By the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary we are secretly enlightened concerning the generation of the soul, who is begotten in the womb of matter, and yet from the first instant of her being is pure and incorrupt.... As the Immaculate Conception is the foundation of the mysteries, so is the Assumption their crown.
For the entire object and end of kosmic evolution is precisely this triumph and apotheosis of the soul. In the mystery presented by this dogma, we behold the consummation of the whole scheme of creation—the perpetuation and glorification of the individual human ego. The grave—the material and astral consciousness, cannot retain the immaculate Mother of God. She rises into the heavens; she assumes divinity.... From end to end the mystery of the soul's evolution—the history, that is, of humanity and of the kosmic drama—is contained and enacted in the cultus of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The acts and the glories of Mary are the one supreme subject of the holy mysteries[73].
"Allegory of stupendous significance!" exclaimed the seeress's illuminator when imparting to her the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. "Allegory of stupendous significance! with which the Church of God has so long been familiar, but which yet never penetrated its understanding, like the holy fire which enveloped the sacred Bush, but which nevertheless the Bush withstood and resisted[72]."
That such failure has been the rule and not the exception is the plea for the New Gospel of Interpretation. For lack of comprehension of its own symbols the Church has fallen into the disastrous errors of mistaking the man Jesus for the Christ within every man, and Mary the mother of Jesus for Virgin Mary the mother of that Christ, committing in both instances idolatry by preferring the form to the substance, persons to principles, and blinding men to the essential truth implied.
CHAPTER VI.
THE EXEMPLIFICATION.
This chapter will be devoted to some examples of the recovered Gnosis, bearing chiefly upon the supreme doctrine of Regeneration. As with all else received by the Seeress, they are the product of intuitional memory regained under divine illumination occurring mostly in sleep. And here I will take occasion to state explicitly and positively, that the states, whether of sleep or of trance, in which her faculty was exercised, were all natural and spontaneous, being induced by the Spirit itself; and that in no case were artificial means employed by either of us, whether drugs, mesmerism, hypnotism, crystal-gazing, or any other of the devices ordinarily used to induce abnormal states of consciousness or promote enhancement of faculty. Our work was to be a real work, done not only by us but in us, and we had from the first a profound instinctive distrust of results obtained by such artificial stimulation.
Nor was any change even of a word ever made in the teachings received. They came one and all in the finished perfection in which they are put forth, coming down as the holy city from the heaven of the upper and the within, and incapable of improvement. The following are the examples proposed:—
(1) Concerning Holy Writ.
All Scriptures which are the true Word of God, have a dual interpretation, the intellectual and the intuitional, the apparent and the hidden.