THE LAKE OF EQUIPOISE
Man on earth is an epitome of the zodiacal or heavenly man, and the zodiac has depths of meaning for the mind of man that are still unfathomed. The twelve signs, the four quarters, the twenty-four "elders," the thirty regents, the thirty-six rulers, the seventy-two messengers and other numerical divisions have each their special significance in the total of twelve times thirty degrees. And all of these are prominent throughout the Bible to mystify the unenlightened. Of particular illumination to the mind is the study of the four "corners," the points where the four arms of the cross in the circle intersect the circumference, that is, at the two solstices and the two equinoxes. The "story of mankind," collectively and individually, is both concealed and revealed in the recondite significance of these four poles. The story will remain sealed in dark unintelligibility until the four cardinal points of the zodiac are seen to denote four critical epochs in the life of evolving man, namely, his entry into the four planes of consciousness,--sensation, emotion, thought and spiritual intuition, on and over which his life of awareness extends. Any life cycle exhibits these four turning points, so that the zodiacal chart will be seen to be a key to living process universally.
With this fundamentum in mind it will be advantageous to present a group of other cycles or processes in life and nature which manifest the division of wholes into four-part segmentation:
YEAR: June 21. September 21. December 21. March 21.
CARDINAL POINTS: North. West. South. East.
DAY: Noon. Evening Midnight. Morning.
ZODIAC: Cancer. Libra. Capricorn. Aries.
ELEMENTS: Fire. Earth. Water. Air.
MOON CYCLE: Full moon. Last Quarter. Dark Moon. First Quarter.
ANIMAL SYMBOL: Man. Beast. Fish. Bird.
KINGDOM: Human. Mineral. Vegetable. Animal.
FORTAL CYCLE: Love. Impregnation. Quickening. Birth.
HUMAN LIFE: Death. Birth. Puberty. Adulthood.
THEOLOGY: Descent. Incarnation. Awakening. Resurrection.
FESTIVALS: Fire Festival. Michaelmas. Christmas. Easter.
MYSTERY FIGURE: Harlequin. Pantaloon. Columbine. Clown.
EGYPTIAN GOD: Ra. Seb. Uati. Shu.
This chart may seem to many like the work of sheer analogistic fancy. If so, it is to be remembered that nature, life and mind are constantly playing at this game of correspondences. Mind can discern at every turn the analogies between nature and life, life and truth. All ranges of life are illuminated by the light of the universal parallelism that shows all orders of being to be cognate. The point of value here is that these correspondences are distinctly traceable in the cycles indicated and that they introduce a certain systematism and provide a norm for our perception of times, seasons, periodicities and epochs. By means of what is known of one cycle new meaning may be discerned in another less directly observable. A thorough knowledge of one operation becomes a clue to all others. Taken in relation to the significance of the four cardinal points, the line bisecting the zodiacal circle horizontally from east to west, or Aries to Libra, or March to September, is to be regarded as the "Horizon" of Egyptian symbolism, which will be found to bear the burden of such mighty meaning for mankind.
It will be seen that the June quarter of the circle suggests the point of ideal conception in the noumenal world, when as yet no relation to matter or body has been established. The September point marks the entry of the ideal form into matter in embryo--incarnation, the Word beginning to put on flesh. Here matter and spirit join, or spirit is submerged in matter. December, to our enlightenment, marks the point of the awakening or germination of life after death under matter’s power. This is particularly well seen in the foetal cycle in what is called the "quickening" of the child in the womb half way through the gestation period. If Christmas is celebrated in the December solstice, its meaning can not be strictly that of the "birth" of the Christ in humanity, but rather its quickening after torpidity, preparatory to its true birth at Easter. For then delivery from the womb of matter takes place, introducing the Mother’s child into a higher world of consciousness. The point of release from earth and body is at the March equinox, not at December. And, strangely enough, roughly for three and a half centuries the early Christian Church celebrated the birth of the Savior on March 25! A decree of Pope Julian in 345 A.D. fixed the date authoritatively for the first time at December 25. The sun, of course, is reborn at the December solstice, but his victory is not won until he conquers darkness finally on the horizon line of March 21. The spring equinox is the point of ultimate triumph of spirit over matter and its return to the kingdom of the Father.
Yet very markedly each of the four cardinal crises represent a "birth" for man. At each "corner" of his evolutionary cycle man was born afresh into a higher world of being. This is especially reflected in the four turns of the foetal cycle. June represents the first "birth" of the child, which really takes place when the husband falls in love with her who is to be his wife. The child is then conceived noumenally. The second "birth" falls at September when the father’s seed joins with the ovum and fertilizes it. The third comes with the quickening in the womb, when that which showed no life stirs into activity, at December. And the March date brings the final stage of birth in the child’s delivery. The four stages are: the ideal conception in love’s mind; the actual junction of spirit with matter; the quickening to life after apparent death; and the final victory in release from matter. Transferred to theology these basic conceptions yield a wealth of new discernment.
The four great early religious festivals are important. Only two of the four original celebrations survive in the Church calendar, prominently. We have only the shadow of the former great autumn equinox solemnization in our Hallowe’en on October 31, removed just forty days from the autumn equinox, this period being the true Lent. It was the primal celebration of the death and burial of the god in body. Then came Christmas at the winter solstice, Easter at the vernal equinox, and in June the great fire festival, revived recently by the return to "pagan" ideals in Germany, and perpetuated down to the present in a few parts of Ireland. The September festival commemorated the birth of spirit or soul into flesh; the spring equinox denoted the second birth, or birth out of body into a higher world. The upper half of the circle of signs is the home of soul when detached from flesh, and floating free, in bodies of light, in the empyrean; the lower half is the earthy and watery home when immersed in body. Most of the meaning for humanity obviously lies below the line, or at least upon the surface of the water of this life, which surface is marked by the horizon line, which is the boundary between the two realms. Whether advancing clockwise or downward to the left, we enter body on the west; we leave it on the east to join the gods above. "Pepi saileth with Ra to the east of heaven, where the gods are born." The Egyptian statement is that "the Heavenly Man faces South." Having climbed the steep "of heaven and passed through the Babel gate in Cancer, he turns to look down upon the world of matter below, and thus faces "south." Yet the north was considered the "hinder part of heaven," and the counterpart cosmically of the physical portion of universal life. It was the womb or navel of the world of life, and for this reason the constellation of the Great Bear(er) was denominated the Meskhen, or Thigh of the old genetrix. Life was spiritual (masculine) in the front part of its organism and material (feminine) in the hinder part. And the Eternal told Moses (man) that he dared look only on that hinder part, the glory of deity’s face being overpowering. When the Egyptians portrayed life and man as dual under the form of double animal types, such creatures were always male in front and female behind. The Sphinx is so constructed. If the north is the region of matter and the south that of spirit, then conceivably the heavenly man would look away from the former to the latter. The symbolism that for early ages went with the directions and antithesis of north and south later swung about and came under the typology of west and east direction.
The important fact emerging from all this specification is that man is born au naturel when he enters incarnate life on the west as a falling star or setting sun; and that he is reborn au spirituel when he leaves fleshly life finally on the east with the rising sun of a new epoch. He is born a man on the west, and a god on the east.
If all this seems too finely spun for serious consideration, let the incredulous reader be shocked to hear that it was through losing sight of the analogies connected with this symbolical chart that the Christians actually placed one or more of their most important church festivals on the wrong side of the year! The forty-days’ fast of Lent, for instance, has been placed at a season in which it is utterly out of fitting relation to the natural symbolism of the solar year.
Since the number forty alphabetized in symbolic script the period of gestation of soul in matter, it was chosen as the time for fasting and abasement. This fasting is but another glyph for the privation and lack of true spiritual being suffered by the god in the flesh. Forty days of lamentation and grief were set aside to commemorate the death and burial of the sun-god and the shrouding of his light in the tomb of matter. For ten thousand years B.C. it was part of the celebration of the cult of Iusa, the ever-coming or annually-coming solar god, to keep the forty days and nights in which the sun-hero in the underworld fought the battle with Sut and his Sebau "fiends," in the desert of Amenta. Forty days was the period of seclusion after childbirth appointed for the women by Parsee and Levitical law. In the transformation of Apis, when the old bull died, its successor remained forty days shut up on an island in the Nile. The spies sent out returned after forty days. For forty days Goliath came out to fight each day (I Samuel: 17). David reigned forty years. Moses was with Jehovah in the Mount forty days and nights. Jesus was forty days on earth after the resurrection. Forty appears in the Old Testament some sixty-three times. Forty days was the length of the incubation period of grain in the mud and water before germinating in Egypt; and the human foetus gestates forty weeks. The period of forty days after the planting was a time of scarcity and fasting, which, says Massey, gave a very natural significance to the season of Lent, with its mourning for the dead Osiris, to be followed by rejoicing when the grain germinated. This was transferred to the Hebrew Gospels and became a fast of forty days during which Jesus wrestled with Satan and was hungry.
By every intimation of logic and analogy, Lent should follow, not precede, the burial of the solar god. Only by typing the soul as the seed planted in early spring could it have any natural appropriateness. Christians start in late winter to mourn the death of a god who, according to their own calendar had not yet died, but who, by the calendars of the ancients, had died, under solar symbolism, in the preceding autumn! In spite of the fact that many trace the word "Lent" to the German Lens, meaning "spring," the season of bursting new life is utterly inappropriate to the spirit of such a festival. The death which is placed by Christian error just prior to the Easter resurrection, is thus made to fall in the zodiacal season when all nature is approaching the consummation of her effort to release--not to kill and bury--the solar Christ! All is sadly awry here. Nature herself writes the mark of error upon the Christian Lent in the spring. Whatever the word "Lent" may mean, the spirit of the commemoration is that of sorrow and lament for the Christ crucified and buried. This is appropriate to the autumn season, when "the melancholy days have come," and quite out of harmony with the spirit of nature in the spring. In the vernal season all life is being reborn; the intrusion of the idea of death into the midst of nature’s happy rejuvenescence is a monstrous anachronism and ineptitude. The ancients celebrated the Lord’s death and burial (in the grave of matter only) for forty days following the September equinox, the period ending on October 31, the date of our Hallowe’en. This is the true Lent, no matter how it is taken. The waning sun of autumn is the natural hieroglyph of the Christ’s crucifixion and death, and it is a foul blasphemy against the rhythmic soul of life to send the human spirit into the doldrums of misplaced grief and maudlin sympathy with imagined suffering when grass is greening and earth is opening the tomb of winter’s death for her annual resurrection. Only if it types the god-soul under the symbol of the grain lying six weeks or forty-two days in the earth before re-arising can it escape reprobation. Its only other point of fitness is that it does end with the glory-burst of the resurrection on Easter morn.
The Christians took all three of the numbers denoting the imprisonment of life in physical form--three, seven and forty--and placed periods of three, seven and forty days respectively in the spring at such times that the terminal of each of the three periods fell simultaneously on Easter morning. This is the only extenuating feature of the fixture. In mythical import the entire half year from September to March is the period betokening the death of the god in matter or human life. But it would be most unphilosophical for us to give half of each year to gloom even for symbolism. However, by all the intimations of typology the crucifixion should be in the fall and the resurrection at Easter. And so it was with the ancients.
With his own symbol, the sun, the sun-god plunged into death with the sunset and the autumn waning. The Tuat, the gate of entry to Amenta, was approached at eventide or in autumn on the western side. A commonplace expression for death found in the Ritual and other scriptures of old is "going west." Abraham went west from Ur, to descend into Egypt. The setting sun or expiring day is the universal poetry for death, which our study discloses to be not extinction but incarnation, or life in the actual. The Hallowe’en , or All Souls’ Night, was the primeval commemoration of this event, and became in the course of blunted perception and obscuration of pristine motifs, a motley blending of mummery, buffoonery, witchery and dark magic. The keynote of the celebration was struck in the masking behind animal features! This was the plainest kind of language saying that the gods had taken residence in animal bodies! They were down here on earth disguised as animals! They had clothed themselves in "coats of skin," more bluntly, the hides of animals. They had hid themselves behind a false face. And with their true nature almost obliterated by the animal covering, they could but make ridiculous grimaces and awkward gestures through the course vestments of flesh. Distorted by the animal nature, "marred in his visage, deformed out of the semblance of a man" (Isaiah), the god was little better than a clown cavorting ludicrously on earth behind the beastly exterior. All his efforts to express his more lordly selfhood came forth in weird and uncouth jargon. The Hallowe’en buffoonery is all too realistically a depiction of the soul’s antics and gambols when first incorporated in body.
Likewise the suits of divided color worn at the occasion tell clearer than words the dual nature of the human, when, on this night, god and animal became tenants of the same household, and shared each a half of man’s nature.
That there was confusion in Christian counsels as to the appropriate date of the annual festivals is indicated by the following passage from Massey:
"But there was a diversity of opinion amongst the Christian Fathers as to whether Jesus the Christ was born in the winter solstice or in the vernal equinox. It was held by some that the twenty-fifth of March was the natal day. Others maintained that this was the day of the incarnation. According to Clement of Alexandria the birth of Jesus took place on the twenty-fifth of March. But in Rome the festival of Lady Day was celebrated on the twenty-fifth of March in commemoration of the miraculous conception in the womb of the virgin, which virgin gave birth to a child at Christmas, nine months afterwards. According to the Gospel of James (Ch. 18) it was in the equinox, and consequently not at Christmas, that the virgin birth took place."1
The early Fathers commemorated the death of the sun-god in a seven-days’ ceremonial called the Fetes de Tenebres, or festival of darkness and gloom, which, according to the eminent Egyptologist Brugsch, commemorated the "seven days which he passed in the womb of his mother, Nut," or the seven elementary kingdoms so often mentioned. Perhaps this was the remote origin of the "Ember Days," when the light of the god glowed nearly extinguished, a mere ember.
We come at last to grips with the colossal significance of the horizon symbol. Here there is offered by ancient Egypt a feast of enlightenment rich beyond expectation. The horizon and the equinox! In these zodiacal and seasonal positions, symbolizing both the same inner data, man will find the delineation of his nature and mission with clearer specification than in elaborate treatises on the subject. The horizon and equinox lines tell of man’s definite place in evolution and in nature, and announce most distinctly the terms of his progress. The horizon symbol becomes the open sesame to the clarification of more religious doctrinism than perhaps any other natural feature. There is concealed under it the key to whole segments of the Egyptian texts, the true apprehension of whose meaning has not yet been achieved by modern exegesis. Indeed, the proper elucidation of the meaning of the sun standing on the two horizons, or at the two equinoxes, may be said to be the first actual unlocking of the mysteries of ancient scripture and secret teachings. The very heart of the mystery is enwrapped in the translation of the import of this natural datum and the texts dealing with it. The whole status of man’s life on earth is interblended with the oft-repeated reference to "Horus of the Two Horizons." The release of this hidden truth to modern knowledge will necessitate the revision of much misguided theological dogmatism and will sweep away errors of ghastly consequence in history. Perhaps the opening of this closed mine of priceless intelligence may even awaken the age to a new consciousness of humanity’s mission and a new inspiration to achieve it.
The prologue to the discussion of the location of Amenta in an earlier chapter emphasized the truth that religion had been instituted by its sagacious founders to focus man’s efforts upon the energization of his life here on earth. It was pointed out that earth was the critical arena of human destiny. The location of Amenta on this earth, instead of in vague heavens, was held to be the most vital determination in the field of religion since the third century. What was there fundamentally posited on strong supports receives its final and unimpeachable confirmation in the implications of the horizon and equinox symbology. The single word "horizon" is perhaps fraught with more cogent meaning than any other term in religious usage.
The solution of the mystery behind this symbol may be advantageously approached through the interpretation of some arithmetic cryptically presented in the Books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation. Particularly in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of the last-named there are given three numbers, the recondite import of which hints at the horizon meaning. The three numbers are twelve hundred sixty, forty-two and three and one-half. The first is connected with days, the second with months and the third with days and years. To the casual reader the three numbers as they occur in the verses of the text seem hopelessly mystifying. They seem to refer to a period of duress, captivity or suspension of activity, or exile. It all seems like some mathematical legerdemain that is insoluble. But a little speculation quickly reveals that the three numbers are a numerical periphrasis for the basic one which carries the meaning, namely, three and a half. Twelve hundred and sixty days is found to be forty-two months (of 30 days each), and that in turn is three and a half years. One of the presentations of three and a half is in the famous "for a time, and times, and half a time," which can at least mean one, plus two, plus one-half; and nothing else certainly. But, if all the numbers given resolve into three and a half, what is its great significance?
Here some details of ancient cosmological systematism are necessary to find a positive clue. But the whole mystery breaks clear in the light of the fact that three and a half is one half of seven! A simple fact is this, yet it is the great key to our understanding the real meaning of scriptures. If, as is subtly intimated in these texts, man’s position is at a place cryptically marked by the number three and a half in a seven-cycle series, then it is clear that the esoteric information purveyed to the astute is that man stands at a point which is half way through his entire cycle. His position is just half way between the two ends of the scale or gamut of being. And precisely this is what is conveyed by both the numerical and the horizontal suggestions. Three and a half is at the half way point between the upper and lower termini of a seven series. And the horizon is half way between heaven and earth, typing, as always, spirit and matter, the two ends of being. The momentous information, then, which is vouchsafed to man in this recondite fashion is that he, as a creature in a stupendous cyclical evolution, stands at the point exactly midway between the beginning and the end of the complete area to be traversed. Man is half way through his evolution and stands at its midmost point.
Several deductions at once flow from this datum. The first is that the line marking off three and a half stages in seven would equate the horizon line in the zodiacal chart, and that this fateful line would at the same time mark the boundary between the two natures in man’s constitution, the earthly and the heavenly. It would indicate the border line where the two natures, separated by life’s aboriginal act of bifurcation into spirit and matter, remain contiguous to each other. It would be the fence between the two kingdoms, from the opposite sides of which they face each other. If there is warfare between the two, this would be the battle line, the front of the Battle of Armageddon. And amazingly does the Ritual say that this aeonial conflict is fought on the horizon! At last weird speculation as to the meaning and location of a pertinent Biblical symbol is settled by, and as, a bit of Egyptian imagery.
The implication is clearly, then, that man was taught that he stands on his evolutionary boundary line between the immortal nature of spirit and the mortal nature of material body. He stands directly on the line between the two great kingdoms into which life split itself in the arche. And the further deduction is that he stands in two worlds at once. Put differently, it can be said that the two worlds are in him, the world of spirit localized or functioning in the upper half of his body, and that of matter’s powers centered in the lower half. So that now it becomes possible to read greater cogency into the many Egyptian statements that man lives in heaven by virtue of his soul faculties, and on earth by virtue of his bodily senses. His soul is in heaven with Ra, and his body on earth in the form of an animal, asserts the text. Man stands with both feet in the "grave," but his soul is in heaven. And to crown this knowledge with inspiring impressiveness, it is intimated that he is the only creature in existence that stands at this pivotal and strategic place in all evolution! For he is the only being in whose constitution spirit and matter meet to affect each other in exactly equal measure. Even the angels are said to envy man from their seats, for man’s experience will put him ahead of them. "Know ye not," says St. Paul, "that we are to manage angels, let alone mundane affairs?" And "he hath made man for a little while lower than the angels" (Moffatt trans.), to crown him eventually with greater glory and honor than theirs.
It follows likewise from the terms of the situation that the horizon line is precisely the point at which the two elements of soul and flesh are in exact equilibration with each other. If man stands at the middle point in his journey from matter back to spirit, then he is also at the point where the two nodes of his being, spirit and matter, exactly counterbalance each other in efficacious influence. And this at once opens the way for the introduction of the whole range of symbolic values connected with the sign of Libra, the Scales of the Balance, and the Scales of the Judgment. And precisely at the horizon’s western terminus stands the Libra sign! The Judgment is a corollary aspect of the horizon typism and will be treated in a following chapter.
The sun standing on the horizon line at evening and morning, autumn and spring, is the graphic symbol of man’s position in the universe of flowing life. For the horizon marks the dividing line between heaven and earth, so that man stands directly on the line between the heaven of spiritual consciousness and the earth of physical being. He bestrides this evolutionary horizon line and finds his living activity and expression equally measured between the two kingdoms. No more lively utterance of this fact could be had than the statement of the Book of the Dead that man "cultivates the crops on both sides of the horizon." This advises us that we are farmers of both a spiritual and a physico-sensual domain. And we reap the harvests both in Amenta and in the Aarru-Hetep or fields of peace. Man’s sovereignty extends across both sides of life’s total area. He occupies the Two Lands, or Upper and Lower Egypt. And after long cycles it will be his prerogative to settle the aeonial warfare between these two provinces of his nature, reconcile them in harmony, and finally unify them under his single spiritual lordship. Straight and clear is Egypt’s proclamation of this sterling truth: "He cultivates the Two Lands; he pacifies the Two Lands; he unites the Two Lands." Man is "the god of the two mysterious horizons," and the glowing pronouncement of his final evolutionary triumph is given in the words: "Thou illuminest the Two Lands like the Disk at daybreak."
Ancient scripts set forth repeatedly that in the middle of the "fourth watch of the night" of every sevenfold cycle in evolution’s recurrent rounds of manifestation, the hidden and latent power of spiritual mind comes, as it were, walking out on the surface of the sea of life, to quiet its chaotic tempest and harmonize its contending forces and elements. The fourth watch in the night of incarnate evolution would be the human kingdom, following the mineral, vegetable and animal. Every creative life wave building a globe and an evolution of life and consciousness on it does its work in seven successive releases or impulses of its power. It works through six creations before it can crown its effort with the establishment of mind as king and conscious ruler of all lower energies, in the seventh and last round. But the first six of these efforts work for the creation of material substance and organic forms built from it, the last and highest of which forms is to be brought to capability of embodying the kingly mind. And the first three formative impulses work with matter in its sub-atomic states, which are in the invisible world. The first stirs up inchoate formless root-substance; the second separates, as the white and yolk of an egg, the two basic elements into opposite sides of polarity; the third granulates the substantial essence of the material half. It is not until the fourth wave strikes that matter is brought out onto the stage of visible substantiality, in the elements of the mineral kingdom on earth. The fifth wave raises mineral elements to organic structure of the vegetable type, and the sixth lifts these up to the forms of animal bodies. Only in the seventh comes man, whose physical vehicle is to be the cradle of the Christ child of divine Intelligence. Man stands therefore at the summit of the material creation. He is the Egyptian Iu-em-Hetep, the deity that comes seventh to make peace, and rule the six (or seven) lower elements. But the seventh wave comes midway in the fourth kingdom, or at the point of three and one half.
But the summit of the material creation is just under the foot, or heel, of the spiritual kingdom. And man is the union of the highest physical potency with the lowest divine consciousness, and he therefore stands on the horizon line dividing spirit and matter, and so bears the title: "Lord of the Two Halves of Egypt."
The three activities of life energy taking root-matter through its three primary formative stages in the invisible world prepare finally the mineral kingdom on a globe--Earth--which represents the nadir of descent of life energization in dense matter. Life has descended to its deepest death in matter in the mineral state. Its involution ends there, and its evolution through form begins. The mineral kingdom, therefore, is the lowest plane of created matter. We count upward from it. The vegetable is the second, the animal the third, and the human is the fourth evolutionary kingdom, though it brings man on the crest of the seventh wave of life force. And it is in the middle of the human kingdom--certainly not at its beginning--that the Christ divinity comes out on the surface of conscious existence and takes responsible control of the processes thenceforth. Arcane texts state that humanity itself has subsisted through three great cycles of development from rudimentary state as human, and is now in the middle of the fourth round. We stand exactly at the line marking three and one-half stages of the entire life cycle on earth, or succinctly at the middle of the fourth human energization, which in turn is the middle of the fourth natural kingdom of life expression on this globe. And never a Christian priest in sixteen centuries has told his flock why the number three and a half occurs in the middle of the Book of Revelation. It may be helpful to attempt a diagram that will, crudely enough, delineate the rationale of the seven and the three and a half in the scheme of evolution.
@insert diagram
The curved line B B represents the dip of the wave of purely matter-building energy, unconscious and controlled by higher agents of the hierarchy, into the heart of matter. It goes as low as the bottom of the mineral kingdom, and there turns to return--its Mount Sinai. A A represents the dip of the unit of divine self-consciousness into matter. Since it can not be embodied in a form less complex and responsive than the human body, it reaches its nadir of descent in the human body at its mid point of development, and so goes into its Mount Sinai exactly on the horizon line. And there it begins its aeonial "warfare" to regenerate the animal. As the chart will reveal, there are three and a half stages of purely spiritual evolution to be accomplished from our present station. We are on the horizon, where animal dominance ends and spiritual governance begins.
It will be found extremely enlightening to juxtapose Paul’s statement (Ephesians 2) that a "middle wall of partition between us"--between our two natures--will in the end be broken down, permitting the Two Lands to unite under one sovereignty, beside Jesus’ anthropological declaration to his disciples, "I am from above; ye are from beneath." The Christ here announces that he is the god above the horizon, while the natural man, disciple or learner, is the creature below it. Man is created when the life force has evolved organic fleshly structure up to the point of capability of becoming a fit living dynamo for spiritual forces. Then, with affinities established, the Christ principle can descend and tabernacle with flesh. Man then occupies the most strategic point in evolution. For he can pit the two nodes of life in equilibration and mutuality against each other, and effectuate that balance and intercourse between them which is the prime prerequisite for the birthing of the next generation of ongoing life. The balance, the warfare, the friction, the alternate bruising of head and heel, is the condition basic for the new propagation. This situation outlines a whole vast position of the theological field and covers wide ranges of salient meaning.
Theology has gone on blindly for centuries, never dreaming that the zodiacal sign of Libra was all the while the cryptic sign and seal of the great doctrine of the Judgment, and that man was being weighed in the scales of the living balance between spirit and matter in the life in body. Emerson writes that "man stands midway betwixt the inner spirit and the outer matter." The name for the Norse region of life where man dwelt was Midgard, or the middle ground. Man’s life is the Libra Scales. Through him as a gate, unseen spirit steps forth for the first time in evolution onto the plane of open conscious being in a world constituted of matter. It comes out of the depths onto the surface, from submergence in earth and water into the light of the air and the sun, and walks on the water. It is only in man that soul wakes from dreamy semi-consciousness to exert its creative powers upon and through matter in world structure, in co-operation with God. Man is the channel through which every portion of spiritual intelligence must pass to be transformed from sheer potentiality to actual dynamism. The kingdom of the human is the only breeding ground in which the ungerminated seed of munificent divine being can be incubated, hatched and grown to maturity of self-conscious rulership in the cosmic field. All higher ranks of angels, gods, thrones and dominions have once been men on some former planetary stage, and we present men shall rise in time to grandeur, while the dull brutes below us will tread the ascending path in our wake.
One aspect of the typology touches the opposition of light and darkness. The sun on the horizon is midway between the kingdom of light and that of darkness, as it appears to man’s view. It therefore stands in the twilight. We are neither in gross darkness nor in undimmed splendor. Oddly enough the Talmud preserved the statement that the tabernacle which man was ordered by deity to build was to be erected "half in light and half in shade." The equal arms of the cross likewise carry the same idea of balance between dark and light. And the cross was set up on a hill, the hill of the horizon. The Scales on the horizon were the cross on the hill. Horus and horizon both spell hor, which is the same as hel, and means "light." Izon is in all probability the Greek ison, meaning "equal." So then we have the horizon as the place of equal light and darkness, as in the day period on September 21 and March 21.
Salvation is won on the cross because the place of preservation, in the Ritual, is stated to be where "the body and soul are united to be saved." Death on the cross of matter, as we have clarified previously, is at the same time the preservation of the soul’s integrity. It was earth, the region of twilight, that opened its gates and cities of refuge to the mother fleeing with her sun-child from the Dragon of Necessity. A quotation from Massey will prove timely:
"The opening of the mount is in the equinox, and it is there the pursued ones attain safety by entering the earth to escape from Apap, the devouring dragon. Seb is the Egyptian Joseph, as the consort of Isis, the earth mother, and foster-father of the child; and at this point in the western equinox where Horus enters the earth or earth-life, Seb, as god of earth, takes charge of the child and mother to convey them on the way to the lower Egypt of Amenta."
Seb, however, does not convey them to any other realm than his own, but fosters them there.
The horizon line is to be seen as the equivalent Egyptian symbol for the values depicted under a different typology in the Hebrew Bible. It matches the great "cleft in the rock" imagery of the Old Testament. And this figment of theological fancy only finds its concealed sense when examined side by side with its cognate Egyptian glyph. The Eternal Being of God was by the mythicists typed by that which is most enduring and stable of all earthly things--the rock. But that everlasting Rock split itself into two at the beginning of creation. The line of cleavage runs midway through the center of its being, dividing the upper millstone of spirit from the lower one of matter. And right into that aperture between the two nodes of being deity placed man. Graphically is this depicted in the Old Testament. The Eternal says to Moses (man) that he will hide him in the cleft of the rock and will place his hand over his eyes, so that as his glory passes by man will not look full in the face of his overpowering effulgence; but when he shall have passed, and his hand is removed, man may then look safely upon his hinder part. Matter is this hand of God over mortal eyes, and it is the veil that deity has suspended between his mighty glory of spirit and our feeble powers of sight. We see God only through the veil which he has flung over our face. So man, standing on the horizon, gazes upon deity with its light dimmed to twilight by its admixture with the powers of darkness. God veils his face, or veils our power of vision, as Moses put on a veil every time he went into the Mount (of the horizon) to commune with deity. But it is in the Cleft of the Rock of Eternal Being, or on the horizon line between heaven and earth, that we are hidden by deity. That Rock was cleft in twain for man, and though we have sung
"Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee."
with pious unction, no one has ever told us that God has thrust our life into the fissure made by the cleaving asunder of the two aspects of divine life, or that this cleft is in the human body of man itself. The rock cleft of Hebrew imagery is expressly called in Egypt the "rock of the horizon." Humanity is born in this rock cleft, and primitive necessity used the cave or rock recess as the place of birth actually. It is by name the Tser Hill, and it is where the dead body of Osiris was laid for its repose when buried in Annu. When the mummied Osiris rises to come forth like Lazarus from the sarcophagus or cave of the body on the other side of the horizon, he passes through "the gate of the rock, to approach the land of spirits." It is at this rock-gate that Shu stands when he uplifts the heavens (Ch. 17). This god is the uplifter of buried divinity, raiser of the grave rock, or opener of the sepulcher and the bringer of breath to the long-inert soul now awakened.
Shu’s counterpart is Anhur, identical with Moses, and he is hyphenated with Shu as Shu-Anhur. He is represented as being the medium of communication between God and mortals. "His substance is identical with the substance of Ra," which is the truth about humanity likewise. He makes divine law known to men, as did Moses, when he brought the twelve tables of the law from the Mount. As the breathing force of deity he is pictured as the panting lion on the Mount of Dawn. He was, like the morning star, absorbed into the blazing fires of Ra, with whom he reunites after his separation on the western mount. His transubstantiation is said to have taken place during a nine days’ tempest, which may be assumed to figure the disappearance of the god in his cycle of earth life, itself typed by the nine months of gestation, at the end of which his apotheosis into the being of Ra occurred as "he ascended alive into heaven."
This intermediary office of Anhur in the earlier cults is afterwards borne by Horus who, after stating that he disrobes himself to reveal his nature "when he presents himself to earth," says: "I am the babe born as the connecting link between earth and heaven, and as the one who does not die the second death" (Ch. 42). He then escapes Apap and the slaughter of the Innocents and goes on to conquer death in Suten-Khen. Shu-Anhur is equated in another cult with Atum-Iu, who as the opener and closer of the gates in and out of Amenta, holds the keys of death and of hell.
Horus’ succession to the functions and titles of Shu-Anhur, guardian of Amenta’s west and east gates of entry and exit, yields further exegesis and edification. The title of Horus as the god of the two horizons, west and east, is Har-Makhu. Har is "light, sun or sun-god." Khu is the divine spiritual body or entity in man. Ma must be taken as the root of Ma, "mother, matter." The title then subsumes in it the meaning of "the divine sun-god of spirit and matter." Therefore he stands on the horizon. Now Shu was the "lion-god," and Horus, as his successor, inherited Leo signatures. Atum-Ra-Har-Makhu was portrayed in the form of a lion-god upon the Mount of the horizon as the "lion of the double force" of spirit and matter. "I am the twin lions," he says. He rose or stood between the two lions which image the double force of being, betokened by the fore and hind parts of the lion, or the sphinx. The male lion is spirit, the female hinder part is the material power requisite to implement spiritual conceptions. Science has dealt with "matter and force" as the two exclusive factors in the living world, but omitted the invincible king of all, spirit. The spiritual or fore part directs, but must use the material hinder part, its shakti, as the fulcrum against which to exert power.
The two lions are much in evidence as representatives of the two natures that are balanced on the horizon line. The two leonine figures that are still placed as the guardians of doorways, driveways, steps and portals, may now have their arcane riddle unraveled for an oblivious world. They are survivals through many millennia from the time when Leo was at the point of the autumn equinox in the reckoning. Instead of the scales, the two lion-gods stood, one on either horizon, to guard the entry and exit gates of Amenta. And these two lion figures type something more than fanciful guardianship. They dramatize god-man himself in his two characters of deity gone to its death in the flesh, and deity re-arisen. The lion on the west border is the figure of dying divinity; the lion east is the figure of divinity born anew, conqueror of darkness and death, opener of graves, lifter-up of humanity. The two are Horus the Elder, decrepit, wizened, disfigured, ready to die and give place to his seed; and Horus the Younger, radiant, blooming, triumphant. Dying lion and the "lion’s welp" of the Old Testament, they were the two phases of godhead at the two opposite sides of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. At once a large segment of disguised purport in theology is opened to enlightened view when we examine the Egyptian name for these two antique lion figures. It is kherufu. This is at once seen to be the Hebrew cherub and its plural cherubim, the angelic powers that support the ark of the covenant at its two ends. And further thrilling revelation accrues from this connection through a passage in Exodus (25:22), in which it is stated that Moses (Man) was bidden to commune with deity "from between the two cherubim"! The best that literalism could do for us in this matter was to leave us with a picture of Moses ensconced atop the ark of testimony crouched under the two overarching wings of the cherubim trying to meditate! Now we can see the portrayal redeemed from nonsense to positive and gripping meaning for us. Naturally all communication must come across at the point where the two natures, human and divine, can effect a contact, and this is on the horizon line, in the body of man. Where mind and body meet is our holy mount. Our life stretches from the western gate of physical birth across the dark nocturnal sea of earthly experience to the eastern horizon of bursting light. The space between the two cherubim is the span of mortal life. In this life alone we have our chance to commune with deity. Our elaborate study is worth all its labor if it brought us this one gleaming light of realization alone. Man stands or travels between the two divine lions of dual force, the dying lion on the west and the panting lion of the resurrection dawn. The tree of life is often pictured between two lions, or two goats (Capricorn), or two cherubs, or two rams (Aries). Seraphim is a companion figure with the cherubim, for they designate the same two phases of deity under the zodiacal form of Taurus. Ser is Osir(is), or Lord, Sire; and Apis is the Bull, Taurus. Serapis yields in Hebrew "seraph" and "seraphim." Cherubim and seraphim, like Urim and Thummin, at last are seen to be the two alternating powers of divine life, entering and leaving earthly embodiment. The solar disk is often drawn between two animals. Earth is the place between two trees, two lions, bulls, pillars, gates, mounts, altars, lampstands, doorposts, or the two horizons. In this life we are on the mount of the horizon, the hill of the Lord, our Mount Sinai, whereon with veiled face we may approach close enough to deity to hear his voice, his uttered manifested Word of Truth, though we can not face his full glory.
In the vignette to chapter 138 of the Ritual--the "chapter of entering into Abtu"--there are drawn the forms of the two lion-gods on the horizon, one of whom is called "Yesterday" and the other "Tomorrow." Nothing could be more instructive than these titles, for, of the two natures of man, the lower has been built up as the result of past experience now consigned to the realm of the "subconscious," being our habitual or natural tendencies; and the higher, the "super-conscious," is to be the development of "tomorrow." Conscious man of the present would be "Today."
A variant of the typology set the dragon of spirit, or serpent of fire, upon the horizon in such a position that his upper half projected above the skyline and his lower portion was below the rim of the earth. This is a perfect typograph of the situation in the human body, where, with the diaphragm for horizon, all spirito-intellectual elements function above the line and all physico-genetic ones below it.
The dualism of man was commonly typed in Egypt by the sphinx-figure of the lion, with fore and hind parts in various forms. Also the giraffe became an eloquent biograph of this meaning, because of the unusual feature of his eyes protruding so far on each side of his head that he can see both fore and aft without turning his head.
Another zootype of the same import was the crocodile, which was placed in the sign of Scorpio. The Scorpion represented breath and dryness, the crocodile typed water. Hence the one at the station of the other suggested the god and animal in union in one organism--man. The crocodile at the place of the equinox limned the idea of equal balance of the air and water. The ape, half man and half animal by descent through miscegenation, stood as a most apt embodiment of the horizon idea. The various chimerical animals conceived by mythological fancy to typify mankind were often half brute, half human, such as the centaurs, harpies, satyrs, mermaids, sphinxes, gryphons and others.
Greek philosophy places man in a midway position in the scale of being. Proclus states: "We, however, being of a middle nature . . ."2 Again: "Hence that which is in our power, neither pertains to the first, nor to the last of things [pure spirit and matter], but to the medium between both." And many another Proclean passage voices the Greek statement that man stands at the line where the "summits of inferior natures" touch the bases of the superior orders.
The mystic seer Swedenborg writes that "while man is in the world, he is in the midst between heaven and hell; and then he is kept in freedom to turn himself either to hell or to heaven."3 In Jeremiah (21:8) we find: "Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I set before you the way of life and the way of death." And Deuteronomy (30:19) iterates: "I call heaven and earth to record this day against you; that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing."
The Roman god Janus (whence the first month January, from janua, "a doorway") was also a type of the lower nature facing the higher, enabling man to see both before and behind. The same implication attaches to the two brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus, forethought and afterthought; likewise to the two dogs of Orion, Cyon and Procyon. The occult philosophers summarized their doctrine by saying that man was the hinge point of the universe. On him as pivot rested the crossbeam of the balance, with the natural constituting the one end and the supernatural the other. As intimated in other connections, the Hebrew Sinai plays a most prominent part in this exegesis. After the passage of the Red (Reed) Sea in the Exodus, the children of Israel arrive at the "Wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai." Elim, the plural form of El, Hebrew "God," would mean "deity," and Sinai the opposite station from it. The Egyptian Sheni denotes an orbit, circle or circuit, a place of turning face about, as in a transformation. It is the mount of the equinox, whereon man pivots as he stands poised between his downward descent and his return to spirit. Another name for the two lions was Sheni (Massey).
Standing on the dividing line, homo sapiens surveys the lands on both sides. In the Ritual Isis addresses the rising Horus: "Thou risest on us; thou illuminest the Two Lands. The horizon is covered with the tracks of thy passings. The faces of gods and men are turned to thee." The statement that the horizon is covered with the tracks of the god’s passings can mean nothing but that the soul has passed over the west and east horizon lines time after time in his descents and ascents, in his pilgrimages from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven. That the faces of gods and men are turned upon us as we cross the line confirms our position on the boundary. It is declared to the soul: "The Light-God rolleth over thy body. Thou art the Lord of the two halves of Egypt." And these are the two kingdoms which every noted Egyptologist and historian has mistaken for two geographical divisions of the country, in spite of the obvious impossibility of a separation and reuniting having taken place in the reigns of ruler after ruler, as the record appears to show. Spiritual and not political history is being recorded.
Horus leaves us in no doubt as to his position: "I make my appearance on the seat of Ra and I sit upon my seat which is upon the horizon." And in all sacred literature there is hardly to be found a passage of more natural strength of meaning than that from the Ritual which says: "His mother suckleth him and she giveth to him her breast on the horizon." Mother Nature feeds man’s spirit in that world where alone soul and flesh can interchange reciprocal influence.
When water symbolism is resorted to, the Two Lands are the Two Lakes. On approaching the two lakes, the Speaker says:
"Lo, I come that I may purify this soul of mine in the most high degree. Let me be purified in the lake of propitiation and equipoise. Let me plunge into the divine pool beneath the two divine sycamores of heaven and earth." (Ch. 97, Renouf)
Revelation states that the two witnesses "are the two olive trees." It also states that the tree of life is rooted on either side of the river of water.
Already noted is the statement that the soul "makes to flourish the crops on both sides of the horizon." It cultivates either mundane or celestial interests. "He is the Bull of the Gods, with the twofold light in his Eye . . . he unites the heavens, he has dominion in the lands of the South and North. He rules the night." The south is the front, male or spirit; the north the back, female or matter. By ruling the night he is lord of the lower or darker half. The climactic utterance is that he "pacifies the Two Lands, he unites the Two Lands." As he closes the gate of heaven on the west, he opens it on the east. "Thou openest the gate of heaven leading to the horizon and the hearts of the gods rejoice at meeting thee." "The doors are opened and the gates are thrown wide open to Ra as he cometh forth from the horizon." In the "chapter of making the transformation into a swallow," Nu says: "I am a swallow. I am the Scorpion, the daughter of Ra. Hail, thou flame which cometh forth from the horizon . . . in the Pool of the Double Fire. I am pure at the place of the passage of souls"--which is the horizon. Ra is apostrophized:
"Thou art the lord of heaven; thou art the lord of earth; thou art the creator of those who dwell in the heights and of those who dwell in the depths. Worshipped be thou whom the goddess Maat embraceth at noon and at eve."
At "noon" Ra is at the height of the spiritual empyrean, with the celestials; at "eve" he is descending to glorify mortals. He then crosses the underworld by night from the west, "the place that thou lovest." And the chapter ends with the gripping statement that "This thou doest in one little moment of time." This follows the recital of his journey "over untold spaces requiring millions of years to pass over," and is a reminder to world citizens that in the consciousness of higher "dimensions" a thousand years are as an instant. The grand simplicity of Isaac Watts’ hymn should not be slighted:
"A thousand ages in Thy sight
Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun."
To Pepi (the soul) it is said: "Thou takest thy seat in the two halls of the horizon. . . . Thou art Ra appearing at the horizon. Ra is born every day and Pepi is born every day like Ra." In the Book of Unas we read: "He sails in the horizon like Ra and Heru-Khuti . . . he sails to the east of heaven . . . where the gods are born."
Unmistakably the situation of man between the two natures is implied in the following:
"The water of life cometh into heaven, the water of life cometh on the earth. The sky catcheth fire before thee, the earth quaketh before thee, at the hands of the children of God. The two mountains are cleft, the god appeareth, and the god hath the mastery over his own body."
The Ritual prayer for Pepi asks:
"Make him to embrace the two horizons of the sky; this Pepi saileth therein with Ra to the horizon. Make Ra to embrace the two horizons of the sky."
To embrace the two horizons would be to unify the two natures in one identity. Of Osiris-Ani (the soul) the Ritual states: "He cometh into his city . . . the horizon of his father Tem." Tem means "total" and intimates the union of the forces of the two horizons. "The divine power hath risen and shineth in the horizon." Adoration is paid to the risen sun-god: "Homage to thee, O thou that shinest from thy disk, thou living soul that cometh forth from the horizon."
Anubis was a double-headed deity, one of the twelve guardians of the Light. One head could watch by day, the other by night; or the two could watch the opposite sides of the line.
Pepi, the Ritual states, "makes the two regions of heaven to embrace . . . so that Ra may sail over them with Heru-Khuti to the horizon. This Pepi cometh forth on the east side of heaven where the gods are born, and he is born there with Horus and the Khuti." The Khuti are those who have evolved the Khu, or shining body of imperishable flame.
Reconciliation between the two hostile natures is indicated in the Litany of Ra:
"He made the two Rheti goddesses, the Two Sisters of the Two Lands, to be at peace before thee. He did away with the hostility that was in their hearts, and each became reconciled to the other."
Here is the doctrine of the Atonement. In the Hymn to Osiris we find:
"Thou rollest up into the horizon, thou hast set light over the darkness, thou sendest forth air from thy plumes, and thou floodest the Two Lands like the Disk at daybreak."
In Zechariah (14) there stands the following:
"When the very cleft shall open into a deep valley, the living waters shall go out from Jerusalem; half of them toward the southern sea (in front or before) and half of them toward the hinder sea."
The valley is used many times in the Bible to indicate this sphere of existence, our earth, into which the cleft opens out. It is the space between the two mountains which open and close, giving man his interval of opportunity to dash in and fill his chalice before being caught. The Zechariah passage uses the symbolism of two waters dividing. What more could possibly be connoted by the Exodus typology of the waters of the Red Sea dividing to let the children of God pass, and closing to catch those coming behind in hostile pursuit?
The great philosophical debate as to the Monistic or Dualistic view of life is largely gratuitous. All ancient systems of philosophy rise out of a basic initial proposition stating that a primal Oneness opened out to become a duality. The shell bursts asunder to release the seed; the seed splits in two to release the ideal pattern of form within. The first beginning was from the bosom of the Absolute, which opened to generate the twins, Light and Darkness, Day and Night, Manifestation and Reabsorption. The two Dioscuri or heavenly twins were pictured with half of the severed egg on each of their heads as a cap or helmet. One of the earliest of all symbols was the circle divided horizontally.
Now, wherever out of the void of primal space and darkness came visible substance into concrete status, as a world, there was a "hill" or "mount," a station in the abyss, an "island" in the firmamental waters. The exegesis of the mount or hill scripturally used is of great value, for the words have never had careful and explicit definition. When a globe appeared, born out of the formless abyss, it was a resting place or foothold of stable life for finite beings, who could have no local habitation in the vast areas of nothingness otherwise. The hill and mount were glyphs for the earth itself.
A work attributed to Simon the Samaritan called The Great Announcement teaches that the root of all things branched into two powers. Of these, one appears above and is the Great Father, the mind of the universe, directing all things; the other appears below, producing all things, female. The Great Mother divided into the two heavens, or heaven and earth, giving rise to the Two Women, the Mothers of all life. These two women, who brought forth the twin brothers of light and darkness, were placed in the zodiac six months apart. They stand at the same stations as the two lion gods. This makes the one the mother of incarnating deity in his first half, or the natural man, the other the mother of resurrected deity, the spiritualized man. The one, Virgo, was the virgin mother of the god-seed buried in body and undeveloped; the other, in Pisces, was the mother, no longer virgin, but impregnated by spiritual mind, so that her offspring was not merely born, but also begotten of the Father. This double motherhood and double birth of twin saviors is duplicated in Luke. Elizabeth, who is described as barren (virgin) when she is six months gone with the child John, bears her child six months earlier than Mary (Luke I:36). "Of the vivifying Goddesses," says Proclus, "they call the one older but the other younger" (Timaeus: B. III).
The figure of Aquarius, the Waterman standing in the zodiac at the January station and pouring out the two streams of the water of life from the "Ur-n," pictures the division of life at the very start. The name of the great primal God Tem means "total," and it was Tem’s seed or seminal life-blood falling upon earth that begat the two personfications of spirit and matter, Shu and Tefnut, or Hu and Sa. Massey says that "there is no god that is not a biune being, a twin form of the ‘double primitive essence’ like Ptah." "Manifested existences are in his hand; unmanifested existences are in his womb," runs the Ritual. Many gods were represented with female marks, many goddesses with male ones. Deity was epicene, in token either of its original unity or of its later return to androgyne state. The first Horus was most significantly pictured with the locks of girlhood. Even the mummy was dual in sex, another proof incidentally that it typified living man, since only in Amenta does the soul split into the two halves of sex. There is the Jesus with the female paps in Revelation, matching Bacchus and Serapis. Horus is shown with the cteis, Venus with the beard, and Christ as Charis and Jesus as St. Sophia. Astarte wore on her head a bull’s horns (Philo). A bull-headed goddess is found on Egyptian monuments; Neith and the vulture, her emblem, were both depicted with the male member erect in front of them. Aphrodite is sometimes written Aphroditos, the masculine form. And men sought to parody the androgyne condition of divine perfection by making themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. Even Jehovah was half feminine gender (Hovah) and was called Jehovah-genetrix. The sun-gods in incarnation went into their feminine phase.
Life was Father-Mother in one at first, and only in long slow development did it become Father and Mother. The human race, which represents a miniature eidolon of cosmic creation, reflects the same process. Humans were androgyne or male-female for aeons before, in the third root race, they bifurcated into separate sexes. A single life portrays again the same stages. For the human child, matching early humanity as a whole, is of dual or epicene gender until puberty unfolds true differentiation of sex. This is why Horus, the mummy and the child Jesus of the catacombs, were represented with legs bound together. The two legs are the signs of bifurcation, the one typing spirit, the other matter, and free to move in counterbalance with each other. The human child represents the pre-Adamic races, the pre-manifestation deity, who was androgyne. The human race had its time of puberty. Man bifurcated in the image and example of primordial God. The impubescent stage was made the general type of life or deity undifferentiated.
Massey’s summary of the dual nature of Horus or the Christ, so long lost and so sorely needed to bring clear ideas into religion, is valuable:
"In the west he is Horus in matter, feeble and dwindling; on the east he is Horus in spirit. In the one he is the child of twelve years, in the other he is the adult of thirty years. The first is the founder, the second is the fulfiller. The first was Horus of the incarnation, the second is Horus of the Resurrection . . . In both phases of character this is Horus of the double force, the double crown, the double father, the double Uraei, the double life, or other types of duplication, including the double equinox."4
He is addressed: "Fearsome one, thou who art over the two earths . . . to whom the double crown is given" at his second coming (Rit., Ch. 17). And here it becomes imperative to dissolve in the clear light of understanding a false apparition of doctrinal accretion: the second coming of a god in bodily form to earth historically. Every god figure, typing the god in all mankind, comes twice; first as purely man, secondly as man become god. The presentment is only figurative, though the mighty truth it adumbrates is actual. Horus rises on the east to avenge the wrongs inflicted on his father on the west; to raise his father’s paralyzed arm, to reconstitute his dismembered, mutilated body. This redemptive work wins for him the second crown.
In the Epistle to the Hebrews (5:7) is a brief sketch of the twofold Horus, who suffered as Horus the mortal and overcame as Horus the immortal spirit. He "learned obedience through the things which he suffered; and having been made perfect he became unto all them that obey him the author of eternal salvation." The spirit of God came upon him in his adulthood, when he was divinized as the hawk; and he who had been dumb and meek as the lamb or bull led to the slaughter, became Horus Ma-Kheru, the utterer of very truth. The change of the boy’s voice from feminine tone to masculine at twelve is a most astonishing natural parallel with arcane truth. The feminine or child voice is a falsetto; the false word must become the Word made Truth.
The Horus of the western horizon, taking the plunge into matter, is, somewhat confusedly to many, typed as both the decaying Osiris, the dying old man, and the infant, speechless, impubescent child Horus. Har-Ur, or "old-child is his name." As a portion of the "Ur" or aboriginal essence of conscious being, he is infinitely old, the Ancient of Days. But in his present incarnation he starts embodied life afresh, as a child. He is old in timeless being, but young in the present life cycle. He says: "I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself and I grow young each day." The sea of earth life lying between the two cherubim guarding the gates of west and east is verily the fountain of eternal youth, whose waters impart to the bathers the potent elixir that restores a vigor agelessly fresh. The disappearing old man merges insensibly into the helpless infant at the winter solstice and again transforms into the radiant new divinity at the vernal equinox. Horus says: "I am the twin lions, the heir of Ra" (Ch. 38). As he passes across the space between the two horizons he blends the powers of his two forces into one, carrying over the first natural potencies into the spiritual realm exalted and glorified.
The word "child" in a number of languages, notably Spanish, is a derivative of the original Nu, firmamental water of first life, which was life in a form unexpressed and unproductive. The child was of Nu(neu)ter gender. He was the negation, or privation, as yet, of true life. So the Nu, Nnu, Nun, and eventually the ninny and in Spanish the niño (child).
Some tribal legends retain descriptions of primeval ancestors of humanity who were half male and half female, and were unaware of their unlikeness and innocent of sexual desire until a god created a longing to eat of the earth. Tasting earth’s fruit, they lost the power to fly back to heaven. One Arunta legend tells of ancestors who were double-sexed when they first started on their journey, but before they had proceeded very far, their organs were modified and their mothers "became as other women are." The races emerging from Paradise were hermaphrodite.
A long narrative from the Pymander discourses of Egypt recounts how God, or the creator gods, becoming exceedingly enamored of their own forms, brought forth man in their likeness. But man, seeing the beauty of creative workmanship, must needs fall also to work, and so he separated himself from the Father and descended into the sphere of generation. He stooped down to break through the harmony and strength of the Circles, and manifested the "downward-borne nature." And seeing in the "water" of earth the fair reflection of his own beauty, he loved it and would cohabit with it. (Here is probably the genesis of the Greek fable of Narcissus.) In his love for it he wrapped himself about it and became married unto it. And for this cause man above all creatures is double; mortal because of his body, and immortal because of his celestial part. Immortal and having power over all things, he yet suffers mortal experience and is subject to Fate and Destiny. Being hermaphroditic, he is governed by powers both male and female. Air and water, the account runs, drew down from Fire and Aether their subtle powers, and so nature produced bodies in the shape of men. Thereupon the bond of all things was loosed by the will of God, and the males were cut apart from the females. And straightway God ordered the creatures to increase and multiply, and bade them know themselves to be immortal, the cause of death being the too ardent love of body. He that knew himself to be a mixture of high spirit with lowly body advanced to "superstantial good." But he that through erroneous love was enamored of body, abode wandering in darkness, sensibly suffering the things of death.
Manifestation can not arise without the breaking apart of primal unity into duality. But the soul that "makes the journey through Amenta in the two halves of sex" must reunify its two halves before it can return to the Father. Bisexuality is for the journey in time, not for all eternity. That which has been put asunder by God must be remarried for the return to the invisible world. "This soul, divided in the two halves of sex, must be united again in establishing an eternal soul." Manifestation is the result of bifurcation; retirement must be accompanied by reunion. Here is the rationale of the Atonement doctrine; the two halves, spirit and matter, god and man, must return to antecedent oneness. Man began as androgyne, and as androgyne he must end the cycle. Spirit and matter must marry in the body of man. Shu and Tefnut "are blended in Tattu." And this statement is of critical moment to the race, for its asserts that the blending of the two natures is done in Tattu, our earth. We are sent to bathe in the Pool of Siloam so that the two halves of our nature may be made into the original whole. Earthly human wedlock is but an emblem of the greater marriage of the two elements of matter and consciousness in one organism. "The Manes could only enter the kingdom of heaven as a being of both sexes or of none," writes Massey lucidly. In the light of which we venture to suggest an entirely new and undreamed-of meaning in Jesus’ statement that man, to be regenerate, must become as a little child. The child is of neither sex, functionally; and the man returned to deity is of neither sex. The redeemed must return to the sexless state of the child. Orthodox ignorance has read into Jesus’ utterance only a return to "the simple faith and purity of childhood." But there is in this no lift to the plane of cosmic and racial significance where alone the esoteric interpretations of ancient books is to be made. The Gospels are not dealing with everyday homiletics. They expound the occult laws of evolution. Jesus was telling the race that it must return to angelic epicene state, spiritually. We must reunite the two divided sexes in us. Paul endorses the necessity when he says that the wall of partition between us must be broken down, and the two made one new creature. And the Gnostic Jesus tells Salome that his kingdom will come when there shall be neither male nor female, but when both shall be one. Paul again supports the thesis when he says: "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus," the biune being, the Alpha and Omega of any cycle. And no one can forget that impressive assurance of the Master himself that "when they shall arise from the dead they neither marry nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven" (Mark 12:25). Sex is an appurtenance of the body only. This is the meaning of the statement in Revelation that "the dragon shall rise up and slay" the two witnesses, the two thieves between whose opposite tensions the Christ had been crucified. Unification slays duality. This is outlined in the "mystery of Tattu,"
"where the body-soul in matter (Osiris) is blended with the holy spirit of Ra; the female with the male (Tefnut with Shu), or Horus, the child under twelve years, with Horus, the adult of thirty years. The transaction of blending occurs on the day that was termed ‘Come thou to me’" (Rit., Ch. 17).5
The primal cleft and bifurcation is the genesis of the horizon situation. There could be no horizon line in man’s life but for the primal bicussating that Plato tells of. The duality of our nature is a trite religious truth. Yet its consideration from the angle of the horizon typology has yielded new disclosures of piercing meaning.
Jerome, the Church Father, states that the crucifixion was not signalized by the rending of the veil of the temple, but by the breaking in twain of an enormous beam. The beam was the cross bar of the balance. But we also catch a new and stirring significance of "the veil." The rent veil is indeed another framing of the horizon and cleft rock symbolism. The veil was the curtain of invisibility that shrouded unmanifest deity in its primal oneness. As seen, life can not come to view until it is broken into the two nodes of spirit and matter, to provide a subject-consciousness which can become aware of object-matter. The celestial rending of the veil was then the division of the All-life into its positive and negative phases, and through the rent thus made, archetypal life emerged to view. The rent veil is again the bifurcation, the cleft rock. Through the rent life emerges to view on the hill of the horizon. It was specifically rent in twain. The rending of the veil of the Absolute broke the primal homogeneity and brought life to manifestation. For visible life only exists where the two opposing forces engage in the neutralization of their contrary tensions. The ancients did their best to expound these abstrusities under appropriate and striking representations; but we have been blind.
The horizon symbol brings further grist to the interpretative mill in another direction. It puts us in position to see at last the meaning of the "rib" figure in the creation story. The rib that has been a bone of contention and mystification for centuries yields readily to mythic art. The form of the myth must have been mangled to some extent, for the hidden sense is not readily evident in the Genesis statement. Since it is the account of the split into sexual duality, which is, or is the emblem of, the bifurcation in the beginning of creation, it must mean both these things. Therefore the rib mentioned is to be taken in the sense of "midrib"! God ran a midrib through the center of his one unitary nature, and thus separated off spirit and matter, male and female. All the root significance of the stem "rib, rif," which yields "rift," "riven," supports this interpretation. Riven is "cleft." The hymn speaks of "the blood, from thy riven side which flowed." Deity mutilated, cleft in twain by a mid-rift (mid-rib is written "mid-rif" in Shakespeare), and from the life blood which flowed forth mankind was nourished.
Reconciliation is attested in the following: "Pepi is the uniter of the Two Lands." And by this again: "The heart of Osiris rejoiceth and the heart of Horus; and therefore are the northern and southern parts of heaven at peace." Even Keb (Seb), earth-god, is dualized in the following: "Behold, one arm of Keb is to heaven, and the other is to the earth, and he taketh Pepi along to Ra." In The Crown of Triumph (Rit., Ch. 19) the announcement is made to Horus: "Thy father Seb hath decreed that thou shouldst be his heir. He hath decreed for thee the two earths, absolutely and without condition." The two earths are heaven and earth. Hor-Apollo narrates that the Egyptians signified the course of the sun in the winter solstice (the underworld) by two feet or legs walking, a miracle, for the legs walked without a body or a head. The god in matter was indeed regarded as having lost his head. The sun-god in the underworld, Af-Ra, was without a head. It is said that Osiris goes into Tattu and finds there the soul of the sun or Ra. There the one god embraces the other, and divine souls spring into being.
It seems certain that Michael is the Revelation character on the horizon under the title of Makhu-El, the god of the dividing line. And, true to type, Michaelmas was placed at the autumn equinox on the western horizon! And Gnostic literature names the western hill Mount Bakhu, while the eastern one is the Mount of Olives, or Mount Manu.
A prayer is made that the Osiris may be saved from the attack made against him "at the crossing." (Ch. 135.) This indicates that assault on his young divinity is made as soon as he crosses the line on the west in his descent. He is then "the youngling in the egg" and subject to the Herut attack. Here the dragon lay in wait to devour the young child.
Direct corroboration of our interpretation of Satan as just the god on earth is seen in this forthright statement: "Unas standeth up and is Horus! Unas sitteth down and is Set! Ra receiveth him, soul in heaven and body on earth!" This shows the incarnation itself to be the root of "evil"; the resurrection overcomes it. The gender differentiation of the two aspects, as female on the west, male on the east, is carried out remarkably in a passage from a Babylonian tablet: "Venus is a male at sunrise; Venus is a female at sunset" (Sayce: T.S.B.A., Vol. 3, p. 196).
In the Ritual the soul must open thirty-six gates (the twelve decans each of three zodiacal signs?) by as many transformations of character. Chapter 145 is devoted to the opening of twenty-one of these gates. The sun-god is the King of Glory for and by whom these gates are opened. Taht, the Egyptian Psalmist, says:
"Opened be the gates of heaven! Opened be the gates of earth! Opened be the gates of the west! Opened be the gates of the northern and southern sanctuaries! Opened be the gates and thrown wide open be the portals as Ra ariseth from the mount of glory! Glory be to thee, O Ra, lord of the Mount of Glory! . . . He is the King of Glory; these are the gates of glory that were opened on the mount of glory ‘at the beautiful coming forth of his powers.’"
The Book of Enoch designates the west wind under the "name of diminution," because "it is there that all the luminaries are diminished and descend."
"Pepi takes possession of the Two Lands, like a king of his gods." He seizes first the west or natural kingdom, then the spiritual east, after making the crossing via the solstice of winter. To Pepi in his resurrection the joyful announcement is made:
"Hail, Pepi, heaven has conceived thee with the star Seh (Orion), the Tuat has brought thee forth with the star Seh--Life, Life, by the command of the gods, thou livest. Thou comest forth (risest) with the star Seh in the eastern part of heaven; thou settest with the star Seh in the western part of heaven."
Again:
"This Pepi appears in the eastern part of the sky. Thou art renewed in thy season; thou becomest young again at thine appointed time. Nut brings forth this Pepi with the constellation of Orion."
Though traveling through the earth of Amenta, "he belongs not to the earth, he belongs to heaven. . . . He pounces upon heaven like the ahau bird, he kisses heaven like the hawk." As he emerges in his splendor in the east side, he "makes the hearts of the dwellers in the east to expand with joy." "He strides over Akar, he stands up in the eastern part of heaven."
The glory of the Lord in Ezekiel’s vision "went up and stood upon the mountain which is on the east side of the city." The four fishers in the Ritual pull the dragnet through the water in the act of fishing for Horus. These are they who are described as fishers for "the great prince who sits at the east of the sky" (Rit., Ch. 153B). Jesus was accompanied by four fishermen.
The legend of the stone in the temple of Memnon which sang at sunrise is a poetic dramatism of the joy that greets the rising god on the eastern horizon.
"The gods or spirits that mount with the great god to the eastern horizon . . ." are spoken of. "In our mysteries," says Jerome (cited by Bingham: Christian Antiquities, Vol. I, 517--and evidencing, too, a thing often denied: that the Christians had their mysteries along with the pagans) "we first renounce him that is in the west, who dies to us with our sin; and then turning about to the east, we make a covenant with the Sun of Righteousness and promise to be his servants." Christian exegesis has not always done so well in the transmission of ancient teaching! The Ritual (Ch. 44) reiterates: "I am the sun; very glorious, seeing mysteries--hating him who dwells in the west, telling his name." As Horus (Osiris) when he sank in the west became Set, the theological basis for the mythic hatred here expressed is easily discerned.
We have seen that in Luke Jesus delivered the sermon, not on the mount, but on the plain. Nothing but our interpretative diagram will reconcile the apparent contradiction, since by its aid we see that the horizon may be either a hill or the open plain. Two variant aspects of a symbol chanced to cross or appear in conflict in this case. The theologians are saved the annoyance of having to explain a seeming contradiction. But--the point of utmost moment in the matter is that the "sermon" was not uttered by fleshly lips on either hill or meadow; it is the living utterance of the Christ who stands on the hill of the horizon between the two natures in man.
Before Horus came to the underworld, the sky had to be held up by Seb, the earth-god. And Horus’ coming to relieve Seb of his burden recalls the relief of Atlas by another sun-god, Hercules. The Greeks also assert that Hercules separated two mountains to form the two columns or pillars--fabled to be geographically at Gibraltar. And this again repeats Egyptian dramatization in the erection of the two pillars
of Tat, tokens of dual stability. The meaning is that the god in man could enter the opening made by the cleaving apart of heaven and earth. Man is the Atlas who stands with feet (body) on earth and head (soul) in the sky, supporting the two realms by the power of his two equal arms. So the patriarch’s two arms had to be held up till the battle was won, in Old Testament copying of Egypt’s deepest lore. The sun-god came to relieve Atlas of his burden until he could go and get the three golden apples from the garden of Paradise; which three golden apples, be it known at last, were the solar triad of mind-soul-spirit.
The two equinoctial points of September and March in our zodiacal chart have yielded a rich meed of interpretative insight. Do the solstices speak as voluble a message?
The June solstice has rather little to offer for mundane instruction, because it is the index of divine soul entirely out of relation to the earthly scene in highest heavens. Its intimations point to the life of spirit in the empyrean, which is of little direct concern for man below. The sun-spirit of evolution stands at its high noon, which is seen as cognate with the Nun or non-manifest state. His interests lie on or below the horizon line. Antiquity celebrated the great Festival of Fire at the June solstice to do homage to the principle of Fire or spirit in the universe and in man. Maintained in a few scattered districts over the world, it has entirely disappeared from Christian notice.
But the December solstice yields a harvest as bountiful as that of the equinox and the horizon. It shows soul at the nadir of its dip into matter, and all its implications bear immediately and weightily upon the human situation. In the large general view the winter solstice significance is a reinforcement of that of the horizon. The suggestion of balance between spirit and carnality is accentuated again in the fixed relation between light and darkness at the turn of the year. At the equinoxes light and dark are equal in sovereignty. But at the solstice the two powers are stabilized for the period, albeit in unequal relation. The balance, in the special sense of fixity and stability, is the ground for further striking disclosures of cryptic meaning and symbolic beauty fully matching those based on the horizon. As a flood of rich meanings gushed up from consideration of man’s position on the evolutionary horizon, so another stream of cogent revelation wells forth from examination of his position at the evolutionary solstice. For under a shift of the hieroglyph, man stands also at the winter solstice of his entire evolutionary cycle. He stands at the point where his soul has made its deepest descent into matter, having taken actual residence in a body of animal flesh. The soul has emanated from the bosom of the Father and gone forth under primal impulse into the heart of matter. But with the exhaustion of its projecting force, it comes to a dead stop in the arms of matter’s inertia. The material force that was able to bring it to a stop must be exactly equal to its own power at that point. For an aeon--a section of the entire evolutionary round--it stands motionless, locked in the arms of matter. Here, at the nadir of descent, is its evolutionary solstice. And that solstice covers the period of human evolution.
As sheer metaphor it can be seen in a flash that the interlocking of male and female principles in each other’s arms is the condition precedent and necessary to a birth. The Logos, and below him the Christ, are both the products of wedlock and intercourse between spirit and matter, and must therefore be born at the solstice. And so the Christ birth (mes, mas, in Egyptian) fell at the winter solstice.
All values are born out of the struggle between the opposing nodes of consciousness and material inertia. The exertion necessary for latent consciousness to awaken its energies to greater awareness and function alone brings it to its birth. Heraclitus’ declaration that "war is the father of all things" is a great philosophical truth that applies here most forcefully. All birth arises out of the stabilized wedlock between spirit and matter, and their frictional interplay. The two parents must cohabit to produce their child of divine consciousness. And they are married at the solstice. Heraclitus adds a most pertinent observation: "The harmonious structure of the world depends upon opposite tension, like that of the bow and the lyre." Stability is gained only by the mutual annulment of two opposite forces. The planets swing in fixed orbits because of the exact counterbalance of centrifugal and centripetal energies.
The significance of the solstice (the word meaning "sun standing still") lies in the fact that for the time both light and darkness stand still in relation to each other. The basic feature is motionlessness. Neither is losing or gaining. They are stabilized. In the parallel situation in human evolution, soul and body stand in precisely the same relation. Soul has come down in involution and come to a stop in exact equilibration with matter, which on its side had come up from below. The spirit is from above, the body from below, as Jesus has told us. The first man is from the earth, the second is the Lord from heaven, is Paul’s corroboration. The one ascending, the other descending, the two meet, are thrown into stable equilibrium with each other, enter wedlock and birth the Christ. Each brings the other, by the exact equilibration of forces, to a standstill. Again flashes into thought the brilliance of the Egyptian phrase-name for this life: the Lake of Equipoise! We are in the pool of balanced, stabilized forces. The term "pool" has great significance here because the water in a pool is stagnant, not in stream. At the angle made by the turn in direction of the line of involution into that of evolution--"the angle of the Pool of Fire"--the water of life is stagnant, as in a bay, cove or "bight of Amenta." The moving forces coming from above and below meet and hold each other still in the Pool of the Solstice. It is the lake or pool of human life, the Pool of Siloam.
The animal evolution, up from below, came to a meeting point with soul and was stabled or stabilized with it. Soul, coming down from above, met the animal and was stabled or stabilized with it. Copulation and birth took place in this stable relation. Now a stable is a building erected by man for animals, a station where they may come to stand (sta- is the root of the Latin word meaning "to stand") for the night or in winter--both symbols of incarnation, be it noted. Evolution was stalled for the night in a "stable." Animal life came to a stand in a stable place, to stay or stand still in a stall or static state or station, along with soul. Along and together with the divine, animal evolution was stabled for the night. Soul came to lift up the animal, and to do so he had to build a stable for him and enter it with him. So the Christ was born in a stable.
The features of motionlessness, stillness and midnight quietude are played upon in much allegorical material that could be adduced to support the reading. Hymns and legends emphasize these aspects:
"The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing."
. . . . .
"O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie;"
And perhaps no single chant has ever so powerfully inclined the shallow and boisterous western mind to a moment of real reverence and devotion as the lines of Franz Grueber’s Silent Night, Holy Night, sung at midnight of December 24. For the Christ mind was born in the midnight stillness--of evolution.
This dead stoppage of all motion in evolution received a dramatization in one of the Apocryphal Gospels in so graphic a form and so laden with significant implications for all religion that we are constrained to reprint it here. It is an entire chapter from The Protevangelium or Gospel of James. It reveals that the Nativity scene was so obviously a drama that one speculates whether this fact does not supply an all-sufficient reason for its being kept out of the official canon of New Testament books. The recondite meaning of the solstice pause and motionlessness had somehow to be represented in the stage play. It was depicted thus:
1. And leaving her [Mary] and his sons in the cave, Joseph went forth to seek a Hebrew midwife in the village of Bethlehem.
2. But as I was going (said Joseph) I looked up into the air and I saw clouds astonished, and the fowls of the air stopping in the midst of their flight.
3. And I looked down toward the earth and I saw a table spread, and working people sitting around it, but their hands were upon the table and they did not move to eat.
4. They who had meat in their mouths did not eat.
5. They who had lifted their hands up to their heads did not draw them back.
6. And they who lifted them up to their mouths did not put anything in.
7. But all their faces were fixed upwards.
8. And I beheld the sheep dispersed, and yet the sheep stood still.
9. And the shepherd lifted up his hand to smite them, and his hand continued up.
10. And I looked into a river and saw the kids with their mouths close to the water, and touching it, but they did not drink.
Here is represented the sudden stoppage of all motion in the field of nature and human life. The sons of men, typed as crude working people, below; the birds of the air, symbol as ever of the divine soul, above; and both suddenly motionless. The sheep and their shepherd, repeating the same classification--and all caught by the stasis, or standstill of evolution! It is drama.
The New Testament parable of the wise and foolish virgins contains a most direct reference to the midnight pause: "At midnight arose the cry, The Bridegroom cometh."
And another clear intimation of the solstice purport hides in the story of Hannah and the relief of her barren condition through the birth of God’s prophet Samuel: "At the turn of the year she bore a son." As Hannah equates Anna, the mother of the mother of the Christ in the Gospels, we have an identity of reference with the Christ story.
And light is available at last to enable us to read rational sense and meaning into the otherwise impossible riddle of Joshua at Ajalon commanding the sun and moon to stand still, until the battle was won. It is a variant of the solstice symbolism. The sun types soul always, the moon, body. The battle of evolution could not be won unless these two forces were brought to a standstill to birth the Christ. And this again is a variant typing of the holding up of the two arms to insure the victory.
The ox and the ass are present at the divine birth as zoötypes of prophetic meaning. Both these animals represent, along with other subtle typology, the end of purely animal procreation in human history with the coming of the Christos--much the same as circumcision. They stand at the birth of the Christ as indices of the beginning of humanity’s return from male and female progenation to androgyneity through spiritual evolution. The ox is sterile through castration, and the ass through cross breeding. And man is to become a eunuch for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.
The dramatic ritual also arranged that the new-born Christ should be laid in the manger, where the animal eats, since his own explicit command to all mortals who would win immortal life was that they should eat his very body. God and man conjoined were reciprocally to nourish each other. An old script reports Adam as asking: "Am I and my ass to eat out of the same manger?"
Now indeed is the winter of our discontent in evolution; but our faces are set toward the lengthening light and the sun-glory of the vernal equinox, where we shall rise as gods.