“Never were men more perplexed and bewildered than the A-Gnostic Christians of the third and fourth centuries—who had started from a new beginning altogether, which they had been taught to consider solely historic—when they turned to look back for the first time to find that an apparition of their faith was following them one way and confronting them in another; a shadow that threatened to steal away their substance, mocking them with its aërial unreality; the ghost of the body of truth which they had embraced as a solid and eternal reality claiming to be the rightful owner of their possessions; a phantom Christ without flesh or bone; a crucifixion that only occurred in cloudland; a parody of the drama of salvation performed in the air, with never a cross to cling to, not a nail-wound to thrust the fingers into and hold on by, not one drop of blood to wash away their sins. It was horrible. It was devilish. It was the devil, they said, and thus they sought to account for Gnosticism and fight down their fears. ‘You poor ignorant idiotai!’ said the Gnostics, ‘you have mistaken the mysteries of old for modern history, and accepted literally all that was only meant mystically.’—‘You spawn of Satan!’ responded the Christians, ‘you are making the mystery by converting our accomplished facts into your miserable fables; you are dissipating and dispersing into thin air our only bit of solid foothold in the world, stained with the red drops of Calvary. You are giving a Satanic interpretation to the word of revelation and falsifying the oracles of God. You are converting the solid facts of our history into your new-fangled allegories.’—‘Nay,’ replied the Gnostics, ‘it is you who have taken the allegories of mythology for historic facts.’ And they were right. It was in consequence of their taking the allegorical tradition of the fall for reality that the Christian Fathers considered woman to be accursed, and called her a serpent, a scorpion, the devil in feminine form.”
The Gnostics are said by Gibbon to have been “the most polite, the most learned, and the most wealthy of the Christian name.” They were finally forbidden by Theodosias I. to assemble at their places of meeting or to teach their doctrines. Their books, too, were burned, so that we have now no full account of them. Only those who lied about them have been permitted a hearing.
The very fact that all the apparently historic events in the life of Jesus have an astrological and metaphoric character lifts him out of the category of physical humanity into that of the ideal. We may relegate him thither, and yet leave no vacant place in the arena of common life. This would be in perfect keeping with ancient usage. Among the reputed founders of philosophic systems we have no evidence of the existence of such great teachers as Manu, Kapila, Vyasa, Kanada, or Gotama, and the founding of the principal commonwealths was ascribed to demigods and fictitious eponymous heroes. Rome, Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and indeed every ancient city of note, was said to be established after that manner. Even leaders and teachers actually existing have been disguised by myth or the characteristics of the doctrine which they taught. Confucius and Zoroaster are hidden from view by the character assigned to them by later writers. Even Socrates as he appears and speaks in the Platonic Dialogues is little else than a personification of the Academic philosophy. When we consider that he is closely assimilated to the sages and hero-gods of the other worships, and that every significant point in his history conforms to astrological periods and to similar characteristics in the pagan religions, we cannot well avoid the conclusion that he too is an ideal.
Mr. William Oxley of England, in his great work on Egypt, takes the ground that the account we have of Jesus in the Gospels is substantially drawn from Egyptian sources.
Amenoph III. was one of the greatest of the old Egyptian kings. Amongst other gigantic works, he built the temple at Luxor, much of which is buried in sand and covered over by native houses. It is on the walls of this temple that very remarkable sculptures are portrayed relating to the birth, etc. of Amenoph III.; they are on the inner wall of the sacred shrine, the holy of holies, and the sculptured scenes represent the annunciation, the conception, the incarnation, birth, and adoration of the divine man-child (Amenoph III.) born from Mut-em-Sa. The two latter syllables mean “the Alone,” or Only One, and the whole title means “the mother who gave birth to the Only One.”
One fact is established beyond all cavil, and that is that the New Testament is the product of an order of men well versed in astronomy, and who by the aid of that science produced, on lines laid down by the ancient Egyptian hierophants, a new version of the old myths and allegories. We have as a fact the actual names and dates plagiarized from an Egypto-Arabic source, which undoubtedly betrays its origin, and the interpretation of this, and numberless instances besides, in strict accordance with the astrological formula and system, with its Graeco-Egyptian zodiacal pictorial representations.
Oxley says: “Apropos to this doctrine, I have in my possession two statuettes—one dating from the twenty-second dynasty, 900 B. c.—of Isis, crowned and nursing the babe Horus. On my return from Egypt through Italy, I obtained a statuette of Mary, crowned and nursing the babe Jesus, which is an exact copy of the Virgin and Child in the church of St. Augustine in Rome. The figures are identical.”
Face to face with such a fact, who dare assert that the Egyptian Isis and Horus are a myth, and that the Christian Mary and Jesus are really historical? Some simple-minded ones beguile themselves with the delusion that these Egyptian and other heathen beliefs are prophecies of the real Jesus who in the fulness of time came down from heaven and was born of a virgin. But against this we have not only the actual claim of several Egyptian kings to be the “son of God according to promise or prophecy” (sixteen hundred years before Christ was born), but we have the fact of a whole nation for thousands of years resting their hopes of eternal salvation upon a belief that “the son of God, Osiris, came down from heaven, took upon himself the mortal form, was slain by wicked hands, rose again from the dead, and ascended into heaven, where he became the great judge of all mankind.”
What adds to the difficulty is that no dates are given in the writings of the early Christian authors, and, what is more, many of their names are evidently noms de plume; for instance, the arch-heretic Arius and the great Nicene Council seem to resolve themselves simply into a controversy relating to the sun-god under the form of Aries (the Ram or Lamb); and as to dates in connection therewith, they are simply Masonic points with an astronomical reference and symbolical meaning. In plain terms, nearly the whole of both the Old and New Testaments is an allegorical record of astral, solar, and planetary phenomena, with personages substituted for zodiacal signs; and with this key in hand the Hermetic student can unravel the allegories which are presented in such a form as to read like literal history.
Our English name for the zodiacal sign referred to is the Ram, but in Latin it is Aries, and Nisan (which is the month of March). The “sacred year” of all systems commences with this month and sign; hence the Arian heresy and the Council of Nice; which resolves itself into a descriptive personified account of a conjunction of planets about the definite fixing of the first point of Aries as a basic point in time in history, and which point is used in astronomical science to this day. But the appearance of the Cross, with the letters I H S on the planispherical chart, gives the key to the solution of the mystery. The Church interprets these letters to stand for Jesus Salvator Hominum—i. e. Jesus the Saviour of Men. The initiates read them as numerals, which stand for 608; which is the exact period of a solar-lunar cycle—i. e. the number of years which pass before the sun and moon occupy the same relative positions in the heavens.