Lecture VI
The Coming Christ
Friends: Looking back over the long story of the past we can see certain mighty, grandiose figures emerging from the great crowd of human beings, men who tower far above their generation, who are giants, as it were, with pigmies around them; however far we look back such figures are ever to be seen, until at last the mists appear to roll across this great vista of the past, and even through those mists we can discover the outlines of great Ones who teach and bless mankind. To the great mass of students these figures, standing out in the past, appear very closely to resemble each other. We cannot, as it were, distinguish Them with regard to Their knowledge or Their power; all are so far above the men of the time, so far above the most advanced humanity of our own day, that it seems impossible to throw Them into any kind of order, or to understand how far They are part of one great group of mighty Beings; what relation They bear to each other we cannot see; what Their rank in the hierarchy of the superhuman we are practically unable to say. But as the occult student tries to study the past, there are certain indications that he can grasp which serve as a kind of guide as to these mighty Beings. He sees great world-cycles of different extent, embracing longer or shorter periods of time, and he is able to trace some relation between these mighty Beings and the cycles of the world, the point of time at which They appear, at which They manifest. And by this study of the past, assisted by occult methods, these periods in the world’s story and these Teachers of the world’s humanity fall into quite definite relations.
We can notice, looking back, that there are four great ages through which the world passes in its long evolutionary history, ages that are often referred to in what are called the mythologies of the past, ages which are characterised very differently the one from the other, and in which the whole cycle of the world’s story is divided. It may be noticed that at the beginning of each of those huge cycles a very great figure appears, as though, when the world was entering on a new phase of life, it were necessary that a special benediction should descend upon it, a special light should shine out. When we ask who are the great Ones who mark these longest periods in human history, we are told that They are Beings belonging to past worlds, belonging to other planets than our own, planets and worlds older in the scale of manifestation; that They have passed through all the struggles of an evolving life, that They have formed part of a humanity that long since has passed away and been numbered in the records of the universe, too far off to touch a world like ours; that, reaching through human to superhuman growth, They have finally joined their consciousness with the consciousness of the Logos Himself, expanding to His consciousness, uniting with His nature, and yet never losing that centre which is the result of Their long evolution up the human and the superhuman ladder. Holding that centre in all the life of God, it is possible for Them to draw around Themselves again a circumference which shall enable Them to become manifest in any world, in any race. Where a centre is, a circumference can ever be drawn; and around such a centre in Deity itself, of the Son made one with the Father, from such a centre a new circumference of a human life may be drawn, and such a Being, mighty in His Deity and yet veiled in humanity, may appear to enlighten and to bless the world. Among the Hindū people, whose teachers have carried them far along occult lines, whose sacred scriptures are full of occult indications, a special name is given to these pre-eminent manifestations. They call them by a Sanskrit word which means those who descend. The name avatāra may be familiar to you, perhaps. But it is the significance of the name on which for a moment I pause. They have climbed up to unity with the God head: They descend to humanity in order to preserve and help. Such are the mightiest figures that appear in any world, on any globe, through the long course of its evolution. Egypt signified that mystery under a special name: they called it the birth of Horus. Christianity has symbolised it under another name—Divine Incarnation; and the Christian will tell you—accurate in the spiritual fact, although at times confused in the definition of the life—that the Second Person of the Trinity descends upon earth, and he regards the Christ of Judea as being such a manifestation of the Most High. The main fact that such a revelation may come to man is a fundamental spiritual truth. It ought never to be lost from sight; and in every great religion it has ever been said that it is from that aspect of the Logos that these manifestations descend upon earth. Christianity recognises but a single manifestation; Hindūism recognises nine that have passed and one that is to come. In Zoroastrianism you find the same conception. Religions, living and dead, have ever groped after that highest of truths; only it must never be lost sight of that He who is an Avatāra, the highest of divine manifestations, has been in some other cycle of life a man among men, and that it is because of that long-past experience that a return to those conditions is possible at any time.
Leave that aside for a moment, and take another great type that shines out. There is no name for the next type I am just thinking of except in Eastern lands, where they call him “The Enlightened,” the Buddha. In the West that name is constantly connected with the last of those manifestations, with the great Being born into the world nearly six hundred years before the Christian era. He is called the Buddha. But among the people of the faith that He gave to the world the belief is that there were many before Him, that there shall be many after Him; that He is only one among the great host of revealers of the divine, and that one of those is born in every world, in every Root Race. So that in every world there are seven of such Beings, one manifesting in every Race; but when He has appeared, then He passes away from earth, having finished even the superhuman evolution, and passes on, as those that I mentioned passed in other worlds, in other times, in order to unite Himself as the Son with the Eternal Father, so that in a world later than our own such a one may return as an Avatāra, one who descends. But note that the Buddha, mighty as He was, climbed to His greatness through the humanity of our own globe. Climbing step by step up the long ladder of human life, of superhuman unfolding, He touched the last rung of that ladder when He was born as Gautama into India some twenty-five centuries ago, and then, having finished His work, passed onward into what is there called Nirvāna, the highest condition available for the superhuman, that of union with the divine, though without loss of the centre of which I spoke.
Considering that great Teacher, let us ask what He was before He became the Buddha, and then passed away from earth, His teaching work being over. Before He took that last and greatest of the Initiations along the line He followed, He had manifested several times before on earth, and manifested in the same great Root Race, the Aryan Race, to which we all and so many others belong. For before that last step was taken there was another high office that He filled for thousands and tens of thousands of years. I do not want in any way to confuse you with unfamiliar names, and yet it is a little difficult to avoid them, because I want a name that stretches back to manifestation after manifestation; and our own fifth sub-race, the Teutonic, has been on earth so brief a time, living in the western world, that it has not yet created the general name which we can use with regard to these past manifestations. The eastern name is a word which translated means “the Wisdom-Truth,” the Bodhisattva; the name matters little provided that you take it for the moment that it signifies an office, and the office is that of the Supreme Teacher, not only teacher of men, but teacher, as they would say, of Gods, as you would say, of Angels and Archangels. For you must remember that the Shining Ones of the East are the same as those to whom over here you give the names of Angels and Archangels. The East calls them by a name which merely means “the shining”; and though it is often translated over here as “God,” much confusion of thought thereby is made as regards the great eastern faiths. For they, like Christianity, proclaim the unity of God, the one all-pervading life; and those whom they call the Shining Ones, the Devas, are but manifestations of that light, the Angels and Archangels of Christianity or of Islām. And He who is the Supreme Teacher has for His pupils Archangels and Angels as well as men; He is the one who is the Teacher of all, whether in the body of flesh or outside of it as spiritual intelligences; there is no other Teacher in earth or heaven above that mightiest One who fills this supreme office.
Now, such a Teacher, the Supreme Teacher of the worlds, makes Himself manifest as man at the beginning of every sub-race. I have talked to you so much of Races and sub-races that the terms will not be unfamiliar; and if I remind you that we are all of one great Root Race, the Aryan, whether you take the first sub-race in India; or the second along the basin of the Mediterranean in the ancient days; or the third in ancient Persia; or the fourth giving birth to the ancient Greeks and the Romans, and then spreading westwards through Spain, France, Britain, up to the North of Scotland, and then across to Ireland, the mighty Keltic sub-race; or the fifth, the Teutonic, now peopling Germany, Britain, America, and their offshoots—if you think of those, the one Race including all the divisions, you will be able readily enough to follow the manifestations of the Supreme Teacher. Just as in the larger cycles there are manifestations of great Beings, so has every successive sub-race the appearance of this great Teacher as man, to give it the religion under which the civilisation shall develop, to give it the benediction which starts it on its evolution in the world.
Looking backwards to the sub-races that preceded the fifth, the Teutonic, to which the greater part of you who are present here belong, we can mark in each the appearance of the Supreme Teacher, taking a different name, but ever the same immortal Individuality under the veil of that name. One name that is known to all of you who are students of the past was the name He took when He led forth from Central Asia the second of the great emigrations that passed westward, which āryanised large numbers of the people dwelling in Arabia, in Northern Africa, in the whole great basin of the Mediterranean. He then bore the name of Hermes, a name familiar to every student of antiquity, especially to the students of Egyptian thought, for it was largely in relation to that that this mighty manifestation was made, and in much of the so-called Hermetic literature the name of Hermes, the Thrice Greatest, is preserved. It was a name first worn in Lemuria, but in this case was used by the Supreme Teacher manifesting for the second sub-race.
Let me pause a moment to say one word of explanation, to meet a difficulty that may readily rise in the minds of the more scholarly amongst you who have looked back to these past tales. You find the same name appearing from time to time along the same tradition. That has ever been so in the past. The name of the great teacher himself has been taken up by his successors, who renewed his teaching and carried on the tradition that he left; and so in the vast spaces of time that have elapsed since that Hermes first appeared in the second root-race of the Aryans, others took up the tradition, carried on the teaching, and the name was ever repeated. It is the eastern way. No disciple dreams of teaching there under his own name; it is under the name of his Master that he gives his wisdom to the world; and that not to conceal, but because it is held that to the teacher the credit belongs of that which the pupil may be able to expound, and so, in humility, in veneration, in gratitude to the mightiest, those who follow Him write under the name that they worship, and so hand on His wisdom, although in generations much later than Himself. It causes much of confusion, much of difficulty when the people with the western historical sense go turning over these ancient writings and applying their own canons of interpretation to people who were ancient long before those canons were invented. What is called the historical sense is a very different thing in the East from that in the West. Historical sense here means a sequence of names, dates, persons, and that is what is regarded as important; in the East it means the God unfolding in the various types of humanity that may appear; and that which they are interested in is not a special individual who has written this, that, or the other, but the teaching, the tradition, handed on from age to age, and ever marked out from the first Revealer, the name of Him who gave the knowledge to mankind. I do not want to dispute which is the better way. I only mark the difference that you may realise that in the likeness of the name there is no attempt to deceive the reader, but only to mark the line of the tradition.
In the second sub-race, then, appeared Hermes. Ages rolled on. The third sub-race was to be born; the emigration to found that sub-race rolled westwards into Persia. Once more the “Wisdom-Truth” led the emigration. To that people he was known as Zarathustra, more often called among us Zoroaster. Fourteen of those are known in the old story of Persia, but the first, the eldest of them all, He alone was that one Supreme Teacher, coming down to His disciples, building the policy of Persia, handing down to those who came after Him the tradition that went by His name; and every great high-priest of that religion worthy to bear the mantle of the great One, he also is known in history as Zoroaster; and, as I have just said, some fourteen of those are named.
The time came for the fourth sub-race, the Keltic; the same great Being came forth again under another name, the name known to every student of Greek thought as that of Orpheus. The Orphic Mysteries, the Orphic tradition—these are phrases familiar to every student of the mighty past of Greece. But the scholars, as a rule, with regard to him will say, as was said in regard to Hermes: This is not an individual; it is only a name for a succession of individuals. There is a truth in that, for there was such a succession. The blunder lies in not realising that such a succession must have an originator, and that the first and mightiest of the teachers, to whom everything ran back, is not necessarily a myth merely because He is so great. Those who started the Sun Myth have done a great deal of harm in clouding the story of the past, and it is only as the buried remains of that past are brought up and studied by the scholars of the time that people find that many of the so-called Sun Myths were mighty Teachers and mighty Kings in the childhood of our race. That has become more and more palpable as the excavations go into deeper and deeper strata, uncover more and more ancient civilisations; so that those who have been made into myths are now taking on again a semblance of humanity, but humanity so great, so divine, that it seems scarcely possible to believe that such Beings lived in the guise of men on earth. But you can trace down that Orphic tradition through all that was mightiest and most beautiful in Greece; you can trace in by the Mysteries I mentioned, by the names of the great Greeks who declared that they took their inspiration from that tradition. So we come to the last of the incarnations of that great Being until He appeared as Gautama, became the Buddha, passed away as teacher from the worlds.