Originally published in a private edition c. 1900
Whilst the people of modern times appear to have been
losing their Soul altogether, or not to have found out that they really possess
one, the ancient Egyptians, Chaldeans, Hindus, Britons, and other races,
reckoned that they had Seven souls, or that the one soul as permanent entity
included the sum total of seven powers. The doctrine is very ancient, but it has
been stated anew by the author of "Esoteric Buddhism," as if it
were a recent revelation derived from India as the fountain-head of ancient
knowledge.
Mr. Sinnett's claim is, that he has been specially
appointed by the Mahatmas as their mouth-piece to the Western World, and
empowered to put into print, for the first time, the oral Wisdom that has
hitherto been kept all sacredly concealed. But I can assure Mr. Sinnett that the
seven Souls of Man are by no means new to us, nor are they those "transcendental
conceptions of the Hindu mind" in which he has been led devoutly to
believe. To the serious student of such subjects, the system of esoteric
interpretation now put forth, with its seven souls of man projected into
shadow-land; its races of men that go round and round the Planetarium seven by
seven, like the animals entering Noah's ark; its seven planets as stages of
human existence, with our earth left out of the reckoning; its seven continental
cataclysms, which occur periodically; does not contain a revelation of new truth
from the Orient, nor a corroboration of the old. The seven souls of man were not
metaphysical "concepts" at any time in the past. The doctrine
belongs to primitive biology, or the physiology of the soul, which preceded the
later psychology. Just as we speak of the seven senses the ancients spoke of the
seven souls as principles, powers, or constituent elements of man. These were
founded on facts of common perception, verifiable in nature; and we do not need
those faculties of the occult adept "which mankind at large has not yet
evolved" in order that they may be apprehended.
Mr. Sinnett is of opinion that it would be "impossible
for even the most skilful professor of occult science to exhibit each of these
seven principles separate and distinct from the
others." That is, when they have been mystified by pseudo-esoteric
misrepresentation, in a metaphysical phase; then they lose the distinctness of
physics; and then we have to hark back once more to distinguish and identify
these seven souls of man. The truth is, that when the teachings of primitive
philosophy have passed into the domain of later speculations, you can make
neither head, tail, nor vertebra of them--they constitute an indistinguishable
mush of manufactured mystery! And the only way of exposing the pretensions of
false teaching, and of destroying the superstitions, old or new, that prey upon
and paralyse the human mind, is by explaining them from the root; to learn what
they once meant in their primary phase is to know what they do not and cannot
mean for us to-day. Nothing avails us finally, short of a first-hand
acquaintanceship with the knowledge and modes of expression that were
primordial.
It is quite possible, and even apparent, that the first
form of the mystical SEVEN was seen to be figured in
heaven by the seven large stars of the Great Bear, the constellation
assigned by the Egyptians to the Mother of Time, and of the seven Elemental
Powers. And once a type like this has been founded it becomes a mould for future
use--one that cannot be got rid of or out of. The Egyptians divided the face of
the sky by night into seven parts. The primary Heaven was sevenfold. The
earliest forces recognised in Nature were reckoned as seven in number. These
became Seven Elementals, devils, or later divinities. Seven properties were
assigned to nature--as matter, cohesion, fluxion, coagulation, accumulation,
station, and division--and seven elements or souls to man. A principle of sevening,
so to say, was introduced, and the number seven supplied a sacred type that
could be used for manifold future purposes. When Abraham took his oath at Beer-sheba,
the Well of the Seven, we are told that he sevened, or did seven. Sevening
was then a recognised mode of swearing; and Sevening is still a recognised mode
of swearing with the Esoteric Buddhists, who, according to Mr. Sinnett, continue
it ad libitum, and carry it on through thick and thin.
The seven souls of the Pharaoh are often mentioned in the
Egyptian texts. The moon-god, Taht-Esmun, or the later sun-god, expressed the
Seven nature-powers that were prior to himself, and were summed up in him as his
seven souls, of which he was the manifestor as the Eighth One. In the Hindu
drawings we see the god Agni pourtrayed with seven arms to his body. These
represent his seven powers, principles, breaths, or souls. The seven rays
of the Chaldean god Heptaktis, or Iao, on the Gnostic stones indicate the same
septenary of souls. The seven stars in the hand of the Christ in Revelation have
the same significance. There is a star with eight rays, which is found to be the
symbol of Buddha, of Assur in Assyria, of Mithras; and of the Christ in the
catacombs of Rome. That was the symbol of the Gnostic pleroma of the
seven souls, the perfect flower or star of which was the Christ of the Gnosis; not
of any
human history. It can be traced back to Egypt as
the star of Sut-Horus, a star with eight points or loops, undoubtedly meant for
Orion, which was at one time the star of Annunciation, that showed the place
where the young child lay, or where the God was re-born upon the horizon of the
Resurrection at Easter. A very ancient form of the eight-rayed star was a sign
of the Nnu, the Associate Gods of Egypt, who were the Seven Ali (Ari) or
Companions (Cf. the Babylonian Ili and Gnostic Elohim), as children of the Great
Mother, the Gnostic Ogdoas. The same type, with the same meaning, is
represented in the Book of Revelation, where the son of man (who is a male with
female breasts, and therefore not a human being) holds in his hand the seven
stars which symbolise the seven angels or spirits who are in the service of
their Lord--like the Seven Great Spirits in the 17th chapter of the Egyptian
"Book of the Dead."
Seven souls, or principles in man, were identified by our
British Druids. In the Hebrew Targummim, Haggadoth and Kabbala, the Rabbins
sometimes recognise a threefold soul--as of life, the animal--from the Egyptian nef,
for the breath. This is the quickening spirit of the embryo. The Ruach is
said to enter the boy at the age of thirteen years and one day. That is the soul
of adultship, the reproducing spirit reproduced for reproduction at puberty. The
third spirit, or Neshamah, is an intelligent soul which enters a man at twenty
years of age, if the deeds of his life are right; if not, he is unworthy of the
Neshamah, and the Nephesh and Ruach remain his only souls. Another Rabbi says
the soul of man has five distinct forms and names--the Nephesh, Ruach,
Neshamah, Cajiah, and the Jachida. The Cajiah is the spirit that makes to
re-live; the Jachida denotes that which unifies all in one, and so establishes
the permanent entity. Some persons are spoken of as being worthy to receive the
Jachida in the life to come. Ben Israel teaches that the Nephesh, Ruach, and
Neshamah signify nothing more than faculties, capacities, or constituent
principles of the man, and that an additional soul means increase of knowledge
and advancement in the study of Divine laws. The Rabbins also ran the number of
souls up to seven; so likewise do the Karens of India. The Khonds of Orissa
recognise four souls, or a fourfold soul. One of these dies on the dissolution
of the body; one, the ancestral soul, remains attached to the Tribe on earth to
be re-produced, generation after generation--in relation to which, when a child
is born the priest inquires which member of the family has come back
again? The third soul is able to go forth and hold spirit-intercourse,
leaving the body in an inert condition. This is the soul that can assume other
shapes by the art of Mleepa, or the gnosis of transformation. The fourth soul is
restored to the good deity Boora, and thus attains immortality. Here, as in
other instances, there is an ascending series.
Sometimes we meet with a dual soul called the dark
shadow and the light shadow; at other times with a triple soul.
But we have now to do with the natural genesis of the
Seven Souls and their culmination in the eighth One, the reproducer for another
life, which was personified as the Pharaoh, the Repa, the Heir-Apparent, the
Horus, the Buddha, Krishna or the Christ. Two sets of the seven may be tabulated
in their Egyptian and Hindu shapes and compared as follows:--
| 1. Rupa, body, or element of form........................ | 1. Kha, body. |
| 2. Prana, or Jiva, the breath of life....................... | 2. Ba, the soul of breath. |
| 3. Astral body...................................................... | 3. Khabs, the shade. |
| 4. Manus, or Intelligence..................................... | 4. Akhu, Intelligence or Perception |
| 5. Khama-Rupa, or animal soul........................... | 5. Seb, ancestral soul. |
| 6. Buddhi, or spiritual soul.................................. | 6. Putah, the first intellectual father. |
| 7. Atma, pure spirit............................................. | 7. Atmu, a divine, or eternal soul. |
Primitive man naturally observed from the first that he
was brought forth by the mother, formed of flesh, made from her blood; that is
the mystical water, or matter of life, and the red earth of mythology. This
primal element was represented by the Great Mother of all flesh; and the first
soul was accordingly derived from the blood, the mystical parent of Life. Thus,
in the Mangaian account of Creation, the Great Mother, Vari, is said to make the
first man from pieces of her own flesh! Flesh being blood that has taken form. "Some,
indeed," says Hermes, "misled by nature, mistook the blood for
the soul;" that is, they took it so, to begin with; and such was
the nature of the human soul No. 1. This soul of blood is identified in Genesis
ix. 4 and 5. Blood is the Adamic soul! From the Mother source came the red earth
of the Adamic or primary creation, whence the Rabbins sometimes call Adam the "Blood
of the world!" In the Semitic languages, Assyrian and Hebrew, Adam
signified "Blood"--simply blood, as the red. It was
thought at one time that two primal races of men were alluded to in the
Cuneiform Texts, under the names of Adamu and Sarku; but it is now
known that these names signify the two principles of female matter and male
spirit, the Hindu perusha.
At this primitive stage begin the legends with which we
have been so pitiably beguiled, or so profoundly perplexed!
In the first account of the creation of man, in the Hebrew
Genesis, he is formed in the image of the Elohim, who were the seven primal
elemental powers, that became celestial as the keepers of time in Heaven--in
their second phase--and ultimately the seven Planetary spirits. At that early
stage of sociology, man descended from the mother alone! In the second creation
(for there are two), the woman is derived from the male as progenitor. The first
is born of blood, the second of bone, a type of masculine substance. And these
two sources, female and male, supply the two doctrinal types to Paul when he
says, "As in Adam (the flesh-man) all men die, even so in Christ
(the spirit-man) shall all be made alive!" Here the true
interpretation cannot be obtained without the aid of the
primitive physiology; it does not depend upon any
fulfilment of fable as fact in later history, but on the adaptation of the
mythical types to convey a mystical meaning in what are called
"mysteries," that were very simple in their primal phase--which phase
is the object of our present search.
The Psalmist refers to this Adamic man when he says, "Put
not your trust in the son of man; his breath goeth forth, he returneth to his
earth. In that very day his purposes perish." The antithesis to this
was the Son of God, the second Adam, the man from heaven, the Christ, or
immortal spirit; in short, a later type of the human soul! The first Adam
represented the man, or creation of the seven souls, and the seven Elohim,
whence it was said, in the Semitic Legends, that his head only reached up to
the seventh heaven. The second Adam, or the Christ, attains the eighth
heaven, as the height; or, he comes, later on, to represent the ten-fold heaven
as the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalists.
The Tahitians, whose Great Mother is named Eve (or Ivi),
have the same physiological myth! They say that the first men were formed of
Araea, or red earth, and on this they lived until bread was made--bread being
typical of corn, corn of seed, i.e., male source. All men derived from
the motherhood at first--and in that mythical creation the man was really
created from the woman, instead of the woman being taken from the man, which was
of necessity a later creation, in keeping with the sociology. The mystery of the
woman being taken from the man is mentioned in the Egyptian Ritual, or Book of
the Dead. The speaker says: "I know the mystery of the woman being taken
from the man." The matter of such a mystery was physiological. The far
earlier mystery was that of man being created by the woman from the red earth,
or blood.
Next it was apprehended that the mother inspired the
breath of life into her embryo. And breath, prajna, jiva, or the ba,
constitutes the soul No. 2. In various legends man was made from the red earth,
and the Blacks of Victoria say that their creator, Pundjel, blew the breath of
life, or the soul of breath, in at his navel. These were the first two souls of
the seven, because blood supplied the element of flesh, or form, and breath was
the primal element of life. A Yuni Indian description of death speaks of a man
as having the wind pressed out of him, so that he forgot.
And now for a doctrinal development!
Blood and breath being the two primary
elements or souls of life, these consequently became the two great types of
sacrificial offering. Among the Amaponda Kaffirs when a new chief succeeds to
the government it is a custom for him to be baptised in the blood of his
brother, or some near relative, who is put to death for the purpose; and in Fiji
when the canoe of a chief was launched a number of men were sacrificed, so that
their souls (or Breath) might supply a wind of good luck for the sails of the
vessel. It was on account of their natural genesis that these two souls of the
blood and breath
were typically continued in the water and the breath
employed for the re-genesis, or regeneration, of the child in Christian baptism.
Everyone of our religious rites and ceremonies has to be read backwards, like
Hebrew, to be understood.
The observation that blood, the first factor in primitive
biology, was the basis used by Nature in building up the future human being is
probably the source and origin of the superstition that in building a city,
fortress, bridge, or church, an enduring foundation must be laid in blood;
whence the primitive practice of burying a living child, a calf, a dog, goat, or
lamb--the lamb slain from the foundation of the world being a Mithraic
and Christian survival of the same significance, with the bloody and barbarous
rite of the Victim immured as a basis for the building. Sometimes, as in the
legend of Vortigern, the foundation-stone was to be bathed in the blood of a
child that was born of a mother without any father; as was the
child-Horus, who was the child of the Virgin Mother only. The doctrine is
Egyptian, and as such can be understood. It was applied to Horus shut up in the
region of annihilation, or transformation (the Skhem), where his type was the
Red Mouse.
As the breath of life was a kind of soul, so the steam of
food, or the incense presented in sacrifice, was a form of the breath of life
offered to the spirits of the dead or to the gods. The motive and meaning of
many curious customs can only be apprehended on these physical grounds. For
instance, when the Canadian Indians killed a bear they adjured the soul of the
animal not to be angry with them, and then placing a pipe between its teeth blew
tobacco-smoke backwards into its mouth, and thus symbolically restored that
which they had just taken--its soul of breath. In the Rubric to the Egyptian
Ritual it says--"Offer ye a great quantity of incense; it makes that
spirit alive." Drops of blood from the heart of a cow are likewise to
be offered with the incense. Blood and breath (incense) were both offered by the
Jews. Philo explains that the offerings of frankincense laid on the golden altar
in the Inner Temple were more holy than the blood offered outside. The mystical
meaning of which, he says, must be investigated by those who are eager for the
truth in accordance with the Gnosis. The blood and breath survive also in the
bloody wafer and incense of the Roman Ritual.
Now, we have to go back to this Soul of Breath to reach
the origin of the transmigration of souls, which has been continued into the
domain of later doctrines by those who were ignorant of its beginnings. To
breathe and to transmigrate are synonymous in Egyptian, under the word sen. But
the transmigration of the soul of breath is neither physical nor spiritual in
the modern sense; it is an entirely different doctrine from those of the
Pythagorean and the Esoteric Buddhists, both of which were derived from the same
primitive original, but have been perverted until they no longer represent
the early coinage of human thought, and so they can
authenticate nothing in this world, for any other. With a primitive soul of
breath was evolved the notion of an Ancestral soul of the race, tribe, and
Totem, which of necessity was as general as the intercourse of the sexes was
then common. The Commentator on the Analects of the Confucius says--"My
own animal spirits are the animal spirits of my progenitors." Another
Chinese teacher says-- "Though we speak of individuals, and distinguish
one from the other, yet there is in reality but one breath that animates them
all. My own breath (or spirit) is the identical breath of my ancestors." This
soul of Breath, thus Pantheistically apprehended and expressed, could and did
transmigrate; might be, and was, re-incarnated. It was incarnated in being
individualised and discreeted from the Ancestral soul; and when it went back it
was merged again in the general--qua soul.
The king (Eg. Ank), who never dies, was first
established upon this generic soul of the race, and not on a recurring identical
personality of the reincarnated Soul. Thus reincarnation was true to the general
Ancestral soul, but when continued in a later state of sociology, and applied to
the Individual soul, it is a counterfeit--a false presentment of the original
doctrine.
The basis of all incarnation and reincarnation has to be
sought in the primitive animism of the general, Ancestral, or Pan-soul, first
recognised. At that stage of thought it is our soul that comes, and goes,
and returns again--not my soul nor yours; and afterwards the reincarnation of soul
was continued as the reincarnation of souls, when souls had been
individualised here on earth by the father coming to recognise his own children;
but this was only through taking a false step and making a false inference.
The breath, or soul, of the dying was believed to re-enter
the living. Thus, the Algonkins would bury their spirits, which were supposed to
re-enter the future mothers as they were passing by! This was a soul of breath
that could be inhaled, hence the practice of in-breathing souls.
According to the Roman custom, it was the privilege of the nearest relative to
inhale the last breath, or the passing soul, of a person dying.
But the soul that was founded on the mere breath of life,
which the mother inspired to quicken the embryo, was not much to go upon for
ultimate duration! The African Dinka tribe are said to reject the idea of
immortality, because their soul is "but a breath!"--in
which they agree with some modern secularists; because this sign of life
visibly ceases in death! Such would be the argument of the primitive
positivists, who had not got beyond their second soul--that of breath.
The third elementary is the so-called Astral shade, or
shadow-soul. I once thought the shadow cast by the body might serve as
the original type; or the image reflected in the eye. But there is more than
that in it! There is a shade which is not a shadow.
Dr. Tylor says that ghost, or phantom, seen by the dreamer, or visionary, is
like a shadow, and thus the familiar term of the shade comes to
express the soul! Such, however, is not the origin, as the Egyptian
Shade, or Khaba, proves. The Khaba, or third soul, is a light,
visible, but not tangible, envelope of the Ba, or soul of the breath. Khab
signifies cover, to veil, to cover over. It is applied to an eclipse; and
what is shade in a burning land but cover? Hence the type of the
third soul is an Egyptian sunshade! It is so the thought is thinged.
But they did not require, nor did they devise, a sunshade to image something
like a shadow seen in sleep! In the Text, the deceased rejoices that his shade,
cover, or Khaba, has not been stripped from his Ba, or second
soul, in death. More literally, that he hasn't lost his envelope! The Ba, distinguished
from the Shade, is said to breathe. It is pourtrayed with a human head on the
body of a bird, and may be seen in the Amenti, going through the hells accompanied
by its sunshade, for cover in a burning land! It retains form, breath and
shade or covering. The Egyptian sunshade is a fan--actually the shade of
breath. Their symbolism was so near to the natural fact!
The shadow-soul of the Khonds is one that dies when the
body dissolves, which shows that the Shade with them was this corporeal soul.
The Greenlanders also recognised two souls as the Shade and the Breath.
The fourth soul is an Intelligence, a form of mind, as the
Power to perceive, to memorize, expressed by the Scottish "mind," to
mind, or remember; the Egyptian ment, to memorize. In "making his
transformation into the Soul" (Rit. ch. 85), the Deceased exclaims, in this
character, "I am Perception, who never perishes under the name of the
Soul" of mere breath.
The third soul being a sense-perception, or corporeal
spirit, the fourth an intelligence--the intelligence developing perceptibly in
the growing child -- the fifth is the Animal soul that visibly descends upon the
male nature at the period of puberty, and not till then. This was the first soul
that was seen to have the power of perpetuating itself for this life! No child
has such power; therefore at this stage it was held that the child did not
possess this soul, and so, in another doctrinal development, it was taught that
children who died in the pre-pubescent stage of life, had NO souls! They had the
soul of blood and breath, and the Astral shade, or, as the Egyptians have it,
the Envelope; they were not without intelligence; but the power of reproduction
constituted a self-creative soul! It was on this ground, then, that children who
died before the soul of manhood had descended on their nature to transform it at
puberty, were supposed to have no substantial, or self-producing soul. This
accounts for the superstition that they wandered about after death as elves, or
Elementaries, on the outskirts of this life, unable to enter the other world.
For the
infant elementaries were believed to walk and wander as
elves, fairies, and brownies, in search of a soul, or in want of a name--as the
conferring of a name was one mode of constituting a personality, or
communicating a soul to the child! This may be illustrated by the Scotch
story,--an "un-christened wean" was seen wandering about at
Whittingham, in Scotland, who could not obtain foothold on the threshold of the
other world, being minus in the matter of an adult principle, or soul No. 5.
Many saw, but none dared speak to the poor little fellow, for fear of having to
give up their own soul to him. One night, however, a drunken man addressed the
Elementary,--"Hoo's a' wi' ye, the morn's morn, Short Hoggers?" (short
stockings that were sole-less as the child itself!) And the Elementary,
having a name conferred, cried joyfully,--"Oh! weel's me noo, I've
gotten a name! They ca' me Short Hoggers o' Whittingham!" and vanished,
having obtained his soul by proxy, or through Naming. These undeveloped little
spirits became the "Wee-folk" that peopled fairy-world. The
superstitions still retain traces of this origin; those of the Brownie, for
example. He is a very helpful worker, who serves freely and faithfully by night
in the house, or out on the farm by day. But show him a pair of breeks, and
he's off like Aiken-drum, the brownie of Blednock. The reason why would never be
divined, apart from the natural genesis here explained. Breeches are a type of
that masculine soul which the Brownie had never attained, and the poor little
Elementary could not face this significant reminder of the fatal fact!
Now observe, upon this primeval constitution of a soul the
rite of baptism and conferring a name (the name of the father) is founded. The
doctrine of conferring a soul by proxy is very general! Hence the god-father and
god-mother, or the father-god and mother-god of earlier beliefs, who represented
the adult creative source. Hence, also, the power falsely claimed by the
Christian Church to-day to save the souls of children by baptismal grace,
in response to the equally false belief that children would otherwise be lost,
or have to go without an eternal soul! Children that die unbaptised in Russia
are not registered at all; are (or were) not reckoned in the data for the laws
of mortality! What an influence such a system must exert on the pietistic, the
ignorant, and feeble-minded, in forcing them into the fold of faith, out of
which is supposed to open the only doorway for their little ones into
everlasting life! In this manner the modern sacerdotalists employ the fetishism
of the ancient medicine men in the form of religious dogmas, superstitious
doctrines, and rites supposed to save.
It was at this stage of the soul that the doctrine of
Salvation by means of self-emasculation had its natural genesis, and men unsexed
themselves to save their souls, becoming eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's
sake; a doctrine of salvation taught by the Christ in Matthew's Gospel, which
was carried out by the castrating Christians, who, like the Russian Skoptsi,
looked forward to a
millennium that was to come when all were self-mutilated.
In the fragment of the "Egyptian Gospel," quoted both by Clement of
Alexandria and Clement of Rome, we are told that the Christ, having been asked
by Salome when his Kingdom was to come, answered, "When the male with
the female shall be neither male nor female." Now the Christ of which
that could be said is of necessity the Spiritual Christ of either or of both
Sexes. This is also the Christ of Paul when he says, "There is neither male
nor female, for ye are all one in Christ." Christian literalisers sought to
attain that type by unsexing themselves!
It follows, on the same physical basis, that the woman
does not possess a soul, or, at least, not this particular soul, founded on the
principle of virility, and that at this stage of thought she must derive her
self-perpetuating soul from the masculine nature--if at all. In the Egyptian
tale of the two brothers (in which we find the story of Joseph and Potiphar's
wife), the younger one is deprived of his virile soul, whereupon he says to his
consort,--"I am a woman, even as thou art." Here, then, the
woman is also treated as the impubescent or soulless child! Some of the
Christian fathers maintained that woman has no inherent soul, which proves they
could not have been Spiritualists in any practical sense! They held that woman
only represented matter (our soul No. 1) degraded and damned ever since the Fall
of Man, and only to be saved by childbearing, as Paul teaches; that is, by the
grace of the male, and the addition of a later soul. The Khonds of India, who
had not got beyond the general Ancestral soul of the tribe, coupled this with
the masculine power, and held that Woman was not a producer of soul; and
they actually killed off their female children, because these shared in the
Ancestral soul of the tribe, without contributing to the reserved stock, and
were thus robbing the males of a portion of their own proper soul. If they
reserved all the virile soul to themselves, they were brave enough to capture
women and wives from other tribes; and such was their argument for and defence
of female infanticide within their own tribe! The Turks, in common with
other races, hold that Woman has no soul--I am trying to show the natural ground
for such belief!--and that if she is reproduced at the time of the resurrection,
it will have to be in the image of the male. This doctrine was likewise
maintained by Augustine, amongst other of the Christian Fathers; and it dimly
survives to-day with the Mormons, whose wives are wedded to the male, in order
that they who are by nature soulless may have a chance of being raised at the
last day by the saving power of the husband; consequently, the more wives wedded
the more souls saved. This doctrine of the masculine soul is illustrated in
Egypt by the shebti image of the dead. Egyptologists, like Mariette, have
been puzzled to know why the "double" of the dead, which is
always a figure of the bearded male, should be found in the tombs, as the
type of the re-arising female, as well as of the male. It was because at a
certain
stage of thought--in relation to the physical basis--the
female had to rise again in the image of the masculine soul--the soul No. 5--if
at all. Thus, the potential immortality of the female is here made dependent on
the male, through the primitive physiology dominating and determining the
later doctrine. Here, as in so many other cases, it is a survival--simply a
survival--from the early physics! good for its own meaning--but unable to carry
us any further--except in the way in which it will mislead us. The potential
immortality of the soul is one of the oldest beliefs common to the aboriginal
and barbaric races of the world. Potential, or conditional immortality, is a
doctrine put forward afresh in our time by Esoteric Buddhists and certain
bibliolators! But these latter never can touch bottom or determine anything
whatever by wrangling over a few texts of Scripture, that have been brought on
without the explanation of the oral hidden wisdom. It may be truly said of the
people of one book:--"Behold! ye know not anything!" Such doctrines as
conditional immortality can only be judged by their natural genesis! We shall
never get at them by mistaking what we cannot understand for a divine
revelation; nor by reading into them a modern mis-interpretation.
We have now to go back and learn of the primitive and
uncivilised races, with whom the loss, say of Memory, is the loss of a soul.
Absence of mind may be another mode of losing your soul. To lose your shadow
even by having your likeness taken, may be the means of losing your soul, as is
yet believed! Or it may be, that under the affliction of bronchitis or asthma,
you run very great risk of losing your prana or soul of breath. Under
such circumstances a Fijian would lie down and call upon his departing soul to
come back to his bosom; or the Karen magician will run after the sick man's
butterfly, as they call his wavering, wandering soul of breath, and pray it to
return. And if the spirit-doctor should fail to catch the butterfly (or psyche),
because it has crossed the boundary of life and death, he tries to capture the
Astral Shade of a living man which may be flitting about whilst its owner is
sleeping with his six other souls (or any lesser number) in the land of dreams;
so that when he wakes he sickens, pines, and dies, because his other souls will
besure to go in search of the missing Astral Shade--or envelope--for cover! We
smile at such simplicity, but--when Plato, or any other metaphysical perverter
of primitive thought, sets forth the doctrine that our knowledge is a matter of
memory, and our science a mere reminiscence, that is but a sophism founded on
this fourth soul of the early philosophy, which dates from the time when the
faculty of memorising was the highest recognised type of mind or a soul.
Again, one form of the adult or masculine soul was
considered to be a secretion of the marrow, the Sanskrit mearg, or majja-rasa,
the sap of life--the marrow of manhood, or soul of horn and bone. An Accra
saying has it that "marrow is the father of blood"! In
the earliest biology, blood was the mother of marrow. With
this change of view it was fabled that the woman was created from the man, as
Eve was taken from the bone of Adam, or derived from the soul of his bone,
considered to be masculine, and, as such, a form of the fifth soul. Here we can
trace yet another doctrinal development. At this stage fat and oil were offered
to the dead, as a type of the marrow of life, and soul of bone: the fat that was
placed in the cups on the tombstones of the buried dead. To this day the Red
Indians sacredly place a lump of fat in the mouth of the corpse prepared for the
grave; and the Romanists anoint the dying with the oil called "extreme
unction." In Egypt the very divinity of Horus consisted in the
preservation of the holy oil on his face; he who was the anointed or the greased,
i.e., the Christ (Records of the Past, 10, 164); he who was "raised
from the dead through (and as) the glory of the Father"; and
whose earliest advent was in the male nature, as the anointed at the time of
puberty. Hence fat or oil was used as a bone-type of the primitive soul of
man--the sole bone from which the first woman ever was created. This, the fifth
soul, was at one time the quintessence of a man!
When the brain had been identified as the physical basis,
or matter of mind, the sixth soul was then derived from this Ritual (chap.
lxxviii.), the Osirified deceased says,--"Horus has come to me out of my
father Osiris!" "He has come to me out of the brains of his
head!" That was as the nous of the Gnostics, the revealer of an
intellectual soul, who in Egypt is the god Ptah, or Putah, the opener,
whom I elsewhere identify with Buddha in India. The Hindu Buddhi is the sixth
soul, and Putah is lord of the sixth creation: he is also known as the "wisdom
of the first intellect." (See "Natural Genesis," section 9.)
The Seventh soul was derived from the individualised
fatherhood, which was represented by the father Atum for the first time in the
Egyptian mythology--Atum being equivalent to the Buddhist Atma, the
creative soul. Atum of the seventh creation represents the eternal--he inspires
the breath of life everlasting, and is called the one sole God without
change. At this stage of attainment the soul exults that it is created
forever, and is a soul beyond time. The deceased exclaims, "Shu causes
me to shine as a living lord, and to be made the Seventh when he comes
forth!" "I am the one born of Sevekh!" and Sevekh means the
sevenfold or seventh, the type of attainment, as the seventh of the total
series. This "is he who comes out sound (in death)--the
Unknown is his name." The "mystery of this soul made by the
gods" is described as being, as it were, "self-existence"--i.e.
of the permanent entity attained at last. It is called the "reserved
soul," the "engendered of the gods, who provided it with its
shapes. Inexplicable is the genesis. It is the greatest of secrets." (Rit.
ch. 15.)
In this way the seven souls were identified in Egypt, and
may
be formulated as--(1) the Soul of Blood, (2) the Soul of
Breath, (3) the Shade or Covering Soul, (4) the Soul of Perception, (5) the Soul
of Pubescence, (6) the Intellectual Soul, (7) the Spiritual Soul.
The first was formative.
The second soul breathed.
The third soul enveloped.
The fourth soul perceived.
The fifth soul procreated.
The sixth soul reproduced intellectually.
The seventh perpetuated permanently.
And at every one of these seven stages of development
there was a fresh outgrowth of mythical legend or mystical representation--just
as there might be a new efflorescence at the seven ascending knots of a bamboo
cane. Much of this, however, has been shown in my "Natural
Genesis," and cannot be repeated now.
But because the primitive and archaic man recognised and
laid hold of seven elements, one after another, in the shape of form, breath,
corporeal soul, perception, pubescent soul, intellectual soul, and an enduring
soul, as a mode of identifying his physical elements and mental qualities--that
does not make him resolvable into a number of elementary spirits after death, as
if falsely imagined and maintained by the Esoteric Buddhists. There never were
seven souls of blood, of breath, of cover, of perception, of the animal,
intellectual, and spiritual nature which could have passed into another world as
seven elementary spirits. These phantom likenesses of natural facts belonging to
our past selves have no more power than photographs for each to become a future
self. The shadows projected by the Seven did not, and could not, become
spiritual beings in another world. They were only types for use in the mental
world. They were a number of types, seven lines in an upward series, each
of which served, for the time being, to denote the element at the time
identified with or as the soul. We may look upon them as the seven lines
of an ascending high-water mark. The seven elements in the nature of man never
could become anything more than seven types, according to an ascertained mode of
typology; whereas the Esoteric Buddhist continues them as seven potential
spirits of a man, the elementaries of another life, who may either attain the
immortality of a united and permanent entity there, in some far-off future, or
fail for lack of power to persist, and finally die out altogether. That is not a
vision of the future, human or spiritual; it is but looking in a camera
obscura held in front, which reflects in some dim and distorting manner a
picture of the past that lies behind. We shall no more deposit seven, or even
two, souls in death than Oliver Cromwell could have left behind him two skulls,
found in two rival museums, one of which (the smaller of the two) was said to
have been his skull when he was a boy!
These is nothing in the nature of things known or
prefigured to warrant us in assuming a fundamental and enduring difference
in the constituent quality of beings who belong to the
same species. Nature gives no hint that we can either engender a force or
destroy a faculty of persisting that may be called immortal--no hint that we can
commit eternal suicide, and put an end to existence, any more than we could
initiate our own beginning. It is here, as so often elsewhere, that an ancient
mode of expression has become the modern mould of thought. The Esoteric
Buddhists, like the primitive Christians, have been beguiled by the typology
which they have failed to interpret. Of course, if you only credit an
undeveloped being with the human form, the life of breath, the astral shade, and
a twinkle of terrestrial intelligence, you can easily establish a doctrine of
conditional immortality, but I affirm that it is solely on the plan of this
primitive map of man, which was only tentatively true. There never was a time
when the adult male did not possess at least five of the seven principles
or souls--those of blood, breath, shade, perception, and the animal
soul--howsoever small his intellect may have been. At least four of these
souls--the soul of blood, breath, intelligence, and reproduction--belong to the
animal in common with man; and so we find four souls are ascribed to the Bear by
the Sioux Indians. The only possible human elementary spirit is the child that
died before it came of age, and that is identifiably extant--in short, the seven
were not souls in the flesh that when out of it could become seven orders of
spirits objective to man. Seven elements, seven principles in seven degrees of
the one life's development, became seven personalities or persons solely as a
mode of expression, a classification in accordance with these primitive types.
And being elements, when spoken of as personages they naturally become seven
elementaries; and being elementaries in this biological sense of the true
Esoteric teaching, they get mixed up with the seven powers of the elements or
elementals and their prototypes, which never did, and never could, have a
personal existence--never were living beings. Hence the dire confusion amongst
the modern echoes of the ancient wisdom, and the indefiniteness of Esoteric
Buddhism, on the subject of elementals and elementaries.
In the "Natural Genesis" I have traced the seven
powers of the elements to their origin in external phenomena. The seven
elementaries in the nature of man may also be followed as far as they will go.
In the Inscription of Una (Records of the Past; 2,
8), these Seven Souls of the Pharaoh are spoken of as being invoked "more
than all the Gods." These were the Divine Ancestors, the Manes, who
were worshipped in Egypt by the "Shus-en-Har," or followers of
Horus, for thirteen hundred years before the time of Menes. Being Seven in
Number, they are identical with the Seven Manus, Rishis, Elohim, and other
Hebdomads found elsewhere. Their origin was in this wise. The Seven, who
preceded the Eighth, being looked upon as progenitors of the one-enduring
Soul, the Horus, Christ or Buddha, became a form of the Ancestors, or Manes;
the nature of which has
to be partly determined by the number Seven. They
never were the Spirits of Individual Ancestors! They originated as seven human Elementaries,
and not as Ghosts that made their appearance in a group of seven. These
seven, being correlated and combined with the seven elemental forces recognised
in external nature, we have that perplexing mixture of Elementaries and Elementals,
on which subject we are told the Adepts are very diffident.
The Septenary of souls can be traced from first to last by
means of the Egyptian doctrine of transformation. Thus the blood source that
formed the embryo was quickened and transformed into the soul that breathed. The
breathing soul attained cover, and transformed into the corporeal soul of shade;
this transformed into an Intelligence. The intelligent youth transformed into
the adult, when the animal soul, or pro-creative spirit, manifested at puberty.
The adult soul transformed into the Hebrew Neshamah, the wise soul, or the Hindu
Buddhi, the soul of ascertainment, and this into the soul that makes to re-live,
which was represented by the God Atum, in whom the fatherhood was individualized
at last as the begetter of an eternal soul; also by the Hebrew Adam, whose head
reached up to the seventh Heaven. This doctrine of transformation, and the
unifying of various individualities into one personality, puts an end to the
septenary, and to the diverse destinations after death of several human
principles, which must have already attained totality by unity, in order that
there might be a personality, or ego, in this life. Not one of the Seven Souls
had obtained the permanent personality, and, as they were but seven rudimental
factors in the development of an ultimate Soul, they could not become Seven
Spirits as realities, or Apparitions, in another life. Each older self was
merged in the now, and, therefore, the seven could neither be simultaneous nor
contemporary, except when absorbed in the oneness of unity.
Hermes describes the one soul of the universe as entering
into creeping things, and transforming into the soul of watery things, and this
into the soul of things that live on the land; and airy ones are changed into
men; and human souls that lay hold of immortality are changed into spirits, and
so they ascend up to the region of the fixed stars (or gods), which is the
eighth sphere; and this is the most perfect glory of the soul! But this was as
the one soul of life, not as the eight, or seven individual souls. The eighth
was the immortal blossom on the human branch.
The worst kind of haunting in this world is not done by
the spirits of dead people, but by the phantoms of defunct ideas; the shadows
cast upon the cloud-curtain of the hereafter by those things which were only
types and figures of human realities here--not things in themselves from the
first. And these seven, or other number of other selves, belonging to the one
personality, have left their shadows in the domain of metaphysic, which is
fundamentally fractured by this splitting up of the one personality into
separate
selves, whether sevenfold, fivefold, fourfold, threefold,
or only secondary. Also, these ghosts of primitive physics are beginning to walk
in our midst, and are trying to pass themselves off upon us as genuine
spirit-phenomena. The Buddhist difference between personality and individuality
was necessitated, and is explained by the individuality which may include a
seven-fold form, or passage of the personality; seven persons in one ego, like
the "Three Persons and one God" in the Trinity. In the process of
doctrinal development, objective re-birth in a series of human lives, or
spirits, has been substituted for the re-birth of the ego in personality at the
different stages and conversions of the one being, whereas the original
re-births were subjective, whether biological or psychical, and limited to the
one life alone, in its successive stages of transformation.
Besides which, the Seven Souls are all summed up in an
eighth.
This eighth to the seven is mentioned in the Book of
Revelation, where the numbers of the Gnosis constitute Wisdom. The Beast, who is
an Eighth, is also of the Seven! In Egypt it was the lunar Taht-Smen, the
eighth, or the sun-god with the seven souls; in India, the god with seven arms.
The eighth is also represented by the Buddha, who is the manifestor for the
seven Buddhas, or Manus, and by the Gnostic Christ, who is called the
eight-rayed star of the pleroma, or god-head, composed of seven earlier powers,
of whom it is is said:--"Then, out of gratitude for the great benefit
which had been conferred on them, the whole pleroma of Æons, with one design
and one desire, and with the concurrence of Christ and the holy spirit, their
father also setting the seal of his approval on their conduct, brought together
whatever each one had in himself of the greatest beauty and preciousness; and
uniting all these contributions so as skilfully to blend the whole, they
produced a being of most consummate beauty, the very star of the pleroma, and
the perfect fruit (of it), namely, Jesus. Him they also speak of under
the name of Saviour, and Christ, and, patronymically, Logos, and All Things,
because he was formed from the contributions of all." Such is the
Gnostic account of the Christ as the eighth one, in whom the Seven Souls
culminated. The seven spirits were also continued in the Gnostic system as the
seven angels who convey the eternal soul to the human creature. You may see them
in Didron's Christian Iconography as the Seven Doves which hover round the
Virgin Mary, who carries the Christ in embryo--he who, as the eighth, became
superior to the angels. The dove was also said by the Gnostics to represent
Christ as the eight-fold one, or the illustrious Ogdoad; the number of the Dove
being 801 in Greek letters. Hence the descent of the Dove that abode on Jesus
when he attained the Christ-hood; where the symbol proves and identifies the
typical and non-historical nature of the transaction, and the Gnostic character
of the cumulative Christ.
The Ass, a Typhonian type of lunar phenomena, was likewise
a
representative of the Word or Logos that was reproduced as
the Eighth--like the repeating note in the musical scale. It is well known that
the bray of the donkey is just an octave in its range; and this made it
an utterer of the Word or Logos, who was the Eighth. We read in the Ritual (ch.
125) that "Great words are spoken by the Ass!" And in old
Egyptian the Ass has the name of Iu or Iao. The Eighth was the Seventh
Soul, as first Person in the Hebdomad, the father-God afterwards reproduced
as his own Son. This was Iu-em-hept (hept=7) in Egypt; the Ass-headed
Iao-Sabaoth and Iao-Chnubis of the Gnostics. When expressed by means of external
phenomena it was the Solar vivifier who was reproduced monthly, or annually, by
the Mother-Moon; whence the re-birth or resurrection that is still dependent on
the full moon of Easter; he who became Lord of the first day, or Sunday, instead
of the seventh day, or Saturday.
The divine Fatherhood being founded at last in the God, or
supreme one of the seven souls, whether called Atum-Ra, or Osiris in Egypt,
Vishnu in India, Adam in the Greek Mysteries, or Jehovah amongst the Jews, his
manifestor was impersonated as the divine son of the father-God, in whom the
octave is attained, and the God-head of all the powers or souls is reproduced
just as the eighth note in music is the note of repetition, reproduction, or
re-appearance. And this eighth one was the Christ, as Iu-em-hept, the son of
Atum, who is designated the "Eternal Word." This eighth one, as
manifestor of the seven, was also Har-Khuti, in Egypt, the Lord of Lights and of
the Glorified Elect, the God whose Sign is the Pyramid - figure of 7; Krishna
Agni, or Buddha in India; Assur in Assyria; Pan, of the seven pipes, in Greece;
and the Gnostic Christ, called Totem, the All, who was formed from the
contributions of all the Seven, identical with the Buddha, who is the outcome of
the seven Buddhas, the result of their "Collective Intelligence," called
Adi-Buddha, or Buddha from the beginning, in allusion to this process of
development; and whose symbol, like that of the Christ, and of Horus, is the
star with eight rays! The Christ, or Mithras, or Horus, represented that height,
or octave of attainment, to which the Gnostic adept aspired, and which Paul
designates the full-grown Man, and the measure of the stature of the fulness of
the Christ, or a sort of divine Octavius!
Such was the nature of the "Wisdom" that
a Gnostic like Paul, Epopt and perfect, spoke amongst the perfected; and it
would have been useless to have spoken such among A-Gnostics who were of the
fleshly faith. This was the mystical Christ who came BY and AS the Holy Spirit;
so Jesus is transformed into the Christ when the Holy Spirit descends upon him
in his Baptism! But, after this transformation, it is said in the same Gospel
that the Holy Spirit was not yet extant (or communicated), because Jesus
was not yet glorified. To the genuine Gnostics this holy spirit always
had been extant; but here we see its very existence made altogether depend-
ent upon the personality and death of Jesus in the process
of re-dating it and making him the author of it historically. Barnabas knew
better. He identifies the Christ with the Man of the eighth Soul, who rose again
on the Eighth Day of Creation!
Here the height was synonymous, and is identical, with the
number eight! This height is represented in the Buddhist, Gnostic, and Mithraic
mysteries by a ladder with eight steps, the eighth, or height, being the top of
attainment, the place of the perfected; and so the octave was completed at last
in Buddha-hood, in Elijah-hood, in Christ-hood, or the divine man-hood, of the
pre-Christian religions; such likewise being the natural genesis of the eight
ways and eight paths of Buddhism.
The Gnostics said salvation was brought by the Ogdoad; and
the Saviour personified was the mystical Octavius: the superior man of the
eighth creation! It is said by Peter in the Clementine Recognitions that there
was an Ideal Man who had the right to the name of Messiah, because the
Jews called their Kings the Christ, the Romans Cæsar, and the Egyptians
Pharaoh. That is true. Each of these DID represent the same original type. The
Roman Cæsar, the hairy, pubescent, or Anointed One, was an impersonation of
this supreme soul; who happens to be the Eighth also by name in Octavianus,
who was the first Emperor! (Born B.C. 63, called Augustus B.C. 27.)
According to the Christianised Legends of the Sybil, the Romans wished to adore
Octavianus as a divinity, but the Sybil showed him the Coming Christ in the
Virgin's lap, whereupon he refused to be worshipped himself, took off his
diadem, and adored the future child! Nevertheless, Octavianus was just as good
an historical realisation of the mythical and mystical Christ as any
personal Jesus could be; or, rather, both were equally impossible for those who
knew.
Another Gnostic mode of illustrating this mystery may be
pointed out in passing. The supreme personality was attained in the eighth
degree of ascension, and the supreme sign of that personality, the pronoun I,
was the ultimate outcome and representative sign of seven vowel sounds. Our
letter I was the ai, ei, eta or ida of the Coptic, which has the numeral
value of eight. Seven vowels, said the Gnostics, glorify the Word, and these
were uttered in a single sound, in an O or an I. Thus the octave was completed,
the height attained and expressed in a single letter sign, the I of Personality.
The God was also invoked with adorations in the Greek Mysteries; possibly with
the "8 Adorations," which are Egyptian and Chinese. This was another
sign of the Eighth Soul, having the numerical value of Eight in hundreds. The
sign survives as the vocative "Oh!" of religious aspiration.
According to the Gnosis, then, the Seven were only a group
of phenomena which evolved the enduring entity at last, the eternal soul itself,
into which they were transubstantiated in death; the re-appearing, manifesting
spirit that was personified as the fully
awakened Buddha, or the mystical Christ of the Mysteries.
Such was the Finding of the Christ as a human product, which was first
demonstrated by Spiritualism--the type having been continued by combining the
mythical with the mystical! This was the "True Logos" which
Philo and Celsus wrote about, the "Heavenly and indestructible offspring
of a Divine and Incorporeal nature," the Gnostic "Light which
lighteth every one that cometh into the world," not that earthly Shadow
cast upon the background of ignorance called the Historical Christ. Such was the
origin and mode of building up, stage by stage, the Christ of the Gnosis; the
divine man, the man from heaven, described by Paul, the Christ of those who
knew, the evolution of which has now been traced step by step to its
culmination; the Christ of that spiritual existence beyond the grave, which was
demonstrated in the mysteries of mediumship, who was called the son of God, also
the son of man, because the son as manifestor implied the father as begetter!
This was in the mystical phase. In the moral aspect the Horus, Christ, or Buddha
was set forth as a model to all men, the highest type of attainment for those
who were climbing up the ladder of eight rounds. It was not the portrait of any
one individual who could attain perfection once and for all as the
representative of all men. That was the fatal mistake of the Christians--the men
who did not know--as it is equally the error of those Esoterists who only
pretend to know. The earliest mode of attaining this Christhood, or Buddhahood,
was by cultivating the trance-conditions and becoming a spirit amongst spirits.
This was moralised in a second phase when attainment was made dependent upon the
practice of certain saving virtues. In the final phase conversion to a belief in
the Christian scheme has taken the place of both!
It is positively provable that the Christ is but a type
identical with the Horus, the Iao-Heptaktis, the Buddha or Pan of the prior
cultus. According to Irenæus, the Valentinian Gnostics maintained the identity
of the Saviour with Pan, who is called Christum in the Latin text. Pan
was, of course, an earlier personification of the All, or "All
Things." The type and origin are one, under whatsoever name. Consequently
Pan, or Aristæus, with the seven-fold pipe in his hand, and the sheep on his
shoulders, is the Christ, the Saviour, the Good Shepherd pourtrayed in the Roman
Catacombs, instead of the historic Jesus, whose picture is not there.
The Christ or Buddha of the Gnostics could not become
flesh once for all, as he was the supreme outcome and consummate flower of all
flesh, in the culminating stage of spiritual attainment in life, and spiritual
apparition after death. The Christ being an immortal principle, and very life
itself, could not be put to death; so that "redemption by the death of
Christ" is a fundamental fallacy from the first. Here, as in other
matters, the essence of all the present writer has to say is, that a physical
fulfilment
is always and everywhere the doctrine of delusion. Historic
personality could not authenticate the existence of the Buddha. It had no
meaning when applied to the Christ. They alone could accept such a version who
were non-Gnostics and non-Spiritualists, entirely ignorant of the nature of the
manifestor. It was the type of immortality, not as the mummy-image on earth, but
as the starry Horus; as the Ka or glorified apparition that reappeared
through the dark of death; as the risen Christ who rose upon the horizon of the
resurrection; the Horus, whose name denotes the one who ascends as a spirit.
For, the Egyptian, "only one who comes forth from the body"
applies to the spirit in life, as well as in death. The art of leaving the body
was common to the old dark races, and is practised by the rudest indigenes of
many lands. The Khonds call it the art of Mleepa or transformation. An
Egyptian artist named Iritsen (11th Dynasty) says he knows the "mystery
of the Divine Word," and "how to produce the mode (or form) of
issuing forth and coming in."
Whether in this life or another, the "Wise
Spirits" were all one. "He has become as one of us" is
said of Adam when he had become Dead as "Wise Spirits." It was this
so-called Magical Art of producing abnormal conditions, and the faculty of
Second Sight, that finally established the existence of a permanent
individuality or soul beyond the Seven Elementaries. And it was the mystical
Christ, so established, who alone could bring immortality to light; but not by a
physical resurrection from the tomb. "I am the resurrection and the
life" applies only to the principle or spirit--the 8th, as the one that
rises again, the "only one," as the Ritual has it, "who
ever comes from the body"--the typical eternal who appears as the
deathless one upon the other side of the grave! This Christ cannot be made
Historical or Personal FOR US,--only IN US! That is the doctrine of Paul, of
Philo, and the Gnostics, opposed to the Christian doctrine of the physical or
fleshly faith.
The ultimate soul, type or phase of existence, then, was
not born as a mental concept, nor as the result of an induction, nor as
the dream-shadow made objective; it was practically demonstrated as scientific
matter - of - fact! The Christ of the Gnostics, of Philo-Judæus, and of Paul,
the heavenly man, or second Adam, who came from Above, was no mere doctrinal
abstraction, but the spirit or ghost that could be seen,--as it was seen by Paul
in visions--and made to constitute his own special mystery; and always had been
seen by those who possessed the second sight! even as it continues to be seen by
the abnormal seers of to-day,--which ghost, according to the evidence collected
by the Society for Psychical Research, is also visible at times to ordinary
vision. In pourtraying their Ka image of the spiritual Ego, the glorified
second-self, as a type of the Eternal Being, the Egyptians represented that
which
their Seers saw, and you may trust them for the truth in
this, as in everything else, they were so entirely truthful. Indeed, I think the
mind of man has never had so profound a sense of truth and verity as in the
Egyptian phase. Through life they put their trust in truth, and it was their
principle of cohesion in death. The Osirified deceased says, "I am the
Lord of Truth, living it daily. I am spiritualised, I have become a soul!
I have touched truth." Their typical Eternal is called the sole
being who lives by truth. Before the tribunal of eternal truth the
accused pleads that he has not even altered a story in the telling of it! That
alone was true which is for ever; and all along the line of progress they had
groped in search of that which was ultimately true, and true for ever,--the
exact opposite of the Hindu Maya, the untrue, or delusion. And
they vouch for the fact that the Ghost of Man is a living reality--the final
reality--the Horus or Christ. In comparison with those who know because
they see that there is a continuity of existence beyond the change
called death, because they have the faculty to perceive the dead as living
phantasms embodied in a rarer form, we are all of us on the blind side of
things! They know because they see; and we deny because we do not know. With the
savage or the civilised seeing makes all the difference, and cuts short all
question of the possibility of seeing.
But to return. Esoteric Buddhism tells us the higher
principles of the series which go to constitute man are not fully developed in
the mankind with which we are as yet familiar. Whereas this system of thought,
this mode of representation, this septenary of powers, in various aspects, had
been established in Egypt at least seven thousand years ago, as we learn from
certain allusions to Atum found in the inscriptions lately discovered at
Sakkarah. I say in various aspects because the Gnosis of the Mysteries was at
least seven-fold in its nature--it was Elemental, Biological, Elementary
(human), Stellar, Lunar, Solar, and Spiritual--and nothing short of a grasp of
the whole system can possibly enable us to discriminate the various parts,
distinguish one from the other, and determine the which and the what, as we try
to follow the symbolical Seven through their several phases of character.
The Egyptian Ritual represents the drama of the doctrinal
developments relating to the passage of the Deceased, with his trials and
transformations in the underworld, which furnished the matter of the later
mysteries, including the Greek, Mithraic, and Christian. In this, the Deceased
plays over again the whole seven characters that went to the making up of the
one personality, which became permanent in the eighth nature. He is
reconstructed for the other life in exact accordance with the seven principles
or souls with which he was constructed in this life. On the day of reckoning
souls, the seven constituents have to be collected, counted, and united in one.
According to the dramatic representation, immortality depended on totality. The
seven chief
organs of life, or vehicles of Soul, were all preserved as
types. And when put together again, according to pattern, he is as we say "all
there," with the whole of his parts and members sound. The soul could
exist independently of the heart, but there was no proper reconstruction
possible without the heart being literally "in its right place." It
was thus they acted the Mystery. The Deceased cries, "Do not take my
soul!" (Ba.) "Do not detain my shade!" (Khaba.) "Open
the path to my shade, and my soul, and my intelligence (Akhu) to see the
great God on the day of reckoning souls." One of the Genii says to him,
"I join together thy bones for thee. I revive thy members for thee; I
bring thee thy heart, and put it in its place." Then the Osirified
deceased exclaims, "I am the reckoning which goes in"--"and
the account which comes out"--i.e., when summed up and VERIFIED.
When put together and divinized as the compound image of the Seven, it is said
of the Eighth Soul, "Thy Individuality is permanent!" Having
attained his sevenfold totality, he is the Eighth one, at peace as an enduring
spirit, one of the Verified. The deceased is thus greeted, "Hail
Osiris! thou hast come--thy ka (his spiritual image, or divine likeness) with
thee!" and he is now hailed as the only one ever coming forth from the
body, the foremost of those who belong to the solar race; the sun being the
supreme type of the soul, as the Vivifier for ever. He has culminated in that
unity which Spiritualism enables us to start with, without this prolegomena of
the ancient physics. He makes the significant remark,--"I hasten to
escape the Shades!" whose shadows have been utilised by our friends,
the Theosophists, to explain away, or minimise the extant phenomena called
Spiritualistic.
"The Third principle, or astral body," says
Mr. Sinnett, "is that which is at times taken for the ghost of departed
persons! Also, it may exude from the body of a spiritualistic medium, but it is
no more a being than the cloud in the sky can become an animal, although it may
show a spurious semblance in its form." This is to introduce the direst
confusion, and to utterly mystify that which is sufficiently mystical! The
corporeal or third soul of the series, only persists as a type, because it was
once the highest representative of the soul. Souls that passed off into
spirit-world when the soul was but a shade or covering soul, did not become
sunshades in heaven nor fire-proofs in hell--nor can they issue from the
medium's body as such, even through the sunshade is retained as a pictorial type
of that soul! Yet the sunshade has an equal right to be classed among the
Elementaries with the Astral Shade, or any other symbol of the soul. Indeed, the
Siamese have the sunshade as a seven-fold type. Their sacred umbrella, that used
to be the sunshade of royalty, had seven tiers to it, which represented the
seven heavens in the mythical phase, and the seven souls in the mystical sense.
The spirit that returned to earth when the soul was the corporeal shade, and the
third was the highest in the series, would be the Shade; this being the
corporeal soul, when it appeared on a visit to the living it was
supposed to go back to the body in the tomb, and to pass
away altogether as the body decayed. It could not go to heaven when there was no
heaven made out to go to. Being third in the series, this would become a ghost
that only lived up to the third generation--as we find it among the Zulu
Kaffirs! But the shade never could be one of seven souls emanating from the body
of a medium. In such a climate as ours it would be economical if every medium
could materialise and spread out a covering in that way! Of course, if you
postulate or pourtray a soul at that immature stage of development, it will be
without mind or memory, language, or individuality. It will be a shadow indeed!
And so it reappears amongst the ghosts of Esoteric Buddhism, but it is not one
of the Intelligences known to modern Spiritualism. We may as well say that the
soul of blood became a red mouse, and the soul that fed on blood became a hawk,
and so on all through the series of types; which they did according to the
system of representation, although not in reality.
The Sevens were all correlated, the seven elemental
powers, with the seven elements in man; and these seven souls, or elemental
parts of man, were assigned to seven creators, or gods, and considered as seven
creations in mythology, each of which had its zootype, such as the red mouse,
the hawk, the ape, jackal, serpent, beetle, and crocodile. Seven zootypes having
been adopted to represent seven elements in external nature, these or their equivalents
were continued to express the seven elements or souls in man. The Shrew
mouse was an Egyptian type of the first formation, the soul No. 1, the "blind
Horus," as he was called; the hawk, of the second soul, that of breath
and of sight; the monkey, of reflection (the other self); the jackal, of memory;
the serpent (or goose which laid the egg), of the transformation into adultship;
the frog (or beetle), of the transformation into an intellect; and the
crocodile, Sevekh, which is number seven, into the Seer unseen, the soul as
supreme one of the seven souls. Now, as a soul was once typified by the red
mouse, it is certain that the soul or ghost will be seen as a red mouse; and
accordingly this soul was seen as the red mouse that came out of the sleeper's
mouth, in a German story. This red mouse of a soul is also mentioned by Goëthe
in "Faust." That is the red mouse that typified the primary soul of
blood. The German goddess Holda, the receiver of children's souls, is
represented as commanding a multitude of mice. Moreover, the mouse is sure to
survive in a sort of spirit-world; and here we have it. The moon was a
re-birthplace for the most elementary or rudimentary souls, because it was the
first step on the planetary ladder, above the sublunary sphere. And so we find
the myth of souls in the moon in the shape of little mice. The Dakota Indians
say the waning of the moon is caused by multitudes of mice that are nibbling at
it and causing its disappearance--the mouse being an Egyptian emblem of
disappearance.
The mouse was a type of the first Horus, or soul No. 1.
The
hawk is a type of the soul of breath, or soul No. 2,
because as Hor-Apollo explains, the hawk drinks blood, never water, and the soul
is sustained by blood. As there was a soul that fed on blood in this life, the
soul emaned from the body in death at that stage of thought and expression, will
continue the type in another phase and sphere; so we have a soul or spirit of
the dead that is supposed to come out of the corpse to suck the blood of the
living; and the origin of the Vampire, that only lives by drinking human blood,
has to be sought at this depth of rootage; for the blood-sucking demons of
various kinds are held to be human souls, and not the elemental powers
personified. If you consider (as I do) the ghost to be an objective fact in
nature, the power to demonstrate, and the vision for seeing, may have existed
from the earliest times, and there would be apparitions when the biology had
only identified the blood with the soul of life! Now there is not only evidence
of a haunting spirit at this stage--a soul of blood--a gory ghost, as the
Vampire, but certain evil spirits, when conquered by a Mage like Solomon, always
fled to, and were drowned in, the Red Sea, which was their fabled home and
birthplace. That is the Egyptian Red Lake of Primordial Matter! In the Book of
the Dead, certain undeveloped and rudimentary souls are sent back again, doomed
to be resolved into the primal element, and are said in the texts to be
suppressed in blood; they make their typical return to that from which they
came.
Each of the Seven Principles, or Appetites, or souls, had
the physical prototype, that was separately preserved by the Egyptians--the
brain, tongue, heart, stomach, and other vehicles of life. Thus when the Kroo
negroes hold that the stomach of a man ascends to heaven after death, we
can understand it as a representative of one of the souls, or appetites. This
soul of the stomach would need to be fed. No wonder, then, if we should hear of
a demon in the shape of a stomach that goes about seeking whom it may devour.
This is the Kephu of the Karens, a wandering wizard's stomach supposed to
prey upon the souls of men.
Raw flesh and blood were offered to the uncivilised and
gory ghost. But in the second phase a Soul of Breath would be more refined and
not considered capable of consuming material food. At this stage we hear of the
spirits snuffing the vapours and steam of victuals, inhaling the essences and
smelling the aroma of food or the fragrance of flowers. In fine, we see
provisions cold and hot offered--some things to eat and others to smell--the
body and spirit of aliment, so to say, being presented to the Corporeal Soul of
Matter and the less palpable Soul of Breath.
The shrew-mouse, or the bird, has no likeness to the human
being, but the ape has a little. And at this third stage the nearest likeness to
the human is adapted to express the other, or reflected, self, at the stage of
the third soul; the Shade in Egypt is synonymous with the God Shu, one of whose
types is the Great Ape. The Ape, as a type of the Soul, may account for the
African superstition
of men being changed into monkeys after death; the
primitive symbol having been literalised. Now, Esoteric Buddhism professes to
give some account of the seven races of man (which are founded on the seven
souls) and of the evolution of the elementary into the human. In his third stage
we are told that the "Coming man had developed at first the form rather
of a giant ape than of a true man, but with intelligence coming more and more
into the ascendant." Here we can clutch the proof that the third race
is a continuation of the third soul, and that the basis of both is to be
found in Egyptian typology; for the giant ape in Egypt was the type of the third
elementary, the God Shu, or shade, the monkey-man on the monuments!
The Marawi say the souls of bad men after death will
become jackals; and the jackal was another of the elementaries, the one who
possibly represented the fourth soul, that of memory, as he was made the
remembrancer and recorder of the gods.
The soul was also reckoned to be a birth of time! Hermes
alludes to every soul that is in flesh by the wonderful working of the gods in
circles! In the Ritual the deceased says, "My soul is from the
beginning, from the reckoning of years"--and he boasts that he has time
in his body! Time is Seb, and the soul of Seb is the soul of pubescence--our
soul No. 5. The goose that laid the egg was a type of this soul! The goose being
a representative of the soul born of time, an equivalent for the soul according
to a symbolical mode of expression, you have only to continue that type in
spirit-world or fairy-world for the goose to become identical with a spirit, and
you may expect to find the goose amongst the elementaries--as in fact we do. In
German faeryology, or the spiritualism of folk-lore, we find a class of
earth-spirits, or wee folk, who visit the living; and when the ground is strewn
with ashes overnight the footprints are supposed to be visible next morning as
those of the goose or duck. Here the returning spirit is identifiable with the
likeness of Seb, or with his type the goose, but it does not mean that the human
soul came back upon the feet of a goose! The ancient typology was continued, and
remains to be interpreted. Take it literally at any stage and you must be all
wrong, as are those Esoteric Buddhists who have mistaken an ancient mode of
expression for a reality, and continued it into the future of the human soul,
and applied it to the development of the human race, in doing which they are but
wandering in a mental wilderness that is dark overhead with the shadows of the
past.
The beetle was a type of our sixth soul, an emblem of
transformation; and some of the primitive races held that a certain low class of
spirits turn into beetles after death.
The crocodile, whose Egyptian name is Sevekh, or seventh,
was a type of intelligence, as the seventh soul, the supreme one of seven,
because (so Plutarch says) it could see in the water when its eyelids were
closed over the eyes. It was thus the seer unseen. In
the Kaffir languages the crocodile and a spirit (i.e., a
soul, or the intelligence) have the same name. It is said to be believed by some
of the Inner Africans that when a child of their's is born the mother gives
birth to a crocodile at the same time. Here the Egyptian symbolism (over which I
have spent a third of my lifetime) will enable us to interpret the meaning!
These poor people intend to say their children are born with an intelligent
soul, and the fact is expressed in the African language of typology.
But the human soul in its upward ascent had not actually
passed through the stages of the mouse, hawk, ape, jackal, goose, beetle, and
crocodile; nor will it return to or in any such shapes; nor did it project seven
such elementaries as its shadows into spirit-world; nor did any primitive race,
whether savage, Egyptian, or Hindu, ever think these things. Nor were they
evolutionists in the Darwinian sense. It was a mode of expression, still
readable in the Ritual, where the speaker, in making his transformations of the
soul, says--"I am the mouse," "I am the hawk," "I am
the ape;" jackal, goose, or serpent; "I am the crocodile whose
soul comes from men"--that is, as a type of intelligence; "I am
the soul of the gods," the Horus, or Christ, as the outcome of all.
Moreover, each of these souls had its representative type
of Sacrifice that was eaten in eucharistic rites, and these might be traced more
or less from the Shrew-mouse, that was eaten by the Hebrews, down to the body
and blood of Jesus eaten by the Christians, as a mystery of transubstantiation.
It is in vain that the Pseudo-Esoterists try to saddle
modern Spiritualism with this bestial set of acquaintances, elementaries,
shadows, and shells as our relatives in another world. They are ignorant of the
beginning, the natural genesis of this system of representation. They do not
seem to know that the transformations of Buddha were of the same character, and
originated in the same zoomorphic typology. The Buddha, or supreme soul, that
reaches the top of attainment as the outcome of the previous seven, has in a
sense been all seven, because of the one life running through them all--just as
the mature man has been boy, babe, embryo. It consequently follows that
whatsoever types the seven have been masked under, or represented by, may be
applied to the Buddha as the ascending human soul. Hence he has various
transmigrations and re-births, in which he emerges now as a bird, an ape, a
frog--now as one kind of animal, now as another, because these were at first
symbolic of the seven elements of body and soul that made up the totality of
being--which elements in man, or in external nature, had been imaged by the
zootypes of totemism that were continued as ideographs in a later phase of
thought, and had no reference at all to any remote course of pre-human evolution
on earth.
The Seven Races of Men that have been sublimated and made
Planetary by Esoteric Buddhism, may be met with in the Bundahish as (1) the
earth-men; (2) water-men; (3) breast-eared men; (4)
breast-eyed men; (5) one-legged men; (6) bat-winged men;
(7) men with tails. But these were never real races of men.
These are they who were created in the likenesses of the
Seven Elementals, who were represented by Zootypes, which were afterwards
continued in the heraldry of Tribal Totemism. Mr. Sinnett's instructors have
mistaken these shadows of the Past, for things human and spiritual. They are
neither, and never were either. This mode of representation can be studied as
intended typology in Egypt, whereas, in India, a land that is haunted with the
phantoms of metaphysics, it has been perverted into a system of metempsychosis,
and a doctrine of migration for the human soul. In the Egyptian Judgment scenes,
it is common to see the wicked soul sent back as, or by means of, an unclean
beast--the sow being the type of uncleanness. Such symbolical representation was
made actual in India, where such souls are sent back to earth as beasts
or reptiles. It is affirmed in the Book of Manu that "In whatever
disposition a man accomplishes such and such an act, he shall reap the fruit in
a body endowed with such and such a quality." As Hor-Apollo says, the
Egyptians denoted a people obedient to their king, by depicting a bee! and then
the Jewish Rabbins, adopting the type, say the soul of a governor who exalts
himself proudly above his people, goes into a bee! When the Jews speak of souls
that migrate into beasts and birds, and Plato of souls being re-incarnated into
birds and beasts, they are making unwarrantable use of the primitive typology.
In the later teachings, conveyed by means of the ancient symbolism, it was
threatened that the fleshly soul would be reborn as a mouse or an ass; the thief
would become a rapacious rat; the coward, a reptile; the bloodthirsty tyrant a
vulture, or devouring beast of prey; the lowest classes, into the vilest
creatures. This is but the other side of the same mental coinage, and it is only
to be understood as belonging to the same symbolism. All such primitive
doctrines were indigenous to India, long ages before the latest Esoteric
Buddhism was born; and here, as elsewhere, only in the earliest phases and
physics, can we ever reach the root of the matter. So often the more abstract
doctrines have no other foundation than this of perverted typology, the
resulting metaphysical phantasmagoria being then put forth as an Esoteric
revelation! That is, the mode or representation, which was only true as
fable, has been moralized and made false in fact. An ancient mode of expression
has become a modern mould of thought.
I once had a singular experience with an incipient medium,
who came to me at the moment when my mind was full of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
After he had entered the state of trance, these images appeared to take shape
and "go for him!" He seemed to be surrounded and pursued by the very
animals I had just been copying. Because he at first mistook the mental pictures
for objective realities! And this is exactly what has been done by the pseudo-Esoterists
represented by Mr. Sinnett.
The natural genesis was physical and followable; the
expression was typical. In the later metaphysical phase we have only the shadow,
the returning manes of the once living meaning, trying to pass itself off
as a revelation of future reality. Metamorphosis of the soul was ancestral,
biological, and figurative, at first; then it was continued in the astronomical
allegory--both of which are omitted by the pseudo-Esoterists. And, lastly, it
was made mystical by metaphysical assumption in the later systems of Esoteric
hermeneutics; and now it is pretended that the last was first, and the uppermost
stratum was primary, or, in the beginning, which it IS only in beginning
to go back.
In conclusion. It has been my literary lot to explore the
past of human thought, and its modes of expression, somewhat thoroughly, as an
evolutionary fundamentalist. The obscurity lessened by slow degrees. I began to
see how the primary "types" of thought were originated of
necessity, and for use; how they became the signs of expression in
language and mythology; and how theology, by its perversions and
misrepresentations, has instituted a reign of error throughout the whole domain
of religion. But, I am not one of those who go back to rehabilitate the past, or
resuscitate the religion of Osiris, or Hermes, or Buddha, any more than that
assigned to Jesus by 300 sects of Christians. Neither am I at enmity with the
Theosophists. I am ready to join hands with all who work for the universal
brotherhood; and I am their best ally, if they only knew it.
My desire is to gain all the knowledge the past can give,
and supplement it with all that is known in the present, but with face set
steadfastly toward the dawn of a still more luminous day of a larger knowledge,
and of loftier out-look in the future! If we turn back to the past for our
revelation and authoritative teaching, we are exalting the child as father to
the man. The past is a region to explore, and learn of it all we can. It is
impossible to understand the present without the profoundest knowledge of the
past. Without a comprehension of the laws of evolution and development in the
past, and of survival in the present, we can have no opinion ourselves that is
of the least value to others. And then we want to get out of it, and away from
it, by growth, individual and national, as fast and as far as ever we are able.
They are blind guides who seek to set up the past as superior to the present,
because they may have a little more than ordinary knowledge of some special
phase of it! There were no other facts or faculties in nature for the Hindu
adepts or Egyptian Rekhi than there are for us, although they may have brooded
for ages and ages over those of a supra-normal kind. The faculties with which
the Adepts can--as Mr. Sinnett says--read the mysteries of other worlds, and of
other states of existence, and trace the current of life on our globe, are
identical with those of our clairvoyants and mediums, however much more
developed and disciplined they may be in the narrower grooves of ancient
knowledge. Much
of the wisdom of the past depends on its being held secret
and Esoteric--on being "kept dark," as we say. It is like the corals,
that live whilst they are covered over and concealed in the waters, but die on
reaching day!
Moreover, it is a delusion to suppose there is anything in
the experience or wisdom of the past, the ascertained results of which can only
be communicated from beneath the cloak and mask of mystery, by a teacher who
personates the unknown accompanied by rites and ceremonies belonging to the
pantomime and paraphernalia of the ancient medicine men. They are the
cultivators of the mystery in which they seek to enshroud themselves, and live
the other life as already dead men in this; whereas we are seeking to explore
and pluck out the heart of the mystery. Explanation is the soul of science. They
will tell you we cannot have their knowledge without living their life. But we
may not all retire into a solitude to live the existence of ecstatic dreamers.
Personally I do not want the knowledge for myself. These treasures I am in
search of I need for others. I want to utilise both tongue and pen and printer's
type; and if there are secrets of the purer and profounder life, we cannot
afford them to be kept secret; they ask to be made universally known. I do not
want to find out that I am a god in my inner consciousness. I do not seek the
eternal soul of self. I want the ignorant to know, the benighted to become
enlightened, the abject and degraded to be raised and humanized; and would have
all means to that end proclaimed world-wide, not patented for the individual
few, and kept strictly private from the many. I cannot join in the new
masquerade and simulation of ancient mysteries manufactured in our time by
Theosophists, Hermeneutists, pseudo-Esoterists, and Occultists of various orders
howsoever profound their pretensions. The very essence of all such mysteries as
are got up from the refuse leavings of the past is pretence, imposition, and
imposture. The only interest I take in the ancient mysteries is in ascertaining
how they originated, in verifying their alleged phenomena, in knowing what they
meant on purpose to publish the knowledge as soon and as widely as possible.
Public experimental research, the printing press, and a free-thought platform,
have abolished the need of mystery. It is no longer necessary for Science to
take the veil, as she was forced to do for security in times past. Neither was
the ancient gnosis kept concealed at first on account of its profundity, so much
as on account of its primitive simplicity. That significance which the esoteric
misinterpreters try to read into it was not in the nature of it
originally--always excepting the phenomena of Spiritualism. There is a regular
manufacture of the old masters carried on by impostors in Rome. The modern
manufacture of ancient mysteries is just as great an imposition, and equally
sure to be found out. Do not suppose I am saying this, or waging war, on behalf
of the mysteries called Christian, for
I look upon them as the greatest imposition of all. Rome
was the manufactory of old masters 1800 years ago. I am opposed to all man-made
mystery, and all kinds of false belief. The battle of truth and error is not to
be darkly fought now-a-days behind the mask of secrecy. Darkness gives all its
advantage to error; day light alone is in favour of truth! Nature is full of
mystery; and we are here to make out the mysteries of Nature and draw them into
day-light, not to cultivate and keep veiled the mysteries made by man in the day
of his need or the night of his past. We want to have done with the mask of
mystery and all the devious devilries of its double-facedness, so that we may
look fully and squarely into the face of Nature for ourselves, whether in the
past, present, or future. Mystery has been called the mother of abominations,
but the abominations themselves are the superstitions, the rites and ceremonies,
the dogmas, doctrines, delusive idealisms, and unjust laws that have been
falsely founded on the ancient mysteries by ignorant literalisation and esoteric
misinterpretation!
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In quoting evidence of the double doctrine ascribed to
Paul, I omitted one of the most conclusive illustrations of the fact. We read in
Galatians iii. 13--"Christ hath redeemed us from the Curse of the Law, being
made a Curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that
hangeth on a Tree." The object of hanging the Condemned One on the tree
was to make him Accursed. But what says the voice of Paul the Gnostic in another
text (Cor. xii. 3)?--"No man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus Accursed,
and no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Spirit."
That is, the Christ of the Gnosis could not become accursed, could not be hung
upon a tree, and no Gnostic would say that Jesus was the KURIOS save in the
mystical or esoteric sense. Here the Historic and Gnostic doctrines are directly
antipodal. This again is the teaching of Paul--"Say not in thy heart,
Who shall ascend into Heaven? (that is, to bring Christ down;) or, Who shall
descend into the abyss? (that is, to bring Christ up from the Dead.) The Word is
nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart." That is, the Word as
preached by Paul. Then follows the interpolation. Also, as an illustration of
the statement made by Clement Alexander--that Paul said he would bring the
Gnosis or Hidden Wisdom to the Brethren in Rome--it should have been shown by me
that the teaching of the Epistle (ch. i. 23-32) is taken almost bodily
and repeated nearly verbatim from ch. xiv. 12-31 of the "Wisdom of
Solomon."
The Karast, which I claim to be the Egyptian
original of the Greek Christ, was an image of rising again--a representative of
the resurrection; and in speaking of this symbol I ought to have pointed to the
fact that the alleged historic resurrection of Jesus has never yet been found
pourtrayed on the so-called early Christian Monuments, including those
discovered in the Roman Catacombs. But what do we find there in place of the
missing fact? The scene of Lazarus being raised from the dead. This is
depicted over and over again as the typical resurrection where there is
no real one! Christ of Egypt reproduced in Rome like the other Mythical
types perpetuated there by Gnostic Art. As the image is Egyptian, it is probable
that the name is so likewise. Las (or ras) signifies to be raised up, and
aru is another name for the Mummy-type; so that Las-aru, or
Lazarus, with the Greek terminal, is the Egyptian symbol of resurrection called
the Karast, or Christ. This typical and pictorial representation of the
rising from the dead would become the story of Lazarus in the natural course of
humanising the Mythos.