Part 2 (2/2)
Dr. Ginsburg should have been aware of this distinction and that the pa.s.sage in question had therefore no bearing on his argument. As a matter of fact it would appear that some of the apostles kept servants, since Christ commends them for exacting strict attention to duty:
Which of you, having a servant ploughing or feeding cattle, will say unto him by and by, when he is come from the field, Go and sit down to meat? And will not rather say unto him, Make ready wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken; and afterwards thou shalt eat and drink? Doth he thank that servant because he did the things that were commanded to him? I trow not.[99]
This pa.s.sage would alone suffice to show that Christ and His apostles did not inhabit communities where all were equal, but followed the usual practices of the social system under which they lived, though adopting certain rules, such as taking only one garment and carrying no money when they went on journeys. Those resemblances between the teaching of the Essenes and the Sermon on the Mount which Dr. Ginsburg indicates refer not to the customs of a sect, but to general precepts for human conduct--humility, meekness, charity, and so forth.
At the same time it is clear that if the Essenes in general conformed to some of the principles laid down by Christ, certain of their doctrines were completely at variance with those of Christ and of primitive Christians, in particular their custom of praying to the rising sun and their disbelief in the resurrection of the body.[100] St. Paul denounces asceticism, the cardinal doctrine of the Essenes, in unmeasured terms, warning the brethren that ”in the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils, ...
forbidding to marry, and commanding to abstain from meats, which G.o.d hath created to be received with thanksgiving of them which believe and know the truth. For every creature of G.o.d is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving ... If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things, thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ.”
This would suggest that certain Essenean ideas had crept into Christian communities and were regarded by those who remembered Christ's true teaching as a dangerous perversion.
The Essenes were therefore not Christians, but a secret society, practising four degrees of initiation, and bound by terrible oaths not to divulge the sacred mysteries confided to them. And what were those mysteries but those of the Jewish secret tradition which we now know as the Cabala? Dr. Ginsburg throws an important light on Essenism when, in one pa.s.sage alone, he refers to the obligation of the Essenes ”not to divulge the secret doctrines to anyone, ... carefully to preserve the books belonging to their sect and the names of the angels or the mysteries connected with the Tetragrammaton and the other names of G.o.d and the angels, comprised in the theosophy as well as with the cosmogony which also played so important a part among the Jewish mystics and the Kabbalists.”[101] The truth is clearly that the Essenes were Cabalists, though doubtless Cabalists of a superior kind. The Cabal they possessed very possibly descended from pre-Christian times and had remained uncontaminated by the anti-Christian strain introduced into it by the Rabbis after the death of Christ.[102]
The Essenes are of importance to the subject of this book as the first of the secret societies from which a direct line of tradition can be traced up to the present day. But if in this peaceful community no actually anti-Christian influence is to be discerned, the same cannot be said of the succeeding pseudo-Christian sects which, whilst professing Christianity, mingled with Christian doctrines the poison of the perverted Cabala, main source of the errors which henceforth rent the Christian Church in twain.
The Gnostics
The first school of thought to create a schism in Christianity was the collection of sects known under the generic name of Gnosticism. In its purer forms Gnosticism aimed at supplementing faith by knowledge of eternal verities and at giving a wider meaning to Christianity by linking it up with earlier faiths. ”The belief that the divinity had been manifested in the religious inst.i.tutions of all nations”[103] thus led to the conception of a sort of universal religion containing the divine elements of all.
Gnosticism, however, as the _Jewish Encyclopaedia_ points out, ”was Jewish in character long before it became Christian.”[104] M. Matter indicates Syria and Palestine as its cradle and Alexandria as the centre by which it was influenced at the time of its alliance with Christianity. This influence again was predominantly Jewish. Philo and Aristobulus, the leading Jewish philosophers of Alexandria, ”wholly attached to the ancient religion of their fathers, both resolved to adorn it with the spoils of other systems and to open to Judaism the way to immense conquests.”[105] This method of borrowing from other races and religions those ideas useful for their purpose has always been the custom of the Jews. The Cabala, as we have seen, was made up of these heterogeneous elements. And it is here we find the princ.i.p.al progenitor of Gnosticism. The Freemason Ragon gives the clue in the words: ”The Cabala is the key of the occult sciences. The Gnostics were born of the Cabalists.”[106]
For the Cabala was much older than the Gnostics. Modern historians who date it merely from the publication of the Zohar by Moses de Leon in the thirteenth century or from the school of Luria in the sixteenth century obscure this most important fact which Jewish savants have always clearly, recognized.[107] The _Jewish Encyclopaedia_, whilst denying the certainty of connexion between Gnosticism and the Cabala, nevertheless admits that the investigations of the anti-Cabalist Graetz ”must be resumed on a new basis,” and it goes on to show that ”it was Alexandria of the first century, or earlier, with her strange commingling of Egyptian, Chaldean, Judean, and Greek culture which furnished soil and seeds for that mystic philosophy.”[108] But since Alexandria was at the same period the home of Gnosticism, which was formed from the same elements enumerated here, the connexion between the two systems is clearly evident. M. Matter is therefore right in saying that Gnosticism was not a defection from Christianity, but a combination of systems into which a few Christian elements were introduced. The result of Gnosticism was thus not to christianize the Cabala, but to cabalize Christianity by mingling its pure and simple teaching with theosophy and even magic. The _Jewish Encyclopaedia_ quotes the opinion that ”the central doctrine of Gnosticism--a movement closely connected with Jewish mysticism--was nothing else than the attempt to liberate the soul and unite it with G.o.d”; but as this was apparently to be effected ”through the employment of mysteries, incantations, names of angels,” etc., it will be seen how widely even this phase of Gnosticism differs from Christianity and identifies itself with the magical Cabala of the Jews.
Indeed, the man generally recognized as the founder of Gnosticism, a Jew commonly known as Simon Magus, was not only a Cabalist mystic but avowedly a magician, who with a band of Jews, including his master Dositheus and his disciples Menander and Cerinthus, inst.i.tuted a priesthood of the Mysteries and practised occult arts and exorcisms.[109] It was this Simon of whom we read in the Acts of the Apostles that he ”bewitched the people of Samaria, giving out that himself was some great one: to whom they all gave heed from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of G.o.d,” and who sought to purchase the power of the laying on of hands with money.
Simon, indeed, crazed by his incantations and ecstasies, developed megalomania in an acute form, arrogating to himself divine honours and aspiring to the adoration of the whole world. According to a contemporary legend, he eventually became sorcerer to Nero and ended his life in Rome.[110]
The prevalence of sorcery amongst the Jews during the first century of the Christian era is shown by other pa.s.sages in the Acts of the Apostles; in Paphos the ”false prophet,” a Jew, whose surname was Bar-Jesus, otherwise known as ”Elymas the sorcerer,” opposed the teaching of St. Paul and brought on himself the imprecation: ”O full of all subtlety and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?”
Perversion is the keynote of all the debased forms of Gnosticism.
According to Eliphas Levi, certain of the Gnostics introduced into their rites that profanation of Christian mysteries which was to form the basis of black magic in the Middle Ages.[111] The glorification of evil, which plays so important a part in the modern revolutionary movement, const.i.tuted the creed of the Ophites, who wors.h.i.+pped the Serpent (?f??) because he had revolted against Jehovah, to whom they referred under the Cabalistic term of the ”demiurgus,”[112] and still more of the Cainites, so-called from their cult of Cain, whom, with Dathan and Abiram, the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, and finally Judas Iscariot, they regarded as n.o.ble victims of the demiurgus.[113]
Animated by hatred of all social and moral order, the Cainites ”called upon all men to destroy the works of G.o.d and to commit every kind of infamy.”[114]
These men were therefore not only the enemies of Christianity but of orthodox Judaism, since it was against the Jehovah of the Jews that their hatred was particularly directed. Another Gnostic sect, the Carpocratians, followers of Carpocrates of Alexandria and his son Epipha.n.u.s--who died from his debaucheries and was venerated as a G.o.d[115]--likewise regarded all written laws, Christian or Mosaic, with contempt and recognized only the ???s?? or knowledge given to the great men of every nation--Plato and Pythagoras, Moses and Christ--which ”frees one from all that the vulgar call religion” and ”makes man equal to G.o.d.”[116]
So in the Carpocratians of the second century we find already the tendency towards that _deification of humanity_ which forms the supreme doctrine of the secret societies and of the visionary Socialists of our day. The war now begins between the two contending principles: the Christian conception of man reaching up to G.o.d and the secret society conception of man as G.o.d, needing no revelation from on high and no guidance but the law of his own nature. And since that nature is in itself divine, all that springs from it is praiseworthy, and those acts usually regarded as sins are not to be condemned. By this line of reasoning the Carpocratians arrived at much the same conclusions as modern Communists with regard to the ideal social system. Thus Epipha.n.u.s held that since Nature herself reveals the principle of the community and the unity of all things, human laws which are contrary to this law of Nature are so many culpable infractions of the legitimate order of things. Before these laws were imposed on humanity everything was in common--land, goods, and women. According to certain contemporaries, the Carpocratians returned to this primitive system by inst.i.tuting the community of women and indulging in every kind of licence.
The further Gnostic sect of Ant.i.tacts, following this same cult of human nature, taught revolt against all positive religion and laws and the necessity for gratifying the flesh; the Adamites of North Africa, going a step further in the return to Nature, cast off all clothing at their religious services so as to represent the primitive innocence of the garden of Eden--a precedent followed by the Adamites of Germany in the fifteenth century.[117]
These Gnostics, says Eliphas Levi, under the pretext of ”spiritualizing matter, materialized the spirit in the most revolting ways.... Rebels to the hierarchic order, ... they wished to subst.i.tute the mystical licence of sensual pa.s.sions to wise Christian sobriety and obedience to laws....
Enemies of the family, they wished to produce sterility by increasing debauchery.”[118]
By way of systematically perverting the doctrines of the Christian faith the Gnostics claimed to possess the true versions of the Gospels, and professed belief in these to the exclusion of all the others.[119] Thus the Ebionites had their own corrupted version of the Gospel of St.
Matthew founded on the ”Gospel of the Hebrews,” known earlier to the Jewish Christians; the Marcosians had their version of St. Luke, the Cainites their own ”Gospel of Judas,” and the Valentinians their ”Gospel of St. John.” As we shall see later, the Gospel of St. John is the one that throughout the war on Christianity has been specially chosen for the purpose of perversion.
Of course this spirit of perversion was nothing new; many centuries earlier the prophet Isaiah had denounced it in the words: ”Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness!” But the role of the Gnostics was to reduce perversion to a system by binding men together into sects working under the guise of enlightenment in order to obscure all recognized ideas of morality and religion. It is this which const.i.tutes their importance in the history of secret societies.
Whether the Gnostics themselves can be described as a secret society, or rather as a ramification of secret societies, is open to question. M.
Matter, quoting a number of third-century writers, shows the possibility that they had mysteries and initiations; the Church Fathers definitely a.s.serted this to be the case.[120] According to Tertullian, the Valentinians continued, or rather perverted, the mysteries of Eleusis, out of which they made a ”sanctuary of prost.i.tution.”[121]
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