SKYLARK AT HEAVEN’S GATE

Paul asks (I Corinthians 15:35) a question which, had it been envisaged in the light of the succinct answer which he himself immediately gave to it, would have left world religion in far better case than its present position.

"But some man will say," he argues, "How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come?" Paul’s first word of answer is a rebuke to the stupidity of such a question. He says: "Foolish man!" And by a quirk of ironic fate the rebuke administered to such ignorance of basic Greek philosophy (in which Paul was steeped) as the question implied, now falls upon the very institution which exalts him as its original propagandist and builder. By one of the most arrant perversions of clear philosophy ever to be perpetrated in world history, the Church he founded has put itself in the very place of the "some man" asking the absurd question--whether the dead rise up in their corpses or in some other form. And this in spite of the fact that the great Apostle addressed himself, in the remainder of his chapter, to as lucid an exposition of the spiritual resurrection as is to be found anywhere in sacred literature. This 15th chapter of I Corinthians marks the high point of spiritual sublimity reached in the New Testament. Its oracular grandeur should have lifted the body of Christian theology far above the mists of controversy that overhang it over the question of the corporeal resurrection. But the later formulators of orthodox theology looked askance at Paul and classed him as a heretic. They would have ousted his Epistles from the canon if they had dared. For he had grown in disfavor among them. His studies were not in line with the policy of the literalizers of religious drama; he was the exponent of that Orphic-Platonic wisdom from the Chaldean and Egyptian springs that they had come to revile. He indited more than one of the grandest chapters of their Bible; yet they frowned upon him because his writing was not in accord with their cult-Christianity. His was cosmic Christianity. It was emblemed in terms of Platonic Gnosticism, the flower of Greek rational mysticism. Orphic paganism glows throughout that 15th chapter of Corinthians. The sublimest chapter in the Christian Bible is clearly pagan philosophy.

Let us follow Paul in his exposition and see how completely he is in accord with pagan teaching. First he announces the great law of incubation, as the prelude to any understanding of the resurrection in spirit: "What you sow never comes to life unless it dies." Then he clarifies a moot point: "And what you sow is not the body that is to be; it is a mere grain of wheat . . . or of some other seed." But "God gives it a body . . . gives each kind of seed a body of its own. Flesh is not all the same; there is human flesh, there is flesh of beasts, flesh of birds and flesh of fish." Has it ever been noticed that Paul here enumerates precisely the four kingdoms on which man’s life rests at its corners, matching the four figures in Egyptology, and in Ezekiel’s and John’s celestial visions? Man, animal, bird, fish. Amsta, Hapi, Tuamutef and Kabhsenuf, the four sons of Horus; the man, lion, eagle and fish (crocodile); the four quarters of the zodiac; the four bases of man’s life. Paul’s vital statement is that God plants "bare grain" (Authorized Version), that is, souls of pure spirit untried by matter in incarnation, our Hamemmet Beings, Innocents, younglings, Kumaras, Asuras, virgin souls; and he later gives to these tender spirits garments of solar glory.

Then Paul tells us that "there are heavenly bodies and also earthly bodies," but the splendor of the one is greater than that of the other.

"There is a splendor of the sun and a splendor of the moon and a splendor of the stars--for one star differeth from another in splendor. So with the resurrection of the dead:

what is sown is mortal,

what rises is immortal;

sown inglorious,

it rises in glory;

sown in weakness,

it rises in power;

sown an animate body,

it rises a spiritual body.

As there is an animate body, so there is a spiritual body. Thus it is written:

"The first man, Adam, became an animate being,

the last Adam a life-giving spirit;’

. . . . . .

Man the first is from the earth, material;

Man the second is from heaven.

Thus as we have borne the likeness of the material Man,

so we are to bear the likeness of the heavenly Man.

I tell you this, my brothers, flesh and blood cannot inherit the Realm of God, nor can the perishing inherit the imperishable . . . the dead will rise invested with the imperishable, and this mortal body invested with immortality; . . . then . . .

Death is swallowed up in victory."

How in the face of this lucidity of statement the Church perpetrated its frightful dogmatic travesty of "the resurrection of the body," it is hard indeed to understand. And now we can see also that the first and second Adam of Paul were the Egyptian Horus of the two horizons, the "lions of the double force" of soul and body, Horus the younger, and Horus the elder.

The seed is sown in and as the natural material body, but unless that dies, and in dying transmits its essential strength over to a finer vehicle that will be built out of its disintegrating elements, it will not live again. The old material seed will never rise again; and the physical corpus of man will not rise from the grave. But the germinal essence will come forth from decay shining in new life. That which is sown in the earth will die; but out of its death will rise the stem that bears the new generation of beauty aloft to sun and air. Well did Paul say, "Foolish man!" to ask such a question. And well may the world say "Foolish Church!" to have missed and confounded the simple clear meaning of the resurrection.

The putting on of the robe of immortality has not been adequately translated into rational comprehension. It hovers in the background of the Christian consciousness as a beautiful haze of indefinite meaning. A clearer grasp of its significance may accrue from inspection of some of the ancient material touching it.

The deceased says to Osiris:

"Do thou embalm these my members; for I would not perish and come to an end, (but be) like unto my divine father Khepera, who is the divine type of him that never saw corruption. . . . Let not my body become worms, but deliver me as thou didst deliver thyself. . . . Homage to thee, Osiris; thou didst not decay, thou didst not become worms, thou didst not waste away, thou didst not become corruption, thou didst not putrefy. . . . I am the god Khepera and my members shall have an everlasting existence. I shall not decay, I shall not rot, I shall not putrefy . . . and I shall not see corruption beneath the eye of the god Shu. I shall have my being . . . I shall live . . . I shall germinate . . . I shall wake up in peace . . . I shall not suffer from any defect; mine eye shall not decay; the form of my visage shall not disappear; mine ear shall not become deaf; my head shall not be separated from my neck; my tongue shall not be carried away; my hair shall not be cut off; . . . and no baleful injury shall come to me."

In spite of death the Manes cries: "I am, I am; I live, I live; I grow, I grow; and when I awake I shall awake, I shall awake in peace, I shall not see corruption . . . I shall not perish in the earth forever" (Ch. 154, Naville). The immortality that was previously potential in the first Adam-Horus became established at last in Tattu and secured by the resurrection of the illumined soul from the pit of Akar (Rit., Ch. 30A). At the consummation of the Mane’s victory over earthly forces it is declared to him: "Thy father Tum hath prepared for thee this beautiful crown of triumph, the living diadem which the gods love, that thou mayest live forever" (Ch. 19). The Manes says (Ch. 85):

"I am the first-born god of primeval matter, that is to say, the divine Soul, even the Soul of the god of everlastingness, and my body is eternity. My form is everlastingness, and is the lord of years and the prince of eternity."

The soul is assured in the text: "Thou shalt never perish, thy Ka shall never perish, a Ka established." The flow of events in time is connected with the temporal and impermanent vestures in which the seed-spark of divinity has embodied itself to travel through Amenta. Decay does not touch the core of being itself, the Ka.

But what specifically is this robe of immortality that the mortal must put on if he is to live forever? It is Paul’s "spiritual body" as contrasted with the natural or "animate body." But what is a spiritual body, the world has been asking for these hundreds of years, and "science" has also asked contemptuously. The answer is to be found in an early chapter, in the theses that modern science itself has now reified or hypostasized matter of various grades of ethereal fineness, sublimated essence, capable of being organized into material structures in the world invisible to man. The Egyptians predicated a total of seven such successively finer bodies in man’s constitution, of which the lower or coarser four have been so far developed to function. Besides this obvious physical body, man possesses inner bodies of what a scientist called "immaterial matter."

That sublimated vesture, then, which seems to be the "spiritual body" in which the dead specifically rise, is the Sahu, though the next higher one, the Khu, is frequently mentioned in the experience. The Khu is so high in its structure that of it is said: "Thou shalt not be imprisoned . . . it is heaven alone that shall hold thee." Also it is written that the Khus, or glorified ones, "live on the shades of the motionless, or the souls of the dead." This means that the highest bodies absorb and transmute into their own subtler essence the substances of the ones below, as a candle flame absorbs the tallow below it. The Khu was thus figuratively conceived of as a "ghoul" or "feeder on the shades" of the Manes in the nether worlds. It is constellated as the "Ghoul," the star Beta in the Perseus group.

The Ka always accompanies the soul through its incarnations and returns. "Thou hast come and thy Ka with thee" is the welcome greeting on the soul’s return. The Manes passes from the state of a shade to that of a Ka when he is said to have completed his investiture. Then as a Sahu he is reincorporated in a spiritual body, and as a Khu he is invested with the robe of light and glory. No healthy child was believed to be born without this Ka, the soul of animate life; and in their pictures of it they made it resemble the physical body. They looked upon it as the "double" of the body. It did not die with the body.

In open contradiction to other reasons he had assigned elsewhere, Budge gives a motive for mummification:

"It has been urged by some that the custom of mummifying the dead, which obtained throughout Egypt for so many thousands of years, was maintained because the Egyptians believed in the resurrection of the material body, but it is not so. They mummified their dead simply because they believed that spiritual bodies would ‘germinate’ in them."

This passage is a remarkable demonstration of how a scholar can state the surface facts in a particular matter and yet tell nothing true about it. Yes, the Egyptians believed that spiritual bodies would germinate from or in the physical Khat, but while it was a living body, not the long-preserved cadaver! Germination of finer spiritual bodies would come in the living man, and in the mummy only as the ritual symbol of the body of this death.

Budge gives both "Ba" and "Sahu" as meaning "something like" "noble" or "sublime," "chief," "free." The Ba, he says, was free to travel over all heavens and mix with souls there and to take any form it pleased; for such statements are found. Far more free were the higher bodies to do the same. The learned Egyptologist writes again:

"Concerning the form in which Osiris rises from the dead the texts are silent, and nothing is said as to the nature of his body in the underworld; that he dwelt in the [same] material body which was his upon earth there is no reason whatever to suppose, for there are indications in the texts which point to a definite belief in the resurrection of a spiritual body, both in the case of the god and of man."1

When the reader has noted with us even the limited and haphazard collection of passages from these same texts describing the bodies in which Osiris lives and rises, he will be able to determine for himself whether "the texts are silent, and nothing is said as to the nature of" the body of Osiris in the underworld; also how futile seems to have been the reading of these venerable texts by such savants as Budge and others. In the present matter Spence has read somewhat more intelligently:

"The soul, ba, and the spirit, Khu, which were usually represented as a hawk and a heron in the hieroglyphics, partook of heavenly food and became one with the gods, and in time became united with the glorified body of heavenly frame, so that the soul, spirit, power, shade, double, and name of the deceased were all collected in the one heavenly body, known as the Sahu, which may be described as the spiritual body. It was considered to grow out of the dead body, and its existence became possible through the magic ceremonies performed and the words of power spoken by the priests during the burial service."2

Budge endorses this general view in saying:

"When the material body had been brought to the tomb for burial . . . it acquired the power of sending forth from itself a body called the Sahu, which was able to ascend to heaven and dwell with the gods there. The only suitable rendering for the word ‘Sahu’ is ‘spiritual body,’ and the meaning fits very well into the translation of the texts where the word is found."

This is in the broad sense true, but thrown out of due symmetry to the scholar’s ignorance of the cardinal meaning of "death" and "the dead" in symbolic usage. The name unquestionably means "spiritual body" and "free, noble, chief" might be applicable to it. But the derivation would seem to be closer at hand than Budge presumes. The two divine sons of the great first god Tem, or Tum (meaning "total"), were the gods Sa and Hu. These two short names seem either broadly or in some particular reference to connote "spirit" and "matter," the opposite nodes of primal energy. Souls were said to be composed of the essence of Sa, drawn in the beginning from the great "Lake of Sa" in the southern heavens. "Sa" also meant the son, or spirit born of matter. Hu was the basis of Ihuh, or Atum-Huhi (Adam-Jehovah), the spark of flame in matter. As the spiritual body was built up of spirit and matter in combination, the two basic god-names seem to have been combined to designate it. Massey says that the word "Sahu" means "to incorporate." It is the incorporated spirit or its product. Chapter 47 of the Ritual reads: "I am a spiritual body (sah), therefore let me rise among those who follow the great god." As Osiris-Sekari, the god was the coffined one; as Osiris-Sahu, he rose again in a spiritual body. "I am the spiritual body of the god," cries the Manes on fleeing the grave (Ch. 99). In chapter 128 Osiris exclaims: "Horus hath made for me a spiritual body through his own soul, to take possession of that which belongeth to Osiris in the Tuat." In the text of Unas we read: "Behold, he cometh forth this day in the real form of a living spirit." The Chaldean Oracles say: "The powers build up the body of the holy man."

In the Hymn to Osiris the risen soul is praised: "Thou art a shining Spirit-Body, the Governor of Spirit-Bodies."

Luke (24:39) represents Jesus after the resurrection as calling attention to his very members: "See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself." This is clarified by the knowledge that, the resurrection once consummated, the soul has power to assume what form it will and to materialize for the moment its old physical semblance. Did not Jesus pass through closed doors and appear to his disciples, so that Thomas put his hands in the wounds in the flesh to resolve his doubts? Of spiritual essence, he could yet become palpable to sense.

Budge’s assertion that the texts are silent with respect to the nature of the vesture in which the soul arose might have been modified had he seen the following from the Papyrus of Pepi: "They draw thee unto heaven in thy soul, and thou art endowed with soul among them. Thou appearest in the sky as Horus from the womb of the sky in this thy form which came forth from the mouth of Ra, as Horus, the Chief of the Spirits." And again from the same text: "When Osiris ascended the ladder, he was covered with the coverings of Horus, he wore the apparel of Thoth." In chapter 180 the soul says: "I stretch myself at my desire, I run forward with my strides in my spiritual form of hidden qualities." And how striking is the following from the text of Teta: "He receives bones of a marvelous nature and a complete and imperishable body is bestowed upon him in the womb of his mother Nut!"

The Egyptians regarded the physical body as being powerless and lifeless save for the more magnetically powerful inner bodies. Of itself it could never have arisen. It could not rise as flesh and blood; it could ascend only after being transformed, like water converted into vapor, by more potent spirit. It was only the presence in it of the Ba, the Sekhem, the Khu that gave it erectile force. As says James (2:26): "the body without the spirit is dead." So much more vital was the spirit than the body, so much "more ancient" and established, that even the destruction of the latter would not annihilate it. For well the Egyptians knew, before Paul, that "if our earthly house of this tabernacle is dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." When the deity descended to earth he put on the mask of a crocodile, an ibis, a lion, or other zootype of the primary powers. But when rising into spirit, he divested himself of these "filthy rags" and stood forth clothed in the majesty of solar light. He personates in turn each of the gods and appropriates their strength and qualities.

"Their magical powers are in his body, the Sahu do not retreat from his hands. He eats the wisdom of every god, his period of life is eternity, his limit is everlastingness in this form (sah) of his."

"I am come," says Horus, "as a sahu in the spiritual body, glorious and well-equipped; and that is given to me which lives on amidst all overthrow."

Here at last is that element which all philosophy, all religion, all moral feeling has been seeking for ages as the indubitable foundation of both faith and knowledge. All rationalism and mysticism alike are the search for the enduring real, that which abides amid the flux. Here it is, says Horus. Here is the ages’ Rock of Certitude.

The soul was released from the khat or physical body when the latter had been itself sublimated to such tenuity that it quickly vanished away. Horus, coming out of Sekhem, left his earthly body behind in the sepulcher, and was greeted as pure spirit by those who had forerun him in the glorification. They rejoiced to see him walking upright and ready to stride onward through eternity. He who had earned these salutations was the re-establisher of time "for millions of years." He came in raiment like the dawn, as the true light of the world newly kindled in the night of death. He says he comes forth equipped with Ra’s words of power. In the Book of Teta the risen soul is greeted: "Hail, thou hast received thy robe of honor, thou hast arrayed thyself in the Hata garment. Thou art clothed with the Eye of Horus . . . which giveth thee thy apparel before the gods." "Let love for him," proceeds the text, "be in the body of every god who shall see him. This is the swathing which Horus made for his father Osiris," mentioned by Tertullian. "Thou art provided with thy form, O dweller among the spirits." "Thy movement is like that of a star. No ruin falls to thee . . . Thou art complete in thy members of crystal." "Thou hast thy state of glory . . . thou hast thy faculty of knowledge." "Thou art pure with the purity of the gods, who journey unceasingly." Chapter 171 is captioned: "Of trying on the garment of purity." In the Pepi text it is stated that as he rises he puts on the sheth garment of Horus and the apparel of Thoth. The coming forth of Jesus as a spirit, or as the Christos, is called his investiture. He says: "The times are fulfilled for me to put on my vesture. Lo, I have put on my vesture, and all power hath been given to me by the first mystery" (Pistis Sophia I:10).

In his first advent as the Virgin’s son he was the "bare grain," the word made flesh but not yet made truth. In his second advent he revealed the glory of the Father through that body which God gave him. He now regains the glory he had with the Father before he laid it aside to put on the sackcloth of earth. The Ritual details how the ransomed spirits, redeemed from the mummy condition and all the ills of the corruptible flesh, put on the pure white robe of righteousness, called the vesture of truth. This is given them by the god Taht for their entrance into the boat of the sun. Earth’s apron is removed, and he receives a bandage of the finest linen "in place of the old garb of shame." In chapter 64 there is this explicit statement: "I have made the dress which Ptah has woven out of his clay." Spirit must draw its light from the very womb of matter. Ptah was the divine Potter, as Jesus was the Carpenter and Hiram the Mason.

When the deceased has been resuscitated he says (Ch. 85): "The seven Uraeus divinities are my body. . . . My image is eternal." The lower elements form his material body; his spirit body is imperishable. But the soul synthesized the seven and raised them aloft to share its everlastingness. Ptah tells Rameses II that he has refashioned his flesh in vermilion. The texts speak of the dead bones being refleshed with a coating of red earth. These are references to the renewal through the soul’s bath in the pool of the body’s blood.

The Manes were of two classes, the clothed and the naked. Those were clothed who had passed the judgment trial and received their investiture of the robe of righteousness. "I hasten to the land (of Aarru) and I fasten my stole upon me," says the Manes, "that I may come forth and take possession of the wealth assigned to me" (Ch. 110). "I range within the garden of Hetep (Aarru); I fasten my stole upon me." "I am the glorified one coming forth in triumph." Paul has said that we "groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven," "clothed upon that mortality might be swallowed up of life." "I was naked and ye clothed me," says the Gospel Jesus himself. Isaiah (61:10) sings: "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord . . . for he hath clothed me with the garment of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness." Hermes says: "I am gone out of myself into an immortal body, and am not what I was before, but am begotten in mind." How well this describes what the Greek philosophers call the "ekstasis," or transport of release from the physical body-tomb! Ekstasis means literally "a standing out" of the soul from the body, so that one is in truth "beside oneself" with "ecstasy."

In Iamblichus’ great work on the Mysteries of the Egyptians (p. 55) he unfolds the doctrine thus:

"The Gods, being benevolent and propitious, impart their light to theurgists in unenvying abundance, calling upon their souls, procuring them a union with themselves, and accustoming them, while they are yet in body, to be separated from bodies, to be led around to their intelligible principle."

Thus they, too, were "begotten in mind." Hermes tells Ptah he "would that thou also wert gone out of thyself, like them that dream in their sleep." This is the ecstasy and transport when the soul passes from the boat of Horus to the ship of the sun, from mortal flesh to radiant spiritual glory.

In chapter 19 of the Ritual is the whole detailed struggle of the powers of intellectual light to gain the victory for Horus over his enemies "on the day of making his triumph over Set and his fiends." For a purpose of very great importance we quote some of this chapter at length. The great final conquest is achieved by Horus--

"on the night of the battle and overthrow of the Seba-fiend in Abtu; on the night of Osiris’ triumph over his enemies; on the day of the festival of Haker (on the fifteenth of the month); on the night of setting up the Tat in Tattu in the presence of the great sovereign princes; on the night of the judgment of those who shall be annihilated in Sekhem; on the night of laying the things on the altars in Sekhem; on the night of the establishing of the inheritance by Horus of the things of the father Osiris, at the great festival of plowing and turning up the earth in Tattu or in Abtu (Abydos); on the night of the weighing of words or a weighing of looks; on the night when Isis lieth down to watch and make lamentation for her brother in Re-stau; on the night of making Osiris to triumph."

The design in making this strange quotation is to call attention to the multiplicity of symbolic occurrences that are thrown into the period of the night preceding the Passover of the vernal equinox, which is just the "dark night of the soul" in incarnation, ending with the passing of the soul across the boundary at Easter. All processes of transformation, purifying, perfecting, glorifying, reach their consummation on the last marge of the "night" period, as it breaks into the dawn of Easter’s spiritual Sun. In the yearly calendar this would be the night of the Passover of spring. Hence Egyptian drama placed the crowning of every process on this eventful "night." Being purely symbolical, there would be no difficulty in allocating to this date any number of representations of the various aspects of the soul’s experience as it concluded its earthly history. The Christ’s trial, his bloody sweat, his battle with the fiends, his mockery and suffering, his crucifixion in its last stages, his last supper, his bearing the cross, and every other phase of his "death" and "burial" in matter could be "staged" on this night. But it would not and could not be "history." What then would happen if at a later time symbolic events in such number were turned into alleged history? Here indeed is a point for "higher criticism," if not for downright common sense.

It seems to be incontestable that the many events of the last night of Jesus’ life as narrated in the Gospels are a somewhat attenuated copy of this momentous nineteenth chapter of Egypt’s Ritual! Perhaps the material was not taken directly from it, but was drawn from the dramas and Mystery plays that had been based on it and worked out in consonance with it. Obviously so blind was fanatical zealotry in hurrying to crush paganism and to change spiritual allegory into history that it did not pause to reckon with the difficulty of crowding a long series of varied events into the course of a single night of clock time. So Jesus was given a busy night to close his sad career! The literalizers of drama did not scruple to ask zealotry to believe that there could actually have occurred in the brief space of one night the Last Supper with the disciples, the walk to the Mount of Olives, the long watch in the garden of Gethsemane, the incidents of the disciples falling asleep when Jesus upbraided them for not being able to watch with him one little hour, the arrest, the severed and healed ear cut off by Peter, then three separate and distinct judicial trials involving the summoning of judges, juries, attendants, officers, the populace in the dead of night (a thing impossible if considered in realism), then the mockery of the soldiers, the parting of Jesus’ garments, the forcing on him of the crown of thorns, then the march to the hill of Golgotha ("the place of the skull"), and the harrowing "crucifixion" running into the next morning. There is an obvious very meager limit to what can occur in the temporal span of one short night. The Gospels here stand helplessly exposed to the attack of plain reason in view of the patent conditions of the problem raised. The Gospels are the old manuscripts of the dramatized ritual of the incarnation and resurrection of the sun-god, which was first Egyptian, later Gnostic and Hellenic, then Hebrew and finally adopted ignorantly by the Christian movement and transferred to the arena of history. They were not history until in Christian hands the esoteric meaning had been obscured and the wisdom needed to interpret them non-historically was wanting.

An important link is the identification of the Sahu body with the sun. The Kabalah intimates that the soul in each solar system spends six aeons on planets and the seventh in the sun of the system. In the seventh or human kingdom, then, life would be preparing for the soul a body of solar essence. And solar energy is the expression of deific intellect, according to Proclus. The soul of humanity is to clothe itself in an indestructible armor of solar light, eternally self-luminous and self-perpetuating. The Bible’s statement that "the Lord God is a sun" is echoed in Egypt: "I am the lord of light, and that which is an abomination unto me is death; let me not go into the chamber of torture which is in the Tuat." A hundred texts exalt the principle of light, and here its rebellion against being overwhelmed by the darkness of matter in incarnation is registered.

Here was the whole gist of theology outlined in terms whose significance for human life could not have been missed save by minds hopelessly warped by previous obsession of fantastic conceptions. For "death" is here distinctly defined as residence in a world where the intellectual light of deity would be sadly darkened. But we have seen how the failure properly to locate "the underworld" blocked the sway to all true comprehension of intrinsic wisdom for centuries. The appearance of the angel who descended from heaven to roll away the stone from the grave was "as lightning, and his raiment was white as snow" (Matt. 28:2). "He has come forth like the sun," says the Osirian in his eulogy of the soul. "He comes in raiment like the dawn," sings the sacred writer. Osiris is said to give life "to the ministers of the sun," the sun-gods. Says Horus: "I have come like the sun through the gate . . . and have passed pure" (Rit., Ch. 148, Birch). Jesus insisted that each man had light within himself, and with its increase by spiritual cultivation, it would even supplant the sun and moon as light-givers. In man all previous powers of creative light were to be synthesized in the glory of a new order of radiant being.

We read in the Litany of Ra (Ch. 2:7): "Thou commandest the Osirified deceased to be like Khuti, the brilliant triangle which appears in the shining place." This was the solar trinity of mind, soul, spirit. Horus is seated in the decans of the Ram, the whip of rule in his left hand and the starry "Triangula" in his right. Thus the dead god rose on the horizon of the resurrection like the sun in the vernal equinox when that sun was in Aries, bearing the triangle as symbol of the triunity of man’s spirit. "He shineth like a new being in the east," is a tribute to the risen glory of the soul. In chapter 129 of the Ritual--the book of making perfect the Khu--we have: "And the majesty of the god Thoth lovingly shall make light to rest upon his corruptible body." The very gods "withdraw themselves when they see thee arrayed in the awful majesty of Ra."

In Exodus we read that the vestments worn by the children of Israel were to be woven of violet, purple and scarlet yarn. These three vivid colors likely typify the higher triad in the scale of seven colors, or the coat of many colors. Macrobius, commenting on the Orphic Hymns, speaks of the sacred dress in which those initiated into the Dionysiac Mysteries were invested, preparatory to their enthronement:

"He who desires in pomp of sacred dress

The sun’s resplendent body to express,

Should first a veil assume of purple bright,

Like fair white beams combined with fiery light."

"I shine forth from the egg which is in the unseen world" (Ch. 22).

The mummy-swath was, like the shenti, a linen tunic, made from shena, and this was the garment woven without a seam. The "young man" who left his garment and fled naked from the resurrection scene was the figure of the rising soul that had shed its mummy-cloth and made its transformation into spirit that no longer needed earthly covering. The seam was obliterated when the two halves of man were made into one whole and new man.

Spence states that the spirits of heaven "lived upon the rays of light which fell from the eyes of Horus; that is, they were nourished upon sunlight, so that in time their bodies became wholly composed of light."3 This is true. They emaned their own light and there was no need of external light, "for the glory of the Lord did lighten it." The Talmud says: "There is a light which is never eclipsed or obscured, derived from the upper light, by which the first man could view the world from one end to the other" (Avodath Hakodesh). This is presumably that light of the poets which never was on land or sea; the gleam, of Tennyson’s conception. "I live by reason of my splendor," chants the emancipated soul.

The souls having attained the resurrected state in shining raiment were called the Khus or the glorified. Jesus asked the Father to glorify him with primeval radiance; Horus pleads in the same way (Ch. 175): "But let the state of the shining ones be given unto me instead of water and air. . . ." The elect "arriveth at the Aged One, on the confines of the Mount of Glory, where the crown awaiteth him" (Ch. 131).

Mt. Olympus of the Greeks was identical with Mount Hetep of the Egyptians. Hence the Kimmerians of Homer may possibly be identified with the Egyptian Khemi, or Akhemu, the dwellers in the northern heaven, as never-setting stars or spirits of the glorified, the Khus or Khuti.

The whole course of evolution on earth is designed to perfect the individualized humans, who are the crown of animal development. This perfection comes through the spiritualization of the gross animal nature by the impacting upon it of currents of intellectual and spiritual forces which gradually refine the lower self. When a certain degree of sublimation has been achieved the lower bodies become capable of affording free course to the influx of the higher influences, which then so transform the lower that a practical identity between the two is established. Greek mythology called it the union of Cupid and Psyche; in Egypt it was the embrace of Horus and Osiris; in Churchly language it was the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb. It was that welding at last in blissful harmony of the mortal and immortal elements. Of this ultimate union of male and female components, the body-soul with the spirit-soul, all marriage and sexual intercourse is only the outward sign and symbol. For its attainment the male and female natures in the individual must be "married"; the centers below and those above the diaphragm must merge in interchange of activity. The wedding or welding of these two groups of energies will divinize human nature. For it will return man to his original androgyne state which obtained before the "fall" into physical generation, when he assumed the garb of the animal nature and put on the mask of personality.

Massey concisely sums up this basic datum of theology:

"The marriage of Cupid and Psyche is a fable that was founded on this union of the two souls which we have traced in the Ritual as the soul in matter, or as the human, and the soul in spirit."4

Evolution’s work in the moral sphere was to unite a soul inherent in matter with a higher soul that was divine. This operation takes place in the body and consciousness of mankind. The divine soul was a unit of sublimated intellectual essence from beyond the skies, but temporarily united with the lower body to engraft upon it its own higher potencies. Physical evolution was impotent to pass a certain point, the boundary between sense and soul, until the germ of conscious selfhood linked with it from above. Life languished on earth until the heaven spirit descended like a dove to free it." As soon as thou enterest the Utchau and unitest thyself thereto, the beings on earth flourish."

A strong and moving assertion of the influence of the union of lower life with higher is seen in the following from the Book of the Dead:

"Thou joinest thyself unto the Eye of Horus and thou hidest thyself within its secret place; it destroyeth for thee all the convulsions of thy face, it maketh thee strong with life, and thou livest . . . thou joinest thyself unto the upper heaven, O luminary."

The soul is addressed here as the luminous person of the sun, and most challenging is the statement that the force of the solar intellect released in the personal life will destroy the convulsions of the face, caused by the painful constraint of the soul under the bondage of matter. Like lovers’ kiss, the embrace between the spiritual soul and the psychic entity in the body brought harmony and expanded life. A complementary and salutary interchange of health and strength flashed between spirit and matter in the embrace, when the two met in Amenta.

Budge says that the conjunction of the lower ba, or animal soul, with its Ka, or spiritual soul, took place in Heliopolis, the city of the sun, Annu. This would correspond with the revival of Osiris, or Lazarus, at Beth-Any. The ba comes forth upon earth to do the will of its Ka. This is important, matching Jesus’ declaration that he comes to do the will of his Father.

The work of the exiled god on earth being now consummated, his effort having prevailed to overcome the flesh and transform the soul of the body into the likeness of the glorious sun-soul, the risen deity stands on the eastern threshold of heaven, ready to complete the last stages of the twelve-months’ journey, and with the waxing sun of spring to climb the steep ascent of heaven from March to June. This is the final arc of the return to the Father who stands at the apex of heaven at the gate of Cancer. The summit of the mount of the zodiac was the place of reunion and reconciliation; the paradise of perennial plenty and everlasting peace, the land where there was no more sea and no more night, where beings carried their own light eternally within them. Hither the twelve companions of Horus bring the sheaves of golden grain which they have reaped in the harvest fields of Amenta. Horus tells Osiris at the festival of the Harvest Home that he has cultivated his corn for him and reaped the golden crop in the Aarru Fields of Peace, or Hetep.

Exodus (3:12) reports the Eternal as saying to Moses: "When thou hast brought the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain." It was there called Mt. Horeb, and the first syllable, Hor-, can be equated with the Hor-, of Hor-us, the sun. The injunction to Moses precedes:

"Thou shalt bring them in and plant them in the mountain of their inheritance, the place, O Lord, which thou hast made for them to dwell in, the sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established."

Here "the Lord shall reign for ever and ever." This was the Mount of Jerusalem, the Aarru-Salem, or Aarru-Hetep, the mount of eternal peace. In escaping from Egypt or Amenta, the goal of refuge is the Mount of Peace, as every religion on earth has attested. As spirits, not human marching columns, the children of Israel, after crossing the swampy Reed Sea of this life, are led to the celestial land flowing with water. This heavenly home was located and dramatized as the circumpolar paradise, the Homeland of exiles and captives. "I am master there," says the beatified spirit who has attained this mansion in the skies and built his homestead there. "I am in glory there; I eat there; I plant and I reap there; I plough there; I take my fill of love." "I net ducks and I eat dainties." "I am united there to the god Hetep"--the seven powers completely exalted, unified and at peace.

There the risen spirit becomes one of the glorious stars that never-more shall set in ocean’s or in earth’s depths. "A divine domain hath been constructed for me: I know the name of it; the name of it is the garden of Aarru" (Ch. 109, Renouf).

Instead of being damned eternally for eating of the fruit of the tree of life and knowledge, the Manes is part by part divinized as he transmutes the substance of its food into higher essence. In the Rubric at the end of chapter 99 of the Ritual we read: "This chapter being known, the deceased appears in the fields of Aarru. He receives food there, the produce of its fields." The cakes, corn, bread and wine which he shall partake of there are described. "And he shall come forth in Sekhet-Aarru in any form whatsoever he pleaseth, and he shall appear regularly and continually." Chapter 110 tells of the soul’s going in and out of Sekhet-Hetep, of the coming forth by day, of becoming a glorified Khu there; of reaping, eating, drinking, making love there and "doing everything even as a man doeth upon earth." The soul exults: "And I have sailed into the divine city of Hetep . . . I array myself in apparel and I gird myself with the sa garment of Ra." To have attained this blessed home the soul must have undergone the earthly baptism:

"I have gone into the city of An-Aarret-f (the place where nothing groweth) and I covered my nakedness with the garments which are there."

In the midst of Sekhet-Aarru was a door, with a sycamore of turquoise on each side of it, through which the sun-god Ra appeared every day. The outgoing and return of the celestial glory was thus depicted for the blessed each day, as it is for mortals on earth.

The soul’s reward for leaving its celestial home and spending the long toilsome cycle of necessity in dreary exile on earth is the evolutionary gain therefrom, which is vast and permanent, as is attested by the ecstasy that accompanies the return. The pitiful nostalgia which has oppressed it throughout its long sojourn among "the wild beasts" is blithesomely appeased by its nearing vision of the Father’s portals and the sunny meads and shady bowers of the Homeland. Death is indeed swallowed up in victory and the night of gloom and the Götterdämmerung are followed by the fresh sweetness of supernal dawn.

Iamblichus presents beautifully the philosophy of our escape from the iron fetters of fate and return to the liberty of the sons of God:

"But neither are all things comprehended in the nature of fate, but there is another principle of the soul, which is superior to all nature and generation, and through which we are capable of being united to the Gods, of transcending the mundane order and of participating eternal life and the energy of the super-celestial gods. Through this principle, therefore, we are able to liberate ourselves from fate. For when the more excellent parts of us energize, and the soul is elevated to natures better than itself, then it is entirely separated from things which detain it in generation, departs from subordinate natures, exchanges the present for another life and gives itself to another order of things, entirely abandoning the former order with which it was connected."5

Iamblichus says elsewhere that there is found no other dissolution of the fetters of fate and necessity than the knowledge of the gods. For to know the godly powers is felicity. Oblivion of them while in terrestrial body is the greatest source of evil to a deific nature. Knowledge of the gods preserves the true life of the soul and leads it back to the Father, the Noetic principle. For fate ties the soul to natures that are inferior, that are perpetually unstable, flowing from one impermanency to another, and prevents it at every turn from obtaining a vision of immutable good. Intellectual union with the gods alone will anchor the soul to the support of its true felicity.

Proclus is as luminously clear on the same point:

"The one salvation of the soul herself, which is extended by the Demiurgus and which liberates her from the circle of generation, from abundant wanderings and an inefficacious life, is her return to the intellectual form, and a flight from every thing which naturally adheres to us from generation."6

For the soul, he continues, having been hurled like seed into the realms of generation, should cast aside the stubble and bark, as it were, which she accumulates about herself from contact with the fluctuations in these realms, and preserve her pristine purity. Purging herself from everything she touches, she should become the intellectual flower and fruit, delighting in the stable circles of sameness, rather than in the revolutions of difference. Having fallen from celestial harmony into the jangling diffusion of divine energies, she had, as Proclus says, become something belonging to an individual instead of to the universe. Departing from her connection with the lower irrational nature, and steering her course by reason, she will be led happily from her wanderings about the realms of sense, and from the passions which adhere to us from generation, back to the blissful contemplation of the one universal Life.

In a cosmic upper chamber the "old ones" and "the ones gone before" gather to welcome the return of the exiled souls. There are reception hosts who assemble to "welcome the pilgrims of the night." The text of the Ritual gives some faint picture of the joy that thrills through the heavenly arches when the solar sons return triumphant from their long expatriation:

"The divine power hath risen and shineth in the horizon. . . . The Khus shine in heaven . . . for there is among them a form which is like unto themselves; and there are shouts and cries of gladness within the shrine, and the sounds of those who rejoice go round about through the underworld . . . and his majesty shineth as he shone in the primeval time, when the Utchat was first upon his head."

The script of Teta reads:

"Thou standest at the doors. . . . Khent-Ament-f comes forth to thee; he grasps thy hand and leads thee to heaven before thy father Keb [Seb], who rejoices to meet thee and gives thee his two hands. He kisses thee, he fondles thee, he pushes thee forward at the head of the indestructible spirits . . . thou keepest the festivals of the first day of the month and the festivals of the fifteenth day of the month, according to the decree which thy father Keb made for thee."

When Osiris, reborn as Horus, triumphs, "Joy goeth the rounds in Thinis," the celestial city; and even earth catches the repercussion of the jubilee in the heavens. The Book of Enoch relates that the same heavenly host that met to anoint the collective angelry that was preparing to come to earth to do evolution’s work assembled again to welcome the returning victors, and that the reaches of farthest space were filled with angelic halleluiahs, as heaven and nature sang in unison.

Yet the paeans of heaven are hardly more intriguing than the more restrained pronouncements of Greek philosophy. Says Proclus:

There is "the race of men, who through a more excellent power and with piercing eyes, acutely perceive supernal light, to the vision of which they raise themselves above the clouds and darkness, as it were, of this lower world; and there abiding, despise every thing in those regions of sense; being no otherwise delighted with the place which is truly and properly their own, than he who, after many wanderings, is at length restored to his lawful country."7

The night of earthly sorrow breaks into the morn of heavenly rejoicing, for "joy cometh in the morning."

"The great and mighty gods cry out: ‘He hath gotten the victory.’"

. . . . . . .

Earthly dust from off thee shaken,

Soul immortal thou shalt waken,

With thy last dim journey taken,--

All through the night.