AMBROSIA AND NECTAR

Theological confusion over the ancient use of bread and wine and various foods as types of spiritual nourishment makes necessary a chapter to clarify these matters. All such figures--heavenly manna, bread, wheat, ambrosia, nectar, meat, corn, wine, honey, barley--are forms of typology suggestive of the deific life ordered to mortals for their immortal nutriment. The body of spiritual intellect, Ceres, which was the true "cereal" food for man, was crushed into bits and then welded into cake so that it might be "eaten" by mortals. The body of Christ was the intellectual bread broken to be made edible and assimilable by our lower range of digestive capacity. We could not eat the god in his wholeness, or his rawness. The golden grain of life-giving wheat had to be crushed, ground, lacerated, before it could be rendered fit food for our consumption, in the Eucharistic cake and the sacrificial meal on the altar. Jesus says that we must "eat" his body, and the Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans (Apocryphal) says that the wheat of God must be ground between the teeth of wild animals, our animal bodies, to be made the pure bread of Christ.

The breaking of the bread and the libation of the wine are now clearly seen to be emblematic of the partition of the unified energy of the god’s life for distribution to the races of men. The banquets of the gods, the Passover feasts, the funerary meals, the last suppers and the Totemic repasts were all forms of a primary Eucharist. Man was given the transcendent privilege of feeding upon the life of the gods! And it can be freely admitted that nowhere is the necessity of transferring a literal physical meaning over to a spiritual one more definitely apparent than here.

The final definitive meaning of the great Eucharistic rite is bound up in the reconstitution of lost significance in this doctrine. The entire debate as to the matter of transubstantiation, transfusion, the partaking of the material body and blood or their inner essence, finds its resolution in the premises of this interpretation. Strangely enough it is now seen to be possible to give up the physical meaning of the sacrament and yet take it as a thing of literal reality. Man is literally to eat his Lord’s body; only it is not a physical body. The eating is literal and real enough, but neither it nor the body eaten is physical. Stout human good sense has revolted at a rite of swallowing a physical body, but theology has failed to picture how we can partake of a spiritual essence or body of divinity. The absorption and transmutation of currents of deific life in our own nature is as possible as our digestion of food. The physical rite was only a symbol and, its higher meaning once apprehended, its efficacy is secured. The eating of bread and drinking of wine outwardly dramatize the inner reality, a transubstantiation which can be literally, though not physically, true.

Says St. Paul:

shun idolatry, then, my beloved [doubtless the material sense of the symbols.]

I am speaking to sensible people: weigh my words for yourselves.

The cup of blessing which we bless, is that not participating in the blood of Christ?

The bread we break, is that not participating in the body of Christ?

(for many as we are, we are one Bread, one Body, since we all partake of the one Bread)."1

But the nauseous ecclesiastical wrangling over whether the bread and wine were the body and blood of a historical Jesus, or merely symbols of them, points to the frightful desecration of the wholly spiritual and figurative nature of the drama. The inner sense of this mighty typology passed out of ken with the submergence of Greek wisdom under canonical literalism. The body of Christ, emblemed by bread, wheat, ambrosia, meat, flesh or other forms of solid food, can mean nothing but the substantial essence of divine nature; the blood, wine, nectar, ichor, honey and liquid forms of nourishment can mean only that same divinity when liquefied to be poured out in streams of nourishment for man. The cutting of meat is to render it macerable; the grinding of grain is to render it edible; the crushing of the grape for wine is to liquefy it for drinking. In every case there is the destruc- tion of the bodily integrity of the food, and a fragmentation for better assimilation. The ritualism of Christianity thus still dramatizes the principles of Greek spiritual philosophy, which it persists in denying as part of a true religious system. If we were to eat the body of Christos and drink his blood, the first had to be macerated and the second liquefied.

Briefly, solid food typified divine essence on its own high plane, the more ethereal states being the more substantial! Liquid forms emblemed the same divine nature poured out in streams, "rivers of vivification," for the feeding of "secondary natures." Also in its descent godhood became admixed with the "watery" elements of the life down here and were further liquefied thereby. Solid food was the emblem of stability; liquid food the sign of that mobile essence which was to run out in blessing.

The several symbols must be looked at more minutely, for they cover deep suggestions of vital meaning. We take first that of bread. There is in all literature no more direct and compelling statement of the spiritual significance of bread than the verses of John’s Gospel (6:47 ff). Says Jesus:

"I am the bread of life. Your fathers did eat Manna in the wilderness and have died; such is the bread that comes down from heaven, that a man shall eat of it and shall not die.

"And in truth the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.

"Verily, verily I say unto you, Unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you have not life in you. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.

"For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me and I in him."2

The bread is, then, the radiant divine principle of light and life. The blood is the pledge of the same life poured out for man’s behoof. But Jesus was not the only divine personage who offered his body and blood for the nourishment of mortals. Says Massey:

"Horus was not only the bread of life derived from heaven and the producer of bread in the character of Amsu, the husbandman; he also gave his flesh for food and his blood for drink."3

Horus says (Rit., Ch. 53A): "I am the possessor of bread in Annu. I have bread in heaven with Ra." Again the deceased says: "I am the lord of cakes in Annu; and my bread is in heaven with Ra, and my cakes are on the earth with the god Seb." The distinction here between bread in heaven and cakes on earth is perhaps of vast significance, matching, as it does, many assertions that the soul is in heaven and the body on earth. The cake form of the divine pastry must have been regarded as a state of soul more highly advanced or refined by organic evolution. Many texts carry out the two types. The soul continues: "I eat of what they [the gods] eat there; and I eat of the cakes which are in the hall of the lord of sepulchral offerings"--or bread with the gods in heaven and cakes with the "dead" on earth. And in the Rubric to the 71st chapter of the Ritual this meaning is confirmed: "Sepulchral bread shall be given to him and he shall come forth into the presence of Ra day by day, and every day, regularly and continually." Sepulchral bread, like the funerary meals, undoubtedly refers to the "bread of Seb," or food of earth, earth and body being the sepulcher of the soul.

Wheat is much employed as a symbol. The law of divine incubation in matter is expressly intimated in Budge’s account of the Resurrection in Egypt:

"The grain which is put into the ground is the dead Osiris, and the grain which has germinated is the Osiris who has once again renewed his life."4

The resurrection of Osiris is closely interwoven with the germination of wheat. Jesus announces: "My father giveth you the true bread out of heaven and giveth life unto the world." And as Jesus was the divine bread out of heaven, the consubstantial essence with the Father, so Horus: "He is Horus, he is the flesh and blood of his father Osiris." Horus in his Christological character says: "I am a soul and my soul is divine. I am he who produceth food. I am the food that perisheth not--in my name of self-originating force, together with Nu"--the Mother Heaven. (Rit., Ch. 85).

The body of Christ could not be mystically eaten in its wholeness and unreduced power. It had to be crushed and bruised, broken and mutilated, so that from its deep gashes would flow out the living streams. If taken literally and materially, the wounded side is not only gruesome, but carries only a feeble suggestion of its grand meaning. And herein lies the spiritual meaning of all blood sacrifice and "shed blood." There is no truth found in it until for "blood" (of the gods) we read "divine intellect." Had early theology made it clear, in a word, that the "shed blood" of God connoted spiritual force, which we must embody in our lives, there would have been a vastly less amount of actual "bloodshed" in European history! The god shed his life essence for us out of his earth-bruised body of deific mind.

On this divine wheat, it is said, Osiris and his followers lived. It was a form of Osiris himself, as the god who brought it from heaven, and those who are it and lived upon it nourished themselves upon their god. As he came to feed them, he is declared to have "provided them with food and drink as he passed through the Tuat." How the partaking of the divine body would affect man is set forth by Budge:

"Eating and drinking with the spirits raised man’s nature and ‘made his spirit divine,’ and destroyed the feeling of separation which came with the appearance of death . . . And it must always be remembered that the altar was the place to possess the power of transmuting the offerings which were laid upon it and of turning them into spiritual entities of such a nature that they became suitable food for the god Osiris and his spirits."5

But we are those spirits, the living men or Manes in this underworld. The recovered Logia, or "sayings of the Lord," give a most direct allusion to the dismemberment doctrine of the Eucharist in the line: "the flesh of the Son of God, broken for all souls."

By a slight shifting of the symbol, the ceremony performed in the rites of many lands, of eating the serpent and drinking the dragon’s blood, was a replica of the Eucharistic festival. For the serpent was universally a type of supernal wisdom--"wise as serpents"--or the intellectual nature of the gods.

Horus, we find, was the Kamite prototype of Bacchus, Lord of Wine. Like Bacchus and Jesus, Horus is the vine, whose season was celebrated at the Uaka festival, with prodigious rejoicing and a deluge of drink. The divine mania, declared by Plato to be better than laborious reason, was the heady transport resulting from the imbibing of the spiritual liquor of life. The Bacchic feast of intoxication was, however sensual in later performance, a token of the legitimate and blessed ecstasy of the soul upon partaking of the heavenly wine. The vine and the mixing bowl were constellated as celestial symbols, the latter as the cluster called the Crater (Latin: bowl) or the Goblet, the sacramental cup or grail. The juice of the grape was the blood of Horus or Osiris, in the Egyptian Eucharist.

The Manes in one of the chapters in the Ritual prays that he may have possession of all things whatsoever that were offered ritualistically for him in the nether world, the "table of offerings which was heaped" for him on earth, "the solicitations that were uttered" for him, "that he may feed upon the bread of Seb," or food of earth experience. "Let me have possession of my funeral meals." A fact that should loom large in any valuation of Eucharistic meaning is that the flat surface of the coffin lid of the mummified Osiris constituted the table of the Egyptian Last Supper. It was the board whereon were served the mortuary meals. This unmistakable connection of the Eucharist with the burial, which is only the passing of the god into the mummy or incarnate form, speaks volubly as to the hidden relation of the two symbolic operations. For the god, about to be buried in body, was to be eaten by the mortal nature.

Ancient tribes indulged in the rite of a symbolic feeding upon the body of their god. At times when spiritual symbology had passed into the literalism of ignorance and barbarity, a living victim was cut to pieces and actually eaten by the celebrants. In very early periods of the matriarchate, when the mother was the only known giver and fount of life, a living mother was dedicated to the office of hostia or victim, and her body cut up and eaten as a token of the distribution of her fecund life. "The primordial Eucharist was eating the Mother’s flesh and drinking her blood!6 A converted phase of this custom exhibits the idea of the "disrobing" combined with the Eucharistic rite:

"A young girl called (significantly) the Meriah, was stripped stark naked and bound with cords to a maypole crowned with flowers, and ultimately put to death . . . torn to pieces and partly eaten."7

Human sacrifices were later commuted to animal offerings. And when crude natural instincts were softened by humane ideals, bread and wine were substituted. Thus one can see how an original spiritual conception, passing from hand to hand in the lapse of time and changing mores, reverts at one time to a brutal literalism amongst untamed peoples and again rises to symbolism in more cultured races. Through all stages, however, can be seen the lineaments of the germinal high spiritual idea back of each rite.

One of the Egyptian texts reads: "Shesmu cuts them in pieces and cooks them in his fiery cauldrons." Another line runs: "O, Osiris-Pepi, the Sma-Bull is brought to thee cut in pieces."

Expressing a phallic significance to the ritual, it is of interest to note that in very remote tribal celebrations of the Eucharist the female participants invited the fecundating offices of the males. The two sisters, or wife and sister, of Horus plead with the still recumbent god to arise and come and embrace them. There are two women in the Biblical resurrection scene. And when Isis and Nephthys invite the young lord to come to them, Isis says: "Thou comest to us from thy retreat to . . . distribute the bread of thy being, that the gods may live and men also." This is of transcendent importance as pointing to the verification of the basic thesis of our study, that the dip into incarnation is an avenue of evolutionary advance for both the god and the animal-human in their linked lives. It is striking that in this context both Jesus and Horus are themselves raised up from death, and both raise up in turn those below. Two far separate streams of evolution are confluent in man, and both are going onward as the result of their co-operative life in one body. The Manes pleads:

"May I go in and come out without repulse at the pylons of the lords of the underworld; may there be given unto me loaves of bread in the house of coolness, and offerings of food in Annu (Heliopolis) and a homestead forever in Sekhet-Aarru (paradise), with wheat and barley therefor."8

And the Rubric to this chapter recites that if the chapter be known by the Manes he shall come forth in Sekhet-Aarru, "and he shall eat of that wheat and barley and his limbs shall be nourished therewith, and his body shall be like unto the bodies of the gods." Here is perfect matching of Egyptian script with Paul’s statement that Christ shall "change our vile body into the likeness of his glorious body."

Holy Thursday was especially consecrated by the Roman Church to a commemoration of the Last Supper, and the institution of the Eucharistic meal was fixed, at which the corpus of the Christ, already dead, was laid out to be eaten sacramentally. In the Gospels the Last Supper, with Jesus present, is eaten before the crucifixion has occurred. There is obviously confusion of ancient ritualistic practice here, yet strangely enough no grave violence is done to the inner significance either way, since the Christ was "dead" in the one sense, and alive in the other. The whole of incarnation is the "crucifixion, death and burial" of the Lord.

After the raising of Osiris Taht says: "I have celebrated the festival of Eve’s provender," or the meal which came to be called the Last Supper. The raising of Lazarus is likewise commemorated by a supper. "So they made him a supper there" (John 12:2).

In the Greek Mystery play the candidate for initiation underwent the taurobolium or bull’s-blood bath. He stood under a grating and received upon his naked body the dripping blood of the sacrificial bull, in token that his nature was being suffused with the shed blood of the god emblemed by the astrological sign of Taurus, as in Christian practice it was the blood of the ram or lamb, the zodiacal Aries. The sign of the sun in the spring equinox determined the zodiacal type under which the Christos was figured. Elsewhere animal blood was actually drunk as a more literal partaking of the emblem of divine life.

In the Ritual the evening meal depicted the absorption of the higher nature into and by the lower, and the occasion was called the "Night of Laying Provision on the Altar." Not in a given moment of time, but in the total course of the cycle, each physical body was to be transubstantiated into spirit. The whole round of human incarnations was provided to this end. As the physical was converted into sublimated essence, we have an explanation of the strange disappearance of the physical body in all resurrection scenes. In one of the texts cited by Birch concerning the burial of Osiris at Abydos, it is said that the sepulchral chamber was searched, but the body was not found. "The ‘Shade’ it was found."9 In Marcion’s account of the resurrection no body is found in the tomb; only the phantom or shade was visible there. So in the Johannine version (Ch. 20:17) the body of Jesus is missing; the "Shade" is present in the tomb. But this was of a texture which forbade it being touched.

The night of the evening meal was called also "the night of hiding him who is supreme of attributes" (Rit., Ch. 18). We have seen that the descent into the tomb of body was considered a hiding, and the period of incarnation was called the night of the soul.

The Eucharistic emblems are many and varied. The deceased in the Ritual prays: "Grant unto me ale, and let me cleanse myself by means of the haunch and by the offerings of cakes." In Chapter 65 cakes of white grain and ale of red grain are mentioned. The juxtaposition of the statements in the following citation is noteworthy, as identifying the emblems with their non-material references: "Thou descendest under protection; are given unto thee breed, wine and cakes . . . thou art endowed with a soul, with power and with will." "he hungers not, for he eats bread-cakes made of fine flour . . . He lives on the daily bread which comes in this season"--of incarnation. "He shall have offered wine and cakes and roasted fowl for the journey . . ." The bird was a universal symbol of the soul, and its descent into the lower fires of earth and hell provided the basis of the allegory of "roasting." In Chapter 106 the Manes says: "Give me bread and beer. Let me be made pure by the sacrificial joint, together with white bread." Horus is both the bread of life and the divine corn (Rit. Ch. 83). In I Corinthians (37:38) Paul has a remarkable imagery of divine food:

"And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body."

The remarkable passage from the Apocryphal Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans, already quoted should be recalled at this point, as it definitely states that the soul comes to be food to the wild beasts, by whom it will attain its new godhood. The figure of the soul as wheat, ground between the teeth of the wild animals to be made the pure bread of Christ, is a most pungent typograph,--of the incarnation. And this passage prepares the ground for understanding the relevance of the manger symbolism in the Nativity scene. The Christ, at birth, was laid in a manger, the place where animals eat! He came to be eaten by the lower, animal nature.

In the Ritual the soul entreats: "Give thou bread to this Pepi, give thou beer to him, of the bread of eternity, and of the beer of everlastingness." "This bread which can not go mouldy is brought to Pepi, and this wine which can not go sour." What sublime imagery for states of spiritual immortality, and natures that change not!

A special feature in connection with the Eucharistic bread is seen in several passages from the Ritual, which are of great weight in stabilizing the general position of the purely figurative nature of the symbols. It is found in the chapter "of not eating filth in the underworld.":

"Let food come unto me from the place whither thou wilt bring food, and let me live upon the seven loaves of bread, which shall be brought as food before Horus, and upon bread which is brought before Thoth . . . Let me not eat filth and let me not trip up and fall in the underworld."

Again in the "chapter of not letting a man perform a journey being hungry" we read:

"Let me live upon the seven cakes which shall be brought unto me, four cakes before Horus, and three cakes before Thoth."

Four is the number of the lower physical world of the body, three the number of the soul as the triad of mind, soul, spirit. Horus was the soul in matter, Thoth the cosmic spirit.

Massey writes that a three-days fast was ended by the feeding of the multitude on what the Ritual terms "celestial diet," i.e., the "seven loaves" of heavenly bread that were supplied as sustenance for the risen dead in Annu, "the place of multiplying bread." In this phrase descriptive of Annu (Anu), one of the cities named as both the place of death and resurrection of the sun-god, we find the open sesame to the New Testament "miracle" of Jesus feeding the multitude. But in the Gospel "miracle," instead of the seven loaves we have the five loaves and the two small fishes, the latter being introduced evidently to bring in the Piscean house along with Virgo, the house of bread.

Hebrew symbology closely matches Egyptian. In Exodus (29) one reads that

"With the former lamb you must offer about seven pints of fine flour mixed with nearly three pints of beaten oil, and nearly three pints of wine as a libation . . . This is to be a regular burnt-offering made, age after age, at the entrance of the Trysting-Tent before the Eternal, where I meet you and speak to you."

If it was known that this Trysting-Tent is the human body, where alone God can meet man and speak to him, and that the three pints of oil and wine stand for the three elements of divine consciousness that are to be mixed with the seven elementary powers of nature or physis, the brotherhood of man might not so fearfully have miscarried. The human body is the place where the two lovers, spirit and matter, or body and soul, make their tryst, and that they are to make their libation to the Eternal before the entrance to the tent indicates that the higher and lower partners to the coming marriage compound their elements as they enter into incarnation. One stroke of symbolism tells us more than volumes of theology.

Divine food is called sometimes simply "meat." "Thou hast in great abundance in the Fields of the Gods the meat and drink which the gods live upon therein."

Even butter comes in as a type of representation, and coming from a female source, indicates the material foundation of life. The seven cows of Hathor produce the divine butter. As the formation of primal matter out of the primeval undifferentiated essence was pictured as a kind of curdling, the butter symbolism has a profound cosmical significance.

The Manes’ life is fed upon divine food throughout its sojourn in Amenta; Horus and Jesus, Jonah and Ioannes of Babylonia, all came as the zodiacal Pisces, or the Fish, offering themselves as food for man while he is immersed in the sea of generation! The Egyptians saw in the tortoise, which lived half in water and half on land, the sign of Libra, the Balance, and took it as another type of divine nourishment, when the two natures, divine and human, are in equilibration in the body.

When the Manes have sufficiently cultivated the fields of Aarru, Ra says to them: "Your own possessions, gods, and your own domains, elect, are yours. Now eat. Ra . . . appoints you your food." They have labored at cultivation and at last they collect their harvest of corn. Their seeds are warmed into germination by the sunlight of Ra at his appearance. The radiance of the god in human life causes the divine seed buried in us to sprout and grow as the sun fructifies plants in any earthly garden. The elect, enveloped in light, are fed mysteriously with food from heaven. Milk is one of the types used and is called "the white liquor which the glorified ones love," and it was supplied by the seven cows, of course, providers of plenty in the meadows of Aarru. The seven cows, of course, emblem the seven modifications of cosmic energy which create and sustain the worlds of life, the appropriate counterparts of which irradiate man’s being and formulate his basic constitution. The uplifted Manes says: "I eat of the food of Sekhet-Hetep and I go onward to the domain of the starry gods." The zodiacal twelve supply food to the gods and the elect in two groups, seven reapers and five collectors of corn (Book of Hades). The spiritualized Manes live on the food of Ra, "and the meats belong to the inhabitants of Amenta," a possible reference to the animal bodies on earth. The divine food is apparently repeated in the quails and manna that were sent from heaven in the Biblical account. The Osiris-Nu asserts: "I am the divine soul of Ra proceeding from the god Nu; that divine soul which is God. I am the creator of the divine food . . . which is not corrupted in my name of Soul." This soul "comes to him and brings him abundance of celestial food, and what the god lives on he also lives on, and he partakes of the food and drink and offerings of the god." At another place we are told that the Manes "maketh his purificatory substances with figs and wine from the vineyard of the god."

As the living rivers flow forth out of the heart of eternal matter, the womb of all life, the godly nutriment is again proffered to man streaming from the breast of the Mother Isis or Hathor. "She giveth him her breast and he suckleth thereat." Paul (I Corinthians 10:1, 2) writes that all those in Christ have eaten "the same supernatural food and all drank the same supernatural drink (drinking from the supernatural Rock which accompanied them--and that Rock was Christ)." Revelation (2:17) enlightens us with the following: "To him that overcometh, to him will I give of the hidden manna." When the deceased is making his way through Amenta, Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, goddess of Love, emerges from the trees and offers him a drink of fruit juice, which she prepared to woo him with. By accepting this gift he is bound to remain the guest of the goddess and return no more to the world of the living, unless by her permission. This fruit is not that which is sent down gratuitously from heaven, but the fruit of the soul’s living experience on earth, yet it is the same thing in the end. For it is sent down as seed, and bears its fruit on the ends of the branches of the Tree of Life and Knowledge, of the taste of good and evil here on earth. And this is the same tree which in the last chapter in the Bible is declared to bear twelve fruits upon its branches. These twelve fruits are the completed unfoldment of the twelve original types of Kumeric infant deity that will be brought to their maturity by cultivation on this planet. The bread of Seb becomes metamorphosed eventually into the divine food. Eve and Hathor are identical figures. They offer to virgin spiritual units and to animal man the opportunity to live, grow and create, out of which cycle they will emerge as gods, through knowledge of good and evil. And the temptation is baited with the promise, "yet shall not surely die." The fruit of earthly life is divinization. Says Massey:

"Hathor was the goddess draped in golden vesture, who drew men with the cords of a love that was irresistible."

"Instead of being damned eternally through eating the fruit of the tree, the Manes in Amenta are divinized piecemeal as the result of eating it." (Rit., Ch. 82).10

Again pause must be made to reflect that had these two items of theology been known in clear light, as here presented, whole centuries of human bigotry and hate might have been painted in brighter colors.

Red as the color of blood, and white, the color of milk, emblem the two natures of man, his bodily birth through the mother’s blood, and his later nourishment through her milk. Red is connected closely with the first Adam, whose name means in one interpretation, Red Earth, that is, physical matter mixed with red blood. In this character he would be the answer to the Bible’s query, "Who is this that comes from Edom, with his garments crimson in Bozrah?" Edom was this man Adam, red earth, mortal clay mixed with the life essence of divinity typed by the blood, in which the Old Testament affirms several times the life of the soul is to be found. And he who comes out of Edom may be taken as the Christ, the Son of Man. For the first Adam is to give birth to the second Adam. Blood here types the divine part of man, as contrasted with earth or with water. Jesus emblems the two births as those of "water and the blood." But when the blood is used to typify the lower natural man then it is contrasted with the white essence, the mother’s milk, a higher nutriment than her blood, or with the father’s seminal essence. White universally types that which is spiritually highest, up to the shining white raiment of the redeemed. Perfection being the synthesis of all lower or divided natures in original unity, white represents that perfection, as it is the synthesis of the colors. Ra says to the god: "Light the earth up bright! My benefits are for you who are in the light." The food he promised them is itself of the nature of intellectual light. "The immortal liquor is the Solar Light."11 No utterance surpasses this for sublime import. A Chaldean Oracle asserts that "the Intelligible is food to that which understands." And the solar light is intelligence, shining abroad.

Looking now at wine, many phases of meaning not commonly considered are brought to view. The grape and the vine share in the symbolism. There is first the significant detail, brought out by Massey, that the Egyptian Garden of Aarru, or Allu (the Islamic Garden of Allah!) has in the Ritual the same essence as the substance of that celestial life itself in the Paradise above. The wine offered by the gods for man’s uplift is their celestial nature.

Horus came as the lord of wine and is said to be "full of wine" at the Uaka festival. The old "festival of intoxication" is the prototype of all later communal rites that celebrate the outpouring of lofty deity. The form of this festival has become universally popular, but as usual its interior meaning has been lost. The Christian Agape and Eucharist are moderate demonstrations of the same old effort to commemorate the perpetual gift of divine afflatus to mankind. Horus achieved the sub-title of "the Jocund" when he rose up "full of wine," and was astrologically typed as Orion, with the constellation of the Crater or bowl for his cup. The fable said that this cup held seven thousand gallons of intoxicating drink and that Horus brought the grapes to make the wine. "Thou didst put grapes in the water that cometh forth from Edfu." The seven thousand had no explicit numerical significance beyond the number seven itself, the thousands only adding the idea of multiple division and diffusion. Horus came to distribute to the thousands of mortals the divine essence in its seven-fold expression in the full gamut of its nature. Who shall prove that the Jesus of the canonical Gospels, who gained notoriety as a wine-bibber and came eating and drinking, is not a frayed copy of this Kamite original? For Greece in her Bacchus repeated the same type. Christ came to intoxicate man with the divine wine.

In the Assyrian account of the Deluge those who came out of the ark poured out a libation of seven jugs of wine. And they built an altar on the peak of the mountain, or set up contact between man and god at the summit of man’s spiritual being. Likewise after the Deluge Noah planted the vine and became intoxicated. This vine may be seen in the decans of Virgo, where the star Vindemeatrix denotes the time of the vintage in Egypt, a symbol of the infusion of the higher nature into the lower.

The Christ treading the grapes in the winepress is all very like the portrait of Har-Tema (Horus), the mighty avenger of his despoiled father, and he came at the end and the re-beginning of the cycle of incarnation, which is called the year of redemption. Careful research discloses that Edom is another name for Esau, the Red; he had asked to be fed with pottage, translated in one text "red." Edom, not identical with Eden, seems to refer to earth as the "red land." In all its Biblical usages Edom refers to the lower kingdom of human nature, not the celestial sphere in any case. Edom was heavily punished by the Eternal, David put garrisons in it and reduced its people to servants, and they later revolted. It refused passage to the Israelites, as the lower nature refused entry to the godly part. In Obadiah (I:6) we read: "But what a ransacking of Edom! What a rifling of her treasures!" Edmonites were Esau’s descendants. The avenging god’s anger (dramatization merely, of course) is apparently vented upon the lower propensities of human nature, which are the foes of his incarnating enterprise, the obstructors of his path and mutilators of his father Osiris. The figure of treading the winevat is a noble one and definitely points to the earth as the great winepress wherein the essence of the mortal nature is crushed and trampled by deity into a liquor to reinforce the god’s dying life. That the god trod the winepress alone is evidence of the loneliness of his mission. Jesus’ loneliness is accentuated in the Gospel drama. That the god comes from the underworld stained with the blood of his foes is an allegorical way of saying that he had not kept himself entirely "unspotted from the world" in his wrestling with the flesh. Greek philosophy asserts that his garments were badly stained by terrene contacts.

Plutarch tells us that the Egyptian priests conceived vines to have sprung from the blood of those fallen deities mixed with the earth. A Babylonian legend sets forth that the blood of the god Belus was mixed with the earth in the same way. Man is compounded of the mud of earth for his body, and the blood of the gods for his animating soul. He is Adam, red earth.

Hathor, the great mother of the living in Egyptian mythology, pours out the heavenly drink made from the fruit of the sycamore-fig tree, a most prominent ancient form of the tree of life. Hathor was the Shekhem, or shrine of the child, figured as the bearing tree, the genetrix, the womb, bird-cage and significantly the tomb, not that of final death, but of buried life about to germinate. The word Shekhem, hidden shrine, is from sekh, "liquid," "drink." Teka means "to supply with drink." The fig, like the pomegranate, is an emblem of the womb. The Persea fruit is the fruit of the sycamore-fig tree. Sycamore is from sykos (sukos), the Greek for the fig-tree, from the fruit of which a powerful beverage was made. The root means latent power unfolded, as by fermentation; to fill with aeriform spirit force, as by the bubbles of air in fermentation. It becomes possible now to sense the meaning of Jesus’ pronouncement (Luke 17:6):

"If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed ye would say unto this sycamore tree [Moffatt: ‘mulberry’], Be thou rooted up and be thou planted in the sea; and it would have obeyed you."

As Revelation and the Book of the Dead both describe the entry of divine fire into the "sea," causing a fermentation in it to spiritualize or divinize it, the sycamore’s removal into the sea to lodge inspiriting power in it at last comes to clear significance. To have faith as a grain of mustard seed, so tiny, is for the soul, buried in the deep soil of the mortal self, to have an instinctive assurance that, like the life in any seed, it will rise out of death to live again.

Who can fail to trace the Genesis story in the following legend preserved among the Hottentots? The deity, Heitsi Eibib, tells his son Urisip, the whitish one, not to eat of the raisin trees in the valley. Heitsi Eibib in his travels came to a valley (the earth) in which the raisin trees were ripe. There he was attacked by a severe illness. Then his young second wife (Eve is often called Adam’s second wife, Lilith being the first) said: "This brave one is taken ill on account of these raisins; death is here at the place." The old man told his son: "I shall not live, I feel it." And he spoke further: "This is the thing which I order you not to do: Of the raisin trees of this valley ye shall not eat, for if ye eat of them I shall infect you; and ye shall surely die in a similar way." So he died. When they moved to another place, they heard always from the side whence they had come a noise as of people eating raisins and singing. The song ran:

"I, father of Urisip,

Father of this unclean one;

I, who had to eat these raisins and died,

And, dying, live."

The raisin tree gave dysentery, and this natural detail was used to prefigure the sickness, swooning, distress and intoxication that came over the gods upon their plunge into this life, or their eating of the fruit of the tree whose juice made them drunk with a mixture of spiritous and sensuous ingredients. This is, in short, to type the effect of incarnation upon the god as a bewildering, befuddling, stupefying drunkenness, as from a semi-poison injected into his blood; and such indeed the Platonists have ever described it.

"Heaven is pregnant with wine" is an Egyptian fragment.

In the Book of Judges (Ch. 6) Gideon, the son of Joash, is found beating out some wheat inside the winepress to save it from Midian, when the angel of the Lord comes down to entrust him with the commission to redeem Israel. What appears here like a mixed metaphor is perhaps only a close mingling of several customary symbols. Beating out the chaff was a kindred figure with that of stamping out the wine.

Greek philosophy, rising sphinxlike out of the Orphic Mysteries, proclaims a hidden meaning of the grapes in the winepress. Thomas Taylor says that the pressing of grapes is as evident a symbol of the dispersion of divine energy into humanity as could well be devised.12 The grape was for this reason consecrated to Bacchus, who personalized empyreal intelligence flowing out in divided streams. Previous to its pressing it aptly represented that which is collected into one; when pressed into juice it aptly represented the diffusion of the same. Hence wine-pressing symbols the crushing and division of unity to flow into multiplicity and spiritize divided creatural life. What is most singular is that Taylor likens this process to another oft-used typology, that of fleece, stating that the Greek word for "wool," lenos, is practically identical with that for a "winepress," lenôs. The tearing and carding of wool matches the liquidation of the grape for purposes of typism. Should it be deemed strange, then, that Gideon, found threshing wheat in the winepress, should immediately ask the Eternal to authenticate his commission to him by the test of the dew on the fleece? It need hardly be pointed out what strength these symbols of wine and fleece, along with flour, bring to the theory of dismemberment. And there is also the obvious suggestion of the fruitful rendering of the symbolism of the mythological Golden Fleece (Aries of the zodiac), as typing the Christ avatar who came under that sign. Fleece, says Taylor, is the symbol of laceration or distribution of intellect, or Dionysus, into matter; and he adds that Isidorus traces lana (Latin: "wool") from laniando, "tearing," as vellus (Latin: "fleece") from vellendo, also "tearing." "Delano," "to tear asunder," he uses "in relation to Bacchic discerption." So succinctly and integrally is the history of ideas preserved in the amber of words.

Massey explains:

"The typical tree of life in an Egyptian-Greek planisphere is the grapevine. This is the tree still represented by the female vine-dresser and the male grape-gatherer in the decans of Virgo [W. H. Higgins, Arabic Names of the Stars]. Orion rose up when the grapes were ripe to represent the deliverer who was coming ‘full of wine.’"13

The birthplace of the grapes was figured in or near the sign of Virgo, the mother of the child who was to rise up out of death to bring salvation to lower man under the symbol of the vine. He was also typed as the rising Nile, bringing a new birth to the parched land of Egypt. And the grape ripened with the rising inundation! In ways that astonish us with the fidelity of the parallelism, both natural and astronomical phenomena reflect man’s inner history.

The vine and sycamore tree were two types of producing life in the Kamite Paradise. In the Papyrus of Nu the Manes prays that he may sit under his own vine and also beneath the refreshing foliage of the sycamore-fig tree of Hathor. The Garden of Aarru is the garden of the grape, and the god Osiris is sometimes seated in a Naos, under the vine, from which branches of grapes are hanging. Moreover Osiris was charactered as the vine and his son Horus the unbu or Branch. Need we pause to point out the identity of this with the Biblical sentence (I Kings 4:25): "And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig-tree"?

Jesus was the true vine of the Logos and we are his branches, destined to bear the fruit. Horus bore the same representative character in Egypt. The American Indians have traditions of tribes climbing to safety across the Mississippi, or up out of the interior of mother earth to the land of light, by means of trees with overhanging branches and grapevines. (Schoolcraft: VI, 14). Jack climbing the bean stalk to overcome the ogre is a variant of the aboriginal type-legend.

The Eucharist easily lends itself to characterization as a festival of intoxication if it is viewed in the light of the following lines from the Ritual: "Are not all hearts drunk through love of thee, O Un-Nefer (Osiris), triumphant?" The entire body of mystic testimony from St. Augustine to St. Francis of Assizi and on through to the modern revivalist, is to the effect of the spiritual intoxication of the supreme love frenzy or mania, as Plato terms it. It needs no descanting to enhance it further. There is every warrant for the ancient imagery. Only it must be seen as working at both ends of the gamut. The meaning covered by intoxication, a swooning and giddy stupefaction after his entry into mortal body; while mortal man undergoes a more positive intoxication, an exaltation and marvelous giddy expansion of his faculties when he becomes filled with the power of divine intellect and begins to feel its influence expanding the whole range and vividness of his consciousness. The one is to be thought of as a scattering of wits, the other as an overpowering afflatus. Yet incarnation is the open door to both god and animal for the advance into higher life, and their opposite elements finally so merge in the new expansion that the intoxication is the same for both in the end. The god, drunk with animal sensual enjoyment, and the animal mind, intoxicated with undreamed-of delirium, reel onward together in the dance of life, and who shall sharply distinguish where intoxication ends and ecstasy begins? All this is germane to the understanding of the symbolism and the irrefragible factuality behind it.

The Delaware Indians put into effect an outward demonstration of the intoxicating imagery when in one of their festivals an old man threw handfuls of tobacco on heated stones in a tent, and the sitters, narcotized by the fumes, were carried in a swoon. The ceremony typed the inhalation of spirit, producing a delirious rapture. Vapor has ever been a mode of representing spirit, and the smoke of the Indian’s pipe was suggestive of allaying the fierce nature of rude forest children to mildness and peace.

The Egyptian typology placed a Lake of Sa in the northern heavens. Sa was the name of a sort of ichor that circulated in the veins of the gods and perfected mortals. This they could communicate to men on earth and give them health, vigor and new life. This datum will be of significance when we come to study the Egyptian spirit body, the Sahu.

Honey, as symbol, shared place with the Greek nectar served at the tables of the Olympian gods. Its plain suggestion is of the sweetness of the divine life as sustenance for starving mortals, and as bestowing immortality. Some of its relevance of course can be traced to its origin from the bee. There is a tradition that bees alone of all animals descended from Paradise. Virgil (Georgics IV) celebrates the never-dying bee that ascends alive into heaven. The faithful diligent insect is thus an image of the immortal soul, or the god. Egyptian typology makes the Abait, or bird-fly, the guide of the souls of the dead on their way to the fields of Aarru, the land of celestial honey. The "beeline" directness of travel betokens the unerring sense of the soul, lost afar in Amenta’s fields, to go straight home. This Aarru is, of course, "Jerusalem the Golden, with milk and honey blest" of the Christian hymn. The "ba" name of the astral or ethereal body of man in Egypt may be related to "bee." For ba is also a word for "honey." Honey was used in embalming. It is suggestively entwined with the imagery of the "meads of amaranth." The soul is as the bee gathering sweet honey of immortality from the flowers of life experience on earth. Also the bee reproduces the new life in plants by acting as the intermediator between male and female flower elements; and the divine soul likewise links male spirit and female body and marries them in man.

The myth represents the sun, eternal type of divine generative source, as "letting water fall from his eyes; it is changed into working bees; they work in the flowers of each kind, and honey and wax are produced instead of water." Shu and Tefnut give honey to the living members. Divine emanations, falling as tear drops, diffuse their power of blessing over the earth, like Shakespeare’s "gentle rain from heaven."

The Samson story in Judges bears on the meaning of honey. "Out of the strong came forth honey." The honey was found by the solar god (Samson means "solar") in the decaying carcass of the lion upon his return. The return types evolution, as the outward journey, involution. The god, as the lion, is "slain" on the outward arc or descent, overcome by matter. But in evolution, the bees (the soul) have built their nest of sweet honey in the very midst of the old decay, in the very body of corruption. In the Persian myth we see the lion depicted with a bee in his mouth.

There are, however, intimations of involved astrological reference in the linking together of the bee and the lion. Massey thinks that the bee typifies the sweet refreshing waters of the inundation in Egypt, which came to its fullest outpouring in the month of July, the sign of the lion. His elaboration of the point is lengthy and the reader is referred to his Lecture on Luniolatry. The lion, or lioness, he claims, types the fiery solar heat (Cf. the lioness in heat) and the bee the cooling influence of the waters. For the hero, Samson, fairly immersed in symbols of the number thirty, obviously is a soli-lunar character, and the full moon in the lion sign rose in conjunction with the sign of Aquarius, the Waterman. The moon brought the cool waters that conquered the solar heat. The application of the typism may hint at the god’s bringing the force of cool intellectual judgment to allay the fierce heat of sensual passion of the lower self. The types of divinity in the summer season are the reverse of those appropriate to the winter. Salvation comes to man in the heat of summer in the form of shade, coolness and water. Earth and water type the lower self and the evil side under winter’s symbolism. But they spell salvation under reversed conditions. The duality and reversibility of the symbols must be constantly borne in mind.

The most meaningful aspect of the wine symbolism is perhaps that of fermentation. This arises from the development in the liquid of a potent energy at first latent. Hidden and buried, silent and inert, the dynamic fiery spirit rises to activity and exerts an influence that yields to mortals a semblance of divine inspiration and glorious liberty. As a symbol it is far-reaching and vivid. The "spirit" in wine and the spirit in man are not inaptly related even as a pun. The Greeks indulged in such puns, as in the Cratylus of Plato, and yet have covered the most majestic significations under these light touches. The "spirit" in wine is a graphic figure of the other spirit. Wine is water that has in it the fire of spirit, and in American pioneer days it was often called "fire-water." Fire universally typed spirit. Grape juice is just water of earth that has had injected in it a power engendered by the sun, again the type of spirit, as it passed through the length of the vine to be deposited in the berry at the end. The sun, like the Christ it symboled in his "miracle" at Cana, turns water into wine in any vineyard!

The Egyptian goddess who represented the "spirit" of alcoholic fermentation was Sekhet, and her pictures show her carrying the sun-disk on the head of a lioness. Her name is also, says Massey, the name for the Bee. As a goddess Sekhet is the fiery energy of Mother Nature, which engenders the ferment out of which comes the soul, the bee. For she is also the goddess of sweetness or pleasure, literally "goddess of the honeymoon." She is designated the "force or energy of the gods, astonisher of mankind." (Birch, Gallery, p. 17.) She was the inspirer of the male, his Sakti, or creative force. The Egyptian sakh means "to inflame," "to inspire," and Sekhet is the double force personified as female. This sakh brings us close again to the syc- of the sycamore fig, whose juice bred spirit intoxication, and the Greek psyche hovers close in the background of this etymology. The soul is, or causes, the divine ferment in the body of life, developed there, as in the vine, by the sun of man’s spiritual self. Drink and divinity are thus found under one name, as were fleece and grape, seven and peace, star and soul.

Isis, whose original variant names were Hes, Hesit, Sesit, Sesh, etc., also carries this element of Sekhet’s function. Sesh means primarily "breath," which is the inspirer (Latin: spiro, I breathe) in the sense of imparting the gift of higher life of spirit to a creature "dead" in matter. Man was not finished until God had breathed into him divine breath. Ses, Sesh is "breath," "flame," "combustion"; also "the spirit of wine." From it Massey traces the "svas" from which we have the Swastika, the sign of vivifying fire,--"tika" meaning "cross."

Another root yields meaning along the same line. Kep means "to light," "kindle," "heat," "cause a ferment." And from it Massey derives the Greek fire-forger of the gods, Vulcan or Hephaestus, who is Kep and the Greek root of the Latin aestas, summer heat. He forges for the gods whatever needs to be shaped by fire. Vapor produced from water by heat was the primitive illustration for breath which gave a creature its soul. It was a natural marvel, this emergence of a principle of fiery energy in vapor form, so likely a type of soul engendered in man out of the mixture of his lower earth and water elements.

Horus and Jesus, both turning water into wine, represented this transforming power of the god, maturing the inert elements of sense and feeling into spiritual character. Horus put grapes into the water, and "the water of Teta is as wine even as that of Ra." The Jewish Feast of the Tent or Tabernacle was a ceremony embodying the turning of water into wine.

There are many instances of rivers and seas being turned into blood, Revelation reports that at the sound of the angel’s trumpet a mountain, around which lightning played (symbol of the divine emanations, Jove’s thunderbolts), went down into the sea and changed its waters into blood. As the first forms of life were generated in sea water, their initial body plasms were just that water. In eras of evolution this primitive life fluid was gradually transmuted, by the operation upon it of even higher voltages of life force, into that which eventually in man became human blood! Sea water has been turned into blood in man’s constitution! Blood is the fluid containing the living dynamic, and the Bible states that the soul dwells in the blood. Now, astonishingly, chemical analysis reveals that sea water and human blood are identical in elementary composition. It has remained for science and ancient symbolism to combine in this latter day to tell us the hidden meaning of one of the greatest spiritual allegories that theology failed to interpret for eighteen centuries.

Blood is the last of the Eucharistic signs to be dealt with. Few Christians can tell capably why it was that the human race had to be redeemed by the blood of an innocent victim poured out for its guilt. There is so glaring an inference of vicariousness here that common sense has halted long before giving credence to this dogma. It seems to contravene all natural justice and leaves an unstudied laity incredulous and unconvinced. There could be found no ground of fitness in the necessity that made a being of a higher rank, a god, come down and suffer gratuitously for sins of ours. With its linkage to evolution and anthropology cut totally away from it, there was no way to connect the doctrine with elucidative reference. Even Massey revolts in horror from the Biblical verse, in the words of the Son: "My father! This day shalt thou refresh thyself in blood." The picture of a blood-lustful deity terrifies us. But such revulsion is gratuitous. The primal implications hold nothing to cause us horror. The Son is only reminding the Father that the descent of his germinal essence into the blood of this human body would give him his next cycle of rebirth and renewal. "Day" is one of the glyphs for cycle, aeon, round of incarnation, as in Genesis with its seven "days" of creation. The god finds fresh experience and new conquest in each life; he renews himself like the phoenix or the eagle, when bathed in new blood-bodies in incarnation. In our cycle he does this in the blood of man. But what might well cause Massey and the whole world abhorrence is that blood as symbol should have been taken for blood as substance, and that a whole millennium and a half of alleged civilized history has been deluded with the picture of a human personage buying unearned redemption for a race by the gruesome act of pouring out the blood of his physical body on a wooden cross! Rational reaction from religion is largely, if not overwhelmingly, justified. To a degree distressing to contemplate religion has befogged the mind of the world by converting the forms of ancient tropism into a sense repugnant even to the intelligence of children.

The entire theological theme of blood sacrifice, so literalized in the Old Testament rites, reduces itself to the one simple meaning of divine life poured out to circulate vitally through the mental and spiritual veins of man on earth. Mortal man underwent a transfusion of deific "blood." Divine energies of consciousness course and thrill through our life. This higher infusion regenerates us, makes us new. The lamb slain on the altar was but the ceremonial token of this meaning. The bull-bath of Mithraic rites was the washing away of sin in the blood of the Tauric emanation of deity. On the other side, however, the consuming of the animal on the altar by fire that flashed down from heaven was the token of the transfiguration of the animal nature in man into immortal purity by the aeonial "burning" of the godly fire in life after life. Man was nourished in the substance of animal life, as the candle flame feeds upon the animal tallow below it, converting it from gross substance into divine flame. That a race of people could for centuries believe that God demanded the killing and burning of actual animals on actual altars for his sensuous delight of sniffing the odors of roasting flesh--a sweat savor unto his nostrils--well nigh destroys faith in human intelligence. The imputation of gory sensualism to supreme deity, the unconscionable assumption that he would delight in the slaughter of billions of his own creatures, and that he would discharge man’s sins by accepting the suffering of a lower order of his creatures as yet incapable of sin, form a list of theological aberrations that have gone far to throw the general mind into nearly barbarian besottedness.

The cleansing power of the blood was in part at least borrowed from the fact of the menstrual process. The ancient allegorists did not hesitate to employ the generative functions in the way of cosmic analogues. It is outwardly easy to fasten the charge of phallicism on the symbolic religion of the past. But man’s creative processes are typical of all creative process, and the sages did not scruple to use the known functionism to depict the unknown cosmic procedures. There is no taint of ill in this until sordid sensuality invades the realm of pure depiction. Each incarnation in earthly bodies subjected the soul to a sort of menstrual purification, working, so to say, a lot of bad blood out of the system of god-man. It linked him with a body of flesh which came "under the law" of periodicity and purgation. Books on primeval religious customs tell of men dressing as women and laboring to manifest the menstrualia, in token of the entry of the god into his feminine phase, becoming a child of Mother Nature. In Egypt Tefnut (the Greek Daphne) was a name formed from the root tefn, tebn, "to shed, drip, drop." The same root means also to "rise up, spread, illumine," as the dawn. The dawn of womanhood came with the cleansing by blood.

However theology might like to disown the connection, this background looms as essential for our interpretation of the Gospel "bloody sweat" of the savior in the Garden of Gethsemane. The menstrual purification of the god in Egypt was in Smen! Legends of Tem, Atum and Ra portray them as shedding drops of their blood, under male symbolism, to fall on the earth and create mankind, or man and woman, Shu and Tefnut, Hu and Sa. The relation of Smen to the essence of the male blood is obvious. The gods poured out their vital life to fecundate matter, their mother and sister, to give creation a new birth. This general typism is all that could ever have been hinted at under the figure of the bloody sweat. The emission of life-fluid is accompanied by sweating. The male and female aspects of the meaning enter side by side. Smen, says Massey, was the place appointed for the purging, purifying and cleansing of souls. It is the place of pain and torment, the birthplace of the new moon, symbol of the infant birth of solar light in humanity. Hesmen is the Egyptian name for the rhythmic purgation. It is the voice of matter, the woman, saying in the Ritual: "I am the woman, the orb in the darkness; I have brought my orb to darkness where it is changed to light." The bloody sweat of the god in Smen is described as "the flux emanating from Osiris," when Osiris is the god in his feminine or material expression. It is the divine "shedding of blood," without which humanity would have no cosmic opportunity to escape the eternal weight of karmic "sin."

Where the outpouring of deific power was not as yet linked with Mother Nature’s body, was not yet implemented by its proper Shakti, or force in matter, the god was figured as "masturbating." Kheper-Ra was the Egyptian deity fulfilling this function. His type was the beetle or scarabaeus, which, according to Egyptian belief, created its young by itself alone, without the female. There was hidden in this symbolism the truth that would have settled the famous "filioque" dispute that split the early Church into Greek and Roman Catholicism.

Chapter 17 of the Ritual runs:

"O ye gods who are in the presence of Osiris, grant me your arms, for I am the god who shall come into being among you. Who then are these? They are the drops of blood which came forth from the phallus of Ra when he went forth to perform mutilation upon himself. They sprang into being as the gods Hu and Sa." [In another legend Shu and Tefnut.]

The Ritual states that "the sun mutilates himself, and from the streams of blood all things come into existence." Here is so-called phallicism, yet with sublimity.

Matching the Assyrian and Egyptian jugs of wine and pitchers of mixed drink, the Hebrews (Leviticus 4) were ordered to sprinkle some blood seven times before the Eternal in front of the curtain of the inner sanctuary. This was for a sweet savor and soothing fragrance to deity. In their sacrifices they were instructed never to consume the blood of any animal: "The soul of any creature lies in its blood . . . blood expiates by reason of the soul in it."

Esau was called "red" because he sucked his mother’s blood before his birth. He is said to have sold his birthright for a mess of "red." Tradition shows him to have been a divinity imaged by the solar hawk, which symbolized blood "because they say that this bird does not drink water but blood, by which the soul is nourished" (Hor-Apollo, Bk. I, 6). The soul lives on natural forces, its Mother’s blood, before it is born into Christhood in man.

One of the marvels in Exodus that were to persuade the reluctant Egyptians to let the Israelites go was the turning into blood some water that Moses poured on the ground. The pouring it on the ground would point to the necessity of making the transformation on earth. A Mexican legend sets forth the vivification of the dead remains of former races by the blood of the gods.

As the sun of spirit descending into the darkness of matter, in the evening or autumn, the god was suggestively depicted as the woman, suffering, becoming ill, wasting her substance unproductively. The god linked with Mother Nature was as a woman not yet impregnated by spirit. It required the passage of "virtue" from the Christ to stop her wastage.

A further aspect of the red-and-white symbolism comes to view here. If the red types the mother’s blood giving generation, the white types the seminal life of spirit. The union of the white of divinity with the red of nature produces the new birth. Nor did the sages overlook the meaningful fact that it is the white creative essence of the father’s blood that releases the stream of the mother’s white nourishment for the new child. So the first or natural man, born of the blood, the first Adam or "red earth," is raised to his status of spiritual new birth by "the white liquor which the glorified ones love." And both the mother’s and the father’s condensation of white creative and sustaining essence is distilled out of the natural red blood. Our divinization turns us from red to white. Under Christmas tropism, the red stands for the divine; the green--universal color of nature--for the physical.

The red color of the evening sun, sinking into his feminine phase, and the red color of the morning sun, when for a brief space of his infancy he is still close to his Mother Earth, like the human child tied through the first years to his mother, again beautifully adumbrate the feminine connotation of red; while the white blaze of the sun throughout the day suggests the male or spiritual power.

In the Ritual (Ch. 37A) the Speaker is told he shall make four troughs of clay and shall "fill them with milk of a white cow." The four containers of the divine ichor are the physical, etheric, emotional and concrete mental natures in man’s lower self. An instructive picturing of the human creation is given in this Kamite description: the basis of the oblation in the Egyptian sacrifice is "the blood of beings that have been destroyed."

"Said by the majesty of the god, Let them begin with Elephantine and bring to me the fruits in quantity. And when the fruits had been brought they were given . . . (Lacuna).

"The Sekti (miller) of Annu was grinding the fruits, while the priestesses poured the juices into vases; and those fruits were put into vessels with the blood of the beings, and there were seven thousand pitchers of drink.

"And there came the majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, with the gods, to see the drink after he had ordered the goddess to destroy the beings in three days of navigation."

The Assyrian seven jugs and the Egyptian seven thousand pitchers of drink are brewed from the blood of the massacred beings (the dismembered incarnating gods) mingled with the juice of the fruits of earth. This is vastly significant. Massey comments instructively:

"Blood and the fruit of earth were the two primitive forms of the offering, and these are blended together in a deluge of intoxicating drink."14

The plain inference here is that the mingling in one drink of the juices of the fruits of earth and the blood of the "beings," is a type of the blending in one composite nature of the life of the gods and that of animal-man--the base of all religion.

An exactly similar depiction is found in the Berosan account of the Babylonian creation. The deity Belus cut off his own head; whereupon the other gods mixed the blood as it gushed out with the earth, and from the mixture men were formed. "On this account it is that men are rational and partake of divine knowledge."

The Beast in Revelation is to be overcome by the blood of the Lamb. The lower sense creature in us is to be raised up by the infusion of godlike quality from above.

We are now in possession of much of the multifarious data which will enable proper judgment to be exercised in interpreting the central significance of the Eucharistic meal. We commemorate our partaking of the Lord’s body and blood to remind our sluggish sense that there dwells in us a god, whose nature is compounded with that of a beast.

In the drama the Lord assigned immediately a pointed reason for his institution of the rite. And in this reason we come upon one of the pivotal elements of the Platonic philosophy, the loss of which out of Christian theology has contributed to our generally palsied grasp of fundamental truth. Little is it dreamed that the Lord himself announced the great Platonic doctrine of "reminiscence" in the midst of his ordination of the Eucharist. The world’s astutest students have been puzzled and perplexed over the great Academician’s principle of regained memory for the soul, and they have labeled it a philosophical fantasy, a finely spun poetization. That it bears direct relation to our earthly history has not been discerned by scholars.

When the Christos concluded his injunction to eat the broken fragments of his body and to drink the flowing stream of his life-blood with the command: "Do this in memory of me," he set Plato’s great doctrine at the very heart of Christianity. But Christianity could not catch the relevance of the statement because it did not have the correlative tenets of the dismemberment and disfigurement. The restoration of memory can have understanding only in relation to a previous loss of it. Paradise regained must follow Paradise lost. So "rememberment" is the repairing of the dismemberment. Reminiscence is the recuperation of shattered memory. Death must have its resurrection. Divine intellect, dispersed into all forms of divulsion and enfeeblement, torn into fragments, with the links of connection lost, condemned to wander blindly in murks and shadows, must be reintegrated in the end. "My reason returned unto me," says the reconstituted Nebuchadnezzar. The Prodigal Son remembered his forgotten Father’s house on high. Away off in that "far country," the Vale of Lethe and Land of Oblivion, the exiled soul begins to recover from its amnesia, and the divine nostalgia sets in to lead it back home.

A Chaldean Oracle states that the "paternal principle" of higher intellect "will not receive the will of the soul till she has departed from oblivion; and has spoken the word, assuming the memory of her paternal sacred impression." Immersed in scattered and partial images of reality, the soul can not regain her former unity of vision until she has restored some semblance of her former integrity of intellection. She must weave the tangled strands of mental fleece again into a garment with pattern matching archetypal ideals.

The figures of both Jesus and Jonah, fast asleep in the holds of their respective ships in the storm are variant types of this oblivion of the god in his mundane journey. In a similar episode in the career of Horus, "there was deep slumber within the ship."

Iamblichus paints a beautiful picture of the gods gathering up the loose shreds of memory and weaving them again into the design of original loveliness, to escape their dire condition of forgetfulness:

"Neither is it proper to say that the soul primarily consists of harmony and rhythm. For thus enthusiasm would be adapted to the soul alone. It is better . . . to assert that the soul, before she gave herself to body, was the auditor of divine harmony; and that hence, when she proceeded into body and heard melodies of such a kind as especially preserve the divine vestiges of memory, she embraced these, from them recollected divine harmony, and tends and is allied to it, and as much as possible participates of it."15

Amid her distraction the soul catches faint and feeble glimpses of former felicity and these stir her latent recollection of harmonies known before. Through them she strives to integrate her former bliss and grandeur. And this states the whole office of ritual religion!

Plato’s esoteric principle, grounded in segments of recondite anthropology lost out of modern consideration, is one vital to all theory and practique of education. Subtle principles of cultural technique are involved in the incarnational situation which make learning not at all the acquiring of something new and alien to the soul, but the remembering or recollecting of scattered fragments of things inherently kin to consciousness itself. Culture is reintegration, not the acquiring of a collection.

Of the nine Muses of classical mythology Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory, and memory is thus indicated as one of the nine paths by which we return to our divinity. Mercury also shared the function of rehabilitating the memory. A note by Thomas Taylor reads:

"Hermes disperses the sleep and oblivion with which the different herds of souls are oppressed. He is likewise the supplier of recollection, the end of which is a genuine intellectual apprehension of divine natures."16

As man is a rational soul thrust into an irrational life, the province of Mercury is to impress upon the mind, distracted by the shifting flux of this world’s dream images, the beauty of the stable principles of Universal Mind that were visioned by the soul in her own world. Chapter 90 of the Ritual gives a prayer in these words:

"O thou who restorest memory in the mouth of the dead through the words of power which they possess, let my mouth be opened through the words of power which I possess."

The title of Chapter 25 is itself convincing: "The chapter of making a man possess memory in the underworld." This again is the whole office of religion. Of what, be it asked, could a man on earth be expected to have memory, if not of a former life which he had forgotten?

If religion is to be animated and inspired by its most forceful significance, it must be practiced with a view to awakening in earthbound souls lost divine memories. This is the import of all its song, its ritual, its rhythms and prayers. A powerful reinforcement of spiritual unction and dynamic life would well up out of its decadent forms if this motif were revived. Salvation, the aim of religion, is by way of rekindled memory of slumbering divinity.

In an address to Pepi it is written that the god "setteth his remembrance upon men and his love before the gods." Indeed the Ritual records the fact that the deceased in Amenta was shown his Ka (higher soul body) and assured that it accompanied him through the lower earth in order that he might not utterly forget his divine moorings, or as he says, "that he might not suffer loss of identity by forgetting his name." Man is on earth like one stricken with amnesia. Showing him his Ka bestirs the Manes to recall his divine name and nature. Also the passage of Osiris through the underworld is effected only by means of his preserving all the mystical names in memory. Ra has 75 names, Osiris 153. As the "name" stood for one of the higher spiritual principles, to call upon the name of the Lord, or to know the deity’s name, was to have come en rapport with his higher nature. This presupposed the restoration of all the soul’s higher metaphysical faculties. This is given elsewhere as knowing the names of all the gates and their god keepers, past whom the voyaging soul had to go.

In the Orphic Mysteries of Greece the phrase occurs more than once: "I am a child of earth and the starry sky, but my race is of heaven alone." The "dead" man is instructed to address these words to the guardian of the Lake of Memory, while he asks for a drink of water from the lake. In our highest flights toward divine consciousness we drink from that Lake of Memory and regale ourselves anew with aboriginal harmonies. If it holds true to its prime purpose the persistent vogue of religion in human society is abundantly warranted.

Max Müller gives an important link of philology when he derives the Sanskrit word Smara, "love," from Smar, "to recollect"!17 He states that the German Schmerz, "pain," and the English "smart," come from this root. Love, then, like learning, is only the memory of former transports and ecstasies of the glory the soul once had with the Father before the worlds.

When, therefore, Jesus breaks the bread and sips the wine in token of his death till he come--his discerption and dismantling--he is dramatizing the necessity of their "remembering" his scattered selfhood in their lives. The Ritual of Egypt assigns a name to the ship of Horus as it passes across the sea of this lower life, which name shows the archaic origin of the sage philosophy of Greece: "Collector of souls is the name of my barque"! Recollection is the soul’s office on earth. We are to gather up in the boat of our life the twelve baskets of scattered fragments and restore the broken body of our Lord "whole and entire."

Out of the dissertation on divine food here elaborated there should accrue to the modern mind a new and grander sense of the Christ’s ordinance: "Do this in memory of me." And an elevated consciousness arising from the double sense of the word "remember" should lift humanity once more to an awareness of its mission, which is to bind up the broken and dismembered body of the Lord of Hosts, by welding together the nations in the spirit of a lofty fraternity. In the light of restored sublimity to the doctrine, every individual will know that the appeal to remember his deity comes not from an isolated figure in ancient Judea, but from the living god within, begging all to drink the cup of communion with him and thus hasten to forge that recollection of him which alone will effect his release from the dreary grave of the body.