The qualification of Golden given to the fabulous legend of allegorical saints is a sufficient indication of its character. Gold, in the eyes of initiates, is condensed light; the sacred numbers of the Kabalah were called golden; the moral instructions of Pythagoras were contained in Golden Verses; and for the same reason that mysterious work of Apuleius in which an ass has an important rôle, is called the Golden Ass.
The Christians were accused by Pagans of worshipping an ass, and the slander in question is not of their own devising; it is referable to the Jews of Samaria, who expressed Kabalistic ideas on the Divinity by means of Egyptian symbols. Intelligence was represented in the symbol of a magical star, venerated under the name of Rempham; science was depicted by the emblem of Anubis, the latter name being altered into Nibbas; whilst vulgar faith or credulity appeared in the likeness of Thartac, a god represented holding a book, wearing a mantle and having the head of an ass.[136] According to the Samaritan doctors, Christianity was the reign of Thartac, or blind faith and vulgar credulity set up as an universal oracle, superior to understanding and knowledge. This is why, in their intercourse with Gentiles and when they heard themselves identified by these with Christians, they protested and begged not to be confounded with the worshippers of an ass’s head. The pretended revelation diverted the philosophers, and Tertullian mentions a Roman caricature, extant in his days, which exhibited Thartac in all his glory, identified as the god of Christianity, much to the amusement of Tertullian, though he was the author of that famous aphorism: Credo quia absurdum.[137]
The Golden Ass of Apuleius is the occult legend of Thartac. It is a magical epic and a satire against Christianity, which the author had doubtless professed for a period, or so at least he appears to intimate under the allegory of his metamorphosis into an ass. The story of the work is as follows. Apuleius was travelling in Thessaly, the country of enchantments. He received hospitality at the house of a man whose wife was a sorceress, and he seduced the servant of his hostess, thinking to obtain in this manner the secrets of her mistress. The maid promised to deliver to her lover a concoction by means of which the sorceress changed herself into a bird, but she made a mistake in the box and Apuleius was transformed into an ass. She could only console him by saying that to regain his proper form it would be sufficient to eat roses, the rose being the flower of initiation. The difficulty at the moment being to find roses in the night, it was decided to wait till the morrow and the servant therefore stabled the ass, but only for it to be taken by robbers and carried off. There was little chance now of coming across roses, which are not intended for asses, and gardeners chased away the animal with sticks.
During his long and sad captivity, he heard the history of Psyche related, that marvellous and symbolical legend which was like the soul and poetry of his own experience. Psyche desired to take by surprise the secrets of love, as Apuleius sought those of Magic; she lost love and he the human form. She was an exiled wanderer, living under the wrath of Venus, and he was the slave of thieves. But after having journeyed through hell, Psyche was to return into heaven, and the gods took pity on Lucius. Isis appeared to him in a dream and promised that her priest, warned by a revelation, would give him roses during the solemnities of her coming festival. That festival arrived, and Apuleius describes at great length the procession of Isis; the account is valuable to science, for it gives the key of Egyptian mysteries. Men in disguise come first, carrying grotesque animals; these are the vulgar fables. Women follow strewing flowers and bearing on their shoulders mirrors which reflect the image of the great divinity. So do men go in front and formulate dogmas which women embellish, reflecting unconsciously the higher truths, owing to their maternal instincts. Men and women came afterwards in company as light-bearers; they represented the alliance of the two terms, the active and passive generators of science and life.[138] After the light came harmony, represented by young musicians, and, in fine, the images of gods, to the number of three, followed by the grand hierophant, carrying, instead of an image, the symbol of great Isis, being a globe of gold surmounted by a Caduceus. Lucius Apuleius beheld a crown of roses in the hands of the high priest; he approached and was not repulsed; he ate the roses and was restored to human shape.
All this is learnedly written and intermingled with episodes which are now heroic and again grotesque in character, as befitted the double nature of Lucius and the ass. Apuleius was at once the Rabelais and Swedenborg of the old world at the close of the epoch.
The great masters of Christianity either failed or refused to understand the mysticism of the Golden Ass. St. Augustine in the City of God asks in the most serious manner whether one is to believe that Apuleius was metamorphosed literally into an ass and seems disposed to admit the possibility, but only as an exceptional phenomenon—from which nothing follows as a consequence. If this be an irony on his part, it must be allowed that it is cruel, but if it be ingenuousness—however, St. Augustine, the acute rhetorician of Madaura, was scarcely given to being ingenuous.
Blind and unfortunate indeed were those initiates of the Antique Mysteries who ridiculed the ass of Bethlehem without perceiving the infant God Who shone upon the peaceful animals in the stable—the Child on whose forehead reposed the conciliating star of all the past and future. Whilst philosophy, convicted of impotence, offered insult to victorious Christianity, the fathers of the Church assumed all the magnificence of Plato and created a new philosophy based upon the living reality of the Divine Word, ever present in His Church, reborn in each of its members and immortal in humanity. It would be a greater dream of pride than that of Prometheus, were it not at the same time a doctrine which is all abnegation and all devotion, human because it is divine and divine because it is human.
CHAPTER VI
SOME KABALISTIC PAINTINGS AND SACRED EMBLEMS
In obedience to the Saviour’s formal precept, the primitive Church did not expose its Most Holy Mysteries to the chance of profanation by the crowd. Admission to Baptism and the Eucharist was in virtue of progressive initiations; the sacred books were also held in concealment, their free study and, above all, interpretation being reserved to the priesthood. Moreover, images were fewer and less explicit in character. The feeling of the time refrained from reproducing the figure of Christ Himself, and the paintings on the catacombs were, for the most part, Kabalistic emblems. There was the Edenic Cross with the four rivers, where harts came to drink; the mysterious fish of Jonah was replaced frequently by a two-headed serpent; a man rising from a chest recalls pictures of Osiris.[139] All these allegories at a later period fell under proscription, owing to the Gnosticism which misapplied them, materialising and debasing the holy traditions of the Kabalah.
The name of Gnostic was not always rejected by the Church. Those fathers whose doctrine was allied to the traditions of St. John frequently made use of this title to designate the perfect Christian. Apart from the great Synesius, who was a finished Kabalist but of questionable orthodoxy, St. Irenæus and St. Clement of Alexandria applied it in this sense. The false Gnostics were all in revolt against the hierarchic order, seeking to level the sacred science by its general diffusion, to substitute visions for understanding, personal fanaticism for hierarchic religion, and especially the mystical licence of sensual passions for that wise Christian sobriety and obedience to law which are the mother of chaste marriages and saving temperance.