The resolution of the “birth of Christ” into the
delivery of a babe in a localized Bethlehem has kept the race from realizing the
true meaning of the Messianic fulfillment. With the third century conversion of
the features of the age-old spiritual drama into the alleged biography of a
man-savior, the outlines of the great truth that a ray of the solar Logos was
incorporated distributively in animal humanity faded out and were obliterated.
All sound sense of the inner signification of the Christmas nativity tableau was
irrevocably lost. The annual celebration of the advent of deity to earth remains
a meaningless travesty to this day.
It becomes necessary, then, to outline the historical
trends that led to the obscuration of this central feature of religious cultism.
This is in no sense a diversion, but the most direct approach to the correct
envisagement of ancient material. It will reveal items of the utmost strategic
importance for a true evaluation of archaic structures. The restoration of the
lost meaning will be given greater credence if the causes of its decadence are
set forth.
The knowledge that a fragment of the spiritual heart of
the sun was implanted in the body of each son of man to be his soul and his god
was the golden secret imparted by the hierophants in the Mystery Schools to
their qualified pupils. It was regarded as such a priceless treasure that these
Secret Brotherhoods were organized specifically to guard its esoteric
inviolability. From age to age it passed down the stream of oral transmission,
now waning in one quarter, but spreading in another, and was revived
periodically by messengers who came as the agents of a hierarchy of perfected
men. From remote antiquity it was present in China, Tibet, India, Chaldea,
Egypt. It was carried by the priests of the Orphic Mysteries over to the
Hellenic world.1 It was disseminated in the Greek areas in the philosophies of
Pythagoras, Plato, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras;2 was embodied in the
51
poetry of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; in the dramas of
Euripides and Aeschylus. From Egypt and Chaldea it emerged in the religion of
the Hebrews, who wrought its myths, allegories and symbols obscurely into their
Old Testament, but had more authentically kept the deposit in their ancient
Kabalah. It was taken up by pre-Christian and early Christian Gnostics, being
contained with sufficient clarity in the great Gnostic work, Pistis Sophia, a
work conjecturally of Basilides or Valentinus. Its Orphic-Platonic rescension
was widely republished by the Neo-Platonist school in the second, third and
fourth centuries, with ample elucidation, a measure adopted in all likelihood by
the spiritual hierarchy to check the growing trend of the nascent Christian
movement toward the complete exoterization of its esoteric message. It was
reintegrated eclectically around Alexandria by such syncretists as Maximius of
Tyre, Ammonias Saccas and Philo Judaeus, powerfully influencing the character of
primitive Christianity. It was carried most directly into Christian
documentation by St. Paul, whom many scholars claim on evidence to have been
himself an Initiate in the Greek Mysteries (as were Clement and Origen in the
Egyptian), and also by St. John, whose Bible writings are decidedly more
Platonic than distinctively Christian. The visible thread of its transmission
runs on to Plutarch, after whom it became more subterranean, being propagated by
Hermeticists, Therapeutae, Rosicrucians, Platonists, Mystics, Illuminati,
Alchemists, Brothers of various designations and secret fraternities in Europe,
out of sight of the jealous eye of the all-powerful Church. At the period of its
lowest ebb in Europe it was tided over the danger of total extinction by Arabian
and Moorish scholars and Jewish students in Spain. The teaching was preserved
and handed on by such associations in Medieval Europe as the Cathedral Builders,
the Platonic Academy of Florence, the Alchemists, the “Fire Philosophers,”
the Troubadours and Minnesingers, by secret printers, among them Aldus Minutius
of Venice, who reprinted the classic Greek literature that ushered in the
Italian Renaissance. Sporadically, now in one region, now in another, it took
form in outward movements in groups of mystic and pietistic tendency of many
names. It was the secret spring of motive and meaning in most medieval
literature, in the folk-lore, the hero legends, the fairy myths, the Arthurian
cycle, the Mabinogian tales, the Peredur stories, the Niebelungenlied, the
castle ballads, the Romance of the Rose and many another invention of esoteric
skill.
52
Features of it came to be embodied in a thousand
conventional forms of common “superstition.” It was pictorially outlined in
the set of Tarot Cards of the Bohemians in the twelfth century. Philosophers
such as Paracelsus, Raymond Lully, Pletho, Cardano, Philalethes, Robert Fludd
(from whose work on Moses Milton is said to have derived his theses on which
Paradise Lost was built) and others presented aspects of it in more or less
surreptitious fashion. Jacob Boehme’s “Theosophical Points” vitally
influenced Newton’s thought in important directions, as he confesses.
Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo acknowledge their debt to the principles of the
ancient science. Later came the English Platonists More and Cudworth, and it is
alleged that Francis Bacon and the mysterious Count de St. Germain formulated
the body of Masonic ritualism upon the old principles.
Coming to the surface again in recent years it is being
revived by Rosicrucians, Theosophists, Kabalists, Esotericists, Mystics,
Spiritual and Psychic Scientists and Parapsychologists in large numbers, and is
perhaps the most vital movement in the thought life of today.
The door to this rejuvenescence of an influence so long
buried was opened during the last century by the studies in Comparative Religion
and Comparative Mythology assiduously pursued by many scholars. There was needed
nothing but a mind free from bias to discern the unity, amounting virtually to
identity, underlying all the old systems, which expressed so clearly the
characteristic features of what appeared to have been a universal primal world
religion, with the solar myth as its corner-stone. Every great historical
religion is readily seen to have been, at its start, a pure expression of the
basic elements of this outline, and equally readily seen to have badly vitiated
the pristine purity of teaching in later decadence. A gross transgressor in this
respect is seen to be Christianity, which carried original spiritual meaning
further afield than perhaps any other. It is desirable to trace the causes and
progress of this corruption.
The blanket assertion that ancient spiritual light was
darkly obscured under Christian handling is a challenging statement and must be
given the room to vindicate itself. This work in its entirety will amount to a
substantiation of that claim. The point can be carried only by an ample
reproduction of the substance of the archaic world religion, so that the clear
outlines of the great pristine doctrines of theology as they were apprehended in
the arcane schools, may by contrast reveal the darkness
53