“Σεμέλην τρέμουσι δαίμονες.” This Greek inscription on a small temple, reproduced on a stone that was found by Beger, and copied by Montfaucon, as De Mirville tells us, informs us of the stupendous fact, that the Magna Mater of the old world was an impudent “plagiarism” of the Immaculate Virgin Mother of his Church, perpetrated by the Demon. Whether so, or vice versâ, is of no importance. That which is interesting to note is the perfect identity between the archaic copy and the modern original.
Did space permit we might show the inconceivable coolness and unconcern exhibited by certain followers of the Roman Catholic Church, when they are made to face the revelations of the Past. To Maury's remark that “the Virgin took possession of all the Sanctuaries of Ceres and Venus, and that the Pagan rites, proclaimed and practised in [pg 431] honour of those Goddesses, were in a great measure transferred to the Mother of Christ,”[645] the advocate of Rome answers, that such is the fact, and that it is just as it should be, and quite natural.
As the dogma, the liturgy, and the rites professed by the Roman Apostolical Church in 1862 are found engraved on monuments, inscribed on papyri, and cylinders hardly posterior to the Deluge, it does seem impossible to deny the existence of a first ante-historical [Roman] Catholicism of which our own is but the faithful continuation.... [But while the former was the culmination, the “summumof the impudence of demons and goëtic necromancy” ... the latter is divine.] If in our [Christian] Revelation [l'Apocalypse], Mary, clothed with the Sun and having the Moon under her feet, has no longer anything in common with the humble servant [servante] of Nazareth [sic], it is because she has now become the greatest of theological and cosmological powers in our universe.[646]
Verily so, since Pindar thus sings of her “assumption”: “She sits at the right hand of her Father [Jupiter], ... and is more powerful than all the other (Angels or) Gods”[647]—a hymn likewise applied to the Virgin. St. Bernard also, quoted by Cornelius à Lapide, is made to address the Virgin Mary in this wise: “The Sun-Christ lives in thee and thou livest in him.”[648]
Again the Virgin is admitted to be the Moon by the same unsophisticated holy man. Being the Lucina of the Church, in childbirth the verse of Virgil, “Casta fove Lucina, tuus jam regnat Apollo,” is applied to her. “Like the Moon, the Virgin is the Queen of Heaven,” adds the innocent saint.[649]
This settles the question. According to such writers as De Mirville, the more similarity there exists between the Pagan conceptions and the Christian dogmas, the more divine appears the Christian religion, and the more is it seen to be the only truly inspired one, especially in its Roman Catholic form. The unbelieving Scientists and Academicians who think they see in the Latin Church quite the opposite of divine inspiration, and who will not believe in the Satanic tricks of plagiarism by anticipation, are severely taken to task. But then “they believe in nothing and reject even the Nabathean Agriculture as a romance and a pack of superstitious nonsense,” complains the memorialist. “In their perverted opinion Qû-tâmy's ‘idol of the Moon’ and the statue of the Madonna are one!” A noble Marquis, twenty-five [pg 432] years ago, wrote six huge volumes, or, as he calls them “Mémoires to the French Academy,” with the sole object of proving Roman Catholicism to be an inspired and revealed faith. As a proof thereof, he furnishes numberless facts, all tending to show that the entire Ancient World, ever since the Deluge, had, with the help of the Devil, been systematically plagiarizing the rites, ceremonies, and dogmas of the future Holy Church, which was to be born ages later. What would that faithful son of Rome have said had he heard his co-religionist, M. Renouf, the distinguished Egyptologist of the British Museum, declaring in one of his learned lectures, that neither “Hebrews nor Greeks borrowed any of their ideas from Egypt”?
But perhaps M. Renouf intended to say that it was the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Âryans, who borrowed their ideas from the Latin Church? And if so, why, in the name of logic, do the Papists reject the additional information which the Occultists may give them on Moon-worship, since it all tends to show that the worship of the Roman Catholic Church is as old as the world—of Sabæanism and Astrolatry?
The reason of early Christian and later Roman Catholic Astrolatry, or the symbolical worship of Sun and Moon, a worship identical with that of the Gnostics, though less philosophical and pure than the “Sun-worship” of the Zoroastrians, is a natural consequence of its birth and origin. The adoption by the Latin Church of such symbols as Water, Fire, Sun, Moon and Stars, and many others, is simply a continuation by the early Christians of the old worship of Pagan nations. Thus, Odin got his wisdom, power, and knowledge, by sitting at the feet of Mimir, the thrice-wise Jotun, who passed his life by the fountain of primeval Wisdom, the crystalline Waters of which increased his knowledge daily. “Mimir drew the highest knowledge from the fountain, because the World was born of Water; hence primeval Wisdom was to be found in that mysterious element.” The eye which Odin had to pledge to acquire that knowledge may be “the Sun, which enlightens and penetrates all things; his other eye being the Moon, whose reflection gazes out of the deep, and which at last, when setting, sinks into the Ocean.”[650] But it is something more than this. Loki, the Fire-God, is said to have hidden in the Water, as well as in the Moon, the light-giver, whose reflection he found therein. This belief that the Fire finds refuge in the Water was not limited to [pg 433] the old Scandinavians. It was shared by all nations and was finally adopted by the early Christians, who symbolized the Holy Ghost under the shape of Fire, “cloven tongues like as of fire”—the breath of the Father-Sun. This Fire descends also into the Water, or the Sea—Mare, Mary. The Dove was the symbol of the Soul with several nations; it was sacred to Venus, the Goddess born from the sea-foam, and it became later the symbol of the Christian Anima Mundi, or Holy Spirit.
One of the most occult chapters in the Book of the Dead is that entitled, “The transformation into the God giving Light to the Path of Darkness,” wherein “Woman-Light of the Shadow” serves Thot in his retreat in the Moon. Thot-Hermes is said to hide therein, because he is the representative of the Secret Wisdom. He is the manifested Logos of its light side; the concealed Deity or “Dark Wisdom” when he is supposed to retire to the opposite hemisphere. Speaking of her power, the Moon calls herself repeatedly: “The Light which shineth in Darkness,” the “Woman-Light.” Hence it became the accepted symbol of all the Virgin-Mother Goddesses. As the wicked “evil” Spirits warred against the Moon in days of yore, so they are supposed to war now, without, however, being able to prevail against the actual Queen of Heaven, Mary, the Moon. Hence, also, the Moon was intimately connected in all the Pagan Theogonies with the Dragon, her eternal enemy. The Virgin, or Madonna, stands on the mythical Satan thus symbolized, who lies crushed and powerless, under her feet. This, because the head and tail of the Dragon, which, to this day in Eastern Astronomy, represent the ascending and descending nodes of the Moon, were also symbolized in ancient Greece by the two serpents. Hercules kills them on the day of his birth, and so does the Babe in his Virgin-Mother's arms. As Mr. Gerald Massey aptly observes in this connection:
All such symbols figured their own facts from the first, and did not pre-figure others of a totally different order. The iconography [and dogmas, too] had survived in Rome from a period remotely pre-Christian. There was neither forgery nor interpolation of types; nothing but a continuity of imagery with a perversion of its meaning.