We are told that it is just the same with our Brahmâ-Prajâpati, with Osiris and all other Creative Gods. Quite so, when their rites are judged exoterically and externally; the reverse when their inner meaning is unveiled, as we see. The Hindû Lingam is identical with Jacob's “Pillar”—most undeniably. But the difference, as said, seems to consist in the fact that the Esoteric significance of the Lingam was too truly sacred and metaphysical to be revealed to the profane and the vulgar; hence its superficial appearance was left to the speculations of the mob. Nor would the Âryan Hierophant and Brâhman, in their proud exclusiveness and the satisfaction of their knowledge, go to the trouble of concealing its primeval nakedness under cunningly devised fables; whereas the Rabbi, having interpreted the symbol to suit his own tendencies, had to veil the crude significance; and this served a double purpose—that of keeping his secret to himself and of exalting himself in his supposed monotheism over the Heathen, whom his Law commanded him to hate[1081]—a commandment now gladly accepted by the Christian too, in spite of another and later commandment, “Love one another.” Both India and Egypt had and have their sacred lotuses, symbolic of the same “Holy of Holies”—the lotus growing in the water, a double feminine symbol—the bearer of its own [pg 495] seed and root of all. Virâj and Horus are both male symbols, emanating from Androgyne Nature, one from Brahmâ and his female counterpart Vâch, the other, from Osiris and Isis—never from the One Infinite God. In the Judæo-Christian systems it is different. Whereas the lotus, containing Brahmâ, the Universe, is shown growing out of Vishnu's Navel, the Central Point in the Waters of Infinite Space, and whereas Horus springs from the lotus of the Celestial Nile—all these abstract pantheistic ideas are dwarfed and made terrestrially concrete in the Bible. One is almost inclined to say that in the esoteric they are grosser and still more anthropomorphic, than in their exoteric rendering. Take as an example the same symbol, even in its Christian application—the lilies in the hand of the Archangel Gabriel.[1082] In Hindûism—the “Holy of Holies” is a universal abstraction, whose dramatis personæ are Infinite Spirit and Nature; in Christian Judaism, it is a personal God, outside of that Nature, and the human womb—Eve, Sarah, etc.; hence, an anthropomorphic phallic God, and his image—man.
Thus it is maintained, that with regard to the contents of the Bible, one of two hypotheses has to be admitted. Either behind the symbolic substitute Jehovah, there was the Unknown, Incognizable Deity, the kabalistic Ain Suph; or, the Jews have been from the beginning no better than the dead-letter Lingam-worshippers[1083] of the India of to-day. We say it was the former; and that, therefore, the secret or esoteric worship of the Jews was the same Pantheism that the Vedântin Philosophers are reproached with to-day; Jehovah was a substitute for purposes of an exoteric national faith, and had no importance or reality in the eyes of the erudite Priests and Philosophers—the Sadducees, the most refined and the most learned of all the Israelite sects, who stand as a living proof of it, with their contemptuous rejection of every belief, save the Law. For how could those who invented the stupendous scheme now known as the Bible, or their successors who knew, as all Kabalists do, that it was so invented for a popular “blind”—how could they, we ask, feel reverence for such a phallic symbol and a number, as Jehovah is shown most undeniably to be in the kabalistic works? How could anyone worthy of the name of a Philosopher, and knowing the real secret meaning of their “Pillar of Jacob,” their Bethels, oil-anointed Phalli, and their “Brazen Serpent,” worship such a gross symbol, and minister unto it, seeing in it their “Covenant”—the [pg 496] Lord Himself! Let the reader turn to Gemara Sanhedrim and judge. As various writers have shown, and as brutally stated in Hargrave Jennings' Phallicism:
We know from the Jewish records that the Ark contained a table of stone; and if it can be demonstrated that that stone was phallic, and yet identical with the sacred name Jehovah or Yehovah, which, written in unpointed Hebrew with four letters, is J-E-V-E or J-H-V-H (the H being merely an aspirate and the same as E). This process leaves us the two letters I and V (or in another of its forms U); then if we place the I in the U we have the “Holy of Holies”; we also have the Linga and Yoni and Argha of the Hindûs, the Iswarra [Îshvara] or “supreme Lord”; and here we have the whole secret of its mystic and arc-celestial import, confirmed in itself by being identical with the Linyoni [?] of the Ark of the Covenant.[1084]
The biblical Jews of to-day do not date from Moses but from David—even admitting the identity of the old and genuine with the later and remodelled Mosaic scrolls. Before that time their nationality is lost in the mists of pre-historic darkness, the veil from which is now withdrawn as much as we have space to do. It is only to the days of the Babylonian captivity that the Old Testament may be referred by the most lenient criticism as the approximately correct views that were current about the days of Moses. Even such fanatical Christians and worshippers of Jehovah as the Rev. Mr. Horne, have to admit the numerous changes and alterations made by the later compilers of the “Book of God,” since it was found by Hilkiah,[1085] and since
The Pentateuch arose out of the primitive or older documents, by means of a supplementary one.
The Elohistic texts were re-written 500 years after the date of Moses; the Jehovistic 800, on the authority of the biblical chronology itself. Hence, it is maintained that the deity, represented as the organ of generation in his pillar-form, and as a symbol of the double-sexed organ in the numeral value of the letters of his name—the Yod, י or “phallus,” and Hé, ה, the “opening,” or the “womb,” according to kabalistic authority—is of a far later date than the Elohim-symbols and is borrowed from the Pagan exoteric rites; and Jehovah is thus on a par with the Lingam and Yoni found on every roadside in India.
Just as the Iao of the Mysteries was distinct from Jehovah, so was the later Iao and Abraxas, or Abrasax, of some Gnostic sects identical with the God of the Hebrews, who was the same as the Egyptian Horus. [pg 497] This is undeniably proven on “Heathen” as on the Gnostic “Christian” gems. In Matter's collection of such gems there is a “Horus”—
Seated on the lotus, inscribed ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ ΙΑΩ (Abrasax Iao)—an address exactly parallel to the so frequent ΕΙΣ ΖΕΥΣ ΣΑΡΑΠΙ (Eis Zeus Sarapi) on the contemporary Heathen gems, and therefore only to be translated by “Abraxas is the One Jehovah.”[1086]
But who was Abraxas? As the same author shows:
The numerical or Kabbalistic value of the name Abraxas directly refers to the Persian title of the god “Mithras,” Ruler of the year, worshipped from the earliest times under the appellation of Iao.[1087]