Chapter III…

Chapter III

“KING.--Let us from point to point this story know.” --All’s Well That Ends Well.--Act v., Scene 3.

“He is the One, self-proceeding; and from Him all things proceed. And in them He Himself exerts His activity; no mortal BEHOLDS HIM, but HE beholds all!”--Orphic Hymn.

“And Athens, O Athena, is thy own! Great Goddess hear! and on my darkened mind Pour thy pure light in measure unconfined; That sacred light, O all-proceeding Queen, Which beams eternal from thy face serene. My soul, while wand’ring on the earth, inspire With thy own blessed and impulsive fire!” --PROCLUS; TAYLOR: To Minerva.

“Now faith is the substance of things.... By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies in peace.”--Hebrews xi. 1, 31.

“What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man hath faith, and have not works? Can FAITH save him?... Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way?”--James ii. 14, 25.

Clement describes Basilides, the Gnostic, as “a philosopher devoted to the contemplation of divine things.” This very appropriate expression may be applied to many of the founders of the more important sects which later were all engulfed in one--that stupendous compound of unintelligible dogmas enforced by Irenæus, Tertullian, and others, which is now termed Christianity. If these must be called heresies, then early Christianity itself must be included in the number. Basilides and Valentinus preceded Irenæus and Tertullian; and the two latter Fathers had less facts than the two former Gnostics to show that their heresy was plausible. Neither divine right nor truth brought about the triumph of their Christianity; fate alone was propitious. We can assert, with entire plausibility, that there is not one of all these sects--Kabalism, Judaism, and our present Christianity included--but sprung from the two main branches of that one mother-trunk, the once universal religion, which antedated the Vedaic ages--we speak of that prehistoric Buddhism which merged later into Brahmanism.

The religion which the primitive teaching of the early few apostles most resembled--a religion preached by Jesus himself--is the elder of these two, Buddhism. The latter as taught in its primitive purity, and carried to perfection by the last of the Buddhas, Gautama, based its moral ethics on three fundamental principles. It alleged that 1, every thing existing, exists from natural causes; 2, that virtue brings its own reward, and vice and sin their own punishment; and, 3, that the state of man in this world is probationary. We might add that on these three principles rested the universal foundation of every religious creed; God, and individual immortality for every man--if he could but win it. However puzzling the subsequent theological tenets; however seemingly incomprehensible the metaphysical abstractions which have convulsed the theology of every one of the great religions of mankind as soon as it was placed on a sure footing, the above is found to be the essence of every religious philosophy, with the exception of later Christianity. It was that of Zoroaster, of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Jesus, and even of Moses, albeit the teachings of the Jewish law-giver have been so piously tampered with.

We will devote the present chapter mainly to a brief survey of the numerous sects which have recognized themselves as Christians; that is to say, that have believed in a Christos, or an ANOINTED ONE. We will also endeavor to explain the latter appellation from the kabalistic standpoint, and show it reappearing in every religious system. It might be profitable, at the same time, to see how much the earliest apostles--Paul and Peter, agreed in their preaching of the new Dispensation. We will begin with Peter.

We must once more return to that greatest of all the Patristic frauds; the one which has undeniably helped the Roman Catholic Church to its unmerited supremacy, viz.: the barefaced assertion, in the teeth of historical evidence, that Peter suffered martyrdom at Rome. It is but too natural that the Latin clergy should cling to it, for, with the exposure of the fraudulent nature of this pretext, the dogma of apostolic succession must fall to the ground.

There have been many able works of late, in refutation of this preposterous claim. Among others we note Mr. G. Reber’s, The Christ of Paul, which overthrows it quite ingeniously. The author proves, 1, that there was no church established at Rome, until the reign of Antoninus Pius; 2, that as Eusebius and Irenæus both agree that Linus was the second Bishop of Rome, into whose hands “the blessed apostles” Peter and Paul committed the church after building it, it could not have been at any other time than between A.D. 64 and 68; 3, that this interval of years happens during the reign of Nero, for Eusebius states that Linus held this office twelve years (Ecclesiastical History, book iii., c. 13), entering upon it A.D. 69, one year after the death of Nero, and dying himself in 81. After that the author maintains, on very solid grounds, that Peter could not be in Rome A.D. 64, for he was then in Babylon; wherefrom he wrote his first Epistle, the date of which is fixed by Dr. Lardner and other critics at precisely this year. But we believe that his best argument is in proving that it was not in the character of the cowardly Peter to risk himself in such close neighborhood with Nero, who “was feeding the wild beasts of the Amphitheatre with the flesh and bones of Christians”[179] at that time.

Perhaps the Church of Rome was but consistent in choosing as her titular founder the apostle who thrice denied his master at the moment of danger; and the only one, moreover, except Judas, who provoked Christ in such a way as to be addressed as the “Enemy.” “Get thee behind me, SATAN!” exclaims Jesus, rebuking the taunting apostle.[180]

There is a tradition in the Greek Church which has never found favor at the Vatican. The former traces its origin to one of the Gnostic leaders--Basilides, perhaps, who lived under Trajan and Adrian, at the end of the first and the beginning of the second century. With regard to this particular tradition, if the Gnostic is Basilides, then he must be accepted as a sufficient authority, having claimed to have been a disciple of the Apostle Matthew, and to have had for master Glaucias, a disciple of St. Peter himself. Were the narrative attributed to him authenticated, the London Committee for the Revision of the Bible would have to add a new verse to Matthew, Mark, and John, who tell the story of Peter’s denial of Christ.

This tradition, then, of which we have been speaking, affirms that, when frightened at the accusation of the servant of the high priest, the apostle had thrice denied his master, and the cock had crowed, Jesus, who was then passing through the hall in custody of the soldiers, turned, and, looking at Peter, said: “Verily, I say unto thee, Peter, thou shalt deny me throughout the coming ages, and never stop until thou shalt be old, and shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee and carry thee whither thou wouldst not.” The latter part of this sentence, say the Greeks, relates to the Church of Rome, and prophesies her constant apostasy from Christ, under the mask of false religion. Later, it was inserted in the twenty-first chapter of John, but the whole of this chapter had been pronounced a forgery, even before it was found that this Gospel was never written by John the Apostle at all.

The anonymous author of Supernatural Religion, a work which in two years passed through several editions, and which is alleged to have been written by an eminent theologian, proves conclusively the spuriousness of the four gospels, or at least their complete transformation in the hands of the too-zealous Irenæus and his champions. The fourth gospel is completely upset by this able author; the extraordinary forgeries of the Fathers of the early centuries are plainly demonstrated, and the relative value of the synoptics is discussed with an unprecedented power of logic. The work carries conviction in its every line. From it we quote the following: “We gain infinitely more than we lose in abandoning belief in the reality of Divine Revelation. Whilst we retain, pure and unimpaired, the treasure of Christian morality, we relinquish nothing but the debasing elements added to it by human superstition. We are no longer bound to believe a theology which outrages reason and moral sense. We are freed from base anthropomorphic views of God and His government of the Universe, and from Jewish Mythology we rise to higher conceptions of an infinitely wise and beneficent Being, hidden from our finite minds, it is true, in the impenetrable glory of Divinity, but whose laws of wondrous comprehensiveness and perfection we ever perceive in operation around us.... The argument so often employed by theologians, that Divine revelation is necessary for man, and that certain views contained in that revelation are required for our moral consciousness, is purely imaginary, and derived from the revelation which it seeks to maintain. The only thing absolutely necessary for man is TRUTH, and to that, and that alone, must our moral consciousness adapt itself.”[181]

We will consider farther in what light was regarded the Divine revelation of the Jewish Bible by the Gnostics, who yet believed in Christ in their own way, a far better and less blasphemous one than the Roman Catholic. The Fathers have forced on the believers in Christ a Bible, the laws prescribed in which he was the first to break; the teachings of which he utterly rejected; and for which crimes he was finally crucified. Of whatever else the Christian world can boast, it can hardly claim logic and consistency as its chief virtues.

The fact alone that Peter remained to the last an “apostle of the circumcision,” speaks for itself. Whosoever else might have built the Church of Rome it was not Peter. If such were the case, the successors of this apostle would have to submit themselves to circumcision, if it were but for the sake of consistency, and to show that the claims of the popes are not utterly groundless, Dr. Inman asserts that report says that “in our Christian times popes have to be privately perfect,”[182] but we do not know whether it is carried to the extent of the Levitical Jewish law. The first fifteen Christian bishops of Jerusalem, commencing with James and including Judas, were all circumcised Jews.[183]

In the Sepher Toldos Jeshu,[184] a Hebrew manuscript of great antiquity, the version about Peter is different. Simon Peter, it says, was one of their own brethren, though he had somewhat departed from the laws, and the Jewish hatred and persecution of the apostle seems to have existed but in the fecund imagination of the fathers. The author speaks of him with great respect and fairness, calling him “a faithful servant of the living God,” who passed his life in austerity and meditation, “living in Babylon at the summit of a tower,” composing hymns, and preaching charity. He adds that Peter always recommended to the Christians not to molest the Jews, but as soon as he was dead, behold another preacher went to Rome and pretended that Simon Peter had altered the teachings of his master. He invented a burning hell and threatened every one with it; promised miracles, but worked none.

How much there is in the above of fiction and how much of truth, it is for others to decide; but it certainly bears more the evidence of sincerity and fact on its face, than the fables concocted by the fathers to answer their end.

We may the more readily credit this friendship between Peter and his late co-religionists as we find in Theodoret the following assertion: “The Nazarenes are Jews, honoring the ANOINTED (Jesus) as a just man and using the Evangel according to Peter.”[185] Peter was a Nazarene, according to the Talmud. He belonged to the sect of the later Nazarenes, which dissented from the followers of John the Baptist, and became a rival sect; and which--as tradition goes--was instituted by Jesus himself.

History finds the first Christian sects to have been either Nazarenes like John the Baptist; or Ebionites, among whom were many of the relatives of Jesus; or Essenes (Iessaens) the Therapeutæ, healers, of which the Nazaria were a branch. All these sects, which only in the days of Irenæus began to be considered heretical, were more or less kabalistic. They believed in the expulsion of demons by magical incantations, and practiced this method; Jervis terms the Nabatheans and other such sects “wandering Jewish exorcists,”[186] the Arabic word Nabæ, meaning to wander, and the Hebrew נבא naba, to prophesy. The Talmud indiscriminately calls all the Christians Nozari.[187] All the Gnostic sects equally believed in magic. Irenæus, in describing the followers of Basilides, says, “They use images, invocations, incantations, and all other things pertaining unto magic.” Dunlap, on the authority of Lightfoot, shows that Jesus was called Nazaraios, in reference to his humble and mean external condition; “for Nazaraios means separation, alienation from other men.”[188]

The real meaning of the word nazar נזר signifies to vow or consecrate one’s self to the service of God. As a noun it is a diadem or emblem of such consecration, a head so consecrated.[189] Joseph was styled a nazar.[190] “The head of Joseph, the vertex of the nazar among his brethren.” Samson and Samuel (שמו־אל שצשון Semes-on and Semva-el) are described alike as nazars. Porphyry, treating of Pythagoras, says that he was purified and initiated at Babylon by Zar-adas, the head of the sacred college. May it not be surmised, therefore, that the Zoro-Aster was the nazar of Ishtar, Zar-adas or Na-Zar-Ad,[191] being the same with change of idiom? Ezra, or עזרא, was a priest and scribe, a hierophant; and the first Hebrew colonizer of Judea was זרובבל Zeru-Babel or the Zoro or nazar of Babylon.

The Jewish Scriptures indicate two distinct worships and religions among the Israelites; that of Bacchus-worship under the mask of Jehovah, and that of the Chaldean initiates to whom belonged some of the nazars, the theurgists, and a few of the prophets. The headquarters of these were always at Babylon and Chaldea, where two rival schools of Magians can be distinctly shown. Those who would doubt the statement will have in such a case to account for the discrepancy between history and Plato, who of all men of his day was certainly one of the best informed. Speaking of the Magians, he shows them as instructing the Persian kings of Zoroaster, as the son or priest of Oromasdes; and yet Darius, in the inscription at Bihistun, boasts of having restored the cultus of Ormazd and put down the Magian rites! Evidently there were two distinct and antagonistic Magian schools. The oldest and the most esoteric of the two being that which, satisfied with its unassailable knowledge and secret power, was content to apparently relinquish her exoteric popularity, and concede her supremacy into the hands of the reforming Darius. The later Gnostics showed the same prudent policy by accommodating themselves in every country to the prevailing religious forms, still secretly adhering to their own essential doctrines.

There is another hypothesis possible, which is that Zero-Ishtar was the high priest of the Chaldean worship, or Magian hierophant. When the Aryans of Persia, under Darius Hystaspes, overthrew the Magian Gomates, and restored the Masdean worship, there ensued an amalgamation by which the Magian Zoro-astar became the Zara-tushra of the Vendidad. This was not acceptable to the other Aryans, who adopted the Vedic religion as distinguished from that of Avesta. But this is but an hypothesis.

And whatever Moses is now believed to have been, we will demonstrate that he was an initiate. The Mosaic religion was at best a sun-and-serpent worship, diluted, perhaps, with some slight monotheistic notions before the latter were forcibly crammed into the so-called “inspired Scriptures” by Ezra, at the time he was alleged to have _re_written the Mosaic books. At all events the Book of Numbers was a later book; and there the sun-and-serpent worship is as plainly traceable as in any Pagan story. The tale of the fiery serpents is an allegory in more than one sense. The “serpents” were the Levites or Ophites, who were Moses’ bodyguard (see Exodus xxxii. 26); and the command of the “Lord” to Moses to hang the heads of the people “before the Lord against the sun,” which is the emblem of this Lord, is unequivocal.

The nazars or prophets, as well as the Nazarenes, were an anti-Bacchus caste, in so far that, in common with all the initiated prophets, they held to the spirit of the symbolical religions and offered a strong opposition to the idolatrous and exoteric practices of the dead letter. Hence, the frequent stoning of the prophets by the populace and under the leadership of those priests who made a profitable living out of the popular superstitions. Otfried Müller shows how much the Orphic Mysteries differed from the popular rites of Bacchus,[192] although the Orphikoi are known to have followed the worship of Bacchus. The system of the purest morality and of a severe asceticism promulgated in the teachings of Orpheus, and so strictly adhered to by his votaries, are incompatible with the lasciviousness and gross immorality of the popular rites. The fable of Aristæus pursuing Eurydiké into the woods where a serpent occasions her death, is a very plain allegory, which was in part explained at the earliest times. Aristæus is brutal power, pursuing Eurydiké, the esoteric doctrine, into the woods where the serpent (emblem of every sun-god, and worshipped under its grosser aspect even by the Jews) kills her; i.e., forces truth to become still more esoteric, and seek shelter in the Underworld, which is not the hell of our theologians. Moreover, the fate of Orpheus, torn to pieces by the Bacchantes, is another allegory to show that the gross and popular rites are always more welcome than divine but simple truth, and proves the great difference that must have existed between the esoteric and the popular worship. As the poems of both Orpheus and Musæus were said to have been lost since the earliest ages, so that neither Plato nor Aristotle recognized anything authentic in the poems extant in their time, it is difficult to say with precision what constituted their peculiar rites. Still we have the oral tradition, and every inference to draw therefrom; and this tradition points to Orpheus as having brought his doctrines from India. As one whose religion was that of the oldest Magians--hence, that to which belonged the initiates of all countries, beginning with Moses, the “sons of the Prophets,” and the ascetic nazars (who must not be confounded with those against whom thundered Hosea and other prophets) to the Essenes. This latter sect were Pythagoreans before they rather degenerated, than became perfected in their system by the Buddhist missionaries, whom Pliny tells us established themselves on the shores of the Dead Sea, ages before his time, “per sæculorum millia.” But if, on the one hand, these Buddhist monks were the first to establish monastic communities and inculcate the strict observance of dogmatic conventual rule, on the other they were also the first to enforce and popularize those stern virtues so exemplified by Sakya-muni, and which were previously exercised only in isolated cases of well-known philosophers and their followers; virtues preached two or three centuries later by Jesus, practiced by a few Christian ascetics, and gradually abandoned, and even entirely forgotten by the Christian Church.

The initiated nazars had ever held to this rule, which had to be followed before them by the adepts of every age; and the disciples of John were but a dissenting branch of the Essenes. Therefore, we cannot well confound them with all the nazars spoken of in the Old Testament, and who are accused by Hosea with having separated or consecrated themselves to Bosheth בשת (see Hebrew text); which implied the greatest possible abomination. To infer, as some critics and theologians do, that it means to separate one’s self to chastity or continence, is either to advisedly pervert the true meaning, or to be totally ignorant of the Hebrew language. The eleventh verse of the first chapter of Micah half explains the word in its veiled translation: “Pass ye away, thou inhabitant of Saphir, etc.,” and in the original text the word is Bosheth. Certainly neither Baal, nor Iahoh Kadosh, with his Kadeshim, was a god of ascetic virtue, albeit the Septuaginta terms them, as well as the galli--the perfected priests--τετελεσμένους, the initiated and the consecrated.[193] The great Sod of the Kadeshim, translated in Psalm lxxxix. 7, by “assembly of the saints,” was anything but a mystery of the “sanctified” in the sense given to the latter word by Webster.

The Nazireate sect existed long before the laws of Moses, and originated among people most inimical to the “chosen” ones of Israel, viz., the people of Galilee, the ancient olla-podrida of idolatrous nations, where was built Nazara, the present Nazareth. It is in Nazara that the ancient Nazorïa or Nazireates held their “Mysteries of Life” or “assemblies,” as the word now stands in the translation,[194] which were but the secret mysteries of initiation,[195] utterly distinct in their practical form from the popular Mysteries which were held at Byblus in honor of Adonis. While the true initiates of the ostracised Galilee were worshipping the true God and enjoying transcendent visions, what were the “chosen” ones about? Ezekiel tells it to us (chap. viii) when, in describing what he saw, he says that the form of a hand took him by a lock of his head and transported him from Chaldea unto Jerusalem. “And there stood seventy men of the senators of the house of Israel.... ‘Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients ... do in the dark?’” inquires the “Lord.” “At the door of the house of the Lord ... behold there sat women weeping for Tammuz” (Adonis). We really cannot suppose that the Pagans have ever surpassed the “chosen” people in certain shameful abominations of which their own prophets accuse them so profusely. To admit this truth, one hardly needs even to be a Hebrew scholar; let him read the Bible in English and meditate over the language of the “holy” prophets.

This accounts for the hatred of the later Nazarenes for the orthodox Jews--followers of the exoteric Mosaic Law--who are ever taunted by this sect with being the worshippers of Iurbo-Adunai, or Lord Bacchus. Passing under the disguise of Adoni-Iachoh (original text, Isaiah lxi. 1), Iahoh and Lord Sabaoth, the Baal-Adonis, or Bacchus, worshipped in the groves and public sods or Mysteries, under the polishing hand of Ezra becomes finally the later-vowelled Adonai of the Massorah--the One and Supreme God of the Christians!

“Thou shalt not worship the Sun who is named Adunai, says the Codex of the Nazarenes; whose name is also Kadush[196] and El-El. This Adunai will elect to himself a nation and congregate in crowds (his worship will be exoteric) ... Jerusalem will become the refuge and city of the Abortive, who shall perfect themselves (circumcise) with a sword ... and shall adore Adunai.”[197]

The oldest Nazarenes, who were the descendants of the Scripture nazars, and whose last prominent leader was John the Baptist, although never very orthodox in the sight of the scribes and Pharisees of Jerusalem were, nevertheless, respected and left unmolested. Even Herod “feared the multitude” because they regarded John as a prophet (Matthew xiv. 5). But the followers of Jesus evidently adhered to a sect which became a still more exasperating thorn in their side. It appeared as a heresy within another heresy; for while the nazars of the olden times, the “Sons of the Prophets,” were Chaldean kabalists, the adepts of the new dissenting sect showed themselves reformers and innovators from the first. The great similitude traced by some critics between the rites and observances of the earliest Christians and those of the Essenes may be accounted for without the slightest difficulty. The Essenes, as we remarked just now, were the converts of Buddhist missionaries who had overrun Egypt, Greece, and even Judea at one time, since the reign of Asoka the zealous propagandist; and while it is evidently to the Essenes that belongs the honor of having had the Nazarene reformer, Jesus, as a pupil, still the latter is found disagreeing with his early teachers on several questions of formal observance. He cannot strictly be called an Essene, for reasons which we will indicate further on, neither was he a nazar, or Nazaria of the older sect. What Jesus was, may be found in the Codex Nazaræus, in the unjust accusations of the Bardesanian Gnostics.

“Jesu is Nebu, the false Messiah, the destroyer of the old orthodox religion,” says the Codex.[198] He is the founder of the sect of the new nazars, and, as the words clearly imply, a follower of the Buddhist doctrine. In Hebrew the word naba נבא means to speak of inspiration; and נבו is nebo, a god of wisdom. But Nebo is also Mercury, and Mercury is Buddha in the Hindu monogram of planets. Moreover, we find the Talmudists holding that Jesus was inspired by the genius of Mercury.[199]

The Nazarene reformer had undoubtedly belonged to one of these sects; though, perhaps, it would be next to impossible to decide absolutely which. But what is self-evident is that he preached the philosophy of Buddha-Sakyamûni. Denounced by the later prophets, cursed by the Sanhedrim, the nazars--they were confounded with others of that name “who separated themselves unto that shame,”[200] they were secretly, if not openly persecuted by the orthodox synagogue. It becomes clear why Jesus was treated with such contempt from the first, and deprecatingly called “the Galilean.” Nathaniel inquires--“Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” (John i. 46) at the very beginning of his career; and merely because he knows him to be a nazar. Does not this clearly hint, that even the older nazars were not really Hebrew religionists, but rather a class of Chaldean theurgists? Besides, as the New Testament is noted for its mistranslations and transparent falsifications of texts, we may justly suspect that the word Nazareth was substituted for that of nasaria, or nozari. That it originally read “Can any good thing come from a nozari, or Nazarene;” a follower of St. John the Baptist, with whom we see him associating from his first appearance on the stage of action, after having been lost sight of for a period of nearly twenty years. The blunders of the Old Testament are as nothing to those of the gospels. Nothing shows better than these self-evident contradictions the system of pious fraud upon which the superstructure of the Messiahship rests. “This is Elias which was for to come,” says Matthew of John the Baptist, thus forcing an ancient kabalistic tradition into the frame of evidence (xi. 14). But when addressing the Baptist himself, they ask him (John i. 16), “Art thou Elias?” “And he saith I am not!” Which knew best--John or his biographer? And which is divine revelation?

The motive of Jesus was evidently like that of Gautama-Buddha, to benefit humanity at large by producing a religious reform which should give it a religion of pure ethics; the true knowledge of God and nature having remained until then solely in the hands of the esoteric sects, and their adepts. As Jesus used oil and the Essenes never used aught but pure water,[201] he cannot be called a strict Essene. On the other hand, the Essenes were also “set apart;” they were healers (assaya) and dwelt in the desert as all ascetics did.

But although he did not abstain from wine he could have remained a Nazarene all the same. For in chapter vi. of Numbers, we see that after the priest has waved a part of the hair of a Nazorite for a wave-offering before the Lord, “after that a Nazarene may drink wine” (v. 20). The bitter denunciation by the reformer of the people who would be satisfied with nothing is worded in the following exclamation: “John came neither eating nor drinking and they say: ‘He hath a devil.’... The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say: ‘Behold a man gluttonous and a wine-bibber.’” And yet he was an Essene and Nazarene, for we not only find him sending a message to Herod, to say that he was one of those who cast out demons, and who performed cures, but actually calling himself a prophet and declaring himself equal to the other prophets.[202]

The author of Sod shows Matthew trying to connect the appellation of Nazarene with a prophecy,[203] and inquires “Why then does Matthew state that the prophet said he should be called Nazaria?” Simply “because he belonged to that sect, and a prophecy would confirm his claims to the Messiahship.... Now it does not appear that the prophets anywhere state that the Messiah will be called a Nazarene.”[204] The fact alone that Matthew tries in the last verse of chapter ii. to strengthen his claim that Jesus dwelt in Nazareth merely to fulfil a prophecy, does more than weaken the argument, it upsets it entirely; for the first two chapters have sufficiently been proved later forgeries.

Baptism is one of the oldest rites and was practiced by all the nations in their Mysteries, as sacred ablutions. Dunlap seems to derive the name of the nazars from nazah, sprinkling; Bahak-Zivo is the genius who called the world into existence[205] out of the “dark water,” say the Nazarenes; and Richardson’s Persian, Arabic, and English Lexicon asserts that the word Bahak means “raining.” But the Bahak-Zivo of the Nazarenes cannot be traced so easily to Bacchus, who “was the rain-god,” for the nazars were the greatest opponents of Bacchus-worship. “Bacchus is brought up by the Hyades, the rain-nymphs,” says Preller;[206] who shows, furthermore, that[207] at the conclusion of the religious Mysteries, the priests baptized (washed) their monuments and anointed them with oil. All this is but a very indirect proof. The Jordan baptism need not be shown a substitution for the exoteric Bacchic rites and the libations in honor of Adonis or Adoni--whom the Nazarenes abhorred--in order to prove it to have been a sect sprung from the “Mysteries” of the “Secret Doctrine;” and their rites can by no means be confounded with those of the Pagan populace, who had simply fallen into the idolatrous and unreasoning faith of all plebeian multitudes. John was the prophet of these Nazarenes, and in Galilee he was termed “the Saviour,” but he was not the founder of that sect which derived its tradition from the remotest Chaldeo-Akkadian theurgy.

“The early plebeian Israelites were Canaanites and Phœnicians, with the same worship of the Phallic gods--Bacchus, Baal or Adon, Iacchos--Iao or Jehovah;” but even among them there had always been a class of initiated adepts. Later, the character of this plebe was modified by Assyrian conquests; and, finally, the Persian colonizations superimposed the Pharisean and Eastern ideas and usages, from which the Old Testament and the Mosaic institutes were derived. The Asmonean priest-kings promulgated the canon of the Old Testament in contradistinction to the Apocrypha or Secret Books of the Alexandrian Jews--kabalists.[208] Till John Hyrcanus they were Asideans (Chasidim) and Pharisees (Parsees), but then they became Sadducees or Zadokites--asserters of sacerdotal rule as contradistinguished from rabbinical. The Pharisees were lenient and intellectual, the Sadducees, bigoted and cruel.

Says the Codex: “John, son of the Aba-Saba-Zacharia, conceived by his mother Anasabet in her hundredth year, had baptized for forty-two years[209] when Jesu Messias came to the Jordan to be baptized with John’s baptism.... But he will pervert John’s doctrine, changing the baptism of the Jordan, and perverting the sayings of justice.”[210]

The baptism was changed from water to that of the Holy Ghost, undoubtedly in consequence of the ever-dominant idea of the Fathers to institute a reform, and make the Christians distinct from St. John’s Nazarenes, the Nabatheans and Ebionites, in order to make room for new dogmas. Not only do the Synoptics tell us that Jesus was baptizing the same as John, but John’s own disciples complained of it, though surely Jesus cannot be accused of following a purely Bacchic rite. The parenthesis in verse 2d of John iv., “... though Jesus himself baptized not,” is so clumsy as to show upon its face that it is an interpolation. Matthew makes John say that he that should come after him would not baptize them with water “but with the Holy Ghost and fire.” Mark, Luke, and John corroborate these words. Water, fire, and spirit, or Holy Ghost, have all their origin in India, as we will show.

Now there is one very strange peculiarity about this sentence. It is flatly denied in Acts xix. 2-5. Apollos, a Jew of Alexandria, belonged to the sect of St. John’s disciples; he had been baptized, and instructed others in the doctrines of the Baptist. And yet when Paul, cleverly profiting by his absence at Corinth, finds certain disciples of Apollos’ at Ephesus, and asks them whether they received the Holy Ghost, he is naïvely answered, “We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost!” “Unto what then were you baptized?” he inquires. “Unto John’s baptism,” they say. Then Paul is made to repeat the words attributed to John by the Synoptics; and these men “were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus,” exhibiting, moreover, at the same instant, the usual polyglot gift which accompanies the descent of the Holy Ghost.

How then? St. John the Baptist, who is called the “precursor,” that “the prophecy might be fulfilled,” the great prophet and martyr, whose words ought to have had such an importance in the eyes of his disciples, announces the “Holy Ghost” to his listeners; causes crowds to assemble on the shores of the Jordan, where, at the great ceremony of Christ’s baptism, the promised “Holy Ghost” appears within the opened heavens, and the multitude hears the voice, and yet there are disciples of St. John who have “never so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost!”

Verily the disciples who wrote the Codex Nazaræus were right. Only it is not Jesus himself, but those who came after him, and who concocted the Bible to suit themselves, that “perverted John’s doctrine, changed the baptism of the Jordan, and perverted the sayings of justice.”

It is useless to object that the present Codex was written centuries after the direct apostles of John preached. So were our Gospels. When this astounding interview of Paul with the “Baptists” took place, Bardesanes had not yet appeared among them, and the sect was not considered a “heresy.” Moreover, we are enabled to judge how little St. John’s promise of the “Holy Ghost,” and the appearance of the “Ghost” himself, had affected his disciples, by the displeasure shown by them toward the disciples of Jesus, and the kind of rivalry manifested from the first. Nay, so little is John himself sure of the identity of Jesus with the expected Messiah, that after the famous scene of the baptism at the Jordan, and the oral assurance by the Holy Ghost Himself that “This is my beloved Son” (Matthew iii. 17), we find “the Precursor,” in Matthew xi., sending two of his disciples from his prison to inquire of Jesus: “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another!!”

This flagrant contradiction alone ought to have long ago satisfied reasonable minds as to the putative divine inspiration of the New Testament. But we may offer another question: If baptism is the sign of regeneration, and an ordinance instituted by Jesus, why do not Christians now baptize as Jesus is here represented as doing, “with the Holy Ghost and with fire,” instead of following the custom of the Nazarenes? In making these palpable interpolations, what possible motive could Irenæus have had except to cause people to believe that the appellation of Nazarene, which Jesus bore, came only from his father’s residence at Nazareth, and not from his affiliation with the sect of Nazaria, the healers?

This expedient of Irenæus was a most unfortunate one, for from time immemorial the prophets of old had been thundering against the baptism of fire as practiced by their neighbors, which imparted the “spirit of prophecy,” or the Holy Ghost. But the case was desperate; the Christians were universally called Nazoræns and Iessaens (according to Epiphanius), and Christ simply ranked as a Jewish prophet and healer--so self-styled, so accepted by his own disciples, and so regarded by their followers. In such a state of things there was no room for either a new hierarchy or a new God-head; and since Irenæus had undertaken the business of manufacturing both, he had to put together such materials as were available, and fill the gaps with his own fertile inventions.

To assure ourselves that Jesus was a true Nazarene--albeit with ideas of a new reform--we must not search for the proof in the translated Gospels, but in such original versions as are accessible. Tischendorf, in his translation from the Greek of Luke iv. 34, has it “Iesou Nazarene;” and in the Syriac it reads “Iasoua, thou Nazaria.” Thus, if we take in account all that is puzzling and incomprehensible in the four Gospels, revised and corrected as they now stand, we shall easily see for ourselves that the true, original Christianity, such as was preached by Jesus, is to be found only in the so-called Syrian heresies. Only from them can we extract any clear notions about what was primitive Christianity. Such was the faith of Paul, when Tertullus the orator accused the apostle before the governor Felix. What he complained of was that they had found “that man a mover of sedition ... a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes;”[211] and, while Paul denies every other accusation, he confesses that “after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers.”[212] This confession is a whole revelation. It shows: 1, that Paul admitted belonging to the sect of the Nazarenes; 2, that he worshipped the God of his fathers, not the trinitarian Christian God, of whom he knows nothing, and who was not invented until after his death; and, 3, that this unlucky confession satisfactorily explains why the treatise, Acts of the Apostles, together with John’s Revelation, which at one period was utterly rejected, were kept out of the canon of the New Testament for such a length of time.

At Byblos, the neophytes as well as the hierophants were, after participating in the Mysteries, obliged to fast and remain in solitude for some time. There was strict fasting and preparation before as well as after the Bacchic, Adonian, and Eleusinian orgies; and Herodotus hints, with fear and veneration about the LAKE of Bacchus, in which “they (the priests) made at night exhibitions of his life and sufferings.”[213] In the Mithraic sacrifices, during the initiation, a preliminary scene of death was simulated by the neophyte, and it preceded the scene showing him himself “being born again by the rite of baptism.” A portion of this ceremony is still enacted in the present day by the Masons, when the neophyte, as the Grand Master Hiram Abiff, lies dead, and is raised by the strong grip of the lion’s paw.

The priests were circumcised. The neophyte could not be initiated without having been present at the solemn Mysteries of the LAKE. The Nazarenes were baptized in the Jordan; and could not be baptized elsewhere; they were also circumcised, and had to fast before as well as after the purification by baptism. Jesus is said to have fasted in the wilderness for forty days, immediately after his baptism. To the present day, there is outside every temple in India, a lake, stream, or a reservoir full of holy water, in which the Brahmans and the Hindu devotees bathe daily. Such places of consecrated water are necessary to every temple. The bathing festivals, or baptismal rites, occur twice every year; in October and April. Each lasts ten days; and, as in ancient Egypt and Greece, the statues of their gods, goddesses, and idols are immersed in water by the priests; the object of the ceremony being to wash away from them the sins of their worshippers which they have taken upon themselves, and which pollute them, until washed off by holy water. During the Arâtty, the bathing ceremony, the principal god of every temple is carried in solemn procession to be baptized in the sea. The Brahman priests, carrying the sacred images, are followed generally by the Maharajah--barefoot, and nearly naked. Three times the priests enter the sea; the third time they carry with them the whole of the images. Holding them up with prayers repeated by the whole congregation, the Chief Priest plunges the statues of the gods thrice in the name of the mystic trinity, into the water; after which they are purified.[214] The Orphic hymn calls water the greatest purifier of men and gods.

Our Nazarene sect is known to have existed some 150 years B.C., and to have lived on the banks of the Jordan, and on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, according to Pliny and Josephus.[215] But in King’s Gnostics, we find quoted another statement by Josephus from verse 13, which says that the Essenes had been established on the shores of the Dead Sea “for thousands of ages” before Pliny’s time.[216]

According to Munk the term “Galilean” is nearly synonymous with that of “Nazarene;” furthermore, he shows the relations of the former with the Gentiles as very intimate. The populace had probably gradually adopted, in their constant intercourse, certain rites and modes of worship of the Pagans; and the scorn with which the Galileans were regarded by the orthodox Jews is attributed by him to the same cause. Their friendly relations had certainly led them, at a later period, to adopt the “Adonia,” or the sacred rites over the body of the lamented Adonis, as we find Jerome fairly lamenting this circumstance. “Over Bethlehem,” he says, “the grove of Thammuz, that is of Adonis, was casting its shadow! And in the GROTTO where formerly the infant Jesus cried, the lover of Venus was being mourned.”[217]

It was after the rebellion of Bar Cochba, that the Roman Emperor established the Mysteries of Adonis at the Sacred Cave in Bethlehem; and who knows but this was the petra or rock-temple on which the church was built? The Boar of Adonis was placed above the gate of Jerusalem which looked toward Bethlehem.

Munk says that the “Nazireate was an institution established before the laws of Musah.”[218] This is evident; as we find this sect not only mentioned but minutely described in Numbers (chap. vi.). In the commandment given in this chapter to Moses by the “Lord,” it is easy to recognize the rites and laws of the Priests of Adonis.[219] The abstinence and purity strictly prescribed in both sects are identical. Both allowed their hair to grow long[220] as the Hindu cœnobites and fakirs do to this day, while other castes shave their hair and abstain on certain days from wine. The prophet Elijah, a Nazarene, is described in 2 Kings, and by Josephus as “a hairy man girt with a girdle of leather.”[221] And John the Baptist and Jesus are both represented as wearing very long hair.[222] John is “clothed with camel’s hair” and wearing a girdle of hide, and Jesus in a long garment “without any seams” ... “and very white, like snow,” says Mark; the very dress worn by the Nazarene Priests and the Pythagorean and Buddhist Essenes, as described by Josephus.

If we carefully trace the terms nazar, and nazaret, throughout the best known works of ancient writers, we will meet them in connection with “Pagan” as well as Jewish adepts. Thus, Alexander Polyhistor says of Pythagoras that he was a disciple of the Assyrian Nazaret, whom some suppose to be Ezekiel. Diogenes Laërtius states most positively that Pythagoras, after being initiated into all the Mysteries of the Greeks and barbarians, “went into Egypt and afterward visited the Chaldeans and Magi;” and Apuleius maintains that it was Zoroaster who instructed Pythagoras.

Were we to suggest that the Hebrew nazars, the railing prophets of the “Lord,” had been initiated into the so-called Pagan mysteries, and belonged (or at least a majority of them) to the same Lodge or circle of adepts as those who were considered idolaters; that their “circle of prophets” was but a collateral branch of a secret association, which we may well term “international,” what a visitation of Christian wrath would we not incur! And still, the case looks strangely suspicious.

Let us first recall to our mind that which Ammianus Marcellinus, and other historians relate of Darius Hystaspes. The latter, penetrating into Upper India (Bactriana), learned pure rites, and stellar and cosmical sciences from Brachmans, and communicated them to the Magi. Now Hystaspes is shown in history to have crushed the Magi; and introduced--or rather forced upon them--the pure religion of Zoroaster, that of Ormazd. How is it, then, that an inscription is found on the tomb of Darius, stating that he was “teacher and hierophant of magic, or magianism?” Evidently there must be some historical mistake, and history confesses it. In this imbroglio of names, Zoroaster, the teacher and instructor of Pythagoras, can be neither the Zoroaster nor Zarathustra who instituted sun-worship among the Parsees; nor he who appeared at the court of Gushtasp (Hystaspes) the alleged father of Darius; nor, again, the Zoroaster who placed his magi above the kings themselves. The oldest Zoroastrian scripture--the Avesta--does not betray the slightest traces of the reformer having ever been acquainted with any of the nations that subsequently adopted his mode of worship. He seems utterly ignorant of the neighbors of Western Iran, the Medes, the Assyrians, the Persians, and others. If we had no other evidences of the great antiquity of the Zoroastrian religion than the discovery of the blunder committed by some scholars in our own century, who regarded King Vistaspa (Gushtasp) as identical with the father of Darius, whereas the Persian tradition points directly to Vistaspa as to the last of the line of Kaianian princes who ruled in Bactriana, it ought to be enough, for the Assyrian conquest of Bactriana took place 1,200 years B.C.[223]

Therefore, it is but natural that we should see in the appellation of Zoroaster not a name but a generic term, whose significance must be left to philologists to agree upon. Guru, in Sanscrit, is a spiritual teacher; and as Zuruastara means in the same language he who worships the sun, why is it impossible, that by some natural change of language, due to the great number of different nations which were converted to the sun worship, the word guru-astara, the spiritual teacher of sun-worship, so closely resembling the name of the founder of this religion, became gradually transformed in its primal form of Zuryastara or Zoroaster? The opinion of the kabalists is that there was but one Zarathustra and many guruastars or spiritual teachers, and that one such guru, or rather _huru_aster, as he is called in the old manuscripts, was the instructor of Pythagoras. To philology and our readers we leave the explanation for what it is worth. Personally we believe in it, as we credit on this subject kabalistic tradition far more than the explanation of scientists, no two of whom have been able to agree up to the present year.

Aristotle states that Zoroaster lived 6,000 years before Christ; Hermippus of Alexandria, who is said to have read the genuine books of the Zoroastrians, although Alexander the Great is accused of having destroyed them, shows Zoroaster as the pupil of Azonak (Azon-ach, or the Azon-God) and as having lived 5,000 years before the fall of Troy. Er or Eros, whose vision is related by Plato in the Republic, is declared by Clement to have been Zordusth. While the Magus who dethroned Cambyses was a Mede, and Darius proclaims that he put down the Magian rites to establish those of Ormazd, Xanthus of Lydia declares Zoroaster to have been the chief of the Magi!

Which of them is wrong? or are they all right, and only the modern interpreters fail to explain the difference between the Reformer and his apostles and followers? This blundering of our commentators reminds us of that of Suetonius, who mistook the Christians for one Christos, or Crestos, as he spells it, and assured his readers that Claudius banished him for the disturbance he made among the Jews.

Finally, and to return again to the nazars, Zaratus is mentioned by Pliny in the following words: “He was Zoroaster and Nazaret.” As Zoroaster is called princeps of the Magi, and nazar signifies separated or consecrated, is it not a Hebrew rendering of mag? Volney believes so. The Persian word Na-zaruan means millions of years, and refers to the Chaldean “Ancient of Days.” Hence the name of the Nazars or Nazarenes, who were consecrated to the service of the Supreme one God, the kabalistic En-Soph, or the Ancient of Days, the “Aged of the aged.”

But the word nazar may also be found in India. In Hindustani nazar is sight, internal or supernatural vision; nazar band-ī means fascination, a mesmeric or magical spell; and nazarān is the word for sightseeing or vision.

Professor Wilder thinks that as the word Zeruana is nowhere to be found in the Avesta, but only in the later Parsi books, it came from the Magians, who composed the Persian sacred caste in the Sassan period, but were originally Assyrians. “Turan, of the poets,” he says, “I consider to be Aturia, or Assyria; and that Zohak (Az-dahaka, Dei-okes, or Astyages), the Serpent-king, was Assyrian, Median, and Babylonian--when those countries were united.”

This opinion does not, however, in the least implicate our statement that the secret doctrines of the Magi, of the pre-Vedic Buddhists, of the hierophants of the Egyptian Thoth or Hermes, and of the adepts of whatever age and nationality, including the Chaldean kabalists and the Jewish nazars, were identical from the beginning. When we use the term Buddhists, we do not mean to imply by it either the exoteric Buddhism instituted by the followers of Gautama-Buddha, nor the modern Buddhistic religion, but the secret philosophy of Sakyamuni, which in its essence is certainly identical with the ancient wisdom-religion of the sanctuary, the pre-Vedic Brahmanism. The “schism” of Zoroaster, as it is called, is a direct proof of it. For it was no schism, strictly speaking, but merely a partially-public exposition of strictly monotheistic religious truths, hitherto taught only in the sanctuaries, and that he had learned from the Brahmans. Zoroaster, the primeval institutor of sun-worship, cannot be called the founder of the dualistic system; neither was he the first to teach the unity of God, for he taught but what he had learned himself with the Brahmans. And that Zarathustra and his followers, the Zoroastrians, “had been settled in India before they immigrated into Persia,” is also proved by Max Müller. “That the Zoroastrians and their ancestors started from India,” he says, “during the Vaidik period, can be proved as distinctly as that the inhabitants of Massilia started from Greece.... Many of the gods of the Zoroastrians come out ... as mere reflections and deflections of the primitive and authentic gods of the Veda.”[224]

If, now, we can prove--and we can do so on the evidence of the Kabala and the oldest traditions of the wisdom-religion, the philosophy of the old sanctuaries--that all these gods, whether of the Zoroastrians or of the Veda, are but so many personated occult powers of nature, the faithful servants of the adepts of secret wisdom--Magic--we are on secure ground.

Thus, whether we say that Kabalism and Gnosticism proceeded from Masdeanism or Zoroastrianism, it is all the same, unless we meant the exoteric worship--which we do not. Likewise, and in this sense, we may echo King, the author of the Gnostics, and several other archæologists, and maintain that both the former proceeded from Buddhism, at once the simplest and most satisfying of philosophies, and which resulted in one of the purest religions of the world. It is only a matter of chronology to decide which of these religions, differing but in external form, is the oldest, therefore the least adulterated. But even this bears but very indirectly, if at all, on the subject we treat of. Already some time before our era, the adepts, except in India, had ceased to congregate in large communities; but whether among the Essenes, or the Neo-platonists, or, again, among the innumerable struggling sects born but to die, the same doctrines, identical in substance and spirit, if not always in form, are encountered. By Buddhism, therefore, we mean that religion signifying literally the doctrine of wisdom, and which by many ages antedates the metaphysical philosophy of Siddhârtha Sakyamuni.

After nineteen centuries of enforced eliminations from the canonical books of every sentence which might put the investigator on the true path, it has become very difficult to show, to the satisfaction of exact science, that the “Pagan” worshippers of Adonis, their neighbors, the Nazarenes, and the Pythagorean Essenes, the healing Therapeutes,[225] the Ebionites, and other sects, were all, with very slight differences, followers of the ancient theurgic Mysteries. And yet by analogy and a close study of the hidden sense of their rites and customs, we can trace their kinship.

It was given to a contemporary of Jesus to become the means of pointing out to posterity, by his interpretation of the oldest literature of Israel, how deeply the kabalistic philosophy agreed in its esoterism with that of the profoundest Greek thinkers. This contemporary, an ardent disciple of Plato and Aristotle, was Philo Judæus. While explaining the Mosaic books according to a purely kabalistic method, he is the famous Hebrew writer whom Kingsley calls the Father of New Platonism.

It is evident that Philo’s Therapeutes are a branch of the Essenes. Their name indicates it--Ἐσσαῖοι, Asaya, physician. Hence, the contradictions, forgeries, and other desperate expedients to reconcile the prophecies of the Jewish canon with the Galilean nativity and godship.

Luke, who was a physician, is designated in the Syriac texts as Asaia, the Essaian or Essene. Josephus and Philo Judæus have sufficiently described this sect to leave no doubt in our mind that the Nazarene Reformer, after having received his education in their dwellings in the desert, and been duly initiated in the Mysteries, preferred the free and independent life of a wandering Nazaria, and so separated or inazarenized himself from them, thus becoming a travelling Therapeute, a Nazaria, a healer. Every Therapeute, before quitting his community, had to do the same. Both Jesus and St. John the Baptist preached the end of the Age;[226] which proves their knowledge of the secret computation of the priests and kabalists, who with the chiefs of the Essene communities alone had the secret of the duration of the cycles. The latter were kabalists and theurgists; “they had their mystic books, and predicted future events,” says Munk.[227]

Dunlap, whose personal researches seem to have been quite successful in that direction, traces the Essenes, Nazarenes, Dositheans, and some other sects as having all existed before Christ: “They rejected pleasures, despised riches, loved one another, and more than other sects, neglected wedlock, deeming the conquest of the passions to be virtuous,”[228] he says.

These are all virtues preached by Jesus; and if we are to take the gospels as a standard of truth, Christ was a metempsychosist “or re-incarnationist--again like these same Essenes, whom we see were Pythagoreans in all their doctrines and habits. Iamblichus asserts that the Samian philosopher spent a certain time at Carmel with them.[229] In his discourses and sermons, Jesus always spoke in parables and used metaphors with his audience. This habit was again that of the Essenians and the Nazarenes; the Galileans who dwelt in cities and villages were never known to use such allegorical language. Indeed, some of his disciples being Galileans as well as himself, felt even surprised to find him using with the people such a form of expression. “Why speakest thou unto them in parables?”[230] they often inquired. “Because, it is given unto you to know the Mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given,” was the reply, which was that of an initiate. “Therefore, I speak unto them in parables; because, they seeing, see not, and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand.” Moreover, we find Jesus expressing his thoughts still clearer--and in sentences which are purely Pythagorean--when, during the Sermon on the Mount, he says:

“Give ye not that which is sacred to the dogs, Neither cast ye your pearls before swine; For the swine will tread them under their feet And the dogs will turn and rend you.”

Professor A. Wilder, the editor of Taylor’s Eleusinian Mysteries, observes “a like disposition on the part of Jesus and Paul to classify their doctrines as esoteric and exoteric, the Mysteries of the Kingdom of God ‘for the apostles,’ and ‘parables’ for the multitude. ‘We speak wisdom,’ says Paul, ‘among them that are perfect’ (or initiated).”[231]

In the Eleusinian and other Mysteries the participants were always divided into two classes, the neophytes and the perfect. The former were sometimes admitted to the preliminary initiation: the dramatic performance of Ceres, or the soul, descending to Hades.[232] But it was given only to the “perfect” to enjoy and learn the Mysteries of the divine Elysium, the celestial abode of the blessed; this Elysium being unquestionably the same as the “Kingdom of Heaven.” To contradict or reject the above, would be merely to shut one’s eyes to the truth.

The narrative of the Apostle Paul, in his second Epistle to the Corinthians (xii. 3, 4), has struck several scholars, well versed in the descriptions of the mystical rites of the initiation given by some classics, as alluding most undoubtedly to the final Epopteia.[233] “I knew a certain man--whether in body or outside of body, I know not: God knoweth--who was rapt into Paradise, and heard things ineffable αρρητα ρηματα, which it is not lawful for a man to repeat.” These words have rarely, so far as we know, been regarded by commentators as an allusion to the beatific visions of an “initiated” seer. But the phraseology is unequivocal. These things “which it is not lawful to repeat,” are hinted at in the same words, and the reason for it assigned, is the same as that which we find repeatedly expressed by Plato, Proclus, Iamblichus, Herodotus, and other classics. “We speak WISDOM only among them who are PERFECT,” says Paul; the plain and undeniable translation of the sentence being: “We speak of the profounder (or final) esoteric doctrines of the Mysteries (which were denominated wisdom) only among them who are initiated.”[234] So in relation to the “man who was rapt into Paradise”--and who was evidently Paul himself[235]--the Christian word Paradise having replaced that of Elysium. To complete the proof, we might recall the words of Plato, given elsewhere, which show that before an initiate could see the gods in their purest light, he had to become liberated from his body; i.e., to separate his astral soul from it.[236] Apuleius also describes his initiation into the Mysteries in the same way: “I approached the confines of death; and, having trodden on the threshold of Proserpina, returned, having been carried through all the elements. In the depths of midnight I saw the sun glittering with a splendid light, together with the infernal and supernal gods, and to these divinities approaching, I paid the tribute of devout adoration.”[237]

Thus, in common with Pythagoras and other hierophant reformers, Jesus divided his teachings into exoteric and esoteric. Following faithfully the Pythagoreo-Essenean ways, he never sat at a meal without saying “grace.” “The priest prays before his meal,” says Josephus, describing the Essenes. Jesus also divided his followers into “neophytes,” “brethren,” and the “perfect,” if we may judge by the difference he made between them. But his career at least as a public Rabbi, was of a too short duration to allow him to establish a regular school of his own; and with the exception, perhaps, of John, it does not seem that he had initiated any other apostle. The Gnostic amulets and talismans are mostly the emblems of the apocalyptic allegories. The “seven vowels” are closely related to the “seven seals;” and the mystic title Abraxas, partakes as much of the compositian of Shem Hamphirosh, “the holy word” or ineffable name, as the name called: The word of God, that “no man knew but he himself,”[238] as John expresses it.

It would be difficult to escape from the well-adduced proofs that the Apocalypse is the production of an initiated kabalist, when this Revelation presents whole passages taken from the Books of Enoch and Daniel, which latter is in itself an abridged imitation of the former; and when, furthermore, we ascertain that the Ophite Gnostics who rejected the Old Testament entirely, as “emanating from an inferior being (Jehovah),” accepted the most ancient prophets, such as Enoch, and deduced the strongest support from this book for their religious tenets, the demonstration becomes evident. We will show further how closely related are all these doctrines. Besides, there is the history of Domitian’s persecutions of magicians and philosophers, which affords as good a proof as any that John was generally considered a kabalist. As the apostle was included among the number, and, moreover, conspicuous, the imperial edict banished him not only from Rome, but even from the continent. It was not the Christians whom--confounding them with the Jews, as some historians will have it--the emperor persecuted, but the astrologers and kabalists.[239]

The accusations against Jesus of practicing the magic of Egypt were numerous, and at one time universal, in the towns where he was known. The Pharisees, as claimed in the Bible, had been the first to fling it in his face, although Rabbi Wise considers Jesus himself a Pharisee. The Talmud certainly points to James the Just as one of that sect.[240] But these partisans are known to have always stoned every prophet who denounced their evil ways, and it is not on this fact that we base our assertion. These accused him of sorcery, and of driving out devils by Beelzebub, their prince, with as much justice as later the Catholic clergy had to accuse of the same more than one innocent martyr. But Justin Martyr states on better authority that the men of his time who were not Jews asserted that the miracles of Jesus were performed by magical art--μαγικὴ φαντασία--the very expression used by the skeptics of those days to designate the feats of thaumaturgy accomplished in the Pagan temples. “They even ventured to call him a magician and a deceiver of the people,” complains the martyr.[241] In the Gospel of Nicodemus (the Acta Pilate), the Jews bring the same accusation before Pilate. “Did we not tell thee he was a magician?”[242] Celsus speaks of the same charge, and as a Neo-platonist believes in it.[243] The Talmudic literature is full of the most minute particulars, and their greatest accusation is that “Jesus could fly as easily in the air as others could walk.”[244] St. Austin asserted that it was generally believed that he had been initiated in Egypt, and that he wrote books concerning magic, which he delivered to John.[245] There was a work called Magia Jesu Christi, which was attributed to Jesus[246] himself. In the Clementine Recognitions the charge is brought against Jesus that he did not perform his miracles as a Jewish prophet, but as a magician, i.e., an initiate of the “heathen” temples.[247]

It was usual then, as it is now, among the intolerant clergy of opposing religions, as well as among the lower classes of society, and even among those patricians who, for various reasons had been excluded from any participation of the Mysteries, to accuse, sometimes, the highest hierophants and adepts of sorcery and black magic. So Apuleius, who had been initiated, was likewise accused of witchcraft, and of carrying about him the figure of a skeleton--a potent agent, as it is asserted, in the operations of the black art. But one of the best and most unquestionable proofs of our assertion may be found in the so-called Museo Gregoriano. On the sarcophagus, which is panelled with bas-reliefs representing the miracles of Christ,[248] may be seen the full figure of Jesus, who, in the resurrection of Lazarus, appears beardless “and equipped with a wand in the received guise of a necromancer (?) whilst the corpse of Lazarus is swathed in bandages exactly as an Egyptian mummy.”

Had posterity been enabled to have several such representations executed during the first century when the figure, dress, and every-day habits of the Reformer were still fresh in the memory of his contemporaries, perhaps the Christian world would be more Christ-like; the dozens of contradictory, groundless, and utterly meaningless speculations about the “Son of Man” would have been impossible; and humanity would now have but one religion and one God. It is this absence of all proof, the lack of the least positive clew about him whom Christianity has deified, that has caused the present state of perplexity. No pictures of Christ were possible until after the days of Constantine, when the Jewish element was nearly eliminated among the followers of the new religion. The Jews, apostles, and disciples, whom the Zoroastrians and the Parsees had inoculated with a holy horror of any form of images, would have considered it a sacrilegious blasphemy to represent in any way or shape their master. The only authorized image of Jesus, even in the days of Tertullian, was an allegorical representation of the “Good Shepherd,”[249] which was no portrait, but the figure of a man with a jackal-head, like Anubis.[250] On this gem, as seen in the collection of Gnostic amulets, the Good Shepherd bears upon his shoulders the lost lamb. He seems to have a human head upon his neck; but, as King correctly observes, “it only seems so to the uninitiated eye.” On closer inspection, he becomes the double-headed Anubis, having one head human, the other a jackal’s, whilst his girdle assumes the form of a serpent rearing aloft its crested head. “This figure,” adds the author of the Gnostics, etc., “had two meanings--one obvious for the vulgar; the other mystical, and recognizable by the initiated alone. It was perhaps the signet of some chief teacher or apostle.”[251] This affords a fresh proof that the Gnostics and early orthodox (?) Christians were not so wide apart in their secret doctrine. King deduces from a quotation from Epiphanius, that even as late as 400 A.D. it was considered an atrocious sin to attempt to represent the bodily appearance of Christ. Epiphanius[252] brings it as an idolatrous charge against the Carpocratians that “they kept painted portraits, and even gold and silver images, and in other materials, which they pretended to be portraits of Jesus, and made by Pilate after the likeness of Christ.... These they keep in secret, along with Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle, and setting them all up together, they worship and offer sacrifices unto them after the Gentiles’ fashion.”

What would the pious Epiphanius say were he to resuscitate and step into St. Peter’s Cathedral at Rome! Ambrosius seems also very desperate at the idea--that some persons fully credited the statement of Lampridius that Alexander Severus had in his private chapel an image of Christ among other great philosophers. “That the Pagans should have preserved the likeness of Christ,” he exclaims, “but the disciples have neglected to do so, is a notion the mind shudders to entertain, much less to believe.”

All this points undeniably to the fact, that except a handful of self-styled Christians who subsequently won the day, all the civilized portion of the Pagans who knew of Jesus honored him as a philosopher, an adept whom they placed on the same level with Pythagoras and Apollonius. Whence such a veneration on their part for a man, were he simply, as represented by the Synoptics, a poor, unknown Jewish carpenter from Nazareth? As an incarnated God there is no single record of him on this earth capable of withstanding the critical examination of science; as one of the greatest reformers, an inveterate enemy of every theological dogmatism, a persecutor of bigotry, a teacher of one of the most sublime codes of ethics, Jesus is one of the grandest and most clearly-defined figures on the panorama of human history. His age may, with every day, be receding farther and farther back into the gloomy and hazy mists of the past; and his theology--based on human fancy and supported by untenable dogmas may, nay, must with every day lose more of its unmerited prestige; alone the grand figure of the philosopher and moral reformer instead of growing paler will become with every century more pronounced and more clearly defined. It will reign supreme and universal only on that day when the whole of humanity recognizes but one father--the UNKNOWN ONE above--and one brother--the whole of mankind below.

In a pretended letter of Lentulus, a senator and a distinguished historian, to the Roman senate, there is a description of the personal appearance of Jesus. The letter itself, written in horrid Latin, is pronounced a bare-faced forgery; but we find therein an expression which suggests many thoughts. Albeit a forgery it is evident that whosoever invented it has nevertheless tried to follow tradition as closely as possible. The hair of Jesus is represented in it as “wavy and curling ... flowing down upon his shoulders,” and as “having a parting in the middle of the head after the fashion of the Nazarenes.” This last sentence shows: 1. That there was such a tradition, based on the biblical description of John the Baptist, the Nazaria, and the custom of this sect. 2. Had Lentulus been the author of this letter, it is difficult to believe that Paul should never have heard of it; and had he known its contents, he would never have pronounced it a shame for men to wear their hair long,[253] thus shaming his Lord and Christ-God. 3. If Jesus did wear his hair long and parted in the middle of the forehead, after the fashion of the Nazarenes (as well as John, the only one of his apostles who followed it), then we have one good reason more to say that Jesus must have belonged to the sect of the Nazarenes, and been called NASARIA for this reason and not because he was an inhabitant of Nazareth; for they never wore their hair long. The Nazarite, who separated himself unto the Lord, allowed “no razor to come upon his head.” “He shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow,” says Numbers (vi. 5). Samson was a Nazarite, i.e., vowed to the service of God, and in his hair was his strength. “No razor shall come upon his head; the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb” (Judges xiii. 5). But the final and most reasonable conclusion to be inferred from this is that Jesus, who was so opposed to all the orthodox Jewish practices, would not have allowed his hair to grow had he not belonged to this sect, which in the days of John the Baptist had already become a heresy in the eyes of the Sanhedrim. The Talmud, speaking of the Nazaria, or the Nazarenes (who had abandoned the world like Hindu yogis or hermits) calls them a sect of physicians, of wandering exorcists; as also does Jervis. “They went about the country, living on alms and performing cures.”[254] Epiphanius says that the Nazarenes come next in heresy to the Corinthians whether having existed “before them or after them, nevertheless synchronous,” and then adds that “all Christians at that time were equally called Nazarenes!”[255]

In the very first remark made by Jesus about John the Baptist, we find him stating that he is “Elias, which was for to come.” This assertion, if it is not a later interpolation for the sake of having a prophecy fulfilled, means again that Jesus was a kabalist; unless indeed we have to adopt the doctrine of the French spiritists and suspect him of believing in reïncarnation. Except the kabalistic sects of the Essenes, the Nazarenes, the disciples of Simeon Ben Iochaï, and Hillel, neither the orthodox Jews, nor the Galileans, believed or knew anything about the doctrine of permutation. And the Sadducees rejected even that of the resurrection.

“But the author of this restitutionis was Mosah, our master, upon whom be peace! Who was the revolutio (transmigration) of Seth and Hebel, that he might cover the nudity of his Father Adam--Primus,” says the Kabala.[256] Thus, Jesus hinting that John was the revolutio, or transmigration of Elias, seems to prove beyond any doubt the school to which he belonged.

Until the present day uninitiated Kabalists and Masons believe permutation to be synonymous with transmigration and metempsychosis. But they are as much mistaken in regard to the doctrine of the true Kabalists as to that of the Buddhists. True, the Sohar says in one place, “All souls are subject to transmigration ... men do not know the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He; they do not know that they are brought before the tribunal, both before they enter this world and after they quit it,” and the Pharisees also held this doctrine, as Josephus shows (Antiquities, xviii. 13). Also the doctrine of Gilgul, held to the strange theory of the “Whirling of the Soul,” which taught that the bodies of Jews buried far away from the Holy Land, still preserve a particle of soul which can neither rest nor quit them, until it reaches the soil of the “Promised Land.” And this “whirling” process was thought to be accomplished by the soul being conveyed back through an actual evolution of species; transmigrating from the minutest insect up to the largest animal. But this was an exoteric doctrine. We refer the reader to the Kabbala Denudata of Henry Khunrath; his language, however obscure, may yet throw some light upon the subject.

But this doctrine of permutation, or revolutio, must not be understood as a belief in reïncarnation. That Moses was considered the transmigration of Abel and Seth, does not imply that the kabalists--those who were initiated at least--believed that the identical spirit of either of Adam’s sons reappeared under the corporeal form of Moses. It only shows what was the mode of expression they used when hinting at one of the profoundest mysteries of the Oriental Gnosis, one of the most majestic articles of faith of the Secret Wisdom. It was purposely veiled so as to half conceal and half reveal the truth. It implied that Moses, like certain other god-like men, was believed to have reached the highest of all states on earth:--the rarest of all psychological phenomena, the perfect union of the immortal spirit with the terrestrial duad had occurred. The trinity was complete. A god was incarnate. But how rare such incarnations!

That expression, “Ye are gods,” which, to our biblical students, is a mere abstraction, has for the kabalists a vital significance. Each immortal spirit that sheds its radiance upon a human being is a god--the Microcosmos of the Macrocosmos, part and parcel of the Unknown God, the First Cause of which it is a direct emanation. It is possessed of all the attributes of its parent source. Among these attributes are omniscience and omnipotence. Endowed with these, but yet unable to fully manifest them while in the body, during which time they are obscured, veiled, limited by the capabilities of physical nature, the thus divinely-inhabited man may tower far above his kind, evince a god-like wisdom, and display deific powers; for while the rest of mortals around him are but overshadowed by their divine SELF, with every chance given to them to become immortal hereafter, but no other security than their personal efforts to win the kingdom of heaven, the so chosen man has already become an immortal while yet on earth. His prize is secured. Henceforth he will live forever in eternal life. Not only he may have “dominion”[257] over all the works of creation by employing the “excellence” of the NAME (the ineffable one) but be higher in this life, not, as Paul is made to say, “a little lower than the angels.”[258]

The ancients never entertained the sacrilegious thought that such perfected entities were incarnations of the One Supreme and for ever invisible God. No such profanation of the awful Majesty entered into their conceptions. Moses and his antitypes and types were to them but complete men, gods on earth, for their gods (divine spirits) had entered unto their hallowed tabernacles, the purified physical bodies. The disembodied spirits of the heroes and sages were termed gods by the ancients. Hence, the accusation of polytheism and idolatry on the part of those who were the first to anthropomorphize the holiest and purest abstractions of their forefathers.

The real and hidden sense of this doctrine was known to all the initiates. The Tanaïm imparted it to their elect ones, the Isarim, in the solemn solitudes of crypts and deserted places. It was one of the most esoteric and jealously guarded, for human nature was the same then as it is now, and the sacerdotal caste as confident as now in the supremacy of its knowledge, and ambitious of ascendency over the weaker masses; with the difference perhaps that its hierophants could prove the legitimacy of their claims and the plausibility of their doctrines, whereas now, believers must be content with blind faith.

While the kabalists called this mysterious and rare occurrence of the union of spirit with the mortal charge entrusted to its care, the “descent of the Angel Gabriel” (the latter being a kind of generic name for it), the Messenger of Life, and the angel Metatron; and while the Nazarenes termed the same Abel-Zivo,[259] the Delegatus sent by the Lord of Celsitude, it was universally known as the “Anointed Spirit.”

Thus it is the acceptation of this doctrine which caused the Gnostics to maintain that Jesus was a man overshadowed by the Christos or Messenger of Life, and that his despairing cry from the cross “Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani,” was wrung from him at the instant when he felt that this inspiring Presence had finally abandoned him, for--as some affirmed--his faith had also abandoned him when on the cross.

The early Nazarenes, who must be numbered among the Gnostic sects, believing that Jesus was a prophet, held, nevertheless, in relation to him the same doctrine of the divine “overshadowing,” of certain “men of God,” sent for the salvation of nations, and to recall them to the path of righteousness. “The Divine mind is eternal,” says the Codex,[260] “And it is pure light, and poured out through splendid and immense space (pleroma). It is Genetrix of the Æons. But one of them went to matter (chaos) stirring up confused (turbulentos) movements; and by a certain portion of heavenly light fashioned it, properly constituted for use and appearance, but the beginning of every evil. The Demiurg (of matter) claimed divine honor.[261] Therefore Christus (“the anointed”), the prince of the Æons (powers), was sent (expeditus), who taking on the person of a most devout Jew, Iesu, was to conquer him; but who having laid it (the body) aside, departed on high.” We will explain further on the full significance of the name Christos and its mystic meaning.

And now, in order to make such passages as the above more intelligible, we will endeavor to define, as briefly as possible, the dogmas in which, with very trifling differences, nearly all the Gnostic sects believed. It is in Ephesus that flourished in those days the greatest college, wherein the abstruse Oriental speculations and the Platonic philosophy were taught in conjunction. It was a focus of the universal “secret” doctrines; the weird laboratory whence, fashioned in elegant Grecian phraseology, sprang the quintessence of Buddhistic, Zoroastrian, and Chaldean philosophy. Artemis, the gigantic concrete symbol of theosophico-pantheistic abstractions, the great mother Multimamma, androgyne and patroness of the “Ephesian writings,” was conquered by Paul; but although the zealous converts of the apostles pretended to burn all their books on “curious arts,” τα περιεργα, enough of these remained for them to study when their first zeal had cooled off. It is from Ephesus that spread nearly all the Gnosis which antagonized so fiercely with the Irenæan dogmas; and still it was Ephesus, with her numerous collateral branches of the great college of the Essenes, which proved to be the hot-bed of all the kabalistic speculations brought by the Tanaïm from the captivity. “In Ephesus,” says Matter, “the notions of the Jewish-Egyptian school, and the semi-Persian speculations of the kabalists had then recently come to swell the vast conflux of Grecian and Asiatic doctrines, so there is no wonder that teachers should have sprung up there who strove to combine the religion newly preached by the apostle with the ideas there so long established.”

Had not the Christians burdened themselves with the Revelations of a little nation, and accepted the Jehovah of Moses, the Gnostic ideas would never have been termed heresies; once relieved of their dogmatic exaggerations the world would have had a religious system based on pure Platonic philosophy, and surely something would then have been gained.

Now let us see what are the greatest heresies of the Gnostics. We will select Basilides as the standard for our comparisons, for all the founders of other Gnostic sects group round him, like a cluster of stars borrowing light from their sun.

Basilides maintained that he had had all his doctrines from the Apostle Matthew, and from Peter through Glaucus, the disciple of the latter.[262] According to Eusebius,[263] he published twenty-four volumes of Interpretations upon the Gospels,[264] all of which were burned, a fact which makes us suppose that they contained more truthful matter than the school of Irenæus was prepared to deny. He asserted that the unknown, eternal, and uncreated Father having first brought forth Nous, or Mind, the latter emanated from itself--the Logos. The Logos (the Word of John) emanated in its turn Phronesis, or the Intelligences (Divine-human spirits). From Phronesis sprung Sophia, or feminine wisdom, and Dynamis--strength. These were the personified attributes of the Mysterious godhead, the Gnostic quinternion, typifying the five spiritual, but intelligible substances, personal virtues or beings external to the unknown godhead. This is preëminently a kabalistic idea. It is still more Buddhistic. The earliest system of the Buddhistic philosophy--which preceded by far Gautama-Buddha--is based upon the uncreated substance of the “Unknown,” the A’di Buddha.[265] This eternal, infinite Monad possesses, as proper to his own essence, five acts of wisdom. From these it, by five separate acts of Dhyân, emitted five Dhyani Buddhas; these, like A’di Buddha, are quiescent in their system (passive). Neither A’di, nor either of the five Dhyani Buddhas, were ever incarnated, but seven of their emanations became Avatars, i.e., were incarnated on this earth.

Describing the Basilidean system, Irenæus, quoting the Gnostics, declares as follows:

“When the uncreated, unnamed Father saw the corruption of mankind, he sent his first-born Nous, into the world, in the form of Christ, for the redemption of all who believe in him, out of the power of those who fabricated the world (the Demiurgus, and his six sons, the planetary genii). He appeared amongst men as the man, Jesus, and wrought miracles. This Christ did not die in person, but Simon the Cyrenian suffered in his stead, to whom he lent his bodily form; for the Divine Power, the Nous of the Eternal Father, is not corporeal, and cannot die. Whoso, therefore, maintains that Christ has died, is still the bondsman of ignorance; whoso denies the same, he is free, and hath understood the purpose of the Father.”[266]

So far, and taken in its abstract sense, we do not see anything blasphemous in this system. It may be a heresy against the theology of Irenæus and Tertullian,[267] but there is certainly nothing sacrilegious against the religious idea itself, and it will seem to every impartial thinker far more consistent with divine reverence than the anthropomorphism of actual Christianity. The Gnostics were called by the orthodox Christians, Docetæ, or Illusionists, for believing that Christ did not, nor could, suffer death actually--in physical body. The later Brahmanical books contain, likewise, much that is repugnant to the reverential feeling and idea of the Divinity; and as well as the Gnostics, the Brahmans explain such legends as may shock the divine dignity of the Spiritual beings called gods by attributing them to Maya or illusion.

A people brought up and nurtured for countless ages among all the psychological phenomena of which the civilized (!) nations read, but reject as incredible and worthless, cannot well expect to have its religious system even understood--let alone appreciated. The profoundest and most transcendental speculations of the ancient metaphysicians of India and other countries, are all based on that great Buddhistic and Brahmanical principle underlying the whole of their religious metaphysics--illusion of the senses. Everything that is finite is illusion, all that which is eternal and infinite is reality. Form, color, that which we hear and feel, or see with our mortal eyes, exists only so far as it can be conveyed to each of us through our senses. The universe for a man born blind does not exist in either form or color, but it exists in its privation (in the Aristotelean sense), and is a reality for the spiritual senses of the blind man. We all live under the powerful dominion of phantasy. Alone the highest and invisible originals emanated from the thought of the Unknown are real and permanent beings, forms, and ideas; on earth, we see but their reflections; more or less correct, and ever dependent on the physical and mental organization of the person who beholds them.

Ages untold before our era, the Hindu Mystic Kapila, who is considered by many scientists as a skeptic, because they judge him with their habitual superficiality, magnificently expressed this idea in the following terms:

“Man (physical man) counts for so little, that hardly anything can demonstrate to him his proper existence and that of nature. Perhaps, that which we regard as the universe, and the divers beings which seem to compose it, have nothing real, and are but the product of continued illusion--maya--of our senses.”

And the modern Schopenhauer, repeating this philosophical idea, 10,000 years old now, says: “Nature is non-existent, per se.... Nature is the infinite illusion of our senses.” Kant, Schelling, and other metaphysicians have said the same, and their school maintains the idea. The objects of sense being ever delusive and fluctuating, cannot be a reality. Spirit alone is unchangeable, hence--alone is no illusion. This is pure Buddhist doctrine. The religion of the Gnosis (knowledge), the most evident offshoot of Buddhism, was utterly based on this metaphysical tenet. Christos suffered spiritually for us, and far more acutely than did the illusionary Jesus while his body was being tortured on the Cross.

In the ideas of the Christians, Christ is but another name for Jesus. The philosophy of the Gnostics, the initiates, and hierophants understood it otherwise. The word Christos, Χριστος, like all Greek words, must be sought in its philological origin--the Sanscrit. In this latter language Kris means sacred,[268] and the Hindu deity was named Chris-na (the pure or the sacred) from that. On the other hand, the Greek Christos bears several meanings, as anointed (pure oil, chrism) and others. In all languages, though the synonym of the word means pure or sacred essence, it is the first emanation of the invisible Godhead, manifesting itself tangibly in spirit. The Greek Logos, the Hebrew Messiah, the Latin Verbum, and the Hindu Viradj (the son) are identically the same; they represent an idea of collective entities--of flames detached from the one eternal centre of light.

“The man who accomplishes pious but interested acts (with the sole object of his salvation) may reach the ranks of the devas (saints);[269] but he who accomplishes, disinterestedly, the same pious acts, finds himself ridden forever of the five elements” (of matter). “Perceiving the Supreme Soul in all beings and all beings in the Supreme Soul, in offering his own soul in sacrifice, he identifies himself with the Being who shines in his own splendor” (Manu, book xii., slokas 90, 91).

Thus, Christos, as a unity, is but an abstraction: a general idea representing the collective aggregation of the numberless spirit-entities, which are the direct emanations of the infinite, invisible, incomprehensible FIRST CAUSE--the individual spirits of men, erroneously called the souls. They are the divine sons of God, of which some only overshadow mortal men--but this the majority--some remain forever planetary spirits, and some--the smaller and rare minority--unite themselves during life with some men. Such God-like beings as Gautama-Buddha, Jesus, Tissoo, Christna, and a few others had united themselves with their spirits permanently--hence, they became gods on earth. Others, such as Moses, Pythagoras, Apollonius, Plotinus, Confucius, Plato, Iamblichus, and some Christian saints, having at intervals been so united, have taken rank in history as demi-gods and leaders of mankind. When unburthened of their terrestrial tabernacles, their freed souls, henceforth united forever with their spirits, rejoin the whole shining host, which is bound together in one spiritual solidarity of thought and deed, and called “the anointed.” Hence, the meaning of the Gnostics, who, by saying that “Christos” suffered spiritually for humanity, implied that his Divine Spirit suffered mostly.

Such, and far more elevating were the ideas of Marcion, the great “Heresiarch” of the second century, as he is termed by his opponents. He came to Rome toward the latter part of the half-century, from A.D. 139-142, according to Tertullian, Irenæus, Clemens, and most of his modern commentators, such as Bunsen, Tischendorf, Westcott, and many others. Credner and Schleiermacher[270] agree as to his high and irreproachable personal character, his pure religious aspirations and elevated views. His influence must have been powerful, as we find Epiphanius writing more than two centuries later that in his time the followers of Marcion were to be found throughout the whole world.[271]

The danger must have been pressing and great indeed, if we are to judge it to have been proportioned with the opprobrious epithets and vituperation heaped upon Marcion by the “Great African,” that Patristic Cerberus, whom we find ever barking at the door of the Irenæan dogmas.[272] We have but to open his celebrated refutation of Marcion’s Antitheses, to acquaint ourselves with the fine-fleur of monkish abuse of the Christian school; an abuse so faithfully carried through the middle ages, to be renewed again in our present day--at the Vatican. “Now, then, ye hounds, yelping at the God of Truth, whom the apostles cast out, to all your questions. These are the bones of contention which ye gnaw,” etc.[273] “The poverty of the Great African’s arguments keeps pace with his abuse,” remarks the author of Supernatural Religion.[274] “Their (the Father’s) religious controversy bristles with misstatements, and is turbid with pious abuse. Tertullian was a master of his style, and the vehement vituperation with which he opens and often interlards his work against ‘the impious and sacrilegious Marcion,’ offers anything but a guarantee of fair and legitimate criticism.”

How firm these two Fathers--Tertullian and Epiphanius--were on their theological ground, may be inferred from the curious fact that they intemperately both vehemently reproach “the beast” (Marcion) “with erasing passages from the Gospel of Luke which never were in Luke at all.”[275] “The lightness and inaccuracy,” adds the critic, “with which Tertullian proceeds, are all the better illustrated by the fact that not only does he accuse Marcion falsely, but he actually defines the motives for which he expunged a passage which never existed; in the same chapter he also similarly accuses Marcion of erasing (from Luke) the saying that Christ had not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them, and he actually repeats the charge on two other occasions.[276] Epiphanius also commits the mistake of reproaching Marcion with omitting from Luke what is only found in Matthew.”[277]

Having so far shown the amount of reliance to be placed in the Patristic literature, and it being unanimously conceded by the great majority of biblical critics that what the Fathers fought for was not truth, but their own interpretations and unwarranted assertions,[278] we will now proceed to state what were the views of Marcion, whom Tertullian desired to annihilate as the most dangerous heretic of his day. If we are to believe Hilgenfeld, one of the greatest German biblical critics, then “From the critical standing-point one must ... consider the statements of the Fathers of the Church only as expressions of their subjective view, which itself requires proof.”[279]

We can do no better nor make a more correct statement of facts concerning Marcion than by quoting what our space permits from Supernatural Religion, the author of which bases his assertions on the evidence of the greatest critics, as well as on his own researches. He shows in the days of Marcion “two broad parties in the primitive Church”--one considering Christianity “a mere continuation of the law, and dwarfing it into an Israelitish institution, a narrow sect of Judaism;” the other representing the glad tidings “as the introduction of a new system, applicable to all, and supplanting the Mosaic dispensation of the law by a universal dispensation of grace.” These two parties, he adds, “were popularly represented in the early Church, by the two apostles Peter and Paul, and their antagonism is faintly revealed in the Epistle to the Galatians.”[280]

Marcion, who recognized no other Gospels than a few Epistles of Paul, who rejected totally the anthropomorphism of the Old Testament, and drew a distinct line of demarcation between the old Judaism and Christianity, viewed Jesus neither as a King, Messiah of the Jews, nor the son of David, who was in any way connected with the law or prophets, “but a divine being sent to reveal to man a spiritual religion, wholly new, and a God of goodness and grace hitherto unknown.” The “Lord God” of the Jews in his eyes, the Creator (Demiurgos), was totally different and distinct from the Deity who sent Jesus to reveal the divine truth and preach the glad tidings, to bring reconciliation and salvation to all. The mission of Jesus--according to Marcion--was to abrogate the Jewish “Lord,” who “was opposed to the God and Father of Jesus Christ as matter is to spirit, impurity to purity.”

Was Marcion so far wrong? Was it blasphemy, or was it intuition, divine inspiration in him to express that which every honest heart yearning for truth, more or less feels and acknowledges? If in his sincere desire to establish a purely spiritual religion, a universal faith based on unadulterated truth, he found it necessary to make of Christianity an entirely new and separate system from that of Judaism, did not Marcion have the very words of Christ for his authority? “No man putteth a piece of new cloth into an old garment ... for the rent is made worse.... Neither do men put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish; but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.” In what particular does the jealous, wrathful, revengeful God of Israel resemble the unknown deity, the God of mercy preached by Jesus;--his Father who is in Heaven, and the Father of all humanity? This Father alone is the God of spirit and purity, and, to compare Him with the subordinate and capricious Sinaitic Deity is an error. Did Jesus ever pronounce the name of Jehovah? Did he ever place his Father in contrast with this severe and cruel Judge; his God of mercy, love, and justice, with the Jewish genius of retaliation? Never! From that memorable day when he preached his Sermon on the Mount, an immeasurable void opened between his God and that other deity who fulminated his commands from that other mount--Sinai. The language of Jesus is unequivocal; it implies not only rebellion but defiance of the Mosaic “Lord God.” “Ye have heard,” he tells us, “that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. Ye have heard that it hath been said [by the same “Lord God” on Sinai]: Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you; Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew v.).

And now, open Manu and read:

“Resignation, the action of rendering good for evil, temperance, probity, purity, repression of the senses, the knowledge of the Sastras (the holy books), that of the supreme soul, truthfulness and abstinence from anger, such are the ten virtues in which consists duty.... Those who study these ten precepts of duty, and after having studied them conform their lives thereto, will reach to the supreme condition” (Manu, book vi., sloka 92).

If Manu did not trace these words many thousands of years before the era of Christianity, at least no voice in the whole world will dare deny them a less antiquity than several centuries B.C. The same in the case of the precepts of Buddhism.

If we turn to the Prâtimoksha Sûtra and other religious tracts of the Buddhists, we read the ten following commandments:

1. Thou shalt not kill any living creature. 2. Thou shalt not steal. 3. Thou shalt not break thy vow of chastity. 4. Thou shalt not lie. 5. Thou shalt not betray the secrets of others. 6. Thou shalt not wish for the death of thy enemies. 7. Thou shalt not desire the wealth of others. 8. Thou shalt not pronounce injurious and foul words. 9. Thou shalt not indulge in luxury (sleep on soft beds or be lazy). 10. Thou shalt not accept gold or silver.[281]

“Good master, what shall I do that I may have eternal life?” asks a man of Jesus. “Keep the commandments.” “Which?” “Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,”[282] is the answer.

“What shall I do to obtain possession of Bhodi? (knowledge of eternal truth)” asks a disciple of his Buddhist master. “What way is there to become an Upasaka?” “Keep the commandments.” “What are they?” “Thou shalt abstain all thy life from murder, theft, adultery, and lying,” answers the master.[283]

Identical injunctions are they not? Divine injunctions, the living up to which would purify and exalt humanity. But are they more divine when uttered through one mouth than another? If it is god-like to return good for evil, does the enunciation of the precept by a Nazarene give it any greater force than its enunciation by an Indian, or Thibetan philosopher? We see that the Golden Rule was not original with Jesus; that its birth-place was India. Do what we may, we cannot deny Sakya-Muni Buddha a less remote antiquity than several centuries before the birth of Jesus. In seeking a model for his system of ethics why should Jesus have gone to the foot of the Himalayas rather than to the foot of Sinai, but that the doctrines of Manu and Gautama harmonized exactly with his own philosophy, while those of Jehovah were to him abhorrent and terrifying? The Hindus taught to return good for evil, but the Jehovistic command was: “An eye for an eye” and “a tooth for a tooth.”

Would Christians still maintain the identity of the “Father” of Jesus and Jehovah, if evidence sufficiently clear could be adduced that the “Lord God” was no other than the Pagan Bacchus, Dionysos? Well, this identity of the Jehovah at Mount Sinai with the god Bacchus is hardly disputable. The name יהוה is Yava or Iao, according to Theodoret, which is the secret name of the Phœnician Mystery-god;[284] and it was actually adopted from the Chaldeans with whom it also was the secret name of the creator. Wherever Bacchus was worshipped there was a tradition of Nysa and a cave where he was reared. Beth-San or Scythopolis in Palestine had that designation; so had a spot on Mount Parnassus. But Diodorus declares that Nysa was between Phœnicia and Egypt; Euripides states that Dionysos came to Greece from India; and Diodorus adds his testimony: “Osiris was brought up in Nysa, in Arabia the Happy; he was the son of Zeus, and was named from his father (nominative Zeus, genitive Dios) and the place Dio-Nysos”--the Zeus or Jove of Nysa. This identity of name or title is very significant. In Greece Dionysos was second only to Zeus, and Pindar says:

“So Father Zeus governs all things, and Bacchus he governs also.”

But outside of Greece Bacchus was the all-powerful “Zagreus, the highest of gods.” Moses seems to have worshipped him personally and together with the populace at Mount Sinai; unless we admit that he was an initiated priest, an adept, who knew how to lift the veil which hangs behind all such exoteric worship, but kept the secret. “And Moses built an altar, and called the name of it Jehovah-NISSI!” or Iao-Nisi. What better evidence is required to show that the Sinaitic god was indifferently Bacchus, Osiris, and Jehovah? Mr. Sharpe appends also his testimony that the place where Osiris was born “was Mount Sinai, called by the Egyptians Mount Nissa.” The Brazen Serpent was a nis, נחש, and the month of the Jewish Passover nisan.

If the Mosaic “Lord God” was the only living God, and Jesus His only Son, how account for the rebellious language of the latter? Without hesitation or qualification he sweeps away the Jewish lex talionis and substitutes for it the law of charity and self-denial. If the Old Testament is a divine revelation, how can the New Testament be? Are we required to believe and worship a Deity who contradicts himself every few hundred years? Was Moses inspired, or was Jesus not the son of God? This is a dilemma from which the theologians are bound to rescue us. It is from this very dilemma that the Gnostics endeavored to snatch the budding Christianity.

Justice has been waiting nineteen centuries for intelligent commentators to appreciate this difference between the orthodox Tertullian and the Gnostic Marcion. The brutal violence, unfairness, and bigotry of the “great African” repulse all who accept his Christianity. “How can a god,” inquired Marcion, “break his own commandments? How could he consistently prohibit idolatry and image-worship, and still cause Moses to set up the brazen serpent? How command: Thou shalt not steal, and then order the Israelites to spoil the Egyptians of their gold and silver?” Anticipating the results of modern criticism, Marcion denies the applicability to Jesus of the so-called Messianic prophecies. Writes the author of Supernatural Religion:[285] “The Emmanuel of Isaiah is not Christ; the ‘Virgin,’ his mother, is simply a ‘young woman,’ an alma of the temple; and the sufferings of the servant of God (Isaiah lii. 13-liii. 3) are not predictions of the death of Jesus.”[286]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

Chapter IV

“Nothing better than those MYSTERIES, by which, from a rough and fierce life, we are polished to gentleness (humanity, kindness), and softened.”--CICERO: de Legibus, ii., 14.

“Descend, O Soma, with that stream with which thou lightest up the Sun.... Soma, a Life Ocean spread through All, thou fillest creative the Sun with beams.”--Rig-Veda, ii., 143.

“... the beautiful Virgin ascends, with long hair, and she holds two ears in her hand, and sits on a seat and feeds a BOY as yet little, and suckles him and gives him food.”--AVENAR.

It is alleged that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, and yet it contains the account of his own death (Deuteronomy xxxiv. 6); and in Genesis (xiv. 14), the name Dan is given to a city, which Judges (xviii. 29), tells us was only called by that name at that late day, it having previously been known as Laish. Well might Josiah have rent his clothes when he had heard the words of the Book of the Law; for there was no more of Moses in it than there is of Jesus in the Gospel according to John.

We have one fair alternative to offer our theologians, leaving them to choose for themselves, and promising to abide by their decision. Only they will have to admit, either that Moses was an impostor, or that his books are forgeries, written at different times and by different persons; or, again, that they are full of fraudulent interpolations. In either case the work loses all claims to be considered divine Revelation. Here is the problem, which we quote from the Bible--the word of the God of Truth:

“And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name of JEHOVAH was I not known to them” (Exodus vi. 3), spake God unto Moses.

A very startling bit of information that, when, before arriving at the book of Exodus, we are told in Genesis (xxii. 14) that “Abraham called the name of that place”--where the patriarch had been preparing to cut the throat of his only-begotten son--“JEHOVAH-jireh!” (Jehovah sees.) Which is the inspired text?--both cannot be--which the forgery?

Now, if both Abraham and Moses had not belonged to the same holy group, we might, perhaps, help theologians by suggesting to them a convenient means of escape out of this dilemma. They ought to call the reverend Jesuit Fathers--especially those who have been missionaries in India--to their rescue. The latter would not be for a moment disconcerted. They would coolly tell us that beyond doubt Abraham had heard the name of Jehovah and borrowed it from Moses. Do they not maintain that it was they who invented the Sanscrit, edited Manu, and composed the greater portion of the Vedas?

Marcion maintained, with the other Gnostics, the fallaciousness of the idea of an incarnate God, and therefore denied the corporeal reality of the living body of Christ. His entity was a mere illusion; it was not made of human flesh and blood, neither was it born of a human mother, for his divine nature could not be polluted with any contact with sinful flesh.[287] He accepted Paul as the only apostle preaching the pure gospel of truth, and accused the other disciples of “depraving the pure form of the gospel doctrines delivered to them by Jesus, mixing up matters of the Law with the words of the Saviour.”[288]

Finally we may add that modern biblical criticism, which unfortunately became really active and serious only toward the end of the last century, now generally admits that Marcion’s text of the only gospel he knew anything about--that of Luke, is far superior and by far more correct than that of our present Synoptics. We find in Supernatural Religion the following (for every Christian) startling sentence: “We are, therefore, indebted to Marcion for the correct version even of ‘the Lords Prayer.’”[289]

If, leaving for the present the prominent founders of Christian sects, we now turn to that of the Ophites, which assumed a definite form about the time of Marcion and the Basilideans, we may find in it the reason for the heresies of all others. Like all other Gnostics, they rejected the Mosaic Bible entirely. Nevertheless, their philosophy, apart from some deductions original with several of the most important founders of the various branches of Gnosticism was not new. Passing through the Chaldean kabalistic tradition, it gathered its materials in the Hermetic books, and pursuing its flight still farther back for its metaphysical speculations, we find it floundering among the tenets of Manu, and the earliest Hindu ante-sacerdotal genesis. Many of our eminent antiquarians trace the Gnostic philosophies right back to Buddhism, which does not impair in the least either their or our arguments. We repeat again, Buddhism is but the primitive source of Brahmanism. It is not against the primitive Vedas that Gautama protests. It is against the sacerdotal and official state religion of his country; and the Brahmans, who in order to make room for and give authority to the castes, at a later period crammed the ancient manuscripts with interpolated slokas, intended to prove that the castes were predetermined by the Creator by the very fact that each class of men was issued from a more or less noble limb of Brahma. Gautama-Buddha’s philosophy was that taught from the beginning of time in the impenetrable secresy of the inner sanctuaries of the pagodas. We need not be surprised, therefore, to find again, in all the fundamental dogmas of the Gnostics, the metaphysical tenets of both Brahmanism and Buddhism. They held that the Old Testament was the revelation of an inferior being, a subordinate divinity, and did not contain a single sentence of their Sophia, the Divine Wisdom. As to the New Testament, it had lost its purity when the compilers became guilty of interpolations. The revelation of divine truth was sacrificed by them to promote selfish ends and maintain quarrels. The accusation does not seem so very improbable to one who is well aware of the constant strife between the champions of circumcision and the “Law,” and the apostles who had given up Judaism.

The Gnostic Ophites taught the doctrine of Emanations, so hateful to the defenders of the unity in the trinity, and vice versa. The Unknown Deity with them had no name; but his first female emanation was called Bythos or Depth.[290] It answered to the Shekinah of the kabalists, the “Veil” which conceals the “Wisdom” in the cranium of the highest of the three heads. As the Pythagorean Monad, this nameless Wisdom was the Source of Light, and Ennoia or Mind, is Light itself. The latter was also called the “Primitive Man,” like the Adam Kadmon, or ancient Adam of the Kabala. Indeed, if man was created after his likeness and in the image of God, then this God was like his creature in shape and figure--hence, he is the “Primitive man.” The first Manu, the one evolved from Swayambhuva, “he who exists unrevealed in his own glory,” is also, in one sense, the primitive man, with the Hindus.

Thus the “nameless and the unrevealed,” Bythos, his female reflection, and Ennoia, the revealed Mind proceeding from both, or their Son are the counterparts of the Chaldean first triad as well as those of the Brahmanic Trimurti. We will compare: in all the three systems we see

THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE as the ONE, the primordial germ, the unrevealed and grand ALL, existing through himself. In the

INDIAN PANTHEON. Brahma-Zyaus.

THE CHALDEAN. Ilu, Kabalistic En-Soph.

IN THE OPHITE. The Nameless, or Secret Name.

Whenever the Eternal awakes from its slumber and desires to manifest itself, it divides itself into male and female. It then becomes in every system

THE DOUBLE-SEXED DEITY, The universal Father and Mother.

IN INDIA. Brahma. Nara (male), Nari (female).

IN CHALDEA. Eikon or En-Soph. Anu (male), Anata (female).

IN THE OPHITE SYSTEM. Nameless Spirit. Abrasax (male), Bythos (female).

From the union of the two emanates a third, or creative Principle--the SON, or the manifested Logos, the product of the Divine Mind.

IN INDIA. Viradj, the Son.

IN CHALDEA. Bel, the Son.

OPHITE SYSTEM. Ophis (another name for Ennoia), the Son.

Moreover, each of these systems has a triple male trinity, each proceeding separately through itself from one female Deity. So, for instance:

IN INDIA. The Trinity--Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, are blended into ONE, who is Brahmä, (neuter gender), creating and being created through the Virgin Nari (the mother of perpetual fecundity).

IN CHALDEA. The trinity--Anu, Bel, Hoa (or Sin, Samas, Bin), blend into ONE who is Anu (double-sexed) through the Virgin Mylitta.

IN THE OPHITE SYSTEM. The trinity consisted of the Mystery named Sigè, Bythos, Ennoia. These become ONE who is Abrasax, from the Virgin Sophia (or Pneuma), who herself is an emanation of Bythos and the Mystery-god and emanates through them, Christos.

To place it still clearer, the Babylonian System recognizes first--the ONE (Ad, or Ad-ad), who is never named, but only acknowledged in thought as the Hindu Swayambhuva. From this he becomes manifest as Anu or Ana--the one above all--Monas. Next comes the Demiurge called Bel or Elu, who is the active power of the Godhead. The third is the principle of Wisdom, Hea or Hoa, who also rules the sea and the underworld. Each of these has his divine consort, giving us Anata, Belta, and Davkina. These, however, are only like the Saktis, and not especially remarked by theologists. But the female principle is denoted by Mylitta, the Great Mother, called also Ishtar. So with the three male gods, we have the Triad or Trimurti, and with Mylitta added, the Arba or Four (Tetraktys of Pythagoras), which perfects and potentializes all. Hence, the above-given modes of expression. The following Chaldean diagram may serve as an illustration for all others:

⎧ Anu, ⎫ Mylitta--Arba-il, Triad ⎨ Bel, ⎬ or ⎩ Hoa, ⎭ Four-fold God,

become, with the Christians,

⎧God the Father, ⎫ Mary, or mother of these three Gods Trinity ⎨God the Son, ⎬ since they are one, ⎩God the Holy Ghost,⎭ or, the Christian Heavenly Tetraktys.

Hence, Hebron, the city of the Kabeiri was called Kirjath-Arba, city of the Four. The Kabeiri were Axieros--the noble Eros, Axiokersos, the worthy horned one, Axiokersa, Demeter and Kadmiel, Hoa, etc.

The Pythagorean ten denoted the Arba-Il or Divine Four, emblematized by the Hindu Lingham: Anu, 1; Bel, 2; Hoa, 3, which makes 6. The triad and Mylitta as 4 make the ten.

Though he is termed the “Primitive Man,” Ennoia, who is like the Egyptian Pimander, the “Power of the Thought Divine,” the first intelligible manifestation of the Divine Spirit in material form, he is like the “Only-Begotten” Son of the “Unknown Father,” of all other nations. He is the emblem of the first appearance of the divine Presence in his own works of creation, tangible and visible, and therefore comprehensible. The mystery-God, or the ever-unrevealed Deity fecundates through His will Bythos, the unfathomable and infinite depth that exists in silence (Sigè) and darkness (for our intellect), and that represents the abstract idea of all nature, the ever-producing Cosmos. As neither the male nor female principle, blended into the idea of a double-sexed Deity in ancient conceptions, could be comprehended by an ordinary human intellect, the theology of every people had to create for its religion a Logos, or manifested word, in some shape or other. With the Ophites and other Gnostics who took their models direct from more ancient originals, the unrevealed Bythos and her male counterpart produce Ennoia, and the three in their turn produce Sophia,[291] thus completing the Tetraktys, which will emanate Christos, the very essence of the Father Spirit. As the unrevealed One, or concealed Logos in its latent state, he has existed from all eternity in the Arba-Il, the metaphysical abstraction; therefore, he is ONE with all others as a unity, the latter (including all) being indifferently termed Ennoia, Sigè (silence), Bythos, etc. As the revealed one, he is Androgyne, Christos, and Sophia (Divine Wisdom), who descend into the man Jesus. Both Father and Son are shown by Irenæus to have loved the beauty (formam) of the primitive woman,[292] who is Bythos--Depth--as well as Sophia, and as having produced conjointly Ophis and Sophia (double-sexed unity again), male and female wisdom, one being considered as the unrevealed Holy Spirit, or elder Sophia--the Pneuma--the intellectual “Mother of all things;” the other the revealed one, or Ophis, typifying divine wisdom fallen into matter, or God-man--Jesus, whom the Gnostic Ophites represented by the serpent (Ophis).

Fecundated by the Divine Light of the Father and Son, the highest spirit and Ennoia, Sophia produces in her turn two other emanations-- one perfect Christos, the second imperfect Sophia-Achamoth,[293] from חכמות hakhamoth (simple wisdom), who becomes the mediatrix between the intellectual and material worlds.

Christos was the mediator and guide between God (the Higher), and everything spiritual in man; Achamoth--the younger Sophia--held the same duty between the “Primitive man,” Ennoia and matter. What was mysteriously meant by the general term, Christos, we have just explained.

Delivering a sermon on the “Month of Mary,” we find the Rev. Dr. Preston, of New York City, expressing the Christian idea of the female principle of the trinity better and more clearly than we could, and substantially in the spirit of an ancient “heathen” philosopher. He says that the “plan of the redemption made it necessary that a mother should be found, and Mary stands pre-eminently alone as the only instance when a creature was necessary to the consummation of God’s work.” We will beg the right to contradict the reverend gentleman. As shown above, thousands of years before our era it was found necessary by all the “heathen” theogonies to find a female principle, a “mother” for the triune male principle. Hence, Christianity does not present the “only instance” of such a consummation of God’s work--albeit, as this work shows, there was more philosophy and less materialism, or rather anthropomorphism, in it. But hear the reverend Doctor express “heathen” thought in Christian ideas. “He” (God), he says, “prepared her (Mary’s) virginal and celestial purity, for a mother defiled could not become the mother of the Most High. The holy virgin, even in her childhood, was more pleasing than all the Cherubim and Seraphim, and from infancy to the maturing maidenhood and womanhood she grew more and more pure. By her very sanctity she reigned over the heart of God. When the hour came, the whole court of heaven was hushed, and the trinity listened for the answer of Mary, for without her consent the world could not have been redeemed.”

Does it not seem as if we were reading Irenæus explaining the Gnostic “Heresy, which taught that the Father and Son loved the beauty (formam) of the celestial Virgin?” or the Egyptian system, of Isis being both wife, sister, and mother of Osiris--Horus? With the Gnostic philosophy there were but two, but the Christians have improved and perfected the system by making it completely “heathen,” for it is the Chaldean Anu--Bel--Hoa, merging into Mylitta. “Then while this month (of Mary),” adds Dr. Preston, “begins in the paschal season--the month when nature decks herself with fruits and flowers, the harbingers of a bright harvest--let us, too, begin for a golden harvest. In this month the dead comes up out of the earth, figuring the resurrection; so, when we are kneeling before the altar of the holy and immaculate Mary, let us remember that there should come forth from us the bud of promise, the flower of hope, and the imperishable fruit of sanctity.”

This is precisely the substratum of the Pagan thought, which, among other meanings, emblematized by the rites of the resurrection of Osiris, Adonis, Bacchus, and other slaughtered sun-gods, the resurrection of all nature in spring, the germination of seeds that had been dead and sleeping during winter, and so were allegorically said to be kept in the underworld (Hades). They are typified by the three days passed in hell before his resurrection by Hercules, by Christ, and others.

This derivation, or rather heresy, as it is called in Christianity, is simply the Brahmanic doctrine in all its archaic purity. Vishnu, the second personage of the Hindu trinity, is also the Logos, for he is made subsequently to incarnate himself in Christna. And Lakmy (or Lakshmy) who, as in the case of Osiris, and Isis, of En-Soph and Sephira, and of Bythos and Ennoia, is both his wife, sister, and daughter, through this endless correlation of male and female creative powers in the abstruse metaphysics of the ancient philosophies--is Sophia-Achamoth. Christna is the mediator promised by Brahma to mankind, and represents the same idea as the Gnostic Christos. And Lakmy, Vishnu’s spiritual half, is the emblem of physical nature, the universal mother of all the material and revealed forms; the mediatrix and protector of nature, like Sophia-Achamoth, who is made by the Gnostics the mediatrix between the Great Cause and Matter, as Christos is the mediator between him and spiritual humanity.

This Brahmano-Gnostic tenet is more logical, and more consistent with the allegory of Genesis and the fall of man. When God curses the first couple, He is made to curse also the earth and everything that is on it. The New Testament gives us a Redeemer for the first sin of mankind, which was punished for having sinned; but there is not a word said about a Saviour who would take off the unmerited curse from the earth and the animals, which had never sinned at all. Thus the Gnostic allegory shows a greater sense of both justice and logic than the Christian.

In the Ophite system, Sophia, the Androgyne Wisdom, is also the female spirit, or the Hindu female Nari (Narayana), moving on the face of the waters--chaos, or future matter. She vivifies it from afar, but not touching the abyss of darkness. She is unable to do so, for Wisdom is purely intellectual, and cannot act directly on matter. Therefore, Sophia is obliged to address herself to her Supreme Parent; but although life proceeds primally from the Unseen Cause, and his Ennoia, neither of them can, any more than herself, have anything to do with the lower chaos in which matter assumes its definite shape. Thus, Sophia is obliged to employ on the task her imperfect emanation, Sophia-Achamoth, the latter being of a mixed nature, half spiritual and half material.

The only difference between the Ophite cosmogony and that of the St. John Nazarenes is a change of names. We find equally an identical system in the Kabala, the Book of Mystery (Liber Mysterii).[294] All the three systems, especially that of the kabalists and the Nazarenes, which were the models for the Ophite Cosmogony, belong to the pure Oriental Gnosticism. The Codex Nazaræus opens with: “The Supreme King of Light, Mano, the great first one,”[295] etc., the latter being the emanation of Ferho--the unknown, formless LIFE. He is the chief of the Æons, from whom proceed (or shoot forth) five refulgent rays of Divine light. Mano is Rex Lucis, the Bythos-Ennoia of the Ophites. “Unus est Rex Lucis in suo regno, nec ullus qui eo altior, nullus qui ejus similitudinem retulerit, nullus qui sublatis oculis, viderit Coronam quæ in ejus capite est.” He is the Manifested Light around the highest of the three kabalistic heads, the concealed wisdom; from him emanate the three Lives. Æbel Zivo is the revealed Logos, Christos the “Apostle Gabriel,” and the first Legate or messenger of light. If Bythos and Ennoia are the Nazarene Mano, then the dual-natured, the semi-spiritual, semi-material Achamoth must be Fetahil when viewed from her spiritual aspect; and if regarded in her grosser nature, she is the Nazarene “Spiritus.”

Fetahil,[296] who is the reflection of his father, Lord Abatur, the third life--as the elder Sophia is also the third emanation--is the “newest-man.” Perceiving his fruitless attempts to create a perfect material world, the “Spiritus” calls to one of her progeny, the Karabtanos--Ilda-Baoth--who is without sense or judgment (“blind matter”), to unite himself with her to create something definite out of this confused (turbulentos) matter, which task she is enabled to achieve only after having produced from this union with Karabtanos the seven stellars. Like the six sons or genii of the Gnostic Ilda-Baoth, they then frame the material world. The same story is repeated over again in Sophia-Achamoth. Delegated by her purely spiritual parent, the elder Sophia, to create the world of visible forms, she descended into chaos, and, overpowered by the emanation of matter, lost her way. Still ambitious to create a world of matter of her own, she busied herself hovering to and fro about the dark abyss, and imparted life and motion to the inert elements, until she became so hopelessly entangled in matter that, like Fetahil, she is represented sitting immersed in mud, and unable to extricate herself from it; until, by the contact of matter itself, she produces the Creator of the material world. He is the Demiurgus, called by the Ophites Ilda-Baoth, and, as we will directly show, the parent of the Jewish God in the opinion of some sects, and held by others to be the “Lord God” Himself. It is at this point of the kabalistic-gnostic cosmogony that begins the Mosaic Bible. Having accepted the Jewish Old Testament as their standard, no wonder that the Christians were forced by the exceptional position in which they were placed through their own ignorance, to make the best of it.

The first groups of Christians, whom Renan shows numbering but from seven to twelve men in each church, belonged unquestionably to the poorest and most ignorant classes. They had and could have no idea of the highly philosophical doctrines of the Platonists and Gnostics, and evidently knew as little about their own newly-made-up religion. To these, who if Jews, had been crushed under the tyrannical dominion of the “law,” as enforced by the elders of the synagogues, and if Pagans had been always excluded, as the lower castes are until now in India, from the religious mysteries, the God of the Jews and the “Father” preached by Jesus were all one. The contention which reigned from the first years following the death of Jesus, between the two parties, the Pauline and the Petrine--were deplorable. What one did, the other deemed a sacred duty to undo. If the Homilies are considered apocryphal, and cannot very well be accepted as an infallible standard by which to measure the animosity which raged between the two apostles, we have the Bible, and the proofs afforded therein are plentiful.

So hopelessly entangled seems Irenæus in his fruitless endeavors to describe, to all outward appearance at least, the true doctrines of the many Gnostic sects of which he treats and to present them at the same time as abominable “heresies,” that he either deliberately, or through ignorance, confounds all of them in such a way that few metaphysicians would be able to disentangle them, without the Kabala and the Codex as the true keys. Thus, for instance, he cannot even tell the difference between the Sethianites and the Ophites, and tells us that they called the “God of all,” “Hominem,” a MAN, and his mind the SECOND man, or the “Son of man.” So does Theodoret, who lived more than two centuries after Irenæus, and who makes a sad mess of the chronological order in which the various sects succeeded each other.[297] Neither the Sethianites, (a branch of the Jewish Nazarenes) nor the Ophites, a purely Greek sect, have ever held anything of the kind. Irenæus contradicts his own words by describing in another place the doctrines of Cerinthus, the direct disciple of Simon Magus. He says that Cerinthus taught that the world was not created by the FIRST GOD, but by a virtue (virtus) or power, an Æon so distant from the First Cause that he was even ignorant of HIM who is above all things. This Æon subjected Jesus, he begot him physically through Joseph from one who was not a virgin, but simply the wife of that Joseph, and Jesus was born like all other men. Viewed from this physical aspect of his nature, Jesus was called the “son of man.” It is only after his baptism, that Christos, the anointed, descended from the Princeliness of above, in the figure of a dove, and then announced the UNKNOWN Father through Jesus.[298]

If, therefore, Jesus was physically considered as a son of man, and spiritually as the Christos, who overshadowed him, how then could the “GOD OF ALL,” the “Unknown Father,” be called by the Gnostics Homo, a MAN, and his Mind, Ennoia, the SECOND man, or Son of man? Neither in the Oriental Kabala, nor in Gnosticism, was the “God of all” ever anthropomorphized. It is but the first, or rather the second emanations, for Shekinah, Sephira, Depth, and other first-manifested female virtues are also emanations, that are termed “primitive men.” Thus Adam Kadmon, Ennoia (or Sigè), the logoi in short, are the “only-begotten” ones but not the Sons of man, which appellation properly belongs to Christos the son of Sophia (the elder) and of the primitive man who produces him through his own vivifying light, which emanates from the source or cause of all, hence the cause of his light also, the “Unknown Father.” There is a great difference made in the Gnostic metaphysics between the first unrevealed Logos and the “anointed,” who is Christos. Ennoia may be termed, as Philo understands it, the Second God, but he alone is the “Primitive and First man,” and by no means the Second one, as Theodoret and Irenæus have it. It is but the inveterate desire of the latter to connect Jesus in every possible way, even in the Hæresies, with the Highest God, that led him into so many falsifications.

Such an identification with the Unknown God, even of Christos, the anointed--the Æon who overshadowed him--let alone of the man Jesus, never entered the head of the Gnostics nor even of the direct apostles and of Paul, whatever later forgeries may have added.

How daring and desperate were many such deliberate falsifications was shown in the first attempts to compare the original manuscripts with later ones. In Bishop Horseley’s edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s works, several manuscripts on theological subjects were cautiously withheld from publication. The article known as Christ’s Descent into Hell, which is found in the later Apostles’ Creed, is not to be found in the manuscripts of either the fourth or sixth centuries. It was an evident interpolation copied from the fables of Bacchus and Hercules and enforced upon Christendom as an article of faith. Concerning it the author of the preface to the Catalogue of the Manuscripts of the King’s Library (preface, p. xxi.) remarks: “I wish that the insertion of the article of Christ’s Descent into Hell into the Apostles’ Creed could be as well accounted for as the insertion of the said verse” (First Epistle of John, v. 7).[299]

Now, this verse reads: “For there are three that bear record in Heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one.” This verse, which has been “appointed to be read in churches,” is now known to be spurious. It is not to be found in any Greek manuscript, save one at Berlin, which was transcribed from some interpolated paraphrase between the lines. In the first and second editions of Erasmus, printed in 1516 and 1519, this allusion to these three heavenly witnesses is omitted; and the text is not contained in any Greek manuscript which was written earlier than the fifteenth century.[300] It was not mentioned by either of the Greek ecclesiastical writers nor by the early Latin fathers, so anxious to get at every proof in support of their trinity; and it was omitted by Luther in his German version. Edward Gibbon was early in pointing out its spurious character. Archbishop Newcome rejected it, and the Bishop of Lincoln expresses his conviction that it is spurious.[301] There are twenty-eight Greek authors--Irenæus, Clemens, and Athanasius included, who neither quote nor mention it; and seventeen Latin writers, numbering among them Augustine, Jerome, Ambrosius, Cyprian, and Pope Eusebius, who appear utterly ignorant of it. “It is evident that if the text of the heavenly witnesses had been known from the beginning of Christianity the ancients would have eagerly seized it, inserted it in their creeds, quoted it repeatedly against the heretics, and selected it for the brightest ornament of every book that they wrote upon the subject of the Trinity.”[302]

Thus falls to the ground the strongest trinitarian pillar. Another not less obvious forgery is quoted from Sir Isaac Newton’s words by the editor of the Apocryphal New Testament. Newton observes “that what the Latins have done to this text (First Epistle of John, v.), the Greeks have done to that of St. Paul (Timothy iii. 16).” For, by changing ΟΣ into ΘΣ, the abbreviation of Θεος (God), in the Alexandrian manuscript, from which their subsequent copies were made, they now read, “Great is the mystery of godliness, GOD manifested in the flesh;” whereas all the churches, for the first four or five centuries, and the authors of all the ancient versions, Jerome, as well as the rest, read: “Great is the mystery of godliness WHICH WAS manifested in the flesh.” Newton adds, that now that the disputes over this forgery are over, they that read GOD made manifest in the flesh, instead of the godliness which was manifested in the flesh, think this passage “one of the most obvious and pertinent texts for the business.”

And now we ask again the question: Who were the first Christians? Those who were readily converted by the eloquent simplicity of Paul, who promised them, with the name of Jesus, freedom from the narrow bonds of ecclesiasticism. They understood but one thing; they were the “children of promise” (Galatians iv. 28). The “allegory” of the Mosaic Bible was unveiled to them; the covenant “from the Mount Sinai which gendereth to bondage” was Agar (Ibid., 24), the old Jewish synagogue, and she was “in bondage with her children” to Jerusalem, the new and the free, “the mother of us all.” On the one hand the synagogue and the law which persecuted every one who dared to step across the narrow path of bigotry and dogmatism; on the other, Paganism[303] with its grand philosophical truths concealed from sight; unveiling itself but to the few, and leaving the masses hopelessly seeking to discover who was the god, among this overcrowded pantheon of deities and sub-deities. To others, the apostle of circumcision, supported by all his followers, was promising, if they obeyed the “law,” a life hereafter, and a resurrection of which they had no previous idea. At the same time he never lost an occasion to contradict Paul without naming him, but indicating him so clearly that it is next to impossible to doubt whom Peter meant. While he may have converted some men, who whether they had believed in the Mosaic resurrection promised by the Pharisees, or had fallen into the nihilistic doctrines of the Sadducees, or had belonged to the polytheistic heathenism of the Pagan rabble, had no future after death, nothing but a mournful blank, we do not think that the work of contradiction, carried on so systematically by the two apostles, had helped much their work of proselytism. With the educated thinking classes they succeeded very little, as ecclesiastical history clearly shows. Where was the truth; where the inspired word of God? On the one hand, as we have seen, they heard the apostle Paul explaining that of the two covenants, “which things are an allegory,” the old one from Mount Sinai, “which gendereth unto bondage,” was Agar the bondwoman; and Mount Sinai itself answered to “Jerusalem,” which now is “in bondage” with her circumcised children; and the new covenant meant Jesus Christ--the “Jerusalem which is above and free;” and on the other Peter, who was contradicting and even abusing him. Paul vehemently exclaims, “Cast out the bondwoman and her son” (the old law and the synagogue). “The son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.” “Stand fast, therefore, in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free; be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.... Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing!” (Gal. v. 2). What do we find Peter writing? Whom does he mean by saying, “These who speak great swelling words of vanity.... While they promise them liberty, they themselves are servants of corruption, for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage.... For if they have escaped the pollution of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour, they are again entangled therein, and overcome ... it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than after they have known it to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them” (Second Epistle).

Peter certainly cannot have meant the Gnostics, for they had never seen “the holy commandment delivered unto them;” Paul had. They never promised any one “liberty” from bondage, but Paul had done so repeatedly. Moreover the latter rejects the “old covenant,” Agar the bondwoman; and Peter holds fast to it. Paul warns the people against the powers and dignities (the lower angels of the kabalists); and Peter, as will be shown further, respects them and denounces those who do not. Peter preaches circumcision, and Paul forbids it.

Later, when all these extraordinary blunders, contradictions, dissensions and inventions were forcibly crammed into a frame elaborately executed by the episcopal caste of the new religion, and called Christianity; and the chaotic picture itself cunningly preserved from too close scrutiny by a whole array of formidable Church penances and anathemas, which kept the curious back under the false pretense of sacrilege and profanation of divine mysteries; and millions of people had been butchered in the name of the God of mercy--then came the Reformation. It certainly deserves its name in its fullest paradoxical sense. It abandoned Peter and alleges to have chosen Paul for its only leader. And the apostle who thundered against the old law of bondage; who left full liberty to Christians to either observe the Sabbath or set it aside; who rejects everything anterior to John the Baptist, is now the professed standard-bearer of Protestantism, which holds to the old law more than the Jews, imprisons those who view the Sabbath as Jesus and Paul did, and outvies the synagogue of the first century in dogmatic intolerance!

But who then were the first Christians, may still be asked? Doubtless the Ebionites; and in this we follow the authority of the best critics. “There can be little doubt that the author (of the Clementine Homilies) was a representative of Ebionitic Gnosticism, which had once been the purest form of primitive Christianity....”[304] And who were the Ebionites? The pupils and followers of the early Nazarenes, the kabalistic Gnostics. In the preface to the Codex Nazaræus, the translator says: “That also the Nazarenes did not reject ... the Æons is natural. For of the Ebionites who acknowledged them (the Æons), these were the instructors.”[305]

We find, moreover, Epiphanius, the Christian Homer of The Heresies, telling us that “Ebion had the opinion of the Nazarenes, the form of the Cerinthians (who fable that the world was put together by angels), and the appellation of Christians.”[306] An appellation certainly more correctly applied to them than to the orthodox (so-called) Christians of the school of Irenæus and the later Vatican. Renan shows the Ebionites numbering among their sect all the surviving relatives of Jesus. John the Baptist, his cousin and precursor, was the accepted Saviour of the Nazarenes, and their prophet. His disciples dwelt on the other side of the Jordan, and the scene of the baptism of the Jordan is clearly and beyond any question proved by the author of Sod, the Son of the Man, to have been the site of the Adonis-worship.[307] “Over the Jordan and beyond the lake dwelt the Nazarenes, a sect said to have existed already at the birth of Jesus, and to have counted him among its number. They must have extended along the east of the Jordan, and southeasterly among the Arabians (Galat. i. 17, 21; ii. 11), and Sabæans in the direction of Bosra; and again, they must have gone far north over the Lebanon to Antioch, also to the northeast to the Nazarian settlement in Berœa, where St. Jerome found them. In the desert the Mysteries of Adonis may have still prevailed; in the mountains Aiai Adonai was still a cry.”[308]

“Having been united (conjunctus) to the Nazarenes, each (Ebionite) imparted to the other out of his own wickedness, and decided that Christ was of the seed of a man,” writes Epiphanius.

And if they did, we must suppose they knew more about their contemporary prophet than Epiphanius 400 years later. Theodoret, as shown elsewhere, describes the Nazarenes as Jews who “honor the Anointed as a just man,” and use the evangel called “According to Peter.” Jerome finds the authentic and original evangel, written in Hebrew, by Matthew the apostle-publican, in the library collected at Cæsarea, by the martyr Pamphilius. “I received permission from the Nazaræans, who at Berœa of Syria used this (gospel) to translate it,” he writes toward the end of the fourth century.[309] “In the evangel which the Nazarenes and Ebionites use,” adds Jerome, “which recently I translated from Hebrew into Greek,[310] and which is called by most persons the genuine Gospel of Matthew,” etc.

That the apostles had received a “secret doctrine” from Jesus, and that he himself taught one, is evident from the following words of Jerome, who confessed it in an unguarded moment. Writing to the Bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, he complains that “a difficult work is enjoined, since this translation has been commanded me by your Felicities, which St. Matthew himself, the Apostle and Evangelist, DID NOT WISH TO BE OPENLY WRITTEN. For if it had not been SECRET, he (Matthew) would have added to the evangel that which he gave forth was his; but he made up this book sealed up in the Hebrew characters, which he put forth even in such a way that the book, written in Hebrew letters and by the hand of himself, might be possessed by the men most religious, who also, in the course of time, received it from those who preceded them. But this very book they never gave to any one to be transcribed, and its text they related some one way and some another.”[311] And he adds further on the same page: “And it happened that this book, having been published by a disciple of Manichæus, named Seleucus, who also wrote falsely The Acts of the Apostles, exhibited matter not for edification, but for destruction; and that this book was approved in a synod which the ears of the Church properly refused to listen to.”[312]

He admits, himself, that the book which he authenticates as being written “by the hand of Matthew;” a book which, notwithstanding that he translated it twice, was nearly unintelligible to him, for it was arcane or a secret. Nevertheless, Jerome coolly sets down every commentary upon it, except his own, as heretical. More than that, Jerome knew that this original Gospel of Matthew was the expounder of the only true doctrine of Christ; and that it was the work of an evangelist who had been the friend and companion of Jesus. He knew that if of the two Gospels, the Hebrew in question and the Greek belonging to our present Scripture, one was spurious, hence heretical, it was not that of the Nazarenes; and yet, knowing all this, Jerome becomes more zealous than ever in his persecutions of the “Hæretics.” Why? Because to accept it was equivalent to reading the death-sentence of the established Church. The Gospel according to the Hebrews was but too well known to have been the only one accepted for four centuries by the Jewish Christians, the Nazarenes and the Ebionites. And neither of the latter accepted the divinity of Christ.

If the commentaries of Jerome on the Prophets, his famous Vulgate, and numerous polemical treatises are all as trustworthy as this version of the Gospel according to Matthew, then we have a divine revelation indeed.

Why wonder at the unfathomable mysteries of the Christian religion, since it is perfectly human? Have we not a letter written by one of the most respected Fathers of the Church to this same Jerome, which shows better than whole volumes their traditionary policy? This is what Saint Gregory of Nazianzen wrote to his friend and confidant Saint Jerome: “Nothing can impose better on a people than verbiage; the less they understand the more they admire. Our fathers and doctors have often said, not what they thought, but what circumstances and necessity forced them to.”

But to return to our Sophia-Achamoth and the belief of the genuine, primitive Christians.

After having produced Ilda-Baoth, Ilda from ילד, a child, and Baoth from בויץ, the egg, or בהות, Baoth, a waste, a desolation, Sophia-Achamoth suffered so much from the contact with matter, that after extraordinary struggles she escapes at last out of the muddy chaos. Although unacquainted with the pleroma, the region of her mother, she reached the middle space and succeeded in shaking off the material parts which have stuck to her spiritual nature; after which she immediately built a strong barrier between the world of intelligences (spirits) and the world of matter. Ilda-Baoth, is thus the “son of darkness,” the creator of our sinful world (the physical portion of it). He follows the example of Bythos and produces from himself six stellar spirits (sons). They are all in his own image, and reflections one of the other, which become darker as they successively recede from their father. With the latter, they all inhabit seven regions disposed like a ladder, beginning under the middle space, the region of their mother, Sophia-Achamoth, and ending with our earth, the seventh region. Thus they are the genii of the seven planetary spheres of which the lowest is the region of our earth (the sphere which surrounds it, our æther). The respective names of these genii of the spheres are Iòve (Jehovah), Sabaoth, Adonai, Eloi, Ouraios, Astaphaios.[313] The first four, as every one knows, are the mystic names of the Jewish “Lord God,”[314] he being, as C. W. King expresses it, “thus degraded by the Ophites into the appellations of the subordinates of the Creator; “the two last names are those of the genii of fire and water.”

Ilda-Baoth, whom several sects regarded as the God of Moses, was not a pure spirit; he was ambitious and proud, and rejecting the spiritual light of the middle space offered him by his mother Sophia-Achamoth, he set himself to create a world of his own. Aided by his sons, the six planetary genii, he fabricated man, but this one proved a failure. It was a monster; soulless, ignorant, and crawling on all fours on the ground like a material beast. Ilda-Baoth was forced to implore the help of his spiritual mother. She communicated to him a ray of her divine light, and so animated man and endowed him with a soul. And now began the animosity of Ilda-Baoth toward his own creature. Following the impulse of the divine light, man soared higher and higher in his aspirations; very soon he began presenting not the image of his Creator Ilda-Baoth but rather that of the Supreme Being, the “primitive man,” Ennoia. Then the Demiurgus was filled with rage and envy; and fixing his jealous eye on the abyss of matter, his looks envenomed with passion were suddenly reflected in it as in a mirror; the reflection became animate, and there arose out of the abyss Satan, serpent, Ophiomorphos--“the embodiment of envy and of cunning. He is the union of all that is most base in matter, with the hate, envy, and craft of a spiritual intelligence.”[315]

After that, always in spite at the perfection of man, Ilda-Baoth created the three kingdoms of nature, the mineral, vegetable, and animal, with all evil instincts and properties. Impotent to annihilate the Tree of Knowledge, which grows in his sphere as in every one of the planetary regions, but bent upon detaching “man” from his spiritual protectress, Ilda-Baoth forbade him to eat of its fruit, for fear it should reveal to mankind the mysteries of the superior world. But Sophia-Achamoth, who loved and protected the man whom she had animated, sent her own genius Ophis, in the form of a serpent to induce man to transgress the selfish and unjust command. And “man” suddenly became capable of comprehending the mysteries of creation.

Ilda-Baoth revenged himself by punishing the first pair, for man, through his knowledge, had already provided for himself a companion out of his spiritual and material half. He imprisoned man and woman in a dungeon of matter, in the body so unworthy of his nature, wherein man is still enthralled. But Achamoth protected him still. She established between her celestial region and “man,” a current of divine light, and kept constantly supplying him with this spiritual illumination.

Then follow allegories embodying the idea of dualism, or the struggle between good and evil, spirit and matter, which is found in every cosmogony, and the source of which is again to be sought in India. The types and antitypes represent the heroes of this Gnostic Pantheon, borrowed from the most ancient mythopœic ages. But, in these personages, Ophis and Ophiomorphos, Sophia and Sophia-Achamoth, Adam-Kadmon, and Adam, the planetary genii and the divine Æons, we can also recognize very easily the models of our biblical copies--the euhemerized patriarchs. The archangels, angels, virtues and powers, are all found, under other names, in the Vedas and the Buddhistic system. The Avestic Supreme Being, Zero-ana, or “Boundless Time,” is the type of all these Gnostic and kabalistic “Depths,” “Crowns,” and even of the Chaldean En-Soph. The six Amshaspands, created through the “Word” of Ormazd, the “First-Born,” have their reflections in Bythos and his emanations, and the antitype of Ormazd--Ahriman and his devs also enter into the composition of Ilda-Baoth and his six material, though not wholly evil, planetary genii.

Achamoth, afflicted with the evils which befall humanity, notwithstanding her protection, beseeches the celestial mother Sophia--her antitype--to prevail on the unknown DEPTH to send down Christos (the son and emanation of the “Celestial Virgin”) to the help of perishing humanity. Ilda-Baoth and his six sons of matter are shutting out the divine light from mankind. Man must be saved. Ilda-Baoth had already sent his own agent, John the Baptist, from the race of Seth, whom he protects--as a prophet to his people; but only a small portion listened to him--the Nazarenes, the opponents of the Jews, on account of their worshipping Iurbo-Adunai.[316] Achamoth had assured her son, Ilda-Baoth, that the reign of Christos would be only temporal, and thus induced him to send the forerunner, or precursor. Besides that, she made him cause the birth of the man Jesus from the Virgin Mary, her own type on earth, “for the creation of a material personage could only be the work of the Demiurgus, not falling within the province of a higher power. As soon as Jesus was born, Christos, the perfect, uniting himself with Sophia (wisdom and spirituality), descended through the seven planetary regions, assuming in each an analogous form, and concealing his true nature from their genii, while he attracted into himself the sparks of divine light which they retained in their essence. Thus, Christos entered into the man Jesus at the moment of his baptism in the Jordan. From that time Jesus began to work miracles; before that, he had been completely ignorant of his mission.”[317]

Ilda-Baoth, discovering that Christos was bringing to an end his own kingdom of matter, stirred up the Jews against him, and Jesus was put to death.[318] When on the Cross, Christos and Sophia left his body and returned to their own sphere. The material body of the man Jesus was abandoned to the earth, but he himself was given a body made up of æther (astral soul). “Thenceforward he consisted of merely soul and spirit,” which was the reason why the disciples did not recognize him after the resurrection. In this spiritual state of a simulacrum, Jesus remained on earth for eighteen months after he had risen. During this last sojourn, “he received from Sophia that perfect knowledge, that true Gnosis, which he communicated to the very few among the apostles who were capable of receiving the same.”

“Thence, ascending up into the middle space, he sits on the right hand of Ilda-Baoth, but unperceived by him, and there collects all the souls which shall have been purified by the knowledge of Christ. When he has collected all the spiritual light that exists in matter, out of Ilda-Baoth’s empire, the redemption will be accomplished and the world will be destroyed. Such is the meaning of the re-absorption of all the spiritual light into the pleroma or fulness, whence it originally descended.”

The foregoing is from the description given by Theodoret and adopted by King in his Gnostics, with additions from Epiphanius and Irenæus. But the former gives a very imperfect version, concocted partly from the descriptions of Irenæus, and partly from his own knowledge of the later Ophites, who, toward the end of the third century, had blended already with several other sects. Irenæus also confounds them very frequently, and the real theogony of the Ophites is given by none of them correctly. With the exception of a change in names, the above-given theogony is that of all the Gnostics, and also of the Nazarenes. Ophis is but the successor of the Egyptian Chnuphis, the Good Serpent with a lion’s radiating head, and was held from days of the highest antiquity as an emblem of wisdom, or Thauth, the instructor and Saviour of humanity, the “Son of God.” “Oh men, live soberly ... win your immortality!” exclaims Hermes, the thrice-great Trismegistus. “Instructor and guide of humanity, I will lead you on to salvation.” Thus the oldest sectarians regarded Ophis, the Agathodæmon, as identical with Christos; the serpent being the emblem of celestial wisdom and eternity, and, in the present case, the antitype of the Egyptian Chnuphis-serpent. These Gnostics, the earliest of our Christian era, held: “That the supreme Æon, having emitted other Æons out of himself, one of them, a female, Prunnikos (concupiscence), descended into the chaos, whence, unable to escape, she remained suspended in the mid-space, being too clogged by matter to return above, and not falling lower where there was nothing in affinity with her nature. She then produced her son Ilda-Baoth, the God of the Jews, who, in his turn, produced seven Æons, or angels,[319] who created the seven heavens.”

In this plurality of heavens the Christians believed from the first, for we find Paul teaching of their existence, and speaking of a man “caught up to the third heaven” (2 Corin., xiii.). From these seven angels Ilda-Baoth shut up all that was above him, lest they should know of anything superior to himself.[320] They then created man in the image of their Father,[321] but prone and crawling on the earth like a worm. But the heavenly mother, Prunnikos, wishing to deprive Ilda-Baoth of the power with which she had unwittingly endowed him, infused into man a celestial spark--the spirit. Immediately man rose upon his feet, soared in mind beyond the limits of the seven spheres, and glorified the Supreme Father, Him that is above Ilda-Baoth. Hence, the latter, full of jealousy, cast down his eyes upon the lowest stratum of matter, and begot a potency in the form of a serpent, whom they (the Ophites) call his son. Eve, obeying him as the son of God, was persuaded to eat of the Tree of Knowledge.[322]

It is a self-evident fact that the serpent of the Genesis, who appears suddenly and without any preliminary introduction, must have been the antitype of the Persian Arch-Devs, whose head is Ash-Mogh, the “two-footed serpent of lies.” If the Bible-serpent had been deprived of his limbs before he had tempted woman unto sin, why should God specify as a punishment that he should go “upon his belly?” Nobody supposes that he walked upon the extremity of his tail.

This controversy about the supremacy of Jehovah, between the Presbyters and Fathers on the one hand, and the Gnostics, the Nazarenes, and all the sects declared heterodox, as a last resort, on the other, lasted till the days of Constantine, and later. That the peculiar ideas of the Gnostics about the genealogy of Jehovah, or the proper place that had to be assigned, in the Christian-Gnostic Pantheon, to the God of the Jews, were at first deemed neither blasphemous nor heterodox is evident in the difference of opinions held on this question by Clemens of Alexandria, for instance, and Tertullian. The former, who seems to have known of Basilides better than anybody else, saw nothing heterodox or blamable in the mystical and transcendental views of the new Reformer. “In his eyes,” remarks the author of The Gnostics, speaking of Clemens, “Basilides was not a heretic, i.e., an innovator as regards the doctrines of the Christian Church, but a mere theosophic philosopher, who sought to express ancient truths under new forms, and perhaps to combine them with the new faith, the truth of which he could admit without necessarily renouncing the old, exactly as is the case with the learned Hindus of our day.”[323]

Not so with Irenæus and Tertullian.[324] The principal works of the latter against the Heretics, were written after his separation from the Catholic Church, when he had ranged himself among the zealous followers of Montanus; and teem with unfairness and bigoted prejudice.[325] He has exaggerated every Gnostic opinion to a monstrous absurdity, and his arguments are not based on coercive reasoning but simply on the blind stubbornness of a partisan fanatic. Discussing Basilides, the “pious, god-like, theosophic philosopher,” as Clemens of Alexandria thought him, Tertullian exclaims: “After this, Basilides, the heretic, broke loose.[326] He asserted that there is a Supreme God, by name Abraxas, by whom Mind was created, whom the Greeks call Nous. From her emanated the Word; from the Word, Providence; from Providence, Virtue and Wisdom; from these two again, Virtues, Principalities,[327] and Powers were made; thence infinite productions and emissions of angels. Among the lowest angels, indeed, and those that made this world, he sets last of all the god of the Jews, whom he denies to be God himself, affirming that he is but one of the angels.”[328]

It would be equally useless to refer to the direct apostles of Christ, and show them as holding in their controversies that Jesus never made any difference between his “Father” and the “Lord-God” of Moses. For the Clementine Homilies, in which occur the greatest argumentations upon the subject, as shown in the disputations alleged to have taken place between Peter and Simon the Magician, are now also proved to have been falsely attributed to Clement the Roman. This work, if written by an Ebionite--as the author of Supernatural Religion declares in common with some other commentators[329]--must have been written either far later than the Pauline period, generally assigned to it, or the dispute about the identity of Jehovah with God, the “Father of Jesus,” have been distorted by later interpolations. This disputation is in its very essence antagonistic to the early doctrines of the Ebionites. The latter, as demonstrated by Epiphanius and Theodoret, were the direct followers of the Nazarene sect[330] (the Sabians), the “Disciples of John.” He says, unequivocally, that the Ebionites believed in the Æons (emanations), that the Nazarenes were their instructors, and that “each imparted to the other out of his own wickedness.” Therefore, holding the same beliefs as the Nazarenes did, an Ebionite would not have given even so much chance to the doctrine supported by Peter in the Homilies. The old Nazarenes, as well as the later ones, whose views are embodied in the Codex Nazaræus, never called Jehovah otherwise than Adonai, Iurbo, the God of the Abortive[331] (the orthodox Jews). They kept their beliefs and religious tenets so secret that even Epiphanius, writing as early as the end of the fourth century,[332] confesses his ignorance as to their real doctrine. “Dropping the name of Jesus,” says the Bishop of Salamis, “they neither call themselves Iessaens, nor continue to hold the name of the Jews, nor name themselves Christians, but Nazarenes.... The resurrection of the dead is confessed by them ... but concerning Christ, I cannot say whether they think him a mere man, or as the truth is, confess that he was born through the Holy Pneuma from the Virgin.”[333]

While Simon Magus argues in the Homilies from the standpoint of every Gnostic (Nazarenes and Ebionites included), Peter, as a true apostle of circumcision, holds to the old Law and, as a matter of course, seeks to blend his belief in the divinity of Christ with his old Faith in the “Lord God” and ex-protector of the “chosen people.” As the author of Supernatural Religion shows, the Epitome,[334] “a blending of the other two, probably intended to purge them from heretical doctrine”[335] and, together with a great majority of critics, assigns to the Homilies, a date not earlier than the end of the third century, we may well infer that they must differ widely with their original, if there ever was one. Simon the Magician proves throughout the whole work that the Demiurgus, the Architect of the World, is not the highest Deity; and he bases his assertions upon the words of Jesus himself, who states repeatedly that “no man knew the Father.” Peter is made in the Homilies to repudiate, with a great show of indignation, the assertion that the Patriarchs were not deemed worthy to know the Father; to which Simon objects again by quoting the words of Jesus, who thanks the “Lord of Heaven and earth that what was concealed from the wise” he has “revealed to babes,” proving very logically that according to these very words the Patriarchs could not have known the “Father.” Then Peter argues, in his turn, that the expression, “what is concealed from the wise,” etc., referred to the concealed mysteries of the creation.[336]

This argumentation of Peter, therefore, had it even emanated from the apostle himself, instead of being a “religious romance,” as the author of Supernatural Religion calls it, would prove nothing whatever in favor of the identity of the God of the Jews, with the “Father” of Jesus. At best it would only demonstrate that Peter had remained from first to last “an apostle of circumcision,” a Jew faithful to his old law, and a defender of the Old Testament. This conversation proves, moreover, the weakness of the cause he defends, for we see in the apostle a man who, although in most intimate relations with Jesus, can furnish us nothing in the way of direct proof that he ever thought of teaching that the all-wise and all-good Paternity he preached was the morose and revengeful thunderer of Mount Sinai. But what the Homilies do prove, is again our assertion that there was a secret doctrine preached by Jesus to the few who were deemed worthy to become its recipients and custodians. “And Peter said: ‘We remember that our Lord and teacher, as commanding, said to us, guard the mysteries for me, and the sons of my house. Wherefore also he explained to his disciples, privately, the mysteries of the kingdoms of the heavens.’”[337]

If we now recall the fact that a portion of the Mysteries of the “Pagans” consisted of the απορῥήτα, aporrheta, or secret discourses; that the secret Logia or discourses of Jesus contained in the original Gospel according to Matthew, the meaning and interpretation of which St. Jerome confessed to be “a difficult task” for him to achieve, were of the same nature; and if we remember, further, that to some of the interior or final Mysteries only a very select few were admitted; and that finally it was from the number of the latter that were taken all the ministers of the holy “Pagan” rites, we will then clearly understand this expression of Jesus quoted by Peter: “Guard the Mysteries for me and the sons of my house,” i.e., of my doctrine. And, if we understand it rightly, we cannot avoid thinking that this “secret” doctrine of Jesus, even the technical expressions of which are but so many duplications of the Gnostic and Neo-platonic mystic phraseology--that this doctrine, we say, was based on the same transcendental philosophy of Oriental Gnosis as the rest of the religions of those and earliest days. That none of the later Christian sects, despite their boasting, were the inheritors of it, is evident from the contradictions, blunders, and clumsy repatching of the mistakes of every preceding century by the discoveries of the succeeding one. These mistakes, in a number of manuscripts claimed to be authentic, are sometimes so ridiculous as to bear on their face the evidence of being pious forgeries. Thus, for instance, the utter ignorance of some patristic champions of the very gospels they claimed to defend. We have mentioned the accusation against Marcion by Tertullian and Epiphanius of mutilating the Gospel ascribed to Luke, and erasing from it that which is now proved to have never been in that Gospel at all. Finally, the method adopted by Jesus of speaking in parables, in which he only followed the example of his sect, is attributed in the Homilies to a prophecy of Isaiah! Peter is made to remark: “For Isaiah said: ‘I will open my mouth in parables, and I will utter things that have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.’” This erroneous reference to Isaiah of a sentence given in Psalms lxxviii. 2, is found not only in the apocryphal Homilies, but also in the Sinaitic Codex. Commenting on the fact in the Supernatural Religion, the author states that “Porphyry, in the third century, twitted Christians with this erroneous ascription by their inspired evangelist to Isaiah of a passage from a Psalm, and reduced the Fathers to great straits.”[338] Eusebius and Jerome tried to get out of the difficulty by ascribing the mistake to an “ignorant scribe;” and Jerome even went to the length of asserting that the name of Isaiah never stood after the above sentence in any of the old codices, but that the name of Asaph was found in its place, only “ignorant men had removed it.”[339] To this, the author again observes that “the fact is that the reading ‘Asaph’ for ‘Isaiah’ is not found in any manuscript extant; and, although ‘Isaiah’ has disappeared from all but a few obscure codices, it cannot be denied that the name anciently stood in the text. In the Sinaitic Codex, which is probably the earliest manuscript extant ... and which is assigned to the fourth century,” he adds, “the prophet Isaiah stands in the text by the first hand, but is erased by the second.”[340]

It is a most suggestive fact that there is not a word in the so-called sacred Scriptures to show that Jesus was actually regarded as a God by his disciples. Neither before nor after his death did they pay him divine honors. Their relation to him was only that of disciples and “master;” by which name they addressed him, as the followers of Pythagoras and Plato addressed their respective masters before them. Whatever words may have been put into the mouths of Jesus, Peter, John, Paul, and others, there is not a single act of adoration recorded on their part, nor did Jesus himself ever declare his identity with his Father. He accused the Pharisees of stoning their prophets, not of deicide. He termed himself the son of God, but took care to assert repeatedly that they were all the children of God, who was the Heavenly Father of all. In preaching this, he but repeated a doctrine taught ages earlier by Hermes, Plato, and other philosophers. Strange contradiction! Jesus, whom we are asked to worship as the one living God, is found, immediately after his Resurrection, saying to Mary Magdalene: “I am not yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God!” (John xx. 17.)

Does this look like identifying himself with his Father? “My Father and your Father, my God and your God,” implies, on his part, a desire to be considered on a perfect equality with his brethren--nothing more. Theodoret writes: “The hæretics agree with us respecting the beginning of all things.... But they say there is not one Christ (God), but one above, and the other below. And this last formerly dwelt in many; but the Jesus, they at one time say is from God, at another they call him a SPIRIT.”[341] This spirit is the Christos, the messenger of life, who is sometimes called the Angel Gabriel (in Hebrew, the mighty one of God), and who took with the Gnostics the place of the Logos, while the Holy Spirit was considered Life.[342] With the sect of the Nazarenes, though, the Spiritus, or Holy Ghost, had less honor. While nearly every Gnostic sect considered it a Female Power, whether they called it Binah, נינה, Sophia, the Divine Intellect, with the Nazarene sect it was the Female Spiritus, the astral light, the genetrix of all things of matter, the chaos in its evil aspect, made turbido by the Demiurge. At the creation of man, “it was light on the side of the FATHER, and it was light (material light) on the side of the MOTHER. And this is the ‘two-fold man,’”[343] says the Sohar. “That day (the last one) will perish the seven badly-disposed stellars, also the sons of man, who have confessed the Spiritus, the Messias (false), the Deus, and the MOTHER of the SPIRITUS shall perish.”[344]

Jesus enforced and illustrated his doctrines with signs and wonders; and if we lay aside the claims advanced on his behalf by his deifiers, he did but what other kabalists did; and only they at that epoch, when, for two centuries the sources of prophecy had been completely dried up, and from this stagnation of public “miracles” had originated the skepticism of the unbelieving sect of the Sadducees. Describing the “heresies” of those days, Theodoret, who has no idea of the hidden meaning of the word Christos, the anointed messenger, complains that they (the Gnostics) assert that this Messenger or Delegatus changes his body from time to time, “and goes into other bodies, and at each time is differently manifested. And these (the overshadowed prophets) use incantations and invocations of various demons and baptisms in the confession of their principles.... They embrace astrology and magic, and the mathematical error,” (?) he says.[345]

This “mathematical error,” of which the pious writer complains, led subsequently to the rediscovery of the heliocentric system, erroneous as it may still be, and forgotten since the days of another “magician” who taught it--Pythagoras. Thus, the wonders of healing and the thaums of Jesus, which he imparted to his followers, show that they were learning, in their daily communication with him, the theory and practice of the new ethics, day by day, and in the familiar intercourse of intimate friendship. Their faith was progressively developed, like that of all neophytes, simultaneously with the increase of knowledge. We must bear in mind that Josephus, who certainly must have been well informed on the subject, calls the skill of expelling demons “a science.” This growth of faith is conspicuously shown in the case of Peter, who, from having lacked enough faith to support him while he could walk on the water from the boat to his Master, at last became so expert a thaumaturgist, that Simon Magus is said to have offered him money to teach him the secret of healing, and other wonders. And Philip is shown to have become an Æthrobat as good as Abaris of Pythagorean memory, but less expert than Simon Magus.

Neither in the Homilies nor any other early work of the apostles, is there anything to show that either of his friends and followers regarded Jesus as anything more than a prophet. The idea is as clearly established in the Clementines. Except that too much room is afforded to Peter to establish the identity of the Mosaic God with the Father of Jesus, the whole work is devoted to Monotheism. The author seems as bitter against Polytheism as against the claim to the divinity of Christ.[346] He seems to be utterly ignorant of the Logos, and his speculation is confined to Sophia, the Gnostic wisdom. There is no trace in it of a hypostatic trinity, but the same overshadowing of the Gnostic “wisdom (Christos and Sophia) is attributed in the case of Jesus as it is in those of Adam, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses.[347] These personages are all placed on one level, and called ‘true prophets,’ and the seven pillars of the world.” More than that, Peter vehemently denies the fall of Adam, and with him, the doctrine of atonement, as taught by Christian theology, utterly falls to the ground, for he combats it as a blasphemy.[348] Peter’s theory of sin is that of the Jewish kabalists, and even, in a certain way, Platonic. Adam not only never sinned, but, “as a true prophet, possessed of the Spirit of God, which afterwards was in Jesus, could not sin.”[349] In short, the whole of the work exhibits the belief of the author in the kabalistic doctrine of permutation. The Kabala teaches the doctrine of transmigration of the spirit.[350] “Mosah is the revolutio of Seth and Hebel.”[351]

“Tell me who it is who brings about the re-birth (the revolutio)?” is asked of the wise Hermes. “God’s Son, the only man, through the will of God,” is the answer of the “heathen.”[352]

“God’s son” is the immortal spirit assigned to every human being. It is this divine entity which is the “only man,” for the casket which contains our soul, and the soul itself, are but half-entities, and without its overshadowing both body and astral soul, the two are but an animal duad. It requires a trinity to form the complete “man,” and allow him to remain immortal at every “re-birth,” or revolutio, throughout the subsequent and ascending spheres, every one of which brings him nearer to the refulgent realm of eternal and absolute light.

“God’s FIRST-BORN, who is the ‘holy Veil,’ the ‘Light of Lights,’ it is he who sends the revolutio of the Delegatus, for he is the First Power,” says the kabalist.[353]

“The pneuma (spirit) and the dunamis (power), which is from the God, it is right to consider nothing else than the Logos, who is also (?) First-begotten to the God,” argues a Christian.[354]

“Angels and powers are in heaven!” says Justin, thus bringing forth a purely kabalistic doctrine. The Christians adopted it from the Sohar and the hæretical sects, and if Jesus mentioned them, it was not in the official synagogues that he learned the theory, but directly in the kabalistic teachings. In the Mosaic books, very little mention is made of them, and Moses, who holds direct communications with the “Lord God,” troubles himself very little about them. The doctrine was a secret one, and deemed by the orthodox synagogue heretical. Josephus calls the Essenes heretics, saying: “Those admitted among the Essenes must swear to communicate their doctrines to no one any otherwise than as he received them himself, and equally to preserve the books belonging to their sect, and the names of the angels.”[355] The Sadducees did not believe in angels, neither did the uninitiated Gentiles, who limited their Olympus to gods and demi-gods, or “spirits.” Alone, the kabalists and theurgists hold to that doctrine from time immemorial, and, as a consequence, Plato, and Philo Judæus after him, followed first by the Gnostics, and then by the Christians.

Thus, if Josephus never wrote the famous interpolation forged by Eusebius, concerning Jesus, on the other hand, he has described in the Essenes all the principal features that we find prominent in the Nazarene. When praying, they sought solitude.[356] “When thou prayest, enter into thy closet ... and pray to thy Father which is in secret” (Matthew vi. 6). “Everything spoken by them (Essenes) is stronger than an oath. Swearing is shunned by them” (Josephus II., viii., 6). “But I say unto you, swear not at all ... but let your communication be yea, yea; nay, nay” (Matthew v. 34-37).

The Nazarenes, as well as the Essenes and the Therapeutæ, believed more in their own interpretations of the “hidden sense” of the more ancient Scriptures, than in the later laws of Moses. Jesus, as we have shown before, felt but little veneration for the commandments of his predecessor, with whom Irenæus is so anxious to connect him.

The Essenes “enter into the houses of those whom they never saw previously, as if they were their intimate friends” (Josephus II., viii., 4). Such was undeniably the custom of Jesus and his disciples.

Epiphanius, who places the Ebionite “heresy” on one level with that of the Nazarenes, also remarks that the Nazaraioi come next to the Cerinthians,[357] so much vituperated against by Irenæus.[358]

Munk, in his work on Palestine, affirms that there were 4,000 Essenes living in the desert; that they had their mystical books, and predicted the future.[359] The Nabatheans, with very little difference indeed, adhered to the same belief as the Nazarenes and the Sabeans, and all of them honored John the Baptist more than his successor Jesus. The Persian Iezidi say that they originally came to Syria from Busrah. They use baptism, and believe in seven archangels, though paying at the same time reverence to Satan. Their prophet Iezed, who flourished long prior to Mahomet,[360] taught that God will send a messenger, and that the latter would reveal to him a book which is already written in heaven from the eternity.[361] The Nabatheans inhabited the Lebanon, as their descendants do to the present day, and their religion was from its origin purely kabalistic. Maimonides speaks of them as if he identified them with the Sabeans. “I will mention to thee the writings ... respecting the belief and institutions of the Sabeans,” he says. “The most famous is the book The Agriculture of the Nabathæans, which has been translated by Ibn Wahohijah. This book is full of heathenish foolishness.... It speaks of the preparations of TALISMANS, the drawing down of the powers of the SPIRITS, MAGIC, DEMONS, and ghouls, which make their abode in the desert.”[362]

There are traditions among the tribes living scattered about beyond the Jordan, as there are many such also among the descendants of the Samaritans at Damascus, Gaza, and at Naplosa (the ancient Shechem). Many of these tribes have, notwithstanding the persecutions of eighteen centuries, retained the faith of their fathers in its primitive simplicity. It is there that we have to go for traditions based on historical truths, however disfigured by exaggeration and inaccuracy, and compare them with the religious legends of the Fathers, which they call revelation. Eusebius states that before the siege of Jerusalem the small Christian community--comprising members of whom many, if not all, knew Jesus and his apostles personally--took refuge in the little town of Pella, on the opposite shore of the Jordan. Surely these simple people, separated for centuries from the rest of the world, ought to have preserved their traditions fresher than any other nations! It is in Palestine that we have to search for the clearest waters of Christianity, let alone its source. The first Christians, after the death of Jesus, all joined together for a time, whether they were Ebionites, Nazarenes, Gnostics, or others. They had no Christian dogmas in those days, and their Christianity consisted in believing Jesus to be a prophet, this belief varying from seeing in him simply a “just man,”[363] or a holy, inspired prophet, a vehicle used by Christos and Sophia to manifest themselves through. These all united together in opposition to the synagogue and the tyrannical technicalities of the Pharisees, until the primitive group separated in two distinct branches--which, we may correctly term the Christian kabalists of the Jewish Tanaïm school, and the Christian kabalists of the Platonic Gnosis.[364] The former were represented by the party composed of the followers of Peter, and John, the author of the Apocalypse; the latter ranged with the Pauline Christianity, blending itself, at the end of the second century, with the Platonic philosophy, and engulfing, still later, the Gnostic sects, whose symbols and misunderstood mysticism overflowed the Church of Rome.

Amid this jumble of contradictions, what Christian is secure in confessing himself such? In the old Syriac Gospel according to Luke (iii. 22), the Holy Spirit is said to have descended in the likeness of a dove. “Jesua, full of the sacred Spirit, returned from Jordan, and the Spirit led him into the desert” (old Syriac, Luke iv. 1, Tremellius). “The difficulty,” says Dunlap, “was that the Gospels declared that John the Baptist saw the Spirit (the Power of God) descend upon Jesus after he had reached manhood, and if the Spirit then first descended upon him, there was some ground for the opinion of the Ebionites and Nazarenes who denied his preceding existence, and refused him the attributes of the LOGOS. The Gnostics, on the other hand, objected to the flesh, but conceded the Logos.”[365]

John’s Apocalypsis, and the explanations of sincere Christian bishops, like Synesius, who, to the last, adhered to the Platonic doctrines, make us think that the wisest and safest way is to hold to that sincere primitive faith which seems to have actuated the above-named bishop. This best, sincerest, and most unfortunate of Christians, addressing the “Unknown,” exclaims: “Oh Father of the Worlds ... Father of the Æons ... Artificer of the Gods, it is holy to praise!” But Synesius had Hypatia for instructor, and this is why we find him confessing in all sincerity his opinions and profession of faith. “The rabble desires nothing better than to be deceived.... As regards myself, therefore, I will always be a philosopher with myself, but I must be priest with the people.”

“Holy is God the Father of all being, holy is God, whose wisdom is carried out into execution by his own Powers!... Holy art Thou, who through the Word had created all! Therefore, I believe in Thee, and bear testimony, and go into the LIFE and LIGHT.”[366] Thus speaks Hermes Trismegistus, the heathen divine. What Christian bishop could have said better than that?

The apparent discrepancy of the four gospels as a whole, does not prevent every narrative given in the New Testament--however much disfigured--having a ground-work of truth. To this, are cunningly adapted details made to fit the later exigencies of the Church. So, propped up partially by indirect evidence, still more by blind faith, they have become, with time, articles of faith. Even the fictitious massacre of the “Innocents” by King Herod has a certain foundation to it, in its allegorical sense. Apart from the now-discovered fact that the whole story of such a massacre of the Innocents is bodily taken from the Hindu Bagaved-gitta, and Brahmanical traditions, the legend refers, moreover, allegorically, to an historical fact. King Herod is the type of Kansa, the tyrant of Madura, the maternal uncle of Christna, to whom astrologers predicted that a son of his niece Devaki would deprive him of his throne. Therefore he gives orders to kill the male child that is born to her; but Christna escapes his fury through the protection of Mahadeva (the great God) who causes the child to be carried away to another city, out of Kansa’s reach. After that, in order to be sure and kill the right boy, on whom he failed to lay his murderous hands, Kansa has all the male newborn infants within his kingdom killed. Christna is also worshipped by the gopas (the shepherds) of the land.

Though this ancient Indian legend bears a very suspicious resemblance to the more modern biblical romance, Gaffarel and others attribute the origin of the latter to the persecutions during the Herodian reign of the kabalists and the Wise men, who had not remained strictly orthodox. The latter, as well as the prophets, were nicknamed the “Innocents,” and the “Babes,” on account of their holiness. As in the case of certain degrees of modern Masonry, the adepts reckoned their grade of initiation by a symbolic age. Thus Saul who, when chosen king, was “a choice and goodly man,” and “from his shoulders upward was higher than any of the people,” is described in Catholic versions, as “child of one year when he began to reign,” which, in its literal sense, is a palpable absurdity. But in 1 Samuel x., his anointing by Samuel and initiation are described; and at verse 6th, Samuel uses this significant language: “... the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man.” The phrase above quoted is thus made plain--he had received one degree of initiation and was symbolically described as “a child one year old.” The Catholic Bible, from which the text is quoted, with charming candor says in a foot-note: “It is extremely difficult to explain” (meaning that Saul was a child of one year). But undaunted by any difficulty the Editor, nevertheless, does take upon himself to explain it, and adds: “A child of one year. That is, he was good and like an innocent child.” An interpretation as ingenious as it is pious; and which if it does no good can certainly do no harm.[367]

If the explanation of the kabalists is rejected, then the whole subject falls into confusion; worse still--for it becomes a direct plagiarism from the Hindu legend. All the commentators have agreed that a litteral massacre of young children is nowhere mentioned in history; and that, moreover, an occurrence like that would have made such a bloody page in Roman annals that the record of it would have been preserved for us by every author of the day. Herod himself was subject to the Roman law; and undoubtedly he would have paid the penalty of such a monstrous crime, with his own life. But if, on the one hand, we have not the slightest trace of this fable in history, on the other, we find in the official complaints of the Synagogue abundant evidence of the persecution of the initiates. The Talmud also corroborates it.

The Jewish version of the birth of Jesus is recorded in the Sepher-Toldos Jeshu in the following words:

“Mary having become the mother of a Son, named Jehosuah, and the boy growing up, she entrusted him to the care of the Rabbi Elhanan, and the child progressed in knowledge, for he was well gifted with spirit and understanding.

“Rabbi Jehosuah, son of Perachiah, continued the education of Jehosuah (Jesus) after Elhanan, and initiated him in the secret knowledge;” but the King, Janneus, having given orders to slay all the initiates, Jehosuah Ben Perachiah, fled to Alexandria, in Egypt, taking the boy with him.

While in Alexandria, continues the story, they were received in the house of a rich and learned lady (personified Egypt). Young Jesus found her beautiful, notwithstanding “a defect in her eyes,” and declared so to his master. Upon hearing this, the latter became so angry that his pupil should find in the land of bondage anything good, that “he cursed him and drove the young man from his presence.” Then follow a series of adventures told in allegorical language, which show that Jesus supplemented his initiation in the Jewish Kabala with an additional acquisition of the secret wisdom of Egypt. When the persecution ceased, they both returned to Judea.[368]

The real grievances against Jesus are stated by the learned author of Tela Ignea Satanæ (the fiery darts of Satan) to be two in number: 1st, that he had discovered the great Mysteries of their Temple, by having been initiated in Egypt; and 2d, that he had profaned them by exposing them to the vulgar, who misunderstood and disfigured them. This is what they say:[369]

“There exists, in the sanctuary of the living God, a cubical stone, on which are sculptured the holy characters, the combination of which gives the explanation of the attributes and powers of the incommunicable name. This explanation is the secret key of all the occult sciences and forces in nature. It is what the Hebrews call the Scham hamphorash. This stone is watched by two lions of gold, who roar as soon as it is approached.[370] The gates of the temple were never lost sight of, and the door of the sanctuary opened but once a year, to admit the High Priest alone. But Jesus, who had learned in Egypt the ‘great secrets’ at the initiation, forged for himself invisible keys, and thus was enabled to penetrate into the sanctuary unseen.... He copied the characters on the cubical stone, and hid them in his thigh;[371] after which, emerging from the temple, he went abroad and began astounding people with his miracles. The dead were raised at his command, the leprous and the obsessed were healed. He forced the stones which lay buried for ages at the bottom of the sea to rise to the surface until they formed a mountain, from the top of which he preached.” The Sepher Toldos states further that, unable to displace the cubical stone of the sanctuary, Jesus fabricated one of clay, which he showed to the nations and passed it off for the true cubical stone of Israel.

This allegory, like the rest of them in such books, is written “inside and outside”--it has its secret meaning, and ought to be read two ways. The kabalistic books explain its mystical meaning. Further, the same Talmudist says, in substance, the following: Jesus was thrown in prison,[372] and kept there forty days; then flogged as a seditious rebel; then stoned as a blasphemer in a place called Lud, and finally allowed to expire upon a cross. “All this,” explains Levi, “because he revealed to the people the truths which they (the Pharisees) wished to bury for their own use. He had divined the occult theology of Israel, had compared it with the wisdom of Egypt, and found thereby the reason for a universal religious synthesis.”[373]

However cautious one ought to be in accepting anything about Jesus from Jewish sources, it must be confessed that in some things they seem to be more correct in their statements (whenever their direct interest in stating facts is not concerned) than our good but too jealous Fathers. One thing is certain, James, the “Brother of the Lord,” is silent about the resurrection. He terms Jesus nowhere “Son of God,” nor even Christ-God. Once only, speaking of Jesus, he calls him the “Lord of Glory,” but so do the Nazarenes when writing about their prophet Iohanan bar Zacharia, or John, son of Zacharias (St. John Baptist). Their favorite expressions about their prophet are the same as those used by James when speaking of Jesus. A man “of the seed of a man,” “Messenger of Life,” of light, “my Lord Apostle,” “King sprung of Light,” and so on. “Have not the faith of our Lord JESUS Christ, the Lord of Glory” etc., says James in his epistle (ii. 1), presumably addressing Christ as GOD. “Peace to thee, my Lord, JOHN Abo Sabo, Lord of Glory!” says the Codex Nazaræus (ii., 19), known to address but a prophet. “Ye have condemned and killed the Just,” says James (v. 6). “Iohanan (John) is the Just one, he comes in the way of justice,” says Matthew (xxi. 32, Syriac text).

James does not even call Jesus Messiah, in the sense given to the title by the Christians, but alludes to the kabalistic “King Messiah,” who is Lord of Sabaoth[374] (v. 4), and repeats several times that the “Lord” will come, but identifies the latter nowhere with Jesus. “Be patient, therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord ... be patient, for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh” (v. 7, 8). And he adds: “Take, my brethren, the prophet (Jesus) who has spoken in the name of the Lord for an example of suffering, affliction, and of patience.” Though in the present version the word “prophet” stands in the plural, yet this is a deliberate falsification of the original, the purpose of which is too evident. James, immediately after having cited the “prophets” as an example, adds: “Behold ... ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord”--thus combining the examples of these two admirable characters, and placing them on a perfect equality. But we have more to adduce in support of our argument. Did not Jesus himself glorify the prophet of the Jordan? “What went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet.... Verily, I say unto you, among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist.”

And of whom was he who spoke thus born? It is but the Roman Catholics who have changed Mary, the mother of Jesus, into a goddess. In the eyes of all other Christians she was a woman, whether his own birth was immaculate or otherwise. According to strict logic, then, Jesus confessed John greater than himself. Note how completely this matter is disposed of by the language employed by the Angel Gabriel when addressing Mary: “Blessed art thou among women.” These words are unequivocal. He does not adore her as the Mother of God, nor does he call her goddess; he does not even address her as “Virgin,” but he calls her woman, and only distinguishes her above other women as having had better fortune, through her purity.

The Nazarenes were known as Baptists, Sabians, and John’s Christians. Their belief was that the Messiah was not the Son of God, but simply a prophet who would follow John. “Johanan, the Son of the Abo Sabo Zachariah, shall say to himself, ‘Whoever will believe in my justice and my BAPTISM shall be joined to my association; he shall share with me the seat which is the abode of life, of the supreme Mano, and of living fire” (Codex Nazaræus, ii., p. 115). Origen remarks “there are some who said of John (the Baptist) that he was the anointed (Christus).[375] The Angel Rasiel of the kabalists is the Angel Gabriel of the Nazarenes, and it is the latter who is chosen of all the celestial hierarchy by the Christians to become the messenger of the ‘annunciation.’ The genius sent by the ‘Lord of Celsitude’ is Æbel Zivo, whose name is also called GABRIEL Legatus.”[376] Paul must have had the sect of the Nazarenes in mind when he said: “And last of all he (Jesus) was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time” (1 Corinth., xv. 8), thus reminding his listeners of the expression usual to the Nazarenes, who termed the Jews “the abortions, or born out of time.” Paul prides himself of belonging to a hæresy.[377]

When the metaphysical conceptions of the Gnostics, who saw in Jesus the Logos and the anointed, began to gain ground, the earliest Christians separated from the Nazarenes, who accused Jesus of perverting the doctrines of John, and changing the baptism of the Jordan.[378] “Directly,” says Milman, “as it (the Gospel) got beyond the borders of Palestine, and the name of ‘Christ’ had acquired sanctity and veneration in the Eastern cities, he became a kind of metaphysical impersonation, while the religion lost its purely moral cast and assumed the character of a speculative theogony.”[379] The only half-original document that has reached us from the primitive apostolic days, is the Logia of Matthew. The real, genuine doctrine has remained in the hands of the Nazarenes, in this Gospel of Matthew containing the “secret doctrine,” the “Sayings of Jesus,” mentioned by Papias. These sayings were, no doubt, of the same nature as the small manuscripts placed in the hands of the neophytes, who were candidates for the Initiations into the Mysteries, and which contained the Aporrheta, the revelations of some important rites and symbols. For why should Matthew take such precautions to make them “secret” were it otherwise?

Primitive Christianity had its grip, pass-words, and degrees of initiation. The innumerable Gnostic gems and amulets are weighty proofs of it. It is a whole symbolical science. The kabalists were the first to embellish the universal Logos,[380] with such terms as “Light of Light,” the Messenger of LIFE and LIGHT,[381] and we find these expressions adopted in toto by the Christians, with the addition of nearly all the Gnostic terms such as Pleroma (fulness), Archons, Æons, etc. As to the “First-Born,” the First, and the “Only-Begotten,” these are as old as the world. Origen shows the word “Logos” as existing among the Brachmanes. “The Brachmanes say that the God is Light, not such as one sees, nor such as the sun and fire; but they have the God LOGOS, not the articulate, the Logos of the Gnosis, through whom the highest MYSTERIES of the Gnosis are seen by the wise.”[382] The Acts and the fourth Gospel teem with Gnostic expressions. The kabalistic: “God’s first-born emanated from the Most High,” together with that which is the “Spirit of the Anointing;” and again “they called him the anointed of the Highest,”[383] are reproduced in Spirit and substance by the author of the Gospel according to John. “That was the true light,” and “the light shineth in darkness.” “And the WORD was made flesh.” “And his fulness (pleroma) have all we received,” etc. (John i. et seq.).

The “Christ,” then, and the “Logos” existed ages before Christianity; the Oriental Gnosis was studied long before the days of Moses, and we have to seek for the origin of all these in the archaic periods of the primeval Asiatic philosophy. Peter’s second Epistle and Jude’s fragment, preserved in the New Testament, show by their phraseology that they belong to the kabalistic Oriental Gnosis, for they use the same expressions as did the Christian Gnostics who built a part of their system from the Oriental Kabala. “Presumptuous are they (the Ophites), self-willed, they are not afraid to speak evil of DIGNITIES,” says Peter (2d Epistle ii. 10), the original model for the later abusive Tertullian and Irenæus.[384] “Likewise (even as Sodom and Gomorrah) also these filthy dreamers defile the flesh, despise DOMINION and speak evil of DIGNITIES,” says Jude, repeating the very words of Peter, and thereby expressions consecrated in the Kabala. Dominion is the “Empire,” the tenth of the kabalistic sephiroth.[385] The Powers and Dignities are the subordinate genii of the Archangels and Angels of the Sohar.[386] These emanations are the very life and soul of the Kabala and Zoroastranism; and the Talmud itself, in its present state, is all borrowed from the Zend-avesta. Therefore, by adopting the views of Peter, Jude, and other Jewish apostles, the Christians have become but a dissenting sect of the Persians, for they do not even interpret the meaning of all such Powers as the true kabalists do. Paul’s warning his converts against the worshipping of angels, shows how well he appreciated, even so early as his period, the dangers of borrowing from a metaphysical doctrine the philosophy of which could be rightly interpreted but by its well-learned adherents, the Magi and the Jewish Tanaïm. “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind,”[387] is a sentence laid right at the door of Peter and his champions. In the Talmud, Michael is Prince of Water, who has seven inferior spirits subordinate to him. He is the patron, the guardian angel of the Jews, as Daniel informs us (v. 21), and the Greek Ophites, who identified him with their Ophiomorphos, the personified creation of the envy and malice of Ilda-Baoth, the Demiurgus (Creator of the material world), and undertook to prove that he was also Samuel, the Hebrew prince of the evil spirits, or Persian devs, were naturally regarded by the Jews as blasphemers. But did Jesus ever sanction this belief in angels except in so far as hinting that they were the messengers and subordinates of God? And here the origin of the later splits between Christian beliefs is directly traceable to these two early contradictory views.

Paul, believing in all such occult powers in the world “unseen,” but ever “present,” says: “Ye walked according to the ÆON of this world, according to the Archon (Ilda-Baoth, the Demiurg) that has the domination of the air,” and “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the dominations, the powers; the lords of darkness, the mischievousness of spirits in the upper regions.” This sentence, “Ye were dead in sin and error,” for “ye walked according to the Archon,” or Ilda-Baoth, the God and creator of matter of the Ophites, shows unequivocally that: 1st, Paul, notwithstanding some dissensions with the more important doctrines of the Gnostics, shared more or less their cosmogonical views on the emanations; and 2d, that he was fully aware that this Demiurge, whose Jewish name was Jehovah, was not the God preached by Jesus. And now, if we compare the doctrine of Paul with the religious views of Peter and Jude, we find that, not only did they worship Michael, the Archangel, but that also they reverenced SATAN, because the latter was also, before his fall, an angel! This they do quite openly, and abuse the Gnostics[388] for speaking “evil” of him. No one can deny the following: Peter, when denouncing those who are not afraid to speak evil of “dignities,” adds immediately, “Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusations against them (the dignities) before the Lord” (ii. 11). Who are the dignities? Jude, in his general epistle, makes the word as clear as day. The dignities are the DEVILS!! Complaining of the disrespect shown by the Gnostics to the powers and dominions, Jude argues in the very words of Peter: “And yet, Michael, the Archangel, when contending with the devil, he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee” (i. 9). Is this plain enough? If not, then we have the Kabala to prove who were the dignities.

Considering that Deuteronomy tells us that the “Lord” Himself buried Moses in a valley of Moab (xxxiv. 6), “and no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day,” this biblical lapsus linguæ of Jude gives a strong coloring to the assertions of some of the Gnostics. They claimed but what was secretly taught by the Jewish kabalists themselves; to wit: that the highest supreme God was unknown and invisible; “the King of Light is a closed eye;” that Ilda-Baoth, the Jewish second Adam, was the real Demiurge; and that Iao, Adonai, Sabaoth, and Eloi were the quaternary emanation which formed the unity of the God of the Hebrews--Jehovah. Moreover, the latter was also called Michael and Samael by them, and regarded but as an angel, several removes from the Godhead. In holding to such a belief, the Gnostics countenanced the teachings of the greatest of the Jewish doctors, Hillel, and other Babylonian divines. Josephus shows the great deference of the official Synagogue in Jerusalem to the wisdom of the schools of Central Asia. The colleges of Sora, Pumbiditha, and Nahaidea were considered the headquarters of esoteric and theological learning by all the schools of Palestine. The Chaldean version of the Pentateuch, made by the well-known Babylonian divine, Onkelos, was regarded as the most authoritative of all; and it is according to this learned Rabbi that Hillel and other Tanaïm after him held that the Being who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, on Mount Sinai, and who finally buried him, was the angel of the Lord, Memro, and not the Lord Himself; and that he whom the Hebrews of the Old Testament mistook for Iahoh was but His messenger, one of His sons, or emanations. All this establishes but one logical conclusion--namely, that the Gnostics were by far the superiors of the disciples, in point of education and general information; even in a knowledge of the religious tenets of the Jews themselves. While they were perfectly well-versed in the Chaldean wisdom, the well-meaning, pious, but fanatical as well as ignorant disciples, unable to fully understand or grasp the religious spirit of their own system, were driven in their disputations to such convincing logic as the use of “brute beasts,” “sows,” “dogs,” and other epithets so freely bestowed by Peter.

Since then, the epidemic has reached the apex of the sacerdotal hierarchy. From the day when the founder of Christianity uttered the warning, that he who shall say to his brother, “Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell-fire,” all who have passed as its leaders, beginning with the ragged fishermen of Galilee, and ending with the jewelled pontiffs, have seemed to vie with each other in the invention of opprobrious epithets for their opponents. So we find Luther passing a final sentence on the Catholics, and exclaiming that “The Papists are all asses, put them in whatever form you like; whether they are boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, hashed, they will be always the same asses.” Calvin called the victims he persecuted, and occasionally burned, “malicious barking dogs, full of bestiality and insolence, base corrupters of the sacred writings,” etc. Dr. Warburton terms the Popish religion “an impious farce,” and Monseigneur Dupanloup asserts that the Protestant Sabbath service is the “Devil’s mass,” and all clergymen are “thieves and ministers of the Devil.”

The same spirit of incomplete inquiry and ignorance has led the Christian Church to bestow on its most holy apostles, titles assumed by their most desperate opponents, the “Hæretics” and Gnostics. So we find, for instance, Paul termed the vase of election “Vas Electionis,” a title chosen by Manes,[389] the greatest heretic of his day in the eyes of the Church, Manes meaning, in the Babylonian language, the chosen vessel or receptacle.[390]

So with the Virgin Mary. They were so little gifted with originality, that they copied from the Egyptian and Hindu religions their several apostrophes to their respective Virgin-mothers. The juxtaposition of a few examples will make this clear.

HINDU. Litany of our Lady Nari: Virgin. (Also Devanaki.)

1. Holy Nari--Mariāma, Mother of perpetual fecundity. 2. Mother of an incarnated God--Vishnu (Devanaki). 3. Mother of Christna. 4. Eternal Virginity--Kanyabâva. 5. Mother--Pure Essence, Akasa. 6. Virgin most chaste--Kanya. 7. Mother Taumatra, of the five virtues or elements. 8. Virgin Trigana (of the three elements, power or richness, love, and mercy). 9. Mirror of Supreme Conscience--Ahancara. 10. Wise Mother--Saraswati. 11. Virgin of the white Lotos, Pedma or Kamala. 12. Womb of Gold--Hyrania. 13. Celestial Light--Lakshmi. 14. Ditto. 15. Queen of Heaven, and of the universe--Sakti. 16. Mother soul of all beings--Paramatma. 17. Devanaki is conceived without sin, and immaculate herself. (According to the Brahmanic fancy.)

EGYPTIAN. Litany of our Lady Isis: Virgin.

1. Holy Isis, universal mother--Muth. 2. Mother of Gods--Athyr. 3. Mother of Horus. 4. Virgo generatrix--Neith. 5. Mother-soul of the universe--Anouké. 6. Virgin sacred earth--Isis. 7. Mother of all the virtues--Thmei, with the same qualities. 8. Illustrious Isis, most powerful, merciful, just. (_Book of the Dead._) 9. Mirror of Justice and Truth--Thmei. 10. Mysterious mother of the world--Buto (secret wisdom). 11. Sacred Lotos. 12. Sistrum of Gold. 13. Astarté (Syrian), Astaroth (Jewish). 14. Argua of the Moon. 15. Queen of Heaven, and of the universe--Sati. 16. Model of all mothers--Athor. 17. Isis is a Virgin Mother.

ROMAN CATHOLIC. Litany of our Lady of Loretto: Virgin.

1. Holy Mary, mother of divine grace. 2. Mother of God. 3. Mother of Christ. 4. Virgin of Virgins. 5. Mother of Divine Grace. 6. Virgin most chaste. 7. Mother most pure. Mother undefiled. Mother inviolate. Mother most amiable. Mother most admirable. 8. Virgin most powerful. Virgin most merciful. Virgin most faithful. 9. Mirror of Justice. 10. Seat of Wisdom. 11. Mystical Rose. 12. House of Gold. 13. Morning Star. 14. Ark of the Covenant. 15. Queen of Heaven. 16. Mater Dolorosa. 17. Mary conceived without sin. (In accordance with later orders.)

If the Virgin Mary has her nuns, who are consecrated to her and bound to live in chastity, so had Isis her nuns in Egypt, as Vesta had hers at Rome, and the Hindu Nari, “mother of the world hers.” The virgins consecrated to her cultus--the Devadasi of the temples, who were the nuns of the days of old--lived in great chastity, and were objects of the most extraordinary veneration, as the holy women of the goddess. Would the missionaries and some travellers reproachfully point to the modern Devadasis, or Nautch-girls? For all response, we would beg them to consult the official reports of the last quarter century, cited in chapter II., as to certain discoveries made at the razing of convents, in Austria and Italy. Thousands of infants’ skulls were exhumed from ponds, subterranean vaults, and gardens of convents. Nothing to match this was ever found in heathen lands.

Christian theology, getting the doctrine of the archangels and angels directly from the Oriental Kabala, of which the Mosaic Bible is but an allegorical screen, ought at least to remember the hierarchy invented by the former for these personified emanations. The hosts of the Cherubim and Seraphim, with which we generally see the Catholic Madonnas surrounded in their pictures, belong, together with the Elohim and Beni Elohim of the Hebrews, to the third kabalistic world, Jezirah. This world is but one remove higher than Asiah, the fourth and lowest world, in which dwell the grossest and most material beings--the klippoth, who delight in evil and mischief, and whose chief is Belial!

Explaining, in his way, of course, the various “heresies” of the first two centuries, Irenæus says: “Our Hæretics hold ... that PROPATOR is known but to the only-begotten son, that is to the mind” (the nous). It was the Valentinians, the followers of the “profoundest doctor of the Gnosis,” Valentinus, who held that “there was a perfect AIÔN, who existed before Bythos, or Buthon (the Depth), called Propator.” This is again kabalistic, for in the Sohar of Simon Ben Iochaï, we read the following: “Senior occultatus est et absconditus; Microprosopus manifestus est, et non manifestus” (Rosenroth: The Sohar Liber Mysteries, iv., 1).

In the religious metaphysics of the Hebrews, the Highest One is an abstraction; he is “without form or being,” “with no likeness with anything else.”[391] And even Philo calls the Creator, the Logos who stands next God, “the SECOND God.” “The second God who is his WISDOM.”[392] God is NOTHING, he is nameless, and therefore called Ain-Soph--the word Ain meaning nothing.[393] But if, according to the older Jews, Jehovah is the God, and He manifested Himself several times to Moses and the prophets, and the Christian Church anathematized the Gnostics who denied the fact--how comes it, then, that we read in the fourth gospel that “No man hath seen God AT ANY TIME, but the only-begotten Son ... he hath declared him?” The very words of the Gnostics, in spirit and substance. This sentence of St. John--or rather whoever wrote the gospel now bearing his name--floors all the Petrine arguments against Simon Magus, without appeal. The words are repeated and emphasized in chapter vi.: “Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he (Jesus) hath seen the Father” (46)--the very objection brought forward by Simon in the Homilies. These words prove that either the author of the fourth evangel had no idea of the existence of the Homilies, or that he was not John, the friend and companion of Peter, whom he contradicts point-blank with this emphatic assertion. Be it as it may, this sentence, like many more that might be profitably cited, blends Christianity completely with the Oriental Gnosis, and hence with the KABALA.

While the doctrines, ethical code, and observances of the Christian religion were all appropriated from Brahmanism and Buddhism, its ceremonials, vestments, and pageantry were taken bodily from Lamaism. The Romish monastery and nunnery are almost servile copies of similar religious houses in Thibet and Mongolia, and interested explorers of Buddhist lands, when obliged to mention the unwelcome fact, have had no other alternative left them but, with an anachronism unsurpassed in recklessness, to charge the offense of plagiarism upon the religious system their own mother Church had despoiled. This makeshift has served its purpose and had its day. The time has at last come when this page of history must be written.

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