Part 46 (1/2)
The Sacred Tau occurs in the hands of the mummy-shaped figures between the forelegs of the row of Sphynxes, in the great avenue leading from Luxor to Karnac. By the Tau Cross the Cabalists expressed the number 10, a perfect number, denoting Heaven, and the Pythagorean Tetractys, or incommunicable name of G.o.d. The Tau Cross is also found on the stones in front of the door of the Temple of Amunoth III, at Thebes, who reigned about the time when the Israelites took possession of Canaan: and the Egyptian Priests carried it in all the sacred processions.
Tertullian, who had been initiated, informs us that the Tau was inscribed on the forehead of every person who had been admitted into the Mysteries of Mithras.
As the simple Tau represented Life, so, when the Circle, symbol of Eternity, was added, it represented Eternal Life.
At the Initiation of a King, the Tau, as the emblem of life and key of the Mysteries, was impressed upon his lips.
In the Indian Mysteries, the Tau Cross, under the name of _Tiluk_, was marked upon the body of the candidate, as a sign that he was set apart for the Sacred Mysteries.
On the upright tablet of the King, discovered at Nimroud, are the names of thirteen Great G.o.ds (among which are YAV and BEL); and the left-hand character of every one is a cross composed of two cuneiform characters.
The Cross appears upon an Ancient Phnician medal found in the ruins of Citium; on the very ancient Buddhist Obelisk near Ferns in Ross-s.h.i.+re; on the Buddhist Round Towers in Ireland, and upon the splendid obelisk of the same era at Forres in Scotland.
Upon the facade of a temple at Kalabche in Nubia are three regal figures, each holding a Crux Ansata.
Like the Subterranean Mithriatic Temple at New Grange in Scotland, the PaG.o.das of Benares and Mathura were in the form of a Cross. Magnificent Buddhist Crosses were erected, and are still standing, at Clonmacnoise, Finglas, and Kilcullen in Ireland. Wherever the monuments of Buddhism are found, in India, Ceylon, or Ireland, we find the Cross: for Buddha or Boudh was represented to have been crucified.
All the planets known to the Ancients were distinguished by the Mystic Cross, in conjunction with the solar or lunar symbols; Saturn by a cross over a crescent, Jupiter by a cross under a crescent, Mars by a cross resting obliquely on a circle, Venus by a cross under a circle, and Mercury by a cross surmounted by a circle and that by a crescent.
The Solstices, Cancer and Capricorn, the two Gates of Heaven are the two pillars of Hercules, beyond which he, the Sun, never journeyed: and they still appear in our Lodges, as the two great columns, Jachin and Boaz, and also as the two parallel lines that bound the circle, with a point in the centre, emblem of the Sun between the two tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
The Blazing Star in our Lodges, we have already said, represents Sirius, Anubis, or Mercury, Guardian and Guide of Souls. Our Ancient English brethren also considered it an emblem of the Sun. In the old Lectures they said: ”The Blazing Star or Glory in the centre refers us to that Grand Luminary the Sun, which enlightens the Earth, and by its genial influence dispenses blessings to mankind.” It is also said in those lectures to be an emblem of Prudence. The word _Prudentia_ means, in its original and fullest signification, _Foresight_: and accordingly the Blazing Star has been regarded as an emblem of Omniscience, or the All-Seeing Eye, which to the Ancients was the Sun.
Even the Dagger of the Elu of Nine is that used in the Mysteries of Mithras; which, with its blade black and hilt white, was an emblem of the two principles of Light and Darkness.
Isis, the same as Ceres, was, as we learn from Eratosthenes, the Constellation Virgo, represented by a woman holding an ear of wheat. The different emblems which accompany her in the description given by Apuleius, a serpent on either side, a golden vase, with a serpent twined round the handle, and the animals that marched in procession, the bear, the ape, and Pegasus, represented the Constellations that, rising with the Virgin, when on the day of the Vernal Equinox she stood in the Oriental gate of Heaven, brilliant with the rays of the full moon, seemed to march in her train.
The cup, consecrated in the Mysteries both of Isis and Eleusis, was the Constellation Crater or the Cup. The sacred vessel of the Isiac ceremony finds its counterpart in the Heavens. The Olympic robe presented to the Initiate, a magnificent mantle, covered with figures of serpents and animals, and under which were twelve other sacred robes, wherewith he was clothed in the sanctuary, alluded to the starry Heaven and the twelve signs: while the seven preparatory immersions in the sea alluded to the seven spheres, through which the soul plunged, to arrive here below and take up its abode in a body.
The Celestial Virgin, during the last three centuries that preceded the Christian era, occupied the horoscope or Oriental point, and that gate of Heaven through which the Sun and Moon ascended above the horizon at the two equinoxes. Again it occupied it at midnight, at the Winter Solstice, the precise moment when the year commenced. Thus it was essentially connected with the march of times and seasons, of the Sun, the Moon, and day and night, at the princ.i.p.al epochs of the year. At the equinoxes were celebrated the greater and lesser Mysteries of Ceres.
When souls descended past the Balance, at the moment when the Sun occupied that point, the Virgin rose before him; she stood at the gates of day and opened them to him. Her brilliant Star, Spica Virginis, and Arcturus, in Bootes, northwest of it, heralded his coming. When he had returned to the Vernal Equinox, at the moment when souls were generated, again it was the Celestial Virgin that led the march of the signs of night; and in her stars came the beautiful full moon of that month.
Night and day were in succession introduced by her, when they began to diminish in length; and souls, before arriving at the gates of h.e.l.l, were also led by her. In going through these signs, they pa.s.sed the Styx in the 8th Degree of Libra. She was the famous Sibyl who initiated Eneas, and opened to him the way to the infernal regions.
This peculiar situation of the Constellation Virgo, has caused it to enter into all the sacred fables in regard to nature, under different names and the most varied forms. It often takes the name of Isis or the Moon, which, when at its full at the Vernal Equinox, was in union with it or beneath its feet. Mercury (or Anubis) having his domicile and exaltation in the sign Virgo, was, in all the sacred fables and Sanctuaries, the inseparable companion of Isis, without whose counsels she did nothing.
This relation between the emblems and mysterious recitals of the initiations, and the Heavenly bodies and order of the world, was still more clear in the Mysteries of Mithras, adored as the Sun in Asia Minor, Cappadocia, Armenia, and Persia, and whose Mysteries went to Rome in the time of Sylla. This is amply proved by the descriptions we have of the Mithriac cave, in which were figured the two movements of the Heavens, that of the fixed Stars and that of the Planets, the Constellations, the eight mystic gates of the spheres, and the symbols of the elements. So on a celebrated monument of that religion, found at Rome, were figured, the Serpent or Hydra under Leo, as in the Heavens, the Celestial Dog, the Bull, the Scorpion, the Seven Planets, represented by seven altars, the Sun, Moon, and emblems relating to Light, to Darkness, and to their succession during the year, where each in turn triumphs for six months.
The Mysteries of Atys were celebrated when the Sun entered Aries; and among the emblems was a ram at the foot of a tree which was being cut down.
Thus, if not the whole truth, it is yet a large part of it, that the Heathen Pantheon, in its infinite diversity of names and personifications, was but a mult.i.tudinous, though in its origin unconscious allegory, of which physical phenomena, and princ.i.p.ally the Heavenly Bodies, were the fundamental types. The glorious images of Divinity which formed Jehovah's Host, were the Divine Dynasty or real theocracy which governed the early world; and the men of the golden age, whose looks held commerce with the skies, and who watched the radiant rulers bringing Winter and Summer to mortals, might be said with poetic truth to live in immediate communication with Heaven, and, like the Hebrew Patriarchs, to see G.o.d face to face. Then the G.o.ds introduced their own wors.h.i.+p among mankind: then Oannes, Oe or Aquarius rose from the Red Sea to impart science to the Babylonians; then the bright Bull legislated for India and Crete; and the Lights of Heaven, personified as Liber and Ceres, hung the Botian hills with vineyards, and gave the golden sheaf to Eleusis. The children of men were, in a sense, allied or married, to those sons of G.o.d who sang the jubilee of creation; and the encircling vault with its countless Stars, which to the excited imagination of the solitary Chaldean wanderer appeared as animated intelligences, might naturally be compared to a gigantic ladder, on which, in their rising and setting, the Angel luminaries appeared to be ascending and descending between earth and Heaven. The original revelation died out of men's memories; they wors.h.i.+pped the Creature instead of the Creator; and holding all earthly things as connected by eternal links of harmony and sympathy with the heavenly bodies, they united in one view astronomy, astrology, and religion. Long wandering thus in error, they at length ceased to look upon the Stars and external nature as G.o.ds; and by directing their attention to the microcosm or narrower world of self, they again became acquainted with the True Ruler and Guide of the Universe, and used the old fables and superst.i.tions as symbols and allegories, by which to convey and under which to hide the great truths which had faded out of most men's remembrance.
In the Hebrew writings, the term ”Heavenly Hosts” includes not only the counsellors and emissaries of Jehovah, but also the celestial luminaries; and the stars, imagined in the East to be animated intelligences, presiding over human weal and woe, are identified with the more distinctly impersonated messengers or angels, who execute the Divine decrees, and whose predominance in Heaven is in mysterious correspondence and relation with the powers and dominions of the earth.
In Job, the Morning Stars and the Sons of G.o.d are identified; they join in the same chorus of praise to the Almighty; they are both susceptible of joy; they walk in brightness, and are liable to impurity and imperfection in the sight of G.o.d. The Elohim originally included not only foreign superst.i.tious forms, but also all that host of Heaven which was revealed in poetry to the shepherds of the desert, now as an encampment of warriors, now as careering in chariots of fire, and now as winged messengers, ascending and descending the vault of Heaven, to communicate the will of G.o.d to mankind.
”The Eternal,” says the Beres.h.i.+th Rabba to Genesis, ”called forth Abraham and his posterity out of the dominion of the stars; by nature, the Israelite was a servant to the stars, and born under their influence, as are the heathen; but by virtue of the law given on Mount Sinai, he became liberated from this degrading servitude.” The Arabs had a similar legend. The Prophet Amos explicitly a.s.serts that the Israelites, in the desert, wors.h.i.+pped, not Jehovah, but Moloch, or a Star-G.o.d, equivalent to Saturn. The G.o.ds El or Jehovah were not merely planetary or solar. Their symbolism, like that of every other Deity, was coextensive with nature, and with the mind of man. Yet the astrological character is a.s.signed even to Jehovah. He is described as seated on the pinnacle of the Universe, leading forth the Hosts of Heaven, and telling them unerringly by name and number. His stars are His sons and His eyes, which run through the whole world, keeping watch over men's deeds. The stars and planets were properly the angels. In Pharisaic tradition, as in the phraseology of the New Testament, the Heavenly Host appears as an Angelic Army, divided into regiments and brigades, under the command of imaginary chiefs, such as Ma.s.saloth, Legion, Kartor Gistra etc.--each Gistra being captain of 365,000 myriads of stars. The Seven Spirits which stand before the throne, spoken of by several Jewish writers, and generally presumed to have been immediately derived from the Persian Amshaspands, were ultimately the seven planetary intelligences, the original model of the seven-branched golden candlestick exhibited to Moses on G.o.d's mountain. The stars were imagined to have fought in their courses against Sisera. The heavens were spoken of as holding a predominance over earth, as governing it by signs and ordinances, and as containing the elements of that astrological wisdom, more especially cultivated by the Babylonians and Egyptians.
Each nation was supposed by the Hebrews to have its own guardian angel, and its own provincial star. One of the chiefs of the Celestial Powers, at first Jehovah Himself in the character of the Sun, standing in the height of Heaven, overlooking and governing all things, afterward one of the angels or subordinate planetary genii of Babylonian or Persian mythology, was the patron and protector of their own nation, ”the Prince that standeth for the children of thy people.” The discords of earth were accompanied by a warfare in the sky; and no people underwent the visitation of the Almighty, without a corresponding chastis.e.m.e.nt being inflicted on its tutelary angel.
The fallen Angels were also fallen Stars; and the first allusion to a feud among the spiritual powers in early Hebrew Mythology, where Rabab and his confederates are defeated, like the t.i.tans in a battle against the G.o.ds, seems to identify the rebellious Spirits as part of the visible Heavens, where the ”high ones on high” are punished or chained, as a signal proof of G.o.d's power and justice. G.o.d, it is said--
”Stirs the sea with His might--by His understanding He smote Rahab--His breath clears the face of Heaven--His hand pierced the crooked Serpent.... G.o.d withdraws not His anger; beneath Him bow the confederates of Rahab.”