As to his prodigies, without wishing to fathom them, Jerome most undeniably admits them as such; which he would assuredly never have done, had he not been compelled to do so by facts. To end the subject, had Apollonius been a simple hero of a romance, dramatised in the fourth century, the Ephesians would not, in their enthusiastic gratitude, have raised to him a golden statue for all the benefits he had conferred upon them.[252]
Section XVIII. Facts underlying Adept Biographies.
The tree is known by its fruits; the nature of the Adept by his words and deeds. These words of charity and mercy, the noble advice put into the mouth of Apollonius (or of his sidereal phantom), as given by Vopiscus, show the Occultists who Apollonius was. Why then call him the “Medium of Satan” seventeen centuries later? There must be a reason, and a very potent reason, to justify and explain the secret of such a strong animus of the Church against one of the noblest men of his age. There is a reason for it, and we give it in the words of the author of the Key to the Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery in the Source of Measures, and of Professor Seyffarth. The latter analyses and explains the salient dates in the life of Jesus, and thus throws light on the conclusions of the former. We quote both, blending the two.
According to solar months (of thirty days, one of the calendars in use among the Hebrews) all remarkable events of the Old Testament happened on the days of the equinoxes and the solstices; for instance, the foundations and dedications of the temples and altars [and consecration of the tabernacle]. On the same cardinal days, the most remarkable events of the New Testament happened; for instance, the annunciation, the birth, the resurrection of Christ, and the birth of John the Baptist. And thus we learn that all remarkable epochs of the New Testament were typically sanctified a long time before by the Old Testament, beginning at the day succeeding the end of the Creation, which was the day of the vernal equinox. During the crucifixion, on the 14th day of Nisan, Dionysius Areopagita saw, in Ethiopia, an eclipse of the sun, and he said, “Now the Lord (Jehovah) is suffering something.”Then Christ arose from the dead on the 22d March, 17 Nisan, Sunday, the day of the vernal equinox (Seyf., quoting Philo de Septen)—that is, on Easter, or on the day when the sun gives new life to the earth. The words of John the Baptist “He must increase, but I must decrease,” serve to prove, as is affirmed by the fathers of the church, that John was born on the longest day of the year, and Christ, who was six months younger, on the shortest, 22d June and 22d December, the solstices.
This only goes to show that, as to another phase, John and Jesus were but epitomisers of the history of the same sun, under differences of aspect or condition; and one condition following another, of necessity, the statement, Luke, ix. 7, was not only not an empty one, but it was true, that which “was said of some, that (in Jesus) John was risen from the dead.” (And this consideration serves to explain why it has been that the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus, has been so persistently kept back from translation and from popular reading. Those who have studied it in the original have been forced to the comment that either the Life of Apollonius has been taken from the New Testament, or that the New Testament narratives have been taken from the Life of Apollonius, because of the manifest sameness of the means of construction of the narratives. The explanation is simple enough, when it is considered that the names of Jesus, Hebrew יש, and Apollonius, or Apollo, are alike names of the sun in the heavens; and necessarily the history of the one, as to his travels through the signs, with the personifications of his sufferings, triumphs and miracles, could be but the history of the other, where there was a widespread, common method of describing those travels by personification.) It seems also that, for long afterward, all this was known to rest upon an astronomical basis; for the secular church, so to speak, was founded by Constantine, and the objective condition of the worship established was that part of his decree, in which it was affirmed that the venerable day of the sun should be the day set apart for the worship of Jesus Christ, as Sun-day. There is something weird and startling in some other facts about this matter. The prophet Daniel (true prophet, as says Graetz),[253] by use of the pyramid numbers, or astrological numbers, foretold the cutting off of the Méshiac, as it happened (which would go to show the accuracy of his astronomical knowledge, if there was an eclipse of the sun at that time).... Now, however, the temple was destroyed in the year 71, in the month Virgo, and 71 is the Dove number, as shown, or 71 × 5 = 355, and with the fish, a Jehovah number.
“Is it possible,” queries further on the author, thus answering the intimate thought of every Christian and Occultist who reads and studies his work:
Is it possible that the events of humanity do run co-ordinately with these number forms? If so, while Jesus Christ, as an astronomical figure, was true to all that has been advanced, and more, possibly, He may, as a man, have filled up, under the numbers, answers in the sea of life to predestined type. The personality of Jesus does not appear to have been destroyed, because, as a condition, he was answering to astronomical forms and relations. The Arabian says, “Your destiny is written in the stars.”[254]
Nor is the “personality” of Apollonius “destroyed” for the same [pg 140] reason. The case of Jesus covers the ground for the same possibility in the cases of all Adepts and Avatâras—such as Buddha, Shankarâchârya, Krishna, etc.—all of these as great and as historical for their respective followers and in their countries, as Jesus of Nazareth is now for Christians and in this land.