In 1877, the writer, quoting the authority and opinions of some most eminent scholars, ventured to assert that there was a great difference between the terms Chrestos and Christos, a difference having a profound and Esoteric meaning. Also that while Christos means “to live” and “to be born into a new life,” Chrestos, in “Initiation” phraseology, signified the death of the inner, lower, or personal nature in man; thus is given the key to the Brâhmanical title, the twice-born; and finally,
There were Chrestians long before the era of Christianity, and the Essenes belonged to them.[536]...
For this epithets sufficiently opprobrious to characterise the writer could hardly be found. And yet then as well as now, the author never [pg 289] attempted a statement of such a serious nature without showing as many learned authorities for it as could be mustered. Thus on the next page it was said:
Lepsius shows that the word Nofre means Chrestos, “good,” and that one of the titles of Osiris, “Onnofre,” must be translated “the goodness of God made manifest.” “The worship of Christ was not universal at this early date,” explains Mackenzie, “by which I mean that Christolatry had not been introduced; but the worship of Chrestos—the Good Principle—had preceded it by many centuries, and even survived the general adoption of Christianity, as shown on monuments still in existence....” Again, we have an inscription which is pre-Christian on an epitaphial tablet (Spon. Misc. Erud., Ant., x. xviii. 2). Υαχινθε Λαρισαιων Δησμοσιε Πρως Χρηστε Χαιρε, and de Rossi (Roma Sotteranea, tome i., tav. xxi.) gives us another example from the catacombs—“Ælia Chreste, in Pace.”[537]
To-day the writer is able to add to all those testimonies the corroboration of an erudite author, who proves whatever he undertakes to show on the authority of geometrical demonstration. There is a most curious passage with remarks and explanations in the Source of Measures, whose author has probably never heard of the “Mystery-God” Visvakarma of the early Âryans. Treating on the difference between the terms Chrest and Christ, he ends by saying that:
There were two Messiahs: one who went down into the pit for the salvation of this world; this was the Sun shorn of his golden rays, and crowned with blackened ones (symbolising this loss), as the thorns: the other was the triumphant Messiah mounting up to the summit of the arch of heaven, and personified as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. In both instances he had the cross; once in humiliation and once holding it in his control as the law of creation, He being Jehovah.
And then the author proceeds to give “the fact” that “there were two Messiahs,” etc., as quoted above. And this—leaving the divine and mystic character and claim for Jesus entirely independent of this event of His mortal life—shows Him, beyond any doubt, as an Initiate of the Egyptian Mysteries, where the same rite of Death and of spiritual Resurrection for the neophyte, or the suffering Chrestos on his trial and new birth by Regeneration, was enacted—for this was a universally adopted rite.
The “pit” into which the Eastern Initiate was made to descend was, as shown before, Pâtâla, one of the seven regions of the nether world, over which ruled Vâsuki, the great “snake God.” This pit, Pâtâla, has [pg 290] in the Eastern Symbolism precisely the same manifold meaning as is found by Mr. Ralston Skinner in the Hebrew word shiac in its application to the case in hand. For it was the synonym of Scorpio—Pâtâla's depths being “impregnated with the brightness of the new Sun”—represented by the “newly born” into the glory; and Pâtâla was and is in a sense, “a pit, a grave, the place of death, and the door of Hades or Sheol”—as, in the partially exoteric Initiations in India, the candidate had to pass through the matrix of the heifer before proceeding to Pâtâla. In its non-mystic sense it is the Antipodes—America being referred to in India as Pâtâla. But in its symbolism it meant all that, and much more. The fact alone that Vâsuki, the ruling Deity of Pâtâla, is represented in the Hindu Pantheon as the great Nâga (Serpent)—who was used by the Gods and Asuras as a rope round the mountain Mandara, at the churning of the ocean for Amrita, the water of immortality—connects him directly with Initiation.
For he is Shesha Nâga also, serving as a couch for Vishnu, and upholding the seven worlds; and he is also Ananta, “the endless,” and the symbol of eternity—hence the “God of Secret Wisdom,” degraded by the Church to the rôle of the tempting Serpent, of Satan. That what is now said is correct may be verified by the evidence of even the exoteric rendering of the attributes of various Gods and Sages both in the Hindu and the Buddhist Pantheons. Two instances will suffice to show how little our best and most erudite Orientalists are capable of dealing correctly and fairly with the symbolism of Eastern nations, while remaining ignorant of the corresponding points to be found only in Occultism and the Secret Doctrine.
(1) The learned Orientalist and Tibetan traveller, Professor Emil Schlagintweit, mentions in one of his works on Tibet, a national legend to the effect that