Chapter I (2)

Why then roast the lay-magicians and consulters of books, and canonize the ecclesiastics? Simply because the mediæval as well as the modern phenomena, manifested through laymen, whether produced through occult knowledge or happening independently, upset the claims of both the Catholic and Protestant Churches to divine miracles. In the face of reiterated and unimpeachable evidence it became impossible for the former to maintain successfully the assertion that seemingly miraculous manifestations by the “good angels” and God’s direct intervention could be produced exclusively by her chosen ministers and holy saints. Neither could the Protestant well maintain on the same ground that miracles had ended with the apostolic ages. For, whether of the same nature or not, the modern phenomena claimed close kinship with the biblical ones. The magnetists and healers of our century came into direct and open competition with the apostles. The Zouave Jacob, of France, had outrivalled the prophet Elijah in recalling to life persons who were seemingly dead; and Alexis, the somnambulist, mentioned by Mr. Wallace in his work,[31] was, by his lucidity, putting to shame apostles, prophets, and the Sibyls of old. Since the burning of the last witch, the great Revolution of France, so elaborately prepared by the league of the secret societies and their clever emissaries, had blown over Europe and awakened terror in the bosom of the clergy. It had, like a destroying hurricane, swept away in its course those best allies of the Church, the Roman Catholic aristocracy. A sure foundation was now laid for the right of individual opinion. The world was freed from ecclesiastical tyranny by opening an unobstructed path to Napoleon the Great, who had given the deathblow to the Inquisition. This great slaughter-house of the Christian Church--wherein she butchered, in the name of the Lamb, all the sheep arbitrarily declared scurvy--was in ruins, and she found herself left to her own responsibility and resources.

So long as the phenomena had appeared only sporadically, she had always felt herself powerful enough to repress the consequences. Superstition and belief in the Devil were as strong as ever, and Science had not yet dared to publicly measure her forces with those of supernatural Religion. Meanwhile the enemy had slowly but surely gained ground. All at once it broke out with an unexpected violence. “Miracles” began to appear in full daylight, and passed from their mystic seclusion into the domain of natural law, where the profane hand of Science was ready to strip off their sacerdotal mask. Still, for a time, the Church held her position, and with the powerful help of superstitious fear checked the progress of the intruding force. But, when in succession appeared mesmerists and somnambulists, reproducing the physical and mental phenomenon of ecstasy, hitherto believed to be the special gift of saints; when the passion for the turning tables had reached in France and elsewhere its climax of fury; when the psychography--alleged spiritual--from a simple curiosity had developed itself and settled into an unabated interest, and finally ebbed into religious mysticism; when the echoes aroused by the first raps of Rochester, crossing the oceans, spread until they were re-percussed from nearly every corner of the world--then, and only then, the Latin Church was fully awakened to a sense of danger. Wonder after wonder was reported to have occurred in the spiritual circles and the lecture-rooms of the mesmerists; the sick were healed, the blind made to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear. J. R. Newton in America, and Du Potet in France, were healing the multitude without the slightest claim to divine intervention. The great discovery of Mesmer, which reveals to the earnest inquirer the mechanism of nature, mastered, as if by magical power, organic and inorganic bodies.

But this was not the worst. A more direful calamity for the Church occurred in the evocation from the upper and nether worlds of a multitude of “spirits,” whose private bearing and conversation gave the direct lie to the most cherished and profitable dogmas of the Church. These “spirits” claimed to be the identical entities, in a disembodied state, of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters, friends and acquaintances of the persons viewing the weird phenomena. The Devil seemed to have no objective existence, and this struck at the very foundation upon which the chair of St. Peter rested.[32] Not a spirit except the mocking mannikins of Planchette would confess to the most distant relationship with the Satanic majesty, or accredit him with the governorship of a single inch of territory. The clergy felt their prestige growing weaker every day, as they saw the people impatiently shaking off, in the broad daylight of truth, the dark veils with which they had been blindfolded for so many centuries. Then finally, fortune, which previously had been on their side in the long-waged conflict between theology and science, deserted to their adversary. The help of the latter to the study of the occult side of nature was truly precious and timely, and science has unwittingly widened the once narrow path of the phenomena into a broad highway. Had not this conflict culminated at the nick of time, we might have seen, reproduced on a miniature scale the disgraceful scenes of the episodes of Salem witchcraft and the Nuns of Loudun. As it was, the clergy were muzzled.

But if science has unintentionally helped the progress of the occult phenomena, the latter have reciprocally aided science herself. Until the days when newly-reincarnated philosophy boldly claimed its place in the world, there had been but few scholars who had undertaken the difficult task of studying comparative theology. This science occupies a domain heretofore penetrated by few explorers. The necessity which it involved of being well acquainted with the dead languages, necessarily limited the number of students. Besides, there was less popular need for it so long as people could not replace the Christian orthodoxy by something more tangible. It is one of the most undeniable facts of psychology, that the average man can as little exist out of a religious element of some kind, as a fish out of the water. The voice of truth, “a voice stronger than the voice of the mightiest thunder,” speaks to the inner man in the nineteenth century of the Christian era, as it spoke in the corresponding century B.C. It is a useless and unprofitable task to offer to humanity the choice between a future life and annihilation. The only chance that remains for those friends of human progress who seek to establish for the good of mankind a faith, henceforth stripped entirely of superstition and dogmatic fetters is to address them in the words of Joshua: “Choose ye this day whom you will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell.”[33]

“The science of religion,” wrote Max Müller in 1860, “is only just beginning.... During the last fifty years the authentic documents of the most important religions in the world _have been recovered in a most unexpected and almost miraculous manner_.[34] We have now before us the Canonical books of Buddhism; the _Zend-Avesta_ of Zoroaster is no longer a sealed book; and the hymns of the _Rig-Veda_ have revealed a state of religions anterior to the first beginnings of that mythology which in Homer and Hesiod stands before us as a mouldering ruin.”[35]

In their insatiable desire to extend the dominion of blind faith, the early architects of Christian theology had been forced to conceal, as much as it was possible, the true sources of the same. To this end they are said to have burned or otherwise destroyed all the original manuscripts on the _Kabala_, magic, and occult sciences upon which they could lay their hands. They ignorantly supposed that the most dangerous writings of this class had perished with the last Gnostic; but some day they may discover their mistake. Other authentic and as important documents will perhaps reäppear in a “most unexpected and almost miraculous manner.”

There are strange traditions current in various parts of the East--on Mount Athos and in the Desert of Nitria, for instance--among certain monks, and with learned Rabbis in Palestine, who pass their lives in commenting upon the _Talmud_. They say that not all the rolls and manuscripts, reported in history to have been burned by Cæsar, by the Christian mob, in 389, and by the Arab General Amru, perished as it is commonly believed; and the story they tell is the following: At the time of the contest for the throne, in 51 B.C., between Cleopatra and her brother Dionysius Ptolemy, the Bruckion, which contained over seven hundred thousand rolls, all bound in wood and _fire-proof_ parchment, was undergoing repairs, and a great portion of the original manuscripts, considered among the most precious, and which were not duplicated, were stored away in the house of one of the librarians. As the fire which consumed the rest was but the result of accident, no precautions had been taken at the time. But they add, that several hours passed between the burning of the fleet, set on fire by Cæsar’s order, and the moment when the first buildings situated near the harbor caught fire in their turn; and that all the librarians, aided by several hundred slaves attached to the museum, succeeded in saving the most precious of the rolls. So perfect and solid was the fabric of the parchment, that while in some rolls the inner pages and the wood-binding were reduced to ashes, of others the parchment binding remained unscorched. These particulars were all written out in Greek, Latin, and the Chaldeo-Syriac dialect, by a learned youth named Theodas, one of the scribes employed in the museum. One of these manuscripts is alleged to be preserved till now in a Greek convent; and the person who narrated the tradition to us had seen it himself. He said that many more will see it and learn where to look for important documents, when a certain prophecy will be fulfilled; adding, that most of these works could be found in Tartary and India.[36] The monk showed us a copy of the original, which, of course, we could read but poorly, as we claim but little erudition in the matter of dead languages. But we were so particularly struck by the vivid and picturesque translation of the holy father, that we perfectly remember some curious paragraphs, which run, as far as we can recall them, as follows:--“When the Queen of the Sun (Cleopatra) was brought back to the half-ruined city, after the fire had devoured the _Glory of the World_; and when she saw the mountains of books--or rolls--covering the half-consumed steps of the _estrada_; and when she perceived that the inside was gone and the indestructible covers alone remained, she wept in rage and fury, and cursed the meanness of her fathers who had grudged the cost of the real Pergamos for the inside as well as the outside of the precious rolls.” Further, our author, Theodas, indulges in a joke at the expense of the queen for believing that nearly all the library was burned; when, in fact, hundreds and thousands of the choicest books were safely stored in his own house and those of other scribes, librarians, students, and philosophers.

No more do sundry very learned Copts scattered all over the East in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Palestine believe in the total destruction of the subsequent libraries. For instance, they say that out of the library of Attalus III. of Pergamus, presented by Antony to Cleopatra, not a volume was destroyed. At that time, according to their assertions, from the moment that the Christians began to gain power in Alexandria--about the end of the fourth century--and Anatolius, Bishop of Laodicea, began to insult the national gods, the Pagan philosophers and learned theurgists adopted effective measures to preserve the repositories of their sacred learning. Theophilus, a bishop, who left behind him the reputation of a most rascally and mercenary villain, was accused by one named Antoninus, a famous theurgist and eminent scholar of occult science of Alexandria, with bribing the slaves of the Serapion to steal books which he sold to foreigners at great prices. History tells us how Theophilus had the best of the philosophers, in A.D. 389; and how his successor and nephew, the no less infamous Cyril, butchered Hypatia. Suidas gives us some details about Antoninus, whom he calls Antonius, and his eloquent friend Olympus, the defender of the Serapion. But history is far from being complete in the miserable remnants of books, which, crossing so many ages, have reached our own learned century; it fails to give the facts relating to the first five centuries of Christianity which are preserved in the numerous traditions current in the East. Unauthenticated as these may appear, there is unquestionably in the heap of chaff much good grain. That these traditions are not oftener communicated to Europeans is not strange, when we consider how apt our travellers are to render themselves antagonistic to the natives by their skeptical bearing and, occasionally, dogmatic intolerance. When exceptional men like some archæologists, who knew how to win the confidence and even friendship of certain Arabs, are favored with precious documents, it is declared simply a “coincidence.” And yet there are widespread traditions of the existence of certain subterranean, and immense galleries, in the neighborhood of Ishmonia--the “petrified City,” in which are stored numberless manuscripts and rolls. For no amount of money would the Arabs go near it. At night, they say, from the crevices of the desolate ruins, sunk deep in the unwatered sands of the desert, stream the rays from lights carried to and fro in the galleries by no human hands. The Afrites study the literature of the antediluvian ages, according to their belief, and the Djin learns from the magic rolls the lesson of the following day.

The _Encyclopedia Britannica_, in its article on Alexandria, says: “When the temple of Serapis was demolished ... the valuable library was _pillaged_ or destroyed; and _twenty_ years afterwards[37] the _empty shelves_ excited the regret ... etc.” But it does not state the subsequent fate of the _pillaged_ books.

In rivalry of the fierce Mary-worshippers of the fourth century, the modern clerical persecutors of liberalism and “heresy” would willingly shut up all the heretics and their books in some modern Serapion and burn them alive.[38] The cause of this hatred is natural. Modern research has more than ever unveiled the secret. “Is not the worship of saints and angels now,” said Bishop Newton, years ago, “in all respects the same that the worship of demons was in former times? The name only is different, the thing is identically the same ... the very same temples, the very same images, which were once consecrated to Jupiter and the other demons, are now consecrated to the Virgin Mary and other saints ... the whole of Paganism is converted and applied _to Popery_.”

Why not be impartial and add that “a good portion of it was adopted by Protestant religions also?”

The very apostolic designation _Peter_ is from the Mysteries. The hierophant or supreme pontiff bore the Chaldean title פתר, _peter_, or interpreter. The names Phtah, Peth’r, the residence of Balaam, Patara, and Patras, the names of oracle-cities, _pateres_ or _pateras_ and, perhaps, Buddha,[39] all come from the same root. Jesus says: “Upon this _petra_ I will build my Church, and the gates, or rulers of Hades, shall not prevail against it;” meaning by _petra_ the rock-temple, and by metaphor, the Christian Mysteries; the adversaries to which were the old mystery-gods of the underworld, who were worshipped in the rites of Isis, Adonis, Atys, Sabazius, Dionysus, and the Eleusinia. No _apostle_ Peter was ever at Rome; but the Pope, seizing the sceptre of the _Pontifex Maximus_, the keys of Janus and Kubelé, and adorning his Christian head with the cap of the _Magna Mater_, copied from that of the tiara of Brahmâtma, the Supreme Pontiff of the Initiates of old India, became the successor of the Pagan high priest, the real Peter-Roma, or _Petroma_.[40]

The Roman Catholic Church has two far mightier enemies than the “heretics” and the “infidels;” and these are--Comparative Mythology and Philology. When such eminent divines as the Rev. James Freeman Clarke go so much out of their way to prove to their readers that “Critical Theology from the time of Origen and Jerome ... and the Controversial Theology during fifteen centuries, has not consisted in accepting on authority the opinions of other people,” but has shown, on the contrary, much “acute and comprehensive reasoning,” we can but regret that so much scholarship should have been wasted in attempting to prove that which a fair survey of the history of theology upsets at every step. In these “controversies” and critical treatment of the doctrines of the Church one can certainly find any amount of “acute reasoning,” but far more of a still acuter sophistry.

Recently the mass of cumulative evidence has been re-inforced to an extent which leaves little, if any, room for further controversy. A conclusive opinion is furnished by too many scholars to doubt the fact that India was the _Alma-Mater_, not only of the civilization, arts, and sciences, but also of all the great religions of antiquity; Judaism, and hence Christianity, included. Herder places the cradle of humanity in India, and shows Moses as a clever and relatively _modern_ compiler of the ancient Brahmanical traditions: “The river which encircles the country (India) is the sacred Ganges, which all Asia considers as the paradisaical river. There, also, is the biblical Gihon, which is none else but the Indus. The Arabs call it so unto this day, and the names of the countries watered by it are yet existing among the Hindus.” Jacolliot claims to have translated every ancient palm-leaf manuscript which he had the fortune of being allowed by the Brahmans of the pagodas to see. In one of his translations, we found passages which reveal to us the _undoubted origin of the keys_ of St. Peter, and account for the subsequent adoption of the symbol by their Holinesses, the Popes of Rome.

He shows us, on the testimony of the _Agrouchada Parikshai_, which he freely translates as “the _Book of Spirits_” (Pitris), that centuries before our era the _initiates_ of the temple chose a Superior Council, presided over by the Brahm-âtma or supreme chief of all these _Initiates_. That this pontificate, which could be exercised only by a Brahman who had reached the age of eighty years;[41] that the Brahm-âtma was sole guardian of the mystic formula, _résumé_ of every science, contained in the three mysterious letters,

=A=

=U= =M=

which signify _creation_, _conservation_, and _transformation_. He alone could expound its meaning in the presence of the initiates of the third and supreme degree. Whomsoever among these initiates revealed to a profane a single one of the truths, even the smallest of the secrets entrusted to his care, was put to death. He who received the confidence had to share his fate.

“Finally, to crown this able system,” says Jacolliot, “there existed a word still more superior to the mysterious monosyllable--A U M, and which rendered him who came into the possession of its key nearly the equal of Brahma himself. The Brahm-âtma alone possessed this key, and transmitted it in a sealed casket to his successor.

“This unknown word, of which no human power could, even to-day, when the Brahmanical authority has been crushed under the Mongolian and European invasions, to-day, when each pagoda has its Brahm-âtma,[42] _force the disclosure_, was engraved in a golden triangle and preserved in a sanctuary of the temple of Asgartha, whose Brahm-âtma alone held the keys. He also bore upon his tiara _two crossed keys_ supported by two kneeling Brahmans, symbol of the precious deposit of which he had the keeping.... This word and this triangle were engraved upon the tablet of the ring that this religious chief wore as one of the signs of his dignity; it was also framed in a golden sun on the altar, where every morning the Supreme Pontiff offered the sacrifice of the sarvameda, or sacrifice to all the forces of nature.”[43]

Is this clear enough? And will the Catholics still maintain that it was the Brahmans of 4,000 years ago who copied the ritual, symbols, and dress of the Roman Pontiffs? We would not feel in the least surprised.

Without going very far back into antiquity for comparisons, if we only stop at the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and contrast the so-called “heathenism” of the third Neo-platonic Eclectic School with the growing Christianity, the result may not be favorable to the latter. Even at that early period, when the new religion had hardly outlined its contradictory dogmas; when the champions of the bloodthirsty Cyril knew not themselves whether Mary was to become “the Mother of God,” or rank as a “demon” in company with Isis; when the memory of the meek and lowly Jesus still lingered lovingly in every Christian heart, and his words of mercy and charity vibrated still in the air, even then the Christians were outdoing the Pagans in every kind of ferocity and religious intolerance.

And if we look still farther back, and seek for examples of true _Christism_, in ages when Buddhism had hardly superseded Brahmanism in India, and the name of Jesus was only to be pronounced three centuries later, what do we find? Which of the holy pillars of the Church has ever elevated himself to the level of religious tolerance and noble simplicity of character of some heathen? Compare, for instance, the Hindu Asoka, who lived 300 B.C., and the Carthaginian St. Augustine, who flourished three centuries after Christ. According to Max Müller, this is what is found engraved on the rocks of Girnar, Dhauli, and Kapurdigiri:

“Piyadasi, the king beloved of the gods, desires that the ascetics _of all creeds_ might reside in all places. All these ascetics profess alike the command which people should exercise over themselves, and the purity of the soul. _But people have different opinions and different inclinations._”

And here is what Augustine wrote after his baptism: “Wondrous depth of thy words! whose surface, behold! is before us, inviting to little ones; yet are they a wondrous depth, O my God, a wondrous depth! It is awful to look therein; yes ... an awfulness of honor, and a trembling of love. Thy enemies [read Pagans] thereof I _hate_ vehemently; Oh, _that thou wouldst slay them_ with thy two-edged sword, that they might no longer be enemies to it; for _so do I love to have them slain_.”[44]

Wonderful spirit of Christianity; and that from a Manichean converted to the religion of one who even on his cross prayed for his enemies!

Who the enemies of the “Lord” were, according to the Christians, is not difficult to surmise; the few inside the Augustinian fold were His new children and favorites, who had supplanted in His affections the sons of Israel, His “chosen people.” The rest of mankind were His natural foes. The teeming multitudes of heathendom were proper food for the flames of hell; the handful within the Church communion, “heirs of salvation.”

But if such a proscriptive policy was just, and its enforcement was “sweet savor” in the nostrils of the “Lord,” why not scorn also the Pagan rites and philosophy? Why draw so deep from the wells of wisdom, dug and filled up to brim by the same heathen? Or did the fathers, in their desire to imitate the chosen people whose time-worn shoes they were trying to fit upon their feet, contemplate the reënaction of the spoliation-scene of the _Exodus_? Did they propose, in fleeing from heathendom as the Jews did from Egypt, to carry off the valuables of its religious allegories, as the “chosen ones” did the gold and silver ornaments?

It certainly does seem as if the events of the first centuries of Christianity were but the reflection of the images thrown upon the mirror of the future at the time of the Exodus. During the stormy days of Irenæus, the Platonic philosophy, with its mystical submersion into Deity, was not so obnoxious after all to the new doctrine as to prevent the Christians from helping themselves to its abstruse metaphysics in every way and manner. Allying themselves with the ascetical theurapeutæ--forefathers and models of the Christian monks and hermits, it was in Alexandria, let it be remembered, that they laid the first foundations of the purely Platonic trinitarian doctrine. It became the Plato-Philonean doctrine later, and such as we find it now. Plato considered the divine nature under a three-fold modification of the _First Cause_, the reason or _Logos_, and the soul or spirit of the universe. “The three archial or original principles,” says Gibbon,[45] “were represented in the Platonic system as three gods, united with each other by a mysterious and ineffable generation.” Blending this transcendental idea with the more hypostatic figure of the _Logos_ of Philo, whose doctrine was that of the oldest Kabala, and who viewed the King Messiah, as the metatron, or “the angel of the Lord,” the _Legatus_ descended in flesh, but not the _Ancient of Days_ Himself;[46] the Christians clothed with this mythical representation of the Mediator for the fallen race of Adam, Jesus, the son of Mary. Under this unexpected garb his personality was all but lost. In the modern Jesus of the Christian Church, we find the ideal of the imaginative Irenæus, not the adept of the Essenes, the obscure reformer from Galilee. We see him under the disfigured Plato-Philonean mask, not as the disciples heard him on the mount.

So far then the heathen philosophy had helped them in the building of the principal dogma. But when the theurgists of the third Neo-platonic school, deprived of their ancient Mysteries, strove to blend the doctrines of Plato with those of Aristotle, and by combining the two philosophies added to their theosophy the primeval doctrines of the Oriental _Kabala_, then the Christians from rivals became persecutors. Once that the metaphysical allegories of Plato were being prepared to be discussed in public in the form of Grecian dialectics, all the elaborate system of the Christian trinity would be unravelled and the divine prestige completely upset. The eclectic school, reversing the order, had adopted the inductive method; and this method became its death-knell. Of all things on earth, logic and reasonable explanations were the most hateful to the new religion of mystery; for they threatened to unveil the whole ground-work of the trinitarian conception; to apprise the multitude of the doctrine of emanations, and thus destroy the unity of the whole. It could not be permitted, and it was not. History records the _Christ_-like means that were resorted to.

The universal doctrine of emanations, adopted from time immemorial by the greatest schools which taught the kabalistic, Alexandrian, and Oriental philosophers, gives the key to that panic among the Christian fathers. That spirit of Jesuitism and clerical craft, which prompted Parkhurst, many centuries later, to suppress in his _Hebrew Lexicon_ the true meaning of the first word of _Genesis_, originated in those days of war against the expiring Neo-platonic and eclectic school. The fathers had decided to pervert the meaning of the word “_daimon_,”[47] and they dreaded above all to have the esoteric and true meaning of the word _Rasit_ unveiled to the multitudes; for if once the true sense of this sentence, as well as that of the Hebrew word _asdt_ (translated in the Septuagint “_angels_,” while it means emanations),[48] were understood rightly, the mystery of the Christian trinity would have crumbled, carrying in its downfall the new religion into the same heap of ruins with the ancient Mysteries. This is the true reason why dialecticians, as well as Aristotle himself, the “prying philosopher,” were ever obnoxious to Christian theology. Even Luther, while on his work of reform, feeling the ground insecure under his feet, notwithstanding that the dogmas had been reduced by him to their simplest expression, gave full vent to his fear and hatred for Aristotle. The amount of abuse he heaped upon the memory of the great logician can only be equalled--never surpassed--by the Pope’s anathemas and invectives against the liberals of the Italian government. Compiled together, they might easily fill a copy of a new encyclopædia with models for monkish diatribes.

Of course the Christian clergy can never get reconciled with a doctrine based on the application of strict logic to discursive reasoning. The number of those who have abandoned theology on this account has never been made known. They have asked questions and been forbidden to ask them; hence, separation, disgust, and often a despairing plunge into the abyss of atheism. The Orphean views of ether as chief _medium between_ God and created matter were likewise denounced. The Orphic Æther recalled too vividly the _Archeus_, the Soul of the World, and the latter was in its metaphysical sense as closely related to the emanations, being the first manifestation--Sephira, or Divine Light. And when could the latter be more feared than at that critical moment?

Origen, Clemens Alexandrinus, Chalcidius, Methodius, and Maimonides, on the authority of the _Targum_ of Jerusalem, the orthodox and greatest authority of the Jews, held that the first two words in the book of _Genesis_--B-RASIT, mean _Wisdom_, or the _Principle_. And that the idea of these words meaning “_in the beginning_” was never shared but by the profane, who were not allowed to penetrate any deeper into the esoteric sense of the sentence. Beausobre, and after him Godfrey Higgins, have demonstrated the fact. “All things,” says the _Kabala_, “are derived from one great Principle, and this principle is the _unknown_ and _invisible_ God. From Him a substantial power immediately proceeds, which is the _image of God_, and the source of all subsequent emanations. This second principle sends forth, by the _energy_ (or _will_ and _force_) of emanation, other natures, which are more or less perfect, according to their different degrees of distance, in the scale of emanation, from the First Source of existence, and which constitute different worlds, or orders of being, all united to the eternal power from which they proceed. _Matter is nothing more than the most remote effect of the emanative energy_ of the Deity. The material world receives its form from the immediate agency of powers far beneath the First Source of Being[49].... Beausobre[50] makes St. Augustine the Manichean say thus: ‘And if by _Rasit_ we understand the _active Principle_ of the creation, instead of its _beginning_, in such a case we will clearly perceive that Moses never meant to say that heaven and earth were the first works of God. He only said that God created heaven and earth _through the Principle_, who is His Son. It is not the _time_ he points to, but to the immediate author of the creation.’ Angels, according to Augustine, were created _before_ the firmament, and according to the esoteric interpretation, the heaven and earth were created after that, evolving from the _second_ Principle or the Logos--the creative Deity. “The word _principle_,” says Beausobre, “does not mean that the heaven and earth were created before anything else, for, to begin with, the _angels_ were created before that; but that God did everything through His Wisdom, which is His _Verbum_, and which the Christian _Bible_ named the _Beginning_,” thus adopting the exoteric meaning of the word abandoned to the multitudes. The _Kabala_--the Oriental as well as the Jewish--shows that a number of _emanations_ (the Jewish Sephiroth) issued from the _First_ Principle, the chief of which was _Wisdom_. This Wisdom is the Logos of Philo, and Michael, the chief of the Gnostic Eons; it is the Ormazd of the Persians; _Minerva_, goddess of wisdom, of the Greeks, who emanated from the head of Jupiter; and the second Person of the Christian Trinity. The early Fathers of the Church had not much to exert their imagination; they found a ready-made doctrine that had existed in every theogony for thousands of years before the Christian era. Their trinity is but the trio of Sephiroth, the first three kabalistic _lights_ of which Moses Nachmanides says, that “_they have never been seen by any one_; there is not any defect in them, nor any disunion.” The first eternal number is the Father, or the Chaldean primeval, invisible, and incomprehensible _chaos_, out of which proceeded the _Intelligible_ one. The Egyptian Phtah, or “the _Principle of Light_--not the light itself, and the Principle of Life, though himself _no_ life.” The _Wisdom_ by which the Father created the heavens is the _Son_, or the kabalistic androgynous Adam Kadmon. The Son is at once the male _Ra_, or Light of Wisdom, Prudence or _Intelligence_, Sephira, the female part of Himself; while from this dual being proceeds the third emanation, the Binah or Reason, the second Intelligence--the Holy Ghost of the Christians. Therefore, strictly speaking, there is a TETRAKTIS or quaternary, consisting of the Unintelligible First monad, and its triple emanation, which properly constitute our Trinity.

How then avoid perceiving at once, that had not the Christians purposely disfigured in their interpretation and translation the Mosaic _Genesis_ to fit their own views, their religion, with its present dogmas, would have been impossible? The word Rasit, once taught in its new sense of the _Principle_ and not the _Beginning_, and the anathematized doctrine of emanations accepted, the position of the second trinitarian personage becomes untenable. For, if the angels are the _first_ divine emanations from the Divine Substance, and were in existence _before_ the Second Principle, then the anthropomorphized _Son_ is at best an emanation like themselves, and cannot be God _hypostatically_ any more than our visible works are ourselves. That these metaphysical subtleties never entered into the head of the honest-minded, sincere Paul, is evident; as it is furthermore evident, that like all learned Jews he was well acquainted with the doctrine of emanations and never thought of corrupting it. How can any one imagine that Paul identified the _Son_ with the _Father_, when he tells us that God made Jesus “a _little lower_ than the angels” (_Hebrews_ ii. 9), and a _little higher_ than Moses! “For this MAN was counted worthy of more glory than Moses” (_Hebrews_ iii. 3). Of whatever, or how many forgeries, interlined later in the _Acts_, the Fathers are guilty we know not; but that Paul never considered Christ more than a man “full of the Spirit of God” is but too evident: “In the _arche_ was the _Logos_, and the Logos was adnate to the Theos.”

_Wisdom_, the first emanation of En-Soph; the Protogonos, the Hypostasis; the Adam Kadmon of the kabalist, the Brahma of the Hindu; the Logos of Plato, and the “_Beginning_” of St. John--is the Rasit--ראשית, of the _Book of Genesis_. If rightly interpreted it overturns, as we have remarked, the whole elaborate system of Christian theology, for it proves that behind the _creative_ Deity, there was a HIGHER god; a planner, an architect; and that the former was but His executive agent--a simple POWER!

They persecuted the Gnostics, murdered the philosophers, and burned the kabalists and the masons; and when the day of the great reckoning arrives, and the light shines in darkness, what will they have to offer in the place of the departed, expired religion? What will they answer, these pretended monotheists, these worshippers and _pseudo_-servants of the one living God, to their Creator? How will they account for this long persecution of them who were the true followers of the grand Megalistor, the supreme great master of the Rosicrucians, the FIRST of masons. “For he is the Builder and Architect of the Temple of the universe; He is the _Verbum Sapienti_.”[51]

“Every one knows,” wrote the great Manichean of the third century, Fauste, “that the Evangeliums were written neither by Jesus Christ, nor his apostles, but long after their time by some unknown persons, who, judging well that they would hardly be believed when telling of things they had not seen themselves, headed their narratives with the names of the apostles or of disciples contemporaneous with the latter.”

Commenting upon the subject, A. Franck, the learned Hebrew scholar of the Institute and translator of the _Kabala_, expresses the same idea. “Are we not authorized,” he asks, “to view the _Kabala_ as a precious remnant of religious philosophy of the Orient, which, transported into Alexandria, got mixed to the doctrine of Plato, and under the usurped name of Dionysius the Areopagite, bishop of Athens, converted and consecrated by St. Paul, was thus enabled to penetrate into the mysticism of the mediæval ages?”[52]

Says Jacolliot: “What is then this religious philosophy of the Orient, which has penetrated into the mystic symbolism of Christianity? We answer: This philosophy, the traces of which we find among the Magians, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Hebrew kabalists and the Christians, is none other than that of the Hindu Brahmans, the sectarians of the _pitris_, or the spirits of the invisible worlds which surround us.”[53]

But if the Gnostics were destroyed, the _Gnosis_, based on the secret science of sciences, still lives. It is the earth which helps the woman, and which is destined to open her mouth to swallow up mediæval Christianity, the usurper and assassin of the great master’s doctrine. The ancient _Kabala_, the Gnosis, or traditional _secret_ knowledge, was never without its representatives in any age or country. The trinities of initiates, whether passed into history or concealed under the impenetrable veil of mystery, are preserved and impressed throughout the ages. They are known as Moses, Aholiab, and Bezaleel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, as Plato, Philo, and Pythagoras, etc. At the Transfiguration we see them as Jesus, Moses, and Elias, the three Trismegisti; and three kabalists, Peter, James, and John--whose _revelation_ is the key to all wisdom. We found them in the twilight of Jewish history as Zoroaster, Abraham, and Terah, and later as Henoch, Ezekiel, and Daniel.

Who, of those who ever studied the ancient philosophies, who understand intuitionally the grandeur of their conceptions, the boundless sublimity of their views of the Unknown Deity, can hesitate for a moment to give the preference to their doctrines over the incomprehensible dogmatic and contradictory theology of the hundreds of Christian sects? Who that ever read Plato and fathomed his Το Ὀν, “_whom no person has seen except the Son_,” can doubt that Jesus was a disciple of the same secret doctrine which had instructed the great philosopher? For, as we have shown before now, Plato never claimed to be the inventor of all that he wrote, but gave credit for it to Pythagoras, who, in his turn, pointed to the remote East as the source whence he derived his information and his philosophy. Colebrooke shows that Plato confesses it in his epistles, and says that he has taken his teachings from ancient and sacred doctrines![54] Moreover, it is undeniable that the theologies of all the great nations dovetail together and show that each is a part of “one stupendous whole.” Like the rest of the initiates we see Plato taking great pains to conceal the true meaning of his allegories. Every time the subject touches the greater secrets of the Oriental _Kabala_, secret of the true cosmogony of the universe and of the _ideal_, preëxisting world, Plato shrouds his philosophy in the profoundest darkness. His _Timæus_ is so confused that no one but an _initiate_ can understand the secret meaning. And Mosheim thinks that Philo has filled his works with passages directly contradicting each other for the sole purpose of concealing the true doctrine. For once we see a critic on the right track.

And this very trinitarian idea, as well as the so bitterly denounced doctrine of emanations, whence their remotest origin? The answer is easy, and every proof is now at hand. In the sublime and profoundest of all philosophies, that of the universal “Wisdom-Religion,” the first traces of which, historical research now finds in the old pre-Vedic religion of India. As the much-abused Jacolliot well remarks, “It is not in the religious works of antiquity, such as the _Vedas_, the _Zend Avesta_, the _Bible_, that we have to search for the exact expression of the ennobling and sublime beliefs of those epochs.”[55]

“The holy primitive syllable, composed of the three letters A--U--M., in which is contained the Vedic Trimurti (Trinity), must be kept secret, like another triple Veda,” says Manu, in book xi., sloka 265.

Swayambhouva is the unrevealed Deity; it is the Being existent through and of itself; he is the central and immortal germ of all that exists in the universe. Three trinities emanate and are confounded in him, forming a Supreme _unity_. These trinities, or the triple _Trimurti_, are: the Nara, Nari, and Viradyi--the _initial_ triad; the Agni, Vaya, and Sourya--the _manifested_ triad; Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, the _creative_ triad. Each of these triads becomes less metaphysical and more adapted to the vulgar intelligence as it descends. Thus the last becomes but the symbol in its concrete expression; the necessarianism of a purely metaphysical conception. Together with Swayambhouva, they are the ten _Sephiroth_ of the Hebrew kabalists, the ten Hindu Pragâpatis--the En-Soph of the former, answering to the great _Unknown_, expressed by the mystic A U M of the latter.

Says Franck, the translator of the _Kabala_:

“The ten Sephiroth are divided into _three classes_, each of them presenting to us the divinity _under a different aspect_, the whole still remaining an _indivisible Trinity_.

“The first three Sephiroth are purely intellectual in metaphysics, they express the absolute identity of existence and thought, and form what the modern kabalists called the intelligible world--which is the first manifestation of God.

“The three that follow, make us conceive God in one of their aspects, as the identity of goodness and wisdom; in the other they show to us, in the Supreme good, the origin of beauty and magnificence (in the creation). Therefore, they are named the _virtues_, or the _sensible world_.

“Finally, we learn, by the last three Sephiroth, that the Universal Providence, that the Supreme artist is also _absolute Force_, the all-powerful cause, and that, at the same time, this cause _is the generative element of all that is_. It is these last Sephiroth that constitute the _natural world_, or nature in its essence and in its _active_ principle, _Natura naturans._”[56]

This kabalistic conception is thus proved identical with that of the Hindu philosophy. Whoever reads Plato and his _Dialogue_ Timæus, will find these ideas as faithfully re-echoed by the Greek philosopher. Moreover, the injunction of secrecy was as strict with the kabalists, as with the initiates of the Adyta and the Hindu Yogis.

“Close thy mouth, lest thou shouldst speak of _this_ (the mystery), and thy heart, lest thou shouldst think aloud; and if thy heart has escaped thee, bring it back to its place, for such is the object of our alliance” (_Sepher Jezireh_, _Book of Creation_).

“This is a secret which gives death: close thy mouth lest thou shouldst reveal to the vulgar; compress thy brain lest something should escape from it and fall outside” (_Agrouchada-Parikshai_).

Truly the fate of many a future generation hung on a gossamer thread, in the days of the third and fourth centuries. Had not the Emperor sent in 389 to Alexandria a rescript--which was forced from him by the Christians--for the destruction of every idol, our own century would never have had a Christian mythological Pantheon of its own. Never did the Neo-platonic school reach such a height of philosophy as when nearest its end. Uniting the mystic theosophy of old Egypt with the refined philosophy of the Greeks; nearer to the ancient Mysteries of Thebes and Memphis than they had been for centuries; versed in the science of soothsaying and divination, as in the art of the Therapeutists; friendly with the acutest men of the Jewish nation, who were deeply imbued with the Zoroastrian ideas, the Neo-platonists tended to amalgamate the old wisdom of the Oriental _Kabala_ with the more refined conceptions of the Occidental Theosophists. Notwithstanding the treason of the Christians, who saw fit, for political reasons, after the days of Constantine, to repudiate their tutors, the influence of the new Platonic philosophy is conspicuous in the subsequent adoption of dogmas, the origin of which can be traced but too easily to that remarkable school. Though mutilated and disfigured, they still preserve a strong family likeness, which nothing can obliterate.

But, if the knowledge of the occult powers of nature opens the spiritual sight of man, enlarges his intellectual faculties, and leads him unerringly to a profounder veneration for the Creator, on the other hand ignorance, dogmatic narrow-mindedness, and a childish fear of looking to the bottom of things, invariably leads to fetish-worship and superstition.

When Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, had openly embraced the cause of Isis, the Egyptian goddess, and had anthropomorphized her into Mary, the mother of God; and the trinitarian controversy had taken place; from that moment the Egyptian doctrine of the emanation of the creative God out of Emepht began to be tortured in a thousand ways, until the Councils had agreed upon the adoption of it as it now stands--the disfigured Ternary of the kabalistic Solomon and Philo! But as its origin was yet too evident, the _Word_ was no longer called the “Heavenly man,” the _primal_ Adam Kadmon, but became the Logos--Christ, and was made as old as the “Ancient of the Ancient,” his father. The _concealed_ WISDOM became identical with its emanation, the DIVINE THOUGHT, and made to be regarded coëqual and coëternal with its first manifestation.

If we now stop to consider another of the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, the doctrine of atonement, we may trace it as easily back to heathendom. This corner-stone of a Church which had believed herself built on a firm rock for long centuries, is now excavated by science and proved to come from the Gnostics. Professor Draper shows it as hardly known in the days of Tertullian, and as having “_originated_ among the Gnostic heretics.”[57] We will not permit ourselves to contradict such a learned authority, farther than to state that it _originated_ among them no more than their “anointed” Christos and Sophia. The former they modelled on the original of the “King Messiah,” the male principle of wisdom, and the latter on the third Sephiroth, from the Chaldean _Kabala_,[58] and even from the Hindu Brahma and Sara-âsvati,[59] and the Pagan Dionysus and Demeter. And here we are on firm ground, if it were only because it is now proved that the _New Testament_ never appeared in its complete form, such as we find it now, till 300 years after the period of apostles,[60] and the _Sohar_ and other kabalistic books are found to belong to the first century before our era, if not to be far older still.

The Gnostics entertained many of the Essenean ideas; and the Essenes had their “greater” and “minor” Mysteries at least two centuries before our era. They were the _Isarim_ or _Initiates_, the descendants of the Egyptian hierophants, in whose country they had been settled for several centuries before they were converted to Buddhistic monasticism by the missionaries of King Asoka, and amalgamated later with the earliest Christians; and they existed, probably, before the old Egyptian temples were desecrated and ruined in the incessant invasions of Persians, Greeks, and other conquering hordes. The hierophants had their _atonement_ enacted in the Mystery of Initiation ages before the Gnostics, or even the Essenes, had appeared. It was known among hierophants as the BAPTISM OF BLOOD, and was considered not as an atonement for the “fall of man” in Eden, but simply as an expiation for the past, present, and future sins of ignorant but nevertheless polluted mankind. The hierophant had the option of either offering his pure and sinless life as a sacrifice for his race to the gods whom he hoped to rejoin, or an animal victim. The former depended entirely on their own will. At the last moment of the solemn “new birth,” the initiator passed “the word” to the initiated, and immediately after that the latter had a weapon placed in his right hand, and was ordered _to strike_.[61] This is the true origin of the Christian dogma of atonement.

Verily the “Christs” of the pre-Christian ages were many. But they died unknown to the world, and disappeared as silently and as mysteriously from the sight of man as Moses from the top of Pisgah, the mountain of Nebo (oracular wisdom), after he had laid his hands upon Joshua, who thus became “full of the spirit of wisdom” (_i.e._, _initiated_).

Nor does the Mystery of the Eucharist pertain to Christians alone. Godfrey Higgins proves that it was instituted many hundreds of years before the “Paschal Supper,” and says that “the sacrifice of bread and wine was common to many ancient nations.”[62] Cicero mentions it in his works, and wonders at the strangeness of the rite. There had been an esoteric meaning attached to it from the first establishment of the Mysteries, and the Eucharistia is one of the oldest rites of antiquity. With the hierophants it had nearly the same significance as with the Christians. Ceres was _bread_, and Bacchus was _wine_; the former meaning regeneration of life from the seed, and the latter--the grape--the emblem of wisdom and knowledge; the accumulation of the spirit of things, and the fermentation and subsequent strength of that esoteric knowledge being justly symbolized by wine. The mystery related to the drama of Eden; it is said to have been first taught by Janus, who was also the first to introduce in the temples the sacrifices of “bread” and “wine” in commemoration of the “fall into generation” as the symbol of the “seed.” “I am the vine, and my Father is the husbandman,” says Jesus, alluding to the secret knowledge that could be imparted by him. “I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

The festival of the Eleusinian Mysteries began in the month of Boëdromion, which corresponds with the month of September, the time of grape-gathering, and lasted from the 15th to the 22d of the month, _seven_ days.[63] The Hebrew festival of the Feast of Tabernacles began on the 15th and ended on the 22d of the month of Ethanim, which Dunlap shows as derived from Adonim, Adonia, Attenim, Ethanim;[64] and this feast is named in _Exodus_ (xxiii. 16) the feast of _ingatherings_. “All the men of Israel assembled unto King Solomon at the feast in the month Ethanim, which is the _seventh_.”[65]

Plutarch thinks the feast of the booths to be the Bacchic rites, not the Eleusinian. Thus “Bacchus was directly called upon,” he says. The _Sabazian_ worship was _Sabbatic_; the names Evius, or Hevius, and Luaios are identical with _Hivite_ and _Levite_. The French name Louis is the Hebrew _Levi_; Iacchus again is Iao or Jehovah; and Baal or Adon, like Bacchus, was a phallic god. “Who shall ascend into the hill (the high place) of the Lord?” asks the holy king David, “who shall stand in the place of his _Kadushu_ קדשו”? (_Psalms_ xxiv. 3). Kadesh may mean in one sense to _devote, hallow, sanctify_, and even to initiate or to set apart; but it also means the ministers of lascivious rites (the Venus-worship) and the true interpretation of the word Kadesh is bluntly rendered in _Deuteronomy_ xxiii. 17; _Hosea_ iv. 14; and _Genesis_ xxxviii., from verses 15 to 22. The “holy” Kadeshuth of the _Bible_ were identical as to the duties of their office with the Nautch-girls of the later Hindu pagodas. The Hebrew _Kadeshim_ or galli lived “by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove,” or bust of Venus-Astartè, says verse the seventh in the twenty-third chapter of 2 Kings.

The dance performed by David round the ark was the “circle-dance” said to have been prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries. Such was the dance of the daughters of Shiloh (_Judges_ xxi. 21, 23 _et passim_), and the leaping of the prophets of Baal (_1 Kings_ xviii. 26). It was simply a characteristic of the Sabean worship, for it denoted the motion of the planets round the sun. That the dance was a Bacchic frenzy is apparent. Sistra were used on the occasion, and the taunt of Michael and the king’s reply are very expressive. “The king of Israel uncovered himself before his maid-servants as one of the _vain_ (or debauched) fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself.” And he retorts: “I will play (act wantonly) before יהוה, and I will be yet more vile than this, and I will be base in my own sight.” When we remember that David had sojourned among the Tyrians and Philistines, where their rites were common; and that indeed he had conquered that land away from the house of Saul, by the aid of mercenaries from their country, the countenancing and even, perhaps, the introduction of such a Pagan-like worship by the weak “psalmist” seems very natural. David knew nothing of Moses, it seems, and if he introduced the Jehovah-worship it was not in its monotheistic character, but simply as that of one of the many gods of the neighboring nations--a tutelary deity to whom he had given the preference, and chosen among “all other gods.”