The devil's pulpit

Contents

Life of Taylor v

Introduction. . . - ix

The Star of Bethlehem: (Parti.) p

Part II. The Star Of Bethlehem

PREACHED BY HIS HIGHNESSES CHAPLAIN, THE REV. ROBERT TAYLOR, B. A.,

'^ Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the King, behold there came wise men from the East to Jerusalem, saying, * Where is he that is born King of the Jews ? for we have seen his Star in the East, and are come to worship him,' " — Matthew ii. 2.

I RETURN to this most important subject in which man is in terested, to this most delightful science in which man can be instructed. I return to the positions of this great science, to which on Sunday evening last I brought up the convictions of the large auditory which honored me and themselves with a most grateful attention.

The Star of Bethlehem has brought us up to the stable-door ; and no person of rational understanding, who has travelled with us thus far, can any longer doubt that we are in possession of, what you shall seek for in vain in any church or chapel, or from any other minister of the gospel in this metropolis — we are in possession of the ke?/ of the stable-door ! Ye have seen it pass into the lock — ye have seen it ride over all the intricacies and involutions of the wards — ye have heard it, without any strain or effort, throw the bolt, and now the door is open ; and ** Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy^ which shall he to all people. For unto you is lorn this day, in tne city of David, a Savior, which is Christ the Lord, and this shall he a sign^ That is, as I have shown, this Christ the Lord, shall be one of" the signs of the Zodiac. Walk in, ye lovers of true Science, ye friends of genuine and real learning, who would assist her in the arduous struggle in which she is engaged, and aid her rapidly-approaching triumph o'er her barbarous foes, the priests and priest-ridden dunces, who, with all their pretended zeal and attachment to the gospel, when brought to the test of rational criticism, stand convicted of knowing no more about the gospel than the gospel knows about them. They have but fed on the husks and shells of knowledge. Here we have the kernel.

But why, say they, make we such a parade of our learning ? why this apparatus of philology, criticism, and science, set before minds so little able to appreciate, so incompetent to judge, as we must suppose the minds of the many to be ? and why, if I really wish to communicate knowledge and truth to the people, why not follow the example of the preachers of the gospel, and speak in such language as is familiar to them, and so give them reading made easy, and lectures adapted to the meanest capacity ? My answer is, would men but be faithful to their own capacities, there would be no mean capacities to be met with. It is only they who are afraid of hearing what they never heard before, whose capacities are mean indeed. I have found it quite as easy, as I am sure it is more just and generous, to raise the understandings of my hearers to the level of my own ; and if I find them ignorant, at least not to leave them so. We are all of us ignorant before we are learned ; and those who are for ever for coming down to our level while we are down, show but too plainly, that it is the aim of their charity to keep us down. In offering instruction to my fellow-men, I would treat them as my fellows ; and must, therefore, plainly tell them that, it is not for me to descend, but it is for them to rise : the level between us is to be found, not by my humility, but by their ambition. I will not make myself a dunce, but I will make them scholars. Be it asked, " And if I rob them of their faith [which God forgive me for being devilishly like to doj, what will I give them in its stead ?"

I answer, T will give them learning in its stead— I will set before them the treasures of science and knowledge, to no worse effect than to create in them an appetite for extended information, whose cravings shall never more be satisfied with the baby's lesson, nor content with eternal repetitions of what they knew before ; but shall demand continual supplies of what they did not know before ; such supplies as shall increase the store of their intellectual wealth, improve their minds, enlarge their hearts, and free them from the yoke of priestcraft. As now, sirs, ye shall see the use of so much learning, in the learned languages, as shall not cost you the expense of a classical education, nor the labor of your whole life to attain ; but as, by your few hours of diligent attention to these lectures, even with your pleasure and entertainment, you shall find yourselves to have acquired ; till there shall not be an individual of competent faculties that had been fairly applied to these studies, but who shall be a better scholar than any clergyman or preacher of the gospel, if he be dunce enough to believe the gospel himself, can possibly be. See now, sirs, how we advance I As, would not a man who had but the reason and proper spirit of a man, put to himself the question — If these so-called sacred writings of the Old and New Testaments were written, as indeed they purport to be, and most certainly were, ** in ages long ago betid," in conformity to the notions of men who have long ago ceased to exist, and in languages which have long ceased to be spoken ; who but the sheerest idiot and booby would dream of the possibility of a translation of them into a modern language ; or that a sense of them, according to the sense, or nonsense of modern notions, could possibly come even within a guess at their original significancy ? But with the simple data of our admissions, as the axioms and postulates of this science; 1. That men, ten thousand years ago, were of the same nature as they are at present; their heads grew upon their shoulders, I suppose ; and they had ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, in them — that is, they had the same sources and means of acquiring ideas. 2. They had but the same, and no other means and ways of communicating the ideas the^ had acquired. 3. The same things made the same impressions. 4. And the same impressions produced the same reflections.

We arrive at conclusions, than which, the corollaries of a mathematical problem are not more consequential and demon strative. Of these corollaries, one of the first is, that, as all ideas of mankind must necessarily have been received into the mind in the same way, so there must be a wonderful sameness and similarity in the modes, figures, signs, and forms of expressing those ideas, and as wonderful a sameness of association of idea — the one calling up the other by a similar action of a similarly-constituted brain, in all ages, and among all nations of mankind. Hence arises the large and very extensive class of words, called radicals: that is words, which are the roots and bases of innumerable varieties of language, but which, when analyzed, are found to be essentially the same, and of the same signification, in all the languages of the earth. And these, you have the advantage of learning, as you learn the general chords and principles of music, by your own ear ; by hearing me repeat to you, as is my custom, all the different languages through which the text on which I treat, has been derived. These radicals, are always monosyllables ; they never require more than three letters, and may often be expressed by two, or only one. Hence the earliest or most ancient languages of men are all monosyllahic, and all the combinations found with them, are merely grammatical, and artificial variations of the sound, but not of the sense ; and have been intro- ^duced in much later times, sometimes poetically, and tastefully, but oftener to hide and conceal the original source whence they were derived.

Of which last sort of words, you can not have a more striking specimen than that of the first noun in our text, the name Jesus : of which, the last syllable, us, is no part of the word itself, but the mere Latin termination, added to the only real and complete word, Jes. Thus Jesus Christus, is good Latin, but Jesus Christ, is neither good Latin, nor good English, noi good sense. For in taking away the Latin termination from Christus, to render it into the English, Christ, we should take away the Latin termination from Jesus, and render it into Jes. The Greek word for Jesus, being I/?o-»?, which is precisely the same adoption of the Latin termination into Greek, as our Jesus is an adoption of it, into English, is one among the ten thousand proofs that betray the Monkish Latin origin of our New Testament ; that is, that the Latin, and not the Greek, was the first language in which the contents of the sacred Diegesis of Egypt, was brought to the knowledge of the priests of Europe. The translation was made from the Latin into the Greek, and a Greek original pretended, not till after it was found expedient, to oppose a check to the advance of curiosity, and to throw a thicker veil over the mysteries of the gospelcraft. Had the Greek been the original, the Greek for Jesus, must have had the Greek termination o?, and been Ir?o-o? ; but the Greek hang, is bad Greek, and nothing more than the Latin Jesus, exhibited in Greek characters. The written documents, the Diegesis, from which first the Latin, and subsequently, the so falsely called original Greek, was derived, have necessarily perished : but Christian ignorance, in mistaking its fable for a history, and committing itself to criticism, by fixing an era, and a scene, when and where its imagined events occurred, has supplied the means of demonstrating the utter falsehood of its pretences : inasmuch as we are able to adduce positive evidence of the existence and prevalence of precisely the same story in India, Persia, Egypt, and Greece, for more than fifteen hundred years before the date assigned to the pretended occurrence of it, in Palestine. But taking the words of the Greek text, the highest written authority to which we can familiarly appeal, in their most simple and primitive significancy, and suffering no suborned or forestalled sense to pervert us from the sense which those words would naturally convey, we shall find it far, infinitely far, from any such historical, or even pretended historical sense, as our fraudulent English translation, and still more fraudulent preachers of the gospel, would palm on our insulted reason.

** Now when Jesus was borji in Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the King,''^ Now, if this were an accurate rendering of the Greek (which it is not) and if the common-sense meaning of our English words, were allowed to be its meaning ; who could, for one moment, pretend that this was the style of writing of any one who could have been contemporary of the events he was about to relate, who had ever lived with, seen, or conversed with the person of whom he speaks ? How fatal, therefore, is it to any pretence that anything more than a romance was intended. But look at the literality of the

text : T« 6£ lri(T8 yevTi devTog ev Br]d\e£;j. Trjg hSaiag ; the JeSy Or YeS, being

in the house of corn, of the I«Jata in the days of Herod the king.^^ Thus have we the literal translation of the mongrel Greek, Hebrew, and Phoenician roots of this egregiously-misconstrued sentence, of which the sense is, the Sun — (that is, Yes), being in the Zodiacal sign of the Virgin, who is distinguished by the spike of corn in her hand, and is the genius of the month of August, which is the harvest month, which is further distinguished by the definition B?70 Xsf^, the house of corn or bread of the I» Aa^a, that is most literally of the Zodiac, and still further, by the addition, in the days of Herod the king, tv TjjiepaLs HpcxySa m BaaiXeios, that is, not in the days, as signifying the reign of any king on earth, called Herod, but in, or according to, the Ephemeris, or Almanac of Hercules, the Sun. That name, Herod, being compounded of vpojs depas, that is, the Hero of the Skin, the well-known epithet of Hercules, derived from his always being described, sculptured, painted, and distinguished, as wearing the skin of the Cleonean Lion. For whatever real personages in real history, might have assumed the mythologico-astronomical name of Herod, it is certain that no King Herod, or Herod the Tetrarch, as a person that ever existed upon earth, was intended by the Baai\evs Jlpud^g, or King Herod of the Gospel, but, as the literality of the name betrays, the Hero of the Skin, King Hercules, that is the Sun : who, in his annual progress through the signs of the Zodiac, before he can reach the Lion of July, and so invest himself with the skin of the Lion, as to become the Hero of the Skin,

THE DEVILS PXJLFIT. 23

that is, the Herod indeed, is obliged to kill all the children that were m Judea, that is, in Bethlehem and the coasts thereof ; which is a most accurate definition of the Zodiac, E© Br}B Xse/i,

In Bethlehem, and in all the divisions of it, in which you will see that there are two children, ano Suths, of two years old, Gemini the twins of May, which this solar Herod is said to kill, in our English rendering ; but in the literal Greek avaipsiv, to take or put away, or pass through, as the sun passes through the sign of the twins, av€i\s r«? TraiSas ;* and that there were but two of them, is discovered by the reference made to the astronomical scheme of the prophet, that is to say, of the old astronomer, Jeremy.

" In Rama, was there a voice heard^ lamentation and weepings and great mourning ; Rachel weeping for her children" Why in Rama ? What is Rama ? Why Rama is the Hindoostanee, Coptic, Syriac, Phoenician word, and literal name for the Zodiac ; the high, the elevated, the exalted. And this whole tale of the birth of Christ in the days of Herod the king, is found in the Bhagavat Pourana of India, in the Mythriacs of Persia, and in the fabulous writings ascribed to Zoroaster, the supposed contemporary of Moses. As, turn to the old astronomy ascribed to Moses, you will find that Rachael had but two sons, which were Joseph and Benjamin, and there they are to this day in Rama, the two boys of the Zodiac; as Joseph and Benjamin together are accounted as making up but one of the twelve signs; and this King Herod is no other than such a sort of personage as our English John Bull — he never grows old — he never goes dead — but he is the bloody King Herod, the naughty man that comes to take away the naughty children.

As we find the grave historian Eusebius assuring us that the martyrdom of Polycarp, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, at Smyrna, 200 years after the pretended date of this affair

* He took away the boys, i. e. the boys of the Sun, Pi-Ades, whence the Greeks formed their word, naiScg, boys, was a common title of the Sun, and meant particularly, the Sun in Gemini.

took place by order of this self-same bloody King Herod, notwithstanding the worms eating him up ; as they do every year, when he enters into the sign of the Scorpion of October, and gives not God the glory. But not alone the name of King Herod, but the name of the children whom it is so ridiculously supposed that King Herod slew, in its original significancy, and historical derivation, demonstrates the astronomical relations of the whole mystery, avsiXs rravrag rag ILaiSag — Herod the King (that is Hercules, the Hero of the Skin), put away all the boys. Now the Greek word liaideg bctrays to us the Coptic article lit, in composition with the Phoenician Ades, the whole word Pi-Ades being the common title of the Sun, formed of the radicals Pi. Ad. Es., The Lord Fire ; hence the Latin word for a boy, puer, is the Greek word TTvp for Fire, the root of the English words pure and purity, and the key of the evangelical conundrum, *^ Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," that is, the Stars that shine the brighest are nearest to the Sun ; and these boys in Rama, which Herod passed over, are demonstrated to have been none other than the fiery boys of the Zodiac — the two bright clusters of Stars representing the figure of two boys, which the Sun enters in the month of May, and for which, Rachael weeps, and will not be comforted — not because they are killed, but because they are not ; that is, because they are rendered invisible, no longer to be seen, are absorbed in the superior effulgence of the Sun in passing through them, as he does in the month of May, when

-Lost, dissolved in his superior rays,

One tide of glory, one unclouded blaze, Overflows his courts.^'

Thus, in that name of God, Hercules, reduced to its radical, we have the three Ammonian primitives, which are i^n V^ -tin light, all, fire, which is in the composition the light, the unir>ersal fire, or palindromically, the fire, the universal source of light, that is the Sun. As there, in the Zodiac in the Lion of July IS that Cleonean Lion, whom the light, the universal fire, that is the Sun, the H.poig Separog, the King Herod, The Heroof the

S kin t every year overcomes and passes through in his annual progress, with whose skin he seems to invest himself as a trophy of his victory ; and as in which investiture, he is addressed in those words of the Psalmist, or ancient magical incantations appointed to be rfad through every month, in honor of the twelve months of the year, " Lord my God, thou art become exceeding glorious, thou art clothed with majesty and honor ; thou deckest thyself with light as with a garment, and spreadest out the heavens like a curtain. sing unto God, and sing praises unto his name ; magnify him that rideth upon the Heavens as upon a horse ; even God in his holy habitation." Thus, too, the epithet added to the name of Herod, that is, the Hero of the Shriy Herod the King, in Hebrew, nVn Moloch ; in Greek ^aaiXevs; in Latin Rexj the Ruler, the Regulator ; was a characteristic epithet of the Sun — the Sun to rule the day, the monarch or only governor of the whole solar system.

And why should Christ be said to be born in Bethlehem of Judea, and be called by the wise men, the BacrtAcuj roiv ln^aioiVy the King, the Rex, the Governor or Ruler of the days of Jao, but in fulfilment of that prophecy of the prophet, that is, in accordance with that astronomical sketch of the astronomical priest, Micah : ** And thou Bethlehem in the land of Judah art not the least among the Princes of Judah, for out of thee shall come a Governor that shall rule my people IsraeV^ ? Now, would any but a Christian idiot, who had bid good night for ever to all use of reason, or a Christian knave, who would say anything, insult us by saying that there ever was a Bethlehem upon earth that ever brought forth a Governor or Ruler upon earth, that ever governed or ruled an Israel upon earth ? And are we to endure the intolerable insult and ignominy any longer, that a set of sanctified idiots and solemn dunces, a proud and aristocratical priesthood — too haughty as they are, to be willing, and too ignorant as they are, to be able, to confront us — should be allowed to persuade the world that all these glorious prophecies of " the w^onderful Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, of the increase of whose government and dominion there should be no end, upon the throne of David his father, to order and to establish it with judgment and with justice for ever," had their verification in the pretended real history of such a king of the Jews ; who, if his history were historical, presents us with nothing more than the history of a thief, born in a stable, living on the high road, and dying on the gallows ! A King of the Jews that never had his title recognised but in a sarcasm — never triumphed but on the cross — never reigned, but as if all our kings should be like to reign in the same fashion, we should not long want Radical Reform.

But turn we to the sacred text itself, of the astronomical Micah (ch. v. 2), than which nothing can be more astronomical. And thou, the House of Corn, Mansion of the Virgin, Genius of Increase and Abundance, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, that make up the various signs of the Zodiac, out of thee shall he come to me, or shine forth, who is the Governor of Israel (that is, of the whole Solar system) whose goings-forth from the East, have been from the days of eternity," that is, the Sun, beyond all possibility of being anything else, the never-created, eternally-existing Sun, whose goings-forth from the East to pass through the twelve signs of the Zodiac, most literally and really have been from everlasting. And what means the astrologe by those words : " And thou Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah," but the astronomical fact, which if you will but look upon the thousands of Judah, your own eyes will testify — that the Stars which make up the Constellation of Bethlehem Ephratah, which is the sign of the Virgin, or Goodwoman of the Zodiac, are particularly small; those that should make up the head, especially, being so minute, as hardly to be visible to the naked eye ; which gave occasion to the allegorists for their joke, that if you want to find a good woman, you must look for the woman without a head. The Pagan sculptors represented their Venus with a particularly small head, while the Christian painters represented their Venus, the Virgin Mary, whose house or domicil actually is in Bethlehem Ephratah, as a maid with no head at all. The brightest stars m this constellation being those which form the arms, or vindemiatrix, in the elbow ; thus actually supplying the pun, that has never been too gross for the piety of our Catholic brethren, where, in the office of the conception of the Blessed Virgin, they call her —

Judith Invincible I

Woman of arms :

Fair Mishag* Virgin, that

True David, warms !"

Eternal God ! why hast thou given us reason to insult us with Christianity ?

But see, sirs, and your conviction shall seal the truth it sees — how beautiful, how majestic, how delightful is science. From the eternal and never-failing regularity of the goings-forth or progress of the San from sign to sign, through his annual course, the minds of men first received the idea of Truth, of punctuality, and of certainty : and hence among all nations, and in all languages, we find them giving precisely the same name to whatever they held to be true, which they had previously given to the Sun, whose imaginary moral attributes were directly derived from his real physical ones ; and thus the faithful and true wit' ness in Heaven, the Sun, was looked up to, or pointed to, by every man addressing another man, and meaning to say, that what he said was truth. It is true as God^s in Heaven ; that is. It is as true, as accurate, and as regular, as are the goings-forth of the Sun, *^ whose goings-forth have been from of old — from everlasting." So the name of the Sun, in every country in which the Sun hath shone, is universally found to be the same as that of their form of assent or agreement, or pledge of promise. And as the worship of the Sun under the name of Jupiter Ammon, was infinitely the most prevalent over all the world — above all other forms of worship,! the ancient Phoe-

Lucan 1.

nician word Am — On, literally signifying the j^re, the being, the name Ammon, pronounced in all manner of ways, through the nose, through the throat, but always with the eyes shut, to relieve them from the dazzling of the Sun's rays, as A-men, Au-men, Ah-men, 0-men, has found its way, and to this day retains its place at the end of every prayer, ending, ** through Jesus Christ our Lord Ammon;" that is, most literally, that Jesus Christ our Lord, is Ammon ; and Jesus Christ and Jupiter-Ammon, stand thus demonstrated to have been but one and the self-same prosopopeia — that is, the personified Genius of the Sun. As Jesus Christ is made to say of himself, in that beautiful and scientific astronomical Mythos, called the Revelation of St. John, " lam the Amen, the faithful and true witness,'^ So the name Yesus or Jesus, so deceitfully sheltered from the discovery of its real meaning, by the Latin termination us (which is no part of it) in its dissyllabic and earlier form, is yes, which has becomes our English form of assent or pledge of fidelity and truth ; as we say. Yes, with the same meaning as Amen, that is, verily, it is so — or I consent — I will — that is, by-God 1 wilL Hues — Yes — Im — being the most ancient name of the god Bacchus ; and absolutely retained to this day upon all our Christian altar-pieces and pulpit-cloths in those three mystical letters I: H: S, which are Greek letters, absurdly read as Roman letters, by our Romish Monks, as if they were to stand for the words, Jesus Hominum Salvator, Jesus the Savior of Men: whereas they really are the name at full length of the Pagan god, Bacchus, the god of Wine, in whose honor at those altars our Christian Bacchanals, not knowing what they do, continue to this day to drink the sacramental wine, which is the blood of the grape — that is, by metonymy upon metonymy, the blood of Bacchus ; that is of Jes, or Yes — the personified genius of the Sun, whose name is written in those letters I, H, S, and surrounded with that circle of golden rays, than which your ingenuity could not write the word Sun, nor depict it in an hieroglyphical representation less to be mistaken, even if you were the most ingenious man alive. And this same I, E, S, is composed of the Ammonian radicals, I, the one ; and E, S, the fire : i. e. the one great fire : i. e. the Sun, under which identical name he was the Supreme Deity of the ancient fire-worshippers of Persia, from whom, his rites were adopted, hy those who are absurdly called the primitive Christians.

The extent of Christian stupidity, and of Christian ignorance, would have been the most unaccountable of all the phenomena of the universe, if its own history had not supplied the account. Men have been trained to prefer ignorance to learning, and have chosen to be driven mad and wild by faith, rather than to be instructed, enlightened, and improved, by reason and philosophy. But as the intolerance of the religious feeling, alike in all religions, was ever more opposed to improvement than any other, we reap a contingent advantage from the consecration of ignorance. The long continuance of the nomenclature and technicalities 'of theology, and their adoption from one country to another, where every thing might be allowed to change, and to improve — but religion — enables us the more easily to work through the difficulties of the problem, and to demonstrate the fallacy that runs through all religions. Thus, there is a long list of words, which our Christian parrots prattle forth, )f which they have never dreamed, or thought more of the meaning and significancy, than a parrot, and which have been adopted and naturalizedf without ever being translated. I need not mention the Amen and Hallelujah, and Hosanna, and, Glory, and Sanetification, and Holiness, of the derivative meaning of which, a horse is not more ignorant than a Christian : but our words God, and the Sun, are really, the one, a Hebrew, the other an old Coptic word: both signifying the same thing: but both alike adopted without being inquired into; and naturalized without being understood. God, or Gad, being the nevertranslated name in the ancient Tsabaism, or star-worship, of the constellation of the Ram, or Lamb of God, as I have explained to you, the Rama, the great, the elevated, that is, the first of the signs of the Zodiac — that is, by metonymy of the