BAPTISM AT THE CROSSING

The water symbol yields a series of special scriptural and theological interpretations which will correct much insufferable misconception. It is questionable if today any hierophant of orthodox religion has the most distant idea of the esoteric meaning of the rite of baptism. People receive baptism or impose it on their children with a sanctimonious acquiescence, but with heads guiltless of comprehension. It is vaguely felt to betoken an outpouring of divine grace upon the recipient. This may be conceded to be a part of the meaning. Yet in the form in which it is conceived by the participants, it is not in the faintest degree an image of the hidden truth. It is hardly a quarter of the full import. In consonance with the force of the great Law of the Two Truths, or the doubleness of truth, it is not only the mortal who is baptized by the god; the profoundest understanding flows from the knowledge that it is the god himself who is undergoing a baptism. Indeed, as long as it is a baptism with water, it is not at all the baptism of the spring of life. It is more truly the baptism of the god by the animal. For John, the pre-solar or natural man, says: "I indeed baptize you with water," while the baptism of the lower by the higher nature was with fire! Jesus, the god, was baptized by John, the mortal, in the waters of the river Jordan. Jesus was there baptized as part of the process of his further divination. The water baptism was the god’s submergence under the waters in the body of man.

What, then, is the basic meaning of the ceremonial? It is simple indeed. Reverting to the four elemental signs, we have the adequate data for interpretation. Bluntly, water is the symbol of bodily life, the body being mainly water in composition. Also water symbols man’s second psychological principle, emotion, because it is intimately linked with the body and its humors. The sea, the swamp or Reed Sea, or the mire, is the typical picturization of life in the body. Water types soul in body, or the god in matter. Baptism with water, then, is just the experience of the god in this bodily life. It means what the incarnation means, and nothing more. The ceremonial of sprinkling or immersion is but the dramatic representation of the fact of this life itself. By the application of the Law of the Two Truths it can be made to typify the baptism of the lower nature by the celestial water. But this is the obverse of the meaning usually intended in symbolism, and would involve the baptism of water by or in water, which wrecks the typism. It is the god’s immersion in the waters of generation that is the theme of most baptismal ritual.

That this statement embodies the correct view is competently attested by the zodiacal signatures used in the typology. The sun in the lower half of the zodiac is symbolically pictured as being immersed in a sea of water; and according to one derivation the word "Galilee" signifies "water-wheel." The Sea of Galilee is the lower material world--in man the watery body itself--through or across which the fiery spark of soul must pass in rounding its cycles of necessity. Heraclitus’ statement that "man is a portion of cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water" (Plato’s "mire") is apt here. And earth and water stand for the physical and emotional aspects of man’s life, or sense and feeling, both sub-mental. The soul in its rounds must dip down into a life that is irrational, motivated by elemental impulses that are not amenable to reason. It comes under the sway of the pure instinct of life itself and is overswept by the surging tides of elemental being. This is its baptism, its going into or under the water. It is not by chance that the name Galilee was given to the lake or sea of mortal life in the Jewish adaptation of the uranograph. For on it the savior of mankind had to quell or quiet the raging storm of sensual passion. The storm is a true mythograph of the sweep of the forces at play in the lower segment of man’s constitution, for they blow through his life, for the long first cycle of his evolution, in nearly uncontrolled intensity. They rush in upon his spirit, which is as yet unawakened, asleep like Jonah and Jesus in the hold of the ship, and stir up a welter of animal instincts and rapacities in lower man. Proserpine, the soul, was held for half of each year in duress in the underworld of Pluto. Merely put under water symbolism, this is the soul’s baptism. It is earthly embodiment.

A profound significance never fully fathomed attaches to Jesus’ ringing statement to Nicodemus (John 3:I ff):

"Except a man be born of water and the spirit he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. If I told you earthly things and ye believe them not, how shall ye believe if I tell you heavenly things? And no man hath ascended into heaven but he that hath descended out of heaven, the Son of Man which is in heaven."

The elemental man, child of Mother Nature and her seven powers, can never enter the kingdom of conscious immortality except he be reborn of the spirit. His chance to be so reborn arises only through the great sacrificial oblation of the sun-gods. For they came to share their nature with him, to tabernacle with his flesh, and to suffer that he might be quickened to a new expansion of capacity to know life. Jesus is stating the rudiment of all practical knowledge. Unless a man unite the two fiery elements, the mortal and the imperishable, he can have no access to the kingdom of divine mind. For flesh and blood can not inherit the legacy of spiritual consciousness.

Herein lies the necessity for the twice-born experience of every initiate. Hermes describes the form of the second birth:

"I see in myself an unfeigned sight or spectacle made by the mercy of God: And I am gone out of myself into an immortal body, and I am not now what I was before, but am begotten in mind."

To this may be added Paul’s inspiring statement that we can transform ourselves by the renewing of our mind. Hermes also says of the physical and spiritual natures:

"He that looketh upon that which is carried upward as fire, that which is carried downward as earth, that which is moist as water, and that which bloweth or is subject to blast as air; how can he sensibly understand that which is neither hard nor moist, nor tangible nor perspicuous, seeing it is only understood in power and operation? But I beseech and pray to the mind; which alone can understand the generation that is in God."

The phrase "born of water" embalms implications that are commonly passed over unnoticed. All birth in the natural world is by or in water. Paleontology discloses that the first protozoan life emanated from the salt water. The human foetus grows in a watery sack. It emerges from water into air. All growing things must have water as a primary condition. The fact was therefore used by the sagacious mythmakers as an index of birth of any kind. Says Massey:

"Birth from the element of water was represented in the Mysteries of Amenta by rebirth of spirit from the water of baptism."1

It was out of the primordial "waters" of space that the first forms of cosmic life were generated. From the infinite bosom of watery night flashed out the first rays of that light which was to be the life of all things. So in the rain-storm of summer, fire is born out of the banks or moisture or suspended water. Hence the very deities had to be incubated in bodies of water like the foetus in the watery egg. This accounts for the presence of the god in the lake of the moist human body. Horus is born from the lotus plant in the water, as Venus from the sea-foam. So the souls that come forth to populate earth are born of the Lake of Sa, one of the two lakes of paradise, which contained the "waters of life." One of the meanings of this short word "Sa" is "spirit"; another is "soil or basis." It was a lake or body of primordial life essence, spiritual "matter," from which spirits were drawn, as snowballs from a bank of snow. The word is part of the name for the spiritual body, the Sahu.

The twice-born, then, were those born first of the water of nature and again of the fire of spirit. The upper lake yielded the nuclei of spirit force that were to find a higher birth of divinity from immersion in the water and mire of the earthly lake beneath. The Lake of Sa generated the fiery seeds that were to be brought to lotus growth in the muddy lake of the earth. "Heaven conceived him, the Tuat brought him forth." The one was the Pool of Sa(lt), the other the Pool of Natron (Nature). The upper was the pool of life, the lower the pool of death, which is ever the gateway to new life. The spirits from the Lake of Sa needed further cleansing. The sa(lt) may lose its savor. They came down to bathe in the lake of the world, where, linked to a creature already born of water and earth, they would have the chance to wash away ingrained impurities. The Ritual text (Ch. 170) calls to the glorified soul: "Hail, Osiris, thou art born twice!" Again: "Stand up living forever. Thy son Horus reconstituted thee. Arise on thy bed and come forth! Come! Come forth!" They call him to come forth "like a god" "from the mysterious cave." (Cf. the raising of Lazarus and the man who took up his bed and walked.)

This double birth, or birth and rebirth, is no more strange than is its physical counterpart and lower symbol in the life of any mortal. We are born out of nature at physical birth; we are reborn, as a being of dawning mind, again at twelve, when we leave Mother Nature for Father God.

Life advances by periodical and unending regenerations. To live again, the soul must indeed enter again and again into the body of its mother matter and experience repeated new births. This was another esoteric hint beneath Jesus’ answer to Nicodemus.

We are conceived in spirit and born to actual power in nature. The natural man is reconstituted by a spiritual birth. We should be reminded here of the wine, born or made of water, but reborn as "spirit" through fermentation. The twice-born were the twice-baptized, first in water, then in fire. Says Irenaeus (Bk. I, Ch. 21:2): "The two baptisms of the Gnostics were recognized by them as the animal and the spiritual." In olden times children were baptized first with water, later with smoke! One form of the cleansing was by fumigation. In certain places there were administered two baptisms, one a passage through water, the other an ordeal by fire. Already spoken of was the tribal ceremony of having girls after the puberty initiation run naked in the first thunderstorm to receive the blessing of the water and the fire. Every seed cast into the ground for incubation undergoes the baptism by water or moisture, followed by the fiery baptism of the sun’s rays.

Horus in his baptism is transformed from the word made flesh to the word made truth. This again delineates the change from natural to spiritual.

Temples and pyramids were generally built over or near a water course, lake or well. In the Vision of Hermas it is asked: "Lady, why is the tower built upon the water?" She replies that it is because the soul’s life is saved and shall be saved by water. The necessity that forced the gods into this low life was that of purification. In (the Alexandrian version of) John (5:2, 4) we read: "An angel of the Lord washed at a certain season."

The Manes in the Book of the Dead says: "I purify me in the southern tank, and I rest me at the northern lake" (Ch. 125). After dipping into the ordeal of bodily existence he had to rest in the peaceful fields of the northern Aarru-Hetep. The first chapter of the Ritual contains the saying by the priest: "I lustrate with water in Tattu and anoint with oil in Abydos." The sheen of oil replaced the fire typism here.

The ceremonial purity so often insisted on in the texts of the Ritual is acquired by the Manes after he

"purifies himself in the Lake of the Country of Reeds. Horus dries his body, Thoth dries his feet, Shu raises him up, and the Heaven-goddess Nut gives him her hand. He appears in the Field of Reeds and purifies himself therein." [The diseased in the Gospels were promised healing if they bathed in the Pool of Siloam.]

On the second day’s celebration of the Mystery rites in Greece, the one commemorating the descent of the gods into matter, the cry "Alade, mustai" ("to the sea, ye initiated ones!") was the keynote of the ceremony.

"Besides, the sea was am emblem of purity, as is evident from the Orphic Hymn to the Ocean in which that deity is called theon agnisma megiston, i.e., the greatest purifier of the gods; and Saturn . . . is pure (intuitive) intellect . . . Pythagoras called the sea a tear of Saturn (Meursius)."

Plutarch affirms that the child Jesus fell into the sea and was drowned. Likewise Horus.

In many religions the baptism was apparently a rite held for the dead and again for the living. This confusion was due to the loss of the original connotation of "death" as the life lived on earth. Of a surety it was for "the dead"--on earth, who were alive enough to get the instruction. Therefore Paul asserts that we are circumcised "with a circumcision not made with hands, in the putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; having been buried with him in his baptism . . ." (Col. 2:12). This is weighty, for here Paul distinctly figures the burial and the baptism as one and the same. This firmly supports the primary claim of this study, that the incarnation is the one central theme of all scripture. Burial of the soul in the water of the body on earth is all that could ever have been meant by the baptism.

An aspect of the baptism formula was the rite of feet-washing.

Jesus washed the disciples’ feet. This act surely was a dramatization of his laying aside his superior dignity, humbling himself to become a servant and pouring out the water of deific potency for the cleansing baptism of the lower nature of man. For he himself poured out the water in a basin. The Speaker says that he comes that he may purify this soul of his in the most high degree. The Teacher in the Pistis Sophia says that he tore himself asunder to bring unto mankind the "Mysteries of light to purify them . . . otherwise no soul in the whole of mankind would have been saved" (Bk. 2:249, Mead). Here is one of the most explicit references to divine dismemberment anywhere to be found.

In the text of Unas it is said of the Manes: "Horus takes him with his two fingers and purifies him in the Lake of the Jackal." Again: "The followers of Horus purify him. They cleanse him." It is asserted of the purged soul: "He hath been purified in the Lakes of the Tuat, he hath undressed in the Lakes of the Jackals." The unregenerated Manes was always pictured as black or black-haired. But when he kneels before the throne of Osiris his hair has become white. This is the mark of his having been washed pure in the waters. The four sons of Horus are said to wash his face. The Book of the Dead says the soul is "censed" or purified with fire, with the Smen incense and the "bet" incense, which are the

"saliva that comes from the mouth of Set, wherewith Horus was purified, whereby the evil which appertained unto him was cast to the earth when Set performed the censing for him; wherewith Set was purified, whereby the evil which appertained to him was cast to the earth, when Horus performed the censing for him. This Pepi is purified thereby, and the evil which appertains to him is cast to the earth."

The symbolism of spittle as a cleansing substance has before been pointed out. But this passage yields most direct corroboration of the idea that has been presented several times--the reversibility or double direction of the application of the meaning of scriptural glyphs. For here Horus and Set mutually purify each other! Soil and plant mutually exalt each other. God and the human reciprocate purification. The god bathes in the southern tank, the animal in the northern lake. Each baptizes the other. The Gospel story is incomplete without an alternate baptism of John by Jesus.

The Great Harlot, or mother of prolific life, whose fornicatory ways the kings of the earth (the descending gods) had followed into a mire of iniquity, when they yielded to her blandishments, was likewise consumed in the purifying fires.

Those who had exchanged their dark robes for the garments of white linen had, it is declared, "washed their raiment in the blood of the Lamb of God until it was white without blemish."

In the Ritual the mummied deceased is said to go "purified in the place of birth." This is of importance because the purification is categorically stated to be on earth, the place of birth. "He has been steeped in resin in the place of preservation." Divinity, the immortal preservative, is won on earth. Else why did we leave the empyrean?

A passage later to be noted says that the body-soul which rises from Amenta has to suffer "purgatorial rebirth" before it can become pure spirit.

Apollo, who collected and restored the dismembered Dionysus, is called a deity of purification. Greek philosophy was itself the offspring of Mystery systems designed to effect the purification of the soul from the contaminations of life in the flesh.

A striking picture of the alternate besmirching by earth and purification by water is given in a Zulu tale of transformation. A beautiful girl enters the earth, and it is said of her that her body glistened, for she was like brass in her pristine purity; but she took black earth and smeared her body with it. She was then seen, very dirty and soiled, to enter a pool, from which she emerged with all her radiance restored and body shining.

Among the Yorubas a remarkable ceremony of purification is performed over both mother and child seven days after the latter’s birth. The water which is always in the earthen vessels placed before the images of the gods, is brought to the house and thrown upon the thatched roof, and as it drips from the eaves the mother and child pass three times through the falling drops. The performance of the ceremony on the seventh day is meaningful, as final purification in any cycle comes with the crowning seventh round.

The rite of circumcision was generally performed on the eighth day following birth. It types the cutting off of the god from the cycle of generation in the flesh, and was outwardly symbolized by the cutting off of the foreskin of the organ of generation itself. The seventh power released man from bondage to the flesh, and its celebration followed on the next day.

The Manes with satisfaction exclaims:

"I have made an end of my shortcomings and I shall put away my faults. What then is this? It is the cutting off of the corruptible in the body of Osiris, the scribe Ani, the victorious one before all the gods; and all his faults are driven out. What then is this? It is the purification (of Osiris) on the day of his birth. I am purified in the great double nest which is in Suten-Khen(en)."

Another text affirms:

"He is conceived in Isis and begotten in Nephthys, and they cut off from him the things which should be cut off."

An important corroboration of the purely figurative value placed on the rite of circumcision (matching the similar elucidation of mummification) is found in a passage from Budge:

"The general trend of the evidence suggests that circumcision was practiced in the Sudan, as well as in Egypt, from time immemorial, that it had nothing to do with considerations of health, that it had a religious significance, and that it was originally connected with some kind of phallic worship."2

The rite indicates man’s cutting himself free from the law of bodily generation, and his readiness to generate by spiritual will. He stands clear of the law which bound him to sexual carnality. A passage from Paul stoutly vindicates this interpretation:

"Circumcised with the circumcision not made with hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ." (Moffatt trans.: "In him ye have been circumcised with no material circumcision that cuts flesh from the body . . .")

A most curiously involved application of the circumcision typism is seen in Exodus (4), wherein, after the Eternal had tried to kill Moses on his way back to Egypt, his wife Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off the foreskin of her son Gershom (Stranger) and touched his (apparently, Moses’) feet with it, crying, "There, you are my bridegroom in blood . . . by this circumcision." Then the Eternal left him alone!

By the curious operation of the Law of the Two Truths, both circumcision and its emblematic organ, the foreskin, may be taken as typing two distinct phases of meaning. The cutting off can have a double signification. The gods in descending suffered a severing of their connection with deity above; and the mutilation of the phallus, organ of their attachment to sexual generation, would directly type this "discerption" from deity in order to be linked with animality. The foreskin was the symbol of the god’s bond with, and bondage to, matter. Yet on the other wing of the symbolism, the phallus was a type of male virility, spiritual creative renewing power, generative productiveness, and as such it seems to figure in the Moses incident. Salvation from the menace to the young incarnating soul came through the wife, the material life, by means of the application of the son’s foreskin to the father’s feet. Here again, as in Egypt, it is the power of the son that reconstitutes the father. In a word, the meaning of it all is that earth experience brings the power of the reborn god to bear upon the salvation of the original god seed, buried and disintegrated in matter. The earth (mother) joins the creative power of the god to the animal nature (feet) of man. Horus performs almost identically the same operation on his father Osiris in the latter’s reconstitution and renovation.

Foreskins were piled in a heap in the circle of the twelve stones set up at the Eternal’s order by the Israelites at Gilgal. The meaning can be taken in any of the three ways suggested: (1), The twelve legions of angels were sacrificing their foreskins as types of their lost divine power; (2), They were coming into generation, typed again by the foreskin; (3), They were, in the exodus, cutting themselves loose from generation, typed by the removal of the foreskins. Herein is demonstrated the advantage of myth over dogma; the former leaves the mind free to make its own application of truth adumbrated.

The umbilical cord served as a companion symbol with circumcision. Its cutting betokened the severance of the god from his connection with elementary mother nature. It was thus a figure of rebirth, adapted from its part in the function of birth. Weaning was used in much the same fashion.

We, as gods, are sent down to earth to undergo a further bathing in the waters of experience. This experience is nature’s available instrumentality for refining untested spiritual quality. Incrustations which are the deposit of earlier ignorance and error have to be dissolved, burnt out, washed away, by the pedagogical agencies of physical contingencies. There is no power in heaven, where the soul is detached from body, to cleanse or purify it. Only earth can provide the requisite conditions of suffering and hardship to burn out the crudities of undevelopment. Nature must have our hard predicaments of bodily life in order to reach and impress our souls, which, apart from body, float in dreamy irresponsibility and unrealized potentiality. Nature casts us here in order to furnish the conditions of realism which alone can wake our slumbering faculty. We can not in the spirit world be linked with an animal by whose tutoring on earth we advance our own progression.

The children of Israel were "tried as silver is tried," "in the refineries of the nether world"; and they were on earth, not in the hazy spirit realm.

Mesheck, or Meska, was the Egyptian place of scourging and purifying in Suten-Khen. It is the Kamite purgatory, the place of cleansing, then of rebirth and resurrection, Amenta in fact. This is doubtless identical with the Meskhen, the Thigh or Haunch, a term applied to the Great Bear cluster, as the old first mother, Apt or Typhon, from whose thigh emerged all birthing. The purging took place in the lower part of man, the oft-mentioned Suten-Khen, the dwelling place of the Sut powers; khen meaning birthplace.

Examining the baptism of Jesus, we find it in itself a complete representation of the incarnational experience. Contrary to most interpretive opinion, it must be said that the pivotal experiences and allegories of the Christ do not mark successive stages in spiritual development according to a fixed pattern, but are sententious glyphs of the entire cycle. It appears to be so with the baptism. Jesus’ baptism by John, the antecedent earthly man, in the Jordan River adumbrates the incarnation unquestionably. Next we have John’s hitherto utterly misconstrued reluctance to baptize one of a higher order than himself. It was as if the animal man said to the god within him: "My Lord, it is not fitting that I should subject you to the incarnational ordeal. It is more seemly that you should baptize me with your divine fire and lift me up. This is the wrong order of procedure." And as if the Lord rejoined: "No; to you it may seem so. But a necessity of which you can know little forces me to undergo the incarnation and baptism through your good offices. I must, if only for a cycle, be subject unto you and be further educated to divinity in your watery realm. And thus only can your salvation, too, be won." "But Jesus answered him: ‘Come now, this is how we should fulfill all our duty to God’" (Matt. 3:15). Then the immersion took place. And it was at the conclusion of the rite that the spirit from heaven descended upon him in the symbol of the dove. This bird, sharing the role with the hawk and bennu or phoenix, emblemed primarily the life-giving power of the third element, air (mind). Dove is traced to "Tef," the breathing force. It stands in general for the divine energy of the soul. In the planisphere another star beside Sothis, somewhat farther south, stood in position to announce the coming of the solar year and the sun-god. This was the star Phact, the Dove. The hawk, allied to the dove, was the divine symbol of Horus. When divinized Horus received the hawk, Jesus the dove. Horus rose as the dove as well as the hawk; for he exclaims: "I am the Dove; I am the Dove!" Seven doves, showing the sevenfold nature of all deific emanation, are frequently found. In Didron’s Iconography (Fig. 124) the child Jesus is represented in the virgin’s arms or womb, surrounded by seven doves as symbols of the seven nature powers he was to spiritualize.

The baptism preceded and is followed by the deification. Earthly sojourn was to place man finally on Mt. Olympus.

In this exposition is to be found the reason for the forerunners of the Christs, as John, Anup and Mercury, performing the function of the baptism. The earth-soul is to subject the heaven-soul to its immersion in matter, and must precede and prepare the ground. John says: "After me cometh a man who is come before me." "I make way," says Horus, "by what Anup has done for me." What is obviously implied in John’s statement is that the Christ principle, a superior and therefore older evolutionary product than the man of earth, will come to occupy the physical house when nature has made it ready. Earth has but recently fitted a tabernacle to be occupied by a guest who is of venerable age and station in the cosmic family. The house is new, never constructed before; but the coming visitant from celestial spheres is of the family of the Ancient of Days and has been abroad many times before and lived in other houses. John means to say that he is the physical self, a new and late creation, but that the Christos had preceded him in manifestation by aeons. Anubis (Anup) is designated as the "preparer of the way of the other world," the power making straight the paths to the upper heaven. Anup was the guide of the sun and the sun-souls in the nether earth. The Ritual (Ch. 25) speaks of "the god Anubis, who dwelleth in the city of embalmment," and who gives a heart to the deceased. Sut-Anup, the stellar guide and announcer of the new cosmic cycle, was superseded by Taht-Aan, the lunar Mercury, whose more frequent periodicities made him a more reliable measurer of time cycles. Anup and Mercury are closely allied. Mercury’s character as the swift-winged messenger of the gods is matched by Anup’s reputation as the "swift-runner." The planet Mercury was said to be the servant of Sothis, the star announcing the solar birth at the winter solstice. Plutarch suggested that the horizon immediately before the rising and after the setting of the sun was symbolized by Anup (De Isid. et Osir.) Says Renouf: "I believe that he represented twilight or dusk immediately following the disappearance of the sun." He was typified by the jackal that came out at night, and was painted with a black head, as the guide through the dark. The planet Mercury, as sometimes evening and again morning star, fulfills the terms of this identity with the functions of Anubis. As a warder of the gate of sunset and dawn, of descent and resurrection, it is written of him: "All the festivals of earth terminate on the hill (or over the hill) of Anup." It is Anup who in the judgment tests the beam of the scales, and if he finds the balance even between the heart and the feather, reports the verdict to Thoth. This he does as watcher on the two horizons or the scales of nature, where spirit and matter are exactly balanced in our constitution. Aan, the scribe, records it.

It is notable that Jesus is not baptized by John until he is thirty years of age. Horus was baptized at thirty by Anup. There are occurrences of thirty in connection with Samson. There is a lacuna in the life history of the sun-gods between the ages of twelve and thirty. Both numbers are purely typical, standing for the completion and perfection of cycles, the end of an age, or stages of transition and transformation.

The study shifts to another aspect of the water symbolism, but one intimately related to the baptism, if it is not but another typing of the same thing. It is one of the most frequent of religious figurations, and demands sufficient attention to settle clearly its function and scope. This is "the crossing of the waters." Best known are the Biblical crossing of the Red (Reed) Sea and the Jordan, the classical ferrying of the souls of the departed over the underworld Styx by Charon in the Greek mythos, the crossing of the sea by Ulysses and Aeneas in the Odyssey and the Aeneid, the crossing of the Euxine Sea by Jason, and others. Baptism by immersion was a simple glyph of the incarnation, but a crossing of some water permitted a more extended play of fancy to elaborate the symbolism. Such a natural phenomenon as the salmon fighting its way from the vast primal ocean up the waters of an individual stream to the sources, there to deposit the spawn of new generation, was indeed a vivid emblem of the soul fighting its way back to source against the downward current of elementary pressure. The soul, like the salmon, comes out of the great original ocean of life, the lake of Sa(lt), works its way into the channel of an individuality, battles its way far up the stream in the face of the current of animal propensity, and there plants the germ or seed of new life, which in the next generation will run down and join the mother sea. It is a nearly complete analogue of man’s incarnation history.

The crossing of a stream was a serviceable allegory of the passage of the life spark through and across its span of experience in the watery body. As the crossing involved the use of a boat or ark, the chain of ideas carries the research into the whole mass of material dealing with the crossing, the Passover, the cross, the ark and the flood or deluge. An enormous amount of relevant material must be drastically abridged.

The mummy was ferried over the water to the western mount where Hathor-Isis or the Cow-Goddess awaited the solar god and the crowd of Manes with him. This was in preparation for his burial--fittingly on the west side where the sun sank--and the body was placed in a mausoleum there.

But the journey of the Manes across the sea of this life, over the "waters beneath," was from west to east, from the gate of entry to the underworld on the west to the gate of resurrection on the east. That which dies in the west must rise again in the east. The level stretch of "water" between, over which the voyage is made, is the "sea of life." Across this expanse of stormy water the soul essays to sail in the "boat of Horus," with the young god himself in the pilot house directing the course, and with his twelve (collective) sailors, rowers or companions, who man the craft. Alongside swims the great Apap reptile, eager to devour careless sailors who fall overboard. His figure stretches out closely parallel with the horizon of the zodiac. The Manes prays to the Conductor of Heaven that Osiris may safely pass the "great one who dwells in the place of the inundation." And the deceased rejoices in that "He had made me a boat to go by." A boat is now the symbol of safety.

In the chapter "of breathing air and of prevailing over the waters in Hades," the Manes have to escape from the devastating flood by means of the Makhu, or ark of plaited corn, with paddles formed of straw. Here is background for the ark of bulrushes that bore Moses.

A phrase several times used symbolically is: "going into the cabin." This might be taken as the equivalent of the soul’s going into the "belly" or hold of the ship. Yet as the cabin is the locale of the directing intelligence of a ship, it might again refer to the inmost seat of divine spirit in man’s "ship," the holy of holies in the deep center of being, into which he enters as the "captain of his destiny." Release from it in the end seems to bespeak salvation. On the day of the birth of Osiris the utterance is:

"The valves of the door open, the gateway of the god opens. He has unclosed the doors of the ark. He has opened the doors of the cabin. Shu has given him breath, Tefnut has created him; they serve in his service." (Ch. 130)

The Greek imprisonment of soul in body is here seemingly the poet’s "cribbed, cabined, and confined" life in flesh. Escape comes with final victory over the elements.

The picture of the sun-god swallowed by a great fish is very common. In the "crocodile" chapter of the Ritual we read: "I am the crocodile whose soul comes from men . . . I am the Great Fish of Horus." The crocodile was perhaps the earliest form of the Fish-Mother Atergatis, Hathor or Venus, who first produced life from the water. The seizure of the souls of men by a great fish in the sea suggests both capture and safety, as both are implied in incarnation. The astrotype is the constellation of Cetus, the Whale.

The baptism, the crossing a water, the death by drowning and the transformation from a being water-born to one born of fire, are all closely interwoven in various depictions. Confusion has come to scholars from this admixture. Massey is puzzled a trifle to observe that "in the inscription of Shabaka the baptism occurs without death." He adds:

"Either way, the baptism or death was but figurative of the regeneration or rebirth which was affected in this region; from which the second Horus issued at the age of thirty years as the Adult God, the Sheru or Homme Fait. The baptism for the dead was continued by the Christians, although its origin and significance seem to have been unknown to them."

As we have seen, Massey lacked in his exegesis the one key that would have enabled him to unlock the mystery of how baptism can be for the dead, and yet not be attended with ceremony suggestive of the sort of death he is thinking of. It was itself the "death" or experience of incubation of the soul, to achieve a new generation from the seed of its parent. In the cycle of necessity, in which the soul makes the round of all the elements, it must go through those kingdoms in which water is predominantly subsistent.

In the Hottentot fable the sea opened to let the men cross in safety, and the floods closed on the pursuing enemies. The ax, as in the Roman fasces, was a symbol of the sun, because in making its transit through the earth and water of fleshly life it was known as the divider or cleaver of the way. It cleft a passage for itself through the lower elements, dried up the water by its fiery potency and crossed on dry land!

Egyptian ingenuity, using the typology suggested by the life habits of certain water animals, represented the god as making his way across the water in more ways than one. He crossed on its surface, through it and even under it. Sebek-Horus, the crocodile-headed god, the child assigned to Neith in Virgo, swam across as a crocodile; the god, as Atum, the Eel, crawled through the mud; Kepher-Ptah, the beetle god, bored through the earth; Horus Behutet rode across on the vulture’s back; Horus, deified, flew across as a hawk; and Har-Makhu crossed through the corridor of the Sphinx.

In Joshua (I:2), after the death of Moses, the Eternal bade Joshua "arise, go over this Jordan, thou and all this people, unto the land which I do give thee, even to the children of Israel." "All Israel passed over on dry ground."

The eastern shore was the terminus of the voyage. There a plate of tahn was given each disembarking sailor, as a type of protection and salvation. This matched the recovered "eye of Horus" and the white stone given to the redeemed in Revelation. It may be seen at the place of the vernal equinox, between Aries and Pisces in the zodiac of Denderah. Tahn was resin and symboled eternal preservation, and was given to the soul at the completion of its crossing, as a badge of new-won immortality.

The Manes-soul entered or embarked on the sea on the western marge, plunged into the underworld of darkness and emerged on the eastern horizon of light. So he was the evening and the morning star through sheer symbolism. The Gospels keep a slight but unmistakable suggestion of the Egyptian typism in Jesus’ entry into the boat to cross the lake "when even was come." "He entered into the boat and his disciples followed him, And behold there arose a great tempest in the sea, insomuch that the boat was covered with waves, but he was asleep." "Then he arose and rebuked the winds and the sea and there was a great calm" (Matt. 8:24). Of Apap it is said: "Now at the close of day he turneth down his eyes to Ra; for there cometh a standing still in the bark, and a great slumber within the ship." The attack of Apap or Sut and the storm of sensual riot of the carnal passions are made while the deity is asleep in his bodily tomb, the belly of the flesh. Then the god awakes to his task, exercises his sovereignty over nature, and the elemental forces obey him.

Other solar heroes beside Jonah crossed the sea in the belly of a fish. Both Horus and the Greek Hercules crossed inside the fish during the three days at the winter solstice. In some ancient calendars three to five days were intercalated at the winter solstice, additional to the 360 days of the twelve solar months--30 days each--and correspond to the three dark days of the lunar "solstice," or dark of the moon. They typed the time of the incubation, when there was a calm or balance or stasis in the cycle, the solstitial stasis or balance between spirit and matter in evolution.

After these many centuries of zealous study of the Bible in Christian lands it is questionable whether one person in a thousand knows why the number three is basically connected with the baptism. The answer is presumed commonly to lie in the ministrant’s phrase accompanying the threefold sprinkling of water on the head or the three immersions under the water. "In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost." The ceremony commemorates man’s baptism by and under the three forces of the solar triad, mind-soul-spirit, according to this view. This may be taken as a correct interpretation, if the rite is performed by sprinkling, and if it is regarded as the baptism of John by Jesus. But Christian baptism is alleged to be modeled after the Biblical baptism, which is that of Jesus by John! And if the ceremony is that of the three immersions under the water, as performed by many sects, it can not then signify the downpour of the threefold spiritual nature from above on the recipient. Or it could do so only by reading the submergence of the god under the waters of sense as somehow imparting his threefold divinity to lower man. This is most indirect. One would have to say that the god brings his three aspects of higher selfhood under the water. This is implied, of course; and here as elsewhere the intimations of allegorism and symbolism apply both ways and work from either end. Both man and his god subject each other to a mutual baptism, we have seen, the god pouring his flood of transforming fire upon lower man and lower man drenching the god with water of sense and sin.

But the three immersions in or under the water speak definitely of a cosmic meaning that is little known, but that is one of the cardinal features of the arcane systematism. It is a numeral cosmograph of the death, burial or incubation of life in matter before its germination and resurrection. It is the ideograph of soul-death. Jesus was three days in the tomb. Under water emblemism it was the three-days’ sojourn of Jonah in the belly of the fish, though even there it is called "the belly of death." It is primarily expressed in the New Testament verse: "As Jonas was three days in the whale’s belly, so must the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of the earth." In its broad cosmic reference it outlines the great truth that the soul of life must evolve upward through its pre-mental period of gestation. The fiery spark of consciousness must lie dormant in "death," its conscious functions unawakened, for the three aeons of its involvement in dense matter before it comes to self-awareness in the fourth kingdom. In the lunar cycle of twenty-eight days, the three days of the dark moon, when the sun lights no part of the orb’s surface (visible to us) are the emblem.

But Egypt adds a most pertinent and apt phrase to this group of designations in a passage already given in another connection, from an inscription called "The Destruction of Mankind." Atum-Ra decreed that he would punish the rebellious angels who broke in upon his song with raucous shouts by destroying them "in three days of navigation." This carried the meaning that he would commit them to incarnation in lower ranges of being characterized as the sea or realm of "water." They would have to sail across the water of mortal life or become mariners or navigators in the great ocean of what Massey calls "the lower Nun." And that this period of "sailing" was to be three days attests to its identity of meaning with the other glyphs and graphs.

In addition to the cited instances, the three days as glyphs of incubating life are quite numerous all through the Bible and in other scriptures. There are scores of them in varied form. Before the Exodus from Egypt "darkness was over all the land of Egypt for three days; no one could see another, and no one could move about for three days, although the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings." In Exodus (3) Moses declaims to the people: "Pray let us travel for three days into the desert, then, that we may sacrifice to the Eternal our God." A Chaldean Oracle matches this passage remarkably: "And yet three days shall ye sacrifice and no longer." Revelation (11:11) says that after the oblation for sin had been made for three days and a portion of a day, the two witnesses of God rose upon their feet to renew their testimony. (The "portion of a day" will receive its very important treatment in its proper place.) The detail given here as to the witnesses rising to their feet to renew their testimony intimates that the old Egyptian dramatism of throwing down the Tat cross with its face to the ground as a sign of the soul’s fall into matter and death, to be raised up in the opposite season, was employed in this verse.

The three months from the autumn equinox to the winter solstice, ending with the new birth at Christmas or New Year, were one facet of the same symbolism. Again, the three months from the dead of winter to the spring equinox, ending in the resurrection of the solar god, were kindred types. And in a purely symbolical zodiac the three autumn months were earth signs, and the three winter months were water signs, those of spring being air signs, and those of summer fire.

Amsu, the rejuvenated Horus, rose in a new body of light on the third day. Horus, the child, is crowned in the seat of Osiris at the end of three days. In the lunar typing, Osiris dies at the winter solstice to be reborn again as Horus on the third day in the moon. He then rose from the water in his baptism. The resurrection on the third day must have been vividly motivated by lunar phenomena.

As the Eye (of Horus) was a symbol of light reflected (as the eye reflects all images in it), the moon reflecting solar glory could be called the "Eye of Horus." It is a matter of note that the Ritual says: "His eye is at peace . . . at the hour of night; (it is) full at the fourth hour of the earth . . ." So odd a phrase as the one italicized could hardly be given relevant meaning except in the sense of the fourth kingdom of life, the human, on the earth. It is to be noted here that since the two phrases, "the hour of night," and "the fourth hour of the earth," are obviously matched in this passage, this must be the Egyptian origin of the Gospel’s "fourth watch of the night."

Many of the myths contain a hiding or seeking of refuge for three days or three months. In Joshua Rahab the harlot, who sheltered the two Israelite spies, hurried them off with instructions to get away to the hills and "hide themselves there for three days till the pursuers return." A clear intimation of the resurrection on the third day is seen in an Egyptian text which runs: "I will arrange for you to go to the river when you die, and to come to life again on the third day." Here again water types the incarnation and it is also figured as a death. In speaking of the rearising of the dead Pepi, the Ritual says: "Pepi is brought forth there in the place where the gods are born. The star cometh on the morrow and on the third day." Mary searches for Jesus for three days as Isis sought the hidden Horus. In Matthew (15:29-32) Jesus takes compassion on the multitude that followed him into the desert "because they continue with me three days and have nothing to eat, and I would not send them away fasting." The three days’ fast is emblematic of the three "days" in the bleak underworld without the sustenance of the solar light, the divine bread of life. In the story of the dismembered concubine in Judges (19), previously noted, the girl’s father detained the husband three days. With reference to Herod, Jesus enjoined his followers to "Go tell that fox, Behold I cast out devils and I do cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I shall be perfected." Then there is his memorable declaration: "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up. But he spake of the temple of his body," (John 2:9)--and obviously of his spiritual body. The thunder and lightning that emanated from the summit of Mount Sinai at the Eternal’s appearing to Moses came "on the third day in the morning." The manifestation of the Lord’s glory on the mountain was anticipated by Moses, who had been instructed to go to the people and tell them to "consecrate themselves to-day and to-morrow; let them wash their clothes and be ready for the third day, for on the third day the Eternal will descend upon the Mountain of Sinai in the sight of all the people." Joshua told the people to prepare food, for within three days they would cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land. And they remained three days on the banks before crossing the river. A study of these and the many other occurrences of the three days’ period will disclose to any mind the general idea of life being held in bondage or limitation for three cycles or aeons and its release to liberty or to function on the third (properly fourth).

The significance, then, of the Passover festival becomes clear in relation to the only cosmic or anthropological datum to which it could have any reference. In its widest sense it memorialized simply the passing of the soul over the flowing stream of this life. It was the pilgrimage of the Manes across the sea of experience that lay between mortal and immortal life. It must never be lost sight of that the Jordan was a stream that marked the boundary line between the desert and the Promised Land. To migrate from animal existence to godlike status of being we must cross the boundary line separating the two kingdoms. The soul plunges in this water on the western marge, swims or sails across and reaches the "farther shore" on the eastern boundary where he rises to a new day like the sun. As the final stage and termination of the passing over came at the equinox of spring, this date, the first full moon after the equinox, was invested with the cumulative and culminating significance of the whole pass-over. It was the fourteenth or the fifteenth of the Hebrew month Nisan. But after all it is a question of minor difference whether the term "Passover" is taken to embrace the whole extent and duration and experience of the passing across life’s sea, or more specifically the crossing of the final boundary line at the Easter equinox; whether the passage is over the lines at beginning and end of the journey, or over the entire space between them. It may mean the passing into, the passing out of, or the passage across, the realm of bodily life, and has apt significance in any case.

The sun, typing ever the immortal fire in man, dipped down into the sea at evening and underwent his baptism during the night. He crossed the water of the Nun each night and emerged each morning. Also it is to be observed that the boat of Horus makes its journey across the sea on the border of the earth at night. Night in the diurnal cycle matches winter in the annual cycle in solar typism. And both figure the incarnation. Our voyage across the water of mortal existence is made when our souls are struggling through the darkness of material night. At any rate this is the symbolical language in which the ancient sages try to delineate our experience. This is "the dark night of the soul," and "the twilight of the gods." The "dead" are described as those who have voyaged in the boat at night, bound for the city of Akhemu at the polar Paradise.

A flood of light is released by the statement of the Ritual that the ship of Nnu, described in the "chapter by which one saileth a ship in the nether world," was ordered built with three decks or stories. It was to bear the crowd of Manes in safety across the abyss in which the devourer Apap lurked. The Manes supplicates the god:

"O thou who sailest the ship of Nnu over the void, let me sail the ship. Let me be brought in as a distressed mariner and go to the place which thou knowest."

And again he exclaims:

"O thou who sailest the ship of heaven over the gulf which is void, let me come to see my father Osiris" (Ch. 44; 99).

He is told he has to know each part of the bark by name and to repeat each name before he is admitted on board. From the examination in the judgment hall we learn the nature of the boat and its three stories. The lowest story is Akar (Hagar), which is identical with the Hebrew Achor, and that is the same as the Valley of Sheol (Amenta). Akar means also the hold of a ship, deep within which the god fell asleep while the storm raged without. The god was first intoxicated with lethargy and drowsiness. The ark was built first with one story, then two, then three. The lower was earth. The next was lunar, that is, the emotion body; and the third was the lower mind body; and the spirit lives in each or all of the three according to its focus.

In the "chapter of bringing home a boat in the underworld," the several parts of the ship are specified and their correspondences given. The posts at stem and stern are "the two columns of the nether world,"

or the points of entry and egress, west and east. The ribs are the four sustaining gods, or the four bodies typed by earth, water, air and fire. The boat is said to be brought in over the evil lake of Apepi, and the Manes prays that he may bring the boat along and coil up its ropes "in peace, in peace." Bringing in the boat must be taken to figure the soul’s final uplifting of the animal self to the human kingdom, or "landing it." The wood of the right and left sides constitutes the Lord of the Two Lands, master of soul and body. The rudder is the leg of Hapi, one of the four supporters of the world and of man. The towing rope is the hair of Anup. Spiritual guidance is indicated here, as Anup is the keen-scented guide of souls in the dark of incarnation. He also helps to tow the boat, as one of the two "Openers of the Way." The oar-rests are the pillars of the underworld. Earth and water furnish the basic leverage against which one can exert force to push ahead. The mast is described as "he who bringeth back the great lady after she hath gone away." The lower deck is the station of Apuat, protector of the Manes, who sees that they do not fall overboard into the jaws of Apap. The sail is Nut, the original driving power of nature. It is that which engenders moving power by opposing matter to the invisible force of spirit, the wind or breath. The paddles are the fingers of Horus, taking hold and exerting power from within. The planks are the seven constituent elements furnishing the groundbase for all operation. The hull is Mert (Merti?), the womb and sustainer. The keel is the thigh or leg of Isis that Ra cut off with a knife to bring blood into the Sektet boat. The sailor is the traveler, the Manes. The wind "cometh from Tem, to the nostrils of Khenti-Amenti" (Osiris), and is the impelling spiritual power that gives life to the Manes. The river is "that which can be seen," the visible material world, on the bosom of which all flows along. The mooring post is the celestial pole to which the voyaging ship is made fast with the cable of divinity.

The Speaker says: "I stand erect in the bark which the god is piloting." He is the god himself, learning to pilot the boat. "I am the great god in the bark who fought for thee." Ra says to the sailors: "Take your oars, unite yourselves to your stars." And again he assures them: "O my pilots, you shall not perish, gods of the never-setting stars."

A most enlightening name of the boat of Horus on the nether sea is "Collector of Souls for Ra." This name at once takes on meaning against the background of the dismemberment doctrine, and would be otherwise unintelligible. As the overlord fragments himself to nucleate the multitude of souls in the world, the return journey across the sea of this life will operate to reunify the individualized units in the Lord’s reconstituted body. The ship of this world will bring the scattered members of that original unitary body together in a new bond of fellowship. As it sails along it will collect again the fragments scattered broadcast in the descent to earth. Whatever unity of spirit and action mankind will achieve will to that extent make life the collectors of souls for Ra. The Horus spirit in man will reunify the dismembered Osiris.

The offices of scholarship have served no better purpose than to have us look through the glass of ancient mythical construction into a world of alleged fantastic conception of primitive naïveté. Our essay is to direct the modern eye through the same glass to see, not a bizarre world of childish fancy and credulity, but a factual world of meaning enhanced for the first time to resplendent illuminating power. Nothing beyond a meaningless Egyptian word has been to scholars and the world the name given to the boat of Horus in which we cross the lower main from west to east--from birth to death: the Semketet boat, or "boat of the setting sun." That there was another boat that made the voyage back again from the eastern morn to the western eve to repeat the cycle, and that it was named the Maatet boat, or "boat of the rising sun," has remained hidden in dry-as-dust Egyptological research as a pretty poetism, but nothing more. Yet these two boats and their two journeys are almost the two facts of prime import for mankind in this life. For the Semketet and Maatet boats are respectively the physical body in which the soul makes its way across the river of life in the flesh, and the spiritual body of solar light in which it ascends to heaven and traverses the sky in its summertime of disembodied being toward the autumn of another descent into matter. The one is Paul’s "natural body," the other his "spiritual body." The latter is now being gestated within the other as its womb, and upon its delivery at its Easter morn on the side of the rising sun, the soul will transfer its residence from the old body to the new one. Since flesh and blood can not inherit the kingdom of heaven, the soul prepares for its habitation there a fit vesture that can subsist in the celestial Paradise. All this is told in Egyptian myth in which, when the Semketet boat of the setting sun, after voyaging the night on the sea, arrives at last on the eastern marge of sunrise, the passengers with Horus, who are the human Manes with their twelve powers perfected, disembark from it and embark anew on the Maatet boat, or glorious ship of Ra, the spiritual Sun. With the redeemed, the elect and the glorified humanity on board, this majestic boat of the sun then sails upward to the zenith of heaven, and on across the sky till the recurring cycle brings it down to the western gate of the Tuat once more. Man at Easter, or at sunrise, steps out of his mortal vesture into his immortal spirit vehicle to live forever in non-physical realms, robed in light as a garment. The night voyage of the fleshly vessel of Horus ends at dawn, and the joyous sailors, now divinized humans, leave the mummy body of flesh and crowd exultingly on the shining ship of spiritual sunlight, to make the ascent to heaven.

In this boat, along with Ra, there sat the gods Khepera and Tem; but these were only the personifications of Ra’s own forms as descending and rising god of evening and morning, or of incarnation and resurrection. These two are again known as Hu and Sa, the two gods who had their places in the boat of the sun at creation. They personify the two nodes of being, spirit and matter. It is written in the Ritual (Ch. 120) that while Unas sails towards the east side of heaven, his sister, the star Septet, giveth him birth in the Tuat. This is based on the fact that the west-to-east journey through incarnation fits the soul for birth into the vesture of the sun-god. Ra-Harmachis, a later form of the risen Horus, is denominated "the great god within his boat." Another name for the sun-boat was the "bark of Millions of Years."

The lower boat of Horus, the Semketet, is also that place of refuge or retreat in which the Manes find sanctuary from a pressing menace of the great Dragon Law of the wheel of birth and death. In Numbers (35:6) it is stated that six cities were appointed for refuge; and six is the number typing the elemental forces that built the physical body. The lower boat is the earthly refuge for spirits fleeing from heaven. The solar heroes were saved in a basket of reeds. The typology depicts the birth of heavenly beings into the human body on earth. There was always conveyed the idea of safety from circumfluent waters in some sort of enclosure, a boat, ark, or nest of reeds, or an island. In the Norse mythos it was the ash-tree, called "The Refuge of Thor," that caught and saved the young god when he was being swept away by the overflowing waters of the river Vimur. Osiris is saved in the midst of the bole of the tamarisk tree that floated on the water. The reed that offers an escape from the water to the dragon-fly, whereby it may ascend into its proper sphere of the air, is a type of salvation from the water.

A mound of earth, the papyrus reed or a willow stuck in the moist ground were some of the portrayals of emergence or rescue from water before the boat had furnished a more generally used type. The soul must find a place or means of stability amid the flux of life. The early symbols of wading and swimming shadowed the stage of evolution when the soul was deeply mired in matter. The boat typifies the time when the higher entity was able to cross over dry-shod.

It is an extraordinary confirmation of the theses here presented that the entry into the boat to begin the underworld journey was in all respects identical with the burial of Horus or Osiris in their coffins. This certifies to the identity of the physical body of man with the boat of the lower Nun. The boat and the coffin are the same symbol in effect, both typing the physical body. For the Manes says: "I am coffined in an ark like Horus, to whom his cradle is brought." For he is to be reborn in the same body in which he "dies." He transforms his coffin into his new cradle. This cradle is the nest or ark of papyrus reeds, and indicates that the "death" and burial take place in the same realm where a new birth is to occur. The lotus was a type of the boat or ark of safety in the water and of the womb of birth in one. Some of the later ships were lotus-shaped at prow and stern. The cabin was the Hindu Argha-Yoni or the womb of the mother. The constellation Argo Navis, the Pleiades, the Little Bear and Orion were uranographic picturings of the boats of salvation in various relations.

It is evident that the tabernacle which the Eternal ordered Moses to build, in which he might dwell with his children, the Israelites, and eventually be raised up, is but another form of typism for the inner shrine of the sanctuary, the holy of holies in the ark of the covenant. And this in turn is depicted under the water emblemism as the ship of the sun, or boat of Ra. The exchange of passengers from the boat of Horus to the ship of Ra betokened the successful completion of the incarnation cycles. It was the index of their new birth, which was not now that of water. For they had finished the water baptism at that point, and were to enter upon the baptism of fire, which would induct them into the spiritual universe. The solar bark was to pick up the survivors of the mundane sea voyage and transport them across the expanse of a kingdom of air and fire, which required a boat of airy and fiery texture. The happy passengers were carried upward on board the "bark of Hasisadra" "to be like the gods." "Nu saileth round about the heavens and voyageth along with Ra." The material of the ship of Ra is imperishable stuff, formed out of the indestructible essence of solar light. Imprisoned for many incarnations in the tabernacle of the flesh, we finally are released from it, to pass over into another temple of shining glory, our true spirit body. One of the great purposes of our coming into the world is to build this fabric. When it is finished we exchange our house of darkness for this vessel of light. This is most plainly indicated in a sentence on a Chaldean tablet: "O man of Surippak, son of Ubarratutu, destroy the house and build a ship." A house is stationary, bound to a given locale. A ship is mobile. In the glorious vesture of the sun-body the soul of man can traverse all realms and worlds with electric alacrity. When the Osiris obtains command over the upper sea he exclaims: "Collector of souls is the name of my bark. The picture of it is the representation of my glorious journey upon the canal." The canal was probably the Milky Way, which was thought of as the path of souls to reach the empyrean. The solar boat is fastened to the celestial pole by seven ropes. Both boats are drawn by groups of seven or twelve powers, represented by the seven horses of the sun, the seven swans, seven dolphins, and others. The boats were drawn first by the seven nature powers, later by the twelve spirit forces; or the lower boat by the seven and the celestial by twelve. In fact the Egyptians enumerate and name seven boats to suggest the seven principles which carry evolution along. The Ritual (Ch. 89) contains an apostrophe of sublime beauty to these basic energies of life:

"Hail, ye gods who tow along the boat of the lord of millions of years, who bring it above the underworld and who make it to travel over the Mount, who make souls to enter into (their) spiritual bodies, whose hands are filled with your ropes . . . destroy ye the enemy; thus shall the boat of the Sun be glad and the great God shall set out on his journey in peace. May it (the soul) look upon its material body, may it rest upon its spiritual body, and may its body neither perish nor suffer corruption forever."

Chapter 136B is entitled: "of sailing the great boat of Ra to pass over the circle of Bright Flame." And in it the Manes says: "I am the spiritual body (sah) of the lord of divine right and truth made by the goddess Uatchet."

A vast flood of light is let in upon Gospel interpretation at one burst if it is understood that the twelve disciples of Jesus symboled the twelve powers of spiritual light energy to be unfolded by man in twelve labors or stages of growth, all imaged by the twelve signs of the zodiac. It should from the first have been seen without cavil that the function of "the Twelve" in the Gospels was far more than that of useful agents of a historical personage to found an earthly ecclesiasticism. For when the Gospel Jesus told them they would sit with him on the twelve celestial thrones and judge the twelve tribes of Israel, the declaration took them at once from the realm of personal history into that of cosmic hierarchism.

Egypt gave them a more definitive naming and function. Accompanying Horus or Ra, the twelve were astronomical powers, rulers or "saviors of the treasure of light." As light was the crowning product of all cosmic operation, the saviors of its treasure were the culminating depositories of dynamic agency. They became the twelve great spirit-children of Ra’s unimaginable might. With Horus they became the twelve who accompany the god to earth as sowers of the seed and later reapers of the divine harvest reaped on earth for enjoyment in heaven. When the Gnostic Jesus of the Pistis Sophia (I:5) rises as the first fruits of them that slept, he becomes the teacher of the twelve on the Mount of Olives (the Mount of the Olive Tree of Dawn, or the resurrection). He suddenly appears in their midst as they sit on the Mount and dazzles them with his glory. It was the function of the Christos to gather up and synthesize in himself the potentialities of all lower forces. In the Ritual we find this remarkable duplicate of the scene on the Mount of Olives (Ch. 133, Renouf): "Ra maketh his appearance at the Mount of Glory, with the cycle of the gods about him." Here is incontestable evidence that the twelve disciples represent twelve deific powers, and not men.

The twelve were also the Gnostic Aeons, who were powers or "saviors" of light. The Gnostic Jesus gives this testimony:

"When I first came into the world I brought with me twelve powers. I took them from the hands of the twelve saviors of the treasure of light."

There is power in these mighty utterances from old Egypt’s Ritual to dispel the fogs of many centuries of religious superstition.

The first seven powers in physical phenomena had been gathered up, divinized and unified by the coming into evolution of the Christ Avatar. Additional unfoldment raised them to twelve. As the young solar deity passed through the twelve signs of the zodiac, he appropriated to himself and harmonized in the alembic of his own constitution all the natural radiations of deific light put forth by the twelve aeons or emanations. Jesus speaks of them as his ministers and messengers, whom he hath made "a flame of fire." Jesus brought the gift of soul to the natural energies and converted them into agents of cosmic mind. These were the twelve who as kings rowed the solar bark for Ra, with Horus at the prow. These were the twelve knights about the table of King Arthur; they were the twelve sons of Jacob; and the twelve gods with Odin in their midst. And they were the divine powers which were said to be unfolded, one each year, for the first twelve years of the solar god’s life, bringing him to the stage of divinest birth at the age of twelve. And this was a sublimated meaning shadowed in the ancient puberty festivals of many tribes. All the solar gods ended their childhood, or subjection to Mother Nature’s law, at twelve and entered the period of spiritual maturity, consummating it at the age of thirty.

The twelve were called "the saviors of light" because they upheld the radiance of the spiritual sun. They are described as the emanations of the seven voices and the five supports. The seven voices are the seven primary radiations of tonal vibration that carries the energies of the Elohim or Logoi into manifestation. The five supports are apparently the five basic elements, earth, water, air, fire and aether, that support the edifice of the being of man and planets alike. The twelve in Egypt were Sut, Horus, Shu, Hapi, Ap-Uat, Kabhsenuf, Amsta, Anup, Ptah, Atum, Sau and Hu. They accompany Jesus and Horus through the twelve zodiacal signs (Pistis Sophia, 339-371), and it is said they "go forth three by three to the four quarters of heaven to preach the gospel of the kingdom." This "preaching" does not sound as if it meant the Sabbath pulpit oratory. The four quarters of heaven is a description of their location on the zodiacal chart.

The Gospel Jesus repeats some of the features of the sea voyage of "the ark of earth" sailing eastward. Horus emerges from the nocturnal storm on the waters into the calm of daybreak. Jesus comes walking over the water to the boat, while the lower soul (Peter) implores his help in saving him from sinking in the lake and is "lifted into the bark" (Matt. 14:22) like the rescued Manes in the Ritual. Jesus sustains the character of Horus who in the boat is the oar, paddle and rudder of Ra, and who exclaims: "I am the Kheru [ruler, controller] of Ra, who brings the boat to land" (Ch. 63). Jesus becomes master in the ship. It is again noteworthy that the Gospel sun-god appears on the water in the morning watch, the fourth watch of the night. The god of intellect rises after "three days" in the tomb of matter and the sea of earth. The Manes prays: "Grant that I, too, may be able to walk on the water as thou walkest on the Nun without making any halt." In another place he cries: "I fail, I sink in the abyss of the flowing that issues from Osiris."

Before the sun-boat can begin its upward journey from the eastern boundary, the giant Apap must be forced to relinquish his hold on the Tree of Life and to "disgorge the waters of Light." This apparent mixing of metaphors would indicate the birth of the sun-god’s powers out of the womb of lower nature. In man it would connote the parturition of the solar Christ principle in and from the physical body. If the figure of "disgorging" is not a most impressive suggestion of evolution from within the heart of life outward to the periphery--which modern science has now asseverated--one would be at a loss to think of a more forceful one.

The crossing is not the same as the cross in immediate portrayal of meaning, yet the two lead by a short step into each other’s province. In a very direct sense the cross is connected with the flood of water that must be crossed, with the baptism and the lower sea voyage. In its totality, as the allegorical expression of a real experience, racial and individual, all this was the cross. This most ancient, perhaps, of all religious symbols (by no means an exclusive instrument of Christian typology) was the most simple and natural ideograph that could be devised to stand as an index of the main basic datum of human life--the fact that in man the two opposite poles of spirit and matter had crossed in union. The cross is but the badge of our incarnation, the axial crossing of soul and body, consciousness and substance, in one organic unity. An animal nature that walked horizontally to the earth, and a divine nature that walked upright crossed their lines of force and consciousness in the same organism. The implications of this situation are all that the great symbol ever connoted. There can be nothing more religiously holy and sacred about the sign than about any other figure of human life. It means just that human life--nothing more. By ecclesiastical psychologization it has come to betoken a range of emotional repercussions, but it still carries no basic meaning other than that of the god immersed in matter. Whatever is sacred in human life is so by virtue of that single fact. However, since all values in life flow from that fundamental ground, the symbol may legitimately be made the talismanic focus of both emotional and intellectual reaction. If it conveys to the mass mind the strong intimation that this life itself is haloed with august significance, is essentially sacred and worthy of being lived with deepest consecration of purpose and effort to its intelligently discerned ends, its symbolic influence would indeed be salutary. If it is taken to be a cross of wood on which a man of flesh was physically nailed some nineteen centuries ago, its effect on thought must be stultifying and deadening.

Plato says that the divine man was "bicussated and was stamped upon the universe in the likeness of a cross." When primal unity of life bifurcated into spirit and matter, the two forces had to be crossed in interplay in order to engender the worlds and all manifestation. The coming of mind in man to rule nature brought the figure of the cross into symbolism because it brought the upright line to cross at right angles the horizontal line denoting the feminine or natural creation. Man was the first to raise the animal from horizontal position to the vertical; yet both natures live in him, considerably at "cross purposes" with each other. At any rate typology figured the mother creation, before mind came with man, by the horizontal line, which is the minus sign. Nature was privation--the Greeks called matter "privation." The union with it, however, of the intellectual principle made it capable of adding and increasing, giving itself more life, and so the cross is the plus sign. But great multiplication of living beings could not come until the forces were set in motion; and motion was indicated by a moving of the straight cross one half of a quarter revolution, or out of motionless position; and this gives the multiplication sign, as well as the numeral (Roman) ten, the number that joins male and female signs, I and O, in activity. It was the crossing of spirit with matter that moved and multiplied the worlds. And ten is the number of the completed cycle, and the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet is Yod, the name of God. The bread of life had to be vastly multiplied before it could be distributed. The mathematical sign of division is the horizontal line, with a dot above and below to signify that when life divided it split into two kingdoms, one above, the other below, a median line. And we shall see that this gives a perfect picture or glyph of man’s nature lived on the horizon line between "Upper and Lower Egypt."

The Toltecs called the cross the Tree of Sustenance and the Tree of Life. The tree and cross are identical, and even the staff or rod is a reduced form of the tree-type, for Aaron’s rod was fabled to be a stem from the Tree of Life in Genesis. The cross is a symbol of life, never of death, except as "death" means incarnation. It was the cross of life on earth because its four arms represented the fourfold foundation of the world, the four basic elements, earth, water, air and fire, of the human temple, and because it was an emblem of the reproduction of new life, and thus an image of continuity, duration, stability, an eternal principle ever renewing itself in death. The whisperings of esoteric fable report that the very tree on which Jesus was hanged was grown from a sprout or seed from the forbidden Tree of Life in Genesis! There are many instances of the cross burgeoning into fresh life. The savior is not nailed on the tree; he is the tree. He unites in himself the horizontal human-animal and the upright divine. And the tree becomes alive; from dead state it flowers out in full leaf. The leaf is the sign of life in a tree. The Egyptians in the autumn threw down the Tat cross, and at the solstice or the equinox of spring, erected it again. The two positions made the cross. The Tat is the backbone of Osiris, the sign of eternal stability. And Tattu was the "place of establishing forever."

That the cross betokened the basic idea of the impregnation of elemental matter with divine potency typed as male is evidenced by the fact that Apt, the old first Mother, figured as the hippopotamus and the Great Bear, is depicted with a fourfold phallus on her breast in the form of a cross. Again and again the goddess of primal source is figured with male features or the male member, mutely proclaiming her power as re-begetter of the dead. The Christ in the form of the Stauros, or cross, impregnated the Mother Sophia and gave to her who was otherwise formless an ideal form and beauty. Forgetting the ancient Gnostic teaching and calling it "heresy," the early Christians warred over the question of the sex of the Logos. The knowledge that would have saved them all this sad miscarriage of zeal can be summarily stated. The Logos is the product of cosmic male and virginal female substance, in union. A virgin is unproductive until embraced by creative power. At bottom the cross indicates sex union, be it on the plane of the cosmos, in the heart of the atom, in the solar systems, or on the nuptial bed. A crossing is consummated or a cross made wherever the positive and negative poles of life cross each other in their interblended affinity. And then the Son, or Logos, is born. And the child becomes a man, and must enter into creative relation with his Mother Nature in his turn. Gnostic literature states that the Christ fertilized the Mother Sophia by making the sign of "Kr" or "Chr" (Greek XP) over her body. This was the cross within the circle, or the male crossed with the female. The symbol then gave rise to the many words beginning with Chr- or Kr-(Cr-), such as Charis, Christ, Kheru, Cross, Chronos, Course, Circle, Karast, Crest; as well as, by the curious process of reversal employed by the ancients, Rekh, Ark, Arche, Argo, Arch, etc. The letter "A" bears testimony likewise to some ancient philosophy, as it apparently represents the single vertical line of male deity, or god in unity, split apart or in two, as male and female, and then joined by the middle cross stroke, the Ankh-tie. The "O" also proclaims its own meaning as being the boundless infinite, without beginning or end, self-contained, ever returning unto itself, embosoming all things, yet, as the Absolute (that is, released from all finiteness or form), the sign of total negation of Nought. And we are now in position to see something of the significance of the great Gnostic name for the sun-god or Logos, son of Sophia: I A O. It reads under our eyes: "I" am the "A" (Alpha) and the "O" (Omega), the beginning and the end. But, seen with a bit more philosophical penetration it reads again: I, the first emanation of being (typed by the straight vertical line, the No. I), split into two phases, joined (in the "A") in incarnate and manifest existence, and end in a return to infinite Be-ness, "O." The "Y" near the end of the alphabet is an "A" reversed, and the two separated streams returning into the "I." The "U" and "V" show the original "I" split in two, united at the bottom in incarnation, and the force descending and then returning. The "J" indicates the turning to return of the "I." "S" and "Z" are types of turning and endlessly returning life. Other letters show design in their construction, as they were glyphs of esoteric philosophy.

A tradition that the cross of Calvary was made of four kinds of wood, palm, cedar, olive and cypress, signifies again that it stood for the four segments of the nature of man and the world.

The cross of Calvary of Christian iconography is common on the breasts of Egyptian mummies. It is identical with the Ankh-cross, denoting life and renewal. The cross was placed in the hands of the dead as an emblem both of incarnation and the new life to come. It was carved on the back of the scarab, with the same meaning. The Horus of the resurrection is pictured with the Cross of Life in his hand in the act of raising the dead body from the bier. The sign of the cross was made upon the mummy entering the realm of the dead; it was also given to the soul as it arose out of the body as an emblem of rebirth.

The cross has been appropriated by Christian ecclesiasticism as the unique and distinctive emblem of its faith. Yet in the iconography of the catacombs no figure of a man on the cross appears during the first six or seven centuries of the era! Instead there are all forms of the cross except the one which is claimed to be the very basis and origin of the religion itself. The cross of Calvary was not the initial, but the final form of the crucifix. The cult that now buttresses its authenticity upon the historic Calvary presents not a single reproduction of its crucified Redeemer in its symbolic art during the first six or seven centuries! According to Massey the earliest known form of the human figure on the cross is the crucifix presented by Pope Gregory the Great to Queen Theodolinde, now in the Church of St. John at Monza; while no image of the crucifix is found in the catacombs at Rome earlier than that of San Siulio belonging to the seventh or eighth century. In the earliest representations of the Trinity made by Christian artists, the Father and the Holy Spirit, the latter being feminine in the form of the Dove, are pictured beside the cross. A Christ, and him crucified, is utterly absent. Not the Crucified, but the cross, is the primary symbol of the Christian faith. Yet that same cross is pre-Christian, is a pagan and heathen symbol. For centuries the cross stood for the Christ, and was addressed as if it were a living thing. Crucifixes have been found in Christian churches antedating the fourth century, with a human figure nailed or bound in the conventional way; but the figure is not that of Jesus! It is that of Orpheus! In Christian imagery the Lamb was the usual figure on the cross, when a sacrificial victim was added to the bare cross emblem. But it appears that about the end of the seventh century it began to be felt that the alleged historical life of the personal Christ was in danger of being lost amid the mass of symbolic representations and the multiplicity of Messianic and sun-god characters which were current in most countries as the heritage of pagan symbolism. In order, then, to focus emphasis upon the uniqueness of the Christian Jesus as the physically crucified one, it was decreed by the Council of Trullo, or the Quinque Sixtum, in the reign of Justinian II, that in future the figure of the real historical Jesus should supersede the astrological sign of Aries "in the image of Christ, our God." "He shall be represented in his human form, instead of the Lamb, as in former times" (Cited by Didron: Icon. Chret., pp. 338-9).

In the eighth century Adrian I, Pontiff of Rome, in a letter to Barasius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, voiced the opinion that the time had come for the Christ to be no longer portrayed as the Lamb:

"Forasmuch as the shadow hath passed away and that Christ is very man, he ought therefore, to be represented in the form of a man."

"The Lamb of God must not be depicted on the cross as a chief object; but there is no hindrance to the painting of a lamb on the reverse or inferior portion of the cross where Christ hath been duly portrayed as a man."

No criticism can be legitimately lodged against the Holy Fathers for desiring to use the human figure as a symbol to carry the vital truth that the Logos had put on the form of a man, and that the new heaven and earth was to be formed "according to the measure of a man." It would indeed have more impressiveness than the more abstract symbol of the astrological Lamb. But the world, and especially those millions of souls whose earthly lives were snuffed out in the name of an alleged gentle Galilean peasant, call out a vigorous challenge to the procedure of turning an innocuous symbol into a veridical historical personage, when the change entailed, as the sequel showed, the transformation of devotional reverence for a spiritual ideal into frenzied zeal and inhuman cruelty, in the name of an actual man. It was not until the long process of mental corrosion had brought to decay the ancient power to discern spiritual truths through outward symbols that the figure of the personal God was thrust into the place of immolation, and the cross as emblem became the cross of wood.

In John’s account the crucifixion takes place at the time of the Passover, and for the Paschal Lamb is substituted the victim in human form. The killing of the Lamb of God (the Logos under the sign of Aries, as it had been the Bull in the preceding 2155 years) was the divine sacrifice; and his slaughter, with the sprinkling of the doorposts, or gates of the new life, with his blood, was the sign of the new birth of spiritual life. In one sign humanity was washed in the blood of the Bull, in the next in the blood of the Lamb; and again in the next in the blood of the Christ whom the Greeks named Ichthys, the Fish.

The sprinkled blood of the gods, poured out for humanity on earth, was symboled as fertilizer to nourish the earth. In early times the mother’s blood, too, was believed to fertilize the fields for the new sowing. The function of fertilizing the ground is assigned both to Sut and to Judas, the adversaries and betrayers of the sun-god in the Christian and Egyptian myths. Sut was said to fertilize the fields with his blood "on the night of fertilizing the field in Tattu." The coming of divinity to dwell with man was to make the soil of his life productive by enriching the natural self. What more apt symbol, then, than that of fertilizing?

An ancient festival not copied by the Roman Christians was that of the Hiding of the Cross in the Nile, followed in the opposite sign by the ceremony of Finding the Cross. The person traditionally assigned to the finding was Helena, a name which must be taken as derived from Helios, the sun, in Greek. It was the boast of Isis that she had given birth to Helios. The "Hor" of "Horus" is also Har, Hal, Hel (the Egyptian "R" becoming the Hebrew "L"); hence Horus is Helios by name, as Jesus is Joshua. Isis lost the fiery cross in the ocean of incarnation and Helena or the sun-spirit recovered it from the river to blaze in renewed glory at the Passover or crossing in March. Nothing more is depicted by these festivals than the incarnation and resurrection of life in matter, or the god in mortal man. As Isis lost her child at the autumn equinox and found him again at the equinox of spring, there is again a clear identification of cross with Christ-child.

Nothing could more definitely point to the meaning of the cross as the fact of incarnation than the name of the ancient Mexican cross itself, which was Tonocaquahuitl, "the tree of our flesh." We are nailed on this tree of flesh, out of whose symbolic wood alone is to be constructed the only cross on which the god has ever died. This is the only death on the cross known to erudite sages. And every imagined hammer-stroke driving nails through rended flesh on a geographical Golgotha has been a renewed stroke of misguided fanaticism nailing the free spirit of man still more firmly to the cross of ignorance, superstition and bondage.

Baptized with the god in his death on the cross, we shall happily disburden ourselves of this weight of toil and suffering when we have finished the crossing of the waters and see the golden sun rise at the end of the fourth watch of the night.