Part 14 (2/2)

”The Christ of the Gospels is in no sense an historical personage or a supreme model of humanity-a hero who strove, and suffered, and failed to save the world by his death. It is impossible to establish the existence of an historical character even as an impostor. For such an one the two witnesses, astronomical mythology and Gnosticism, completely prove an alibi. The Christ is a popular lay figure that never lived, and a lay figure of pagan origin-a lay figure that was once the Ram and afterward the Fish; a lay figure that in human form was the portrait and image of a dozen different G.o.ds.

”The imagery of the Catacombs shows that the types there represented are not the ideal figures of the human reality. They are the sole reality of the centuries after the Christian era, because they had been in the centuries long before. The symbolism, the allegories, the figures, and types remained there just what they were to the Romans, Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, The iconography of the Catacombs absolutely proves that the lay figure, as Christ, must have sat for the portraits of Osiris, Horus the child, Mithras, Bacchus, Aristaeus, Apollo, Pan, the Good Shepherd. The lay figure or type is one all through. The portraits are manifold, yet they all mean the mythical Christ under whatsoever name.

”The typical Christ, so far from being derived from the model man, has been made up from the features of many G.o.ds, after a fas.h.i.+on somewhat similar to those 'pictorial averages' portrayed by Mr. Galton, in which the characteristics of various persons are photographed and fused in a portrait-a composite likeness of twenty different persons merged in one that is not _anybody_.

”It is pitiful to track the poor faithful gleaners who picked up every fallen fragment or scattered waif and stray of the mythos, and to watch how they treasured every trait and tint of the ideal Christ to make up the personal portrait of their own supposed real one. His mother, like the other forms of the queen of heaven, had the color of the _mater frugum_, the complexion of the golden corn; and a Greek Father of the eighth century cites an early tradition of the Christians concerning the _personnel_ of the Christ to the effect that in taking the form of Adam he a.s.sumed features exactly like those of the Virgin, and his face was of a _wheaten color_, like that of his mother. That is, he (the seed) was _corn-complexioned_, as was the mother of corn, like Flava Keres, Aurea Venus, the Golden Lakshmi, the Yellow Neitli; and the son was her seed, which in Egypt was the corn brought forth at the vernal equinox, and which was continued in the cult of Rome as the 'bread-corn of the elect.'

”In the chapter of 'knowing the spirits of the East' the Osirified a.s.sumes the type of the virile and hairy Horus, the divine hawk of the resurrection. This is called the type under which he desires to appear before all men; and it is said, 'his hair is on his shoulder when he proceeds to the heaven.' This long hair of the adult Horus reaching down to the shoulders is a typical feature in the portraits of the Messiah, the copy of the Kamite Christ made permanent by the art of the Gnostics.

The halo of Christ is the glory of the sun-G.o.d seen in his phantom phase when the more physical type had become psychotheistic. Hence it is worn by the child-Christ as the _karast_ mummy. It is the same halo that illumined Horus and Iu-em-hept, Krishna and Buddha, and others of whom the same old tales of deliverance and redemption were told and believed.

Yet the dummy ideal of paganism is supposed to have become doubly real as the man-G.o.d standing with one foot in two worlds-one resting on the ground of the fall from heaven, and the other on the physical resurrection from the earth.”

It is a well-known fact that many early Christian sects absolutely denied the existence of Christ in the flesh, regarding him as a phantom.

It is very difficult to decide whether the apostle Paul believed in a real or an ideal Christ. He wrote his Epistles before the Gospels were written, and therefore could have learned nothing from that source.

Concerning the various appearances of Jesus after the resurrection, he says: ”Last of all, he was seen of me, as by one born out of due time,”

and this seems to bear out the conjecture that Jesus was an ideal, inasmuch as it was not in the flesh that he saw him, and his refusal to know him after the flesh indicates his strong preference for him as an idea, and not as a person. Paul makes no mention of any miracle but that of the resurrection, and that was manifestly a spiritual rather than a physical fact. Moreover, he was a Pharisee, and it is difficult to see how he could have ”gloried in the cross” had he taken the cross in a literal sense. He casts no reproach on the Jews for causing Jesus to suffer, and never speaks of the crucifixion as a crime, nor shows a particle of sympathy or compa.s.sion with the sufferer. He seems to have been the real founder of Christianity, and might have had in view the direct action of the solar divinity with whom Christ had become a.s.sociated.

A careful a.n.a.lysis of the Pauline Epistles will show, we think, that the Christ of Paul was an idea. And here it is important to bear in mind that those who attributed to him at least ten Epistles he never wrote would not scruple to alter, amend, interpolate, and change portions of the Epistles he actually did write. Those who formed the system of Christian ecclesiasticism never could afford to have a conscience. Those Fathers of the second century who formed the foundations of the Catholic hierarchy were most unscrupulous men.

Of the _Gnostics_, Mr. Gerald Ma.s.sey speaks as follows:

”The ancient wisdom of Egypt and Chaldea lived on with the men who knew, called the Gnostics. They had directly inherited the gnosis that remained oral, the sayings uttered from mouth to ear that were to be unwritten, the mysteries performed in secret, the science kept concealed. The continuity of the astronomical mythos of Equinoctial Christolatry and of the total typology is proved by the persistence of the type-the ancient genitrix, the two sisters, the hebdomad of inferior and superior powers, the trinity in unity represented by _Iao_ the tetrads male and female, the double Horus, or Horus and Stauros, the system of aeons, the Karaite divinities, Harpocrates and Sut-Anubis, Isis and Hathor. Theirs was the Christ not made flesh, but the manifester of the seven powers and perfect star of the pleroma. The figure of eight, which is a sign of the Nnu or a.s.sociate G.o.ds in Egypt, who were the primary Ogdoad, is reproduced as a gnostic symbol, a figure of the pleroma and fellow-type of the eight-rayed star. The 'Lamb of G.o.d' was a gnostic sign. 'Lord, thou art the Lamb' (and 'our Light') was a gnostic formula. The 'Immaculate Virgin' was a gnostic type. On one of the sard stones Isis stands before Serapis holding the sistrum in one hand, in the other a wheatsheaf, the legend being 'Immaculate is our Lady Isis,'

which proves the continuity from Kam.

”It was gnostic art that reproduced the Hathor-Meri and Horus of Egypt as the Virgin and child-Christ of Rome, and the icons of characters entirely ideal which served as the sole portraits of the _historical_ Madonna and Jesus the Christ. The report of Irenaeus sufficed to show the survival of the true tradition. He complains of the oral wisdom of the Gnostics, and says rightly they read from things unwritten-i. e. from sources unknown to him and the Fathers in general. Chief of these sources was the science of astronomy. He testifies that Marcus was skilled in this form of the gnosis, and enables us to follow the line of unbroken continuity, and to confute his own a.s.sertion that Gnosticism had no existence prior to Marcion and Valentinus; which shows he did not know, or else he denied the fact, that the Sutt.i.tes, the Mandaites, the Essenes, and Nazarenes were all Gnostics; all of which sects preceded the cult of the carnalized Christ. Hippolytus informs us that Elkesai said the Christ born of a Virgin was _onian_. The Elkesites maintained that Jesus the Christ had continually transformed and manifested in various bodies at many different times. This shows they also were in possession of the gnosis, and that the Christ and his repeated incarnations were Kronian. Hence we are told that they occupied themselves 'with a bustling activity in regard to astronomical science.'

Epiphanius also bears witness that the head and front of the gnostic boast was astronomy, and that Manes wrote a work on astronomy, astronomy being the root of the whole matter concerning Equinoctial Christolatry.

”Nothing is more astounding, on their own showing, than the ignorance of the Fathers about the nature, the significance, the descent of Gnosticism, and its rootage in the remotest past. They knew nothing of evolution or the survival of types, and for them the new beginning with Christ carnalized obliterated all that preceded. Such a thing as priority, natural genesis, or the doctrine of development did not trouble those who considered that the more the myth the greater was the miracle which proved the divinity.

”Also, it has been a.s.serted from the time of Irenaeus down to that of Mansel that the Gnostic heretics of the second century invented a number of spurious Gospels in imitation of or in opposition to the true gospel of Christ, which has descended to us as canonical, authentic, and historic. This is a popular delusion, false enough to d.a.m.n all belief in it from the beginning until now. The ignorance of the past manifested by men like Irenaeus is the measure of the value of their testimony to the origines of Equinoctial Christolatry. They who pretend to know all concerning the founding and the founder know nothing of the foundations....

”Gnosticism, according to those who are ignorant of its origin and relations.h.i.+ps, was supposed and a.s.sumed to have originated in the second century; the first being carefully avoided, only proves that the A-Gnostics, who had literally adopted the pre-Christian types, and believed they had been historically fulfilled, were then for the first time becoming conscious of the cult that preceded theirs and face to face with those who held them to be the heretics. Gnosticism was no birth or new thing in the second century, it was no perverter or corrupter of Christian doctrines divinely revealed, but the voice of an older cult growing more audible in its protest against a superst.i.tion as degrading and debasing now as when it was denounced by men like Tacitus, Pliny, Julian, Marcus Aurelius, and Porphyry. For what could be more shocking to any sense really religious than the belief that the very G.o.d himself had descended on earth as an embryo in a virgin's womb, to run the risk of abortion and universal miscarriage during nine months in utero, and then dying on a cross to save his own created world or a portion of its people from eternal perdition? The opponents of the latest superst.i.tion were too intelligent to accept a dying deity....

”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 aerial 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 sp.a.w.n 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 G.o.d. 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 a.s.semble 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 princ.i.p.al commonwealths was ascribed to demiG.o.ds and fict.i.tious 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.similated to the sages and hero-G.o.ds of the other wors.h.i.+ps, 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 t.i.tle means ”the mother who gave birth to the Only One.”

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