WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE

The implications and corollaries of the horizon and solstice symbolism will be found to be little short of revolutionary to the highest degree and disruptive of many a solid bulwark of orthodox theology. For one thing they announce the total error of the entire system of eschatological doctrine in Christian preachment for centuries. They will make necessary nothing less than a complete reformulation of the whole of that phase of ecclesiastical dogmatism.

It has been found essential, on the postulates of the archaic teaching, to transplant hell from some vague place of mystery under the earth or "beyond the grave" to the surface of the globe on which we live. It was necessary to define the mummy as the living human, the grave as his body of flesh, and the "dead" of old scriptures as living mortals--ourselves. It devolved upon us to re-locate Amenta, bringing it from its indefinable place somewhere above or below the earth to the open light of our own world. Along with it we were obliged to shift the locale of purgatory from the somber shadows of some unknown Sheol to the present field of our actual existence. But none of these modifications of conventional theology, drastic as they have been, will prove so shattering of commonly accepted ideas as the next transfer of a region of theological fiction from the spirit world back to our good earth. This other mislocated domain is the Hall of Judgment of Osiris in Amenta!

Orthodox religionism and popular belief must receive with what composure they can the forthright declaration that the judgment scene is enacted on this earth, not in the life of spirit following our sojourn here! We are in the scales of the Judgment now! For we are also in Hades, Sheol, Amenta, now. The Egyptian trial of the soul and the weighing of the heart in the Hall of Osiris are located by the old books in Amenta, and this Amenta, according to our now corrected knowledge, is the life we are now living. As argued in an earlier chapter, the Spiritual Guides of humanity gave the race a code of religious instruction that was meant to apply to the world in which it was given, not to a succeeding one. The seers were not concerned with teaching mankind about the supervening consciousness of the discarnate life. They taught humanity how to live in the world in which the teaching was imparted, well assured that philosophic behavior of life here would put them in favorable condition to meet the exigencies of the life of rest following the day on earth. They were vastly concerned to instruct mortals in what it behooved them to learn here, as this was the only realm in which progress could be made,--unless it be contended that one makes greater progress in sleep at night than in one’s waking life by day.

We were led to the discovery that the judgment takes place on earth from the figures, phrases, statements and identities found in the Book of the Dead. When these were noted, related, and studied, it seemed impossible that the plain and obvious truth of the primal doctrine of the judgment could have been so fatuously misconceived as has been the case. The statements are clear and their purport is indubitable. An incredulous world will demand the evidence in hot haste. It is given with what clarity and cogency are at our command. It could not be advanced with any expectation of intelligent reception until the long exposition of the significance of the horizon was prefaced. The brief summary of the position and relevance of the zodiacal sign of Libra is the link between the horizon and the judgment. The cross on the horizon hill is the primary emblem of theological philosophy; but it is not until one transforms the cross into the Scales or Balance that there is introduced the idea of moral quality and judgment pronounced. It is not until the two arms of the cross are made mobile to register any failure of the equilibrium that moral culpability enters the theological situation. Neither above man with the angels, nor below him with the beasts, does moral responsibility reside. It inheres solely in the kingdom of man, who is poised, the only creature in evolution so placed, on the two arms of the balance between mind and matter. Man on the horizon is not only nailed on the cross of matter; he is being weighed in the scales of the balance, to see if his heart is so spiritualized as to be light as a feather! Man’s heart against a feather, and his fate hanging thereon!

The first broad consideration that led the mind to the truth about the judgment was the reflection that if Amenta was this earth, then the judgment trial must necessarily take place in this life. If the argument for the identification of earth with Amenta was sound, the matter was established conclusively by the data presented in that relation. But the position is strengthened by the force of other material drawn from ancient texts. Nothing contravenes it; all the data confirm it.

Thoth, who is the "Attorney" at the trial in Amenta, is entitled "Lord of the Balance." Thoth, or Taht, embodies the power symbolized by the Tat cross of Egypt, which was the emblem of eternal stability, and the power that raised up life which had fallen under the sway of matter. He therefore presides at the horizontal balance where soul and matter are in their conflict. In other words, he is the divinity within us. And this is confirmed by the Ritual passage which says that "Pepi is Thoth, the strength of all the gods." And Pepi, Teta, Unas, Ani and others are kingly puppet figures acting the role of the human soul. Thoth is the divinity that lifts us up when fallen under the seductions of sense. Thoth is he who, "when the eye (of Ra) is sick, and when it weepeth for its fellow eye; then Thoth standeth up to cleanse it." He is the god who comes between Horus and Sut "through the judgment of him that dwelleth in Sekhem." Of the seven cakes to be brought in by the soul, four were to be offered to Horus, the upper three to Thoth. The three upper spiritual principles were to be rendered pure from matter’s stain. Thoth is the god who healed the mutilations of dismemberment. But he was also the god of knowledge. What more direct hint does the mind need, to be assured that the ills of mortal flesh are to be healed by knowledge? Like Jesus, Thoth dries the disciples’ feet. He is said to present to Pepi "his life which was not to him." At the trial he is represented by the ape, which has been shown to be par excellence the symbol of the god who stands at the point of balance between the animal and the human kingdom. He is described as standing at the door of the pure chamber to recite his formula which shall give life to the soul each day. The ape is the scribe or secretary or recorder for the gods because he typifies man, who combines flesh with spirit and who is thus the only being in evolution who is able to write or record the thoughts of his heart and the deeds of his hand in the form and substance of the material world--his own body. Man’s body registers the record of his life. Thoth is the power that imprints the record of living experience upon the subtle ethers of man’s inner spiritual vehicles. As regards the individual human, then, Thoth is the god within, who binds up our broken hearts, our mutilated intelligence, reconstitutes the dismembered corpus of spirit, and raises us up again. And he is Lord of the Balance, the god of the judgment scales.

A second powerful hint that the judgment is staged on earth comes with the declaration of the texts that Thoth, when he found Sut had stirred up the gods to resist the entrance of Osiris (the soul) into their company, decided that the matter should be tried in the Hall of Seb, the earth-god. It was later believed that the trial took place in the city of An. In whatever "city" held, the trial would be typical of the temptation that was universal to mankind, taking place continuously. In the solar myths there was a judgment annually. But such local or temporal judgments were either mythical or memorial, a drama to depict a deeper and constant reality.

A further intimation was seen in the statement that the Egyptian Judgment Hall was at times denominated the Hall of the Two Truths. This name enforces the conclusion that all the weight of the material concerning the horizon as the place of the two truths of life must then bear heavily on the proposition that the earth is the Hall of Judgment. This is additionally supported by the passage from the Ritual which states that the Tree of the Two Truths stands in the place of the Judgment Hall. And on a tablet of Tahtmes, a Memphite functionary of the 18th Dynasty, a reference is made to the judgment under the Tree. The text states that on the thirtieth day of the month Tibi (Dec. 16 of the Sacred Year), the "day of filling the eye in Annu" (the birthplace), "the great Inspectors (or Judges) came out at the end of the Dais under the trees of Life and Perseas." This was the place of the Judgment. Then comes an important item. "Having been questioned, thou answerest in Rusta on the third of the month Epiphi," or on the 17th of June, six months afterwards; the two dates, the one of questioning and the other of answering, corresponding to the two opposite sides of the zodiac of life, the Hall of the Two Truths, and the Tree of Heaven and Earth. Shu, who upholds the heaven with his two arms, like his Hebrew antitype, Moses on the Mount, was represented by the two lawgivers of astrology, the two stars of the solstices, north and south, Kepheus and Cor Leonis. The character of these personifications as lawgivers connects them with the Judgment. The Judgment Hall, then, was the space between the two horizons, or the north and south (east and west, spiritual and material) nodes of our life, a fact which is forever irrefutably established by the inscription here quoted, to the effect that the question or problem of destiny which is put to the Manes on the horizon of September is to be answered in the court six months later on the horizon of March, at the conclusion of the life experience, or in the large, at the end of the whole human cycle. The trial then began at the entrance to Amenta, where the evolutionary problem was propounded to the soul, to which it was to render answer at the culmination of its sojourn on the earth, the Hall of Judgment. The horizon line between the two cherubim is the place of the Great Balance. The two Horus forms or lion gods are the two pillars of justice, and the judgment is the long series of decisions which the man himself renders as he journeys across. At the completion of his journey over the intervening terrain, the man hears Thoth pronounce to the gods: "Hear ye this judgment. The heart of Osiris hath in truth been weighed and his soul hath stood as witness for him; it hath been found true by trial in the Great Balance."

The heart that is weighed in the scales could not be physical. It was the second or spiritual heart. The Manes appeals to this second heart, as to a person detached from himself, not to bear testimony against him in the presence of the god who is at the balance. This second heart was that which was fashioned anew according to the life lived in the body. "The conscience or heart (Ab) of a man is his own god," says the Ritual, and it also is his only judge. The divine words spoken by the soul, the soul’s projection of its highest conception of truth, were to be given flesh and made concrete truth in the life lived on earth. This recording of its own inner nature upon the body of flesh was the writing of its own book of life. And that which was written upon the outward form would in the repercussion stamp its lineaments back again upon inner spirit vestments, or deposit them in the ark. And this book of life, the record inscribed at the end upon the imperishable soul itself, was opened anew at the beginning, not at the end, of each fresh incarnation of the soul. The facing of the record of the past began afresh for each individual every time he plunged into earth life. We meet the book of life at birth, not at death! For we bring with us our own past record, written upon our inner ethereal vestures in letters of character. In life, not in death, we must face the issues raised by former good or ill. By our active deeds we must break the bondage of the past. Never will moral problems be envisaged aright until it is seen that their issues must be met and settled by conduct in the daylight of life, not in the dark night of death. This knowledge can transform human society.

Revelation (20) records the vision of the seer:

"I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened, and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. The sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them; and they were judged every man according to his works."

With the esoteric reading of the words "sea," "death," and "hell," there is no passage in ancient writing that more explicitly sets forth the meaning of the Judgment than this. Categorically it is declared that it is the "works" wrought in this present domain of life that determine the fate and status of the soul. The truth which is thus overwhelmingly established is that "the dead" come to their judgment in this life. It is, of course, possible to abstract from the phraseology of such passages as this apparent support for the idea that after this life is over (a thousand years after, it is expressly claimed by numerous cults) the dead will be summoned out of earthly graves and arraigned in ghostly lines before some august spiritual court, by which the record of the deeds done in the life will be weighted against some standard of abstract justice, and the righteous ones rewarded with a crown of eternal life, while the evil ones are parted off for eternal torment. But such a reading is a sorry distortion of the mythical sense, and was never the true intent of the framers of the allegory. This life is, as we now see, the realm of the "dead." In it, not after it, is the trial of the soul’s qualities, as every common sense conception of the value of earthly life testifies. We are summoned into this Amenta of the body life after life, and in each we are being put to the trial of our character in a varied series of experiences. This is an incontrovertible fact of common knowledge. This world is the high mount into which the dark power, Satan, led the Jesus spirit for its trial and temptation. Given a moment’s sane reflection, any soul will know that this life is the period of its trial and testing. The soul is drawn here to exercise her undeveloped powers, as Plotinus has so well told us. Without such a testing she would remain forever ignorant of her own latent capacity, or would never bring it to expression. Here is where she is thrown into the scales of the balance, in Libra on the horizon, and here is where she is being weighed. How does she measure up under the test of earth? In no other realm of her evolutionary experience is she so situated that her acts become decisive for good or ill. The human life is the only stage on which every act is an act of destiny. Standing on the equally balanced bars of the scales, or arms of the cross, with spirit on one side, matter on the other, her every motivation, word or deed inclines the arms up or down, and thus she frames her destiny. Man is the only creature whose inner spirit writes the record of its character on its inner bodies in turn. For every fleshly experience sends an impression inward and makes a record on soul, which holds it. A man of immortal spirit-essence, eternally. The body he inherits in his successive incorporations is the outer expression on the visible plane of all his previous activities in the cycle. Whatever is hidden within will be revealed, and, cleansed and purified by suffering, returned within. A man’s soul will speak out through his body. For the soul enforms the body, and after its own pattern: "For soul is form, and doth the body make," as the Faerie Queen states.

The earth is the Court of Judgment and Justice because it is the only place in which the consequences of past living and thinking come to light in a living embodiment. The kind of body, mind and emotional nature a person brings with him into incarnation is the book or record of all his past deeds done in the flesh, only now republished in the newest and latest edition. Not a court in a spooky spirit-Amenta, but earth life judges a man, because it subjects the nature and character he brings as his book of life to the test of further experience. And his good, bad or indifferent success in undergoing that test is again recorded in his personal character for further testing and reformation in the next life. "The opening of the books" in the trial in Revelation is just the bringing out of what is in one. Earthly life is expressly designed to do this. How else could nature make a record of the individual’s career save in the permanent nucleus of his soul, which from life to life brings its hidden qualities, its beauty or its deformities, forth to view in the lineaments of both outer body and inner impulse! When the laws of righteousness and good are at last written upon character, then will the body reflect fully the inner glory. Only that can be brought out which is resident within, a fact which has become an accepted principle of modern biology after seventy years of research since Darwin’s day.

Someone may offer as evidence against our conclusions the verse from Hebrews (9:27): "It is appointed unto every man once to die, but after this the judgment." One knows not whether this is a corruption of some original statement of text by partisan or factional zeal, or a true version of what the philosopher wrote. But even if correctly rendered, it is readily interpretable in full consonance with the philosophy here expounded. For it is in line with the ancient wisdom which declares that it is appointed, by the cycle of Necessity, the Great Dragon, that man should go once through human evolution, subdivided of course into many single lives, and have once the experience of embodiment in all the elements of nature. This study has revealed that the allegories in scripture practically all refer to the complete cycle of embodied or incarnate life, and not to single stages or steps. Here again, then, the "once" covers the entire human round. And to enter life in matter is, as shown, "to die." Then "after this" is as well rendered "in this" or "throughout this," since the judgment begins after, or from, the very beginning of the "death." To be sure, all judgment holds for after-time, but it is immediately concomitant with the acts judged. There is a rounding out, finishing and perfecting of judgment in the last stages of the entire round, naturally, and it may be legitimate to think of these last denouements as the final judgment at the end. Hebrews (9:26) does expressly say: "Nay, once for all, at the end of the world, he has appeared, with his self-sacrifice to abolish sin." The havoc wrought upon millions of morbid minds by the mistranslation of teleuten aion as "the end of the world" instead of, properly, "the end of the aeon or cycle," has already been emphasized. But the passage indicates that as the whole cycle rounds out to its conclusion, the registry of the record will reach its beautiful consummation. The writing will then be in final form--until the next great cycle begins. At the end of the aeon nature must reckon with her child and pronounce the verdict on the aeon’s activities and accomplishments.

Nevertheless it is during the run of the cycle that the soul is being weighed in the scales of the balance, for that is the only time when the two elements of being, spirit and matter, are poised in solstitial balance against each other.

That the whole question has perplexed scholars is revealed from the following by Budge:

"The question naturally arises here:--When did the judgment in the hall of Osiris take place? To this no definite answer can be given, for the reason that no text supplies the information needed. There are no grounds so far as I see, for assuming that the Egyptians believed in a great general day of judgment, when all the world should be judged, and the wicked shall be punished, and the righteous shall be rewarded, or for thinking, as some have done, that the mummified bodies were laid in the tomb to await a general resurrection. On the contrary, all the evidence seems to point to the conclusion that the judgment of each individual was thought to take place immediately after death, and if this was the belief, it follows that punishment or reward was allotted to the dead at once. The evil heart or heart which had failed to balance the feather, symbolic of the law, was given to the monster Am-mit to devour; this punishment consisted of instant annihilation, unless we imagine that the destruction of the heart was extended over an indefinite period."1

Budge barely escapes from committing himself to childish literalism at the end of this speculation. And his assertion that no text "supplies information" is but a confession of scholastic inability to read the hieroglyphs and symbols. The whole Book of the Dead and other texts are definite attempts to transmit or preserve knowledge about the judgment. The pity is that modern scholarship has not yet learned to interpret the fathomless wisdom of those texts. But Budge lends authoritative corroboration to the claim that the ancient religions envisaged no such universal "Judgment Day" as exoteric Christianity has plagued the conscience of people with for centuries. It is at any rate inconsequential when a final judgment is pronounced upon life; for the ingredients of that sentence are being compounded by the individual at all moments, in the ever-present Now. Every passing act helps determine the nature of "final" decision. Budge again speculates on the subject:

". . . there exist definite proofs that the Egyptians believed in a judgment which was to be held in the domain of Osiris" [it should be recalled that Osiris was "Lord of Amenta"--earth!] "and we should hardly expect the spiritual body to begin its career until after the trial of the heart in the balance, and until the verdict of the gods at this judgment was favorable to the deceased."

But the noted scholar confesses his confusion and want of definite knowledge in the sentences immediately following the above:

"The whole question is full of difficulty, chiefly because the Egyptians themselves did not, I imagine, form definite ideas on such subjects, or if they did, they did not put them in writing. It is, however, perfectly certain that they believed that Osiris had power to make men to be born after death into a new life, and that such life was everlasting."

In uncertainty over the cryptic and baffling texts, Budge, like others, took the easy way of foisting his own failure on the Egyptians themselves. If we can not make sense out of their texts, they could not themselves have had very clear ideas, is the conclusion. But this work refutes that verdict. In the face of the evidence presented herein the claim that the ancients were unable to form definite ideas, and true ones, upon the profoundest questions of being, can no longer be supported.

It seems never to have been seen that the idea of a universal Day of Judgment commits its holders to the absurd premises that the law of cause and effect, or action and reaction, is inactive or in abeyance throughout all the time of our present energetic life in human society! All consequences of action are somehow being absorbed in Infinite Mind and held suspended in a pralaya, or motionless state, from the time of their causation until the great climactic "Day." This predicament puts the exoteric doctrine out of court where intelligence presides. Moreover, the absurd delusion has so far worked its natural consequences in immediate precipitation that it has impaled the general consciousness of the masses on the idea that somehow one can do as one likes in this world, and escape the Eye of the Law of Retribution. It has promoted in large measure the present age of lawlessness.

The Ritual speaks of the secret knowledge of the periodicities and cycles of incarnation as requisite to render safe the passage through all the trial scenes in the Judgment Hall. The salvation of the deceased depended on his having the facts treasured up in his memory. As the soul walked through the valley of the shadow of death, his security depended upon his knowledge that he was a divinity threading his way through the dark underground labyrinth of matter. His memory of his intrinsically deific nature would be his safeguard; and this memory was his book of life and character, for it was his own self, come hither to purify itself of dross.

Massey affirms that the Rabbins have preserved a tradition that the dead are summoned before the tribunal to be judged upon the day of doom, which occurs each New Year’s Day! The theological dogmatist will scowl at this as a survival of heathen sun-worship. But he is not probably aware that the unknown writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews has discussed at some length this identical matter, and stated succinctly that the annual festivals were but a typical ritual, merely a reminder of spiritual realities! In the ninth chapter we read:

"For Christ has not entered a holy place which human hands have made (a mere type of the reality!)"--[parenthesis not ours]--"nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, like the high priest entering the holy place every year, with blood that was not his own:--for in that case he would have had to suffer repeatedly, ever since the world was founded. Nay, once and for all, at the end of the world, he has appeared with his self-sacrifice to abolish sin . . . For as the law has a mere shadow of the bliss that is to be, instead of representing the reality of that bliss, it can never perfect those who draw near with the same annual sacrifices that are perpetually offered . . . As it is, they are an annual reminder of sins . . ."

The writer of the Epistle was finding it necessary to warn devotees not to fall into the error of assuming that the annual commemorations of spiritual transactions would automatically bestow divine grace and unction upon them by and through their mere performance. It was a caution against literalizing a ritual. For so, says the writer, Jesus would have to come and be crucified over again each year, if the rituals were anything more than "reminders." Even at that time it had become necessary to caution votaries that the religious festivals and myths were only symbols of an inner mystery. How much more is the same caution necessary now! If the Day of Doom came once each year on New Year’s Day, it was set only as an annual commemoration of a fact which was perpetual, constant, persistent throughout life.

Thoth (or Horus in his capacity), the scribe of fate, makes the final summary of the case and presents it to the jury. He introduces Ani (the soul) to Osiris, saying:

"I have come to thee, O Un-nefer, and I have brought unto thee the Osiris-Ani. His heart is right; it hath come forth guiltless from the scales . . . Taht hath weighed it according to the decree pronounced unto him by the company of the gods; it is most right and true. Grant that he may appear in the presence of Osiris; and let him be like unto the followers of Horus for ever and ever."

To come forth guiltless from the scales may now be seen to convey the deep significance of the soul’s emergence from earth life between the two horizons, washed clean and gloriously spiritualized. If the judgment had been adverse, the soul would have been cast to the monster Am-mit, which only means, however, return to animal incarnation until final purification.

We have descanted sufficiently upon the seven elementary powers, which, being mindless, chaotic, had to be cast down. It was an age-old legend that there were seven watchers who were tried in the judgment, found not faithful, and overthrown. Now in the Ritual there appear the seven mortal sins "that lie in wait at the balance where all hearts are weighed, to arrest the further progress of the soul" (Ch. 71). These seven natural instincts of the mortal self constituted the seven-headed serpent that lay in wait at the "bight of Amenta," to devour the infant and innocent god-soul. The present exegesis receives striking corroboration in the statement of the Ritual that this place of ambuscade is "at the balance where all hearts are weighed." For assuredly it is in the incarnate state only that the soul could meet the seven enemies whose very existence is in the animal body and the carnal nature. The seven early mindless rulers were to be displaced by the twelve archons seated on the twelve thrones of judgment. Massey writes in enlightening fashion:

"The seat of justice in the solar mythos was shifted to the point of the equinox, and the balance was erected on the later mount of glory in the zodiac. This is the mountain of Amenta in the eschatology. It is described in the Ritual (Ch. 149) as the exceeding high mountain of the nether world, the top of which touches the sky . . . This was the mountain, as judgment seat."2

It is an exceeding high mountain, but it is not in Massey’s ghost-Amenta, but in our world here. Its top touches the sky, which is just the heaven side of the horizon line in our own natures. It is important to note that the scholar definitely places the judgment mount on the horizon. The Scales figured, he says elsewhere, at the equinoctial level and marked the division, at the same time being the link between the two "heavens," and Libra was the express emblem of the Two Truths of Life and Death.

The main Egyptian symbol of spiritual being in humanity’s trial was the feather. The appropriateness of this emblem consists likely in the fact that, held in certain angles of light, the two sides divided by the midriff reflect, the one a glossy, the other a somber dull appearance. It was a sign, at any rate, of light and shade, and the two halves represent the deities Ma and Shu. And Ma and Shu were unified and pluralized in the name Mati. This introduces us to the Egyptian personification or goddess of Justice, who was Maat. To express her functions we can do no better than to repeat Massey’s characterization:

"The Balance is a symbol of maat and its oneness in duality. The equilibrium of the universe was expressed by maat, which represented the natural, immutable and eternal law. It was erected as a figure at the equinox . . . Makha is a name for the scales and to weigh. The scales were erected at the place of poise and weighing in the equinox . . . The sphinx was a figure of this duality in oneness at the equinox. The feather of Shu (or Ma) was another type of the same duality of light and shade, which meet and mingle as one at twilight."3

It was against this feather that the heart of the Manes was weighed in the judgment trial. It was either a symbol of mere balance and equilibration, or its lightness was to test the purity of man’s spirit. A reduplication of the same balance between light and shade as symbol of justice was later brought into use in the form of the black and white ermine worn by judges. The two lion kherufu (cherubim) at the two gates were likewise symbolical of the idea. Chapter 136B of the Ritual recites: "I am come," says the Speaker, "so that I may see the process of Maat and the lion-forms." The soul comes here to have the experience of weighing ephemeral values against eternal ones, good against evil, and seeing how the balance works for evolution. The Manes waiting to enter the mount is summoned: "Come, come, for the father is uttering the judgment of Maat." In the papyri of Ani and Nunefer the judges or assessors in the trial appear as twelve in number, instead of the twenty-four or the forty-two. They are thus a prototype of the twelve thrones in Revelation and the twelve judges of Israel.

Budge’s description of the hall of the two horizons is worthy of notice:

"The Hall of the two Maat Goddesses, the two Goddesses of Truth, shows one goddess presiding over Upper and the other over Lower Egypt. One guards the soul, the other the body."

Here is the clearest authentication of our analysis and characterization of the two Lands spoken of in the ancient texts, the one as soul, the other as body. Yet in spite of this clear statement of the esoteric significance of the terms, the great scholar has joined the company of those who constantly take Upper and Lower Egypt to refer to two geographical divisions of the Egypt on the map. How long indeed will it take them to learn that very ancient scriptures dealt with the eternal interests of the human soul, and not with the tawdry facts of geography and history?

The two goddesses are also called the "Two Daughters Merti, Eyes of Maat (Truth)." Then comes a detail that must be seen to be of central moment for theology. The hall is in the form of an elongated funerary coffer! In other words, the judgment hall is the coffin, tomb or grave, the place of "death," which we have conclusively shown to be the body of man.

The hands of the god seated at the head are extended over the Two Pools, each of which contains an Eye of Horus. An ape (Thoth) is seated before a pair of scales. Thirteen feathers of Maat and thirteen Uraei or elementary serpent-powers are arranged alternately. The two Maat goddesses are seated beside one of the double doors, each holding a scepter of "serenity" in her right hand and one of "life" in her left. On the head and scepter of each is the feather, symbol of truth. Everything suggests the dual nature of an even balance, and herein the Manes is tried.

A remarkably suggestive statement is made in the 47th chapter of the Ritual, intimating that the judgment came as a result of the splitting of primal biunity into duality. It is the "chapter of not entering in unto the block":

"I have joined up my head and neck, in heaven and on earth . . . the goddess Nut hath joined together the bones of my neck and back, and I beheld them as they were in the time that is past when as yet I had not seen Maat and when the gods were not born in visible forms."

How clearly this says to us that after the unifying of our two natures here the soul beholds itself restored to its primal unity! It sees itself whole, as it was before it came out into the duality of sex polarization; and the identification of this splitting with "seeing Maat" or the judgment on the two horizons, is most direct testimony to the correctness of our resolution of hidden meanings.

We have considered the significance of the term Makhu in the name of Horus or Har-Makhu. Another correlative name of Horus is Har-Tema, which signifies "he who makes justice visible." Har-Tema was lord of the double earth, wherein justice was wrought out in the form of real existence in the life on earth. The Ritual says (Ch. 79): "I am earth, who maketh to come into being the seed which is sown." He is the power which brings the hidden things of God to light in matter.

Hints have already conveyed the general relevance of the great old scriptural term, the Battle of Armageddon, and we have traced its origin from the Egyptian Har-Makhu, with the addition of the Hebrew word adon, meaning "lord," at the end. The name signifies "the sun (spirit) power, lord of the balance between spirit and matter, standing on the horizon." The term has overcast the consciousness of deluded Christians with fearsome speculation and solicitude for so many centuries that its sane clarification at last in the glow of Egyptian symbolism is quite worth an additional paragraph. Again has the mythical shadow of a great natural truth been turned by Christian ignorance into the substance of a catastrophic historical denouement. But, like purgatory, hell and the judgment, this dreaded battle is taking place now, and is indeed partly over. For it is fought "at night" and "on the horizon." These terms of description settle the question, if there is any, whether it is symbolism or factuality. It is just that perennial struggle fought between the two opposing powers of life, on the dividing line between their areas of influence at the place of the balance, where the Makhu, or scales of justice, were erected to weigh the past and present character of the Manes. The scales were said to be erected on the night of the great battle between Horus and Sut, when the Sebau were defeated and the adversaries overpowered. The great contest is nothing but the whole of the battle of life that we are now waging; the war between Horus, the spiritual light, and the seven-headed dragon of darkness. Great military conflicts on the continental plains may be a phase of the struggle in one of its manifestations, but the term refers to the entire aeonial battle. It is notable, however, that in Revelation this battle is fought after the pouring out of the contents of the seventh principle which brought the triadic unity of solar deity into the body formed by the six elementary forces, it is precisely the time when the great battle between the god and the six lower powers, the Sebau, could begin. The battle could not start, surely, until the god arrived on the scene. The battle is preceded by the emptying of the great bowl and the sound of a great voice which proclaimed: "It is done!" The struggle only begins when the seven natures had been conjoined in the physical body on the horizon line. With the coming of the solar triad of mind the battle was on between it and the six (seven) evil spirits which had to be made subservient, or "cast down." "Slaughter" was to be "dealt out to Apap" by Maati! The battle of Armageddon was begun as the "war in heaven" and continued on earth between the sun-god incubated in the body and the six demoniac forces of the natural "first man." We have long been fighting the Battle of Har-Makhu-Adon.

One account of this battle (translated by Goodwin) records that the twins, Sut and Horus, transformed themselves into wild beasts and remained in that state during three days! This is not arrant nonsense, inasmuch as the single unified deity, after splitting into twin powers as matter and spirit, did come into the bodies of beasts before the human stage, typed as the three days of incubation in the kingdoms below the human.

Man has entered the Götterdämmerung; he stands within the twilight. He stands on the mounts both of crucifixion and transfiguration, with the shadow of the two beams of the cross or the scales falling athwart his body. Every act, word and thought of his causes those arms of the scales to move up or down, according as he gives an impulse to spiritual or to sensuous expression. In their motion they write the scroll of his book of life, alternately upon outward feature and inner character. Every movement of the bars is a decree of judgment for him. Taht-Aan, the scribe and recorder, is filling the pages of his book. Who shall estimate the difference in world history since the third century if this knowledge of the sages of Egypt that man is now undergoing trial in the Hall of Judgment on this mount of the double equinox, on the morning and evening horizons of evolution, had not been lost to western humanity through the fatal triumph of ignorance and bigotry over chaste wisdom? Christendom has been taught that the individual can perpetrate what heinousness he will in this life, and wait a millennium before being brought to reckoning. The certitude of the instant judgment of the two Maat goddesses has been obscured or denied. Western man has been deprived of the definite knowledge that the consequences of his acts are in immediate reaction upon him. The shadow of the law has been deludedly removed from his mind and conscience, with the result that human life has proceeded largely without consideration of the certainty of justice. And with this sense of immunity bolstered by the concomitant doctrines of a vicarious atonement and the forgiveness of sins, the misguided mind of Occidental man has indulged in such revelries of license and heedlessness as history has not recorded in another period. The assurance that the world is under law, that acts carve the shape of destiny, is scarcely to be found in Western areas. The habitual philosophy of the "average" mind of modern civilized nations consists of the hazy notion that the Eyes of Maati are mostly asleep, and that the theological Day of Judgment, if it is to come at all, is a long way off.

All the while the arms of that Balance on the hill of the horizon in the twilight are moving, and they are the pen of Taht-Aan inscribing the record.