THE RECAPITULATION.
The first compendious statement of the doctrine which it was intended to
restore, was given to us at Paris in the summer of 1878, in the form of
an exposition of the principles of Biblical interpretation, under the
following circumstances.
We had been following our respective tasks[65] for several months
without any open or special illumination, and I had written enough to
make a considerable volume in exposition of the principles which
appeared to me to be those on which, in order to be a book of the soul,
the Bible ought to be constructed, and by which, therefore, it must be
interpreted. It was not intended for publication, but as an exercise for
myself, being purely tentative; though I was conscious of being aided by
the occasional suggestion of ideas which served as points of light and
guidance. Meanwhile, I was entirely without help from books; for,
besides being desirous of evolving the whole from my own consciousness,
as in the case of the demonstration of any mathematical problem, I was
not aware of any books which would help me; the little I knew of
Swedenborg at this time--who was the only writer known to me as a worker
in a similar direction--having failed to make much impression on me. I
could accept his general principles, but not his particular applications
of them. I felt also that the sources of the knowledges vouchsafed to
us, far transcended those to which Swedenborg had access. And I
accounted for the length of the interval which had elapsed without any
larger measure of light being vouchsafed, by supposing that it was
intended for me to exhaust my own resources first.
The time had come when these were exhausted, and I was reduced to the
conviction that if the work was to be carried any further, assistance
must be rendered, whether for confirmation, for correction, or for
extension. And on retiring to rest one night[66], painfully oppressed by
the sense of my own lack, and the prolonged absence of the needed light,
I stood at the open window, and in presence of a sky resplendent with
stars mentally addressed to those whom we were wont to speak of as the
Gods, and of whose presence I seemed to be dimly conscious, a strong
expression of my need, declaring my utter inability to advance another
step unassisted. Having done which I went to bed, but in a mood the
reverse of sanguine; so many were the months for which they had been
silent.
In the course of the following day, "Mary"--who knew nothing either of
my need or of my adjuration of the preceding night, and could not of
herself have helped me--found herself under an access of exaltation of
faculty which she described as resembling what might be produced by a
draught of spiritual champagne. For she felt herself at her very best,
having all her knowledge at her finger-ends. The expression recurred to
my mind some time afterwards on our receiving an explanation of the "New
Wine of Dionysos" in the ancient mysteries. In this state she went down
to the schools, where an examination in her subjects was being held, in
order to see how the candidates comported themselves, and to compare
them with herself; for it was an oral examination. From this she
returned home in high delight, declaring that she could have answered
every question asked, and far better than any of the students had done.
I hoped that her state might be an indication of the renewal of her
illuminations. But the events of the evening put all thoughts in this
direction entirely out of my mind. For, as if poisoned by the atmosphere
of the schools, she was seized with an attack of sickness so intense and
prolonged as seriously to endanger her life through the exhaustion
induced. And it was a late hour--past midnight--before she could be left
alone.
Nevertheless she was up betimes in the morning, and on our meeting
handed me a paper which she had written in pencil on waking, saying it
was something she had read in her sleep, and asking if it was anything
that I wanted, as she had written it down so rapidly that she scarcely
observed what it was about, and she had not had time to read it over and
think about it. Having read it, I found that it met my every difficulty,
and shed on the Bible a light which rendered it luminous from beginning
to end, disclosing it as pervaded by a system of thought which, when
once seen, was as obvious as it had previously been unsuspected.
And while it confirmed me in respect of principles and method, it
corrected both of us in respect of sundry particulars. It even referred
directly to one of my tentative hypotheses, at once negativing it and
giving another altogether satisfactory. This was my supposition of Adam
and Eve as possibly denoting spirit and matter. The following is the
writing:--
"If, therefore, they be Mystic Books, they ought also to have a
mystic consideration. But the fault of most writers lieth in
this,--that they distinguish not between the books of Moses the
prophet, and those books which are of an historical nature. And
this is the more surprising because not a few of such critics have
rightly discerned the esoteric character, if not indeed the true
interpretation, of the story of Eden; yet have they not applied to
the remainder of the allegory the same method which they found to
fit the beginning; but so soon as they are over the earlier stanzas
of the poem, they would have the rest of it to be of another
nature.
"It is, then, pretty well established and accepted of most authors,
that the legend of Adam and Eve, and of the miraculous tree and the
fruit which was the occasion of death, is, like the story of Eros
and Psyche, and so many others of all religions, a parable with a
hidden, that is, with a mystic meaning. But so also is the legend
which follows concerning the sons of these mystical parents, the
story of Cain and Abel his brother, the story of the Flood, of the
Ark, of the saving of the clean and unclean beasts, of the rainbow,
of the twelve sons of Jacob, and, not stopping there, of the whole
relation concerning the flight out of Egypt. For it is not to be
supposed that the two sacrifices offered to God by the sons of
Adam, were real sacrifices, any more than it is to be supposed that
the apple which caused the doom of mankind, was a real apple. It
ought to be known, indeed, for the right understanding of the
mystical books, that in their esoteric sense they deal, not with
material things, but with spiritual realities; and that as Adam is
not a man, nor Eve a woman, nor the tree a plant in its true
signification, so also are not the beasts named in the same books
real beasts, but that the mystic intention of them is implied.
When, therefore, it is written that Abel took of the firstlings of
his flock to offer unto the Lord, it is signified that he offered
that which a lamb implies, and which is the holiest and highest of
spiritual gifts. Nor is Abel himself a real person, but the type
and spiritual presentation of the race of the prophets; of whom,
also, Moses was a member, together with the Patriarchs. Were the
prophets, then, shedders of blood? God forbid; they dwelt not with
things material, but with spiritual significations. Their lambs
without spot, their white doves, their goats, their rams, and other
sacred creatures, are so many signs and symbols of the various
graces and gifts which a mystic people should offer to Heaven.
Without such sacrifices is no remission of sin. But when the mystic
sense was lost, then carnage followed, the prophets ceased out of
the land, and the priests bore rule over the people. Then, when
again the voice of the prophets arose, they were constrained to
speak plainly, and declared in a tongue foreign to their method,
that the sacrifices of God are not the flesh of bulls or the blood
of goats, but holy vows and sacred thanksgivings, their mystical
counterparts. As God is a spirit, so also are His sacrifices
spiritual. What folly, what ignorance, to offer material flesh and
drink to pure power and essential being! Surely in vain have the
prophets spoken, and in vain have the Christs been manifested!
"Why will you have Adam to be spirit, and Eve matter, since the
mystic books deal only with spiritual entities? The tempter himself
even is not matter, but that which gives matter the precedence.
Adam is, rather, intellectual force: he is of earth. Eve is the
moral conscience: she is the mother of the living. Intellect, then,
is the male, and Intuition the female principle. And the sons of
Intuition, herself fallen, shall at last recover Truth, and redeem
all things. By her fault, indeed, is the moral conscience of
humanity made subject to the intellectual force, and thereby all
manner of evil and confusion abounds, since her desire is unto him,
and he rules over her until now. But the end foretold by the seer
is not far off. Then shall the Woman be exalted, clothed with the
Sun, and carried to the throne of God. And her sons shall make war
with the dragon, and have victory over him. Intuition, therefore,
pure and a virgin, shall be the mother and redemptress of her
fallen sons, whom she bore under bondage to her husband the
intellectual force."
This marvellously luminous exposition, she then told me, had been read
by her in a book she had found in a library which she had visited in
sleep, the owner of which was a courtly old gentleman in the costume of
the last century. The leaves of the book were of silver and reflected
her back to herself as she read. I took this as symbolising the
Intuition. The event proved that her host was no other than Swedenborg,
and that--as her Genius informed us--she had been enabled, "under the
magnetism of Swedenborg's presence, to recover a memory of no small
value," thus confirming my surmise about its intuitional character. The
event proved also that it was Swedenborg's doctrine, but without his
limitations. We ardently desired a continuation of it, and on the next
night but one, she received the following addition to it:--
"Moses, therefore, knowing the mysteries of the religion of the
Egyptians, and having learned of their occultists the value and
signification of all sacred birds and beasts, delivered like
mysteries to his own people. But certain of the sacred animals of
Egypt he retained not in honour, for motives which were equally of
mystic origin.
And he taught his initiated the spirit of the heavenly hieroglyphs,
and bade them, when they made festival before God, to carry with
them in procession, with music and with dancing, such of the sacred
animals as were, by their interior significance, related to the
occasion. Now, of these beasts, he chiefly selected males of the
first year, without spot or blemish, to signify that it is beyond
all things needful that man should dedicate to the Lord his
intellect and his reason, and this from the beginning, and without
the least reserve. And that he was very wise in teaching this, is
evident from the history of the world in all ages, and particularly
in these last days. For what is it that has led men to renounce the
realities of the spirit, and to propagate false theories and
corrupt sciences, denying all things save the appearance which can
be apprehended by the outer senses, and making themselves one with
the dust of the ground? It is their intellect which, being
unsanctified, has led them astray; it is the force of the mind in
them, which, being corrupt, is the cause of their own ruin, and of
that of their disciples. As, then, the intellect is apt to be the
great traitor against heaven, so also is it the force by which men,
following their pure intuition, may also grasp and apprehend the
truth. For which reason it is written that the Christs are subject
to their mothers. Not that by any means the intellect is to be
dishonoured; for it is the heir of all things, if only it be truly
begotten and be no bastard.
"And besides all these symbols, Moses taught the people to have
beyond all things an abhorrence of idolatry. What, then, is
idolatry, and what are false gods?
"To make an idol is to materialise spiritual mysteries. The
priests, then, were idolaters, who coming after Moses, and
committing to writing those things which he by word of mouth had
delivered unto Israel, replaced the true things signified, by their
material symbols, and shed innocent blood on the pure altars of the
Lord.
"They also are idolaters who understand the things of sense where
the things of the spirit are alone implied, and who conceal the
true features of the Gods with material and spurious presentations.
Idolatry is materialism, the common and original sin of men, which
replaces spirit by appearance, substance by illusion, and leads
both the moral and intellectual being into error, so that they
substitute the nether for the upper, and the depth for the height.
It is that false fruit which attracts the outer senses, the bait of
the serpent in the beginning of the world. Until the mystic man and
woman had eaten of this fruit, they knew only the things of the
spirit, and found them suffice. But after their fall, they began to
apprehend matter also, and gave it the preference, making
themselves idolaters. And their sin, and the taint begotten of that
false fruit, have corrupted the blood of the whole race of men,
from which corruption the sons of God would have redeemed them."
She had received this, also in sleep, as one of a class of neophytes
seated in an ancient amphitheatre of white stone, and listening to a
lecture delivered by a man in priestly garb, of which they took notes
the while. She complained that her notes had disappeared on waking, thus
preventing her from rendering what she had heard as perfectly as she
could have wished; for she had trusted to her notes for it.
The more we pondered these communications, the higher was our
appreciation of them. We felt that the "veil of Moses" was at length
"taken away" as promised, and we had been enabled to tap a reservoir of
boundless wisdom and knowledge. For we found in them the longed-for
solution of the purpose and nature of the Bible and Christianity, and
the key to man's spiritual history. The method of the Bible-writers, the
meaning of idolatry, the secret of the Cain and Abel feud between priest
and prophet, as the ministers respectively of the sense-nature and of
the intuition, and the process whereby the religion of Jesus had become
distorted into the orthodoxy which has usurped His name;--all these
things were now clear to us as the demonstration of a proposition in
geometry, the witness of which was in our own minds. And we, too, we
rejoiced to think, were of the school of the prophets, in that with all
the force of our minds we had "exalted the Woman," Intuition, and
refused to make the word of God of none effect by priestly traditions.
Not the least marvellous element in the case was the faculty whereby the
seeress had been able to reproduce, after waking, with such evident
faithfulness the things seen and heard at so great length in sleep. In
reply to my questionings she said that the words seemed to show
themselves to her again as she wrote[67].
Discoursing with her Genius on this subject of memory, she received the
following, which is valuable also for its recognition of the mystical
import of the Bible narratives, and confirmation of St Paul when he says
in reference to certain narratives in Genesis, "These things are an
allegory."
"Concerning memory; why should there any more be a difficulty in
respect of it? Reflect on this saying,--'Man sees as he knows.' To
thee the deeps are more visible than the surfaces of things; but to
men generally the surfaces only are visible. The material can
perceive only the material, the astral the astral, and the
spiritual the spiritual. It all resolves itself, therefore, into a
question of condition and of quality. Thy hold on matter is but
slight, and thine organic memory is feeble and treacherous. It is
hard for thee to perceive the surfaces of things and to remember
their aspect. But thy spiritual perception is the stronger for this
weakness, and the profound is that which thou seest the most
readily. It is hard for thee to understand and to retain the memory
of material facts; but their meaning thou knowest instantly and by
intuition, which is the memory of the soul. For the soul takes no
pains to remember; she knows divinely. Is it not said that the
immaculate woman brings forth without a pang? The sorrow and
travail of conception belong to her whose desire is unto
'Adam'"[68].
The following sentences sum up the conclusions to which, by degrees, we
were led. The first two paragraphs are from an exposition concerning the
dogma of the Immaculate Conception which we considered as one of the
most sublime and momentous of all her illuminations[69].
"All that is true is spiritual.... No dogma is real that is not
spiritual. If it be true, and yet seem to you to have a material
signification, know that you have not solved it. It is a mystery; seek
its interpretation. That which is true is for Spirit alone.
"For matter shall cease and all that is of it, but the Word of the Lord
shall remain for ever. And how shall it remain except it be purely
spiritual; since, when matter ceases, it would then be no longer
comprehensible?"
"For, though matter is eternally the mode whereby spirit manifests
itself, matter is not itself eternal."
"The church has all the truth, but the priests have materialised it,
making religion idolatry, and themselves and their people idolaters."
"In their real and divinely intended sense, its doctrines are eternal
verities, founded in the nature of Being. As ecclesiastically
propounded, they are blasphemous absurdities."
"All the mistakes made about the Bible arise out of the mystic books
being referred to times, places, and persons material, instead of being
regarded as containing only eternal verities about things spiritual."
"The Bible was written by intuitionalists, for intuitionalists, and from
the intuitionalist standpoint. It has been interpreted by externalists,
for externalists, and from the externalist standpoint. The most occult
and mystical of books, it has been expounded by persons without occult
knowledge or mystical insight"[70].
Thus gradually but surely we learnt that Ecclesiastical education has
rigidly excluded from its curriculum all those branches of study which
could throw light on the real nature of existence, and consists in
learning what other men have said who, themselves, did not know, but
were mere hearsay scholars lacking the witness in themselves.
We marvelled much as to how the priesthoods will comport themselves when
compelled to recognise the fact that a New Gospel of Interpretation has
actually been vouchsafed from the world celestial in correction of their
perversion and mutilation of the former Gospel of Manifestation, and
suppression of the true doctrine of salvation. Will Cain and Caiaphas
still have the dominion, and ecclesiasticism be as ready to crucify the
Christ on His second coming as it was on His first? And if not, how will
it find courage to face the world with the humiliating confession that
all through the long ages of its history, while arrogantly claiming to
be the faithful and infallible minister of the Gospel of Christ, it has
persistently withheld that gospel, and, losing the key to its meaning,
has substituted for the wholesome "bread" of divine truth, the "stones"
of innutritious because unintelligible dogmas; and for the "fish" of the
living waters, the "serpents" of the letter which kills? and that when
men have rightly suspected that Christianity has failed, not because it
is false, but because it has been falsified, and have sought to their
own inner light for the truth of which ecclesiasticism had defrauded
them, it dealt out to them pitiless anathema and persecution, making the
earth a scene of torture and slaughter in assertion of the right of the
priesthoods to teach wrong?
That the work committed to us implied nothing less than the fulfilment
of the prophecies of which the promise of the Second Coming of Christ
was the culmination, while intimated to us from the outset, was
gradually unfolded into full assurance, and we were enabled to see that
the very terms in which it was couched implied a spiritual advent, and
one which should disclose the perfect system at once of science,
philosophy, morality, and religion, of which Christ is both the
foundation and the consummation. For the "clouds of heaven" in which it
was to take place, were no other than the heaven of the kingdom within
man of his restored spiritual consciousness. "That wicked one," "the son
of perdition," and "mystery of iniquity" then to be revealed and
destroyed, was no other than the inspiring evil spirit of an
ecclesiasticism which had received indeed its doctrines from above, but
their interpretation and application from below. And the "Spirit of His
mouth," and the "Brightness of His Coming" were no other than a new Word
of God, in the form of a New Gospel of Interpretation, so potent in its
logic and so luminous in its exposition as to indicate the Logos Himself
as its source, and the "Woman" Intuition, "clothed with the Sun" of full
illumination, as its revealer.
We saw, too, that with this "Woman" thus rehabilitated, God's "Two
Witnesses,"--who have so long lain dead in the streets of "that great
city" wherein the Lord, the divinity in man, is ever systematically
crucified; the city of the world's system as fashioned and controlled by
an ecclesiasticism shrouded in the threefold veil of Blood, Idolatry,
and the Curse of Eve,--will rise and stand on their feet, and ascend to
the heaven of their proper supremacy, _vice_ Lucifer deposed and fallen.
And in them Lucifer himself will regain his lost estate, vindicating his
title to be called the Light-bearer, the bright and morning star, the
herald and bringer-in of the perfect day of the Lord God. For, as the
Intellect, he is the heir of all things, if only he be begotten of the
Spirit, and be no bastard engendered of the Sense-Nature.
For--as we had come to learn--God's Two Witnesses in man are ever the
Intellect and the Intuition, when duly unfolded and united in a pure
spirit. Under such conditions the Shiloh comes, and mounted on them man
rides triumphant as king into the holy city of his own regenerate
nature. But divorced from her, the Intuition, and--leagued with the
Sense-Nature--knowing matter only and the body, the Intellect becomes
"prince of devils" in man, the maker of men into fiends, and of the
earth into a hell. Wherefore his fall from the heaven of his power, on
the advent of that whole Humanity, of whom it is said, "the Man is not
without the Woman, nor the Woman without the Man, in the Lord," the
humanity of intellect and intuition combined, has ever been exultingly
hailed in anticipation by all true seers and prophets.
The chief points of the doctrine, the prospect of the restoration of
which has thus been the sustaining hope of the percipient faithful in
all ages, may be summarised as follows:--
The doctrine which, first and foremost, it is the purpose of the Bible
to affirm, and of the Christ to demonstrate, and in which reason
entirely concurs, is no other than that of the divine potentialities of
man, belonging to him in virtue of the nature of his constituent
principles, the force and the substance of existence. These are the
duality of the "heavens" which God is said to "create," meaning to put
forth from Himself, "in the beginning," and of the mutual interaction of
which all things are the product, varying according to the plane of
operation, alike for creation and redemption, generation and
regeneration. And that which Jesus really affirmed in the memorable but
little understood words, "Ye _must_ be born again, or from above, of
Water and the Spirit," was both the possibility and the necessity to all
men of realising the potential divinity belonging to them in virtue of
the divinity of their constituent principles. And in affirming this He
affirmed both the necessity and the possibility to every man of being
born exactly as He Himself, as typical man regenerate, is said to have
been born, of Virgin Mary and Holy Ghost, and also His own identity in
kind with all other men. And He affirmed, moreover, the utter falsity of
that priest-constructed system, which, ignoring Regeneration, insists on
Substitution, as the means of salvation. For "Virgin Mary," and "Holy
Ghost," are but the mystical synonyms with "Water and the Spirit," the
substance and force, or soul and spirit, of which, man is constituted,
in their divine because pure condition, the product of which in man is
the new regenerate selfhood called, as by St Paul, the "Christ within."
Begotten in man as matrix, of the pure Spirit and Substance which are
God, this new selfhood is son at once of God and of man; and in him God
and man are "reconciled" or "at-oned." And that man is said to be saved
by his blood, is because the "blood of God" is pure spirit, and it is
the pure spirit in the man that saves him; and that he is called the
only-begotten Son of God, is not because God begets no other of his
kind, but because God, as God, begets directly none of any other kind.
This, then, as we came to learn, and to recognise as having learned it
in our own long-past lives, is the doctrine which Jesus came to teach
and to demonstrate in His own person. Matter is spirit, being spiritual
substance, projected by force of the divine Will into conditions and
limitations, and made exteriorly cognisable. And being spirit it can
revert to the condition of spirit. In virtue of the divinity of his
constituent principles, man has within himself the seed of his own
regeneration, and the power to effectuate it. He has in him, this is to
say, the potentiality of divinity realisable at will. And the secret and
method of the achievement, which is no other than the secret and method
of Christ, is inward purification and unfoldment, the unfoldment of the
capacities, mental, moral, and spiritual, of his nature, of which inward
purification is the first and essential condition. Thus is the Finding
of Christ the realisation of the Ideal, and Christ is for every man the
summit of his own evolution.
Stated in terms of modern science, but correcting its aberrations, the
doctrine of Christ is in this wise. Evolution is the manifestation of
inherency. Owing to the divinity of the constituent principles of
existence, its Force and its Substance, both of which are God, the
inherency of existence is divine. Wherefore, as the manifestation of a
divine inherency, evolution is accomplished only by the attainment of
divinity; and the cause of evolution is the tendency of substance to
revert from its secondary and "created" condition of matter, to its
original and divine condition of pure spirit. Wherefore evolution is
definable as the process of the individuation of Deity in and through
Humanity.
Such is the genesis of the Christ in man. And he is called _a_ Christ
who, having accomplished this process in himself, returns into the
earth-life when he has no need to do so for his own sake, out of pure
love to redeem, by showing to others their own equal divine
potentialities and the method of the realisation thereof.
This method consists in love, love of perfection, which is God, for its
own sake, and love for others. The process is entirely interior to the
individual. It consists in the sacrifice of the lower nature to the
higher in himself, and of himself for others in love. That which
directly saves the man is not the love of another for the man, but the
love which he has in himself. All that can be done by another is to
kindle this love in him.
The philosophy of this doctrine of salvation by love was formulated for
us as follows:--"It is love which is the centripetal power of the
universe; it is by love that all creation returns into the bosom of God.
The force which projected all things is will, and will is the
centrifugal power of the universe. Will alone could not overcome the
evil which results from the limitations of matter; but it shall be
overcome in the end by sympathy, which is the knowledge of God in
others,--the recognition of the omnipresent Self. This is love. And it
is with the children of the spirit, the servants of love, that the
dragon of matter makes war"[71].
In making the means of salvation extraneous to the individual,
Sacerdotalism has defrauded man of his Saviour, making the first and
personal coming of Christ of none effect. Hence the necessity for the
second and spiritual coming represented by the New Gospel of
Interpretation as was foretold:--the coming which was to be in the
clouds of the heaven of man's restored understanding; the Hermes within.
But the process of regeneration is a prolonged one, extending over many
earth-lives; and so also is the prior process of evolution, whereby man
reaches the stage at which he is amenable to regeneration. Wherefore
regeneration has for its corollary reincarnation. To tell man that he
"must be born again" spiritually, and deny him the requisite
opportunities of experience, which must be acquired while in the
body--seeing that regeneration is _from out of the body_--would be to
mock him.
This doctrine of a multiplicity of earth-lives is implicit and sometimes
explicit in the Bible. The notion that the Hebrews had no belief in a
future state because of the failure of commentators to discover it in
their Scriptures, is altogether futile. The permanence of the Ego was a
matter of course with them, saving only the Sadducees. And the Bible
contemplates the persistence of the individual soul through all the
manifold stages of its evolution, from the "Adam" stage to the "Christ"
stage, saying, as by St Paul, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall
all be made alive." But the Christ insisted on by him was not He Who is
"after the flesh," not the man Jesus, who was but the vehicle of the
Christ, but the Christ within both Jesus and all other regenerate men.
For, as a highly illuminated follower of the Gnosis, St Paul was one who
"after the way which" his orthodox accusers "called heresy, worshipped
the God of his fathers, believing all things which are according to the
law, and are written in the prophets." Rejecting the doctrine of
regeneration, and with it that of reincarnation, in favour of
substitution, the orthodoxy which claims to be Christianity has
practically rejected both the doctrine of St Paul and that of Jesus as
declared to Nicodemus. And, as St Paul implies, the "mystery of
iniquity" was working even already in his days to annul the gospel of
Christ by substituting Jesus as the object of worship, and His physical
blood-shedding as the means of salvation. And Christendom, yielding to
sacerdotal dictation, has to this day accepted a doctrine which at once
dishonours God and robs men of their equal divine potentialities with
Jesus, thus preferring Barabbas. Professing to rest its faith on the
Bible, it has accepted the presentation of religion which the Bible
persistently condemns, that of the priests, and rejected that on which
the Bible emphatically insists, that of the prophets. That St Paul
employed sacerdotal modes of expression was in order to spiritualise
them. He was a mystic of mystics.
Nevertheless the dogmas of the Church contain the truth, but this is not
as the Church has propounded them. And--to cite two crucial
instances--so far from the Church's supreme dogmas, the Immaculate
Conception and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, having any personal
or physical reference, they are prophecies of the method of redemption
for every individual soul. For, as the New Gospel of Interpretation
explicitly declares, restoring the Gnosis persistently rejected by the
builders of the orthodoxies,
The Immaculate Conception is none other than the prophecy of the
means whereby the universe shall at last be redeemed. Maria--the
sea of limitless space--Maria the Virgin, born herself immaculate
and without spot, of the womb of the ages, shall in the fulness of
time bring forth the perfect man, who shall redeem the race. He is
not one man, but ten thousand times ten thousand, the Son of Man,
who shall overcome the limitations of matter, and the evil which is
the result of the materialisation of spirit[72].
By the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin
Mary we are secretly enlightened concerning the generation of the
soul, who is begotten in the womb of matter, and yet from the first
instant of her being is pure and incorrupt.... As the Immaculate
Conception is the foundation of the mysteries, so is the Assumption
their crown.
For the entire object and end of kosmic evolution is precisely this
triumph and apotheosis of the soul. In the mystery presented by
this dogma, we behold the consummation of the whole scheme of
creation--the perpetuation and glorification of the individual
human ego. The grave--the material and astral consciousness, cannot
retain the immaculate Mother of God. She rises into the heavens;
she assumes divinity.... From end to end the mystery of the soul's
evolution--the history, that is, of humanity and of the kosmic
drama--is contained and enacted in the cultus of the Blessed Virgin
Mary. The acts and the glories of Mary are the one supreme subject
of the holy mysteries[73].
"Allegory of stupendous significance!" exclaimed the seeress's
illuminator when imparting to her the mystery of the Immaculate
Conception. "Allegory of stupendous significance! with which the
Church of God has so long been familiar, but which yet never
penetrated its understanding, like the holy fire which enveloped
the sacred Bush, but which nevertheless the Bush withstood and
resisted[10].
That such failure has been the rule and not the exception is the plea
for the New Gospel of Interpretation. For lack of comprehension of its
own symbols the Church has fallen into the disastrous errors of
mistaking the man Jesus for the Christ within every man, and Mary the
mother of Jesus for Virgin Mary the mother of that Christ, committing in
both instances idolatry by preferring the form to the substance, persons
to principles, and blinding men to the essential truth implied.
FOOTNOTES:
[65] A.K. was preparing for her second Doctorat, and E.M. was
elaborating out of his own consciousness "a key to the interpretation
especially of the initial chapters of Genesis." (Life A.K. Vol. I. p.
264.)
[66] On the 4th June, 1878. (Life A.K. Vol. I. p. 265.)
[67] E.M. says:--"Her notes, of course, disappeared with her dream, and
she had to reproduce it from memory. But this was abnormally enhanced,
for she said that the words presented themselves again to her as she
wrote, and stood out luminously to view." (Life A.K. Vol. I. p. 269.)
[68] That is the outer sense and lower reason.
[69] The illumination in question was received by A.K. in Paris on the
night of the 25th July, 1877, and was written down under trance. Further
portions are given on pp. 158, 159, 161. It is given in full in "The
Life of A.K." Vol. I. pp. 202-203.
[70] See further on this most important subject "The Bible's Own Account
of Itself," by E.M., the only complete edition of which is published by
"The Ruskin Press," Ruskin House, Stafford Street, Birmingham. S.H.H.
[71] From the exposition concerning the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception, referred to on p. 151.
[72] From the exposition concerning the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception, referred to on p. 151.
[73] From the exposition concerning the Christian Mysteries given in
full in "The Life of A.K." Vol. II. pp. 99-100.