The Gnostic Crucifixion

by G. R. S. Mead

4. Thereon follow the illumination and the explanation of the familiar drama of appearance taught to those “without the mystery.”

“The multitude below in Jerusalem” is the lower nature of the man, his unillumined mind. “Jerusalem Below” is set over against “Jerusalem Above,” the City of God. Jerusalem Below is that nature in him that is still unordered and unpurified; while Jerusalem Above is that ordered and purified portion of his substance that can respond to the immediate shining of the Light, which further orders it according to the Ordering of Heaven.

And yet the drama below is real enough; there are ever crucifixion and piercing and the drinking of vinegar and gall, before the triumphant Christ is born. It is by such means that His Body is conformed; it is the mystery of the transformation of what we call evil into good. The Body of the Christ is perfected by the absorption of the impersonal evil of the world, which He transmutes into blessing.

“’Twas I who put it in thy heart to ascend this Mount.” I am thy Self, thy true God; ’twas I energizing in thee who enabled thee to rise to the height of contemplation, where thou canst “hear what disciple should learn from Master and man from God.” The man has now reached the stage of Hearer in the Spiritual Mysteries.

5. There then follows the vision of the great Cross of Light, fixed firm, and stretching from earth to heaven. Round its foot on earth is a vast multitude of all the nations of the world; they resemble one another in that they are configured according to the Darkness, their “Spark burns low.” On the Cross, or in it, for doubtless the seer saw within as well as without, was another multitude of various grades of light, being formed into some marvellous Image like unto the Divine, but not yet completed—as it might be the Rose on the Cross, in the famous symbol of the Rosicrucians.

6. And above the Cross, lost in the dazzling brilliancy of the Fullness, John beheld the Lord; he beheld but could not see, because of the Great Light, as we are told in another great vision of the Master in the Pistis Sophia. He can hear only a Voice. But this Voice is no voice of man, but one “truly of God”—a Bath-kol or “Heavenly Voice,” as the Rabbis called it—a Voice of sweetest reasonableness, using no words, but of a higher order of utterance, that can make the man speak to himself in his own language, using his own terms.

7. The sentence “I long for one who will hear,” is instinct with the yearning of the Divine Love, the eagerness to bestow, the longing to speak if only there be one to hear.

8. There then follows a list of synonyms of the Cross, every one of which shows that the Cross, if a symbol, must be taken to denote the master-symbol of all symbols. It is the key to the chief nomenclature of the Gnosis and the greatest terms of the Gospel. These terms, it is stated, are used by the Wisdom “for your sakes,” that is, to bring home in many ways to the hearts of men the intuition of the mystery.

As is explained later on in the text, the mystery of the Cross is the mystery of the Word, the Spiritual Man, or Great Man, the Divine Individuality. Therefore is it called Word or Reason, Mind, Jesus and Christ. Son and Father; for Jesus is the Christ, both as human and divine, the two natures uniting in one in the Cross; and the Son is the Father in a still more divine meaning of the mystery; for both Son and Cross are of the Father alone, they are Himself manifesting Himself to Himself. The whole is the mystery of Ātman or the Self.

The Door is the Door of the Two in One, the state of equilibrium of the opposites which opens out into the all-embracing consciousness and understanding of all oppositions.