Religion in the Heavens; Or, Mythology Unveiled in a Series of Lectures

by Logan Mitchell

Job, who here personates the declining year in its last ungenial and evil months, is of course dejected, sick, and grievously afflicted; his wife (whom we may presume to be Anna, from Annus, the circle of' the year) bids him curse God and die, that is, to cease putting his trust in the sun, who had metaphorically forsaken him for the present. But Job, though nearly worn out, as the year is in December, has still hopes of his revival, and exclaims, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," and at the last day (the 21st December) "I shall rise up", etc. Yet in his exhausted state, and sore afflictions, he is so nigh to despair that his God, the sun, reproaches him for his impatience under the immutable necessities of faith, and seems to say in way of admonition, "I cannot be with you always; nor is it reasonable in you to expect the enjoyment of perpetual summer," and in illustration thereof, he most beautifully instances the summer constellations, and asks, "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth the twelve signs in the season?" that is, canst thou have summer throughout the twelve months. "Canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?" The seven summer months, from March to September inclusive, are personated in the seven sons of Job, who are killed by a "great wind from the wilderness," (winter) that is, they are killed by the five winter months commencing in October,* but as this is only an allegorical death, the drama represents them as being all alive again in the succeeding summer; and Job, the year, is fully restored to health and happiness.

With regard to the whole of that miscellaneous and discordant mass of anecdote, narrative, prophecy, allegory, gospel, epistle, revelation, etc., which compose what is called the Bible (to say nothing at present of its immoral tendency), we cannot make anything rational out of the greater portion, unless we seek the true meaning under type or allegory; but when we turn aside that veil, the nonsense of the exoteric disappears, and we perceive that the allusions are exclusively made to physical or moral principles, under typical personifications.** This is particularly the case in all those books or fragments of books which are known not to be Jewish (the book of Job, for instance), but picked up by that people among the Chaldeans and Persians, who concealed from the vulgar all the higher branches of science under the veil of allegory; and when Levi's ignorant but privileged sons adopted these books, in making their compilation, they contented themselves with the literal, knowing nothing of the occult sense.

* These five winter months, beginning in October, when the
Sun is in the sign Scorpio, are metaphorically alluded to as
Scorpions, by St. John in Revelations ix., where it is said
they shall have power "to hurt men for five months." The
stings in their tails were figurative of the sharpness of
the four months that succeed October, which, though they
"should not kill," are nevertheless so stingingly cold as to
"hurt men."—See Revelations.
** Those parts of this collection in which we perceive that
the astronomical Chronology is veiled in the allegorical
picture, under the appearance of history, may be called the
word of science. Most of the psalms are evidently hymns to
the Sun, as they apply to nothing else.
***In dedicating one of their tribes for the priesthood
alone, the Jews imitated the oriental nations: their tribe
of Levi played the same part amongst them, that the
Chaldeans played amongst the Assyrians and Babylonians; the
Magi amongst the Modes and Persians; the Druids amongst the
Celtæ; the Brahmins amongst the Indians; the Lamas amongst
the Thibetians; and the Christian priesthoods now in Europe;
in all it has been the game of deception.

Even the trinity in unity, as we have already observed, was one of the secrets revealed to the initiated in the Pagan polytheism; and was taught in the mysteries long before the sect Christians adopted the ascetic habits of the Essenes and Egyptian Therapeutæ. In these mysteries this trinity had a twofold allusion—under one meaning it was a personification of physical, and under the other of moral, principles; in the physical sense, those natural principles were personified, which, by their inherent properties, viz., motion, attraction, repulsion, etc., produce these changes which we perceive in matter. But of all these principles, the Sun was looked up to as the grand omnipotent nucleus, whose all-vivifying power is the vital and sole source of animative and vegetative existence upon this globe—the glorious fountain out of which springs all that man ever has, or ever can call good, and as such, the only proper object of the homage and adoration of mankind. Hence the Sun, as we are informed by Pausanius, was worshipped at Eleusis under the name of "The Savior." If it is urged that the Sun cannot properly be regarded as a principle in Nature, the objection is good with respect to the universal systems which "circle other Suns;" but of our Solar system, he is the principal.

Of the thousand Pagan personifications of the Sun, which appear absurd and ridiculous when taken in the literal sense, but which are rational and highly scientific when the veil of allegory is withdrawn, one of the most beautiful is that of the solar Deity under the name of Adonai,* Tammuz, or the Adonis of the Syrians. This allegory represents him, after being glorified as "The most High God," in his exalted reign of summer, as resigning his place in the heavens to the zodiacal animals of the winter signs; and is figured as being slain or mutilated by them, more especially by the wild boar, under whose malefic ascendancy the sun seems annually to expire.

* Adonai is synonymous with Jahouh, or Jehovah. Throughout
the Psalms, the Sun is "the Lord God," and Zion means the
zodiac.

And, as personated in the beautiful Adonis, he is fabled as being mutilated in his genital parts by the boar; that is, by similitude, he is deprived of his genial or generative power over Nature during the winter. But when the annual rains of summer had swelled the river Adonis (so called from the god), its waters became tinged red by some mineral, and were fabled to be the blood of the beauteous Adonis, annually mutilated as aforesaid:—

"While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea,—supposed with blood
Of Tammuz, yearly wounded."

In lamentation over this most shocking outrage against genial Nature,—or rather to celebrate the yearly victory over it, the Sidonian damsels, not wholly without significance, assembled to hail the renovation of the prolific powers of Tammuz, or Adonis, as manifested in their God of summer.

That the Old Testament, as well as the New, is almost wholly allegorical of the sun, the year, and the seasons, is further proved in that apparently heart-felt complaint of St. Paul, 2 Corinthians iii., 15, "But even until this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart."