CONCEPTIONS AND PORTENTS OF AN AVATAR
The conflict between Science and Religion has been thoroughly thrashed out during the last half century, and the “reign of law,” and orderly, and progressive evolution, have made for themselves a habitation and a name that nothing is likely to overthrow.
It is recognized that every effect has a sufficient and a commensurate cause, not en bloc, but in matter, energy, mind, and spirit. Action and reaction are definite mathematical processes. The parallelogram of force tends everywhere to equilibrium and secures further action and new processes under universal law.
The “special creation” theory—everything made out of nothing by a personal God—is no longer regarded as tenable by intelligent individuals, though miracle and special providence are often included in accounting for the vicissitudes of life, just as the so-called scientist superficially and flippantly uses the word “coincidence,” as though it really explained anything.
“The rational order that pervades the universe,” as Prof. Huxley defined the concept and aim of scientific discovery, has steadily gained ascendancy, until it dominates and measures individual intelligence.
The criticism is still occasionally made that this means Pantheism, overlooking the fact that in all mythologies and cosmologies, an ideal and pure theism was recognized as lying back of and beyond the pantheons of the gods and the deification of the powers of Nature.
This was true in the Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and Hindoo mythologies. Back of the many, and beyond the transient and contending divinities, was the One, postulated, but unknown and changeless.
Every religion known to man, with the advancing civilization of a people, copied, modified, adopted, and adapted the mythology and folklore of some pre-existing religion and people. This is readily demonstrable with the Hebrew, Greek, and later Christian dispensations, notwithstanding the most strenuous and persistent determination to deny, disprove, and destroy the ancient records.
It is embodied in the etymology of the very names of heroes, gods, and demigods. A new language arising with any people de novo can nowhere be found.
Phonetics and picturegraphs, the various alphabets and glyphs, are mixed and modified, but never invented nor altogether changed.
Complicated as they may be, it is thus that philology, ethnology, theology, and anthropology constitute a consistent whole, the mythology and folklore of mankind. This reveals the practical unity and solidarity of the human race.
The tradition and prophecy among the ancient Hebrews of the coming of the Messiah, the portents that heralded, and the signs and wonders that preceded or accompanied his appearance, are merely translations or adaptations from previous eras, Buddhas, or Avatars.
Whether Christian or non-Christian, the object of the advent is always identical.
The light of the spirit having become enfeebled or obscured, the people are left in darkness and given over to sin and wickedness. Moral ruin seems inevitable unless there is a divine influx, a new Avatar, or Buddha, or Advent of the God-man.
God incarnates himself as the son of Mary, and Jesus says, “I am come a light into the world that whosoever believeth in me should not abide in darkness.”
Christna says, “Though I am unborn, and my nature is eternal, and I am the Lord also of all creatures, yet taking control of my nature-form, I am born by my illusive power. For whenever piety decays, O son of Bharata, and impiety is in the ascendant, then I produce myself. For the protection of good men, for the destruction of evildoers, for the re-establishment of piety, I am born from age to age.” (Bhagavadgita.)
The historical Buddha taught that he was only one of a long series of Buddhas, who appear at intervals in the world, and who all teach the same system. After the death of each Buddha his religion flourishes for a time and then decays, till at last it is completely forgotten and wickedness and violence rule the earth. The names of twenty-four of these Buddhas who appeared previous to Gautama have been handed down to us, just as the “second coming of Christ” is believed in and referred to among the Christians.
Even the Mohammedan Koran refers to this succession of prophets and messengers of Allah. The same is true of the Parsis.
“I have said that I first of all chose Abad, and after him I sent thirteen prophets in succession, all called Abad. By these fourteen prophets the world enjoyed prosperity.”
“Tradition informs us that when these auspicious prophets and their successors behold evil to prevail among mankind, they invariably withdraw from among them—as they could not endure to behold or hear wickedness.”
This is precisely what happened to Egypt after the ambitious priesthood had gained the ascendency. The Master Builders retired.
Bonwick says (“Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought”): “What is commonly called the Christ idea of humanity, thus appears to have been the hope and consolation of the ancient Egyptians so many thousand years ago.”
That which thus appears and disappears, dies out and is born again, is the spiritual light in the soul of man.
The diversity of man’s intellectual activities exercise, elaborate, and deepen his mental perceptions, and these largely concern the things of sense and time, his appetites, passions, desires, and ambitions.
Back of and beyond all these lie the things of the spirit. On the physical plane of life the former obscure and crowd out the latter, which are thus continually in need of renewal.
In adapting the new revelation to the conditions of life on the physical plane, it is intellectualized and theologized. Pundits and theologians undertake to explain what it all means and how it happened to be. Hence arise wrangles, disputes, and finally creeds, dogmas, and persecution.
“Men fight like devils for the love of God.” This is the ultimate history of every religion known to man.
Meantime, the soul of man, a spiritual being dwelling in a material body on the physical plane, is seeking real knowledge of spiritual things.
This real knowledge is an experience of the soul. It concerns, and is comprised in, the living of a life. It is more than mind or intellect. It is knowledge gained by experience. “This only I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see.”
“Whether in the body or out of the body, I know not, but I saw things impossible to utter.”
Gradually man’s idea of God and his conception of Nature have changed and enlarged.
Man, as a spiritual being, is part of a spiritual universe. He has been able to harmonize his concept of God and Nature progressively as he has gained larger views and deeper insight of both. He is no longer a puppet of infinite caprice, nor a somewhat “improved animal.”
The idea of man as a “fallen god” with the capacity to regain his heavenly estate, is far nearer the truth.
As man advances in knowledge through the combined experiences of his spiritual nature and his physical embodiment, his beliefs change, his horizon enlarges, and his concepts become elevated and purified. The past is apprehended and utilized and the future intelligently anticipated. He begins to understand.
This means the recognition of law and order, permanency, Foundation, and stability.
The birth stories, the portents, signs and wonders that announce, accompany, or follow the birth of a Messiah or Avatar, are almost identical. A common instinct seems to have led all scripture-compilers to infer a simultaneous stimulus of nature and man upon the appearance of what the Hindoo calls an Avatar.
Men, too, seem prepared to expect such an advent as its necessary time approaches. It is an instinct which tells them that “the darkest hour precedes the dawn.”
In the Christian scriptures the premonitions and birth stories are found largely in the Apocryphal books. Doubtless the copying and substitution from the lives of Christna and Buddha were too plain.
At the death of Jesus the seismic, astral, and cosmic disturbances are graphically described, as befitting the death of a god. “The veil of the temple was rent in twain,” etc.
The simple fact is that mankind feels instinctively in the soul the far-reaching influences at work. The spiritual nature is stirred to its depths, and when he tries to describe what he sees and feels, his emotions, fears, or aspirations being at white heat, his imagination draws from the folklore of other times, races, and religions, to express what he so powerfully, but vaguely senses.
But beyond all this, the time of great religious revivals and social upheavals is likely to coincide with seismic disturbance, tidal waves and the like, owing to the conjunction of planets under the general law of cycles. Man is completely involved with and evolved from the bosom of Nature. His freedom is determined by knowledge and obedience to Law.
From the mystic Hymns of Orpheus, with the legends of Gods, demigods, and heroes, and the personification of the varied powers of man and nature, arose the Greek Pantheon, which, in poetic concept, romantic and dramatic embodiment and expression, as a concise and complete whole, has probably never been equaled by man.
True, every essential element, under a different name and detail, may be found elsewhere, but never equaled in concise and constructive folklore and mythology.
But running underneath all this, like a vein of gold under the mountain, was the philosophy of Plato. Grasping the One from the many, Unity from the fantastic diversity, he came to the individual experience of the human soul and its conscious mastership over the body and the things of sense and time.
Civic pride, patriotism, and heroism, walked side by side with dialectics, and the pantheon of the gods and the achievements of warriors rivaled each other on the stage, as themes for the poetic philosopher and dramatist.
Mythology and folklore here furnished a background from which the philosophy of the mysteries and the real science of life gained a hearing.
Plato and Pythagoras generalized, and with many reservations represented that which they had been taught in the mysteries of Egypt.
Greece, with its triumphs in literature, in the drama and in art, and all its magnificent civilization, knew no Avatar.
Jacolliot, in his “Bible in India,” has shown conclusively that not only the whole Greek pantheon, its folklore and mythology, and even its civil code were adopted from the Laws of Manu and the far older Aryan civilization, including even the names of heroes.
The fame of Greece rests upon its Genius for Construction in Art and Architecture and the Drama, and upon the open door it gave to Philosophy. There was no dominant priesthood to close the door of progress.
It utilized all the past and built and beautified the present.
It bequeathed no creed nor dogma to the future, and yet its civilization was transcendent and is immortal.
It had its canons of Art and of Architecture. These it demonstrated by constructive work. It illustrated, explained and exemplified, but it did not argue nor dogmatize.
The world for two thousand years has been “going back to Greece” and trying to explain how it all happened, just as we have been trying to explain Goethe’s “Faust.”
Genius is transcendent and immortal.
With the decline of Greece there arose the Genius of the Tiber, Imperial Rome, and the Cæsars.
Rome created an Avatar out of the “Babe of Bethlehem.” Having enthroned Jehovah, it proceeded to deify Jesus, and then by substitution to take the place of both.
Imperial Rome, the “Scarlet Mother of the Tiber,” assumed the government and dictatorship of the world. Imperial, dogmatic, relentless, the arbiter of the fate of humanity on earth and beyond.
Here was arbitrary, relentless power at any cost, to be maintained on any terms. “The end always justified the means.”
In the civilization of Greece, the Individual, the citizen was first, and association and co-operation built the State.
With Rome the Individual is nothing but a pawn, an accessory to the Church. It was and is the Church first, last, and all the time. The Individual can claim no right nor prerogative except as a concession from the Church.
The contrast is extreme and absolute between the Genius of Greece and that of Rome.
As the Genius of Greece was adapted from the older Aryan, so also was that of Rome, from the Brahmans, through Egypt.
Among the various Avatars of old India designated as “Incarnations of Vishnu,” Siva “the destroyer,” was often in evidence.
Rome proceeded to adopt the Hindoo Trinity—Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva—(the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer), and to so shape its creed and dogmas as to secure and maintain the power of Mother Church, simply with a change of names—“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
It has enslaved nations and slaughtered millions in order to maintain its power. For more than fifteen hundred years it has maintained its relentless warfare against the inalienable rights of the Individual, and the inevitable progress of humanity.
It has escaped the execration of the world only by its priestly trick of deifying Jesus and sophisticating every doctrine that he taught. Supporting its pretensions by Mariolatry, the Auricular Confession, and its army of spies and inquisitors, it has dominated mankind, impoverished whole nations, devastated provinces and murdered all who opposed its progress wherever and whenever it has gained civil power.
Rome is to-day the literal and visible reincarnation of Siva, the Avatar of Destruction. She has originated nothing. Her mass and all her ritualistic mummeries are adopted from paganism at its worst stage and in its most degenerate form, and she awaits the fate that befell Egypt and all her predecessors, “Sodom, Gomorrah, and the cities of the plain.”
Protestantism has hitherto “protested” only in part. Refusing Mariolatry and auricular confession, Protestantism, by accepting the miraculous conception, the deification of Jesus and the vicarious atonement, has kept Rome in countenance.
When these are swept away, and their doom is already declared by the leaders of thought in nearly all our institutions of higher learning, the Roman Avatar will stand revealed in all its nakedness and villainy to the execration of mankind. It is this “Modernism” that “His Holiness” so much fears and is trying to arrest. It is too late, unless civilization and the march of time move backward.
The most amazing thing about it all is, how the world, with its present intelligence and culture, can be so indifferent to this most aggressive, cruel, and relentless Avatar of all the ages, instead of repelling it with contempt and execration.
Thirty-seven Italian Cardinals,[2] proud and arrogant, rule the Church, elect the Pope, and assume dictatorship of the earth, as also arbiters of human destiny, here and hereafter. America, the corn-bin of this modern Egypt, by courtesy has one cardinal, just to keep her in countenance.
The effrontery is cyclopean, but our supineness and indifference are deplorable and inexcusable.
Shipping her impoverished, degraded, criminal, and priest-ridden hordes to America by the million every year, Rome is massing her army for the overthrow of our government and all our present civilization. With her dogma of obedience, her army now votes and will, by and by, fight under the dictatorship of the Cardinals at Rome. Already undermining our Public Free Schools, boycotting the public press, with their army of Jesuit spies and secret assassins of every liberty prized by man, the “merry war” goes on right under our eyes, and we sleep and dream and blindly assume that “there is no danger.”
Read the history of the Crusaders, of the Protestant Reformation and of the “Holy Inquisition,” and if further enlightenment is needed, study the origin, history, and denouement of all the Avatars of the past, the fate of Egypt, the cities of the plain, where paganism and a degenerate priesthood usurped the place of pure and undefiled religion, and literally wiped from the map of the world the civilizations of the past. Nemesis is written in letters of flame across the starry heavens, as an atonement for the blood of nations and the degeneracy and diabolism of an ambitious, cruel, relentless, and unrestrained priesthood. And it is all being literally repeated to-day without the novelty of a new idea, or method, or device, or motive. It is The Reincarnation of the Avatar of Siva, the Destroyer.
At the death of Pope Leo there were 65 Cardinals, 39 of whom were Italians.