religion_ shows, the Epitome,[334]
“a blending of the other two, probably intended to purge them from
heretical doctrine”[335] and, together with a great majority of
critics, assigns to the _Homilies_, a date not earlier than the end
of the third century, we may well infer that they must differ widely
with their original, if there ever was one. Simon the Magician proves
throughout the whole work that the Demiurgus, the Architect of the
World, is not the highest Deity; and he bases his assertions upon
the words of Jesus himself, who states repeatedly that “no man knew
the Father.” Peter is made in the _Homilies_ to repudiate, with a
great show of indignation, the assertion that the Patriarchs were
not deemed worthy to know the Father; to which Simon objects again
by quoting the words of Jesus, who thanks the “Lord of Heaven and
earth that what was concealed from the wise” he has “revealed to
babes,” proving very logically that according to these very words the
Patriarchs could not have known the “Father.” Then Peter argues, in
his turn, that the expression, “what is _concealed_ from the wise,”
etc., referred to the concealed _mysteries_ of the creation.[336]
This argumentation of Peter, therefore, had it even emanated from
the apostle himself, instead of being a “religious romance,” as the
author of _Supernatural Religion_ calls it, would prove nothing
whatever in favor of the identity of the God of the Jews, with the
“Father” of Jesus. At best it would only demonstrate that Peter had
remained from first to last “an apostle of circumcision,” a Jew
faithful to his old law, and a defender of the _Old Testament_. This
conversation proves, moreover, the weakness of the cause he defends,
for we see in the apostle a man who, although in most intimate
relations with Jesus, can furnish us nothing in the way of direct
proof that he ever thought of teaching that the all-wise and all-good
Paternity he preached was the morose and revengeful thunderer of
Mount Sinai. But what the _Homilies_ do prove, is again our assertion
that there was a secret doctrine preached by Jesus to the few who
were deemed worthy to become its recipients and custodians. “And
Peter said: ‘We remember that our Lord and teacher, as commanding,
said to us, guard the mysteries for me, and the sons of my house.
Wherefore also he explained to his disciples, _privately_, the
_mysteries of the kingdoms of the heavens_.’”[337]
If we now recall the fact that a portion of the Mysteries of the
“Pagans” consisted of the απορῥήτα, _aporrheta_, or secret discourses;
that the secret _Logia_ or discourses of Jesus contained in the
original _Gospel according to Matthew_, the meaning and interpretation
of which St. Jerome confessed to be “a difficult task” for him to
achieve, were of the same nature; and if we remember, further, that to
some of the interior or final Mysteries only a very select few were
admitted; and that finally it was from the number of the latter that
were taken all the ministers of the holy “Pagan” rites, we will then
clearly understand this expression of Jesus quoted by Peter: “Guard
_the Mysteries for me and the sons of my house_,” _i.e._, of my
doctrine. And, if we understand it rightly, we cannot avoid thinking
that this “secret” doctrine of Jesus, even the technical expressions
of which are but so many duplications of the Gnostic and Neo-platonic
mystic phraseology--that this doctrine, we say, was based on the same
transcendental philosophy of Oriental _Gnosis_ as the rest of the
religions of those and earliest days. That none of the later Christian
sects, despite their boasting, were the inheritors of it, is evident
from the contradictions, blunders, and clumsy repatching of the
mistakes of every preceding century by the discoveries of the
succeeding one. These mistakes, in a number of manuscripts claimed to
be authentic, are sometimes so ridiculous as to bear on their face the
evidence of being pious forgeries. Thus, for instance, the utter
ignorance of some patristic champions of the very gospels they claimed
to defend. We have mentioned the accusation against Marcion by
Tertullian and Epiphanius of mutilating the _Gospel_ ascribed to Luke,
and erasing from it that which is now proved to have never been in
that Gospel at all. Finally, the method adopted by Jesus of speaking
in parables, in which he only followed the example of his sect, is
attributed in the _Homilies_ to a prophecy of _Isaiah_! Peter is made
to remark: “For Isaiah said: ‘I will open my mouth in parables, and I
will utter things that have been kept secret from the foundation of
the world.’” This erroneous reference to Isaiah of a sentence given in
_Psalms_ lxxviii. 2, is found not only in the apocryphal _Homilies_,
but also in the Sinaitic _Codex_. Commenting on the fact in the
_Supernatural Religion_, the author states that “Porphyry, in the
third century, twitted Christians with this erroneous ascription by
their inspired evangelist to Isaiah of a passage from a _Psalm_, and
reduced the Fathers to great straits.”[338] Eusebius and Jerome tried
to get out of the difficulty by ascribing the mistake to an “ignorant
scribe;” and Jerome even went to the length of asserting that the name
of Isaiah never stood after the above sentence in any of the old
codices, but that the name of Asaph was found in its place, only
“_ignorant_ men had removed it.”[339] To this, the author again
observes that “the fact is that the reading ‘Asaph’ for ‘Isaiah’ is
not found in any manuscript extant; and, although ‘Isaiah’ has
_disappeared_ from all but a few obscure codices, it cannot be denied
that the name anciently stood in the text. In the Sinaitic _Codex_,
which is probably the earliest manuscript extant ... and which is
assigned to the fourth century,” he adds, “the prophet _Isaiah_ stands
in the text by the first hand, _but is erased_ by the second.”[340]
It is a most suggestive fact that there is not a word in the so-called
sacred _Scriptures_ to show that Jesus was actually regarded as a God
by his disciples. Neither before nor after his death did they pay him
divine honors. Their relation to him was only that of disciples and
“master;” by which name they addressed him, as the followers of
Pythagoras and Plato addressed their respective masters before them.
Whatever words may have been put into the mouths of Jesus, Peter,
John, Paul, and others, there is not a single act of adoration
recorded on their part, nor did Jesus himself ever declare his
identity with _his Father_. He accused the Pharisees of _stoning_
their prophets, not of deicide. He termed himself the son of God, but
took care to assert repeatedly that they were all the children of God,
who was the Heavenly Father of all. In preaching this, he but repeated
a doctrine taught ages earlier by Hermes, Plato, and other
philosophers. Strange contradiction! Jesus, whom we are asked to
worship as the one living God, is found, immediately after his
Resurrection, saying to Mary Magdalene: “I am not yet ascended _to my
Father_; but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto _my
Father_ and _your_ Father, and to _my_ God and _your_ God!” (_John_
xx. 17.)
Does this look like identifying himself with his Father? “_My_
Father and _your_ Father, _my_ God and _your_ God,” implies, on
his part, a desire to be considered on a perfect equality with his
brethren--nothing more. Theodoret writes: “The hæretics agree with
us respecting the beginning of all things.... But they say there is
not one Christ (God), but one above, and the other below. And this
last _formerly dwelt in many_; but _the Jesus_, they at one time say
is _from_ God, at another they call him a SPIRIT.”[341] This spirit
is the Christos, the _messenger_ of life, who is sometimes called
the Angel _Gabriel_ (in Hebrew, the mighty one of God), and who took
with the Gnostics the place of the Logos, while the Holy Spirit was
considered _Life_.[342] With the sect of the Nazarenes, though,
the Spiritus, or Holy Ghost, had less honor. While nearly every
Gnostic sect considered it a Female Power, whether they called it
_Binah_, נינה, _Sophia_, the Divine Intellect, with the Nazarene sect
it was the _Female Spiritus_, the astral light, the genetrix of all
things of _matter_, the chaos in its evil aspect, made _turbido_ by
the Demiurge. At the creation of man, “it was light on the side of
the FATHER, and it was light (material light) on the side of the
MOTHER. And this is the ‘_two-fold_ man,’”[343] says the _Sohar_.
“That day (the last one) will perish the seven badly-disposed
stellars, also the sons of man, who have confessed the _Spiritus_,
the Messias (false), the Deus, and the MOTHER of the SPIRITUS shall
perish.”[344]
Jesus enforced and illustrated his doctrines with signs and
wonders; and if we lay aside the claims advanced on his behalf by
his deifiers, he did but what other kabalists did; and only _they_
at that epoch, when, for two centuries the sources of prophecy
had been completely dried up, and from this stagnation of public
“miracles” had originated the skepticism of the unbelieving sect of
the Sadducees. Describing the “heresies” of those days, Theodoret,
who has no idea of the hidden meaning of the word Christos, the
_anointed_ messenger, complains that they (the Gnostics) assert
_that this Messenger or Delegatus changes his body from time to
time_, “_and goes into other bodies, and at each time is differently
manifested_. And these (the overshadowed prophets) use incantations
and invocations of various demons and baptisms in the confession
of their principles.... They embrace astrology and magic, and the
mathematical error,” (?) he says.[345]
This “mathematical error,” of which the pious writer complains,
led subsequently to the rediscovery of the heliocentric system,
erroneous as it may still be, and forgotten since the days of
another “magician” who taught it--Pythagoras. Thus, the wonders of
healing and the thaums of Jesus, which he imparted to his followers,
show that they were learning, in their daily communication with
him, the theory and practice of the new ethics, day by day, and in
the familiar intercourse of intimate friendship. Their faith was
progressively developed, like that of all neophytes, simultaneously
with the increase of knowledge. We must bear in mind that Josephus,
who certainly must have been well informed on the subject, calls
the skill of expelling demons “a science.” This growth of faith is
conspicuously shown in the case of Peter, who, from having lacked
enough faith to support him while he could walk on the water from the
boat to his Master, at last became so expert a thaumaturgist, that
Simon Magus is said to have offered him money to teach him the secret
of healing, and other wonders. And Philip is shown to have become an
Æthrobat as good as Abaris of Pythagorean memory, but less expert
than Simon Magus.
Neither in the _Homilies_ nor any other early work of the apostles,
is there anything to show that either of his friends and followers
regarded Jesus as anything more than a prophet. The idea is as
clearly established in the _Clementines_. Except that too much room
is afforded to Peter to establish the identity of the Mosaic God
with the Father of Jesus, the whole work is devoted to Monotheism.
The author seems as bitter against Polytheism as against the claim
to the divinity of Christ.[346] He seems to be utterly ignorant of
the Logos, and his speculation is confined to Sophia, the Gnostic
wisdom. There is no trace in it of a hypostatic trinity, but the
same overshadowing of the Gnostic “wisdom (Christos and Sophia) is
attributed in the case of Jesus as it is in those of Adam, Enoch,
Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses.[347] These personages are
all placed on one level, and called ‘true prophets,’ and the seven
pillars of the world.” More than that, Peter vehemently denies the
fall of Adam, and with him, the doctrine of atonement, as taught by
Christian theology, utterly falls to the ground, _for he combats it
as a blasphemy_.[348] Peter’s theory of sin is that of the Jewish
kabalists, and even, in a certain way, Platonic. Adam not only never
sinned, but, “as a true prophet, possessed of the Spirit of God,
which afterwards was in Jesus, _could not_ sin.”[349] In short, the
whole of the work exhibits the belief of the author in the kabalistic
doctrine of permutation. The _Kabala_ teaches the doctrine of
transmigration of the spirit.[350] “Mosah is the _revolutio_ of Seth
and Hebel.”[351]
“Tell me who it is who brings about the _re-birth_ (the revolutio)?”
is asked of the wise Hermes. “God’s Son, the _only man_, through the
will of God,” is the answer of the “heathen.”[352]
“God’s son” is the immortal spirit assigned to every human being. It
is this divine entity which is the “_only man_,” for the casket which
contains our soul, and the soul itself, are but half-entities, and
without its overshadowing both body and astral soul, the two are but
an animal _duad_. It requires a trinity to form the complete “man,”
and allow him to remain immortal at every “re-birth,” or _revolutio_,
throughout the subsequent and ascending spheres, every one of which
brings him nearer to the refulgent realm of eternal and _absolute_
light.
“God’s FIRST-BORN, who is the ‘holy Veil,’ the ‘Light of Lights,’ it
is he who sends the revolutio of the Delegatus, for he is the _First
Power_,” says the kabalist.[353]
“The pneuma (spirit) and the dunamis (power), which is from the God,
it is right to consider nothing else than the _Logos_, who is _also_
(?) First-begotten to the God,” argues a Christian.[354]
“Angels and powers are in heaven!” says Justin, thus bringing forth
a purely kabalistic doctrine. The Christians adopted it from the
_Sohar_ and the hæretical sects, and if Jesus mentioned them, it
was not in the official synagogues that he learned the theory,
but directly in the kabalistic teachings. In the Mosaic books,
very little mention is made of them, and Moses, who holds direct
communications with the “Lord God,” troubles himself very little
about them. The doctrine was a secret one, and deemed by the orthodox
synagogue heretical. Josephus calls the Essenes heretics, saying:
“Those admitted among the Essenes must swear to communicate their
doctrines to no one any otherwise _than as he received them himself_,
and equally to preserve the books _belonging to their sect_, and the
_names of the angels_.”[355] The Sadducees did not believe in angels,
neither did the uninitiated Gentiles, who limited their Olympus to
gods and demi-gods, or “spirits.” Alone, the kabalists and theurgists
hold to that doctrine from time immemorial, and, as a consequence,
Plato, and Philo Judæus after him, followed first by the Gnostics,
and then by the Christians.
Thus, if Josephus never wrote the famous interpolation forged by
Eusebius, concerning Jesus, on the other hand, he has described in
the Essenes all the principal features that we find prominent in
the Nazarene. When praying, they sought solitude.[356] “When thou
prayest, enter into thy closet ... and pray to thy Father which is in
secret” (_Matthew_ vi. 6). “Everything spoken by them (Essenes) is
stronger than an oath. Swearing is shunned by them” (_Josephus_ II.,
viii., 6). “But I say unto you, swear not at all ... but let your
communication be yea, yea; nay, nay” (_Matthew_ v. 34-37).
The Nazarenes, as well as the Essenes and the Therapeutæ, believed
more in their own interpretations of the “hidden sense” of the more
ancient Scriptures, than in the later laws of Moses. Jesus, as we
have shown before, felt but little veneration for the commandments of
his predecessor, with whom Irenæus is so anxious to connect him.
The Essenes “enter into the houses of _those whom they never saw
previously_, as if they were their intimate friends” (_Josephus_ II.,
viii., 4). Such was undeniably the custom of Jesus and his disciples.
Epiphanius, who places the Ebionite “heresy” on one level with that
of the Nazarenes, also remarks that the Nazaraioi come next to the
Cerinthians,[357] so much vituperated against by Irenæus.[358]
Munk, in his work on _Palestine_, affirms that there were 4,000
Essenes living in the desert; that they had their mystical books,
and predicted the future.[359] The Nabatheans, with very little
difference indeed, adhered to the same belief as the Nazarenes and
the Sabeans, and all of them honored John the Baptist more than
his successor Jesus. The Persian Iezidi say that they originally
came to Syria from Busrah. They use baptism, and believe in seven
archangels, though paying at the same time reverence to Satan. Their
prophet Iezed, who flourished long prior to Mahomet,[360] taught that
God will send a messenger, and that the latter would reveal to him
a book which is already written in heaven from the eternity.[361]
The Nabatheans inhabited the Lebanon, as their descendants do to
the present day, and their religion was from its origin purely
kabalistic. Maimonides speaks of them as if he identified them with
the Sabeans. “I will mention to thee the writings ... respecting
the belief and institutions of the _Sabeans_,” he says. “The most
famous is the book _The Agriculture of the Nabathæans_, which has
been translated by Ibn Wahohijah. This book is full of heathenish
foolishness.... It speaks of the preparations of TALISMANS, the
drawing down of the powers of the SPIRITS, MAGIC, DEMONS, and ghouls,
which make their abode in the desert.”[362]
There are traditions among the tribes living scattered about _beyond_
the Jordan, as there are many such also among the descendants of the
Samaritans at Damascus, Gaza, and at Naplosa (the ancient Shechem).
Many of these tribes have, notwithstanding the persecutions of
eighteen centuries, retained the faith of their fathers in its
primitive simplicity. It is there that we have to go for traditions
based on _historical_ truths, however disfigured by exaggeration
and inaccuracy, and compare them with the religious legends of the
Fathers, which they call revelation. Eusebius states that before
the siege of Jerusalem the small Christian community--comprising
members of whom many, if not all, knew Jesus and his apostles
personally--took refuge in the little town of Pella, on the opposite
shore of the Jordan. Surely these simple people, separated for
centuries from the rest of the world, ought to have preserved their
traditions fresher than any other nations! It is in Palestine that
we have to search for the _clearest_ waters of Christianity, let
alone its source. The first Christians, after the death of Jesus, all
joined together for a time, whether they were Ebionites, Nazarenes,
Gnostics, or others. They had no Christian dogmas in those days, and
their Christianity consisted in believing Jesus to be a prophet,
this belief varying from seeing in him simply a “just man,”[363] or
a holy, inspired prophet, a vehicle used by Christos and Sophia to
manifest themselves through. These all united together in opposition
to the synagogue and the tyrannical technicalities of the Pharisees,
until the primitive group separated in two distinct branches--which,
we may correctly term the Christian kabalists of the Jewish Tanaïm
school, and the Christian kabalists of the Platonic Gnosis.[364] The
former were represented by the party composed of the followers of
Peter, and John, the author of the _Apocalypse_; the latter ranged
with the Pauline Christianity, blending itself, at the end of the
second century, with the Platonic philosophy, and engulfing, still
later, the Gnostic sects, whose symbols and misunderstood mysticism
overflowed the Church of Rome.
Amid this jumble of contradictions, what Christian is secure in
confessing himself such? In the old Syriac _Gospel according to Luke_
(iii. 22), the Holy Spirit is said to have descended in the likeness
of a dove. “Jesua, full of the sacred Spirit, returned from Jordan,
and the Spirit led him into the desert” (old Syriac, _Luke_ iv. 1,
_Tremellius_). “The difficulty,” says Dunlap, “was that the Gospels
declared that John the Baptist saw the Spirit (the Power of God)
descend upon Jesus after he had reached manhood, and if the Spirit
then first descended upon him, there was some ground for the opinion
of the Ebionites and Nazarenes who denied his _preceding_ existence,
and refused him the attributes of the LOGOS. The Gnostics, on the
other hand, objected to the flesh, but conceded the Logos.”[365]
John’s _Apocalypsis_, and the explanations of sincere Christian
bishops, like Synesius, who, to the last, adhered to the Platonic
doctrines, make us think that the wisest and safest way is to hold
to that sincere primitive faith which seems to have actuated the
above-named bishop. This best, sincerest, and most unfortunate of
Christians, addressing the “Unknown,” exclaims: “Oh Father of the
Worlds ... Father of the Æons ... _Artificer of the Gods_, it is holy
to praise!” But Synesius had Hypatia for instructor, and this is why
we find him confessing in all sincerity his opinions and profession
of faith. “The rabble desires nothing better than to be deceived....
As regards myself, therefore, _I will always be a philosopher with
myself_, but I _must be priest_ with the people.”
“Holy is God the Father of all being, holy is God, whose wisdom is
carried out into execution by his own Powers!... Holy art Thou, who
through the Word had created all! Therefore, I believe in Thee, and
bear testimony, and go into the LIFE and LIGHT.”[366] Thus speaks
Hermes Trismegistus, the heathen divine. What Christian bishop could
have said better than that?
The apparent discrepancy of the four gospels as a whole, does not
prevent every narrative given in the _New Testament_--however much
disfigured--having a ground-work of truth. To this, are cunningly
adapted details made to fit the later exigencies of the Church. So,
propped up partially by indirect evidence, still more by blind faith,
they have become, with time, articles of faith. Even the fictitious
massacre of the “Innocents” by King Herod has a certain foundation
to it, in its allegorical sense. Apart from the now-discovered fact
that the whole story of such a massacre of the Innocents is bodily
taken from the Hindu _Bagaved-gitta_, and Brahmanical traditions, the
legend refers, moreover, allegorically, to an historical fact. King
Herod is the type of Kansa, the tyrant of Madura, the maternal uncle
of Christna, to whom astrologers predicted that a son of his niece
Devaki would deprive him of his throne. Therefore he gives orders to
kill the male child that is born to her; but Christna escapes his
fury through the protection of Mahadeva (the great God) who causes
the child to be carried away to another city, out of Kansa’s reach.
After that, in order to be sure and kill the right boy, on whom he
failed to lay his murderous hands, Kansa has all the male newborn
infants within his kingdom killed. Christna is also worshipped by the
gopas (the shepherds) of the land.
Though this ancient Indian legend bears a very suspicious resemblance
to the more modern biblical romance, Gaffarel and others attribute
the origin of the latter to the persecutions during the Herodian
reign of the kabalists and the _Wise men_, who had not remained
strictly orthodox. The latter, as well as the prophets, were
nicknamed the “Innocents,” and the “Babes,” on account of their
holiness. As in the case of certain degrees of modern Masonry, the
adepts reckoned their grade of initiation by a _symbolic_ age. Thus
Saul who, when chosen king, was “a choice and goodly man,” and “from
his shoulders upward was higher than any of the people,” is described
in Catholic versions, as “child of _one year_ when he began to
reign,” which, in its literal sense, is a palpable absurdity. But in
_1 Samuel_ x., his anointing by Samuel and initiation are described;
and at verse 6th, Samuel uses this significant language: “... the
Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee and thou shalt prophesy with
them, _and shalt be turned into another man_.” The phrase above
quoted is thus made plain--he had received one degree of initiation
and was symbolically described as “a child one year old.” The
Catholic _Bible_, from which the text is quoted, with charming candor
says in a foot-note: “It is extremely difficult to explain” (meaning
that Saul was a child of one year). But undaunted by any difficulty
the Editor, nevertheless, does take upon himself to explain it, and
adds: “_A child of one year._ That is, _he was good and like an
innocent child_.” An interpretation as ingenious as it is pious; and
which if it does no good can certainly do no harm.[367]
If the explanation of the kabalists is rejected, then the whole
subject falls into confusion; worse still--for it becomes a direct
plagiarism from the Hindu legend. All the commentators have agreed
that a litteral massacre of young children is nowhere mentioned in
history; and that, moreover, an occurrence like that would have made
such a bloody page in Roman annals that the record of it would have
been preserved for us by every author of the day. Herod himself was
subject to the Roman law; and undoubtedly he would have paid the
penalty of such a monstrous crime, with his own life. But if, on the
one hand, we have not the slightest trace of this fable in history,
on the other, we find in the official complaints of the Synagogue
abundant evidence of the persecution of the initiates. The _Talmud_
also corroborates it.
The Jewish version of the birth of Jesus is recorded in the
_Sepher-Toldos Jeshu_ in the following words:
“Mary having become the mother of a Son, named Jehosuah, and the boy
growing up, she entrusted him to the care of the Rabbi Elhanan, and
the child progressed in knowledge, for he was well gifted with spirit
and understanding.
“Rabbi Jehosuah, son of Perachiah, continued the education of
Jehosuah (Jesus) after Elhanan, and _initiated_ him in the _secret_
knowledge;” but the King, Janneus, having given orders to slay all
the initiates, Jehosuah Ben Perachiah, fled to Alexandria, in Egypt,
taking the boy with him.
While in Alexandria, continues the story, they were received in the
house of a rich and learned lady (personified Egypt). Young Jesus
found her beautiful, notwithstanding “_a defect in her eyes_,” and
declared so to his master. Upon hearing this, the latter became so
angry that his pupil should find in the land of bondage anything
good, that “he cursed him and drove the young man from his presence.”
Then follow a series of adventures told in allegorical language,
which show that Jesus supplemented his initiation in the Jewish
_Kabala_ with an additional acquisition of the secret wisdom of
Egypt. When the persecution ceased, they both returned to Judea.[368]
The real grievances against Jesus are stated by the learned author of
_Tela Ignea Satanæ_ (the fiery darts of Satan) to be two in number:
1st, that he had discovered the great Mysteries of their Temple, by
having been initiated in Egypt; and 2d, that he had profaned them by
exposing them to the vulgar, who misunderstood and disfigured them.
This is what they say:[369]
“There exists, in the sanctuary of the living God, a cubical stone,
on which are sculptured the holy characters, the combination of
which gives the explanation of the attributes and powers of the
incommunicable name. This explanation is the secret key of all the
occult sciences and forces in nature. It is what the Hebrews call the
_Scham hamphorash_. This stone is watched by two lions of gold, who
roar as soon as it is approached.[370] The gates of the temple were
never lost sight of, and the door of the sanctuary opened but once
a year, to admit the High Priest alone. But Jesus, who had learned
in Egypt the ‘great secrets’ at the initiation, forged for himself
invisible keys, and thus was enabled to penetrate into the sanctuary
unseen.... He copied the characters on the cubical stone, and hid
them in his thigh;[371] after which, emerging from the temple, he
went abroad and began astounding people with his miracles. The dead
were raised at his command, the leprous and the obsessed were healed.
He forced the stones which lay buried for ages at the bottom of
the sea to rise to the surface until they formed a mountain, from
the top of which he preached.” The _Sepher Toldos_ states further
that, _unable to displace_ the cubical stone of the sanctuary, Jesus
fabricated one of clay, which he showed to the nations and passed it
off for the true cubical stone of Israel.
This allegory, like the rest of them in such books, is written
“_inside and outside_”--it has its secret meaning, and ought to be
read two ways. The kabalistic books explain its mystical meaning.
Further, the same Talmudist says, in substance, the following: Jesus
was thrown in prison,[372] and kept there forty days; then flogged
as a seditious rebel; then stoned as a blasphemer in a place called
Lud, and finally allowed to expire upon a cross. “All this,” explains
Levi, “because he revealed to the people the truths which they
(the Pharisees) wished to bury for their own use. He had divined
the occult theology of Israel, had compared it with the wisdom
of Egypt, and found thereby the reason for a universal religious
synthesis.”[373]
However cautious one ought to be in accepting anything about Jesus
from Jewish sources, it must be confessed that in some things they
seem to be more correct in their statements (whenever their direct
interest in stating facts is not concerned) than our good but too
jealous Fathers. One thing is certain, James, the “Brother of the
Lord,” is silent about the _resurrection_. He terms Jesus nowhere
“Son of God,” nor even Christ-God. Once only, speaking of Jesus, he
calls him the “Lord of Glory,” but so do the Nazarenes when writing
about their prophet _Iohanan bar Zacharia_, or John, son of Zacharias
(St. John Baptist). Their favorite expressions about their prophet
are the same as those used by James when speaking of Jesus. A man “of
the seed of a man,” “Messenger of Life,” of light, “my Lord Apostle,”
“King sprung of Light,” and so on. “Have not the faith of our _Lord_
JESUS Christ, _the Lord of Glory_” etc., says James in his epistle
(ii. 1), presumably addressing Christ as GOD. “Peace to thee, my
_Lord_, JOHN Abo Sabo, Lord of Glory!” says the _Codex Nazaræus_
(ii., 19), known to address but a prophet. “Ye have condemned and
killed the _Just_,” says James (v. 6). “Iohanan (John) is the _Just_
one, he comes in the way of _justice_,” says Matthew (xxi. 32, Syriac
text).
James does not even call Jesus _Messiah_, in the sense given to
the title by the Christians, but alludes to the kabalistic “King
Messiah,” who is Lord of Sabaoth[374] (v. 4), and repeats several
times that the “Lord” will come, but identifies the latter nowhere
with Jesus. “Be patient, therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the
Lord ... be patient, for the coming of the Lord _draweth nigh_” (v.
7, 8). And he adds: “Take, my brethren, the prophet (Jesus) _who
has spoken in the name of the Lord_ for an example of suffering,
affliction, and of patience.” Though in the present version the
word “prophet” stands in the plural, yet this is a deliberate
falsification of the original, the purpose of which is too evident.
James, immediately after having cited the “prophets” as an example,
adds: “Behold ... ye have _heard_ of the patience of Job, and _have
seen the end_ of the Lord”--thus combining the examples of these two
admirable characters, and placing them on a perfect equality. But we
have more to adduce in support of our argument. Did not Jesus himself
glorify the prophet of the Jordan? “What went ye out for to see? A
prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet.... Verily,
I say unto you, among them that are born _of women_ there hath not
risen a greater than John the Baptist.”
And of whom was he who spoke thus born? It is but the Roman Catholics
who have changed Mary, the mother of Jesus, into a _goddess_. In the
eyes of all other Christians she was a woman, whether his own birth
was immaculate or otherwise. According to strict logic, then, Jesus
confessed John _greater_ than himself. Note how completely this
matter is disposed of by the language employed by the Angel Gabriel
when addressing Mary: “Blessed art thou among _women_.” These words
are unequivocal. He does not adore her as the Mother of God, nor does
he call her _goddess_; he does not even address her as “Virgin,” but
he calls her _woman_, and only distinguishes her above other women as
having had better fortune, through her purity.
The Nazarenes were known as Baptists, Sabians, and John’s Christians.
Their belief was that the Messiah was not the Son of God, but simply
a prophet who would follow John. “Johanan, the Son of the Abo
Sabo Zachariah, shall say to himself, ‘Whoever will believe in my
_justice_ and my BAPTISM shall be joined to my association; he shall
share with me the seat which is the abode of life, of the supreme
Mano, and of living fire” (_Codex Nazaræus_, ii., p. 115). Origen
remarks “there are some who said of John (the Baptist) that he was
the _anointed_ (Christus).[375] The Angel Rasiel of the kabalists
is the Angel _Gabriel_ of the Nazarenes, and it is the latter who
is chosen of all the celestial hierarchy by the Christians to
become the messenger of the ‘annunciation.’ The genius sent by the
‘Lord of Celsitude’ is Æbel Zivo, whose name is also called GABRIEL
Legatus.”[376] Paul must have had the sect of the Nazarenes in mind
when he said: “And last of all he (Jesus) was seen of me also, as _of
one born out of due time_” (_1 Corinth._, xv. 8), thus reminding his
listeners of the expression usual to the Nazarenes, who termed the
Jews “the abortions, or born out of time.” Paul prides himself of
belonging to a hæresy.[377]
When the metaphysical conceptions of the Gnostics, who saw in Jesus
the Logos and the anointed, began to gain ground, the earliest
Christians separated from the Nazarenes, who accused Jesus of
perverting the doctrines of John, and changing the baptism of the
Jordan.[378] “Directly,” says Milman, “as it (the Gospel) got
_beyond_ the borders of Palestine, and the name of ‘Christ’ had
acquired sanctity and veneration in the Eastern cities, he became
a kind of _metaphysical impersonation_, while the religion lost
its purely moral cast and assumed the character of a _speculative
theogony_.”[379] The only half-original document that has reached us
from the primitive apostolic days, is the _Logia_ of Matthew. The
real, genuine doctrine has remained in the hands of the Nazarenes,
in this _Gospel of Matthew_ containing the “secret doctrine,” the
“Sayings of Jesus,” mentioned by Papias. These sayings were, no
doubt, of the same nature as the small manuscripts placed in the
hands of the neophytes, who were candidates for the Initiations into
the Mysteries, and which contained the _Aporrheta_, the revelations
of some important rites and symbols. For why should Matthew take such
precautions to make them “_secret_” were it otherwise?
Primitive Christianity had its grip, pass-words, and degrees of
initiation. The innumerable Gnostic gems and amulets are weighty
proofs of it. It is a whole symbolical science. The kabalists were
the first to embellish the universal Logos,[380] with such terms
as “Light of Light,” the Messenger of LIFE and LIGHT,[381] and we
find these expressions adopted _in toto_ by the Christians, with the
addition of nearly all the Gnostic terms such as Pleroma (fulness),
Archons, Æons, etc. As to the “First-Born,” the First, and the
“Only-Begotten,” these are as old as the world. Origen shows the
word “Logos” as existing among the Brachmanes. “The _Brachmanes_ say
that the God is _Light_, not such as one sees, nor such as the sun
and fire; but they have the _God_ LOGOS, not the articulate, the
Logos of the Gnosis, through whom the highest MYSTERIES of the Gnosis
are seen by the wise.”[382] The _Acts_ and the fourth _Gospel_ teem
with Gnostic expressions. The kabalistic: “God’s first-born emanated
from the Most High,” together with _that which is the “Spirit of
the Anointing;”_ and again “they called him the anointed of the
Highest,”[383] are reproduced in Spirit and substance by the author
of the _Gospel according to John_. “That was _the true light_,” and
“the light shineth in darkness.” “And the WORD _was made flesh_.”
“And his _fulness_ (pleroma) have all we received,” etc. (_John_ i.
et seq.).
The “Christ,” then, and the “Logos” existed ages before Christianity;
the Oriental Gnosis was studied long before the days of Moses, and we
have to seek for the origin of all these in the archaic periods of
the primeval Asiatic philosophy. Peter’s second _Epistle_ and Jude’s
fragment, preserved in the _New Testament_, show by their phraseology
that they belong to the kabalistic Oriental Gnosis, for they use
the same expressions as did the Christian Gnostics who built a part
of their system from the Oriental _Kabala_. “Presumptuous are they
(the Ophites), self-willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of
DIGNITIES,” says Peter (2d Epistle ii. 10), the original model for
the later abusive Tertullian and Irenæus.[384] “Likewise (even as
Sodom and Gomorrah) also these _filthy_ dreamers defile the flesh,
despise DOMINION and speak evil of DIGNITIES,” says Jude, repeating
the very words of Peter, and thereby expressions consecrated in the
_Kabala_. _Dominion_ is the “Empire,” the _tenth_ of the kabalistic
sephiroth.[385] The _Powers_ and Dignities are the subordinate genii
of the Archangels and Angels of the _Sohar_.[386] These emanations
are the very life and soul of the _Kabala_ and Zoroastranism; and
the _Talmud_ itself, in its present state, is all borrowed from the
_Zend-avesta_. Therefore, by adopting the views of Peter, Jude, and
other Jewish apostles, the Christians have become but a dissenting
sect of the Persians, for they do not even interpret the meaning
of all such _Powers_ as the true kabalists do. Paul’s warning his
converts against the worshipping of angels, shows how well he
appreciated, even so early as his period, the dangers of borrowing
from a metaphysical doctrine the philosophy of which could be rightly
interpreted but by its well-learned adherents, the Magi and the
Jewish Tanaïm. “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary
humility and _worshipping of angels_, intruding into those things
which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,”[387]
is a sentence laid right at the door of Peter and his champions. In
the _Talmud_, Michael is Prince of Water, who has _seven_ inferior
spirits subordinate to him. He is the patron, the guardian angel of
the Jews, as Daniel informs us (v. 21), and the Greek Ophites, who
identified him with their Ophiomorphos, the personified creation
of the envy and malice of Ilda-Baoth, the Demiurgus (Creator of
the _material_ world), and undertook to prove that he was also
Samuel, the Hebrew prince of the evil spirits, or Persian devs, were
naturally regarded by the Jews as blasphemers. But did Jesus ever
sanction this belief in angels except in so far as hinting that they
were the messengers and subordinates of God? And here the origin of
the later splits between Christian beliefs is directly traceable to
these two early contradictory views.
Paul, believing in all such occult powers in the world “unseen,”
but ever “present,” says: “Ye walked according to the ÆON of this
world, according to the _Archon_ (Ilda-Baoth, the _Demiurg_) that
has the domination of the air,” and “We wrestle not against flesh
and blood, but against the _dominations_, the _powers_; the lords of
darkness, the mischievousness of spirits in the upper regions.” This
sentence, “Ye were dead in sin and error,” for “ye walked according
to the _Archon_,” or Ilda-Baoth, the God and creator of matter of
the Ophites, shows unequivocally that: 1st, Paul, notwithstanding
some dissensions with the more important doctrines of the Gnostics,
shared more or less their cosmogonical views on the emanations; and
2d, that he was fully aware that this Demiurge, whose Jewish name
was Jehovah, was _not_ the God preached by Jesus. And now, if we
compare the doctrine of Paul with the religious views of Peter and
Jude, we find that, not only did they worship Michael, the Archangel,
but that also they _reverenced_ SATAN, because the latter was also,
before his fall, an angel! This they do quite openly, and abuse
the Gnostics[388] for speaking “evil” of him. No one can deny the
following: Peter, when denouncing those who are not afraid to speak
evil of “_dignities_,” adds immediately, “Whereas angels, which
are greater in power and might, _bring not railing accusations_
against them (the dignities) before the Lord” (ii. 11). Who are the
dignities? Jude, in his general epistle, makes the word as clear as
day. The _dignities_ are the DEVILS!! Complaining of the disrespect
shown by the Gnostics to the _powers_ and _dominions_, Jude argues
in the very words of Peter: “And yet, Michael, the Archangel, when
contending _with the devil_, he disputed about the body of Moses,
_durst not bring against him a railing accusation_, but said, The
Lord rebuke thee” (i. 9). Is this plain enough? If not, then we have
the _Kabala_ to prove who were the _dignities_.
Considering that _Deuteronomy_ tells us that the “_Lord_” Himself
buried Moses in a valley of Moab (xxxiv. 6), “and no man knoweth of
his sepulchre unto this day,” this biblical _lapsus linguæ_ of Jude
gives a strong coloring to the assertions of some of the Gnostics.
They claimed but what was secretly taught by the Jewish kabalists
themselves; to wit: that the highest supreme God was unknown and
invisible; “the King of Light is a closed eye;” that Ilda-Baoth, the
Jewish second Adam, was the real Demiurge; and that Iao, Adonai,
Sabaoth, and Eloi were the quaternary emanation which formed the
unity of the God of the Hebrews--Jehovah. Moreover, the latter was
also called Michael and Samael by them, and regarded but as an angel,
several removes from the Godhead. In holding to such a belief, the
Gnostics countenanced the teachings of the greatest of the Jewish
doctors, Hillel, and other Babylonian divines. Josephus shows the
great deference of the official Synagogue in Jerusalem to the wisdom
of the schools of Central Asia. The colleges of Sora, Pumbiditha, and
Nahaidea were considered the headquarters of esoteric and theological
learning by all the schools of Palestine. The Chaldean version of
the _Pentateuch_, made by the well-known Babylonian divine, Onkelos,
was regarded as the most authoritative of all; and it is according
to this learned Rabbi that Hillel and other Tanaïm after him held
that the Being who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, on Mount
Sinai, and who finally buried him, was the _angel_ of the Lord,
Memro, and not the Lord Himself; and that he whom the Hebrews of
the _Old Testament_ mistook for _Iahoh_ was but His messenger, one
of His sons, or emanations. All this establishes but one logical
conclusion--namely, that the Gnostics were by far the superiors
of the disciples, in point of education and general information;
even in a knowledge of the religious tenets of the Jews themselves.
While they were perfectly well-versed in the Chaldean wisdom, the
well-meaning, pious, but fanatical as well as ignorant disciples,
unable to fully understand or grasp the religious spirit of their own
system, were driven in their disputations to such convincing logic
as the use of “brute beasts,” “sows,” “dogs,” and other epithets so
freely bestowed by Peter.
Since then, the epidemic has reached the apex of the sacerdotal
hierarchy. From the day when the founder of Christianity uttered the
warning, that he who shall say to his brother, “Thou fool, shall
be in danger of hell-fire,” all who have passed as its leaders,
beginning with the ragged fishermen of Galilee, and ending with
the jewelled pontiffs, have seemed to vie with each other in the
invention of opprobrious epithets for their opponents. So we find
Luther passing a final sentence on the Catholics, and exclaiming
that “The Papists are all asses, put them in whatever form you like;
whether they are boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, hashed,
they will be always the same asses.” Calvin called the victims he
persecuted, and occasionally burned, “malicious barking dogs, full of
bestiality and insolence, base corrupters of the sacred writings,”
etc. Dr. Warburton terms the Popish religion “an impious farce,” and
Monseigneur Dupanloup asserts that the Protestant Sabbath service is
the “Devil’s mass,” and all clergymen are “thieves and ministers of
the Devil.”
The same spirit of incomplete inquiry and ignorance has led the
Christian Church to bestow on its most holy apostles, titles assumed
by their most desperate opponents, the “Hæretics” and Gnostics.
So we find, for instance, Paul termed the vase of election “_Vas
Electionis_,” a title chosen by _Manes_,[389] the greatest heretic of
his day in the eyes of the Church, Manes meaning, in the Babylonian
language, the chosen vessel or receptacle.[390]
So with the Virgin Mary. They were so little gifted with originality,
that they copied from the Egyptian and Hindu religions their several
apostrophes to their respective Virgin-mothers. The juxtaposition of
a few examples will make this clear.
HINDU.
_Litany of our Lady Nari: Virgin._ (_Also Devanaki._)
1. Holy Nari--Mariāma, Mother of perpetual fecundity.
2. Mother of an incarnated God--Vishnu (Devanaki).
3. Mother of Christna.
4. Eternal Virginity--Kanyabâva.
5. Mother--Pure Essence, Akasa.
6. Virgin most chaste--Kanya.
7. Mother Taumatra, of the _five_ virtues or elements.
8. Virgin Trigana (of the three elements, power or richness,
love, and mercy).
9. Mirror of Supreme Conscience--Ahancara.
10. Wise Mother--Saraswati.
11. Virgin of the white Lotos, Pedma or Kamala.
12. Womb of Gold--Hyrania.
13. Celestial Light--Lakshmi.
14. Ditto.
15. Queen of Heaven, and of the universe--Sakti.
16. Mother soul of all beings--Paramatma.
17. Devanaki is conceived without sin, and immaculate
herself. (According to the Brahmanic fancy.)
EGYPTIAN.
_Litany of our Lady Isis: Virgin._
1. Holy Isis, universal mother--Muth.
2. Mother of Gods--Athyr.
3. Mother of Horus.
4. Virgo generatrix--Neith.
5. Mother-soul of the universe--Anouké.
6. Virgin sacred earth--Isis.
7. Mother of all the virtues--Thmei, with the same
qualities.
8. Illustrious Isis, most powerful, merciful, just. (_Book
of the Dead._)
9. Mirror of Justice and Truth--Thmei.
10. Mysterious mother of the world--_Buto_ (secret wisdom).
11. Sacred Lotos.
12. Sistrum of Gold.
13. Astarté (Syrian), Astaroth (Jewish).
14. Argua of the Moon.
15. Queen of Heaven, and of the universe--Sati.
16. Model of all mothers--Athor.
17. Isis is a Virgin Mother.
ROMAN CATHOLIC.
_Litany of our Lady of Loretto: Virgin._
1. Holy Mary, mother of divine grace.
2. Mother of God.
3. Mother of Christ.
4. Virgin of Virgins.
5. Mother of Divine Grace.
6. Virgin most chaste.
7. Mother most pure.
Mother undefiled.
Mother inviolate.
Mother most amiable.
Mother most admirable.
8. Virgin most powerful.
Virgin most merciful.
Virgin most faithful.
9. Mirror of Justice.
10. Seat of Wisdom.
11. Mystical Rose.
12. House of Gold.
13. Morning Star.
14. Ark of the Covenant.
15. Queen of Heaven.
16. Mater Dolorosa.
17. Mary conceived without sin. (In accordance with later
orders.)
If the Virgin Mary has her nuns, who are consecrated to her and bound
to live in chastity, so had Isis her nuns in Egypt, as Vesta had hers
at Rome, and the Hindu Nari, “mother of the world hers.” The virgins
consecrated to her cultus--the Devadasi of the temples, who were the
nuns of the days of old--lived in great chastity, and were objects of
the most extraordinary veneration, as the holy women of the goddess.
Would the missionaries and some travellers reproachfully point to the
modern Devadasis, or Nautch-girls? For all response, we would beg
them to consult the official reports of the last quarter century,
cited in chapter II., as to certain discoveries made at the razing
of convents, in Austria and Italy. Thousands of infants’ skulls were
exhumed from ponds, subterranean vaults, and gardens of convents.
Nothing to match _this_ was ever found in heathen lands.
Christian theology, getting the doctrine of the archangels and angels
directly from the Oriental _Kabala_, of which the Mosaic _Bible_ is
but an allegorical screen, ought at least to remember the hierarchy
invented by the former for these personified emanations. The hosts of
the Cherubim and Seraphim, with which we generally see the Catholic
Madonnas surrounded in their pictures, belong, together with the
Elohim and Beni Elohim of the Hebrews, to the _third_ kabalistic
world, _Jezirah_. This world is but one remove higher than _Asiah_,
the fourth and lowest world, in which dwell the grossest and most
material beings--the _klippoth_, who delight in evil and mischief,
and whose chief is _Belial_!
Explaining, in his way, of course, the various “heresies” of the
first two centuries, Irenæus says: “Our Hæretics hold ... that
PROPATOR is known but to the _only-begotten_ son, that is to the
_mind_” (the nous). It was the Valentinians, the followers of the
“profoundest doctor of the Gnosis,” Valentinus, who held that “there
was a perfect AIÔN, who existed before Bythos, or Buthon (the Depth),
called Propator.” This is again kabalistic, for in the _Sohar_ of
Simon Ben Iochaï, we read the following: “_Senior occultatus est
et absconditus; Microprosopus manifestus est, et non manifestus_”
(Rosenroth: _The Sohar Liber Mysteries_, iv., 1).
In the religious metaphysics of the Hebrews, the Highest One is an
abstraction; he is “without form or being,” “with no likeness with
anything else.”[391] And even Philo calls the Creator, the _Logos_
who stands next God, “the SECOND God.” “The _second_ God who is his
WISDOM.”[392] God is NOTHING, he is nameless, and therefore called
_Ain-Soph_--the word _Ain_ meaning _nothing_.[393] But if, according
to the older Jews, Jehovah is _the_ God, and He manifested Himself
several times to Moses and the prophets, and the Christian Church
anathematized the Gnostics who denied the fact--how comes it, then,
that we read in the fourth gospel that “_No man hath seen God_ AT ANY
TIME, but the _only-begotten_ Son ... he hath declared him?” The very
words of the Gnostics, in spirit and substance. This sentence of St.
John--or rather whoever wrote the gospel now bearing his name--floors
all the Petrine arguments against Simon Magus, without appeal. The
words are repeated and emphasized in chapter vi.: “_Not that any
man hath seen the Father_, save he which is of God, he (Jesus) hath
seen the Father” (46)--the very objection brought forward by Simon
in the _Homilies_. These words prove that either the author of the
fourth evangel had no idea of the existence of the _Homilies_, or
that he was _not_ John, the friend and companion of Peter, whom he
contradicts point-blank with this emphatic assertion. Be it as it
may, this sentence, like many more that might be profitably cited,
blends Christianity completely with the Oriental Gnosis, and hence
with the KABALA.
While the doctrines, ethical code, and observances of the Christian
religion were all appropriated from Brahmanism and Buddhism, its
ceremonials, vestments, and pageantry were taken bodily from Lamaism.
The Romish monastery and nunnery are almost servile copies of similar
religious houses in Thibet and Mongolia, and interested explorers
of Buddhist lands, when obliged to mention the unwelcome fact,
have had no other alternative left them but, with an anachronism
unsurpassed in recklessness, to charge the offense of plagiarism upon
the religious system their own mother Church had despoiled. This
makeshift has served its purpose and had its day. The time has at
last come when this page of history must be written.