COLONISTS FROM HEAVEN

To begin with there is that vast mass of Medieval legend that became focused in Milton’s grand epic. The tradition of man’s having lost a Paradise, having been cast out of heaven and thrown into a prison, a dungeon, a pit, a lake of pitch, a dark cavernous underground where suffering was intensified by fire, was almost universal in the background of theological belief over a long period. This wide possession might have remained highly instructive had not Milton, in common with all save isolated groups of Hermeticists in Europe, lost in signal knowledge that the fallen angels, the rebel hosts, the armies of Satan-Lucifer were, collectively, man himself, and that the fiery lake into which they were hurled was just our good earth! This tradition was the far-trailing descendant of the ancient Mysteries, in which the entire drama of man’s evolution was enacted at the great annual festivals. Says Thomas Taylor, perhaps the most understanding of all Plato’s interpreters:

"I now proceed to prove that the dramatic spectacles of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by the ancient theologists, their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with the earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical nature: . . ."1

Cocker in his Greek Philosophy says that Plato in the Phaedrus, under the allegory of the chariot and the winged steeds, represents the lower or inferior part of man’s nature as dragging the soul down to earth and subjecting it to a slavery under corporeal conditions. Taylor says2 that

"the descent of the superior intellect3 into the realms of generated existence becomes, indeed, the greatest benefit and ornament which a material nature is capable of receiving; for without this participation of intellect in the lowest department of corporeal life, nothing but the irrational soul and a brutal life would subsist in the dark and fluctuating abode of the body."

The whole design of the Mysteries, according to the great Plato himself, was "to lead us back to the perfection from which, as our beginning, we first made our descent." One of the mysterious significations of the Thyrsus or reed used in the Mysteries was connected with the descent of the soul, for, "as it was a reed full of knots," it became "an apt symbol of the diffusion of the higher nature into the sensible world." Bacchus (the divine self) carried a reed instead of a scepter, and it betokened the god’s "descent into our partial nature." "Indeed the Titans are Thyrsus-bearers; and Prometheus concealed fire in a Thyrsus or reed; after which he is considered as bringing celestial light into generation, or leading the soul into the body."

The Greeks allegorized the descent of the soul again in the fable of Ceres and Proserpine. Ceres is the higher intellect, Proserpina being her daughter, the soul. Edward Carpenter says

"that there were ritual dramas or passion plays [in the Mysteries], of which an important one dealt with the descent of Kore or Proserpine into the underworld, as in the Eleusinian representations, and her redemption and restoration to the upper world in spring."4

No less applicable to the same fundamental situation is the Greek fable of Eros and Psyche. Love, the divine Eros, descends into the mortal sphere to redeem the human soul, or Psyche, from suffering in its animal habitat by marrying her. In the Mystery celebrations lasting nine days, Taylor tells us that on the eighth day the "fall of the soul into the lunar orb" was commemorated,

"because the soul in this situation is about to bid adieu to everything of a celestial nature; to sink into a perfect oblivion of her divine origin and pristine felicity; and to rush profoundly into the region of dissimilitude, ignorance and error. And lastly, on the ninth day, when the soul falls into the sublunary world and becomes united with a terrestrial body, a libation was performed such as is usual in the sacred rites."5

Proclus, the great Neo-Platonist of the fourth century, expounding Plato’s theology, says that it is the peculiar function of "heroic souls" (an order above daemons) to express "magnitude of operation, elevation and magnificence," but that this order "descends indeed for the benefit of the life of man, as partaking of a destiny inclining downwards."6

Iamblicus corroborates Plato as to these grades of the hierarchy:

"Angles above dissolve the bonds of generation. Daemons draw souls down into nature; but heroes lead them to a providential attention to sensible works."7

Iamblichus makes an unequivocal statement of the descent when he says:

"But from the first, divinity sent souls hither in order that they might again return to him."8

He reiterates the idea (p. 68) when speaking of the gods:

"These, therefore, descend with invariable sameness for the salvation of the universe, and connectedly contain the whole of generation after the same manner."

He utters a strange sentiment when he affirms (p. 89) that the

"magnitude of the epiphanies [or manifestations] in the Gods, indeed, is so great as sometimes to conceal all heaven, the sun and the moon; and the earth itself, as the Gods descend, is no longer able to stand still."

Greek philosophy, as we have seen, embodies the traditions of the descent in several molds. In the cycle of the twelve mystic operations of Hercules, the hero is ordered to go down into Hades (our world) and bring up the three-headed Cerberus. His journey is a symbolic tracing of the experiences undergone by the soul on earth, not in some mysterious underworld below it. Orpheus descends to the underworld to recover his lost Eurydice, the soul. In Virgil’s epic Aeneas finds the gate to Avernus and descends for the inspection of the Tartarian regions. It is instructive to note the etymology of this word "Avernus." It is the Greek ornos, a bird, and alpha (@insert greek alpha) privative, meaning "un-" or "not" or "-less." The "v" is thrown in for euphony between the two vowels, and the "o" is shortened to "e." It would therefore read "not birds" or "no birds," with the implication of "not a good place for birds." When it is known that in all arcane systems the bird was the universal symbol for the soul, the meaning comes clear that this earth was regarded as the place where souls were poisoned by the noxious fumes arising from the carnal life, since the birds were lethalized by the vapor rising from the mouth of the pit of Avernus, became stupefied and fell into the underworld. The allegory tells the story of our descent with a force that no philosophical descanting could match. So deftly has ancient philological skill woven a theosophical meaning into the structure of language.

Dante’s tour of Purgatory and the deeper Inferno is a treatment of the old myth, with political and other connotations. Ulysses’ visit to the cave of Polyphemus is again a form of the representation, and Theseus and his labyrinthine adventure underground is another rendering of it. From Herodotus we have an account (II, 122) of the descent into Hades of King Rhampsinitus, in whose honor the priests of Egypt instituted a rebirth festival. The Rig Veda parallels this story with an account of the boy Nachiketas, who descended into the realm of Yama, the deity of the earthly underworld, in Yama-Loka, the kingdom of the dead, and then returned to the world of life. Needless to say, neither Egyptians nor Hindus took their theological myths for history.

A number of utterances in the Chaldean Oracles point to a quite complete harmony with Orphic Platonism and Neo-Platonism. Indeed opinion veers strongly to the conclusion that Pythagorean, Platonic and Greek philosophy generally was formulated out of the principles of theology promulgated through the powerful agency of the Orphic Mysteries, and that those principles were brought by the Orphics into Greece from Chaldean sources. The Oracles agree with Greek doctrine that higher deific energies emanated outward from a spiritual focus into the material worlds. One of them runs: "For all things thence begin to extend their admirable rays downwards." The life of the gods rays outward into corporeal beings and becomes the animating principle or soul of living things.

A passage from the Tibetan Book of the Dead (p. 130) warns devotees to "be not attracted towards the dull blue light of the brute world," under penalty of falling into that kingdom of nature. It asserts (p. 125) that the predilection of our immortal nature toward animal grossness will cause it to "stray downwards." The text represents the human soul as beseeching the "Knowledge-Holding Deities" not to let it drift further down, but to lead it to the holy paradise. The soul exults that "These Knowledge-Holding Deities, the Heroes and the Dakinis have come from the holy paradise realms to receive me." The text traces the descent of these divinities who, false to their oaths, fall from lower to still lower stages of the Bardo, or world of dark embodiment.

A cuneiform tablet in the British Museum holds a legend of the rebellious angels who broke into the Lord’s song with impious shouts, destroying the harmony, and who, for punishment, were cast down out of heaven. They are referred to in the Book of Jude (Ch. 6) in the line: "They kept not their own habitations." These in the Book of Enoch are the seven stars which "transgressed the commandment of God and came not in their proper season" (Enoch 18, 21, 22). It is said in the cuneiform text, "May the God of divine speech expel from his five thousand those who in the midst of his heavenly song shouted evil blasphemies."

Of tremendous significance to the thesis that early Christian doctrine was intimately allied with and influenced by the prevalent esoteric wisdom of environing cults, is a fragment called the Naasene Hymn, preserved by Hippolytus (Haer. V. 5). After describing the woes and sufferings of the human soul during its wanderings on earth, the hymn continues:

But Jesus said: Father, Behold

A war of evils has arisen upon earth;

It comes from thy breath and ever works;

Man strives to shun this bitter chaos,

But knows not how he may pass (safely) through it;

Therefore, do thou, O Father, send me;

Bearing thy seals I will descend (to earth);

Throughout the ages I will pass;

All mysteries I will unfold,

All forms of Godhead I will unveil,

All secrets of thy holy path

Styled Gnosis (knowledge) I will impart (to man).

The Jesus character alluded to here is, it seems certain, the Gnostic Jesus, or Ieou, whom we shall see is traceable to Egyptian origins many centuries B.C. Scholars will haggle over the question of the date of the hymn, whether A.D. or B.C. The possibility that it dates B.C. has already been repudiated with great speciousness.9 The name Naasene, of apparently Ophite connection, seems to have etymological relation to both the names of Essene and Nazarene. If an Essene production it could readily be given a B.C. placing without violent improbability. There is evidence that cults of Nazarenes (Nazaraioi) teaching Egypto-Gnostic Christolatry antedated the coming of the Gospel Jesus. The Ophites (serpent-symbolizers, not serpent-worshipers) were a Gnostic sect of early Christianity, later persecuted as heretics, who believed in a spiritual Christ-Aeon that descended into the material chaos to assist Sophia (Wisdom) in her efforts to emancipate the soul from the bondage of the flesh.

Turning to the material of Egypt we find the descent traced unmistakably in a thousand references. The conception is so pervading that all three persons of the Egyptian Trinity, Isis, Osiris and Horus, are represented as descending to the nether earth. Osiris, the Father God, descends, is cut to pieces by Sut (Satan) and the fragments of his body scattered over the earth. Isis, the Mother, descends to earth to search for the fragments. Horus, the Son, comes down in the identical character as the Christian Jesus in the advent at Christmas as the bringer of peace. As Jesus descends into hell (Apostles’ Creed), so Horus came from heaven into the realm of darkness as the light of the world. It is said that he descends into the funeral land, the abode of darkness and of death. The Speaker in the Egyptian Ritual (representing always the human soul) says: "I have come upon this earth, and I take possession of it with my two feet." It is said that Osiris goes down into Tattu (another name for Amenta) and finds there the soul of the sun, and is united thereto. The Manes (again the human soul) says: "I am he that cometh forth by day . . . I descend upon earth and mine eye maketh me to walk thereon." It is said of him: "Thou enterest in to the place where thy Father is, where Keb [Seb, the god of earth] is." Again: "Thou descendest under protection. Ra ferries thee to Amenta." In the Ritual (The Book of the Dead) it is said: "This is he who in his resurrection says, ‘I am the Lord on high and I descend to the earth of Seb that I may put a stop to evil.’"

Such references to the advent of divinity in the scripts of Egypt could be multiplied to great length. Likewise the religious lore of scores of aboriginal tribes in all continents hold multitudinous corroboration of the fact and confirm its status as the basic datum of all religious construction. A hundred folk-tales begin with the coming of some hero from heaven to earth, or with the flinging down of some object emblematic of divinity. The variety of symbols used is wide, and to one lacking the keys of interpretation, bewildering. It is enough to say that in all such legends the idea of the descent is central.

Looking now at the Christian Bible we shall find in plenty the features of the same myth. Bible students are not generally aware of the directness with which the descent of the gods to earth is there told. There is first the well-known declaration of God himself (distorted into a reference to the historical Jesus) that he sent his only-begotten son into the world that all believers might have everlasting life. Then there is the remarkable pronouncement in the Gospel of John (3): "No man ascendeth into heaven but he that cometh down from heaven." From Luke (19:10) we have: "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost." Then there is Jesus’ direct statement to his disciples: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above." The Lord’s affirmation that he laid down his life for his sheep surely means not that he was immolated on a wooden cross, but that he resigned his celestial life to endure the burden of the cross (of flesh and matter). The Apocalyptist’s vision of the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven is a reference to the descent of divinity in its fragmented form. The line that follows--"Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them . . . and God himself shall be with them and he shall be their God" (Rev. 21:1), is to the same effect. Jesus declares that he came from the Father into the earth.

Lifting from the term Christos the Christian limitation of its personification in the body of the historical Jesus, and reading for this distorted meaning the idea of the gods incarnated distributively in all men, it is possible to discern allusions to the descent all through the Bible. Though not so immediately obvious, the Lukan account which states that Jesus came down from the mount and "stood on a level place" (Ch. 6:17) before he delivered the Sermon, is another indirect allusion to the same fact. For the Pistis Sophia, the Gnostic Gospel, states that Jesus preached his discourse to his disciples "in the midst of Amenta"! Later comparison of many texts discloses the surprising fact that both the mount and the level plain, whereon the Sermon was delivered in the Gospels, are diverse forms of the same symbolism! Both refer to our earth, under the terms of equinoctial symbolism. The "mount" in the mythos was never in any sense an earthly elevation. Paul in one passage propounds the logical problem, which should have been given consideration, analogically, by our scientists,--how we can envisage the resurrection without the postulation of a previous descent from heaven. He asks (Ephesians 4:9): "Now he that ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended far above all heavens. . . ." The pertinence of this material for science is that science has studied life as in evolution without having postulated a necessary involution antecedently! Science must meet Paul’s significant query. Likewise must theology restore to its high place the doctrine of the descent.

Symbolizing the divine nature as bread for man, John gives Jesus’ announcement of his descent (6:47, 48) : "I am the bread of life . . . such is the bread that came down from heaven, that a man shall eat of it and shall not die." The general allegorism of scattering or sowing seed is employed to depict the Platonic "distribution of divinity" among men. In the parable of the sower we have a portraiture of the partitive incarnation of divine natures in mortal bodies. The falling of the seed into various types of soil is a natural version of the diversified embodiments the descending souls might have apportioned to them. This interpretation raises the parable to infinite heights of dignity and meaning above the feeble and ineffective rendering of uncomprehending thought, which is able to see in the figured situation nothing higher than the sowing of the "word," that is, the Sabbath droning from pulpits, impinging upon different grades of mental acumen or moral character! The "Word" is in no case the written Bible, even, but the Logos, or form of divine ideation, powerfully stamped upon the physical universe by the deific utterance. No student is in position to grasp the significance of the Logos doctrine until he has mastered the principles of Platonic theology, as outlined by Proclus10 or Plotinus. Christian interpretation has merely shuffled along in the darkness without a light. "Like the streams in the circle of heaven I besprinkle the seeds of men," runs a text in the Records of the Past (Vol. III, 129).

The angels in Revelation pour out the contents of their censers over the earth, granting a nucleus of solar "fire" to each mortal to divinize him. As the Timaeus of Plato reports, the deity was to furnish the collective seed of what was to be immortal in humanity.

In Old Testament allegorism the doctrine is found most unexpectedly to be the core of meaning in the Abraham story. Like the Prodigal Son of the New Testament he was sent out from his home, country and kinsfolk (in the heavenly Eden) to go to a strange land (incidentally to the West, where was the Tuat, or gate of entry to the earth!). There his seed was to multiply until it filled the earth with his children, the heirs of supernal grace.

But the hidden sense of the name Abraham or Abram has escaped notice, and it is of great moment, as are all Bible names. Scholars may protest, but it seems obvious that the word is simply A-Brahm, (Hindu), meaning "non-Brahm." Abraham, the Patriarch or oldest of the aeons or emanations, was not Brahm, the Absolute, but the first emanation from Brahm; the first ray, the first God, perhaps equivalent to Ishwara of the Hindus. He was the first life that was not Absolute, yet from the Absolute. He was to go forth into the realms of matter, divide and multiply, and fill the world with his fragmented units. To return to Abraham’s bosom would be just to complete the cycle of outgoing and return, to rest in the bosom of the highest divinity close to the Absolute. Also he came out of Ur, of the Chaldees (or Kasadim), which is another key word, since Ur is the Chaldean word for "fire," the celestial empyrean, out of which all souls, as fiery sparks, are emanated. Kasadim, or Kasdim, was a term given to the highest celestial spirits, who fathered the production of the divine sparks of soul. It is practically equivalent to "Archangels."

Then Abraham went straight to Egypt from the land of Canaan, and his descendants were to suffer bondage in that lower country. It is a crushing blow to the historical rendering of Bible narrative to declare, on evidence that is incontrovertible, that the "Egypt" of the scriptures is not the country on the map. It is the term used in the allegories to designate the plane, state or "land" of embodied life, life on earth. "Egypt" is just this earth, or the state or locale of bodily life on it. It even at times connotes the physical body itself, as in "the flesh pots of Egypt." Hence the descent of Abraham, and later of the twelve sons of Jacob, into "Egypt" are again the fable of the soul’s adventure here. If the term Egypt is taken as the geographical unit, many passages in which it occurs will be found to read as sheer nonsense. Had theology known that "the strange land" and "the far country" were glyphs for this earth of ours, greater sanity would have marked the counsels of ecclesiasticism down the centuries. If the "bondage in Egypt, that slave pen," as the Eternal repeatedly calls it (in the Moffatt translation), has been in some way interlocked with an historical servitude (as may have been the case), it still does not prove that the allegory intended to recount the bondage of a nation. It was a bondage of spirit under sense that was thus portrayed. Many passages from the Old Testament books refer to the Israelites as captives, outcasts, expatriates and exiles, matching Greek, Egyptian and Gnostic terminology, and alluding of course to the expulsion of the angelic hosts from a celestial Paradise to a bleak earthly exile. The sons of God had to go to Egypt also in order that fulfillment might be given to the hoary scriptural line from the Mystery drama: "Out of Egypt have I called my Son." For resurgent deity in the wandering exiles would eventually lead them back to their home on high.

In Luke (10:18) Jesus says that he "beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." As Satan is identical with Lucifer, the bringer of deific light, or the god (collectively), and the hosts of angelic souls (distributively), Jesus’ utterance is readily seen as another affirmation of the descent of the spiritual principle, eternally symboled by "fire" from heaven. Again, in the resurrection scene "an angel of the Lord descended from heaven." Once more this is not a fragment of veridical history, but another brief figuration of the descent. In an Egypto-Gnostic fragment the same ideograph is repeated under the double representation,11 when "the heavens opened and two men descended thence with great radiance," and both the young men entered the tomb. The seer in Revelation descries an angel in flight toward the earth and also sees the holy city of Zion, radiant with the glory of God, descending from the skies.

One of the Old Testament allegories has to do with the Lord’s reminding Israel that he had "opened the doors of heaven" and "rained down manna upon them to eat." As bread is the Johannine symbol of divine nature on which the mortal race was to feed, so manna in the Mosaic narrative stands in the same usage. There is reason also to suppose that manna is cognate by derivation with the Sanskrit "manas," the principle of intelligence, which was the gift of deity to "man." Its distribution over the ground in a thin layer like frost and glistening white is a symbolism of the spirit, which comes to us in the form of a distillation over the ground of our concrete experience out of the brooding atmosphere of divine super-intelligence. And all deity is described as shining with radiance.

A frequent figure for the descending spirits of light is the falling star. In the Egyptian Records of the Past (Vol. II, p. 16) the Speaker says: "The place is empty into which the starry ones fall down headlong upon their faces and find nothing by which they can raise themselves up." In the same thought the Chinese have a venerable proverb which runs: "The stars ceased shining in heaven and fell upon earth, where they became men." That the star as an emblem of the divine soul is not altogether a sheer poetic fancy, is shown by the fact that, as Massey points out,

"The Elementaries or brute forces of nature may be said to have obtained their souls in the stars. Hence, as Plutarch says, the Dog-Star is the soul of Isis, Orion is the soul of Horus, and the Bear is the soul of Typhon,--Soul and Star being synonymous in the Egyptian word Seb."12

In one of the addresses to King Pepi it is said to him: "Thy soul is a living star at the head of his brethren."13 In the texts of Egypt the evil crocodile, typifying Paul’s "carnal nature," is said to swallow the sinking stars," the souls that fall into the darkness of incarnation. Among the ancients the stars that dipped beneath the horizon were emblematic of souls in physical incarnation, in contradistinction to those that never set, which typed the non-incarnating gods. Souls in incarnation were dubbed by the Greeks "moist souls," since they were immersed in the body, which is seven-eighths water by composition. The redeemed souls rejoiced in the Egyptian Ritual (Ch. 44) at being lifted up "among the stars that never set." Those condemned to descend were represented as falling stars in danger of being devoured by the open jaws of the dragon (of mortal life). This reptile lurked in the "bight of Amenta" or the bend of the river "where the starry procession dipped down below the horizon." The Swabian "Lindwurm" was another form of the dragon that "swallowed the setting stars." Indeed the entire myth of the casting down of Saturn and his hosts was figured under the symbolism of falling stars. The dragon that "made war with the woman drew down into his kingdom many of the stars of heaven." One of the phenomena of the Crucifixion mentioned in Revelation along with the darkness over the earth, the veiled sun, the blood-stained moon, is that "the stars from the heavens fell." In the same place we read that "when the message of the third angel was sounded forth, a great star went down from heaven and it fell upon the earth." Another star fell at the sounding of the trumpet of the firth angel. The various legends, then, of falling stars become invested with unexpected significance as being disguised allusions to the descent of the angelic myriads to our shores,--to become our souls.

But nowhere is the statement of the descent of soul made more explicitly than in the very Creed of the Christian Church, wherein the second person of the Trinity is described as he "who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven . . . and was made man." Our material will show that the idea was common to many early nations, in whose literature it is stated with more definiteness than in the Christian.

If the descent was in partial degree a karmic punishment for sin, an enforced expiation of evolutionary dereliction in past cycles, as is hinted in Greek philosophy, it was also pictured as a seeking of refuge or a hiding for safety. Some contingency or crisis in celestial affairs, not fully divulged, made it both obligatory and advantageous for the angel hosts to flee heaven and find on earth, or in "Egypt," an escape from danger involved in some evolutionary impasse. It is not customary to think of hell as a haven, but certain implications in the old theology require us to do just that. At all events the legend of the hiding away of the young divine heroes is too general to be without deep significance. Adam hid himself when the Eternal walked in the garden. Moses as an infant was hidden in the papyrus swamps of "Egypt"; later he was hidden by the Eternal in a cleft of the rock as the majesty of the Lord swept by. Jonah ran and hid from the Eternal when first commanded to execute a mission to the Ninevites. The child Jesus had to be hidden away from danger in "Egypt"! The Old Testament Joseph went down to "Egypt" to be saved from danger. Jotham preserved his life from his murderous brother Abimelech by hiding. Saul was found in hiding among the baggage when he was chosen to be king in Israel. In Egypt, Buto, the nurse, concealed Horus, the analogue of Jesus, in Sekhem, "the hidden shrine and shut place,"--our earth. Horus’ birth was in a secret place. A similar legend is related of the mythical Sargon in the cuneiform tablets. He says: "My mother, the Princess, conceived me; in a secret place she brought me forth." The supreme Egyptian Sun-God, the mighty spiritual divinity Ra, says to the earth: "I have hidden you."14 He says that in the "Egypt" of this lower world he had prepared a secret and mysterious dwelling for his children. This divine dwelling created by Ra as the place of protection for the elect, is called "the Retreat." Amen, an aspect of Ra, was termed "The Master of the Hidden Spheres"; and Amen itself means "the hidden god." In the Ritual (Ch. 22) Osiris cries: "I rise out of the egg in the hidden land." Under another name, Qem-Ur, he addresses the earth (Aukert, the underworld) as the land "which hidest thy companion who is in thee." The god again speaks of "hiding himself to cast light upon his hidden place." This is the typical Lucifer character of the descending god, the Light-Bringer. He hides himself in order, it is said, to perform there the "mysteries of the underworld." "These things shall be done secretly in the underworld." (Rubric to Ch. 137A of the Ritual.) Under the title of Unas he "gathers together his members which are in the hidden place." He says that he has "made Horus enter into the Hidden Shrine to vivify the heart of the god."

It is desirable to search a little more closely for the rationale of this hiding in the secret place of earth, as the bases of the whole theological situation are involved in this dark background. Two causes can be assigned for the descent, a normal evolutionary one, and another rising out of the motives for karmic punishment for error, stubbornness, pride or wrong. As to the first, the Greeks postulated the Cycle of Necessity, which required that all souls or fragments of divine being must pass through the round of all the elements, in order to embody in their finished perfection the qualities of every modification of life. The second cause is less philosophically rationalized and--hints are given us--grew out of a special situation involving the recalcitrant behavior of twelve legions of angels, who, in retribution for evolutionary irregularities on their part, were forced into an earthly incarnation distasteful to them. In the character of King Teta, Osiris is made to say: "This Teta hath detestation of the earth, and he will not enter into Seb" (god of earth). There are also references to the anger of the higher gods, enkindled against them. Plato (Phaedrus) speaks of those souls who were "subject through the ancient indignation of the Gods in consequence of former guilt" to severe penalties on earth. In the Cratylus he concurs with the doctrine of the Orphics that the soul is punished through its union with body. Iamblicus (Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans and Assyrians, p. 133) states that a partial motive in the celebration of the Mysteries of Sabazius was the appeasing of "the ancient divine anger." Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, III) preserves a passage from a celebrated Pythagorean, Philolaus, which runs: "The ancient theologists and priests also testify that the soul is united with body as if for the sake of punishment." The Book of Enoch points to a motive for this punishment in that the deities "came not in their proper season." It is given that they were ordered to incarnate at an earlier period, when the bodies of the animal race were of a requisite preparedness to receive the principle of intelligence, but that they refused and in consequence were forced to descend much later, when the animal vehicles were far gone in a state of degeneracy. Proclus in his Hymn to Minerva prays to the goddess:

"Nor let these horrid punishments be mine,

Which guilty souls in Tartarus confine,

With fetters fastened to its broken floors,

And locked by hell’s tremendous iron doors."

Dante in the Inferno alludes to the souls in bondage:

"Hither for failure of their vows exiled."

There is ground for connecting all this allusion to the penal character of our adventure on earth with the oft-cited "rebellion of the angels." Theological students should be more familiar with Plato’s version of the Demiurgic speech to the hosts about to incarnate, the "junior gods," in the Timaeus. The Creator covenants with them to insure their immortality, to support them with his power; and then charge them to come to earth and "weave together mortal and immortal natures." It is said they rebelled, procrastinated and, when finally forced to descend by virtue of karma, missed the crest of a wave of evolution that would have carried them more smoothly forward past a crucial point. As it eventuated, their delay brought them to the earth when the lower race they were to uplift had sunk back into brutal degradation, and their penal infliction became the greater by the enhanced grossness of the bodies they were to inhabit. Their proper season had passed, as say Jude and Enoch.

Strangely we find in an old Egyptian inscription called "The Destruction of Mankind" a parallel to this somewhat anomalous situation in Platonic systematism. There is a rebellion against Ra, the Sun-God, followed by a great destruction and a deluge. Atum-Ra had been established as the king of gods and men, the God alone. There is a revolt against his supremacy. He calls the elder gods around him for consultation and says to them:

"You ancient gods, behold the beings who are born of myself; they utter words against me. Tell me, what would you do in these circumstances? Behold, I have waited and I have not destroyed them until I should hear what you have to say."15

The elder gods advise that he permit them to go and smite the enemies who plot evil against Ra, and let none remain alive. The rebels are then destroyed by being cast down for three days. Here is the distinct clue to true meaning, for the three days are a glyph for the time spent by evolutionary consciousness in the three lower kingdoms beneath man, the mineral, vegetable and animal. And "destruction" in this usage can not be taken as equivalent to actual annihilation or extirpation. This latter point is an extremely important one, as it saves many a Biblical allegory from utter perversion of meaning. After the exaction of the penalty, the "majesty of Ra" declares that he will now protect men on this account. "I raise my hand (in token) that I shall not again destroy men." The similarity of this description to more than a score of such narratives of the almighty anger against "a stiff-necked and rebellious people," their being cast out from celestial court and favor, and the eventual divine relenting and restoration of them to his providential care, must strike any fair-minded student who has read the Old Testament.

It is charged that Job, when cause is sought for his trial, had added "rebellion unto his sin."16 It does not seem to be well known that the Old Testament contains an account of the "rebellion of the angels" in the guise of alleged Hebrew history. It is the rebellion of the "Sons of Korah," given in the Mosaic books, and recalled to the attention of the Israelites several times by the Eternal. It is told that at the rebellion the Lord caused the earth to open and swallow them up. It should be noticed that they were engulfed by the earth. It is known that two different groups of Psalms, thirteen to forty-nine, and eighty-four to eighty-eight, are specialized as "Psalms of the Sons of Korah." It is to be remarked as significant also that while swallowed up by earth, they were not destroyed! The rebel hosts, cast out of heaven, were not annihilated! What can this mean but that the term "destruction" is purely a glyph for the enforced descent to earth? Here they could expiate their contumely by sojourning in the untoward conditions of animal embodiment. Milton in the Paradise Lost, expresses Adam’s surprise to find that his sentence of "death" for disobedience is a long, living death, not extinction. The account of the Korahitic rebellion expressly states that they were swallowed alive.

Happily Chaldean as well as Hindu records reaffirm the correctness of our interpretation, for Massey says:

"The Chaldean and Hindu legends know nothing of a human sin as a cause of the deluge. The sin against the gods, however, is described as the cause of the deluge in the so-called ‘destruction of men.’ . . . But these beings in the case were elemental, not mortal, and the sin was not human."17

This is quite important. The beings were pre-human and angelic, not elemental in the theological sense. Their rebellion, in short, occurred in heaven, not on earth, though indeed it has been prolonged into the earthly life. They carried their rebellious attitude down with them and exhibit phases of it to the present!

An Egyptian text says of the god Anhur that he had seen the malice of these gods who "deserted their allegiance to raise a rebellion," and "he refused to go forth with them." Other texts contain references to "the children of impotent revolt," and tell of their "inroad into the Eastern part of heaven, whereupon there arose a battle in heaven and in all the earth." And another passage alludes to the "carrying out of the sentence upon those who are to die," and says it is "the withholding of that which is so needful to the souls of the children of impotent revolt." The meaning here is obviously their expatriation and consequent cutting off from participation in the life of their celestial estate.

In general summary of this point, it may be said that the implications and the moral of these traditions of rebellious and outcast angels are these: our divine souls (for we are those rebellious deities) fled under karmic pressure from heaven to earth, and we have carried the same refractoriness down in our racial history. We refused at first to incarnate in the animal forms, and we still are rebellious in our refusal to take full charge and assume complete mastery over the "animal" segment of our composite nature. Hence the frequent injunctions in old scriptures to "kill out" the lower elements in us, and such a statement as that in the Egyptian text of Unas to "slay the rebel" in consummating our work of redemption.18 Angels indeed were despatched to this realm, and their presence in the human constitution accounts for the divine element apostrophized in all religion. In the Epistle to the Hebrews (1:14) it is asked: "Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to minister for them who should be heirs of salvation?"

The next step in the unfoldment of the theme is to establish beyond dispute that it was to our earth that the descent was made. This is tremendously vital to true interpretation.

In Egyptian scriptures we encounter the promise that "if Pepi falleth on to the earth, Keb [Seb] will lift him up." Pepi here stands for the divinity in man, the god come to earth. To him in another place it is said: "Thou plowest the earth . . . Thou journeyest on the road whereon the gods journeyed." Here is identification of the earth as the place to which the gods were sent to travel the road of evolution.

One of the most conclusive statements of this fact in Christian scriptures is that memorable passage in Revelation (12:7-9), where we have a succinct rehearsal of the "war in heaven" and the casting down of the angel hosts in the character of Satan, as the dragon or serpent.

"There was war in heaven. Michael and his angels went forth to war with the dragon; and the dragon warred and his angels; and they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world; he was cast down into the earth and his angels were cast out with him."

It is of prime interest to note that the war in heaven was continued on earth, as has been intimated before. For after the dragon had been cast down to earth, he "waxed wroth with the woman and went away to make war with the rest of her seed."

This can be seen as the confirmation of the narrative in Genesis, wherein the Lord swore to place enmity between the serpent, or dragon, and the seed of the woman.

In the Egyptian Ritual, in the "chapter by which one cometh forth by day," the spirit of the descending god pleads:

"Let me have possession of all things soever which were offered ritualistically for me in the nether world. Let me have possession of the table of offerings which was heaped up for me on earth." He asks "that he may feed upon the bread of Seb [the earth god] or the food of earth." Proceeding he urges: "Let the Tuat be opened for me. Here am I."

This is an announcement of his advent upon earth, for the Tuat is the gate of entrance to Amenta. He is coming to this world to feed upon that type of concrete experience which the conditions here alone afford, under the name of "the bread of Seb." Later, following his resurrection, he says: "The tunnels of earth have given me birth." "I rise as a god among men," he exclaims. If there are men elsewhere than on earth, they are not those referred to in the old scriptures. He is described again as "Thou who givest light to the earth" (Rit., Ch. 15). Again he says: "I come that I may overthrow my adversaries upon earth." It is on earth that his opposition is to be met and hither he must come to conquer it, for his undeveloped divinity must grow by overcoming opposition. He is spoken of again as "he who has caused the authority of his father to be recognized in the great dwelling of Seb,"--earth. Another passage (Ch. 64) describes the lower self in man as saying: "I draw near to the god whose words were heard by me in the lower earth." As the god-soul descends he says: "My body shall be established and it shall neither fall into decay nor be destroyed upon this earth." His mission to earth is proclaimed as being to "vivify every human being that walketh upon the regions which are upon the earth." In another place we have a combined reference to the earth both as the "hidden place" and as the globe where the young gods came to progress. It is said of Isis that "she suckled the child in solitariness, and none knew where his place was, and he grew in strength and his arm increased in strength in the house of Keb," or the earth. Egypt will offer us in later connections a superabundance of testimony to the thesis under discussion, the relevance of which can not be so well appreciated until other phases of the mundane journey of the god can be presented. The localization of the place where the gods fell when ejected from heaven in the mythos as being our earth is one of the three or four major postulates of the ancient theology which this work is undertaken to establish, and its implications must alter all religious construction drastically.

The point was once known, but was obscured by ignorant handling of the Gnosis and was lost. It is almost unthinkable that it could have met such a fate when the Church had constantly before its eyes the legend of Christmas, with its clear imputation of the incarnation of the children of spiritual skies on earth. But the distributive nature of the Christhood had been submerged, and the tradition of the fall of the angels had been wrenched out of all relation to the Nativity at the winter solstice.

The passage in Revelation (22:16) that has left theological thought in such deep obscurity, may find acceptable rendition of its meaning in the light of the thesis of the descent: "I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches." To apprehend the statement clearly we are required to read the name "Jesus" in the light of its Gnostic meaning as an Aeon, or emanation of divine spirit, an interpretation that is not at odds with its usage in the Book of Revelation. Students have been impressed with the evident resemblance of the Apocalypse to Gnostic literature, and one writer has ventured the opinion that it could have been written only by a Platonist versed in Mystery and Magian symbology. It bears quite pointed resemblances to such a Hermetic book as the Enoch. The Jesus referred to in it obviously has no identic relation to the Jesus personalized in the Gospels. His figure here is of cosmic proportions and equates the stature of the Logos. His dispatching of his angels to testify unto the churches can mean only that the Demiurgus, or Cosmic Intelligence embodied in an exalted being of the hierarchy, ordered the incarnation of the legionary hosts in the interests of the human evolution on earth. The "churches" can by no possible sophistry be distorted into a reference to the early Christian congregations. This would be to bring the dignity of cosmic operations down almost to the level of the monthly meeting of the Ladies’ Auxiliary! The "churches" were groupings or gradations of spiritual beings at or near the completed state of human development, if not the "ecclesia" or "assembly" of the divinized mortals.

Theology has never adequately traced the course of the evolutionary processes by which the simple fact of the descent of the angels for incarnation took on the character of a "fall," with the implication of disaster. Says Cocker: "The present life is a fall and a punishment."19 Many passage from the Bible could be adduced to show that the incarnation was held to have resulted in a fall or debasement of pristine angelic virtue. The Revelation apostrophe to the fallen Babylon, the mighty, whose ancient glory had departed, giving place to the glory of the Beast, whose courts had become the habitation of devils, and whose fornicatory wines had made the nations drunk, is doubtless an allusion to the situation here envisaged. To what else could St. Paul conceivably be referring when, speaking of the Gentiles, he says:

"And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of a corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things."

An earlier paragraph has corrected the miscomprehension of the meaning of the term "Gentiles," which has beset the theological mind for centuries. It would be illogical to ascribe so dire an evolutionary degeneration to the mere accident of non-membership in a religious caste, or nation of allegedly "chosen" people. The Gentiles were the as yet undivinized "sons of men," as distinct from the "Sons of God," or Israelites, and it was their unpurified natures that dragged down the gods who incarnated in their bodies and dimmed their glory. The Gentile is the man "from beneath"; the Israelite is "from above," as Jesus affirmed. "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second is the Lord from heaven," says St. Paul. The immersion of the latter in the bodies of the former reduced their originally vivid intelligence to such a point of stultification that they sank by degrees under the dominance of the sensual disposition. And here is found the conversion of the evolutionary "descent" into the theological "fall." The two terms Gentiles and Israelites can not be attached to any historical nationals. Their employment by several nations was at first only an allegorical flourish. The Greek use of the term "barbarians" and our own recent literary use of the word "Philistines" somewhat parallel this treatment of the word "Gentiles." The Gentiles were the party of the first part in evolution, who drew down the gods and changed their glory into the semblance of grinning hyenas, chattering apes, braying asses and rapacious wolves, in spite of "broad oaths fast sealed" and a covenant with deity.

The advent of the Prometheans to earth was the oblation, the divine sacrifice, the sacrifice "for sin." Yet it is only a perverted connotation of the word "sacrifice" that has caused this act of cosmic policy to be taken in the light of a self-privation on the part of the Luciferian hosts. Few words of noble meaning have not been touched by the disfiguring hand of low human understanding. Sacrifice (Latin: sacra and facio) means "to make sacred," and has no immediate correlation with the denial to oneself of benefits. If privation came in the process of incarnation, it was incidental, not inherent. The angel legions descended to make a lower order of life holy--"to adorn what was below them," as Plotinus puts it. Their labor was to the end of "sacrifying" a merely natural kingdom of life. It was to sanctify with the gift of divinity the mortal race, and make it immortal and divine.

This is not to assert that the enterprise did not entail hardship. The labor of evolution especially when self-consciousness had been awakened and the Ego became aware of his failures, and knew that he bore responsibility for his conduct, is more likely to be a Via Dolorosa than a path of roses. The reason for the accentuation of the denial aspect of the sacrifice is to be found in the fact that the upliftment of the lower grade entailed a long relinquishment of paradisiacal blessedness for the spirits of light, and a quenching of their deific fire in the moist humors, or "water," of the body. The adventure brought privation, torture, woe. It was an exile from a home of beatific happiness. To be plunged from a state of dreamy blissfulness into a state of dull realism and concrete objectivity, where the golden glow of idealism faded from every sight, was for them a dimming of the bright lamp of life. It was indeed a plunge from lively consciousness into partial unconsciousness. It was an ostracism from heaven into a long, hard and unattractive migration. They were to become colonists of a strange, distant land, if not castaways on its unfriendly shores. Cocker, already quoted, comments, in reference to Plato’s Cave Allegory: "Their sojourn on earth is . . . a dreary exile from their proper home." Earth life is only a shadow of reality. In Egyptian scriptures the holy city of Aarru-Hetep (Salem) was to be built up by "the outcasts or the colonists from Egypt." St. Paul states that "we are a colony of heaven" (Moffatt translation). This is a clear Biblical intimation that we are expatriates from a higher world. Greek philosophy and mythology are replete with allusions to souls wandering on earth, exhiles from a diviner sphere. Most of the semi-divine heroes had long journeys and crusades assigned to them. And the Prodigal Son is of course the unquestioned representative of the exile’s role in Bible lore. From the Greek philosopher Empedocles comes the echo of the sentiment that the soul has migrated to a foreign country:

"For this I weep, for this indulge my woe,

That e’er my soul such novel realms should know."

Moses’ son was Gershom, which the Moffatt translation gives as meaning "Stranger," with the parenthetical explanation: "For I have been a stranger in a foreign land."

In this connection there is the possibility of a rational solution of the meaning of a text in the Bible which, in its conventional reading, has proven a perplexity and a "hard saying." It appears to be a stroke at the fundamental integrity of human kinship, family affection. In Luke (14:26) Jesus tells the multitude that no one can be his disciple unless one hate father, mother, brother, sister and all kin. In the great Gnostic-Christian work, the Pistis Sophia (Bk. 2, p. 341) a text runs to nearly the same effect:

"For this cause have I said unto you aforetime, ‘he who shall not leave father and mother to follow after me is not worthy of me.’ What I said then was, ye shall leave your parents, the rulers, that ye may all be children of the first, everlasting mystery."

In the light of the additional explanatory material given in the Pistis Sophia and omitted from the Gospel account, it is possible to see that this necessity of the disciple’s leaving father, mother and kin and breaking all home ties in an apparently ruthless disruption of the most commendable of earthly loves, bore no original reference to human parents and kindred, but was another of the many illusions to the expatriation of the angelic orders. This breaking of home ties occurred in the celestial paradise, which in all portrayal is called "the Homeland." To be a follower of Jesus in his mission to a submerged humanity was to accompany him in his descent to earth from heavenly Father and empyrean home. If religion had kept its original knowledge of our cosmic errand, we could have been saved the perennial perplexity of wondering why the Lord’s disciples are commanded to flout the tenderest of human ties.

Many of the allusions to the children of Israel as exiles, captives in a foreign land, hostages and outcasts, are made during periods when the historical Hebrews were not in either the Egyptian or the Babylonian or Assyrian captivities, and were not in any mundane sense exiles. Empedocles describes mortals as "Heaven’s exiles straying from the orb of light." In line with our thought are the words of the Christian Advent hymn:

O come, O come, Emmanuel,

And ransom captive Israel,

That mourns in lonely exile here,

Until the Son of God appear.

Nor less grandly true are the lines of the "Gospel" hymn:

I’m but a stranger here;

Heaven is my home.

The various exiles, captivities and wanderings of the children of Israel were not historical. They were symbolic accounts of the descent of the twelve "tribes" of angelic spirits, "chosen" by the higher Lords in heaven to come to earth and divinize incipient humanity.

Chapter VIII

IN DURANCE VILE

Having established the place of the soul’s fall or descent as our earth, the next task is to present the teaching of ancient philosophy as to the character of the soul’s actual experience in the dismal habitat of the animal bodies. Christian theology makes much of the doctrine of the Incarnation, but a vast amount of primary knowledge that would enlighten the mind with reference to this cardinal item has been lost by the Church’s flouting of the early Gnosis. The doctrine has been to ecclesiasticism such a baffling conundrum that it was shelved to a place of happy security in the person of the historical Jesus. Indeed the evidence grows stronger, as study proceeds, that the theory of a carnalized or personalized Savior, comprehending in himself every divine attribute, became established in early polity from the sheer fact of its serviceableness, it being found an easy solution of many a knotty problem of exegesis to ascribe every aspect of Godhood to the man Jesus. All divinity once safely localized in his person, a hundred confusing questions arising from the entanglement of deity with mortal flesh in all humanity could be summarily disposed of. Pagan philosophy required the presence of divinity in every son of earth. But a decadent religionism found the rationale of the situation too difficult to purvey to its ignorant following, and the euhemerized Jesus proved an easy evasion. Was not Jesus the only-begotten son of God? Insecure as this left the hierarchical status of every other Christian, it was sufficient for pious zealotry. The Incarnation was condensed in Jesus, touchingly born in the climate of tropical Egypt, and heralded by a star which in any astronomical view whatever becomes a natural monstrosity. All things considered it was a device of consummate utility to consign the whole matter of the Incarnation to the distant and sacrosanct person of the Nazarene. Beside bearing in his body the sins of the world, he has borne also in

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his frail person the unsolved problems of a blind and errant theology! The Jesus of Christianity was as much an intellectual necessity to a befuddled ecclesiasticism as Voltaire’s God has been to a humanity trying to rationalize the universe. To a theology plunged into dialectical difficulties by its rejection of esotericism, a Jesus who "paid it all" has indeed been "a very present help in trouble." By cramming all the essence of divinity that came to earth into the sainted confines of Jesus’ body and life, all qualms concerning the neglected "Christ in you" could be overborne by a wave of the hand toward the picture of the man of Galilee on the cross.

But pagan thought faced the implications and the data of the incarnation problem squarely. A fragment of deity was brought and lodged within the breast of every animal form evolved to the verge of the human kingdom. The animal race awaited the implantation of the divine spark, as their hope of a link with the order of responsible free agency and self-conscious intelligence. They stood at the point at which physical evolution could take them no farther toward mentality without the endowment of a nucleus or seed of potential mind from the plane above. They awaited the incubation of divine intelligence in their physical forms. The agents of such a blessing were at hand in the legions of Asuras, who had evolved the desired element of mind in former cycles elsewhere, but yet required some rounds of incarnate experience to complete the perfection of their divinity. After rebellion and delay they came to fulfill their cosmic destiny. We are those "unwilling Nirvanees," those "junior gods," those angelic hosts! By our coming and sharing our nature with the lesser creatures, they, too, become the heirs of immortality; for the essence of which our higher nature was nucleated is imperishable. If the animal could append it to his being, he would be immortalized also. The Demiurgus in charging us with the commission, assured us that we "should never be dissolved" (Timaeus). The gist of Plato’s, as of Paul’s, writings is that man is a being compounded of a lower perishable and a higher indestructible vesture, the two linked by an intermediate principle which may be inclined to a union with either, and which therefore stands at the place of the balance in human destiny. The fleshly form was contributed by physical evolution on earth, but it was molded upon the matrix of an emotional body of finer etheric substance supplied by the men of the previous Moon race,

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or the Lunar Pitris, at the end of their life period on our satellite.1 A higher race, concluding a course of incarnations upon another planet of our system, Venus or Mercury, contributed the mental or manasic principle, which was to control emotion and sensation. And the highest spiritual node of being was the gift of entities embodying the soul of the sun. We can see now why in ancient legends of the formulation of mankind, the various gods are said to contribute each a bit of his own nature to compile the final product, as in the Pandora myth. Manas or mind was the intermediary between emotion and spirit. Spirit was to control mind as mind controlled emotion. With the descending Asuras2 came potential mind and the germ of undying spirit.

To present briefly the archaic legend of the advent, the accounts relate that of the twelve legions chosen to undertake the adventure in the far country, two were lost and had to find their place again in evolution later. Of the remaining ten, one group of five responded willingly to the order. They were therefore known as the Suras, or "willing Nirvanees." They are the obedient elder brother of the Prodigal Son allegory! But in their effort they did not descend to full incarnation in animal bodies, but remained suspended, so to say, over the earthly scene in what might be called spiritual bodies. They never reached the flesh, never became the souls of fleshly creatures. They were obedient, but never fully executed their commission. The remaining group of five legions, profiting by their example, at first refused to run the risk of the same abortive effort, and were known as the Asuras, or "unwilling ones." (Syrians and Assyrians became their earthly counterparts in the handling of the uranograph, the ancient "u" changing always to a "y" when Anglicized.) However, they could not avert their destiny, and reluctantly obeying, they succeeded in linking their divine principle of intelligence to the mortal forms of the animal-men awaiting them. "The underworld awaits your coming" is a statement made to them in one of the prophetic books of the Old Testament. They were the younger and wayward son in the Prodigal Son allegory! But they did go out from home, as the elder brother did not. Therefore they were worthy of the fatted calf and the shining robe on their return, victorious. The elder brother, though obedient, had not earned the reward. This is the solution of the difficult situation in the allegory, in which the sulkiness and apparent neglect of the obedient son who had remained faithfully at home, have so

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universally defeated the exegetical efforts of the theologians. The parable of the five wise and five foolish virgins is likewise a glyph of this same cosmic predicament. For one of the names of the Asuras was Kumaras, meaning "celibate young men," or "spiritual virgins." They are the "Innocents" of the Gospel story and the Hamemmet Beings of the Book of the Dead. Their virginity is by virtue of the fact that they were entities of pure spiritual nature, radiations of basic Spirit, who had not yet had full incarnation, which was ever symbolized as a "marriage" of spirit with flesh! They were cosmically unmarried, hence "virgin" young men.

We have here a new intimation of profound meaning back of the feature of the "virgin birth" and the "immaculate conception." The virginity pertained to both sides, the spiritual as well as the material. If the matter that was to give birth to spiritual mind was hitherto unwedded to spirit, never impregnated by spirit, so likewise were the spiritual units who were sent to be the "Bridegroom" of New Testament dramatism to wed these immaculate virgins of the material nature. They were yet "innocent" of copulation with matter. They were the ones chosen to descend to earth and wed material forms, inoculating virgin matter with the principle of immortal mind. They were "young men" and "celibate." Beside Hamemmet Beings the Egyptians termed them "younglings in the egg" and the "younglings of Shu," the god. And they dramatized them as birds’ (souls’) eggs in the nest in the tree of life in danger of being devoured by the serpent--of the lower nature! One Egyptian name given, in addition to Apap or Apep, or Apepi, to the great Hydra serpent that lay in wait to devour the Manes in the "bight of Amenta" was Herut or Herrut. Evidence that is not lightly to be brushed aside in derision can be adduced in support of the suggestion that the name Herod, foisted on this serpent character in the myth when drama was historicized, is just a cover for the Herut reptile that threatens the Innocents! The historical Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, was dead at the year 4 B.C. Christian chronology has had to shift the "date" of Christ’s "birth" to the year 4 B.C. in order to be able to include Herod in the story. But Cyrenius (Quirinus), the "Governor in Syria" at the time of Jesus’ birth according to the Gospel account, reigned from 13 to 11 B.C. Will another shift of seven to nine years be made to include him?

The Kumaras in the Egyptian books exult in their escape from the

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serpent threat with the cry: "Apap hath not found my nest. My egg has not been cracked!" The infant Hercules in his cradle strangled the two great snakes that crept up to devour him, and both Horus and his cat symbol stand with feet upon the giant serpent’s neck, the cat severing its head with a knife.

Thomas Taylor, the discerning Platonist, states that we mortal men are composed of the "fragments" of the Titans. In Platonism generally the Titans were styled Thyrsus-bearers, as having "led the soul into the body," or "brought ungenerated into generated existence." Their part in implanting the seed of intelligence in man is poetically set forth in Proclus’ Hymn to Minerva:

"Invigorated hence by thee we find

A demiurgic impulse in the mind."

Massey tells us that

"in the Latita-Vistara eight heavenly beings are enumerated as the Gods or Devas. They are the Nagas, Yakshas, Gandharvas, Asuras, Garudas, Kumaras and Mahorgas."3

They are the gods who (collectively) in Leviticus (26) say to the Israelites:

"I will ratify my compact with you; I will pitch my tent among you and never abhor you. I will live among you and be your God, and you shall be my people."

In this great enterprise of leading whole and impartible natures into the realm of division and darkness they were said to have established "the garden of the Asuras" about the South Pole of the heavens, the Paradise of Yama, Lord of the region of death, whilst the Suras, or unfragmented deities, are said to have dwelt in the locality of the North Polar region, the fabled Mt. Meru, or Paradise of Indra. This opposition of the two races of divinities, termed the War in Heaven, was the celestial counterpart and prototypal aspect of the later struggle inaugurated between the heavenly and the earthly elements in human nature when the Asuras descended to assume physical vestures. It was the pattern in the heavens of the war between the first Adam, or natural man, and the second Adam, or the man regenerated by the infusion of a spiritual consciousness.

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The point now to be demonstrated beyond cavil is that the incarnation was localized in the bodies of a race that at the beginning was animal and in the end was to be human. The "tabernacling with men" which the deities undertook consisted in effecting the incorporation of their subtler faculties and capacities in bodies originally animal. The ancient apothegm of the sages--"Nature unaided fails"--must be given due consideration in the scheme of things and accepted as one of the canons of understanding. It seems to introduce into the system of evolution a bizarre and unaccountable factor. It appears to thrust the causative principle of mind, intelligence, into the order of natural unfoldment in a purely arbitrary way, such as science can not countenance. It appears to make evolution jump over the gap between beast and human, and suddenly presents man endowed with self-determinative intelligence with no provision made for his having earned it in orderly development. But the ancient wisdom does supply the link that to science is missing. It reveals the irrationality of science’s attempt to account for the presence and growth of a plant without permitting the assumption that its seed was first planted in the soil. Science has been straining to explain the presence of mind in man without knowledge of the ancient theorem that each kingdom serves as the seed-bed for the generation of life of the kingdom above it. It has been searching for formulae of explanation in total want of the understanding that

"one long immortal chain, whose sequence is never-ending, reaches by impact with that immediately above and by contact with that immediately below, from the very lowest to the very highest."4

It is possible to discern a replica of this same linkage of principles in the functioning of our bodily organism, reaching from spirit at the top to flesh and bone at the bottom. Spirit touches and influences mind, mind touches emotion, emotion modifies nerve impulse, which affects the composition of the blood, and blood builds cell structure, eventuating in actual flesh and bone. The spirit in the human body is like a power current in a dynamo, motivating a dynamic impulse which reaches to the utmost bounds of the organism. But man, like nature, is composed of a series of structures of different tenuity, and each member of the series is a link in the chain, bound above and below to the contiguous links. The interrelation of the links is governed by the Law of Incubation, by which the seed germ of life on the level

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above is deposited in the soil of the level below, there to be hatched to new generation. In the Egyptian Ritual (Ch. 85) the incarnating Ego says: "I am the soul, the Creator of the god Nu, who maketh his habitation in the underworld; my place of incubation is unseen and my egg is not cracked." And in the resurrection scene in the Ritual the revivified Ego, figured as a dove, exclaims: "I am the Dove; I am the Dove,"! as he rises from the realm of darkness wherein the "egg of his future being was hatched by the divine incubator" (Ch. 86).

In the Pistis Sophia of the Gnostics the doctrine of the incubation finds clear expression when Jesus says:

"I found Mary, who is called my mother, after the material body; I implanted in her the first power which I had received from the hands of Barbelo, and I planted in her the power which I had received from the hands of the great, the good Sabaoth" (Mead’s Trans., Bk. I, 13).

It is of transcendent importance to note that the Greek (Gnostic) work directly identifies Mary, the mother of divinity, with the physical body! Let Christian theology be advised of the long-lost truth of this matter. The mother in all ancient allegories typifies nothing more than the physical body which in man becomes the womb or matrix in which the radiant Christ-body of spirit is brought to birth. Is Christianity to fall below heathenism in its inability to rise above the level of the symbols to the discernment of the abstract truth behind them?

Proclus speaks of the soul having fallen like seed into the realms of generation.5 Paul’s characterization of the nature of man as sown in corruption is a resort again to the imagery of incubation. The "junior gods," potentially if not yet actually divine, were sown, planted in a soil prepared by evolution to nourish their latent fires to expansion and full function, and this was the incarnation. The "fleshly" connotation of the word leaves no doubt as to the full reality of the process; the ground prepared was the physical body of animal-men. The entry of these divine seeds of life and mind into each animal form made possible for those creatures their transition across the gap of the "missing link" to the plane of humanhood. The link between brute beast and thinking man is missing on earth; for it was forged by evolutionary process in another realm, on another planet, and transferred to earth at a given critical epoch in mundane history. As Plutarch tells us, only one fourth of man, his physical body, is derived directly from

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the earth; the other three parts are brought here and linked to his material frame by appropriate affinities. That this may not remain an insoluble enigma to modern skepticism about such things, it may be said that each of these principles intermixed in man’s constitution was the product of an evolution on its particular globe, and that, since these globes themselves are but cells or organs in a larger composite living stellar being, the possibility of their sustaining vital relations or co-operative linkage in a common creative work is far from an unnatural presupposition. Science must go several steps deeper than it has yet gone into the secret workshop of nature before it can admit the legitimacy of such predications. Yet ancient psycho-physics faced the problems of life with the knowledge that all living organisms are concocted of a perishable material element and an imperishable subjective element bound together in temporary union. When the corruptible sheath fades away the imperishable nucleus floats free, persists and may later be embodied in another form. Science is to be reminded that substances are the more enduring in proportion to their tenuity, that "soul," as the Greeks affirmed, is far more lasting than body. Hence impressions made upon it are a more ineradicable book of life than any cemetery epitaph. Our emotional body, our mental vehicle and our immortal spiritual vesture each brings the record of its past indelibly imprinted upon the underlying etheric substance of its composition.

From Greek Platonism we draw some of the most direct and dialectically essential support for the thesis of the bodily incarnation. From Olympiodorus’ Commentary on the Phaedo of Plato we take the following:

"It is necessary, first of all, for the soul to place a likeness of herself in the body. This is to ensoul the body. Secondly, it is necessary for her to sympathize with the image, as being of like idea. For every eternal form or substance is wrought into an identity with its interior substance, through an integrated tendency thereto."

We are here enlightened about the interior affinities which the two partners to the union manifest toward each other, the bonds that draw and hold and eventually weld them together.

Another pointed assertion comes from the Chaldean Oracles:

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"For the Father of Gods and men placed our intellect in soul, but soul he deposited in sluggish body."

Perhaps we shall find nowhere else so detailed and analytic a statement of the principles on which life and nature regulate the metamorphoses which divine consciousness undergoes as it descends the Jacob’s ladder from spirit heights to mortal sense on coming into incarnation, as in a paragraph from Proclus in the quaint style of Thomas Taylor’s rendering:

"In order likewise that this may become manifest and also the arrangement, let us survey from on high the descent, as Plato says, and defluxion of the wings of the soul. From the beginning, therefore, and at first the soul, departing from this divine union, descended into intellect, and no longer possessed real being unitedly and in one, but apprehended and surveyed them by simple projections and, as it were, contacts of its intellect. In the next place, departing from intellect, and descending into reason and dianoia, it no longer apprehended real being by simple intuitions, but syllogistically and transitively, proceeding from one thing to another, from propositions to conclusions. Afterwards, abandoning true reasoning and the dissolving peculiarity [analysis], it descended into generation, and became filled with much irrationality and perturbation. It is necessary, therefore, that it should recur to its proper principles and again return to the place from whence it came."6

Nothing would so quickly aid modern psychology to work for fruitful results in understanding as to adopt this table of the successive "defluxions of the wings of the soul" in Plato’s magnificent analysis. Surely the present status and modus of the psyche’s operation are to be better envisaged if they are known to be the lowest and most darkened activity of a spiritual intelligence that on the heights above functioned by flashing intuition. Clearly outlined are the several steps which the soul takes from piercing light into murky darkness as it descends into body: first from identity with reality and direct inclusion of consciousness in it; then the plunge downward into that form of intellect which apprehends by immediate intuition; again the dip into the more sluggish processes of logical reasoning, in which, the inner relations of things being lost, the mind must establish them slowly by syllogistic process; and finally the dropping altogether from

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rational procedure into following the lead of sheer sense and impulse of the lower nature. With mighty realizations we are now able to see what St. Paul meant in saying, "Now we see through a glass darkly."

From a dissertation on Theurgy translated by the Renaissance Platonist, Ficinus, we take the following clear statement of the gradations in the chain of the descent:

"So that all things are full of divine natures; terrestrial natures receiving the plenitude of such as are celestial, but celestial of supercelestial essences; while every order of things proceeds gradually, in a beautiful descent, from the highest to the lowest. For whatever particulars are collected into one above the order of things, are afterwards dilated in descending, various souls being distributed under their various ruling divinities."7

From the grand master of divine knowledge himself, Plato (Timaeus, xliv), comes the remarkable declaration:

"The Deity (Demiurgus) himself formed the divine; and then delivered over to his celestial offspring (the subordinate or generated gods), the task of creating the mortal. These subordinate deities, copying the example of their parent, and receiving from his hands the immortal principles of the human soul, fashioned after this the mortal body, which was consigned to the soul as a vehicle, and in which they placed also another kind of soul, which is mortal and is the seat of violent and fatal passions."

For sheer enlightenment these passages are worth whole libraries of modern speculation. The lower soul spoken of is the one which emanated from the moon race, and is, strictly speaking, the soul of the animal, not the god-soul of the man. It is this lower soul, called often the "elemental," the seat of the animal instincts, that the god has come to educate, and in the same body with which it has come to dwell. When Plato describes it as "the seat of violent and fatal passions," he is definitely identifying our mortal tenement with the body of an animal. This conclusion is strengthened by one of the Zoroastrian Oracles, which declares: "The wild beasts of the earth shall inhabit thy vessel."8

Edward Carpenter, in reviewing the multifarious forms of the "sacrifice" doctrine in religions, says that "Brahma, . . . Indra, Soma, Hari and other gods, became incarnate in animals."9 And it is not without extreme significance that we have such a statement as the following from a scholarly authority:

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"The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among lower races."10

Naturally so, because the gap between man and animal there is less wide than it now is in cultured races. The animal did not at one jump land into full manhood. He was given the as yet ungerminated seed of divinity to nurse within the depths of his own nature. Only a tiny segment of the god’s life was in conscious manifestation in and through the lower mentality of the beast at the start. The god could put little of his full power and capacity into expression through the imperfect brain of the animal. For a long time, or until the angel’s presence in the brute body could refine the latter’s impulses and proclivities and increase brain expansion, the deity could only lurk in the background of consciousness, becoming what we now so ignorantly term "the subconscious mind." There was obviously little difference between the first humans and the nearest animals. The difference did not assume marked proportions until ages had rolled by and the slow march of development had enabled the god to project more and more of his innate endowment into the sluggish nature of the beast he was tutoring. We have here, systematically propounded for the first time, the basic criterion for evaluating the progress of human culture. Culture is essentially nothing but the gradual modification of crude animal impulses into the gentler motions of the higher self. Modernity has never concisely known the cosmic or evolutionary foundations of this transaction. These lay hidden under the rejected esotericism of Platonic and other arcane teachings.

The Bible sets forth the implications of the incarnation in sensationally direct form in the Book of Daniel. Addressing the king (always a figure for the god) Daniel tells him that he will be taken away from human beings to dwell with the wild animals; and he condenses volumes of Platonic philosophy dealing with the obscuration of deific intellect in the descent, into the pithy statement, repeated three times in the first five chapters, that "you shall be given the mind of an animal"! An animal’s mind was given unto him and his dwelling was with the wild beasts." Also: "He ate grass like cattle, and his nails grew like the claws of a bird." (Incidentally, here is positive proof of the non-historicity of Bible narrative, since these things did not happen

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to the historical King, Nebuchadnezzar!) But the Paradise lost in the incarnation was regained in the end, for finally, "When the time was over, I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted up my eyes unto heaven; my reason returned unto me, and I blessed the Lord, praising him and honoring him forever." The period of the duress in animal habitat is given as "seven years," each cycle of incarnate life being completed in seven ages! And all the mighty meaning of this grand allegory was missed because Nebuchadnezzar was taken for an historical personage, instead of a figure for the god in man.

Egypt furnishes us with one of the most direct and indubitable bits of testimony to the animal incarnation of the soul in one of the numberless prayers addressed to Osiris:

"Hail, Osiris Khenti-Amentiu (Lord of Amenta)! Thou art the Lord of millions of years, the lifter-up of wild animals, the Lord of cattle; . . ."

As Amenta is the region in which the Osiris-soul contacts the body, the verse is of surpassing meaning in this connection.

Massey writes in The Natural Genesis (Vol. I, p. 71):

"A very comprehensive designation for the divinities of all kinds, says Gill (Myths and Songs, p. 34), is the Mangaian ‘te anau tuarangi,’ the heavenly family. This ‘celestial race includes rats, lizards, beetles, sharks and several kinds of birds. The supposition was that the heavenly family had taken up their abode in these birds and fishes.’"

"Plutarch refers to the idea ‘that the Gods, being afraid of Typhon; did, as it were, hide themselves in the bodies of ibises, dogs and hawks,’ and repudiated it as ‘foolery beyond belief.’ This, however, is a matter of interpretation. We know that such representations were part of the drama of the Mysteries. Many descriptions might be quoted to show that in their religious ceremonies, the actors performed their masquerade in the guise of animals."

We have here a sterling clue to the lost meaning of most of the weird ritualism still carried out in our celebration of Hallowe’en. The importance and gripping significance of this remnant of ancient symbolic dramatism is not dreamed of today. The masks worn were originally those of animal faces or hides. The festival, coming at the time of the September equinox (with a forty-days’ interval), when the sun, eternal symbol of the divine soul, was descending across the line which

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marked the boundary between disembodied spirit and soul embodied, dramatized the entry of the god into the animal body. "Mask" is in Latin "persona." The god was then putting on the mask of his personality; and all the weird capers, grimaces, horseplay and general buffoonery of the Hallowe’en revelry most piquantly prefigure the deity’s ungainly animalish behavior when cavorting behind the outward mask of the animal’s nature! The moon being the parent of the mortal body, lunar symbolism was prominently introduced into the portrayal. And all this is another strong proof that it was the primal religious ritual drama that gave rise to social tradition and celebratory custom, and not folk-practice that gave rise to the myth, as scholars have always so erroneously contended.11

A patent hint of strong esoteric significance is found in the following:

"Diodorus has it that the gods were at one time hard pressed by the giants, and compelled to conceal themselves for a while under the form of animals, which in consequence became sacred."12

Here is straight anthropology hidden under semi-fable. It is the true explanation of a vast amount of tribal custom that has perplexed the learned world no end. Whole chapters of Frazers’s Golden Bough and similar works, of which the authors have offered no rational interpretation and believed none possible, become intelligible at one stroke, and such a cultured people as the ancient Egyptians are exculpated from the charge of crude animism and fetishism in "worshipping animals."

The incarnation was incontestably the most fateful event that had ever taken place in the evolutionary career of animal-man, giving him a status far above that of his former condition. It was the far-away beginning of his apotheosis. It was his passport of entry into the kingdom of mind. The folk-lore and Märchen of the nations carry the story of this mighty crisis in evolution in an apparent mélange of childish fancy, flippant caprice of invention and forms of the grossest imagery. These seeming qualities have been the means of derailing the train of our understanding of the hidden purport of the relics. We have but to use our imagination constructively to see how mythography passed first into the realism of dramatic representation, then

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into legend lacking the original spiritual meaning, and finally into a sadly distorted and barren folk-tale.

"Herodotus was told that the Neurian wizards among the Scythians, settled about the Black Sea, became each of them a wolf for a few days once a year. The Texan tribe of the Tonkaways did the same, when, clothed in wolf-skins, they celebrated the resurrection of the wolf from the Hades. The head of a wolf was worn in the Mysteries of Isis; because the wolf (Anup) was her warder and guardian during the search for Osiris in the underworld. . . . The candidate as the Loveteau of French Masonry still enters as a young wolf."13

A Chinese remnant relates that a maid conceived by air (the Holy Spirit!) and brought forth a child, which the father then threw into the pig-yard! "It was the rightful heir, who lived to become the monarch." If this seems tawdry and profane, let the reader note the obvious resemblance to the Prodigal Son allegory and the conception story of Mary.

The Shilluks have a tradition that "Nyakang then created men and women out of the animals he found in the country." The promise to mankind in the Genesis account, that the human should be lord of the animal creation, ruler of the beasts of the field, has obvious reference to the headship of the mental man over the body itself, which would be assumed by the soul or god upon his entry therein, under the terms of his covenant with Deity. His task in the incarnational assignment was to tame, subdue, discipline and finally exalt the lower personality, which was the depository of all animal experience in its soul,--our sub-conscious mind. Passages in the Book of Enoch state that man shall dwell with the wild beasts and shall subdue and overcome them. A verse in Ezekiel declares to the soul: "I shall fill the wild beasts of the earth with thee." But one of the most straightforward figurations of the incarnation in all religious literature is found in the Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans, an apocryphal New Testament Gospel, when the soul, speaking as one of the characters in the drama, most beautifully poetizes his nature and mission in this remarkable utterance: "Suffer me to be food to the wild beasts, by whom I shall attain unto God. For I am the wheat of God, and I shall be ground between the teeth of the wild animals that I may be found the pure bread of Christ." The crushing of wheat into flour for bread was a

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widely used symbol of the fragmentation of unitary deity consequent upon his descent into bodies. The statement here that the crushing was done by the teeth of the wild beasts is beyond cavil a positive reference to the animal embodiment. And the added information that by such lowly incarnation the soul shall attain unto God should restore to theology the lost conception of the importance of the bodily life.

The Bible’s declaration that we "shall be as sheep among wolves" is a slanting hint at the picture of the gentle Christ spirit tenanting the bodies of the wild beasts of earth! And the scene of Daniel, the man of God, in the lion’s den, is another suggestion that the soul may safely reside in the animal’s body or "den," if it holds true to its divine ideal.

An Egyptian text addresses Thoth as "he who sendeth forth his heart to dwell in his body." Another presents us with a definite corroboration of the incarnation thesis. It speaks of Annu (in this case our earth) as "the land wherein souls are joined unto their bodies even in thousands."

An Arunta legend describes the animistic powers attributed to beings as the "ancestors who reproduce themselves by incorporation in the life on earth in the course of becoming men or animal."

It was the fundamental Egyptian conception that the god, on descending to earth, became "fleshed." The word Karas, which was used to designate the mummy, is traced to the Greek kreas, flesh. The taking on of a carnal form was in its true connotation the mummification of the Osiris or spirit.14 An Egyptian text asserts most positively the union of soul and body. Chapter 163 of the Ritual says: "Let his soul have its being within his body, and let his body have its being within his soul." And another chapter (89) is entitled "the chapter by which the soul is united to the body." This can not mean the dead body, since obviously the soul is separated from, not united with, the cadaver. It can mean nothing but the conjunction of the incoming soul with the body at birth or a little later.

The amassing of so much data in support of the Incarnation, a doctrine of theology that is still included in ecclesiastical acceptance, may appear a labor of supererogation. Far from it. The data presented have been assembled with the purpose of restoring the dogma to its pivotal place of importance in the theological temple. It has been so viciously emasculated that a mass of testimony as to its original cardinal utility had to be adduced, if it is to be re-established in its rugged pristine

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meaning. Mankind works blindly at the main problem confronting it so long as this doctrine is obscured. It was never intended to mean that the whole of the power of the Logos was crowded into the admittedly limited area of a single personality. It was not accepted in this light by the intelligent Fathers of the early Church, such as Clement and Origen; for they are on record as expressly repudiating such an eventuality. They regarded a personalized embodiment of deity as infinitely degrading to the Logos, verily a blasphemy.

Furthermore how can we understand Paul’s preachment of the warfare between carnal and spiritual natures unless we are assured that soul and flesh were conjoined in intimate and affective relationship? If theology is to rise again to benignant influence, it must be mounted again upon its ancient bases of anthropology. If the advent, the incarnation, the birth, the temptation, the baptism, transfiguration, crucifixion and resurrection can not be shown to be the type of our own actual experience in present living, the temple of theology can not be expected to be rebuilt on a foundation of mystical sentiment alone. If the cosmological and anthropological aspects of the original esotericism had not been disdained, theology would not now stand in such forlorn case before a world styling itself intelligent. Thrown down from her pedestal of ancient dignity, she lies prostrate in the courtyard of the Church, and the busy populace hurrying by on worldly bent mocks her or heeds her not. She has no place in the hall of science, no true home in the human heart. Hardly even in the somber pulpit does she stand in honor. Her only place is in the dim and darksome alcoves of the ecclesiastic’s library; and priestly zeal essays in vain to win back for her the departed power.

On this score it is desirable to give assent to one or two of Massey’s discerning judgments before passing on to the corollaries of the doctrine:

"The doctrine of the incarnation had been evolved and established in the Osirian religion at least four thousand years, and possibly ten thousand years, before it was purloined and perverted in Christianity."15

"The legend of the voluntary victim who in a passion of divinest pity became incarnate and was clothed in human form and feature for the salvation of the world, did not originate in a belief that God had manifested once for all as an historic personage. It has its roots in the remotest past. The same legend was repeated in many lands with a change of name, and

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at times of sex, for the sufferer, but none of the initiated in the esoteric wisdom ever looked upon the Kamite [Egyptian] Iusa, or Gnostic Horus, Jesus, Tammuz, Krishna, Buddha, Witoba, or any other of the many saviors as historic in personality, for the simple reason that they had been more truly taught."16

The incarnation, however, only begins the impartation of deity to the human race. It inaugurated on the planet a chain of events, the circumstances and trend of which must now be outlined. All of these involvements are profoundly relevant to the system of theology.

Greek philosophy viewed the descent and incarnation of the gods as entailing upon these exalted beings an almost total loss of their pristine glory and felicity, and a devastating reduction of their coefficient of consciousness. The soul became "cribbed, cabined and confined" in the sorry limitations of the carnal body, as it lost a dimension of consciousness at each step on the downward path. It becomes bound to the sensual and the palpable, after having been able to range at will throughout the limitless spaces of universal thought. It is impossible to surpass in lucidity the language of Greek philosophy in delineating these matters. Proclus, as reported by Iamblichus, avers that17

"the soul by descending into the realms of generation, resembles a thing broken and relaxed. . . . Hence the soul energizes partially and not according to the whole of itself . . . the intellectual part of it is fettered . . . but the doxastic18 sustains many fractures and turnings."

Proclus elucidates Plato’s findings to the effect that

"it is impossible while here, to lead a theoretic life in perfection, as is evident from the causes which are enumerated in the Phaedo, viz., the occupations and molestations of the body, which do not suffer us to energize theoretically without impediment and disturbance."19

And his fellow-Platonist, the learned Iamblichus, adds a forceful assertion of the same idea:

"For the human soul is contained by one form and is on all sides darkened by body, which he who denominates the River of Negligence or the Water of Oblivion, or ignorance and delirium, or a bond through passions, will not by such appellations sufficiently express its turpitude. How therefore is it possible that the soul which is detained by so many evils can ever become sufficient to an energy of this kind?"20

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Empedocles, evidently drawing his philosophical ideas from Orphic Mystery cultism, has a poem, a fragment of which speaks of the "joyless region" in which the souls on earth

"Through Ate’s meads and dreadful darkness stray."

The soul descends from the realms of light to the region of gloom:

"She flies from deity and heavenly light

To serve mad Discord in the realms of night."

A dialectical echo of Plato’s Cave Myth is heard seven centuries after the Republic was written, in the language of the great Plotinus, mystic Neo-Platonist of the third century. Dealing with the fable of Narcissus and elucidating its hidden purport, he says:

"Hence, as Narcissus, by catching at the shadow, plunged in the stream and disappeared, so he who is captivated by beautiful bodies, and does not depart from their embrace, is precipitated, not with the body, but with his soul, into a darkness profound and repugnant to intellect, through which, remaining blind both here and in Hades, he associates with shadows."21

In the Phaedrus Plato, in the beautiful allegory of the Chariot and the Winged Steeds, portrays the soul as being dragged down by the lower elements in man’s nature and subjected to a slavery incident to corporeal embodiment. Out of these conditions he traces the rise of numerous evils that disorder the mind and becloud the reason. Indeed he shows with convincing dialectic that evil is just this breaking up of the vision of whole natures into distracted particulars where the interconnection of part with part is lost sight of. Evil is seen to be due to the condition of partiality and multiformity inseparable from the incarnate state, "into which we have fallen by our own fault." The rational element, formerly in full function, now falls asleep. Life is thereupon more generally swayed by the inclinations of the sensual part. Man becomes the slave of sense, the sport of phantoms and illusions. This is the realm in which Plato’s noesis, or godlike intellect, ceases to operate for our guidance and we are dominated by doxa, or "opinion."22 This state of mental dimness is the true "subterranean cave" of the Platonic myth, in which we see only shadows, mistaking them for reality.

Thomas Taylor’s clear language enforces these ideas for our benefit:

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"Such indeed is the wretched situation of the soul when profoundly merged in a corporeal nature. She not only becomes captive and fettered, but loses all her original splendor; she is defiled with the impurity of matter; and the sharpness of her rational sight is blunted and dimmed through the thick darkness of a material night."23

Proclus, an expounder of Plato rated nearly equal with his great inspirer, writes:

"when it [the soul] energizes according to nature, it is superior to the influence of Fate, but when it falls into sense and becomes irrational and corporeal, it follows the natures that are beneath it, and living with them as with intoxicated neighbors, is held in subjection by a cause that has dominion over things that are different from the rational essence."24

Indeed we have here the Greek philosophical root of one of the pivotal phases of Pauline doctrine. It was the descent and mooring of the soul "to the ruinous bonds of the body" that brought the spirit of man under the dominion of what Paul calls "the law"--of Fate, Karma and Necessity. This, too, was "the bondage in Egypt" of the Old Testament. On her own high plane the soul was in a state of liberty, "the glorious liberty of the sons of God." Only by her incarceration in a vessel whose constitutional functions were under the laws of physics and chemistry was she subjected to the rule of matter. The Greek philosophers declared that her release from this bondage was to be won only through the discipline of "philosophy." It taught the earnest man to abjure the motions of the flesh and to rise to the delight and freedom of the noetic consciousness. Paul couched the process in the language of religion, and called it spirituality or "grace."

"The dark night of the soul," no less than the Götterdämmerung, was, in the ancient mind, just the condition of the soul’s embodiment in physical forms. Taylor reasons that Minerva (the rational faculty, as Goddess of Wisdom) was by her attachment to body given wholly "to the dangerous employment and abandons the proper characteristics of her nature for the destructive revels of desire." All this is the dialectic statement of the main theme of ancient theology--the incarnation of the godlike intellect and divine soul in the darksome conditions of animal bodies.

The modern student must adjust his mind to the olden conception--

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renewed again by Spinoza--of all life as subsisting in one or another modification of one primordial essence, called by the Hindus Mulaprakriti. This basic substance was held to make a transit from its most rarefied form to the grossest state of material objectivity and back again, in ceaseless round. Darkness was the only fit symbol to give to the mind any suggestive realization of the conditions of living intellectual energy when reduced in potential under the inertia of matter.

So severely curtailed were the soul’s powers in bodily life that it was denominated her incarceration. The soul was a captive, caught in a prison, the doors of which were clamped fast upon it. Its jailer was the body with its sensuous nature. And like Paul in prison at Philippi, the soul would have to convert her jailer and transform his nature to the likeness of her own, to gain her release.

The implications of this cardinal item for ethics, pietism and spirituality are of the highest moment. For all such philosophies as Buddhism, Christian Science and Spiritualism (of certain forms), which seek escape from the rigors of incarnation by a sheer fiat of philosophical thought, and look to a disembodied state for immediate bliss, this principle is very directly an antidote and corrective. It points clearly to the false premises of all philosophies of "escape." We can not escape our obligation to the animal who is lending us his body for our own advancement. We came hither to transfigure these brute bodies, and such a miracle demands the exercise of the highest philosophical virtues and the fixed habits of theoretic contemplation of the beautiful and the good. Job asks if the days of man on earth "are not the days of an hireling," and declares that he has "found a ransom."

The Greeks believed "that human souls were confined in the body as in a prison, a condition which they denominated generation; from which Dionysus would liberate them." Their sufferings, their progress through the ascending stages of being, their catharsis or purification, and their enlightenment constituted the theme of the Orphic writers and the groundwork of the mystical rites.

We have Proclus declaring that Plato in the Phaedo

"venerates with a becoming silence the assertion delivered in the arcane discourses, that men are placed in the body as in a prison, secured by a guard, and testifies, according to the mystic ceremonies, the different allotments of purified and unpurified souls in Hades."25

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Here is evidence that the Mystery Plays were dramatic representations of our earthly imprisonment, with all that was corollary to it.

Of our condition of bondage Plato speaks in the following manner: ". . . liberated from this surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster in its shell." It is Plato who states that the function of philosophy is to "disenthrall the soul from the bondage of sense." We are "captives chained to sense."

It seems never to have occurred to modern classical students that the many descriptions scattered through the Aeneid of Virgil, of shadowy groves, vales and caves, are allegoric of the gloomy conditions the soul encounters in her residence in bodies. The woods whose bristling shades terrify the hero (the soul) are the dismal murks of physical incarceration. Physical imagery must be translated over into spiritual or psychic realities. For of such matters only were the early sages discoursing. Speaking of the removal of the junior deities from heaven to earth, the poet writes in the Aeneid: "Nor do they, thus enclosed in darkness and the gloomy prison, behold the heavenly air."

One of the Egyptian texts says that it is impossible for the shade (soul) to leave the body on earth until the latter is raised up. After the telestic or perfecting work is finished, it is shown (Rit., Ch. 91) that the soul "does not [any longer] suffer imprisonment at any door in Amenta," this lower earth, "either in coming in or going out."

David echoes the Egyptian idea when in the cave (Ps. 142) he cries to the Lord: "Bring my soul out of prison." In the great Kamite religion Horus, exactly as the Christian Jesus, comes to "the spirits in prison" to set them free from bondage and darkness and lead them to the land of light. The Manes, or soul in the body, cries to the keepers: "Imprison not my soul, keep not in custody my shade. Let the path be open to my soul. Let it not be made captive by those who imprison the shades of the dead. O keep not captive my soul, O keep not ward over my shadow" (Rit., Ch. 92). Says Massey:

"Horus is the Kamite prototype of the chosen one, called the servant by Isaiah, who came ‘for a light to the Gentiles,26 to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeons, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house.’" (Isaiah 42:7.)27

An allied appellation of the "spirits in prison" is "those who are in their cells." Horus comes to wake "those who sleep in their cells."

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Again the Manes in the prison of Osiris cries" "Let not the Osiris enter into the dungeon of the captives." "Let not Osiris advance into the valley of darkness." Osiris says to the warders of the prisons" "May I not sit within your dungeons, may I not fall into your pits." (Ch. 17.) Osiris elsewhere asks to be delivered from "this land of bondage." Sut, the personified evil one as opponent of the deliverer Horus, is called "the keeper of the prison-house for death," to which Horus comes as the lord of life and freedom. Horus, as deliverer, is said to come "to those who are in their prison cells," held captive by Sut. An interesting sidelight is thrown on one aspect of the function of the Goddess Hathor, who was the "habitation of the hawk, or the birdcage of the soul"! Hathor was the goddess of material creation, to which the body belonged, and the hawk represented the soul. The soul is caged in the body. The latter is even called "the chamber of torture" in the title to Ch. 85 of the Ritual. In Ch. 164 it is promised that the soul "shall not be shut in along with the souls that are fettered," and the prayer is uttered: "Let him escape from the evil chamber and let him not be imprisoned therein." The title of Ch. 91 of the Ritual is: "The chapter of not letting the soul of Nu . . . be captive in the underworld." In Ch. 130 there is a prayer: "Let not the Osiris-Nu fall headlong among those who would lead him captive."

In the Egyptian fable of the lion and the mouse, the mouse, a symbol of the quick energic life that descends into the underground and lives in subterranean darkness, comes like Jesus and Horus to gnaw the bonds of the great lion, here seemingly standing for the animal soul in the toils of flesh and matter.

In the Egypto-Gnostic text, the Pistis Sophia, there were twelve dungeons of infernal torment, in which the twelve legions of angels were imprisoned. The souls could only escape by pronouncing the name of the god who guarded each dungeon door. To pronounce a god’s name was to become equal to him in nature.

In the Bible Exodus recounts that the children of Israel, who are figured as these twelve legions of devas "chosen" for the specific work of incarnation, "were groaning under their bondage, and the wail of their cries for help came up to God." The land to which they had been sent to work their redemptive errand in bondage to the flesh was "Egypt, that slave pen." In Leviticus (16) he admonishes them: "Remember, you were once a slave in Egypt."

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A passage from the Logia, or recovered "sayings of the Lord," declares that "whosoever followeth the Beast, into captivity he goeth; for the Beast maketh captive all who so will to follow him."

Beside Plato’s immortal allegory, there are many uses of the cave as emblem of the dark chambers of the body. David’s pleading in the cave to be delivered from his prison is paralleled by Osiris’ crying for deliverance in the cavern of Sut in Amenta.

Thomas Taylor expressly says that the cavern was used to "signify union with the terrestrial body."

In the fables of the Hercules cycle the hero (the soul, as always) tracks the Nemean lion into a cave where its capture is effected. As it was in the body that the divine nature in man was to "capture" or embrace the animal soul to lift it up, the cave symbolism for the body is again indicated.

In the Egyptian Ritual (Ch. 28) the soul affirms: "This whole heart of mine is laid upon the tablets of Tum, who guideth me to the caverns of Sut," or through the dark passages of Amenta. The tablets of Tum are records of the law, or Maat. They are kept by Taht, the divine scribe, in the Hall of Judgment. Thus to come under the law (St. Paul) brings the deity to the caverns of Sut, the physical body. Of Horus it is written again that he comes to awaken the "prisoners in their cells, the sleepers in their caves."

As ancient burial places were frequently caves in the hillside, we shall have little difficulty in tracing the symbolic meaning of the cave in both the birth and the resurrection scenes, not less than in the raising of Lazarus at Bethany, in Palestine, and of El-Asar(us) at Beth-Anu in Egypt.

Another direct employment of the cave emblem in Egyptian scripture is in Ch. 182 of the Ritual: "Taht says: ‘I gave Ra to enter the mysterious cave in order that he may revive the heart of him whose heart is motionless.’" As Ra is always the divinest spirit, there is again a clear allusion to the god descending into the cave of the body. In the Egyptian Bethany scene the "dead" soul is called aloud nine times to come forth from "the mysterious cave." Massey traces the word "cave" to the Egyptian Kep, which he says means a secret dwelling. It is obvious that, whether this etymology stand the scrutiny of linguistic scholarship or not, the mythologists of old did at any rate conceive the body to be that mysterious hidden dwelling, that shadowy cavern into

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which the legionaries of heaven were obliged to plunge for added physical experience. With this point established beyond cavil, one of the great stones in the arch of ancient interpretation will have been put in place and one of the supports of the structure of a correct theology will have been set up.

From the idea of a cave it was but a short step to that of a pit. In Job a remarkable verse adduces the theory that in sleep, when the lower mind is in abeyance, the inner soul, the god, speaks to Job and admonishes him as to the fluctuating issue of his battle with the flesh: "He keepeth back his soul from the pit." "The Lord is gracious unto him and saith, deliver him from going down into the pit."28

In the Biblical account of the rebellion of the sons of Korah, already noticed, it is said that they went down into the pit in death, but lived on, as did the Manes in the Egyptian Amenta. As the earth opened to swallow these rebels (ourselves), the pit is equated with our mundane home. In the Hebrew writings the pit is identical with the region known as Sheol, equivalent to the Greek Hades and the Egyptian Amenta. Horus is cast into the mire of the pit.

Jonah, upon being saved from the sea-monster, exclaims: "Yet thou hast brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God." Ezekiel contributes a reference both to the pit and to Egypt in a passage which appears to be beyond question a replica of the myth of Joseph in Egypt. The prophet says (19:1-5):

As "a lioness she couched among the lions and she brought up one of her whelps; he became a young lion"--Jesus as lion of the house of Judah--"nations also heard of him; he was taken in their pit, and they brought him with hooks into the land of Egypt."

On this portion of Bible text Massey comments as follows:

"The descent of the sun-god into the lower Egypt of Amenta is portrayed in the Marchen as the casting of Joseph into the pit, and the ascent therefrom in his glory by the coat of many colors," adding: "in an exodus from Egypt which can no longer be considered historical."29

In the Book of Hades (10th division) there is a scene "of making fast the dragon in the pit," which is preparatory to the rising of Ra, or the birth of the divine in and from the human.

In Revelation (20:2, 3) the seer visioned an angel coming down out

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of heaven, having the keys of the abyss, or pit, and a great chain in his hand, with which he bound the dragon, the devil or Satan, for a thousand years, and sealed him fast in the pit. Horus makes war on the powers of evil for what they have done to his father Osiris, and calls to the gods to strike them and "punish them in your pits." To them he says: "Your particular duties in Amenta are to keep the pits of fire in accordance with Ra’s command, which I made known to you."

Let the reader estimate how far theology has departed from understanding that these "evil spirits" that were cast down and bound for a thousand years, or a long series of incarnations, were the angels of light, denominated Satan because of their rebellious and recalcitrant behavior under the hard decrees of incorporation in beastly bodies, and that these fiery pits are none other than our very physical bodies. Is not Satan equated with Lucifer, and is he not the Promethean Light-Bringer?

In Budge’s account of the functions of the ba-soul in Egyptian spiritism, he states that in the Papyrus of Nebqet the ba is seen, depicted as a human-headed hawk, flying down the funeral pit, bearing air and food to the mutilated body lying in the mummy-chamber. Here is additional confirmation that the pit designates the human body. Another Egyptian text, the Book of Am-Tuat (Division 20) describes the mutilation of the gods and their being cast down into pits of fire. Revelation tells of the horsemen, ten thousand times ten thousand, going forth to battle with those forms which had come up out of the smoke that ascended from the pit of the abyss, emitting fire. These may be taken as the forms of evil generated in the struggle between the gods and the animals whose natures are long in combat with each other.

Massey links the Egyptian Tepht, the abyss, with our "depth." He equates it also with Tevthe, and that with the Babylonian Tiamat, as well as the old Egyptian underworld monster, Typhon, the Dragon of the Deep. As such it figured the original birthplace of creation, and in a more human application it meant the human body as the seat or birth-place of the spiritual life. For the body is composed of matter, the infinite abysmal mother of all things. Typhon, who brought forth her brood of chaos in the abyss, later brings forth the young Sun-god, the divine immortal soul. The figure in this connection is common, we are

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told, in Akkad, China, Egypt and inner Africa. It is but a step in etymology from Tepht to the Hebrew Tophet, the dark pit.

There were said to be "seven sons of the Abyss,"30 or the seven powers generated in nature, to be matched later by seven phases of growth in the human constitution--the ubiquitous seven in archaic literature.

The universal religious myth of the descent of the solar hero, ever typical of deity, into some dark abysmal region, emerging from it after ordeals of suffering, can have but one explanation: the incarnation of the hosts of light in the dense physical body.

Another earthly figure much used to type the dreary existence in the flesh was that of the "wilderness." A variation of it was the "desert." The people in the Typhonian darkness of Amenta were furnished a guide "through this wilderness." The Quiché Popul Vuh portrays the ancestors of the race as wanderers in a wilderness upon their way to their final homestead. A Hawaiian legend has it that the progenitors "wandered in a desert wilderness until at last they reached the promised land of Kane"--Canaan!

Numbers (14:33, 34) reads: "Your children shall be wanderers in this wilderness even forty days, for every day a year." The same book supplies another highly elucidative text (14:31, 32) which says: "Your little ones will I bring in, but as for you, your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness." The spiritual meaning here adumbrated is that the earthly or carnal nature in which the gods took residence would be conquered and disintegrated, or die, as the substance of the old seed dies in the ground in generating its offspring, while only the new-born god, the "little ones," the resurrected sons of dying fatherhood, would achieve the spiritual homeland of Canaan.

Elsewhere the term "desert in the Amenta of Egypt" is used to name the locality of bodily life. The people there are said to "dwell in darkness and black night."

The wanderings of the Biblical Israelites are a symbolic graph of this spiritual and racial experience, and have no other meaning, historical or literal, whatever. Hagar’s fleeing into the wilderness under the compulsion of her situation, is but another similar picture of the same truth.

The hiding of the various Sons of God in a mysterious cave or secret earth of Amenta is but the mundane segment of a drama, the full

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action of which is involved in the grand play of forces and sweep of relations in higher spheres, as to the complete outline and significance of which we have not been fully informed by the archaic writers. Earth, it is clear, is but an appanage of heaven, and our history here is without full meaning when detached from its celestial base. The old books of Greece, Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, India are priceless for what they give us of this material.

It has been impossible in these excerpts entirely to avoid anticipation of the next symbol of earthly life, darkness. The body was pictured as the abode of night and gloomy shadows.

We have noticed Plotinus’ statement that in her descent the "soul was precipitated into a darkness profound and repugnant to the intellect," which was obscured by it. The body is "night’s dark region" and the soul’s "sojourn on earth is thus a dark imprisonment in the body."

One of the riddles of Greek mythology--why so intelligent a people as the Greeks symbolized deity as Bacchus, the god of intoxication--is solved by the keys here presented. Intoxication was used to image the befuddlement and mental darkness, the scattering of the god’s high intellectual powers in mundane life. Says Thomas Taylor:

"For Bacchus is the evident symbol of the imperfect energies of intellect, and its scattering into the obscure and lamentable dominions of sense."31

And Revelation declares that even the Saints (the gods) have been made drunken with the power of the lower contacts. Soul had been intoxicated with the wine of sense.

The body is thought of as actually seizing souls. The Speaker in the Ritual cries to Ra:

"O deliver me from the god who seizes souls. The darkness in which Sekari dwells is terrifying to the weak."32

In this darkness Osiris suffers, supplicating Ra for light. Ajax cries for light. Horus in his resurrection rises "from the house of darkness." Sut (Satan), the twin of Horus, is portrayed imprisoning his brother the soul of light, in the realm of darkness. He is called "the power of darkness." A dozen sections of the Pyramid Texts and the Records of the Past describe the journey of the soul through a "valley of darkness." The place to which the soul in the Egyptian scripts was con-

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ducted was termed "An-ar-ef, the house of obscurity, the city of dreadful night." The mole or shrewmouse was the animal symbol used by them to depict the god groping his earthly way in an underworld region of darkness. Horus, coming as deliverer, says: "I have sung praises unto those that dwell in darkness." The chapter in which this occurs is entitled "the chapter of making the transformation into the god who giveth light in the darkness." He comes to set prisoners free, and also, it is said, "to dissipate darkness." Incarnation being necessary for the higher birth of the soul, an Egyptian text reads: "The soul is brought forth through the embrace of the Lord of Darkness. He is Babi, the Lord of Darkness." In Ch. 175 "saith Osiris, the scribe Ani: Hail, Tmu! What manner (of land) is this into which I have come? . . . it is black as blackest night, and men wander helplessly therein. In it a man may not live in quietness of heart, nor may the longings of love be satisfied therein."

The very name of the great Egyptian script, the Book of the Dead, hints at the realm of darkness from which the soul emerges in its resurrection; for the title, translated, means "The Coming Forth by Day,"--or into the daylight, ostensibly from some region of darkness.

Our Hebrew and Christian scriptures provide a multitude of fitting texts which might be used to enlarge vastly this résumé of the old material that points to the earthly body of man as the theological world of darkness. Notably there is that in Matthew (4:16) which recites:

"The people which sat in darkness saw a great light; and to them that sat in the shadow . . . did the light spring up."

And is it not the universal prayer of Christendom each Sabbath that the deific power should "enlighten our darkness"?