TRUTH CRUSHED TO EARTH

The resolution of the "birth of Christ" into the delivery of a babe in a localized Bethlehem has kept the race from realizing the true meaning of the Messianic fulfillment. With the third century conversion of the features of the age-old spiritual drama into the alleged biography of a man-savior, the outlines of the great truth that a ray of the solar Logos was incorporated distributively in animal humanity faded out and were obliterated. All sound sense of the inner signification of the Christmas nativity tableau was irrevocably lost. The annual celebration of the advent of deity to earth remains a meaningless travesty to this day.

It becomes necessary, then, to outline the historical trends that led to the obscuration of this central feature of religious cultism. This is in no sense a diversion, but the most direct approach to the correct envisagement of ancient material. It will reveal items of the utmost strategic importance for a true evaluation of archaic structures. The restoration of the lost meaning will be given greater credence if the causes of its decadence are set forth.

The knowledge that a fragment of the spiritual heart of the sun was implanted in the body of each son of man to be his soul and his god was the golden secret imparted by the hierophants in the Mystery Schools to their qualified pupils. It was regarded as such a priceless treasure that these Secret Brotherhoods were organized specifically to guard its esoteric inviolability. From age to age it passed down the stream of oral transmission, now waning in one quarter, but spreading in another, and was revived periodically by messengers who came as the agents of a hierarchy of perfected men. From remote antiquity it was present in China, Tibet, India, Chaldea, Egypt. It was carried by the priests of the Orphic Mysteries over to the Hellenic world.1 It was disseminated in the Greek areas in the philosophies of Pythagoras, Plato, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras;2 was embodied in the poetry of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; in the dramas of Euripides and Aeschylus. From Egypt and Chaldea it emerged in the religion of the Hebrews, who wrought its myths, allegories and symbols obscurely into their Old Testament, but had more authentically kept the deposit in their ancient Kabalah. It was taken up by pre-Christian and early Christian Gnostics, being contained with sufficient clarity in the great Gnostic work, Pistis Sophia, a work conjecturally of Basilides or Valentinus. Its Orphic-Platonic rescension was widely republished by the Neo-Platonist school in the second, third and fourth centuries, with ample elucidation, a measure adopted in all likelihood by the spiritual hierarchy to check the growing trend of the nascent Christian movement toward the complete exoterization of its esoteric message.

It was reintegrated eclectically around Alexandria by such syncretists as Maximius of Tyre, Ammonias Saccas and Philo Judaeus, powerfully influencing the character of primitive Christianity. It was carried most directly into Christian documentation by St. Paul, whom many scholars claim on evidence to have been himself an Initiate in the Greek Mysteries (as were Clement and Origen in the Egyptian), and also by St. John, whose Bible writings are decidedly more Platonic than distinctively Christian. The visible thread of its transmission runs on to Plutarch, after whom it became more subterranean, being propagated by Hermeticists, Therapeutae, Rosicrucians, Platonists, Mystics, Illuminati, Alchemists, Brothers of various designations and secret fraternities in Europe, out of sight of the jealous eye of the all-powerful Church. At the period of its lowest ebb in Europe it was tided over the danger of total extinction by Arabian and Moorish scholars and Jewish students in Spain. The teaching was preserved and handed on by such associations in Medieval Europe as the Cathedral Builders, the Platonic Academy of Florence, the Alchemists, the "Fire Philosophers," the Troubadours and Minnesingers, by secret printers, among them Aldus Minutius of Venice, who reprinted the classic Greek literature that ushered in the Italian Renaissance. Sporadically, now in one region, now in another, it took form in outward movements in groups of mystic and pietistic tendency of many names. It was the secret spring of motive and meaning in most medieval literature, in the folk-lore, the hero legends, the fairy myths, the Arthurian cycle, the Mabinogian tales, the Peredur stories, the Niebelungenlied, the castle ballads, the Romance of the Rose and many another invention of esoteric skill.

Features of it came to be embodied in a thousand conventional forms of common "superstition." It was pictorially outlined in the set of Tarot Cards of the Bohemians in the twelfth century. Philosophers such as Paracelsus, Raymond Lully, Pletho, Cardano, Philalethes, Robert Fludd (from whose work on Moses Milton is said to have derived his theses on which Paradise Lost was built) and others presented aspects of it in more or less surreptitious fashion. Jacob Boehme’s "Theosophical Points" vitally influenced Newton’s thought in important directions, as he confesses. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo acknowledge their debt to the principles of the ancient science. Later came the English Platonists More and Cudworth, and it is alleged that Francis Bacon and the mysterious Count de St. Germain formulated the body of Masonic ritualism upon the old principles.

Coming to the surface again in recent years it is being revived by Rosicrucians, Theosophists, Kabalists, Esotericists, Mystics, Spiritual and Psychic Scientists and Parapsychologists in large numbers, and is perhaps the most vital movement in the thought life of today.

The door to this rejuvenescence of an influence so long buried was opened during the last century by the studies in Comparative Religion and Comparative Mythology assiduously pursued by many scholars. There was needed nothing but a mind free from bias to discern the unity, amounting virtually to identity, underlying all the old systems, which expressed so clearly the characteristic features of what appeared to have been a universal primal world religion, with the solar myth as its corner-stone. Every great historical religion is readily seen to have been, at its start, a pure expression of the basic elements of this outline, and equally readily seen to have badly vitiated the pristine purity of teaching in later decadence. A gross transgressor in this respect is seen to be Christianity, which carried original spiritual meaning further afield than perhaps any other. It is desirable to trace the causes and progress of this corruption.

The blanket assertion that ancient spiritual light was darkly obscured under Christian handling is a challenging statement and must be given the room to vindicate itself. This work in its entirety will amount to a substantiation of that claim. The point can be carried only by an ample reproduction of the substance of the archaic world religion, so that the clear outlines of the great pristine doctrines of theology as they were apprehended in the arcane schools, may by contrast reveal the darkness and vacuity of present readings. Only in the light of the radiant wisdom of the past will the glaring corruption of current interpretation become discernible.

The stream of degradation of originally pure teaching flowed in through the channels of literalism. The simple but still nearly incredible truth of the matter is that elaborate charts of spiritual ideography, devised with poetic genius and analogical skill, were mistaken for literal objective fact. The ancient theologists had sought to portray the essence of deep truth by means of fanciful constructions of many kinds. The whole of early Egyptian and Greek religious literature was a construction commonly termed mythology. What now looms as the consummate catastrophic stupidity of the centuries was the traducing of it into alleged history. This has been perpetrated in spite of the obvious impossibility of explaining how a people that produced Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Pericles, Heraclitus, Homer, Pindar and Demosthenes could gull itself into taking poetic fiction for objective occurrence on a grand scale. Our explanation of the mythology of the Greeks commits us to accrediting such sages with the minds of children. The myths were the lenses through which the gaze might be focused on the realities of recondite truth. Only to the crudely ignorant were the representations not diaphanous. But, oddly enough, blind misapprehension carried the day, and the transparency of the myths was darkened into solid opaqueness.

Christianity started out as a system closely kindred with the cults environing it, and boasting of conformity with them. The early Church Father, Justin Martyr in particular, is at pains to protest that Christianity in no wise differs from pagan usages. But a strange and curious thing then happened. There came to a head a virulent rebellion of mediocrity and inferiority against the aristocracy of intellect and culture. Christianity carried in large measure the impetuosity of this revolt. It became the embodied expression of a vehement assault on the esotericism of the Mystery Religions. It was evidently motivated by a popular resentment against the exclusiveness and aristocracy of the cults. Only a restricted and tested minority was eligible to admission into the Associations. The hidden teaching was withheld from the populace, under the strictest of secret bans. A wave of hostility to the privileged groups swept over the masses and culminated in an effort to crash through the restrictions of esotericism and bring out the secret doctrine for general behoof. Distrust of the possession of any real truth beyond ordinary grasp and perhaps the degeneracy of the Mysteries themselves to some extent, lent substance to the popular enmity. A movement to spread abroad a plain man’s simple enunciation of the truths gained heavy momentum. A definite trend away from esotericism carried the impulse far over into literalism. The genius of culture in mankind has constantly had to contend with this effort of dull mediocrity to tear down its best structures of truth and beauty.3 The attempt to unmask the myths for commonplace rendering was quite like the present-day demand upon popular publicists for a reduction of their best wisdom to the level of moronic bluntness. But the effort to simplify the esoteric purport was to lose it, to wreck the spiritual edifice altogether. Truth can make no terms with incapacity.

When, later, the headship of the early Church passed out of the hands of the academicians of Athens and Alexandria, of Antioch, Tarsus and Ephesus, and fell into those of the less studied Romans, the trend to literalism had gained such volume that there swept into the movement a spirit of fell vindictiveness against the dominant systems. When the conception of the purely spiritual Christos could no longer successfully be imparted to the turbulent masses, who were clamoring for a political savior, it was found necessary, or expedient, to substitute the more concrete idea of a personal Messiah, who would be so obviously factual and realistic as to preclude the possibility of being misconceived by the most doltish. The swell of this tide of force carried the Church Fathers to the limit of recasting the entire Gospel in the terms of a human biography. So that what had been originally in the Mysteries and the sacred scripts a combined astrological and mythical dramatization of man’s total experience, was now turned into the story of one character put forth as a "life." In spite of almost insuperable obstacles and the outcropping of endless absurdities and inanities of meaning in the transposition, the undertaking was carried through. The outcome has been that the theology handed down to us by the early reformation is the crudest, least rational and intellectually most disconcerting rendition of the ancient revelation anywhere extant. Philo, Origen, Clement and Josephus had expressly declared that scripture shielded beneath the literal narrative a secret profundity of meaning, which was its true message. Philo specified four distinct levels in which the sense of scripture was to be apprehended, the purely literal, or physical, the moral or emotional, the allegorical or mental and the anagogical, or lofty spiritual. The later Church discarded or disregarded the two or three more abstruse ones and held only to the lowest and the basest.

The drive to convert the highly concentrated "meat" of spiritual truth into "pap" or "milk" for the babes in capacity probably gave to Christianity that volcanic fervor that swept it forward among the lower ranks and shortly enabled it to turn the tide against its chief rival, Mithraism. The masses will always, as they did in Luther’s Reformation, seize upon a sweeping current of ideological force and attempt to utilize it as a means of escape from their lowly economic lot. The hopes of the rabble interwove the dream of political liberation with the religious message, adding an extraneous factor to the pressure to translate allegory into a tale of history. Then as now low culture soon turned from the fervor to achieve the slow laborious task of mastering an inner kingdom of spiritual character to eager expectation of a utopian regime in world affairs. In the spiritual drama were many lines which could be so misconstrued.4

Thus Christianity lost its Gnosis; and all Christendom has since had to suffer the blighting of its best spiritual effort. If by the tactic the Church may be said to have gained the whole world, it lost its own soul in the process.

That Christianity after its inception was a ferment confined largely to the poor and untutored classes is indicated both by the Gospel story itself and by much data of history. Some authentic testimony may be useful in impressing the little-known fact upon general knowledge. The cultured Celsus, writing about 200 A.D., cannot refrain from commenting on the social complexion of the Christians of his day. He wrote:

"It is only the simpletons, the ignoble, the senseless--slaves and womenfolk and children--whom they wish to persuade . . . wool-dressers and cobblers and fullers, the most uneducated and vulgar persons . . . whosoever is a sinner, or unintelligent, or a fool, in a word, whoever is god-forsaken (kakodaimon), him the kingdom of God will receive."5

Edward Carpenter, an unbiased and kindly student of early Christianity in relation to its contemporary faith, says:

"The rude and menial masses, who had hitherto been almost beneath the notice of Greek and Roman culture, flocked in; and though this was doubtless, as time went on, a source of weakness to the Church, and a cause of dissension and superstition, yet it was the inevitable line of human evolution, and had a psychological basis."6

Many additional statements in the same tenor could be quoted, but it is needless to enforce what is known and indisputable.

But one hears the protestations of Christians that the ministrations of their faith to the simple and the downtrodden was its glory and demonstrated a sounder humanitarianism than the Mystery Schools displayed. Let it have whatever praise goes with this part of its program. It is to the credit of any system that it gives to the lowly the food they need. The default of Christianity is that it gave to one class and withheld from another. Even to that one class it gave the poorest of bread--truth vitiated, devoid of nourishing sense, corrupted and corrupting--as witness its own unconscionable history. It attempted to furnish to the uncultured the easily digested provender they required, but swung with such zeal into this labor that it denied the need of strong meat to more capable digestions. Christianity’s culpability was not that it fed the outcast and the sinner, but that it denied the Gnosis to the intelligent--or to any. Its Roman revolt against the spiritual esotericism constituted its betrayal of the innermost heart of all religion. It chose to feed the religious hunger of all grades of people with food that was not even wholesome for the simple.

And it must answer for its vicious resentment and unholy violence against the high-minded groups that again and again in the whole course of its history essayed with sincerity to restore it to the lost message of the Gnosis. Students of the situation in the early Church will know the factual ground beneath the Emperor Julian’s caustic observation that "there is no wild beast like an angry theologian." And the murder of the learned Hypatia and the burning of the priceless books of the Alexandrian library are sufficient attestation of the level of savage ferocity to which the reaction against the lofty wisdom of the past had reduced its uncultured opponents. Christianity now lives to witness a world of more general intelligence, after repression by fiend-like persecution for fifteen centuries, once more and this time with irrepressible purpose, turning with an eagerness born of long denial to the esotericism of revived Oriental philosophies for the deeper nourishment of the human spirit.

Christianity can not shake off its pagan parentage. It must be seen that in spite of the almost complete dismantling of the esoteric interpretation, the system retained practically all the outward vestments of the hidden truth. That Christianity presented to the world a complete new system of high truth unknown before is of course now understood to be an unfounded legend. That it failed to make any single advance from ignorance to wisdom is not so obvious to its partisans or to the general public, but seems nevertheless indisputable on the evidence. It sadly bedimmed the old splendor of knowledge. For it threw away the golden grain and kept only the husk. The legitimacy of such a dogmatic assertion can become evident only in the light of the entire study here undertaken, since such a lengthy scrutiny is required to demonstrate that in dogma after dogma, rite after rite, and parable after parable, Christianity substituted a mean and valueless literal sense for the original inspiring message. If this was the sacrifice it made on behalf of the lowly masses, it wrote off the payment by a total suppression of light for those in higher intellectual brackets. It sealed up the anagogical meaning and hounded to the death the parties that strove for its dissemination.

Devising nothing new and retaining the outward form and dress of pagan systems, Christianity has ever been hard put to explain the undeniable similarity between antecedent religions and its own faith and practice. Intelligent churchmen have seen the futility of denying the fact and have readily admitted the pagan sources of Christianity. But in the third century it was a matter of critical importance to maintain the novel and superior character of the new religion. The device resorted to by numbers of the Fathers bears indisputable testimony to the desperateness of their plight. Church membership today will be loath to credit the reliability of the evidence on this matter, so nearly does it exceed all belief. Confronted from time to time with amazing evidences of identity between their own and pagan material, there was no recourse save to that negation of all logic, that last resort of bigotry and zealotry--the plea of diabolism! Christian pride should blush at the disingenuousness of its founders in this matter. The evidence bearing on the point is neither inconsiderable nor vague. In his excellent work, Pagan and Christian Creeds, Edward Carpenter comments at length on the subterfuge, as follows:

"The similarity of these ancient pagan legends and beliefs with Christian traditions was indeed so great that it excited the attention and the undisguised wrath of the early Christian Fathers. They felt no doubt about the similarity, but not knowing how to explain it, fell back upon the innocent theory that the Devil--in order to confound the Christians--had centuries before, caused the pagans to adopt certain beliefs and practices! (Very crafty, we may say, of the Devil, but very innocent of the Fathers to believe it!) Justin Martyr, for instance, describes the institution of the Lord’s supper as narrated in the Gospels, and then goes on to say: ‘Which the wicked devils have imitated in the Mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated you either know or can learn.’ Tertullian also says (De Praescriptione Hereticorum, C. 30; De Bapt., C. 3; De Corona, C. 15) that ‘the devil by the mysteries of his idols imitates even the main part of the divine mysteries. . . . He baptizes his worshippers in water and makes them believe that this purifies them from their crimes! . . . Mithra sets his mark on the forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread; he offers an image of the resurrection and presents at once the crown and the sword; he limits his chief priests to a single marriage; he even has his virgins and ascetics.’ Cortez, it will be remembered, complained that the Devil had positively taught to the Mexicans the same things which God had taught to Christendom."

To which may be added the astonishing statement of a modern Catholic priest, quoted by Carpenter (p. 68):

"And the Tartary Father Grüber thus testifies: ‘This only do I affirm, that the Devil so mimics the Catholic Church there, that although no European or Christian has ever been there, still in all essential things they agree so completely with the Roman Church as even to celebrate the Host with bread and wine; with my own eyes I have seen it!’"

There are many accusations against "the devil" in the same strain from Christian apologists. Not only were the theory and practice of the new cult identical in most respects with those of previous systems, but its own central thesis--the divinity of the Savior--had been anticipated by some hundreds of years in other cults.

"If we look close," says Prof. Bousset,7 "the result emerges with great clearness, that the figure of the Redeemer, as such, did not wait for Christianity to force its way into the religion of Gnosis, but was already present there under various forms."

Discussing the doctrine of a Savior, Carpenter writes:8

"Probably the wide range of this doctrine would have been far better and more generally known, had not the Christian Church, all through, made the greatest of efforts and taken the greatest of precautions to extinguish and snuff out all evidence of the pagan claims on the subject. There is much to show that the early Church took this line with regard to pre-Christian Saviors."9

Carpenter makes it clear that the coming of a Savior-God was in no sense a belief distinctive of Christianity. He explains that the Messianic prophecies of the Jews and the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah infected Christian teaching to some degree with Judaic influence. The Hebrew word Messiah, meaning "The Anointed One," occurs some forty times in the Old Testament; and each time in the Septuagint, written as early as the third century before our era, it is translated Christos, which also means "Anointed." It is thus seen, says Carpenter, that the word "the Christ" was in vogue in Alexandria as far back as 280 B.C. In the Book of Enoch, written not later than B.C. 170, the Christ is spoken of as already existing in heaven, about to come to earth, and is called "The Son of Man." The Book of Revelation is full of passages from Enoch, likewise the Epistles of Paul and the Gospels.

These statements are but a suggestion of the full truth in this direction. The Christians were not content to let the matter rest with the explanation that Satan had teased them with some anticipatory resemblances. They resorted to the most violent measures to blot out all links between their body of doctrine and former pagan material. This is a black page in the history of Christianity and a measure of evil policy not easily condoned. They destroyed as far as possible the entire body of pagan record to obliterate, as Carpenter says, "the evidence of their own dishonesty." Porphyry tells of their destruction of elaborate treatises on Mithraism. And his own work on Christianity fell a prey likewise. Their vandal work is of record. The whole matter may be tersely summed up in the world of Sir Gilbert Murray: "The polemic literature of Christianity is loud and triumphant; the books of the pagans have been destroyed."

It is clear, if comment be not superfluous, that Christianity has lost, not gained, by its masking the truth about its origins. Rabid fanaticism and the destruction of literature are always the resort of a bad cause, revealing a want of a good defense on open ground. The frenzy of zeal to wipe out all the testimony that pointed to derivation from pagan forms argues a weak confidence, if not a bad conscience.

It may be said, in partial extenuation of the Fathers’ conduct in the second, third and fourth centuries, that their discovery now and again of the startling similarities between their religion and earlier paganism may have come with genuine astonishment. It is commonly believed that the Greeks and Romans of the early Christian days stood far closer to the great Egyptian and Chaldean cultures than we do today. Such is far from the truth. The Egyptian papyri, monuments and tablets were a sealed book to the Christian Fathers, and remained so until Champollion worked out the key to the hieroglyphics from the Rosetta Stone in the early nineteenth century. The connection between the Christian cult and its antecedents in India, Chaldea and Egypt was not seen then as it can be today. We can in a measure understand the indignant surprise of the propagators of the new faith on finding that their alleged novel truth had been copied ahead of them by the heathen!

The crux of present interest in the matter is the consideration that the Christianity of our time is imperiling its own standing and repute by perpetuating a mistake made at its inception. Continuance in a folly so obvious in the face of modern scholarship will henceforth be an open confession of disingenuousness. It will be at the risk of the loss of the last vestige of respect yet accorded to it by studied intellectuals. Its only salvation from neglect and scorn constantly augmenting is a frank admission of its outgrowth from pagan antecedents, and a willingness to reconstruct its interpretation in relation to them. It must manifest a disposition to lift the stigma of "heathenism" from off the ancient faiths and restore them to their high place of nobility and worth. For in elevating its sources it will exalt itself. The outcome has been disastrous.

The Church might be well advantaged by paying head to Carpenter’s candid conclusions on the subject. He says:

"I have said that out of this World-Religion Christianity really sprang. It is evident that the time has arrived when it must either acknowledge its source and frankly endeavor to affiliate itself to the same, or failing that, must perish. . . . Christianity, therefore, as I say, must either now come frankly forward and, acknowledging its parentage from the great Order of the Past, seek to rehabilitate that, and carry mankind one step forward in the path of evolution--or else it must perish. There is no other alternative."10

It will be hard for an ingrained devotionalism to turn back and embrace what it had been so long taught to despise. But it must be done, or all pretense at regard for the truth be abandoned. The grand body of ancient teaching should never have been brought into contempt. Convicted of its error the Church must go the whole way in making the correction. No course but that of candor and honesty will now suffice, if indeed it is not too late even now to make amends and save a bad situation. Further concealment and evasion will only prove the more surely disastrous. For the sun of the moral zodiac has swung around into the sign of Libra, where the good and evil of historical action are weighed in the balance, and piled high on the adverse pan are the knavery and ignorance of early policies, the violent treatment of earnest esotericists, the destruction of priceless books and the cruel persecution of sincere sectaries. The way in which ecclesiastical Christianity meets this issue will determine its fate. If it confronts it with honest humility it may rise again in power. For there is power in the ancient spiritual science to transfigure Christian nations with the glow of righteousness. Readoption of the pagan wisdom will glorify a movement now sunk in nearly hopeless ineptitude. The Dark Ages are not yet past, and that treasure which slipped away through the fingers of early Christianity has not yet been restored.