And thy desire shall heal thy diseases; it shall bring streams for thee out of the stony rock; it shall lead thee to Paradise.
Evoi, Father Iacchos, Jehovah-Nissi[78]; Lord of the garden and of the vineyard;
Initiator and lawgiver; God of the cloud and of the mount.
Evoi, Father Iacchos; out of Egypt has thou called thy Son.
To vindicate the suppressed mysteries of the pre-Christian churches by disclosing them as the true origines of Christianity, and to replace the false doctrine of the exclusive divinity of one man by the true doctrine of the potential divinity of all men,—these are among the foremost objects of the New Gospel of Interpretation. And it is especially in order to reinforce the last named, that it has restored the following hymn in celebration of the supreme results of regeneration, which formed part of the ritual of the greater mysteries of the Greeks. It is addressed to the first of the Holy Seven, the Spirit of Wisdom, as represented by his "angel," the angel of the sun, even "that light which Adonai created on the first day," "whose name is, in the Hebrew, Uriel, and in the Greek, Phoibos, the Bright One of God." Breathing both the Spirit and the letter of the Bible, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, the hymns, of which this is one, indicate unmistakeably the identity in source and substance of the Hebrew and the Christian with the other sacred mysteries of antiquity, and the derivation of the later through the earlier from their common source in the world celestial when once again they have been restored. And they supply also the motive which led the Christians to destroy the second Alexandrian library, showing that motive to have been the desire to conceal, first, the derivation of the Christian presentment from its predecessors, and next, the perversion of their doctrine in the interests of an unscrupulous sacerdocy.
Taken in connection with its fellow-hymns, similarly recovered, to others of the "Holy Seven," the hymn to Phoibos throws a flood of light on the creative week of Genesis, showing it to be no mere proem to Scripture, or concerned with the world physical merely, but an integral portion of Scripture, being an epitome of eternal verities ever in process, and appertaining both to Creation and to Redemption. The Hymn to Her who is mystically the fourth, but really the third of the Gods, the "Spirit of Counsel" of Isaiah, is especially notable for its solution of the problem of the inversion of the order of the third and fourth days of creation. These hymns, moreover, show indubitably that the order of the solar system was no secret to the hierophants of the sacred mysteries of antiquity.
(7) Hymn to Phoibos, the First of the Gods.
"Strong art thou and adorable, Phoibos Apollo, who bearest life and healing on thy wings, who crownest the year with thy bounty, and givest the spirit of thy divinity to the fruits and precious things of all the worlds.
Where were the bread of the initiation of the Sons of God, except thou bring the corn to ear; or the wine of their mystical chalice, except thou bless the vintage?