Chapter II
CHAPTER II.
"They undertake by scales of miles to tell
The bounds, dimensions, and extent of hell;
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Where bloated souls in smoky durance hung
Like a Westphalia gammon or neat's tongue,
To be redeemed with masses and a song."--OLDHAM: Satires upon the Jesuits.
"York.--But you are more inhuman, more inexorable --
O, ten times more--than tigers of Hyrcania."--King Henry VI., Part Third, Act i., Scene iv.
"War.--And hark ye, Sirs; because she is a maid
Spare for no faggots, let there be enough;
Place barrels of pitch upon the fatal stake."--King Henry VI., Part First, Act v., Scene iv.
IN that famous work of Bodin, on sorcery, * a frightful story is told about Catherine of Medicis. The author was a learned publicist, who, during twenty years of his life, collected authentic documents from the archives of nearly every important city of France, to make up a complete work on sorcery, magic, and the power of various "demons." To use an expression of Eliphas Levi, his book offers a most remarkable collection of "bloody and hideous facts; acts of revolting superstition, arrests, and executions of stupid ferocity." "Burn every body!" the Inquisition seemed to say--God will easily sort out His own! Poor fools, hysterical women, and idiots were roasted alive, without mercy, for the crime of "magic." But, "at the same time, how many great culprits escaped this unjust and sanguinary justice! This is what Bodin makes us fully appreciate."
Catherine, the pious Christian--who has so well deserved in the eyes of the Church of Christ for the atrocious and never-to-be-forgotten massacre of St. Bartholomew--the Queen Catherine, kept in her service an apostate Jacobin priest. Well versed in the "black art," so fully patronized by the Medici family, he had won the gratitude and protection of his pious mistress, by his unparalleled skill in killing people at a distance, by torturing with various incantations their wax simulacra. The process has been described over and over again, and we scarcely need repeat it.
the chaplain of the palace, who was apprised of the plot, and at midnight of the appointed day, in the chamber of the sick man, and in presence only of Catherine and a few of her confederates, the "devil's mass" was celebrated. Let us give the rest of the story as we find it in one of Levi's works: "At this mass, celebrated before the image of the demon, having under his feet a reversed cross, the sorcerer consecrated two wafers, one black and one white. The white was given to the child, whom they brought clothed as for baptism, and who was murdered upon the very steps of the altar, immediately after his communion. His head, separated from the trunk by a single blow, was placed, all palpitating, upon the great black wafer which covered the bottom of the paten, then placed upon a table where some mysterious lamps were burning. The exorcism then began, and the demon was charged to pronounce an oracle, and reply by the mouth of this head to a secret question that the king dared not speak aloud, and that had been confided to no one. Then a feeble voice, a strange voice, which had nothing of human character about it, made itself audible in this poor little martyr's head." The sorcery availed nothing; the king died, and--Catherine remained the faithful daughter of Rome!
How strange, that des Mousseaux, who makes such free use of Bodin's materials to construct his formidable indictment against Spiritualists and other sorcerers, should have overlooked this interesting episode!
It is a well-attested fact that Pope Sylvester II. was publicly accused by Cardinal Benno with being a sorcerer and an enchanter. The brazen "oracular head" made by his Holiness was of the same kind as the one fabricated by Albertus Magnus. The latter was smashed to pieces by Thomas Aquinas, not because it was the work of or inhabited by a "demon," but because the spook who was fixed inside, by mesmeric power, talked incessantly, and his verbiage prevented the eloquent saint from working out his mathematical problems. These heads and other talking statues, trophies of the magical skill of monks and bishops, were fac-similes of the "animated" gods of the ancient temples. The accusation against the Pope was proved at the time. It was also demonstrated that he was constantly attended by "demons" or spirits. In the preceding chapter we have mentioned Benedict IX., John XX., and the VIth and VIIth Gregory, who were all known as magicians. The latter Pope, moreover, was the famous Hildebrand, who was said to have
The magical achievements of the Bishop of Ratisbon and those of the "angelic doctor," Thomas Aquinas, are too well known to need repetition; but we may explain farther how the "illusions" of the former were produced. If the Catholic bishop was so clever in making people believe on a bitter winter night that they were enjoying the delights of a splendid summer day, and cause the icicles hanging from the boughs of the trees in the garden to seem like so many tropical fruits, the Hindu magicians also practice such biological powers unto this very day, and claim the assistance of neither god nor devil. Such "miracles" are all produced by the same human power that is inherent in every man, if he only knew how to develop it.
About the time of the Reformation, the study of alchemy and magic had become so prevalent among the clergy as to produce great scandal. Cardinal Wolsey was openly accused before the court and the privy-council of confederacy with a man named Wood, a sorcerer, who said that "My Lord Cardinale had suche a rynge that whatsomevere he askyd of the Kynges grace that he hadd yt"; adding that "Master Cromwell, when he . . . was servaunt in my lord cardynales housse . . . rede many bokes and specyally the boke of Salamon . . . and studied mettells and what vertues they had after the canon of Salamon." This case, with several others equally curious, is to be found among the Cromwell papers in the Record Office of the Rolls House.
A priest named William Stapleton was arrested as a conjurer, during the reign of Henry VIII., and an account of his adventures is still preserved in the Rolls House records. The Sicilian priest whom Benvenuto Cellini calls a necromancer, became famous through his successful conjurations, and was never molested. The remarkable adventure of Cellini with him in the Colosseum, where the priest conjured up a whole host of devils, is well known to the reading public. The subsequent meeting of Cellini with his mistress, as predicted and brought about by the conjurer, at the precise time fixed by him, is to be considered, as a matter of course, a "curious coincidence." In the latter part of the sixteenth century there was hardly a parish to be found in which the priests did not study magic and alchemy. The practice of exorcism to cast out devils "in imitation of Christ," who by the way never used exorcism at all, led the clergy to devote themselves openly to "sacred" magic in contradistinction to black art, of which latter crime were accused all those who were neither priests nor monks.
Scientia Scientiarum, and those whose sins could not be concealed by the friar's frock. The proof of it lies in the records of history. "In the course only of fifteen years, between 1580 to 1595, and only in the single province of Lorraine, the President Remigius burned 900 witches," says Thomas Wright, in his Sorcery and Magic. It was during these days, prolific in ecclesiastical murder and unrivalled for cruelty and ferocity, that Jean Bodin wrote.
While the orthodox clergy called forth whole legions of "demons" through magical incantations, unmolested by the authorities, provided they held fast to the established dogmas and taught no heresy, on the other hand, acts of unparalleled atrocity were perpetrated on poor, unfortunate fools. Gabriel Malagrida, an old man of eighty, was burnt by these evangelical Jack Ketches in 1761. In the Amsterdam library there is a copy of the report of his famous trial, translated from the Lisbon edition. He was accused of sorcery and illicit intercourse with the Devil, who had "disclosed to him futurity." (?) The prophecy imparted by the Arch-Enemy to the poor visionary Jesuit is reported in the following terms: "The culprit hath confessed that the demon, under the form of the blessed Virgin, having commanded him to write the life of Antichrist (?), told him that he, Malagrida, was a second John, but more clear than John the Evangelist; that there were to be three Antichrists, and that the last should be born at Milan, of a monk and a nun, in the year 1920; that he would marry Proserpine, one of the infernal furies," etc.
The prophecy is to be verified forty-three years hence. Even were all the children born of monks and nuns really to become antichrists if allowed to grow up to maturity, the fact would seem far less deplorable than the discoveries made in so many convents when the foundations have been removed for some reason. If the assertion of Luther is to be disbelieved on account of his hatred for popery, then we may name discoveries of the same character made quite recently in Austrian and Russian Poland. Luther speaks of a fish-pond at Rome, situated near a convent of nuns, which, having been cleared out by order of Pope Gregory, disclosed, at the bottom, over six thousand infant skulls; and of a nunnery at Neinburg, in Austria, whose foundations, when searched, disclosed the same relics of celibacy and chastity!
"Ecclesia non novit Sanguinem!" meekly repeated the scarlet-robed cardinals. And to avoid the spilling of blood which horrified them, they instituted the Holy Inquisition. If, as the occultists maintain, and science half confirms, our most trifling acts and thoughts are indelibly impressed
olive branch on one side, and a sword, stained to the hilt with human gore, on the other. A legend selected from the Psalms emblazoned in golden letters, reading thus: "Exurge, Domine, et judica causam meam." For such appears the standard of the Inquisition, on a photograph in our possession, from an original procured at the Escurial of Madrid.
Under this Christian standard, in the brief space of fourteen years, Tomas de Torquemada, the confessor of Queen Isabella, burned over ten thousand persons, and sentenced to the torture eighty thousand more. Orobio, the well-known writer, who was detained so long in prison, and who hardly escaped the flames of the Inquisition, immortalized this institution in his works when once at liberty in Holland. He found no better argument against the Holy Church than to embrace the Judaic faith and submit even to circumcision. "In the cathedral of Saragossa," says a writer on the Inquisition, "is the tomb of a famous inquisitor. Six pillars surround the tomb; to each is chained a Moor, as preparatory to being burned." On this St. Foix ingenuously observes: "If ever the Jack Ketch of any country should be rich enough to have a splendid tomb, this might serve as an excellent model!" To make it complete, however, the builders of the tomb ought not to have omitted a bas-relief of the famous horse which was burnt for sorcery and witchcraft. Granger tells the story, describing it as having occurred in his time. The poor animal "had been taught to tell the spots upon cards, and the hour of the day by the watch. Horse and owner were both indicted by the sacred office for dealing with the Devil, and both were burned, with a great ceremony of auto-da-fe, at Lisbon, in 1601, as wizards!"
This immortal institution of Christianity did not remain without its Dante to sing its praise. "Macedo, a Portuguese Jesuit," says the author of Demonologia, "has discovered the origin of the Inquisition, in the terrestrial Paradise, and presumes to allege that God was the first who began the functions of an inquisitor over Cain and the workmen of Babel!"
Nowhere, during the middle ages, were the arts of magic and sorcery more practiced by the clergy than in Spain and Portugal. The Moors were profoundly versed in the occult sciences, and at Toledo, Seville, and Salamanca, were, once upon a time, the great schools of magic. The kabalists of the latter town were skilled in all the abstruse sciences; they
Friar Pietro, a Dominican monk of the fourteenth century--the magician who presented the famous Dr. Eugenio Torralva, a physician attached to the house of the admiral of Castile, with a demon named Zequiel--won his fame through the subsequent trial of Torralva. The procedure and circumstances attendant upon the extraordinary trial are described in the original papers preserved in the Archives of the Inquisition. The Cardinal of Volterra, and the Cardinal of Santa Cruz, both saw and communicated with Zequiel, who proved, during the whole of Torralva's life, to be a pure, kind, elemental spirit, doing many beneficent actions, and remaining faithful to the physician to the last hour of his life. Even the Inquisition acquitted Torralva, on that account; and, although an immortality of fame was insured to him by the satire of Cervantes, neither Torralva nor the monk Pietro are fictitious heroes, but historical personages, recorded in ecclesiastical documents of Rome and Cuenca,
Regretting that space should prevent our giving one of the most curious lists in the world of burned witches, we will nevertheless make a few extracts from the original record as printed in Hauber's Bibliotheca
IN THE FIRST BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Old Ancker's widow.
The wife of Liebler.
The wife of Gutbrodt.
The wife of Hocker.
IN THE SECOND BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Two strange women (names unknown). The old wife of Beutler.
IN THE THIRD BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
Tungersleber, a minstrel.
Four wives of citizens.
IN THE FOURTH BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
A strange man.
IN THE FIFTH BURNING, NINE PERSONS.
Lutz, an eminent shop-keeper.
The wife of Baunach, a senator.
IN THE SIXTH BURNING, SIX PERSONS.
The fat tailor's wife.
A strange man.
A strange woman.
i.e., Protestants, 28
Citizens, apparently all WEALTHY people, 100
Summary: Boys, girls, and little children, 34
In nineteen months, 162 persons.
"There were," says Wright, "little girls of from seven to ten years of age among the witches, and seven and twenty of them were convicted and burnt," at some of the other brande, or burnings. "The numbers brought to trial in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take the trouble of setting down their names, but they were cited as the accused No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and so on. * The Jesuits took their confessions in private."
What room is there in a theology which exacts such holocausts as these to appease the bloody appetites of its priests for the following gentle words:
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." "Even so it is not the will of your Father . . . that one of these little ones should perish." "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
We sincerely hope that the above words have proved no vain threat to these child-burners.
Did this butchery in the name of their Moloch-god prevent these treasure-hunters from resorting to the black art themselves? Not in the least; for in no class were such consulters of "familiar" spirits more numerous than among the clergy during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. True, there were some Catholic priests among the victims, but though these were generally accused of having "been
twelve vicars, four canons, and two doctors of divinity burnt alive. But we have only to turn to such works as were published at the time to assure ourselves that each popish priest executed was accused of "damnable heresy," i.e., a tendency to reformation--a crime more heinous far than sorcery.
We refer those who would learn how the Catholic clergy united duty with pleasure in the matter of exorcisms, revenge, and treasure-hunting, to volume II., chapter i., of W. Howitt's History of the Supernatural. "In the book called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down," says this veteran writer. He then proceeds to give a long description of the favorite modus operandi. The Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie of the late Eliphas Levi, treated with so much abuse and contempt by des Mousseaux, tells nothing of the weird ceremonies and practices but what was practiced legally and with the tacit if not open consent of the Church, by the priests of the middle ages. The exorcist-priest entered a circle at midnight; he was clad in a new surplice, and had a consecrated band hanging from the neck, covered with sacred characters. He wore on the head a tall pointed cap, on the front of which was written in Hebrew the holy word, Tetragrammaton--the ineffable name. It was written with a new pen dipped in the blood of a white dove. What the exorcists most yearned after, was to release miserable spirits which haunt spots where hidden treasures lie. The exorcist sprinkles the circle with the blood of a black lamb and a white pigeon. The priest had to adjure the evil spirits of hell--Acheront, Magoth, Asmodei, Beelzebub, Belial, and all the damned souls, in the mighty names of Jehovah, Adonay, Elohah, and Sabaioth, which latter was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in the Urim and Thummim. When the damned souls flung in the face of the exorcist that he was a sinner, and could not get the treasure from them, the priest-sorcerer had to reply that "all his sins were washed out in the blood of Christ, * and he bid them depart as cursed ghosts and damned flies." When the exorcist dislodged them at last, the poor soul was "comforted in the name of the Saviour, and consigned to the care of good angels," who were less powerful, we must think, than the exorcising Catholic worthies, "and the rescued treasure, of course, was secured for the Church."
"Certain days," adds Howitt, "are laid down in the calendar of the
This is the Church, and this the priesthood, which, in the nineteenth century, pays 5,000 priests to teach the people of the United States the infidelity of science and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome!
We have already noticed the confession of an eminent prelate that the elimination of Satan from theology would be fatal to the perpetuity of the Church. But this is only partially true. The Prince of Sin would be gone, but sin itself would survive. If the Devil were annihilated, the Articles of Faith and the Bible would remain. In short there would still be a pretended divine revelation, and the necessity for self-assumed inspired interpreters. We must, therefore, consider the authenticity of the Bible itself. We must study its pages, and see if they, indeed, contain the commands of the Deity, or but a compendium of ancient traditions and hoary myths. We must try to interpret them for ourselves--if possible. As to its pretended interpreters, the only possible assimilation we can find for them in the Bible is to compare them with the man described by the wise King Solomon in his Proverbs, with the perpetrator of these "six things . . . yea seven . . . which doth the Lord hate," and which are an abomination unto Him, to wit: "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren" (Proverbs vi. 16, 17, 18, 19).
Of which of these accusations are the long line of men who have left the imprint of their feet in the Vatican guiltless?
"When the demons," says Augustine, "insinuate themselves in the creatures, they begin by conforming themselves to the will of every one. . . . In order to attract men, they begin by seducing them, by simulating obedience. . . . How could one know, had he not been taught by the demons themselves, what they like or what they hate; the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience; all this art, in short, of magic, the whole science of the magicians?" *
To this impressive dissertation of the "saint," we will add that no magician has ever denied that he had learned the art from "spirits," whether, being a medium, they acted independently on him, or he had been initiated into the science of "evocation" by his fathers who knew it before himself. But who was it then that taught the exorcist? The priest
devils as soon as he finds them obeying any one but himself? He must have learned somewhere from some one that power which he pretends to possess. For, ". . . how could one know had he not been taught by the demons themselves . . . the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience?" asks Augustine.
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
, Peter (in Phoenician and Chaldaic, an interpreter) appears to have been the title of this personage (the hierophant). . . . There is in these facts some reminder of the peculiar circumstances of the Mosaic Law . . . and also of the claim of the Pope to be the successor of Peter, the hierophant or interpreter of the Christian religion." *
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
"They undertake by scales of miles to tell
The bounds, dimensions, and extent of hell;
*******************************************************
Where bloated souls in smoky durance hung
Like a Westphalia gammon or neat's tongue,
To be redeemed with masses and a song."--OLDHAM: Satires upon the Jesuits.
"York.--But you are more inhuman, more inexorable --
O, ten times more--than tigers of Hyrcania."--King Henry VI., Part Third, Act i., Scene iv.
"War.--And hark ye, Sirs; because she is a maid
Spare for no faggots, let there be enough;
Place barrels of pitch upon the fatal stake."--King Henry VI., Part First, Act v., Scene iv.
IN that famous work of Bodin, on sorcery, * a frightful story is told about Catherine of Medicis. The author was a learned publicist, who, during twenty years of his life, collected authentic documents from the archives of nearly every important city of France, to make up a complete work on sorcery, magic, and the power of various "demons." To use an expression of Eliphas Levi, his book offers a most remarkable collection of "bloody and hideous facts; acts of revolting superstition, arrests, and executions of stupid ferocity." "Burn every body!" the Inquisition seemed to say--God will easily sort out His own! Poor fools, hysterical women, and idiots were roasted alive, without mercy, for the crime of "magic." But, "at the same time, how many great culprits escaped this unjust and sanguinary justice! This is what Bodin makes us fully appreciate."
Catherine, the pious Christian--who has so well deserved in the eyes of the Church of Christ for the atrocious and never-to-be-forgotten massacre of St. Bartholomew--the Queen Catherine, kept in her service an apostate Jacobin priest. Well versed in the "black art," so fully patronized by the Medici family, he had won the gratitude and protection of his pious mistress, by his unparalleled skill in killing people at a distance, by torturing with various incantations their wax simulacra. The process has been described over and over again, and we scarcely need repeat it.
the chaplain of the palace, who was apprised of the plot, and at midnight of the appointed day, in the chamber of the sick man, and in presence only of Catherine and a few of her confederates, the "devil's mass" was celebrated. Let us give the rest of the story as we find it in one of Levi's works: "At this mass, celebrated before the image of the demon, having under his feet a reversed cross, the sorcerer consecrated two wafers, one black and one white. The white was given to the child, whom they brought clothed as for baptism, and who was murdered upon the very steps of the altar, immediately after his communion. His head, separated from the trunk by a single blow, was placed, all palpitating, upon the great black wafer which covered the bottom of the paten, then placed upon a table where some mysterious lamps were burning. The exorcism then began, and the demon was charged to pronounce an oracle, and reply by the mouth of this head to a secret question that the king dared not speak aloud, and that had been confided to no one. Then a feeble voice, a strange voice, which had nothing of human character about it, made itself audible in this poor little martyr's head." The sorcery availed nothing; the king died, and--Catherine remained the faithful daughter of Rome!
How strange, that des Mousseaux, who makes such free use of Bodin's materials to construct his formidable indictment against Spiritualists and other sorcerers, should have overlooked this interesting episode!
It is a well-attested fact that Pope Sylvester II. was publicly accused by Cardinal Benno with being a sorcerer and an enchanter. The brazen "oracular head" made by his Holiness was of the same kind as the one fabricated by Albertus Magnus. The latter was smashed to pieces by Thomas Aquinas, not because it was the work of or inhabited by a "demon," but because the spook who was fixed inside, by mesmeric power, talked incessantly, and his verbiage prevented the eloquent saint from working out his mathematical problems. These heads and other talking statues, trophies of the magical skill of monks and bishops, were fac-similes of the "animated" gods of the ancient temples. The accusation against the Pope was proved at the time. It was also demonstrated that he was constantly attended by "demons" or spirits. In the preceding chapter we have mentioned Benedict IX., John XX., and the VIth and VIIth Gregory, who were all known as magicians. The latter Pope, moreover, was the famous Hildebrand, who was said to have
The magical achievements of the Bishop of Ratisbon and those of the "angelic doctor," Thomas Aquinas, are too well known to need repetition; but we may explain farther how the "illusions" of the former were produced. If the Catholic bishop was so clever in making people believe on a bitter winter night that they were enjoying the delights of a splendid summer day, and cause the icicles hanging from the boughs of the trees in the garden to seem like so many tropical fruits, the Hindu magicians also practice such biological powers unto this very day, and claim the assistance of neither god nor devil. Such "miracles" are all produced by the same human power that is inherent in every man, if he only knew how to develop it.
About the time of the Reformation, the study of alchemy and magic had become so prevalent among the clergy as to produce great scandal. Cardinal Wolsey was openly accused before the court and the privy-council of confederacy with a man named Wood, a sorcerer, who said that "My Lord Cardinale had suche a rynge that whatsomevere he askyd of the Kynges grace that he hadd yt"; adding that "Master Cromwell, when he . . . was servaunt in my lord cardynales housse . . . rede many bokes and specyally the boke of Salamon . . . and studied mettells and what vertues they had after the canon of Salamon." This case, with several others equally curious, is to be found among the Cromwell papers in the Record Office of the Rolls House.
A priest named William Stapleton was arrested as a conjurer, during the reign of Henry VIII., and an account of his adventures is still preserved in the Rolls House records. The Sicilian priest whom Benvenuto Cellini calls a necromancer, became famous through his successful conjurations, and was never molested. The remarkable adventure of Cellini with him in the Colosseum, where the priest conjured up a whole host of devils, is well known to the reading public. The subsequent meeting of Cellini with his mistress, as predicted and brought about by the conjurer, at the precise time fixed by him, is to be considered, as a matter of course, a "curious coincidence." In the latter part of the sixteenth century there was hardly a parish to be found in which the priests did not study magic and alchemy. The practice of exorcism to cast out devils "in imitation of Christ," who by the way never used exorcism at all, led the clergy to devote themselves openly to "sacred" magic in contradistinction to black art, of which latter crime were accused all those who were neither priests nor monks.
Scientia Scientiarum, and those whose sins could not be concealed by the friar's frock. The proof of it lies in the records of history. "In the course only of fifteen years, between 1580 to 1595, and only in the single province of Lorraine, the President Remigius burned 900 witches," says Thomas Wright, in his Sorcery and Magic. It was during these days, prolific in ecclesiastical murder and unrivalled for cruelty and ferocity, that Jean Bodin wrote.
While the orthodox clergy called forth whole legions of "demons" through magical incantations, unmolested by the authorities, provided they held fast to the established dogmas and taught no heresy, on the other hand, acts of unparalleled atrocity were perpetrated on poor, unfortunate fools. Gabriel Malagrida, an old man of eighty, was burnt by these evangelical Jack Ketches in 1761. In the Amsterdam library there is a copy of the report of his famous trial, translated from the Lisbon edition. He was accused of sorcery and illicit intercourse with the Devil, who had "disclosed to him futurity." (?) The prophecy imparted by the Arch-Enemy to the poor visionary Jesuit is reported in the following terms: "The culprit hath confessed that the demon, under the form of the blessed Virgin, having commanded him to write the life of Antichrist (?), told him that he, Malagrida, was a second John, but more clear than John the Evangelist; that there were to be three Antichrists, and that the last should be born at Milan, of a monk and a nun, in the year 1920; that he would marry Proserpine, one of the infernal furies," etc.
The prophecy is to be verified forty-three years hence. Even were all the children born of monks and nuns really to become antichrists if allowed to grow up to maturity, the fact would seem far less deplorable than the discoveries made in so many convents when the foundations have been removed for some reason. If the assertion of Luther is to be disbelieved on account of his hatred for popery, then we may name discoveries of the same character made quite recently in Austrian and Russian Poland. Luther speaks of a fish-pond at Rome, situated near a convent of nuns, which, having been cleared out by order of Pope Gregory, disclosed, at the bottom, over six thousand infant skulls; and of a nunnery at Neinburg, in Austria, whose foundations, when searched, disclosed the same relics of celibacy and chastity!
"Ecclesia non novit Sanguinem!" meekly repeated the scarlet-robed cardinals. And to avoid the spilling of blood which horrified them, they instituted the Holy Inquisition. If, as the occultists maintain, and science half confirms, our most trifling acts and thoughts are indelibly impressed
olive branch on one side, and a sword, stained to the hilt with human gore, on the other. A legend selected from the Psalms emblazoned in golden letters, reading thus: "Exurge, Domine, et judica causam meam." For such appears the standard of the Inquisition, on a photograph in our possession, from an original procured at the Escurial of Madrid.
Under this Christian standard, in the brief space of fourteen years, Tomas de Torquemada, the confessor of Queen Isabella, burned over ten thousand persons, and sentenced to the torture eighty thousand more. Orobio, the well-known writer, who was detained so long in prison, and who hardly escaped the flames of the Inquisition, immortalized this institution in his works when once at liberty in Holland. He found no better argument against the Holy Church than to embrace the Judaic faith and submit even to circumcision. "In the cathedral of Saragossa," says a writer on the Inquisition, "is the tomb of a famous inquisitor. Six pillars surround the tomb; to each is chained a Moor, as preparatory to being burned." On this St. Foix ingenuously observes: "If ever the Jack Ketch of any country should be rich enough to have a splendid tomb, this might serve as an excellent model!" To make it complete, however, the builders of the tomb ought not to have omitted a bas-relief of the famous horse which was burnt for sorcery and witchcraft. Granger tells the story, describing it as having occurred in his time. The poor animal "had been taught to tell the spots upon cards, and the hour of the day by the watch. Horse and owner were both indicted by the sacred office for dealing with the Devil, and both were burned, with a great ceremony of auto-da-fe, at Lisbon, in 1601, as wizards!"
This immortal institution of Christianity did not remain without its Dante to sing its praise. "Macedo, a Portuguese Jesuit," says the author of Demonologia, "has discovered the origin of the Inquisition, in the terrestrial Paradise, and presumes to allege that God was the first who began the functions of an inquisitor over Cain and the workmen of Babel!"
Nowhere, during the middle ages, were the arts of magic and sorcery more practiced by the clergy than in Spain and Portugal. The Moors were profoundly versed in the occult sciences, and at Toledo, Seville, and Salamanca, were, once upon a time, the great schools of magic. The kabalists of the latter town were skilled in all the abstruse sciences; they
Friar Pietro, a Dominican monk of the fourteenth century--the magician who presented the famous Dr. Eugenio Torralva, a physician attached to the house of the admiral of Castile, with a demon named Zequiel--won his fame through the subsequent trial of Torralva. The procedure and circumstances attendant upon the extraordinary trial are described in the original papers preserved in the Archives of the Inquisition. The Cardinal of Volterra, and the Cardinal of Santa Cruz, both saw and communicated with Zequiel, who proved, during the whole of Torralva's life, to be a pure, kind, elemental spirit, doing many beneficent actions, and remaining faithful to the physician to the last hour of his life. Even the Inquisition acquitted Torralva, on that account; and, although an immortality of fame was insured to him by the satire of Cervantes, neither Torralva nor the monk Pietro are fictitious heroes, but historical personages, recorded in ecclesiastical documents of Rome and Cuenca,
Regretting that space should prevent our giving one of the most curious lists in the world of burned witches, we will nevertheless make a few extracts from the original record as printed in Hauber's Bibliotheca
IN THE FIRST BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Old Ancker's widow.
The wife of Liebler.
The wife of Gutbrodt.
The wife of Hocker.
IN THE SECOND BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Two strange women (names unknown). The old wife of Beutler.
IN THE THIRD BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
Tungersleber, a minstrel.
Four wives of citizens.
IN THE FOURTH BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
A strange man.
IN THE FIFTH BURNING, NINE PERSONS.
Lutz, an eminent shop-keeper.
The wife of Baunach, a senator.
IN THE SIXTH BURNING, SIX PERSONS.
The fat tailor's wife.
A strange man.
A strange woman.
i.e., Protestants, 28
Citizens, apparently all WEALTHY people, 100
Summary: Boys, girls, and little children, 34
In nineteen months, 162 persons.
"There were," says Wright, "little girls of from seven to ten years of age among the witches, and seven and twenty of them were convicted and burnt," at some of the other brande, or burnings. "The numbers brought to trial in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take the trouble of setting down their names, but they were cited as the accused No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and so on. * The Jesuits took their confessions in private."
What room is there in a theology which exacts such holocausts as these to appease the bloody appetites of its priests for the following gentle words:
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." "Even so it is not the will of your Father . . . that one of these little ones should perish." "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
We sincerely hope that the above words have proved no vain threat to these child-burners.
Did this butchery in the name of their Moloch-god prevent these treasure-hunters from resorting to the black art themselves? Not in the least; for in no class were such consulters of "familiar" spirits more numerous than among the clergy during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. True, there were some Catholic priests among the victims, but though these were generally accused of having "been
twelve vicars, four canons, and two doctors of divinity burnt alive. But we have only to turn to such works as were published at the time to assure ourselves that each popish priest executed was accused of "damnable heresy," i.e., a tendency to reformation--a crime more heinous far than sorcery.
We refer those who would learn how the Catholic clergy united duty with pleasure in the matter of exorcisms, revenge, and treasure-hunting, to volume II., chapter i., of W. Howitt's History of the Supernatural. "In the book called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down," says this veteran writer. He then proceeds to give a long description of the favorite modus operandi. The Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie of the late Eliphas Levi, treated with so much abuse and contempt by des Mousseaux, tells nothing of the weird ceremonies and practices but what was practiced legally and with the tacit if not open consent of the Church, by the priests of the middle ages. The exorcist-priest entered a circle at midnight; he was clad in a new surplice, and had a consecrated band hanging from the neck, covered with sacred characters. He wore on the head a tall pointed cap, on the front of which was written in Hebrew the holy word, Tetragrammaton--the ineffable name. It was written with a new pen dipped in the blood of a white dove. What the exorcists most yearned after, was to release miserable spirits which haunt spots where hidden treasures lie. The exorcist sprinkles the circle with the blood of a black lamb and a white pigeon. The priest had to adjure the evil spirits of hell--Acheront, Magoth, Asmodei, Beelzebub, Belial, and all the damned souls, in the mighty names of Jehovah, Adonay, Elohah, and Sabaioth, which latter was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in the Urim and Thummim. When the damned souls flung in the face of the exorcist that he was a sinner, and could not get the treasure from them, the priest-sorcerer had to reply that "all his sins were washed out in the blood of Christ, * and he bid them depart as cursed ghosts and damned flies." When the exorcist dislodged them at last, the poor soul was "comforted in the name of the Saviour, and consigned to the care of good angels," who were less powerful, we must think, than the exorcising Catholic worthies, "and the rescued treasure, of course, was secured for the Church."
"Certain days," adds Howitt, "are laid down in the calendar of the
This is the Church, and this the priesthood, which, in the nineteenth century, pays 5,000 priests to teach the people of the United States the infidelity of science and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome!
We have already noticed the confession of an eminent prelate that the elimination of Satan from theology would be fatal to the perpetuity of the Church. But this is only partially true. The Prince of Sin would be gone, but sin itself would survive. If the Devil were annihilated, the Articles of Faith and the Bible would remain. In short there would still be a pretended divine revelation, and the necessity for self-assumed inspired interpreters. We must, therefore, consider the authenticity of the Bible itself. We must study its pages, and see if they, indeed, contain the commands of the Deity, or but a compendium of ancient traditions and hoary myths. We must try to interpret them for ourselves--if possible. As to its pretended interpreters, the only possible assimilation we can find for them in the Bible is to compare them with the man described by the wise King Solomon in his Proverbs, with the perpetrator of these "six things . . . yea seven . . . which doth the Lord hate," and which are an abomination unto Him, to wit: "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren" (Proverbs vi. 16, 17, 18, 19).
Of which of these accusations are the long line of men who have left the imprint of their feet in the Vatican guiltless?
"When the demons," says Augustine, "insinuate themselves in the creatures, they begin by conforming themselves to the will of every one. . . . In order to attract men, they begin by seducing them, by simulating obedience. . . . How could one know, had he not been taught by the demons themselves, what they like or what they hate; the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience; all this art, in short, of magic, the whole science of the magicians?" *
To this impressive dissertation of the "saint," we will add that no magician has ever denied that he had learned the art from "spirits," whether, being a medium, they acted independently on him, or he had been initiated into the science of "evocation" by his fathers who knew it before himself. But who was it then that taught the exorcist? The priest
devils as soon as he finds them obeying any one but himself? He must have learned somewhere from some one that power which he pretends to possess. For, ". . . how could one know had he not been taught by the demons themselves . . . the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience?" asks Augustine.
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
How strange, that des Mousseaux, who makes such free use of Bodin's materials to construct his formidable indictment against Spiritualists and other sorcerers, should have overlooked this interesting episode!
It is a well-attested fact that Pope Sylvester II. was publicly accused by Cardinal Benno with being a sorcerer and an enchanter. The brazen "oracular head" made by his Holiness was of the same kind as the one fabricated by Albertus Magnus. The latter was smashed to pieces by Thomas Aquinas, not because it was the work of or inhabited by a "demon," but because the spook who was fixed inside, by mesmeric power, talked incessantly, and his verbiage prevented the eloquent saint from working out his mathematical problems. These heads and other talking statues, trophies of the magical skill of monks and bishops, were fac-similes of the "animated" gods of the ancient temples. The accusation against the Pope was proved at the time. It was also demonstrated that he was constantly attended by "demons" or spirits. In the preceding chapter we have mentioned Benedict IX., John XX., and the VIth and VIIth Gregory, who were all known as magicians. The latter Pope, moreover, was the famous Hildebrand, who was said to have
The magical achievements of the Bishop of Ratisbon and those of the "angelic doctor," Thomas Aquinas, are too well known to need repetition; but we may explain farther how the "illusions" of the former were produced. If the Catholic bishop was so clever in making people believe on a bitter winter night that they were enjoying the delights of a splendid summer day, and cause the icicles hanging from the boughs of the trees in the garden to seem like so many tropical fruits, the Hindu magicians also practice such biological powers unto this very day, and claim the assistance of neither god nor devil. Such "miracles" are all produced by the same human power that is inherent in every man, if he only knew how to develop it.
About the time of the Reformation, the study of alchemy and magic had become so prevalent among the clergy as to produce great scandal. Cardinal Wolsey was openly accused before the court and the privy-council of confederacy with a man named Wood, a sorcerer, who said that "My Lord Cardinale had suche a rynge that whatsomevere he askyd of the Kynges grace that he hadd yt"; adding that "Master Cromwell, when he . . . was servaunt in my lord cardynales housse . . . rede many bokes and specyally the boke of Salamon . . . and studied mettells and what vertues they had after the canon of Salamon." This case, with several others equally curious, is to be found among the Cromwell papers in the Record Office of the Rolls House.
A priest named William Stapleton was arrested as a conjurer, during the reign of Henry VIII., and an account of his adventures is still preserved in the Rolls House records. The Sicilian priest whom Benvenuto Cellini calls a necromancer, became famous through his successful conjurations, and was never molested. The remarkable adventure of Cellini with him in the Colosseum, where the priest conjured up a whole host of devils, is well known to the reading public. The subsequent meeting of Cellini with his mistress, as predicted and brought about by the conjurer, at the precise time fixed by him, is to be considered, as a matter of course, a "curious coincidence." In the latter part of the sixteenth century there was hardly a parish to be found in which the priests did not study magic and alchemy. The practice of exorcism to cast out devils "in imitation of Christ," who by the way never used exorcism at all, led the clergy to devote themselves openly to "sacred" magic in contradistinction to black art, of which latter crime were accused all those who were neither priests nor monks.
Scientia Scientiarum, and those whose sins could not be concealed by the friar's frock. The proof of it lies in the records of history. "In the course only of fifteen years, between 1580 to 1595, and only in the single province of Lorraine, the President Remigius burned 900 witches," says Thomas Wright, in his Sorcery and Magic. It was during these days, prolific in ecclesiastical murder and unrivalled for cruelty and ferocity, that Jean Bodin wrote.
While the orthodox clergy called forth whole legions of "demons" through magical incantations, unmolested by the authorities, provided they held fast to the established dogmas and taught no heresy, on the other hand, acts of unparalleled atrocity were perpetrated on poor, unfortunate fools. Gabriel Malagrida, an old man of eighty, was burnt by these evangelical Jack Ketches in 1761. In the Amsterdam library there is a copy of the report of his famous trial, translated from the Lisbon edition. He was accused of sorcery and illicit intercourse with the Devil, who had "disclosed to him futurity." (?) The prophecy imparted by the Arch-Enemy to the poor visionary Jesuit is reported in the following terms: "The culprit hath confessed that the demon, under the form of the blessed Virgin, having commanded him to write the life of Antichrist (?), told him that he, Malagrida, was a second John, but more clear than John the Evangelist; that there were to be three Antichrists, and that the last should be born at Milan, of a monk and a nun, in the year 1920; that he would marry Proserpine, one of the infernal furies," etc.
The prophecy is to be verified forty-three years hence. Even were all the children born of monks and nuns really to become antichrists if allowed to grow up to maturity, the fact would seem far less deplorable than the discoveries made in so many convents when the foundations have been removed for some reason. If the assertion of Luther is to be disbelieved on account of his hatred for popery, then we may name discoveries of the same character made quite recently in Austrian and Russian Poland. Luther speaks of a fish-pond at Rome, situated near a convent of nuns, which, having been cleared out by order of Pope Gregory, disclosed, at the bottom, over six thousand infant skulls; and of a nunnery at Neinburg, in Austria, whose foundations, when searched, disclosed the same relics of celibacy and chastity!
"Ecclesia non novit Sanguinem!" meekly repeated the scarlet-robed cardinals. And to avoid the spilling of blood which horrified them, they instituted the Holy Inquisition. If, as the occultists maintain, and science half confirms, our most trifling acts and thoughts are indelibly impressed
olive branch on one side, and a sword, stained to the hilt with human gore, on the other. A legend selected from the Psalms emblazoned in golden letters, reading thus: "Exurge, Domine, et judica causam meam." For such appears the standard of the Inquisition, on a photograph in our possession, from an original procured at the Escurial of Madrid.
Under this Christian standard, in the brief space of fourteen years, Tomas de Torquemada, the confessor of Queen Isabella, burned over ten thousand persons, and sentenced to the torture eighty thousand more. Orobio, the well-known writer, who was detained so long in prison, and who hardly escaped the flames of the Inquisition, immortalized this institution in his works when once at liberty in Holland. He found no better argument against the Holy Church than to embrace the Judaic faith and submit even to circumcision. "In the cathedral of Saragossa," says a writer on the Inquisition, "is the tomb of a famous inquisitor. Six pillars surround the tomb; to each is chained a Moor, as preparatory to being burned." On this St. Foix ingenuously observes: "If ever the Jack Ketch of any country should be rich enough to have a splendid tomb, this might serve as an excellent model!" To make it complete, however, the builders of the tomb ought not to have omitted a bas-relief of the famous horse which was burnt for sorcery and witchcraft. Granger tells the story, describing it as having occurred in his time. The poor animal "had been taught to tell the spots upon cards, and the hour of the day by the watch. Horse and owner were both indicted by the sacred office for dealing with the Devil, and both were burned, with a great ceremony of auto-da-fe, at Lisbon, in 1601, as wizards!"
This immortal institution of Christianity did not remain without its Dante to sing its praise. "Macedo, a Portuguese Jesuit," says the author of Demonologia, "has discovered the origin of the Inquisition, in the terrestrial Paradise, and presumes to allege that God was the first who began the functions of an inquisitor over Cain and the workmen of Babel!"
Nowhere, during the middle ages, were the arts of magic and sorcery more practiced by the clergy than in Spain and Portugal. The Moors were profoundly versed in the occult sciences, and at Toledo, Seville, and Salamanca, were, once upon a time, the great schools of magic. The kabalists of the latter town were skilled in all the abstruse sciences; they
Friar Pietro, a Dominican monk of the fourteenth century--the magician who presented the famous Dr. Eugenio Torralva, a physician attached to the house of the admiral of Castile, with a demon named Zequiel--won his fame through the subsequent trial of Torralva. The procedure and circumstances attendant upon the extraordinary trial are described in the original papers preserved in the Archives of the Inquisition. The Cardinal of Volterra, and the Cardinal of Santa Cruz, both saw and communicated with Zequiel, who proved, during the whole of Torralva's life, to be a pure, kind, elemental spirit, doing many beneficent actions, and remaining faithful to the physician to the last hour of his life. Even the Inquisition acquitted Torralva, on that account; and, although an immortality of fame was insured to him by the satire of Cervantes, neither Torralva nor the monk Pietro are fictitious heroes, but historical personages, recorded in ecclesiastical documents of Rome and Cuenca,
Regretting that space should prevent our giving one of the most curious lists in the world of burned witches, we will nevertheless make a few extracts from the original record as printed in Hauber's Bibliotheca
IN THE FIRST BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Old Ancker's widow.
The wife of Liebler.
The wife of Gutbrodt.
The wife of Hocker.
IN THE SECOND BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Two strange women (names unknown). The old wife of Beutler.
IN THE THIRD BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
Tungersleber, a minstrel.
Four wives of citizens.
IN THE FOURTH BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
A strange man.
IN THE FIFTH BURNING, NINE PERSONS.
Lutz, an eminent shop-keeper.
The wife of Baunach, a senator.
IN THE SIXTH BURNING, SIX PERSONS.
The fat tailor's wife.
A strange man.
A strange woman.
i.e., Protestants, 28
Citizens, apparently all WEALTHY people, 100
Summary: Boys, girls, and little children, 34
In nineteen months, 162 persons.
"There were," says Wright, "little girls of from seven to ten years of age among the witches, and seven and twenty of them were convicted and burnt," at some of the other brande, or burnings. "The numbers brought to trial in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take the trouble of setting down their names, but they were cited as the accused No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and so on. * The Jesuits took their confessions in private."
What room is there in a theology which exacts such holocausts as these to appease the bloody appetites of its priests for the following gentle words:
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." "Even so it is not the will of your Father . . . that one of these little ones should perish." "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
We sincerely hope that the above words have proved no vain threat to these child-burners.
Did this butchery in the name of their Moloch-god prevent these treasure-hunters from resorting to the black art themselves? Not in the least; for in no class were such consulters of "familiar" spirits more numerous than among the clergy during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. True, there were some Catholic priests among the victims, but though these were generally accused of having "been
twelve vicars, four canons, and two doctors of divinity burnt alive. But we have only to turn to such works as were published at the time to assure ourselves that each popish priest executed was accused of "damnable heresy," i.e., a tendency to reformation--a crime more heinous far than sorcery.
We refer those who would learn how the Catholic clergy united duty with pleasure in the matter of exorcisms, revenge, and treasure-hunting, to volume II., chapter i., of W. Howitt's History of the Supernatural. "In the book called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down," says this veteran writer. He then proceeds to give a long description of the favorite modus operandi. The Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie of the late Eliphas Levi, treated with so much abuse and contempt by des Mousseaux, tells nothing of the weird ceremonies and practices but what was practiced legally and with the tacit if not open consent of the Church, by the priests of the middle ages. The exorcist-priest entered a circle at midnight; he was clad in a new surplice, and had a consecrated band hanging from the neck, covered with sacred characters. He wore on the head a tall pointed cap, on the front of which was written in Hebrew the holy word, Tetragrammaton--the ineffable name. It was written with a new pen dipped in the blood of a white dove. What the exorcists most yearned after, was to release miserable spirits which haunt spots where hidden treasures lie. The exorcist sprinkles the circle with the blood of a black lamb and a white pigeon. The priest had to adjure the evil spirits of hell--Acheront, Magoth, Asmodei, Beelzebub, Belial, and all the damned souls, in the mighty names of Jehovah, Adonay, Elohah, and Sabaioth, which latter was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in the Urim and Thummim. When the damned souls flung in the face of the exorcist that he was a sinner, and could not get the treasure from them, the priest-sorcerer had to reply that "all his sins were washed out in the blood of Christ, * and he bid them depart as cursed ghosts and damned flies." When the exorcist dislodged them at last, the poor soul was "comforted in the name of the Saviour, and consigned to the care of good angels," who were less powerful, we must think, than the exorcising Catholic worthies, "and the rescued treasure, of course, was secured for the Church."
"Certain days," adds Howitt, "are laid down in the calendar of the
This is the Church, and this the priesthood, which, in the nineteenth century, pays 5,000 priests to teach the people of the United States the infidelity of science and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome!
We have already noticed the confession of an eminent prelate that the elimination of Satan from theology would be fatal to the perpetuity of the Church. But this is only partially true. The Prince of Sin would be gone, but sin itself would survive. If the Devil were annihilated, the Articles of Faith and the Bible would remain. In short there would still be a pretended divine revelation, and the necessity for self-assumed inspired interpreters. We must, therefore, consider the authenticity of the Bible itself. We must study its pages, and see if they, indeed, contain the commands of the Deity, or but a compendium of ancient traditions and hoary myths. We must try to interpret them for ourselves--if possible. As to its pretended interpreters, the only possible assimilation we can find for them in the Bible is to compare them with the man described by the wise King Solomon in his Proverbs, with the perpetrator of these "six things . . . yea seven . . . which doth the Lord hate," and which are an abomination unto Him, to wit: "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren" (Proverbs vi. 16, 17, 18, 19).
Of which of these accusations are the long line of men who have left the imprint of their feet in the Vatican guiltless?
"When the demons," says Augustine, "insinuate themselves in the creatures, they begin by conforming themselves to the will of every one. . . . In order to attract men, they begin by seducing them, by simulating obedience. . . . How could one know, had he not been taught by the demons themselves, what they like or what they hate; the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience; all this art, in short, of magic, the whole science of the magicians?" *
To this impressive dissertation of the "saint," we will add that no magician has ever denied that he had learned the art from "spirits," whether, being a medium, they acted independently on him, or he had been initiated into the science of "evocation" by his fathers who knew it before himself. But who was it then that taught the exorcist? The priest
devils as soon as he finds them obeying any one but himself? He must have learned somewhere from some one that power which he pretends to possess. For, ". . . how could one know had he not been taught by the demons themselves . . . the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience?" asks Augustine.
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
The magical achievements of the Bishop of Ratisbon and those of the "angelic doctor," Thomas Aquinas, are too well known to need repetition; but we may explain farther how the "illusions" of the former were produced. If the Catholic bishop was so clever in making people believe on a bitter winter night that they were enjoying the delights of a splendid summer day, and cause the icicles hanging from the boughs of the trees in the garden to seem like so many tropical fruits, the Hindu magicians also practice such biological powers unto this very day, and claim the assistance of neither god nor devil. Such "miracles" are all produced by the same human power that is inherent in every man, if he only knew how to develop it.
About the time of the Reformation, the study of alchemy and magic had become so prevalent among the clergy as to produce great scandal. Cardinal Wolsey was openly accused before the court and the privy-council of confederacy with a man named Wood, a sorcerer, who said that "My Lord Cardinale had suche a rynge that whatsomevere he askyd of the Kynges grace that he hadd yt"; adding that "Master Cromwell, when he . . . was servaunt in my lord cardynales housse . . . rede many bokes and specyally the boke of Salamon . . . and studied mettells and what vertues they had after the canon of Salamon." This case, with several others equally curious, is to be found among the Cromwell papers in the Record Office of the Rolls House.
A priest named William Stapleton was arrested as a conjurer, during the reign of Henry VIII., and an account of his adventures is still preserved in the Rolls House records. The Sicilian priest whom Benvenuto Cellini calls a necromancer, became famous through his successful conjurations, and was never molested. The remarkable adventure of Cellini with him in the Colosseum, where the priest conjured up a whole host of devils, is well known to the reading public. The subsequent meeting of Cellini with his mistress, as predicted and brought about by the conjurer, at the precise time fixed by him, is to be considered, as a matter of course, a "curious coincidence." In the latter part of the sixteenth century there was hardly a parish to be found in which the priests did not study magic and alchemy. The practice of exorcism to cast out devils "in imitation of Christ," who by the way never used exorcism at all, led the clergy to devote themselves openly to "sacred" magic in contradistinction to black art, of which latter crime were accused all those who were neither priests nor monks.
Scientia Scientiarum, and those whose sins could not be concealed by the friar's frock. The proof of it lies in the records of history. "In the course only of fifteen years, between 1580 to 1595, and only in the single province of Lorraine, the President Remigius burned 900 witches," says Thomas Wright, in his Sorcery and Magic. It was during these days, prolific in ecclesiastical murder and unrivalled for cruelty and ferocity, that Jean Bodin wrote.
While the orthodox clergy called forth whole legions of "demons" through magical incantations, unmolested by the authorities, provided they held fast to the established dogmas and taught no heresy, on the other hand, acts of unparalleled atrocity were perpetrated on poor, unfortunate fools. Gabriel Malagrida, an old man of eighty, was burnt by these evangelical Jack Ketches in 1761. In the Amsterdam library there is a copy of the report of his famous trial, translated from the Lisbon edition. He was accused of sorcery and illicit intercourse with the Devil, who had "disclosed to him futurity." (?) The prophecy imparted by the Arch-Enemy to the poor visionary Jesuit is reported in the following terms: "The culprit hath confessed that the demon, under the form of the blessed Virgin, having commanded him to write the life of Antichrist (?), told him that he, Malagrida, was a second John, but more clear than John the Evangelist; that there were to be three Antichrists, and that the last should be born at Milan, of a monk and a nun, in the year 1920; that he would marry Proserpine, one of the infernal furies," etc.
The prophecy is to be verified forty-three years hence. Even were all the children born of monks and nuns really to become antichrists if allowed to grow up to maturity, the fact would seem far less deplorable than the discoveries made in so many convents when the foundations have been removed for some reason. If the assertion of Luther is to be disbelieved on account of his hatred for popery, then we may name discoveries of the same character made quite recently in Austrian and Russian Poland. Luther speaks of a fish-pond at Rome, situated near a convent of nuns, which, having been cleared out by order of Pope Gregory, disclosed, at the bottom, over six thousand infant skulls; and of a nunnery at Neinburg, in Austria, whose foundations, when searched, disclosed the same relics of celibacy and chastity!
"Ecclesia non novit Sanguinem!" meekly repeated the scarlet-robed cardinals. And to avoid the spilling of blood which horrified them, they instituted the Holy Inquisition. If, as the occultists maintain, and science half confirms, our most trifling acts and thoughts are indelibly impressed
olive branch on one side, and a sword, stained to the hilt with human gore, on the other. A legend selected from the Psalms emblazoned in golden letters, reading thus: "Exurge, Domine, et judica causam meam." For such appears the standard of the Inquisition, on a photograph in our possession, from an original procured at the Escurial of Madrid.
Under this Christian standard, in the brief space of fourteen years, Tomas de Torquemada, the confessor of Queen Isabella, burned over ten thousand persons, and sentenced to the torture eighty thousand more. Orobio, the well-known writer, who was detained so long in prison, and who hardly escaped the flames of the Inquisition, immortalized this institution in his works when once at liberty in Holland. He found no better argument against the Holy Church than to embrace the Judaic faith and submit even to circumcision. "In the cathedral of Saragossa," says a writer on the Inquisition, "is the tomb of a famous inquisitor. Six pillars surround the tomb; to each is chained a Moor, as preparatory to being burned." On this St. Foix ingenuously observes: "If ever the Jack Ketch of any country should be rich enough to have a splendid tomb, this might serve as an excellent model!" To make it complete, however, the builders of the tomb ought not to have omitted a bas-relief of the famous horse which was burnt for sorcery and witchcraft. Granger tells the story, describing it as having occurred in his time. The poor animal "had been taught to tell the spots upon cards, and the hour of the day by the watch. Horse and owner were both indicted by the sacred office for dealing with the Devil, and both were burned, with a great ceremony of auto-da-fe, at Lisbon, in 1601, as wizards!"
This immortal institution of Christianity did not remain without its Dante to sing its praise. "Macedo, a Portuguese Jesuit," says the author of Demonologia, "has discovered the origin of the Inquisition, in the terrestrial Paradise, and presumes to allege that God was the first who began the functions of an inquisitor over Cain and the workmen of Babel!"
Nowhere, during the middle ages, were the arts of magic and sorcery more practiced by the clergy than in Spain and Portugal. The Moors were profoundly versed in the occult sciences, and at Toledo, Seville, and Salamanca, were, once upon a time, the great schools of magic. The kabalists of the latter town were skilled in all the abstruse sciences; they
Friar Pietro, a Dominican monk of the fourteenth century--the magician who presented the famous Dr. Eugenio Torralva, a physician attached to the house of the admiral of Castile, with a demon named Zequiel--won his fame through the subsequent trial of Torralva. The procedure and circumstances attendant upon the extraordinary trial are described in the original papers preserved in the Archives of the Inquisition. The Cardinal of Volterra, and the Cardinal of Santa Cruz, both saw and communicated with Zequiel, who proved, during the whole of Torralva's life, to be a pure, kind, elemental spirit, doing many beneficent actions, and remaining faithful to the physician to the last hour of his life. Even the Inquisition acquitted Torralva, on that account; and, although an immortality of fame was insured to him by the satire of Cervantes, neither Torralva nor the monk Pietro are fictitious heroes, but historical personages, recorded in ecclesiastical documents of Rome and Cuenca,
Regretting that space should prevent our giving one of the most curious lists in the world of burned witches, we will nevertheless make a few extracts from the original record as printed in Hauber's Bibliotheca
IN THE FIRST BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Old Ancker's widow.
The wife of Liebler.
The wife of Gutbrodt.
The wife of Hocker.
IN THE SECOND BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Two strange women (names unknown). The old wife of Beutler.
IN THE THIRD BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
Tungersleber, a minstrel.
Four wives of citizens.
IN THE FOURTH BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
A strange man.
IN THE FIFTH BURNING, NINE PERSONS.
Lutz, an eminent shop-keeper.
The wife of Baunach, a senator.
IN THE SIXTH BURNING, SIX PERSONS.
The fat tailor's wife.
A strange man.
A strange woman.
i.e., Protestants, 28
Citizens, apparently all WEALTHY people, 100
Summary: Boys, girls, and little children, 34
In nineteen months, 162 persons.
"There were," says Wright, "little girls of from seven to ten years of age among the witches, and seven and twenty of them were convicted and burnt," at some of the other brande, or burnings. "The numbers brought to trial in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take the trouble of setting down their names, but they were cited as the accused No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and so on. * The Jesuits took their confessions in private."
What room is there in a theology which exacts such holocausts as these to appease the bloody appetites of its priests for the following gentle words:
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." "Even so it is not the will of your Father . . . that one of these little ones should perish." "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
We sincerely hope that the above words have proved no vain threat to these child-burners.
Did this butchery in the name of their Moloch-god prevent these treasure-hunters from resorting to the black art themselves? Not in the least; for in no class were such consulters of "familiar" spirits more numerous than among the clergy during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. True, there were some Catholic priests among the victims, but though these were generally accused of having "been
twelve vicars, four canons, and two doctors of divinity burnt alive. But we have only to turn to such works as were published at the time to assure ourselves that each popish priest executed was accused of "damnable heresy," i.e., a tendency to reformation--a crime more heinous far than sorcery.
We refer those who would learn how the Catholic clergy united duty with pleasure in the matter of exorcisms, revenge, and treasure-hunting, to volume II., chapter i., of W. Howitt's History of the Supernatural. "In the book called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down," says this veteran writer. He then proceeds to give a long description of the favorite modus operandi. The Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie of the late Eliphas Levi, treated with so much abuse and contempt by des Mousseaux, tells nothing of the weird ceremonies and practices but what was practiced legally and with the tacit if not open consent of the Church, by the priests of the middle ages. The exorcist-priest entered a circle at midnight; he was clad in a new surplice, and had a consecrated band hanging from the neck, covered with sacred characters. He wore on the head a tall pointed cap, on the front of which was written in Hebrew the holy word, Tetragrammaton--the ineffable name. It was written with a new pen dipped in the blood of a white dove. What the exorcists most yearned after, was to release miserable spirits which haunt spots where hidden treasures lie. The exorcist sprinkles the circle with the blood of a black lamb and a white pigeon. The priest had to adjure the evil spirits of hell--Acheront, Magoth, Asmodei, Beelzebub, Belial, and all the damned souls, in the mighty names of Jehovah, Adonay, Elohah, and Sabaioth, which latter was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in the Urim and Thummim. When the damned souls flung in the face of the exorcist that he was a sinner, and could not get the treasure from them, the priest-sorcerer had to reply that "all his sins were washed out in the blood of Christ, * and he bid them depart as cursed ghosts and damned flies." When the exorcist dislodged them at last, the poor soul was "comforted in the name of the Saviour, and consigned to the care of good angels," who were less powerful, we must think, than the exorcising Catholic worthies, "and the rescued treasure, of course, was secured for the Church."
"Certain days," adds Howitt, "are laid down in the calendar of the
This is the Church, and this the priesthood, which, in the nineteenth century, pays 5,000 priests to teach the people of the United States the infidelity of science and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome!
We have already noticed the confession of an eminent prelate that the elimination of Satan from theology would be fatal to the perpetuity of the Church. But this is only partially true. The Prince of Sin would be gone, but sin itself would survive. If the Devil were annihilated, the Articles of Faith and the Bible would remain. In short there would still be a pretended divine revelation, and the necessity for self-assumed inspired interpreters. We must, therefore, consider the authenticity of the Bible itself. We must study its pages, and see if they, indeed, contain the commands of the Deity, or but a compendium of ancient traditions and hoary myths. We must try to interpret them for ourselves--if possible. As to its pretended interpreters, the only possible assimilation we can find for them in the Bible is to compare them with the man described by the wise King Solomon in his Proverbs, with the perpetrator of these "six things . . . yea seven . . . which doth the Lord hate," and which are an abomination unto Him, to wit: "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren" (Proverbs vi. 16, 17, 18, 19).
Of which of these accusations are the long line of men who have left the imprint of their feet in the Vatican guiltless?
"When the demons," says Augustine, "insinuate themselves in the creatures, they begin by conforming themselves to the will of every one. . . . In order to attract men, they begin by seducing them, by simulating obedience. . . . How could one know, had he not been taught by the demons themselves, what they like or what they hate; the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience; all this art, in short, of magic, the whole science of the magicians?" *
To this impressive dissertation of the "saint," we will add that no magician has ever denied that he had learned the art from "spirits," whether, being a medium, they acted independently on him, or he had been initiated into the science of "evocation" by his fathers who knew it before himself. But who was it then that taught the exorcist? The priest
devils as soon as he finds them obeying any one but himself? He must have learned somewhere from some one that power which he pretends to possess. For, ". . . how could one know had he not been taught by the demons themselves . . . the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience?" asks Augustine.
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
While the orthodox clergy called forth whole legions of "demons" through magical incantations, unmolested by the authorities, provided they held fast to the established dogmas and taught no heresy, on the other hand, acts of unparalleled atrocity were perpetrated on poor, unfortunate fools. Gabriel Malagrida, an old man of eighty, was burnt by these evangelical Jack Ketches in 1761. In the Amsterdam library there is a copy of the report of his famous trial, translated from the Lisbon edition. He was accused of sorcery and illicit intercourse with the Devil, who had "disclosed to him futurity." (?) The prophecy imparted by the Arch-Enemy to the poor visionary Jesuit is reported in the following terms: "The culprit hath confessed that the demon, under the form of the blessed Virgin, having commanded him to write the life of Antichrist (?), told him that he, Malagrida, was a second John, but more clear than John the Evangelist; that there were to be three Antichrists, and that the last should be born at Milan, of a monk and a nun, in the year 1920; that he would marry Proserpine, one of the infernal furies," etc.
The prophecy is to be verified forty-three years hence. Even were all the children born of monks and nuns really to become antichrists if allowed to grow up to maturity, the fact would seem far less deplorable than the discoveries made in so many convents when the foundations have been removed for some reason. If the assertion of Luther is to be disbelieved on account of his hatred for popery, then we may name discoveries of the same character made quite recently in Austrian and Russian Poland. Luther speaks of a fish-pond at Rome, situated near a convent of nuns, which, having been cleared out by order of Pope Gregory, disclosed, at the bottom, over six thousand infant skulls; and of a nunnery at Neinburg, in Austria, whose foundations, when searched, disclosed the same relics of celibacy and chastity!
"Ecclesia non novit Sanguinem!" meekly repeated the scarlet-robed cardinals. And to avoid the spilling of blood which horrified them, they instituted the Holy Inquisition. If, as the occultists maintain, and science half confirms, our most trifling acts and thoughts are indelibly impressed
olive branch on one side, and a sword, stained to the hilt with human gore, on the other. A legend selected from the Psalms emblazoned in golden letters, reading thus: "Exurge, Domine, et judica causam meam." For such appears the standard of the Inquisition, on a photograph in our possession, from an original procured at the Escurial of Madrid.
Under this Christian standard, in the brief space of fourteen years, Tomas de Torquemada, the confessor of Queen Isabella, burned over ten thousand persons, and sentenced to the torture eighty thousand more. Orobio, the well-known writer, who was detained so long in prison, and who hardly escaped the flames of the Inquisition, immortalized this institution in his works when once at liberty in Holland. He found no better argument against the Holy Church than to embrace the Judaic faith and submit even to circumcision. "In the cathedral of Saragossa," says a writer on the Inquisition, "is the tomb of a famous inquisitor. Six pillars surround the tomb; to each is chained a Moor, as preparatory to being burned." On this St. Foix ingenuously observes: "If ever the Jack Ketch of any country should be rich enough to have a splendid tomb, this might serve as an excellent model!" To make it complete, however, the builders of the tomb ought not to have omitted a bas-relief of the famous horse which was burnt for sorcery and witchcraft. Granger tells the story, describing it as having occurred in his time. The poor animal "had been taught to tell the spots upon cards, and the hour of the day by the watch. Horse and owner were both indicted by the sacred office for dealing with the Devil, and both were burned, with a great ceremony of auto-da-fe, at Lisbon, in 1601, as wizards!"
This immortal institution of Christianity did not remain without its Dante to sing its praise. "Macedo, a Portuguese Jesuit," says the author of Demonologia, "has discovered the origin of the Inquisition, in the terrestrial Paradise, and presumes to allege that God was the first who began the functions of an inquisitor over Cain and the workmen of Babel!"
Nowhere, during the middle ages, were the arts of magic and sorcery more practiced by the clergy than in Spain and Portugal. The Moors were profoundly versed in the occult sciences, and at Toledo, Seville, and Salamanca, were, once upon a time, the great schools of magic. The kabalists of the latter town were skilled in all the abstruse sciences; they
Friar Pietro, a Dominican monk of the fourteenth century--the magician who presented the famous Dr. Eugenio Torralva, a physician attached to the house of the admiral of Castile, with a demon named Zequiel--won his fame through the subsequent trial of Torralva. The procedure and circumstances attendant upon the extraordinary trial are described in the original papers preserved in the Archives of the Inquisition. The Cardinal of Volterra, and the Cardinal of Santa Cruz, both saw and communicated with Zequiel, who proved, during the whole of Torralva's life, to be a pure, kind, elemental spirit, doing many beneficent actions, and remaining faithful to the physician to the last hour of his life. Even the Inquisition acquitted Torralva, on that account; and, although an immortality of fame was insured to him by the satire of Cervantes, neither Torralva nor the monk Pietro are fictitious heroes, but historical personages, recorded in ecclesiastical documents of Rome and Cuenca,
Regretting that space should prevent our giving one of the most curious lists in the world of burned witches, we will nevertheless make a few extracts from the original record as printed in Hauber's Bibliotheca
IN THE FIRST BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Old Ancker's widow.
The wife of Liebler.
The wife of Gutbrodt.
The wife of Hocker.
IN THE SECOND BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Two strange women (names unknown). The old wife of Beutler.
IN THE THIRD BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
Tungersleber, a minstrel.
Four wives of citizens.
IN THE FOURTH BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
A strange man.
IN THE FIFTH BURNING, NINE PERSONS.
Lutz, an eminent shop-keeper.
The wife of Baunach, a senator.
IN THE SIXTH BURNING, SIX PERSONS.
The fat tailor's wife.
A strange man.
A strange woman.
i.e., Protestants, 28
Citizens, apparently all WEALTHY people, 100
Summary: Boys, girls, and little children, 34
In nineteen months, 162 persons.
"There were," says Wright, "little girls of from seven to ten years of age among the witches, and seven and twenty of them were convicted and burnt," at some of the other brande, or burnings. "The numbers brought to trial in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take the trouble of setting down their names, but they were cited as the accused No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and so on. * The Jesuits took their confessions in private."
What room is there in a theology which exacts such holocausts as these to appease the bloody appetites of its priests for the following gentle words:
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." "Even so it is not the will of your Father . . . that one of these little ones should perish." "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
We sincerely hope that the above words have proved no vain threat to these child-burners.
Did this butchery in the name of their Moloch-god prevent these treasure-hunters from resorting to the black art themselves? Not in the least; for in no class were such consulters of "familiar" spirits more numerous than among the clergy during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. True, there were some Catholic priests among the victims, but though these were generally accused of having "been
twelve vicars, four canons, and two doctors of divinity burnt alive. But we have only to turn to such works as were published at the time to assure ourselves that each popish priest executed was accused of "damnable heresy," i.e., a tendency to reformation--a crime more heinous far than sorcery.
We refer those who would learn how the Catholic clergy united duty with pleasure in the matter of exorcisms, revenge, and treasure-hunting, to volume II., chapter i., of W. Howitt's History of the Supernatural. "In the book called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down," says this veteran writer. He then proceeds to give a long description of the favorite modus operandi. The Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie of the late Eliphas Levi, treated with so much abuse and contempt by des Mousseaux, tells nothing of the weird ceremonies and practices but what was practiced legally and with the tacit if not open consent of the Church, by the priests of the middle ages. The exorcist-priest entered a circle at midnight; he was clad in a new surplice, and had a consecrated band hanging from the neck, covered with sacred characters. He wore on the head a tall pointed cap, on the front of which was written in Hebrew the holy word, Tetragrammaton--the ineffable name. It was written with a new pen dipped in the blood of a white dove. What the exorcists most yearned after, was to release miserable spirits which haunt spots where hidden treasures lie. The exorcist sprinkles the circle with the blood of a black lamb and a white pigeon. The priest had to adjure the evil spirits of hell--Acheront, Magoth, Asmodei, Beelzebub, Belial, and all the damned souls, in the mighty names of Jehovah, Adonay, Elohah, and Sabaioth, which latter was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in the Urim and Thummim. When the damned souls flung in the face of the exorcist that he was a sinner, and could not get the treasure from them, the priest-sorcerer had to reply that "all his sins were washed out in the blood of Christ, * and he bid them depart as cursed ghosts and damned flies." When the exorcist dislodged them at last, the poor soul was "comforted in the name of the Saviour, and consigned to the care of good angels," who were less powerful, we must think, than the exorcising Catholic worthies, "and the rescued treasure, of course, was secured for the Church."
"Certain days," adds Howitt, "are laid down in the calendar of the
This is the Church, and this the priesthood, which, in the nineteenth century, pays 5,000 priests to teach the people of the United States the infidelity of science and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome!
We have already noticed the confession of an eminent prelate that the elimination of Satan from theology would be fatal to the perpetuity of the Church. But this is only partially true. The Prince of Sin would be gone, but sin itself would survive. If the Devil were annihilated, the Articles of Faith and the Bible would remain. In short there would still be a pretended divine revelation, and the necessity for self-assumed inspired interpreters. We must, therefore, consider the authenticity of the Bible itself. We must study its pages, and see if they, indeed, contain the commands of the Deity, or but a compendium of ancient traditions and hoary myths. We must try to interpret them for ourselves--if possible. As to its pretended interpreters, the only possible assimilation we can find for them in the Bible is to compare them with the man described by the wise King Solomon in his Proverbs, with the perpetrator of these "six things . . . yea seven . . . which doth the Lord hate," and which are an abomination unto Him, to wit: "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren" (Proverbs vi. 16, 17, 18, 19).
Of which of these accusations are the long line of men who have left the imprint of their feet in the Vatican guiltless?
"When the demons," says Augustine, "insinuate themselves in the creatures, they begin by conforming themselves to the will of every one. . . . In order to attract men, they begin by seducing them, by simulating obedience. . . . How could one know, had he not been taught by the demons themselves, what they like or what they hate; the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience; all this art, in short, of magic, the whole science of the magicians?" *
To this impressive dissertation of the "saint," we will add that no magician has ever denied that he had learned the art from "spirits," whether, being a medium, they acted independently on him, or he had been initiated into the science of "evocation" by his fathers who knew it before himself. But who was it then that taught the exorcist? The priest
devils as soon as he finds them obeying any one but himself? He must have learned somewhere from some one that power which he pretends to possess. For, ". . . how could one know had he not been taught by the demons themselves . . . the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience?" asks Augustine.
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Under this Christian standard, in the brief space of fourteen years, Tomas de Torquemada, the confessor of Queen Isabella, burned over ten thousand persons, and sentenced to the torture eighty thousand more. Orobio, the well-known writer, who was detained so long in prison, and who hardly escaped the flames of the Inquisition, immortalized this institution in his works when once at liberty in Holland. He found no better argument against the Holy Church than to embrace the Judaic faith and submit even to circumcision. "In the cathedral of Saragossa," says a writer on the Inquisition, "is the tomb of a famous inquisitor. Six pillars surround the tomb; to each is chained a Moor, as preparatory to being burned." On this St. Foix ingenuously observes: "If ever the Jack Ketch of any country should be rich enough to have a splendid tomb, this might serve as an excellent model!" To make it complete, however, the builders of the tomb ought not to have omitted a bas-relief of the famous horse which was burnt for sorcery and witchcraft. Granger tells the story, describing it as having occurred in his time. The poor animal "had been taught to tell the spots upon cards, and the hour of the day by the watch. Horse and owner were both indicted by the sacred office for dealing with the Devil, and both were burned, with a great ceremony of auto-da-fe, at Lisbon, in 1601, as wizards!"
This immortal institution of Christianity did not remain without its Dante to sing its praise. "Macedo, a Portuguese Jesuit," says the author of Demonologia, "has discovered the origin of the Inquisition, in the terrestrial Paradise, and presumes to allege that God was the first who began the functions of an inquisitor over Cain and the workmen of Babel!"
Nowhere, during the middle ages, were the arts of magic and sorcery more practiced by the clergy than in Spain and Portugal. The Moors were profoundly versed in the occult sciences, and at Toledo, Seville, and Salamanca, were, once upon a time, the great schools of magic. The kabalists of the latter town were skilled in all the abstruse sciences; they
Friar Pietro, a Dominican monk of the fourteenth century--the magician who presented the famous Dr. Eugenio Torralva, a physician attached to the house of the admiral of Castile, with a demon named Zequiel--won his fame through the subsequent trial of Torralva. The procedure and circumstances attendant upon the extraordinary trial are described in the original papers preserved in the Archives of the Inquisition. The Cardinal of Volterra, and the Cardinal of Santa Cruz, both saw and communicated with Zequiel, who proved, during the whole of Torralva's life, to be a pure, kind, elemental spirit, doing many beneficent actions, and remaining faithful to the physician to the last hour of his life. Even the Inquisition acquitted Torralva, on that account; and, although an immortality of fame was insured to him by the satire of Cervantes, neither Torralva nor the monk Pietro are fictitious heroes, but historical personages, recorded in ecclesiastical documents of Rome and Cuenca,
Regretting that space should prevent our giving one of the most curious lists in the world of burned witches, we will nevertheless make a few extracts from the original record as printed in Hauber's Bibliotheca
IN THE FIRST BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Old Ancker's widow.
The wife of Liebler.
The wife of Gutbrodt.
The wife of Hocker.
IN THE SECOND BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Two strange women (names unknown). The old wife of Beutler.
IN THE THIRD BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
Tungersleber, a minstrel.
Four wives of citizens.
IN THE FOURTH BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
A strange man.
IN THE FIFTH BURNING, NINE PERSONS.
Lutz, an eminent shop-keeper.
The wife of Baunach, a senator.
IN THE SIXTH BURNING, SIX PERSONS.
The fat tailor's wife.
A strange man.
A strange woman.
i.e., Protestants, 28
Citizens, apparently all WEALTHY people, 100
Summary: Boys, girls, and little children, 34
In nineteen months, 162 persons.
"There were," says Wright, "little girls of from seven to ten years of age among the witches, and seven and twenty of them were convicted and burnt," at some of the other brande, or burnings. "The numbers brought to trial in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take the trouble of setting down their names, but they were cited as the accused No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and so on. * The Jesuits took their confessions in private."
What room is there in a theology which exacts such holocausts as these to appease the bloody appetites of its priests for the following gentle words:
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." "Even so it is not the will of your Father . . . that one of these little ones should perish." "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
We sincerely hope that the above words have proved no vain threat to these child-burners.
Did this butchery in the name of their Moloch-god prevent these treasure-hunters from resorting to the black art themselves? Not in the least; for in no class were such consulters of "familiar" spirits more numerous than among the clergy during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. True, there were some Catholic priests among the victims, but though these were generally accused of having "been
twelve vicars, four canons, and two doctors of divinity burnt alive. But we have only to turn to such works as were published at the time to assure ourselves that each popish priest executed was accused of "damnable heresy," i.e., a tendency to reformation--a crime more heinous far than sorcery.
We refer those who would learn how the Catholic clergy united duty with pleasure in the matter of exorcisms, revenge, and treasure-hunting, to volume II., chapter i., of W. Howitt's History of the Supernatural. "In the book called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down," says this veteran writer. He then proceeds to give a long description of the favorite modus operandi. The Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie of the late Eliphas Levi, treated with so much abuse and contempt by des Mousseaux, tells nothing of the weird ceremonies and practices but what was practiced legally and with the tacit if not open consent of the Church, by the priests of the middle ages. The exorcist-priest entered a circle at midnight; he was clad in a new surplice, and had a consecrated band hanging from the neck, covered with sacred characters. He wore on the head a tall pointed cap, on the front of which was written in Hebrew the holy word, Tetragrammaton--the ineffable name. It was written with a new pen dipped in the blood of a white dove. What the exorcists most yearned after, was to release miserable spirits which haunt spots where hidden treasures lie. The exorcist sprinkles the circle with the blood of a black lamb and a white pigeon. The priest had to adjure the evil spirits of hell--Acheront, Magoth, Asmodei, Beelzebub, Belial, and all the damned souls, in the mighty names of Jehovah, Adonay, Elohah, and Sabaioth, which latter was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in the Urim and Thummim. When the damned souls flung in the face of the exorcist that he was a sinner, and could not get the treasure from them, the priest-sorcerer had to reply that "all his sins were washed out in the blood of Christ, * and he bid them depart as cursed ghosts and damned flies." When the exorcist dislodged them at last, the poor soul was "comforted in the name of the Saviour, and consigned to the care of good angels," who were less powerful, we must think, than the exorcising Catholic worthies, "and the rescued treasure, of course, was secured for the Church."
"Certain days," adds Howitt, "are laid down in the calendar of the
This is the Church, and this the priesthood, which, in the nineteenth century, pays 5,000 priests to teach the people of the United States the infidelity of science and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome!
We have already noticed the confession of an eminent prelate that the elimination of Satan from theology would be fatal to the perpetuity of the Church. But this is only partially true. The Prince of Sin would be gone, but sin itself would survive. If the Devil were annihilated, the Articles of Faith and the Bible would remain. In short there would still be a pretended divine revelation, and the necessity for self-assumed inspired interpreters. We must, therefore, consider the authenticity of the Bible itself. We must study its pages, and see if they, indeed, contain the commands of the Deity, or but a compendium of ancient traditions and hoary myths. We must try to interpret them for ourselves--if possible. As to its pretended interpreters, the only possible assimilation we can find for them in the Bible is to compare them with the man described by the wise King Solomon in his Proverbs, with the perpetrator of these "six things . . . yea seven . . . which doth the Lord hate," and which are an abomination unto Him, to wit: "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren" (Proverbs vi. 16, 17, 18, 19).
Of which of these accusations are the long line of men who have left the imprint of their feet in the Vatican guiltless?
"When the demons," says Augustine, "insinuate themselves in the creatures, they begin by conforming themselves to the will of every one. . . . In order to attract men, they begin by seducing them, by simulating obedience. . . . How could one know, had he not been taught by the demons themselves, what they like or what they hate; the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience; all this art, in short, of magic, the whole science of the magicians?" *
To this impressive dissertation of the "saint," we will add that no magician has ever denied that he had learned the art from "spirits," whether, being a medium, they acted independently on him, or he had been initiated into the science of "evocation" by his fathers who knew it before himself. But who was it then that taught the exorcist? The priest
devils as soon as he finds them obeying any one but himself? He must have learned somewhere from some one that power which he pretends to possess. For, ". . . how could one know had he not been taught by the demons themselves . . . the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience?" asks Augustine.
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Friar Pietro, a Dominican monk of the fourteenth century--the magician who presented the famous Dr. Eugenio Torralva, a physician attached to the house of the admiral of Castile, with a demon named Zequiel--won his fame through the subsequent trial of Torralva. The procedure and circumstances attendant upon the extraordinary trial are described in the original papers preserved in the Archives of the Inquisition. The Cardinal of Volterra, and the Cardinal of Santa Cruz, both saw and communicated with Zequiel, who proved, during the whole of Torralva's life, to be a pure, kind, elemental spirit, doing many beneficent actions, and remaining faithful to the physician to the last hour of his life. Even the Inquisition acquitted Torralva, on that account; and, although an immortality of fame was insured to him by the satire of Cervantes, neither Torralva nor the monk Pietro are fictitious heroes, but historical personages, recorded in ecclesiastical documents of Rome and Cuenca,
Regretting that space should prevent our giving one of the most curious lists in the world of burned witches, we will nevertheless make a few extracts from the original record as printed in Hauber's Bibliotheca
IN THE FIRST BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Old Ancker's widow.
The wife of Liebler.
The wife of Gutbrodt.
The wife of Hocker.
IN THE SECOND BURNING, FOUR PERSONS.
Two strange women (names unknown). The old wife of Beutler.
IN THE THIRD BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
Tungersleber, a minstrel.
Four wives of citizens.
IN THE FOURTH BURNING, FIVE PERSONS.
A strange man.
IN THE FIFTH BURNING, NINE PERSONS.
Lutz, an eminent shop-keeper.
The wife of Baunach, a senator.
IN THE SIXTH BURNING, SIX PERSONS.
The fat tailor's wife.
A strange man.
A strange woman.
i.e., Protestants, 28
Citizens, apparently all WEALTHY people, 100
Summary: Boys, girls, and little children, 34
In nineteen months, 162 persons.
"There were," says Wright, "little girls of from seven to ten years of age among the witches, and seven and twenty of them were convicted and burnt," at some of the other brande, or burnings. "The numbers brought to trial in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take the trouble of setting down their names, but they were cited as the accused No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and so on. * The Jesuits took their confessions in private."
What room is there in a theology which exacts such holocausts as these to appease the bloody appetites of its priests for the following gentle words:
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." "Even so it is not the will of your Father . . . that one of these little ones should perish." "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
We sincerely hope that the above words have proved no vain threat to these child-burners.
Did this butchery in the name of their Moloch-god prevent these treasure-hunters from resorting to the black art themselves? Not in the least; for in no class were such consulters of "familiar" spirits more numerous than among the clergy during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. True, there were some Catholic priests among the victims, but though these were generally accused of having "been
twelve vicars, four canons, and two doctors of divinity burnt alive. But we have only to turn to such works as were published at the time to assure ourselves that each popish priest executed was accused of "damnable heresy," i.e., a tendency to reformation--a crime more heinous far than sorcery.
We refer those who would learn how the Catholic clergy united duty with pleasure in the matter of exorcisms, revenge, and treasure-hunting, to volume II., chapter i., of W. Howitt's History of the Supernatural. "In the book called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down," says this veteran writer. He then proceeds to give a long description of the favorite modus operandi. The Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie of the late Eliphas Levi, treated with so much abuse and contempt by des Mousseaux, tells nothing of the weird ceremonies and practices but what was practiced legally and with the tacit if not open consent of the Church, by the priests of the middle ages. The exorcist-priest entered a circle at midnight; he was clad in a new surplice, and had a consecrated band hanging from the neck, covered with sacred characters. He wore on the head a tall pointed cap, on the front of which was written in Hebrew the holy word, Tetragrammaton--the ineffable name. It was written with a new pen dipped in the blood of a white dove. What the exorcists most yearned after, was to release miserable spirits which haunt spots where hidden treasures lie. The exorcist sprinkles the circle with the blood of a black lamb and a white pigeon. The priest had to adjure the evil spirits of hell--Acheront, Magoth, Asmodei, Beelzebub, Belial, and all the damned souls, in the mighty names of Jehovah, Adonay, Elohah, and Sabaioth, which latter was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in the Urim and Thummim. When the damned souls flung in the face of the exorcist that he was a sinner, and could not get the treasure from them, the priest-sorcerer had to reply that "all his sins were washed out in the blood of Christ, * and he bid them depart as cursed ghosts and damned flies." When the exorcist dislodged them at last, the poor soul was "comforted in the name of the Saviour, and consigned to the care of good angels," who were less powerful, we must think, than the exorcising Catholic worthies, "and the rescued treasure, of course, was secured for the Church."
"Certain days," adds Howitt, "are laid down in the calendar of the
This is the Church, and this the priesthood, which, in the nineteenth century, pays 5,000 priests to teach the people of the United States the infidelity of science and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome!
We have already noticed the confession of an eminent prelate that the elimination of Satan from theology would be fatal to the perpetuity of the Church. But this is only partially true. The Prince of Sin would be gone, but sin itself would survive. If the Devil were annihilated, the Articles of Faith and the Bible would remain. In short there would still be a pretended divine revelation, and the necessity for self-assumed inspired interpreters. We must, therefore, consider the authenticity of the Bible itself. We must study its pages, and see if they, indeed, contain the commands of the Deity, or but a compendium of ancient traditions and hoary myths. We must try to interpret them for ourselves--if possible. As to its pretended interpreters, the only possible assimilation we can find for them in the Bible is to compare them with the man described by the wise King Solomon in his Proverbs, with the perpetrator of these "six things . . . yea seven . . . which doth the Lord hate," and which are an abomination unto Him, to wit: "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren" (Proverbs vi. 16, 17, 18, 19).
Of which of these accusations are the long line of men who have left the imprint of their feet in the Vatican guiltless?
"When the demons," says Augustine, "insinuate themselves in the creatures, they begin by conforming themselves to the will of every one. . . . In order to attract men, they begin by seducing them, by simulating obedience. . . . How could one know, had he not been taught by the demons themselves, what they like or what they hate; the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience; all this art, in short, of magic, the whole science of the magicians?" *
To this impressive dissertation of the "saint," we will add that no magician has ever denied that he had learned the art from "spirits," whether, being a medium, they acted independently on him, or he had been initiated into the science of "evocation" by his fathers who knew it before himself. But who was it then that taught the exorcist? The priest
devils as soon as he finds them obeying any one but himself? He must have learned somewhere from some one that power which he pretends to possess. For, ". . . how could one know had he not been taught by the demons themselves . . . the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience?" asks Augustine.
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Citizens, apparently all WEALTHY people, 100
Summary: Boys, girls, and little children, 34
In nineteen months, 162 persons.
"There were," says Wright, "little girls of from seven to ten years of age among the witches, and seven and twenty of them were convicted and burnt," at some of the other brande, or burnings. "The numbers brought to trial in these terrible proceedings were so great, and they were treated with so little consideration, that it was usual not even to take the trouble of setting down their names, but they were cited as the accused No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and so on. * The Jesuits took their confessions in private."
What room is there in a theology which exacts such holocausts as these to appease the bloody appetites of its priests for the following gentle words:
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of Heaven." "Even so it is not the will of your Father . . . that one of these little ones should perish." "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea."
We sincerely hope that the above words have proved no vain threat to these child-burners.
Did this butchery in the name of their Moloch-god prevent these treasure-hunters from resorting to the black art themselves? Not in the least; for in no class were such consulters of "familiar" spirits more numerous than among the clergy during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. True, there were some Catholic priests among the victims, but though these were generally accused of having "been
twelve vicars, four canons, and two doctors of divinity burnt alive. But we have only to turn to such works as were published at the time to assure ourselves that each popish priest executed was accused of "damnable heresy," i.e., a tendency to reformation--a crime more heinous far than sorcery.
We refer those who would learn how the Catholic clergy united duty with pleasure in the matter of exorcisms, revenge, and treasure-hunting, to volume II., chapter i., of W. Howitt's History of the Supernatural. "In the book called Pneumatologia Occulta et Vera, all the forms of adjuration and conjuration were laid down," says this veteran writer. He then proceeds to give a long description of the favorite modus operandi. The Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie of the late Eliphas Levi, treated with so much abuse and contempt by des Mousseaux, tells nothing of the weird ceremonies and practices but what was practiced legally and with the tacit if not open consent of the Church, by the priests of the middle ages. The exorcist-priest entered a circle at midnight; he was clad in a new surplice, and had a consecrated band hanging from the neck, covered with sacred characters. He wore on the head a tall pointed cap, on the front of which was written in Hebrew the holy word, Tetragrammaton--the ineffable name. It was written with a new pen dipped in the blood of a white dove. What the exorcists most yearned after, was to release miserable spirits which haunt spots where hidden treasures lie. The exorcist sprinkles the circle with the blood of a black lamb and a white pigeon. The priest had to adjure the evil spirits of hell--Acheront, Magoth, Asmodei, Beelzebub, Belial, and all the damned souls, in the mighty names of Jehovah, Adonay, Elohah, and Sabaioth, which latter was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who dwelt in the Urim and Thummim. When the damned souls flung in the face of the exorcist that he was a sinner, and could not get the treasure from them, the priest-sorcerer had to reply that "all his sins were washed out in the blood of Christ, * and he bid them depart as cursed ghosts and damned flies." When the exorcist dislodged them at last, the poor soul was "comforted in the name of the Saviour, and consigned to the care of good angels," who were less powerful, we must think, than the exorcising Catholic worthies, "and the rescued treasure, of course, was secured for the Church."
"Certain days," adds Howitt, "are laid down in the calendar of the
This is the Church, and this the priesthood, which, in the nineteenth century, pays 5,000 priests to teach the people of the United States the infidelity of science and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome!
We have already noticed the confession of an eminent prelate that the elimination of Satan from theology would be fatal to the perpetuity of the Church. But this is only partially true. The Prince of Sin would be gone, but sin itself would survive. If the Devil were annihilated, the Articles of Faith and the Bible would remain. In short there would still be a pretended divine revelation, and the necessity for self-assumed inspired interpreters. We must, therefore, consider the authenticity of the Bible itself. We must study its pages, and see if they, indeed, contain the commands of the Deity, or but a compendium of ancient traditions and hoary myths. We must try to interpret them for ourselves--if possible. As to its pretended interpreters, the only possible assimilation we can find for them in the Bible is to compare them with the man described by the wise King Solomon in his Proverbs, with the perpetrator of these "six things . . . yea seven . . . which doth the Lord hate," and which are an abomination unto Him, to wit: "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren" (Proverbs vi. 16, 17, 18, 19).
Of which of these accusations are the long line of men who have left the imprint of their feet in the Vatican guiltless?
"When the demons," says Augustine, "insinuate themselves in the creatures, they begin by conforming themselves to the will of every one. . . . In order to attract men, they begin by seducing them, by simulating obedience. . . . How could one know, had he not been taught by the demons themselves, what they like or what they hate; the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience; all this art, in short, of magic, the whole science of the magicians?" *
To this impressive dissertation of the "saint," we will add that no magician has ever denied that he had learned the art from "spirits," whether, being a medium, they acted independently on him, or he had been initiated into the science of "evocation" by his fathers who knew it before himself. But who was it then that taught the exorcist? The priest
devils as soon as he finds them obeying any one but himself? He must have learned somewhere from some one that power which he pretends to possess. For, ". . . how could one know had he not been taught by the demons themselves . . . the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience?" asks Augustine.
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
This is the Church, and this the priesthood, which, in the nineteenth century, pays 5,000 priests to teach the people of the United States the infidelity of science and the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome!
We have already noticed the confession of an eminent prelate that the elimination of Satan from theology would be fatal to the perpetuity of the Church. But this is only partially true. The Prince of Sin would be gone, but sin itself would survive. If the Devil were annihilated, the Articles of Faith and the Bible would remain. In short there would still be a pretended divine revelation, and the necessity for self-assumed inspired interpreters. We must, therefore, consider the authenticity of the Bible itself. We must study its pages, and see if they, indeed, contain the commands of the Deity, or but a compendium of ancient traditions and hoary myths. We must try to interpret them for ourselves--if possible. As to its pretended interpreters, the only possible assimilation we can find for them in the Bible is to compare them with the man described by the wise King Solomon in his Proverbs, with the perpetrator of these "six things . . . yea seven . . . which doth the Lord hate," and which are an abomination unto Him, to wit: "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood; an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief; a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren" (Proverbs vi. 16, 17, 18, 19).
Of which of these accusations are the long line of men who have left the imprint of their feet in the Vatican guiltless?
"When the demons," says Augustine, "insinuate themselves in the creatures, they begin by conforming themselves to the will of every one. . . . In order to attract men, they begin by seducing them, by simulating obedience. . . . How could one know, had he not been taught by the demons themselves, what they like or what they hate; the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience; all this art, in short, of magic, the whole science of the magicians?" *
To this impressive dissertation of the "saint," we will add that no magician has ever denied that he had learned the art from "spirits," whether, being a medium, they acted independently on him, or he had been initiated into the science of "evocation" by his fathers who knew it before himself. But who was it then that taught the exorcist? The priest
devils as soon as he finds them obeying any one but himself? He must have learned somewhere from some one that power which he pretends to possess. For, ". . . how could one know had he not been taught by the demons themselves . . . the name which attracts, or that which forces them into obedience?" asks Augustine.
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Useless to remark that we know the answer beforehand: "Revelation . . . divine gift . . . the Son of God; nay, God Himself, through His direct Spirit, who descended on the apostles as the Pentecostal fire," and who is now alleged to overshadow every priest who sees fit to exorcise for either glory or a gift. Are we then to believe that the recent scandal of public exorcism, performed about the 14th of October, 1876, by the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit, at Barcelona, Spain, was also done under the direct superintendence of the Holy Ghost? *
This belief of the Sovereign Pontiffs of an enlightened Christian country is a direct inheritance by the most ignorant multitudes from the southern Hindu rabble--the "heathen." The diabolical arts of certain kangalins (witches) and jadugar (sorcerers) are firmly believed in by these people. The following are among their most dreaded powers: to inspire love and hatred at will; to send a devil to take possession of a person and torture
Pitris. It was the work of the lowest clergy, and designed to hold the populace in a perpetual state of fear. It is thus that in all ages and under every latitude, side by side with philosophical speculations of the highest character, one always finds the religion of the rabble." * In India it was the work of the lowest clergy; in Rome, that of the highest Pontiffs. But then, have they not as authority their greatest saint, Augustine, who declares that "whoever believes not in the evil spirits, refuses to believe in Holy Writ?" **
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Therefore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, we find the counsel for the Sacred Congregation of Rites (exorcism of demons included), Father Ventura de Raulica, writing thus, in a letter published by des Mousseaux, in 1865:
"We are in full magic! and under false names; the Spirit of lies and impudicity goes on perpetrating his horrible deprecations. . . . The most grievous feature in this is that among the most serious persons they do not attach the importance to the strange phenomena which they deserve, these manifestations that we witness, and which become with every day more weird, striking, as well as most fatal.
"I cannot sufficiently admire and praise, from this standpoint, the zeal and courage displayed by you in your work. The facts which you have collected are calculated to throw light and conviction into the most skeptical minds; and after reading this remarkable work, written with so much learnedness and consciousness, blindness is no longer possible.
"If anything could surprise us, it would be the indifference with which these phenomena have been treated by false Science, endeavoring as she has, to turn into ridicule so grave a subject; the childish simplicity exhibited by her in the desire to explain the facts by absurd and contradictory hypotheses. . . . ***
[Signed] "The Father Ventura de Raulica, etc., etc."
Thus encouraged by the greatest authorities of the Church of Rome, ancient and modern, the Chevalier argues the necessity and the efficacy of exorcism by the priests. He tries to demonstrate--on faith, as usual --
divine Catholicism, potential grace is bound (liee) to certain signs." While the power of the Catholic priest proceeds from God, that of the Pagan priest proceeds from the Devil. The Devil, he adds, "is forced to submission" before the holy minister of God--"he dares not LIE." *
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
We beg the reader to note well the underlined sentence, as we mean to test its truth impartially. We are prepared to adduce proofs, undeniable and undenied even by the Popish Church--forced, as she was, into the confession--proofs of hundreds of cases in relation to the most solemn of her dogmas, wherein the "spirits" lied from beginning to end. How about certain holy relics authenticated by visions of the blessed Virgin, and a host of saints? We have at hand a treatise by a pious Catholic, Jilbert de Nogen, on the relics of saints. With honest despair he acknowledges the "great number of false relics, as well as false legends," and severely censures the inventors of these lying miracles. "It was on the occasion of one of our Saviour's teeth," writes the author of Demonologia, "that de Nogen took up his pen on this subject, by which the monks of St. Medard de Soissons pretended to work miracles; a pretension which he asserted to be as chimerical as that of several persons who believed they possessed the navel, and other parts less comely, of the body of Christ." **
"A monk of St. Antony," says Stephens, *** "having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which was a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraph that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherub; one of the ribs of the Verbum caro factum (the Word made flesh); some rays of the star that appeared to the three kings of the East; a phial of St. Michael's sweat, that exuded when he was fighting against the Devil, etc. 'All which things,' observes the monkish treasurer of relics, 'I have brought with me home very devoutly.' "
And if the foregoing is set aside as the invention of a Protestant enemy, may we not be allowed to refer the reader to the History of England and authentic documents which state the existence of a relic not less extraordinary than the best of the others? Henry III. received from the Grand Master of the Templars a phial containing a small portion of the sacred blood of Christ which he had shed upon the cross. It was attested to be genuine by the seals of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and others. The
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
The story of the Prince Radzivil is well known. It was the undeniable deception of the monks and nuns surrounding him and his own confessor which made the Polish nobleman become a Lutheran. He felt at first so indignant at the "heresy" of the Reformation spreading in Lithuania, that he travelled all the way to Rome to pay his homage of sympathy and veneration to the Pope. The latter presented him with a precious box of relics. On his return home, his confessor saw the Virgin, who descended from her glorious abode for the sole purpose of blessing these relics and authenticating them. The superior of the neighboring convent and the mother-abbess of a nunnery both saw the same vision, with a reenforcement of several saints and martyrs; they prophesied and "felt the Holy Ghost" ascending from the box of relics and overshadowing the prince. A demoniac provided for the purpose by the clergy was exorcised in full ceremony, and upon being touched by the box immediately recovered, and rendered thanks on the spot to the Pope and the Holy Ghost. After the ceremony was over the guardian of the treasury in which the relics were kept, threw himself at the feet of the prince, and confessed that on their way back from Rome he had lost the box of relics. Dreading the wrath of his master, he had procured a similar box, "which he had filled with the small bones of dogs and cats"; but seeing how the prince was deceived, he preferred confessing his guilt to such blasphemous tricks. The prince said nothing, but continued for some time testing--not the relics, but his confessor and the vision-seers. Their mock raptures made him discover so thoroughly the gross impositions of the monks and nuns that he joined the Reformed Church.
This is history. Bayle shows that when the Roman Church is no longer able to deny that there have been false relics, she resorts to sophistry, and replies that if false relics have wrought miracles it is "because of the good intentions of the believers, who thus obtained from God a reward of their good faith!" The same Bayle shows, by numerous instances, that whenever it was proved that several bodies of the same saint, or three heads of him, or three arms (as in the case of Augustine) were said to exist in different places, and that they could not well be all authentic, the cool and invariable answer of the Church was that they were all genuine; for "God had multiplied and miraculously reproduced them for the greater glory of His Holy Church!" In other words they would have the faithful believe that the body of a deceased saint may, through divine miracle, acquire the physiological peculiarities of a crawfish!
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
As it is, we are hopelessly left to infer that most of the beatific and divine visions of the Golden Legend, and those to be found in the more complete biographies of the most important "saints," as well as most of the visions of our own persecuted seers and seeresses, were produced by ignorant and undeveloped "spirits" passionately fond of personating great historical characters. We are quite ready to agree with the Chevalier des Mousseaux, and other unrelenting persecutors of magic and spiritualism in the name of the Church, that modern spirits are often "lying spirits"; that they are ever on hand to humor the respective hobbies of the persons who communicate with them at "circles"; that they deceive them and, therefore, are not always good "spirits."
But, having conceded so much, we will now ask of any impartial person: is it possible to believe at the same time that the power given to the exorcist-priest, that supreme and divine power of which he boasts, has been given to him by God for the purpose of deceiving people? That the prayer pronounced by him in the name of Christ, and which, forcing the demon into submission, makes him reveal himself, is calculated at the same time to make the devil confess not the truth, but that only which it is the interest of the church to which the exorcist belongs, should pass for truth? And this is what invariably happens. Compare, for instance, the responses given by the demon to Luther, with those obtained from the devils by St. Dominick. The one argues against the
Before leaving the subject, let us give one or two more instances from the Chronicles of the Lives of the Saints, selected from such narratives as are fully accepted by the Church. We might fill volumes with proofs of undeniable confederacy between the exorcisers and the demons. Their very nature betrays them. Instead of being independent, crafty entities bent on the destruction of men's souls and spirits, the majority of them are simply the elementals of the kabalists; creatures with no intellect of their own, but faithful mirrors of the WILL which evokes, controls, and guides them. We will not waste our time in drawing the reader's attention to doubtful or obscure thaumaturgists and exorcisers, but take as our standard one of the greatest saints of Catholicism, and select a bouquet from that same prolific conservatory of pious lies, The Golden Legend, of James de Voragine. ***
St. Dominick, the founder of the famous order of that name, is one of the mightiest saints on the calendar. His order was the first that received a solemn confirmation from the Pope, **** and he is well known in history as the associate and counsellor of the infamous Simon de Montfort, the papal general, whom he helped to butcher the unfortunate Albigenses in and near Toulouse. The story goes that this saint and the Church after him, claim that he received from the Virgin, in propria persona, a rosary, whose virtues produced such stupendous miracles that they throw entirely into the shade those of the apostles, and even of Jesus himself. A man, says the biographer, an abandoned sinner, was bold enough to doubt the
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Question.--How did you take possession of this man, and how many are you?
Answer of the Devils. --We came into him for having spoken disrespectfully of the rosary. We are 15,000.
Question.--Why did so many as 15,000 enter him?
Answer.--Because there are fifteen decades in the rosary which he derided, etc.
Dominick.--Is not all true I have said of the virtues of the rosary?
Devils.--Yes! Yes! (they emit flames through the nostrils of the demoniac). Know all ye Christians that Dominick never said one word concerning the rosary that is not most true; and know ye further, that if you do not believe him, great calamities will befall you.
Dominick.--Who is the man in the world the Devil hates the most?
Devils.--(In chorus.) Thou art the very man (here follow verbose compliments).
Dominick.--Of which state of Christians are there the most damned?
Devils.--In hell we have merchants, pawnbrokers, fraudulent bankers, grocers, Jews, apothecaries, etc., etc.
Dominick.--Are there any priests or monks in hell?
Devils.--There are a great number of priests, but no monks, with the exception of such as have transgressed the rule of their order.
Dominick.--Have you any Dominicans?
Devils.--Alas! alas! we have not one yet, but we expect a great number of them after their devotion is a little cooled.
We do not pretend to give the questions and answers literally, for they occupy twenty-three pages; but the substance is here, as may be seen by any one who cares to read the Golden Legend. The full description of the hideous bellowings of the demons, their enforced glorification of the saint, and so on, is too long for this chapter. Suffice it to say that as we read the numerous questions offered by Dominick and the answers of the demons, we become fully convinced that they corroborate in every detail the unwarranted assertions and support the interests of the Church. The narrative is suggestive. The legend graphically describes the battle of the exorcist with the legion from the bottomless pit. The sulphurous flames which burst forth from the nose, mouth, eyes, and ears, of the demoniac; the sudden appearance of over a hun-
demons, if demons we must call them. While the Devil faithfully supports the Christian exorcist in his orthodox (?) views, the modern spook generally leaves his medium in the lurch. For, by lying, he acts against his or her interests rather than otherwise, and thereby too often casts foul suspicion on the genuineness of the mediumship. Were modern "spirits" devils, they would evidently display a little more discrimination and cunning than they do. They would act as the demons of the saint which, compelled by the ecclesiastical magician and by the power of "the name . . . which forces them into submission," lie in accordance with the direct interest of the exorcist and his church. The moral of the parallel we leave to the sagacity of the reader.
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
"Observe well," exclaims des Mousseaux, "that there are demons which sometimes will speak the truth." "The exorcist," he adds, quoting the Ritual, "must command the demon to tell him whether he is detained in the body of the demoniac through some magic art, or by signs, or any objects which usually serve for this evil practice. In case the exorcised person has swallowed the latter, he must vomit them back; and if they are not in his body, the demon must indicate the proper place where they are to be found; and having found them they must be burned." * Thus some "demons reveal the existence of the bewitchment, tell who is its author, and indicate the means to destroy the malefice. But beware to ever resort, in such a case, to magicians, sorcerers, or mediums. You must call to help you but the minister of your Church!" "The Church believes in magic, as you well see," he adds, "since she expresses it so formally. And those who disbelieve in magic, can they still hope to share the faith of their own Church? And who can teach them better? To whom did Christ say: 'Go ye therefore, and teach all nations . . . and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the world?' " **
Are we to believe that he said this but to those who wear these black
three feet in diameter," ordered earth and water to be placed on the dragon's eye, out of which suddenly emerged a thorn (or stake), a cubit in length; when the people saw the "miracle" they glorified the Creator. As to the grateful dragon, he arose and, "having adored God for two hours, returned to his cave" *--a half-converted ophidian, we must suppose.
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
And what are we to think of that other narrative, to disbelieve in which is "to risk one's salvation," as we were informed by a Pope's missionary, of the Order of the Franciscans? When St. Francis preached a sermon in the wilderness, the birds assembled from the four cardinal points of the world. They warbled and applauded every sentence; they sang a holy mass in chorus; finally they dispersed to carry the glad tidings all over the universe. A grasshopper, profiting by the absence of the Holy Virgin, who generally kept company with the saint, remained perched on the head of the "blessed one" for a whole week. Attacked by a ferocious wolf, the saint, who had no other weapon but the sign of the cross which he made upon himself, instead of running away from his rabid assailant, began arguing with the beast. Having imparted to him the benefit to be derived from the holy religion, St. Francis never ceased talking until the wolf became as meek as a lamb, and even shed tears of repentance over his past sins. Finally, he "stretched his paws in the hands of the saint, followed him like a dog through all the towns in which he preached, and became half a Christian"! ** Wonders of zoology! a horse turned sorcerer, a wolf and a dragon turned Christians!
These two anecdotes, chosen at random from among hundreds, if rivalled are not surpassed by the wildest romances of the Pagan thaumaturgists, magicians, and spiritualists! And yet, when Pythagoras is said to have subdued animals, even wild beasts, merely through a powerful
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
If it be objected that the Golden Legend is now but half supported by the Church; and that it is known to have been compiled by the writer from a collection of the lives of the saints, for the most part unauthenticated, we can show that, at least in one instance, the biography is no legendary compilation, but the history of one man, by another one who was his contemporary. Jortin and Gibbon demonstrated years ago, that the early fathers used to select narratives, wherewith to ornament the lives of their apocryphal saints, from Ovid, Homer, Livy, and even from the unwritten popular legends of Pagan nations. But such is not the case in the above instances. St. Bernard lived in the twelfth century, and St. Dominick was nearly contemporaneous with the author of the Golden Legend. De Voragine died in 1298, and Dominick, whose exorcisms and life he describes so minutely, instituted his order in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Moreover, de Voragine was Vicar-General of the Dominicans himself, in the middle of the same century, and therefore described the miracles wrought by his hero and patron but a few years after they were alleged to have happened. He wrote them in the same convent; and while narrating these wonders he had probably fifty persons at hand who had been eye-witnesses to the saint's mode of living. What must we think, in such a case, of a biographer who seriously describes the following: One day, as the blessed saint was occupied in his study, the Devil began pestering him, in the shape of a flea. He frisked and jumped about the pages of his book until the harassed saint, unwilling as he was to act unkindly, even toward a devil, felt compelled to punish him by fixing the troublesome devil on the very sentence on which he stopped, by clasping the book. At another time the same devil appeared under the shape of a monkey. He grinned so horribly that Dominick, in order to get rid of him, ordered the devil-monkey to take the candle and hold it for him until he had done reading. The poor imp did so, and held it until it was consumed to the very end of the wick; and, notwithstanding his pitiful cries for mercy, the saint compelled him to hold it till his fingers were burned to the bones!
Enough! The approbation with which this book was received by the
There is scarcely a report sent by the missionaries from India, Thibet, and China, but laments the diabolical "obscenity" of the heathen rites, their lamentable impudicity; all of which "are so strongly suggestive of devil-worship," as des Mousseaux tells us. We can scarcely be assured that the morality of the Pagans would be in the least improved were they allowed a free inquiry into the life of say the psalmist-king, the author of those sweet Psalms which are so rapturously repeated by Christians. The difference between David performing a phallic dance before the holy ark--emblem of the female principle--and a Hindu Vishnavite bearing the same emblem on his forehead, favors the former only in the eyes of those who have studied neither the ancient faith nor their own. When a religion which compelled David to cut off and deliver two hundred foreskins of his enemies before he could become the king's son-in-law (I Sam. xviii.)
Vedas can be found the coarseness and downright immodesty of language, that Hebraists now discover throughout the Mosaic Bible.
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
It would profit little were we to dwell much upon subjects which have been disposed of in such a masterly way by an anonymous author whose work electrified England and Germany last year; * while as regards the particular topic under notice, we cannot do better than recommend the scholarly writings of Dr. Inman. Albeit one-sided, and in many instances unjust to the ancient heathen, Pagan, and Jewish religions, the facts treated in the Ancient and Pagan Christian Symbolism, are unimpeachable. Neither can we agree with some English critics who charge him with an intent to destroy Christianity. If by Christianity is meant the external religious forms of worship, then he certainly seeks to destroy it, for in his eyes, as well as in those of every truly religious man, who has studied ancient exoteric faiths, and their symbology, Christianity is pure heathenism, and Catholicism, with its fetish-worshipping, is far worse and more pernicious than Hinduism in its most idolatrous aspect. But while denouncing the exoteric forms and unmasking the symbols, it is not the religion of Christ that the author attacks, but the artificial system of theology. We will allow him to illustrate the position in his own language, and quote from his preface:
"When vampires were discovered by the acumen of any observer," he says, "they were, we are told, ignominiously killed, by a stake being driven through the body; but experience showed them to have such tenacity of life that they rose, again and again, notwithstanding renewed impalement, and were not ultimately laid to rest till wholly burned. In like manner, the regenerated heathendom, which dominates over the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, has risen again and again, after being transfixed. Still cherished by the many, it is denounced by the few. Amongst other accusers, I raise my voice against the Paganism which exists so extensively in ecclesiastical Christianity, and will do my utmost to expose the imposture. . . . In a vampire story told in Thalaba, by Southey, the resuscitated being takes the form of a dearly-beloved maiden, and the hero is obliged to kill her with his own hand. He does so; but, whilst he strikes the form of the loved one, he feels sure that he slays
But is it merely Pagans and heathen that the Catholics persecute, and about whom, like Augustine, they cry to the Deity, "Oh, my God! so do I wish Thy enemies to be slain"? Oh, no! their aspirations are more Mosaic and Cain-like than that. It is against their next of kin in faith, against their schismatic brothers that they are now intriguing within the walls which sheltered the murderous Borgias. The larvae of the infanticidal, parricidal, and fratricidal Popes have proved themselves fit counsellors for the Cains of Castelfidardo and Mentana. It is now the turn of the Slavonian Christians, the Oriental Schismatics--the Philistines of the Greek Church!
His Holiness the Pope, after exhausting, in a metaphor of self-laudation, every point of assimilation between the great biblical prophets and himself, has finally and truly compared himself with the Patriarch Jacob "wrestling against his God." He now crowns the edifice of Catholic piety by openly sympathizing with the Turks! The vicegerent of God inaugurates his infallibility by encouraging, in a true Christian spirit, the acts of that Moslem David, the modern Bashi-Bazuk; and it seems as if nothing would more please his Holiness than to be presented by the latter with several thousands of the Bulgarian or Servian "foreskins." True to her policy to be all things to all men to promote her own interests, the Romish Church is, at this writing (1876), benevolently viewing the Bulgarian and Servian atrocities, and, probably, manoeuvring with Turkey against Russia. Better Islam, and the hitherto-hated Crescent over the sepulchre of the Christian god, than the Greek Church established at Constantinople and Jerusalem as the state religion. Like a decrepit and toothless ex-tyrant in exile, the Vatican is eager for any alliance that promises, if not a restoration of its own power, at least the weakening of its rival. The axe its inquisitors once swung, it now toys
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
The press of even Catholic France is fairly aroused at this indignity, and openly accuses the Ultramontane portion of the Catholic Church and the Vatican of siding, during the present Eastern struggle, with the Mahometan against the Christian. "When the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the French Legislature spoke some mild words in favor of the Greek Christians, he was only applauded by the liberal Catholics, and received coldly by the Ultramontane party," says the French correspondent of a New York paper.
"So pronounced was this, that M. Lemoinne, the well-known editor of the great liberal Catholic journal, the Debats, was moved to say that the Roman Church felt more sympathy for the Moslem than the schismatic, just as they preferred an infidel to the Protestant. 'There is at bottom,' says this writer, 'a great affinity between the Syllabus and the Koran, and between the two heads of the faithful. The two systems are of the same nature, and are united on the common ground of a one and unchangeable theory.' In Italy, in like manner, the King and Liberal Catholics are in warm sympathy with the unfortunate Christians, while the Pope and Ultramontane faction are believed to be inclining to the Mahometans."
The civilized world may yet expect the apparition of the materialized Virgin Mary within the walls of the Vatican. The so often-repeated "miracle" of the Immaculate Visitor in the mediaeval ages has recently been enacted at Lourdes, and why not once more, as a coup de grace to all heretics, schismatics, and infidels? The miraculous wax taper is yet seen at Arras, the chief city of Artois; and at every new calamity threatening her beloved Church, the "Blessed Lady" appears personally, and lights it with her own fair hands, in view of a whole "biologized" congregation. This sort of "miracle," says E. Worsley, wrought by the Roman Catholic Church, "being most certain, and never doubted of by any." * Neither has the private correspondence with which the most "Gracious Lady" honors her friends been doubted. There are two precious missives from her in the archives of the Church. The first purports to be a letter in answer to one addressed to her by Ignatius. She confirms all things learned by her correspondent from "her friend" --
I and John will come together and pay you a visit." *
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Nothing was known of this unblushing fraud till the letters were published at Paris, in 1495. By a curious accident it appeared at a time when threatening inquiries began to be made as to the genuineness of the fourth Synoptic. Who could doubt, after such a confirmation from headquarters! But the climax of effrontery was capped in 1534, when another letter was received from the "Mediatrix," which sounds more like the report of a lobby-agent to a brother-politician. It was written in excellent Latin, and was found in the Cathedral of Messina, together with the image to which it alludes. Its contents run as follows:
"Mary Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer of the world, to the Bishop, Clergy, and the other faithful of Messina, sendeth health and benediction from herself and son: **
"Whereas ye have been mindful of establishing the worship of me; now this is to let you know that by so doing ye have found great favor in my sight. I have a long time reflected with pain upon your city, which is exposed to much danger from its contiguity to the fire of Etna, and I have often had words about it with my son, for he was vexed with you because of your guilty neglect of my worship, so that he would not care a pin about my intercession. Now, however, that you have come to your senses, and have happily begun to worship me, he has conferred upon me the right to become your everlasting protectress; but, at the same time, I warn you to mind what you are about, and give me no cause of repenting of my kindness to you. The prayers and festivals instituted in my honor please me tremendously (vehementer), and if you faithfully persevere in these things, and provided you oppose to the utmost of your power, the heretics which now-a-days are spreading through the world, by which both my worship and that of the other saints, male and female, are so endangered, you shall enjoy my perpetual protection.
"In sign of this compact, I send you down from Heaven the image of myself, cast by celestial hands, and if ye hold it in the honor to which it is entitled, it will be an evidence to me of your obedience and your faith. Farewell. Dated in Heaven, whilst sitting near the throne of my son, in the month of December, of the 1534th year from his incarnation.
"MARY VIRGIN"
The reader should understand that this document is no anti-Catholic forgery. The author from whom it is taken, *** says that the authenticity of the missive "is attested by the Bishop himself, his Vicar-General,
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.)
Exorcism of Salt.
The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and
ROMAN CATHOLIC
Exorcism of Salt. ****
The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where
bodies.
Through Hochmael
(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water
(and Ashes
).
"Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.)
Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit.
"Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion.
"Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen."
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen."
Exorcism of Water.
"Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon."
Exorcism of the Devil.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
"O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." *
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
A Church must have reached the last stages of degradation, when such sacrilegious trickery as this could be resorted to by its clergy, and accepted with or without question by the people.
No! far from the man who feels the workings of an immortal spirit within him, be such a religion! There never was nor ever will be a truly philosophical mind, whether of Pagan, heathen, Jew, or Christian, but has followed the same path of thought. Gautama-Buddha is mirrored in the precepts of Christ; Paul and Philo Judaeus are faithful echoes of Plato; and Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus won their immortal fame by combining the teachings of all these grand masters of true philosophy. "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good," ought to be the motto of all brothers on earth. Not so is it with the interpreters of the Bible. The seed of the Reformation was sown on the day that the second chapter of The Catholic Epistle of James, jostled the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the same New Testament. One who believes in Paul cannot believe in James, Peter, and John. The Paulists, to remain Christians with their apostle, must withstand Peter "to the face"; and if Peter "was to be blamed" and was wrong, then he was not infallible. How then can his successor (?) boast of his infallibility? Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every house divided against itself must fall. A plurality of masters has proved as fatal in religions as in politics. What Paul preached, was preached by every other mystic philosopher. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage!" exclaims the honest apostle-philosopher; and adds, as if prophetically inspired: "But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not consumed one of another."
That the Neo-platonists were not always despised or accused of demonolatry is evidenced in the adoption by the Roman Church of their very rites and theurgy. The identical evocations and incantations of the Pagan and Jewish Kabalist, are now repeated by the Christian exorcist, and the theurgy of Iamblichus was adopted word for word. "Distinct as were the Platonists and Pauline Christians of the earlier centuries," writes Professor A. Wilder, "many of the more distinguished teachers of the new faith were deeply tinctured with the philosophical leaven. Synesius, the Bishop of Cyrene, was the disciple of Hypatia. St. Anthony reiterated the theurgy of Iamblichus. The Logos, or word of the Gospel
To substantiate our accusation that the Latin Church first despoiled the kabalists and theurgists of their magical rites and ceremonies, before hurling anathemas upon their devoted heads, we will now translate for the reader fragments from the forms of exorcism employed by kabalists and Christians. The identity in phraseology, may, perhaps, disclose one of the reasons why the Romish Church has always desired to keep the faithful in ignorance of the meaning of her Latin prayers and ritual. Only those directly interested in the deception have had the opportunity to compare the rituals of the Church and the magicians. The best Latin scholars were, until a comparatively recent date, either churchmen, or dependent upon the Church. Common people could not read Latin, and even if they could, the reading of the books on magic was prohibited, under the penalty of anathema and excommunication. The cunning device of the confessional made it almost impossible to consult, even surreptitiously, what the priests call a grimoire (a devil's scrawl), or Ritual of Magic. To make assurance doubly sure, the Church began destroying or concealing everything of the kind she could lay her hands upon.
The following are translated from the Kabalistic Ritual, and that generally known as the Roman Ritual. The latter was promulgated in 1851 and 1852, under the sanction of Cardinal Engelbert, Archbishop of Malines, and of the Archbishop of Paris. Speaking of it, the demonologist des Mousseaux says: "It is the ritual of Paul V., revised by the most learned of modern Popes, by the contemporary of Voltaire, Benedict XIV." **
KABALISTIC. (Jewish and Pagan.) Exorcism of Salt. The Priest-Magician blesses the Salt, and says: "Creature of Salt, *** in thee may remain the WISDOM (of God); and may it preserve from all corruption our minds and |
ROMAN CATHOLIC Exorcism of Salt. **** The Priest blesses the Salt and says: "Creature of Salt, I exorcise thee in the name of the living God . . . become the health of the soul and of the body! Every where |
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bodies. Through Hochmael(God of wisdom), and the power of Ruach Hochmael (Spirit of the Holy Ghost) may the Spirits of matter (bad spirits) before it recede. . . . Amen." Exorcism of Water (and Ashes). "Creature of the Water, I exorcise thee . . . by the three names which are Netsah, Hod, and Jerod (kabalistic trinity), in the beginning and in the end, by Alpha and Omega, which are in the Spirit Azoth (Holy Ghost, or the 'Universal Soul'), I exorcise and adjure thee. . . . Wandering eagle, may the Lord command thee by the wings of the bull and his flaming sword." (The cherub placed at the east gate of Eden.) Exorcism of an Elemental Spirit. "Serpent, in the name of the Tetragrammaton, the Lord; He commands thee, by the angel and the lion. "Angel of darkness, obey, and run away with this holy (exorcised) water. Eagle in chains, obey this sign, and retreat before the breath. Moving serpent, crawl at my feet, or be tortured by this sacred fire, and evaporate before this holy incense. Let water return to water (the elemental spirit of water); let the fire burn, and the air circulate; let the earth return to earth by the virtue of the Pentagram, which is the Morning Star, and in the name of the tetragrammaton which is traced in the centre of the Cross of Light. Amen." |
where thou art thrown may the unclean spirit be put to flight. . . . Amen." Exorcism of Water. "Creature of the water, in the name of the Almighty God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost . . . be exorcised. . . . I adjure thee in the name of the Lamb . . . (the magician says bull or ox--per alas Tauri) of the Lamb that trod upon the basilisk and the aspic, and who crushes under his foot the lion and the dragon." Exorcism of the Devil. . . . . . . . . . . . . "O Lord, let him who carries along with him the terror, flee, struck in his turn by terror and defeated. O thou, who art the Ancient Serpent . . . tremble before the hand of him who, having triumphed of the tortures of hell (?) devictis gemitibus inferni, recalled the souls to light. . . . The more whilst thou decay, the more terrible will be thy torture . . . by Him who reigns over the living and the dead . . . and who will judge the century by fire, saeculum per ignem, etc. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen." * |
It is unnecessary to try the patience of the reader any longer, although we might multiply examples. It must not be forgotten that we have quoted from the latest revision of the Ritual, that of 1851-2. If we were to go back to the former one we would find a far more striking identity, not merely of phraseology but of ceremonial form. For the purpose of comparison we have not even availed ourselves of the ritual of ceremonial magic of the Christian kabalists of the middle ages, wherein the language modelled upon a belief in the divinity of Christ is, with the exception of a stray expression here and there, identical with the Catholic
After such a shower of abuse, no devil having the slightest feeling of self-respect could remain in such company; unless, indeed, he should chance to be an Italian Liberal, or King Victor Emmanuel himself both of whom, thanks to Pius IX., have become anathema-proof.
It really seems too bad to strip Rome of all her symbols at once; but justice must be done to the despoiled hierophants. Long before the sign of the Cross was adopted as a Christian symbol, it was employed as a secret sign of recognition among neophytes and adepts. Says Levi: "The sign of the Cross adopted by the Christians does not belong exclusively to them. It is kabalistic, and represents the oppositions and quaternary equilibrium of the elements. We see by the occult verse of the Pater, to which we have called attention in another work, that there were originally two ways of making it, or, at least, two very different formulas to express its meaning--one reserved for priests and initiates; the other given to neophytes and the profane. Thus, for example, the initiate, carrying his hand to his forehead, said: To thee; then he added, belong; and continued, while carrying his hand to the breast--the kingdom; then, to the left shoulder--justice; to the right shoulder--and mercy. Then he joined the two hands, adding: throughout the generating cycles: 'Tibi sunt Malchut, et Geburah et Chassed per Æonas'--a sign of the Cross, absolutely and magnificently kabalistic, which the profanations of Gnosticism made the militant and official Church completely lose." ***
luminary of faith, elevated him to the most sublime heights of philosophy and theology." And his other proposition that Augustine's genius, as a consequence, "developed itself in all its grandeur and prodigious fecundity . . . his intellect radiated with that immense splendor which, reflecting itself in his immortal writings, has never ceased for one moment during fourteen centuries to illuminate the Church and the world"! *
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Whatever Augustine was as a Manichean, we leave Father Ventura to discover; but that his accession to Christianity established an everlasting enmity between theology and science is beyond doubt. While forced to confess that "the Gentiles had possibly something divine and true in their doctrines," he, nevertheless, declared that for their superstition, idolatry, and pride, they had "to be detested, and, unless they improved, to be punished by divine judgment." This furnishes the clew to the subsequent policy of the Christian Church, even to our day. If the Gentiles did not choose to come into the Church, all that was divine in their philosophy should go for naught, and the divine wrath of God should be visited upon their heads. What effect this produced is succinctly stated by Draper: "No one did more than this Father to bring science and religion into antagonism; it was mainly he who diverted the Bible from its true office--a guide to purity of life--and placed it in the perilous position of being the arbiter of human knowledge, an audacious tyranny over the mind of man. The example once set, there was no want of followers; the works of the Greek philosophers were stigmatized as profane; the transcendently glorious achievements of the Museum of Alexandria were hidden from sight by a cloud of ignorance, mysticism, and unintelligible jargon, out of which there too often flashed the destroying lightnings of ecclesiastical vengeance." **
Augustine and Cyprian *** admit that Hermes and Hostanes believed in one true god; the first two maintaining, as well as the two Pagans, that he is invisible and incomprehensible, except spiritually. Moreover we invite any man of intelligence--provided he be not a religious fanatic--after reading fragments chosen at random from the works of Hermes
Father Ventura depicts the saint as attitudinizing before an astonished world upon "the most sublime heights of philosophy." But here steps in again the same unprejudiced critic, who passes the following remarks on this colossus of Patristic philosophy. "Was it for this preposterous scheme," he asks, "this product of ignorance and audacity, that the works of the Greek philosophers were to be given up? It was none too soon that the great critics who appeared at the Reformation, by comparing the works of these writers with one another, brought them to their proper level, and taught us to look upon them all with contempt." **
For such men as Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Apollonius, and even Simon Magus, to be accused of having formed a pact with the Devil, whether the latter personage exist or not, is so absurd as to need but little refutation. If Simon Magus--the most problematical of all in an historical sense--ever existed otherwise than in the overheated fancy of Peter and the other apostles, he was evidently no worse than any of his adversaries. A difference in religious views, however great, is insufficient per se to send one person to heaven and the other to hell. Such uncharitable and peremptory doctrines might have been taught in the middle ages; but it is too late now for even the Church to put forward this traditional scarecrow. Research begins to suggest that which, if ever verified, will bring eternal disgrace on the Church of the Apostle Peter, whose very imposition of herself upon that disciple must be regarded as the most unverified and unverifiable of the assumptions of the Catholic clergy.
The erudite author of Supernatural Religion assiduously endeavors to prove that by Simon Magus we must understand the apostle Paul, whose Epistles were secretly as well as openly calumniated by Peter, and charged with containing "dysnoetic learning." The Apostle of the Gentiles was brave, outspoken, sincere, and very learned; the Apostle of Circumcision, cowardly, cautious, insincere, and very ignorant. That Paul had been, partially, at least, if not completely, initiated into the theurgic mysteries, admits of little doubt. His language, the phraseology so peculiar to the Greek philosophers, certain expressions used but by the initiates, are so many sure ear-marks to that supposition. Our suspicion has been strengthened by an able article in one of the New York periodicals,
Another proof that Paul belonged to the circle of the "Initiates" lies in the following fact. The apostle had his head shorn at Cenchrea (where Lucius, Apulcius, was initiated) because "he had a vow." The nazars--or set apart--as we see in the Jewish Scriptures, had to cut their hair which they wore long, and which "no razor touched" at any other time, and sacrifice it on the altar of initiation. And the nazars were a class of Chaldean theurgists. We will show further that Jesus belonged to this class.
Paul declares that: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me, as a wise master-builder, I have laid the foundation." ****
This expression, master-builder, used only once in the whole Bible, and by Paul, may be considered as a whole revelation. In the Mysteries, the third part of the sacred rites was called Epopteia, or revelation, reception into the secrets. In substance it means that stage of divine clairvoyance when everything pertaining to this earth disappears, and earthly sight is paralyzed, and the soul is united free and pure with its Spirit, or God. But the real significance of the word is "overseeing," from οπτομαι--I see myself. In Sanscrit the word evapto has the same meaning, as
If we search in this direction, with those sure guides, the Grecian Mysteries and the Kabala, before us, it will be easy to find the secret reason why Paul was so persecuted and hated by Peter, John, and James. The author of the Revelation was a Jewish kabalist pur sang, with all the hatred inherited by him from his forefathers toward the Mysteries. ** His jealousy during the life of Jesus extended even to Peter; and it is but after the death of their common master that we see the two apostles--the former of whom wore the Mitre and the Petaloon of the Jewish Rabbis--preach so zealously the rite of circumcision. In the eyes of Peter, Paul, who had humiliated him, and whom he felt so much his superior in "Greek learning" and philosophy, must have naturally appeared as a magician, a man polluted with the "Gnosis," with the "wisdom" of the Greek Mysteries--hence, perhaps, "Simon *** the Magician."
As to Peter, biblical criticism has shown before now that he had probably no more to do with the foundation of the Latin Church at Rome, than to furnish the pretext so readily seized upon by the cunning Irenaeus to benefit this Church with the new name of the apostle--Petra or Kiffa, a name which allowed so readily, by an easy play upon words to connect it with Petroma, the double set of stone tablets used
As such, we must concede to him, to some extent, the right to be such an interpreter. The Latin Church has faithfully preserved in symbols, rites, ceremonies, architecture, and even in the very dress of her clergy, the tradition of the Pagan worship--of the public or exoteric ceremonies, we should add; otherwise her dogmas would embody more sense and contain less blasphemy against the majesty of the Supreme and Invisible God.
An inscription found on the coffin of Queen Mentuhept, of the eleventh dynasty (2250 B.C.), now proved to have been transcribed from the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead (dating not later than 4500 B.C.), is more than suggestive. This monumental text contains a group of hieroglyphics, which, when interpreted, read thus:
Baron Bunsen shows this sacred formulary mixed up with a whole series of glosses and various interpretations on a monument forty centuries old. "This is identical with saying that the record (the true interpretation) was at that time no longer intelligible. . . . We beg our readers to understand," he adds, "that a sacred text, a hymn, containing the words of a departed spirit, existed in such a state about 4,000 years ago . . . as to be all but unintelligible to royal scribes." **
That it was unintelligible to the uninitiated among the latter is as well proved by the confused and contradictory glossaries, as that it was a "mystery"-word, known to the hierophants of the sanctuaries, and, moreover, a word chosen by Jesus, to designate the office assigned by him to one of his apostles. This word, PTR, was partially interpreted, owing to another word similarly written in another group of hieroglyphics, on a
But, whether the "Illuminator" of the Graeco-Demotic manuscript is identical with Jesus or not, the fact remains, that we find him selecting a "mystery"-appellation for one who is made to appear later by the Catholic Church as the janitor of the Kingdom of Heaven and the interpreter of Christ's will. The word Patar or Peter locates both master and disciple in the circle of initiation, and connects them with the "Secret Doctrine." The great hierophant of the ancient Mysteries never allowed the candidates to see or hear him personally. He was the Deus-ex-Machina, the presiding but invisible Deity, uttering his will and instructions through a second party; and 2,000 years later, we discover that the Dalai-Lamas of Thibet had been following for centuries the same traditional programme during the most important religious mysteries of lamaism.
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
But we will discuss this question further on. For the present we will endeavor to briefly indicate the extraordinary similarity--or rather identity, we should say--of rites and ceremonial dress of the Christian clergy with that of the old Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and other Pagans of the hoary antiquity.
If we would find the model of the Papal tiara, we must search the annals of the ancient Assyrian tablets. We invite the reader to give his attention to Dr. Inman's illustrated work, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism. On page sixty-four, he will readily recognize the head-gear of the successor of St. Peter in the coiffure worn by gods or angels in ancient Assyria, "where it appears crowned by an emblem of the male trinity" (the Christian Cross). "We may mention, in passing," adds Dr. Inman, "that, as the Romanists adopted the mitre and the tiara from 'the cursed brood of Ham,' so they adopted the Episcopalian crook from the augurs of Etruria, and the artistic form with which they clothe their angels from the painters and urn-makers of Magna Grecia and Central Italy."
Would we push our inquiries farther, and seek to ascertain as much in relation to the nimbus and the tonsure of the Catholic priest and monk? * We shall find undeniable proofs that they are solar emblems. Knight, in his Old England Pictorially Illustrated, gives a drawing by St. Augustine, representing an ancient Christian bishop, in a dress probably identical with that worn by the great "saint" himself. The pallium, or the ancient stole of the bishop, is the feminine sign when worn by a priest in worship. On St. Augustine's picture it is bedecked with Buddhistic crosses, and in its whole appearance it is a representation of the Egyptian
(tau), assuming slightly the figure of the letter
. "Its lower end is the mark of the masculine triad," says Inman; "the right hand (of the figure) has the forefinger extended, like the Assyrian priests while doing homage to the grove. . . . When a male dons the pallium in worship, he becomes the representative of the trinity in the unity, the arba, or mystic four." **
"Immaculate is our Lady Isis," is the legend around an engraving
Before the shrine of Jupiter Ammon were suspended tinkling bells, from the sound of whose chiming the priests gathered the auguries; "A golden bell and a pomegranate . . . round about the hem of the robe," was the result with the Mosaic Jews. But in the Buddhistic system, during the religious services, the gods of the Deva Loka are always invoked, and invited to descend upon the altars by the ringing of bells suspended in the pagodas. The bell of the sacred table of Siva at Kuhama is described in Kailasa, and every Buddhist vihara and lamasery has its bells.
We thus see that the bells used by Christians come to them directly from the Buddhist Thibetans and Chinese. The beads and rosaries have the same origin, and have been used by Buddhist monks for over 2,300 years. The Linghams in the Hindu temples are ornamented upon certain days with large berries, from a tree sacred to Mahadeva, which are strung into rosaries. The title of "nun" is an Egyptian word, and had with them the actual meaning; the Christians did not even take the trouble of translating the word Nonna. The aureole of the saints was used by the antediluvian artists of Babylonia, whenever they desired to honor or deify a mortal's head. In a celebrated picture in Moore's Hindoo Pantheon, entitled, "Christna nursed by Devaki, from a highly-finished picture," the Hindu Virgin is represented as seated on a lounge and nursing Christna. The hair brushed back, the long veil, and the golden aureole around the Virgin's head, as well as around that of the Hindu Saviour, are striking. No Catholic, well versed as he might be in the mysterious symbolism of iconology, would hesitate for a moment to worship at that shrine the Virgin Mary, the mother of his God! ** In Indur Subba, the south entrance of the Caves of Ellora, may be seen to this day the figure of Indra's wife, Indranee, sitting with her infant son-god, pointing the finger to heaven with the same gesture as the Italian Madonna and child. In Pagan and Christian Symbolism, the author gives a figure from a
Such pictures are not purely astronomical. They represent the male god and the female goddess, as the sun and moon in conjunction, "the union of the triad with the unit." The horns of the cow on the head of Isis have the same significance.
And so above, below, outside, and inside, the Christian Church, in the priestly garments, and the religious rites, we recognize the stamp of exoteric heathenism. On no subject within the wide range of human knowledge, has the world been more blinded or deceived with such persistent misrepresentation as on that of antiquity. Its hoary past and its religious faiths have been misrepresented and trampled under the feet of its successors. Its hierophants and prophets, mystae and epoptae, ** of the once sacred adyta of the temple shown as demoniacs and devil-worshippers. Donned in the despoiled garments of the victim, the Christian priest now anathematizes the latter with rites and ceremonies which he has learned from the theurgists themselves. The Mosaic Bible is used as a weapon against the people who furnished it. The heathen philosopher is cursed under the very roof which has witnessed his initiation; and the "monkey of God" (i.e., the devil of Tertullian), "the originator and founder of magical theurgy, the science of illusions and lies, whose father and author is the demon," is exorcised with holy water by the hand which holds the identical lituus *** with which the ancient augur, after a solemn prayer, used to determine the regions of heaven, and evoke, in the name of the HIGHEST, the minor god (now termed the Devil), who unveiled to his eyes futurity, and enabled him to prophesy! On the part of the Christians and the clergy it is nothing but shameful ignorance, prejudice, and that contemptible pride so boldly denounced by one of their own reverend ministers, T. Gross, **** which rails against all investigation "as a useless or a criminal labor, when it must be feared that they will result in the overthrow of preestablished systems of faith." On the part of the scholars it is the same apprehension of the possible necessity of having to
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
All this gives a sure clew to the real cause of the hatred felt by the early and mediaeval Christian toward his Pagan brother and dangerous rival. We hate but what we fear. The Christian thaumaturgist once having broken all association with the Mysteries of the temples and with "these schools so renowned for magic," described by St. Hilarion, * could certainly expect but little to rival the Pagan wonder-workers. No apostle, with the exception perhaps of healing by mesmeric power, has ever equalled Apollonius of Tyana; and the scandal created among the apostles by the miracle-doing Simon Magus, is too notorious to be repeated here again. "How is it," asks Justin Martyr, in evident dismay, "how is it that the talismans of Apollonius (the τελεσματα) have power in certain members of creation, for they prevent, as we see, the fury of the waves, and the violence of the winds, and the attacks of wild beasts; and whilst our Lord's miracles are preserved by tradition alone, those of Apollonius are most numerous, and actually manifested in present facts, so as to lead astray all beholders?" ** This perplexed martyr solves the problem by attributing very correctly the efficacy and potency of the charms used by Apollonius to his profound knowledge of the sympathies and antipathies (or repugnances) of nature.
Unable to deny the evident superiority of their enemies' powers, the fathers had recourse to the old but ever successful method--that of slander. They honored the theurgists with the same insinuating calumny that had been resorted to by the Pharisees against Jesus. "Thou hast a daemon," the elders of the Jewish Synagogue had said to him. "Thou hast the Devil," repeated the cunning fathers, with equal truth, addressing the Pagan thaumaturgist; and the widely-bruited charge, erected later into an article of faith, won the day.
But the modern heirs of these ecclesiastical falsifiers, who charge magic, spiritualism, and even magnetism with being produced by a demon, forget or perhaps never read the classics. None of our bigots has ever looked with more scorn on the abuses of magic than did the true initiate
witchcraft, acquired powers dangerous to his fellow-creatures, the priests of old were as severe as justice herself. "Any person accidentally guilty of homicide, or of any crime, or convicted of witchcraft, was excluded from the Eleusinian Mysteries." * And so were they from all others. This law, mentioned by all writers on the ancient initiation, speaks for itself. The claim of Augustine, that all the explanations given by the Neo-platonists were invented by themselves is absurd. For nearly every ceremony in their true and successive order is given by Plato himself, in a more or less covered way. The Mysteries are as old as the world, and one well versed in the esoteric mythologies of various nations can trace them back to the days of the ante-Vedic period in India. A condition of the strictest virtue and purity is required from the Vatou, or candidate in India before he can become an initiate, whether he aims to be a simple fakir, a Purohita (public priest) or a Sannyasi, a saint of the second degree of initiation, the most holy as the most revered of them all. After having conquered, in the terrible trials preliminary to admittance to the inner temple in the subterranean crypts of his pagoda, the sannyasi passes the rest of his life in the temple, practicing the eighty-four rules and ten virtues prescribed to the Yogis.
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
"No one who has not practiced, during his whole life, the ten virtues which the divine Manu makes incumbent as a duty, can be initiated into the Mysteries of the council," say the Hindu books of initiation.
These virtues are: "Resignation; the act of rendering good for evil; temperance; probity; purity; chastity; repression of the physical senses; the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures; that of the Superior soul (spirit); worship of truth; abstinence from anger." These virtues must alone direct the life of a true Yogi. "No unworthy adept ought to defile the ranks of the holy initiates by his presence for twenty-four hours." The adept becomes guilty after having once broken any one of these vows. Surely the exercise of such virtues is inconsistent with the idea one has of devil-worship and lasciviousness of purpose!
And now we will try to give a clear insight into one of the chief objects
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Naturally enough, this same extreme penalty was prescribed in all the multifarious sects and brotherhoods which at different periods have sprung from the ancient stock. We find it with the early Essenes, Gnostics, theurgic Neo-platonists, and mediaeval philosophers; and in our day, even the Masons perpetuate the memory of the old obligations in the penalties of throat-cutting, dismemberment, and disemboweling, with which the candidate is threatened. As the Masonic "master's word" is communicated only at "low breath," so the selfsame precaution is prescribed in the Chaldean Book of Numbers and the Jewish Mercaba. When initiated, the neophyte was led by an ancient to a secluded spot, and there the latter whispered in his ear the great secret. * The Mason swears, under the most frightful penalties, that he will not communicate the secrets of
inferior degree"; and the Agrushada Parikshai says: "Any initiate of the third degree who reveals before the prescribed time, to the initiates of the second degree, the superior truths, must be put to death." Again, the Masonic apprentice consents to have his "tongue torn out by the roots" if he divulge anything to a profane; and in the Hindu books of initiation, the same Agrushada Parikshai, we find that any initiate of the first degree (the lowest) who betrays the secrets of his initiation, to members of other castes, for whom the science should be a closed book, must have "his tongue cut out," and suffer other mutilations.
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
As we proceed, we will point out the evidences of this identity of vows, formulas, rites, and doctrines, between the ancient faiths. We will also show that not only their memory is still preserved in India, but also that the Secret Association is still alive and as active as ever. That, after reading what we have to say, it may be inferred that the chief pontiff and hierophants, the Brahmatma, is still accessible to those "who know," though perhaps recognized by another name; and that the ramifications of his influence extend throughout the world. But we will now return again to the early Christian period.
As though he were not aware that there was any esoteric significance to the exoteric symbols, and that the Mysteries themselves were composed of two parts, the lesser at Agrae, and the higher ones at Eleusinia, Clemens Alexandrinus, with a rancorous bigotry that one might expect from a renegade Neo-platonist, but is astonished to find in this generally honest and learned Father, stigmatized the Mysteries as indecent and diabolical. Whatever were the rites enacted among the neophytes before they passed to a higher form of instruction; however misunderstood were the trials of Katharsis or purification, during which they were submitted to every kind of probation; and however much the immaterial or physical aspect might have led to calumny, it is but wicked prejudice which can compel a person to say that under this external meaning there was not a far deeper and spiritual significance.
It is positively absurd to judge the ancients from our own standpoint of propriety and virtue. And most assuredly it is not for the Church--which now stands accused by all the modern symbologists of having adopted precisely these same emblems in their coarsest aspect, and feels herself powerless to refute the accusations--to throw the stone at those who were her models. When men like Pythagoras, Plato, and Iamblichus, renowned for their severe morality, took part in the Mysteries, and spoke of them with veneration, it ill behooves our modern critics to judge them so rashly upon their merely external aspects. Iamblichus explains the worst; and his explanation, for an unprejudiced mind, ought to be
the awful sanctity with which these rites were accompanied." * "The wisest and best men in the Pagan world," adds Dr. Warburton, "are unanimous in this, that the Mysteries were instituted pure, and proposed the noblest ends by the worthiest means." **
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
In these celebrated rites, although persons of both sexes and all classes were allowed to take a part, and a participation in them was even obligatory, very few indeed attained the higher and final initiation. The gradation of the Mysteries is given us by Proclus in the fourth book of his Theology of Plato. "The perfective rite τελετε, precedes in order the initiation--Muesis--and the initiation, Epopteia, or the final apocalypse (revelation)." Theon of Smyrna, in Mathematica, also divides the mystic rites into five parts: "the first of which is the previous purification; for neither are the Mysteries communicated to all who are willing to receive them; . . . there are certain persons who are prevented by the voice of the crier (Κερυξ) . . . since it is necessary that such as are not expelled from the Mysteries should first be refined by certain purifications which the reception of the sacred rites succeeds. The third part is denominated epopteia or reception. And the fourth, which is the end and design of the revelation, is the binding of the head and fixing of the crowns *** . . . whether after this he (the initiated person) becomes . . . an hierophant or sustains some other part of the sacerdotal office. But the fifth, which is produced from all these, is friendship and interior communion with God." And this was the last and most awful of all the Mysteries.
There are writers who have often wondered at the meaning of this claim to a "friendship and interior communion with God." Christian authors have denied the pretensions of the "Pagans" to such "communion," affirming that only Christian saints were and are capable of enjoying it; materialistic skeptics have altogether scoffed at the idea of both. After long ages of religious materialism and spiritual stagnation, it has most certainly become difficult if not altogether impossible to substantiate the claims of either party. The old Greeks, who had once crowded
ottoman" with the younger sister, a lover of "ethics," while Martha goes off to the kitchen to cook. Anon the heated fancy of a blasphemous Brooklyn preacher and harlequin, the Reverend Dr. Talmage, makes us see her rushing back "with besweated brow, a pitcher in one hand and the tongs in the other . . . into the presence of Christ," and blowing him up for not caring that her sister hath left her "to serve alone." *
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
From the birth of the solemn and majestic conception of the unrevealed Deity of the ancient adepts to such caricatured descriptions of him who died on the Cross for his philanthropic devotion to humanity, long centuries have intervened, and their heavy tread seems to have almost entirely obliterated all sense of a spiritual religion from the hearts of his professed followers. No wonder then, that the sentence of Proclus is no longer understood by the Christians, and is rejected as a "vaglary" by the materialists, who, in their negation, are less blasphemous and atheistical than many of the reverends and members of the churches. But, although the Greek epoptai are no more, we have now, in our own age, a people far more ancient than the oldest Hellenes, who practice the so-called "preterhuman" gifts to the same extent as did their ancestors far earlier than the days of Troy. It is to this people that we draw the attention of the psychologist and philosopher.
One need not go very deep into the literature of the Orientalists to become convinced that in most cases they do not even suspect that in
grihesta [priests of the vulgar castes] and purahita [exorcisers, divines, prophets, and evocators of spirits]. And yet, we shall see . . . once that we have touched upon the question and study of manifestations and phenomena, that these initiates of the first degree (the lowest) attribute to themselves, and in appearance possess faculties developed to a degree which has never been equalled in Europe. As to the initiates of the second and especially of the third category, they pretend to be enabled to ignore time, space, and to command life and death." *
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Such initiates as these M. Jacolliot did not meet; for, as he says himself, they only appear on the most solemn occasions, and when the faith of the multitudes has to be strengthened by phenomena of a superior order. "They are never seen, either in the neighborhood of, or even inside the temples, except at the grand quinquennial festival of the fire. On that occasion, they appear about the middle of the night, on a platform erected in the centre of the sacred lake, like so many phantoms, and by their conjurations they illumine the space. A fiery column of light ascends from around them, rushing from earth to heaven. Unfamiliar sounds vibrate through the air, and five or six hundred thousand Hindus, gathered from every part of India to contemplate these demi-gods, throw themselves with their faces buried in the dust, invoking the souls of their ancestors." **
Let any impartial person read the Spiritisme dans le Monde, and he cannot believe that this "implacable rationalist," as Jacolliot takes pride in terming himself, said one word more than is warranted by what he had seen. His statements support and are corroborated by those of other skeptics. As a rule, the missionaries, even after passing half a lifetime in the country of "devil-worship," as they call India, either disingenuously deny altogether what they cannot help knowing to be true, or ridiculously attribute phenomena to this power of the Devil, that outrival the "miracles" of the apostolic ages. And what do we see this French
pretended magicians. This skilled and cool observer, this redoubtable materialist, after his long sojourn in India, affirms, "We unhesitatingly avow that we have not met, either in India or in Ceylon, a single European, even among the oldest residents, who has been able to indicate the means employed by these devotees for the production of these phenomena!"
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
And how should they? Does not this zealous Orientalist confess to us that even he, who had every available means at hand to learn many of their rites and doctrines at first hand, failed in his attempts to make the Brahmans explain to him their secrets. "All that our most diligent inquiries of the Pourohitas could elicit from them respecting the acts of their superiors (the invisible initiates of the temples), amounts to very little." And again, speaking of one of the books, he confesses that, while purporting to reveal all that is desirable to know, it "falls back into mysterious formulas, in combinations of magical and occult letters, the secret of which it has been impossible for us to penetrate," etc.
The fakirs, although they can never reach beyond the first degree of initiation, are, notwithstanding, the only agents between the living world and the "silent brothers," or those initiates who never cross the thresholds of their sacred dwellings. The Fukara-Yogis belong to the temples, and who knows but these cenobites of the sanctuary have far more to do with the psychological phenomena which attend the fakirs, and have been so graphically described by Jacolliot, than the Pitris themselves? Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the Scin-lecca, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyasi?
Although the story has been translated and commented upon by Professor Perty, of Geneva, still we will venture to give it in Jacolliot's own words: "A moment after the disappearance of the hands, the fakir continuing his evocations (mantras) more earnestly than ever, a cloud like the first, but more opalescent and more opaque, began to hover near the small brasier, which, by request of the Hindu, I had constantly fed with live coals. Little by little it assumed a form entire human, and I distinguished the spectre--for I cannot call it otherwise--of an old Brahman sacrificator, kneeling near the little brasier.
"He bore on his forehead the signs sacred to Vishnu, and around his
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
" 'Art thou, indeed,' said I at this moment, in a loud voice, 'an ancient inhabitant of the earth?'
"I had not finished the question, when the word AM, (yes) appeared and then disappeared in letters of fire, on the breast of the old Brahman, with an effect much like that which the word would produce if written in the dark with a stick of phosphorus.
" 'Will you leave me nothing in token of your visit?' I continued.
"The spirit broke the triple cord, composed of three strands of cotton, which begirt his loins, gave it to me, and vanished at my feet." *
"Oh Brahma! what is this mystery which takes place every night? . . . When lying on the matting, with eyes closed, the body is lost sight of, and the soul escapes to enter into conversation with the Pitris. . . . Watch over it, O Brahma, when, forsaking the resting body, it goes away to hover over the waters, to wander in the immensity of heaven, and penetrate into the dark and mysterious nooks of the valleys and grand forests of the Hymavat! " (Agroushada Parikshai.)
The fakirs, when belonging to some particular temple, never act but under orders. Not one of them, unless he has reached a degree of extraordinary sanctity, is freed from the influence and guidance of his guru, his teacher, who first initiated and instructed him in the mysteries of the occult sciences. Like the subject of the European mesmerizer, the average fakir can never rid himself entirely of the psychological influence exercised on him by his guru. Having passed two or three hours in the silence and solitude of the inner temple in prayer and meditation, the fakir, when he emerges thence, is mesmerically strengthened and prepared; he produces wonders far more varied and powerful than before he entered. The "master" has laid his hands upon him, and the fakir feels strong.
It may be shown, on the authority of many Brahmanical and Buddhist sacred books, that there has ever existed a great difference between
Atharva-Veda, "is in the power of the gods. The gods are under the power of magical conjurations. The magical conjurations are under the control of the Brahmans. Hence
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
sannyasis, or members of the ancient Supreme Council of Seventy.
Moreover, in Book I., of the Hindu Genesis, or Book of Creation of Manu, the Pitris are called the lunar ancestors of the human race. They belong to a race of beings different from ourselves, and cannot properly be called "human spirits" in the sense in which the spiritualists use this term. This is what is said of them:
"Then they (the gods) created the Jackshas, the Rakshasas, the Pisatshas, * the Gandarbas ** and the Apsaras, and the Asuras, the Nagas, the Sarpas and the Suparnas, *** and the Pitris--lunar ancestors of the human race" (See Institutes of Manu, Book I., sloka 37, where the Pitris are termed "progenitors of mankind").
The Pitris are a distinct race of spirits belonging to the mythological hierarchy or rather to the kabalistical nomenclature, and must be included with the good genii, the daemons of the Greeks, or the inferior gods of the invisible world; and when a fakir attributes his phenomena to the Pitris, he means only what the ancient philosophers and theurgists meant when they maintained that all the "miracles" were obtained through the intervention of the gods, or the good and bad daemons, who control the powers of nature, the elementals, who are subordinate to the power of him "who knows." A ghost or human phantom would be termed by a fakir palit, or chutna, as that of a female human spirit pichhalpai, not pitris. True, pitara means (plural) fathers, ancestors; and pitra-i is a kinsman; but these words are used in quite a different sense from that of the Pitris invoked in the mantras.
To maintain before a devout Brahman or a fakir that any one can converse with the spirits of the dead, would be to shock him with what would appear to him blasphemy. Does not the concluding verse of the Bagavat state that this supreme felicity is alone reserved to the holy sannyasis, the gurus, and yogis?
"Long before they finally rid themselves of their mortal envelopes, the souls who have practiced only good, such as those of the sannyasis and the vanaprasthas, acquire the faculty of conversing with the souls which preceded them to the swarga."
copies though they were intended to be. The story of the temptation of St. Anthony in the desert by the female demon, is a parody upon the preliminary trials of the neophyte during the Mikra, or minor Mysteries of Agrae--those rites at the thought of which Clemens railed so bitterly, and which represented the bereaved Demeter in search of her child, and her good-natured hostess Baubo. *
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Without entering again into a demonstration that in Christian, and especially Irish Roman Catholic, churches ** the same apparently indecent customs as the above prevailed until the end of the last century, we will recur to the untiring labors of that honest and brave defender of the ancient faith, Thomas Taylor, and his works. However much dogmatic Greek scholarship may have found to say against his "mistranslations," his memory must be dear to every true Platonist, who seeks rather to learn the inner thought of the great philosopher than enjoy the mere external mechanism of his writings. Better classical translators may have
Taylor devoted his whole useful life to the search after such old manuscripts as would enable him to have his own speculations concerning several obscure rites in the Mysteries corroborated by writers who had been initiated themselves. It is with full confidence in the assertions of various classical writers that we say that ridiculous, perhaps licentious in some cases, as may appear ancient worship to the modern critic, it ought not to have so appeared to the Christians. During the mediaeval ages, and even later, they accepted pretty nearly the same without understanding the secret import of its rites, and quite satisfied with the obscure and rather fantastic interpretations of their clergy, who accepted the exterior form and distorted the inner meaning. We are ready to concede, in full justice, that centuries have passed since the great majority of the Christian clergy, who are not allowed to pry into God's mysteries nor seek to explain that which the Church has once accepted and established, have had the remotest idea of their symbolism, whether in its exoteric or esoteric meaning. Not so with the head of the Church and its highest dignitaries. And if we fully agree with Inman that it is "difficult to believe that the ecclesiastics who sanctioned the publication of such prints ** could have been as ignorant as modern ritualists," we are not at all prepared to believe with the same author "that the latter, if they knew the real meaning of the symbols commonly used by the Roman Church, would not have adopted them."
To eliminate what is plainly derived from the sex and nature worship
infallibility, has quasi-revolutionized the Christian world, is not original with the Church of Rome. It is but a return to a hardly-remembered heresy of the early Christian ages, that of the Collyridians, so called from their sacrificing cakes to the Virgin, whom they claimed to be Virgin-born. * The new sentence, "O, Virgin Mary, conceived without sin," is simply a tardy acceptance of that which was at first deemed a "blasphemous heresie" by the orthodox fathers.
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
To think for one moment that any of the popes, cardinals, or other high dignitaries "were not aware" from the first to the last of the external meanings of their symbols, is to do injustice to their great learning and their spirit of Machiavellism. It is to forget that the emissaries of Rome will never be stopped by any difficulty which can be skirted by the employment of Jesuitical artifice. The policy of complaisant conformity was never carried to greater lengths than by the missionaries in Ceylon, who, according to the Abbe Dubois--certainly a learned and competent authority--"conducted the images of the Virgin and Saviour on triumphal cars, imitated from the orgies of Juggernauth, and introduced the dancers from the Brahminical rites into the ceremonial of the church." ** Let us at least thank these black-frocked politicians for their consistency in employing the car of Juggernauth, upon which the "wicked heathen"
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Says Manu: "The Sovereign Master who exists through himself, divides his body into two halves, male and female, and from the union of these two principles is born Viradj, the Son." *
There was not a Christian Father who could have been ignorant of these symbols in their physical meaning; for it is in this latter aspect that they were abandoned to the ignorant rabble. Moreover, they all had as good reasons to suspect the occult symbolism contained in these images; although as none of them--Paul excepted, perhaps--had been initiated they could know nothing whatever about the nature of the final rites. Any person revealing these mysteries was put to death, regardless of sex, nationality, or creed. A Christian father would no more be proof against an accident than a Pagan Mysta or the Μυστες.
If during the Aporreta or preliminary arcanes, there were some practices which might have shocked the pudicity of a Christian convert--though we doubt the sincerity of such statements--their mystical symbolism was all sufficient to relieve the performance of any charge of licentiousness. Even the episode of the Matron Baubo--whose rather eccentric method of consolation was immortalized in the minor Mysteries--is explained by impartial mystagogues quite naturally. Ceres-Demeter and her earthly wanderings in search of her daughter are the euhemerized descriptions of one of the most metaphysico-psychological subjects ever treated of by human mind. It is a mask for the transcendent narrative of the initiated seers; the celestial vision of the freed soul of the initiate of the last hour describing the process by which the soul that has not yet been incarnated descends for the first time into matter, "Blessed is he who hath seen those common concerns of the underworld; he knows both the end of life and its divine origin from Jupiter," says Pindar. Taylor shows, on the authority of more than one initiate, that the "dramatic performances of the Lesser Mysteries were designed by their founders, to signify occultly the condition of the unpurified soul invested with an earthly body, and enveloped in a material and physical
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
The body is the sepulchre, the prison of the soul, and many Christian Fathers held with Plato that the soul is punished through its union with the body. Such is the fundamental doctrine of the Buddhists and of many Brahmanists too. When Plotinus remarks that "when the soul has descended into generation (from its half-divine condition) she partakes of evil, and is carried a great way into a state the opposite of her first purity and integrity, to be entirely merged in which is nothing more than to fall into dark mire"; * he only repeats the teachings of Gautama-Buddha. If we have to believe the ancient initiates at all, we must accept their interpretation of the symbols. And if, moreover, we find them perfectly coinciding with the teachings of the greatest philosophers and that which we know symbolizes the same meaning in the modern Mysteries in the East, we must believe them to be right.
If Demeter was considered the intellectual soul, or rather the Astral soul, half emanation from the spirit and half tainted with matter through a succession of spiritual evolutions--we may readily understand what is meant by the Matron Baubo, the Enchantress, who before she succeeds in reconciling the soul--Demeter, to its new position, finds herself obliged to assume the sexual forms of an infant. Baubo is matter, the physical body; and the intellectual, as yet pure astral soul can be ensnared into its new terrestrial prison but by the display of innocent babyhood. Until then, doomed to her fate, Demeter, or Magna-mater, the Soul, wonders and hesitates and suffers; but once having partaken of the magic potion prepared by Baubo, she forgets her sorrows; for a certain time she parts with that consciousness of higher intellect that she was possessed of before entering the body of a child. Thenceforth she must seek to rejoin it again; and when the age of reason arrives for the child, the struggle--forgotten for a few years of infancy--begins again. The astral soul is placed between matter (body) and the highest intellect (its immortal spirit or nous). Which of those two will conquer? The result of the battle of life lies between the triad. It is a question of a few years of physical enjoyment on earth and--if it has begotten abuse--of the dissolution of the earthly body being followed by death of the astral body, which thus is prevented from being united with the highest spirit of the triad, which alone confers on us individual immortality; or, on the other hand, of becoming immortal mystae; initiated before death of the body into the divine truths of the after life. Demi-gods below, and GODS above.
epopteia was is alluded to by Plato in Phaedrus (64); ". . . being initiated in those Mysteries, which it is lawful to call the most blessed of all mysteries . . . we were freed from the molestations of evils which otherwise await us in a future period of time. Likewise, in consequence of this divine initiation, we became spectators of entire, simple, immovable, and blessed visions, resident in a pure light." This sentence shows that they saw visions, gods, spirits. As Taylor correctly observes, from all such passages in the works of the initiates it may be inferred, "that the most sublime part of the epopteia . . . consisted in beholding the gods themselves invested with a resplendent light," or highest planetary spirits. The statement of Proclus upon this subject is unequivocal: "In all the initiations and mysteries, the gods exhibit many forms of themselves, and appear in a variety of shapes, and sometimes, indeed, a formless light of themselves is held forth to the view; sometimes this light is according to a human form, and sometimes it proceeds into a different shape." *
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
"Whatever is on earth is the resemblance and SHADOW of something that is in the sphere, while that resplendent thing (the prototype of the soul-spirit) remaineth in unchangeable condition, it is well also with its shadow. But when the resplendent one removeth far from its shadow life removeth from the latter to a distance. And yet, that very light is the shadow of something still more resplendent than itself." Thus speaks Desatir, the Persian Book of Shet, ** thereby showing its identity of esoteric doctrines with those of the Greek philosophers.
The second statement of Plato confirms our belief that the Mysteries of the ancients were identical with the Initiations, as practiced now
surrounding vestment, which we denominate body, and to which we are now bound like an oyster to its shell." *
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati.
Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One.
Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere!
To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris.
The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
who is not to be divulged to the external senses of man; dissipated darkness, and manifested the perceptible world."
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
So the doctrine of planetary and terrestrial Pitris was revealed entirely in ancient India, as well as now, only at the last moment of initiation, and to the adepts of superior degrees. Many are the fakirs, who, though pure, and honest, and self-devoted, have yet never seen the astral form of a purely human pitar (an ancestor or father), otherwise than at the solemn moment of their first and last initiation. It is in the presence of his instructor, the guru, and just before the vatou-fakir is dispatched into the world of the living, with his seven-knotted bamboo wand for all protection, that he is suddenly placed face to face with the unknown PRESENCE. He sees it, and falls prostrate at the feet of the evanescent form, but is not entrusted with the great secret of its evocation; for it is the supreme mystery of the holy syllable. The AUM contains the evocation of the Vedic triad, the Trimurti Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, say the Orientalists; ** it contains the evocation of something more real and objective than this triune abstraction--we say, respectfully contradicting the eminent scientists. It is the trinity of man himself, on his way to become immortal through the solemn union of his inner triune SELF--the exterior, gross body, the husk not even being taken in consideration in this human trinity. *** It is, when this trinity, in anticipation of the final
"In ancient India, the mystery of the triad, known but to the initiates, could not, under the penalty of death, be revealed to the vulgar," says Vrihaspati. Neither could it in the ancient Grecian and Samothracian Mysteries. Nor can it be now. It is in the hands of the adepts, and must remain a mystery to the world so long as the materialistic savant regards it as an undemonstrated fallacy, an insane hallucination, and the dogmatic theologian, a snare of the Evil One. Subjective communication with the human, god-like spirits of those who have preceded us to the silent land of bliss, is in India divided into three categories. Under the spiritual training of a guru or sannyasi, the vatou (disciple or neophyte) begins to feel them. Were he not under the immediate guidance of an adept, he would be controlled by the invisibles, and utterly at their mercy, for among these subjective influences he is unable to discern the good from the bad. Happy the sensitive who is sure of the purity of his spiritual atmosphere! To this subjective consciousness, which is the first degree, is, after a time, added that of clairaudience. This is the second degree or stage of development. The sensitive--when not naturally made so by psychological training--now audibly hears, but is still unable to discern; and is incapable of verifying his impressions, and one who is unprotected the tricky powers of the air but too often delude with semblances of voices and speech. But the guru's influence is there; it is the most powerful shield against the intrusion of the bhutna into the atmosphere of the vatou, consecrated to the pure, human, and celestial Pitris. The third degree is that when the fakir or any other candidate both feels, hears, and sees; and when he can at will produce the reflections of the Pitris on the mirror of astral light. All depends upon his psychological and mesmeric powers, which are always proportionate to the intensity of his will. But the fakir will never control the Akasa, the spiritual life-principle, the omnipotent agent of every phenomenon, in the same degree as an adept of the third and highest initiation. And the
"He that can be perceived only by the spirit, that escapes the organs of sense, who is without visible parts, eternal, the soul of all beings, that none can comprehend, displayed His own splendor" (Manu, book i., slokas, 6-7).
Such is the ideal of the Supreme in the mind of every Hindu philosopher.
"Of all the duties, the principal one is to acquire the knowledge of the supreme soul (the spirit); it is the first of all sciences, for it alone confers on man immortality" (Manu, book xii., sloka 85).
And our scientists talk of the Nirvana of Buddha and the Moksha of Brahma as of a complete annihilation! It is thus that the following verse is interpreted by some materialists.
"The man who recognizes the Supreme Soul, in his own soul, as well as in that of all creatures, and who is equally just to all (whether man or animals) obtains the happiest of all fates, that to be finally absorbed in the bosom of Brahma" (Manu, book xii., sloka 125).
The doctrine of the Moksha and the Nirvana, as understood by the school of Max Muller, can never bear confronting with numerous texts that can be found, if required, as a final refutation. There are sculptures in many pagodas which contradict, point-blank, the imputation. Ask a Brahman to explain Moksha, address yourself to an educated Buddhist and pray him to define for you the meaning of Nirvana. Both will answer you that in every one of these religions Nirvana represents the dogma of the spirit's immortality. That, to reach the Nirvana means absorption into the great universal soul, the latter representing a state, not an individual being or an anthropomorphic god, as some understand the great EXISTENCE. That a spirit reaching such a state becomes a part of the integral whole, but never loses its individuality for all that. Henceforth, the spirit lives spiritually, without any fear of further modi-
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
The hierophants and some Brahmans are accused of having administered to their epoptai strong drinks or anaesthetics to produce visions which shall be taken by the latter as realities. They did and do use sacred beverages which, like the Soma-drink, possess the faculty of freeing the astral form from the bonds of matter; but in those visions there is as little to be attributed to hallucination as in the glimpses which the scientist, by the help of his optical instrument, gets into the microscopic world. A man cannot perceive, touch, and converse with pure spirit through any of his bodily senses. Only spirit alone can talk to and see spirit; and even our astral soul, the Doppelganger, is too gross, too much tainted yet with earthly matter to trust entirely to its perceptions and insinuations.
How dangerous may often become untrained mediumship, and how thoroughly it was understood and provided against by the ancient sages, is perfectly exemplified in the case of Socrates. The old Grecian philosopher was a "medium"; hence, he had never been initiated into the Mysteries; for such was the rigorous law. But he had his "familiar spirit" as they call it, his daimonion; and this invisible counsellor became the cause of his death. It is generally believed that if he was not initiated into the Mysteries it was because he himself neglected to become so. But the Secret Records teach us that it was because he could not be admitted to participate in the sacred rites, and precisely, as we state, on account of his mediumship. There was a law against the admission not only of such as were convicted of deliberate witchcraft * but even
How then, with such an instance as that of Socrates, in relation to the visions and spiritual wonders at the epoptai, of the Inner Temple, can any one assert that these seers, theurgists, and thaumaturgists were all "spirit-mediums"? Neither Pythagoras, Plato, nor any of the later more important Neo-platonists; neither Iamblichus, Longinus, Proclus, nor Apollonius of Tyana, were ever mediums; for in such case they would not have been admitted to the Mysteries at all. As Taylor proves--"This assertion of divine visions in the Mysteries is clearly confirmed by Plotinus. And in short, that magical evocation formed a part of the sacerdotal office in them, and that this was universally believed by all antiquity long before the era of the later Platonists," shows that apart from natural "mediumship," there has existed, from the beginning of time, a mysterious science, discussed by many, but known only to a few.
The use of it is a longing toward our only true and real home--the after-life, and a desire to cling more closely to our parent spirit; abuse of it is sorcery, witchcraft, black magic. Between the two is placed natural "mediumship"; a soul clothed with imperfect matter, a ready agent for either the one or the other, and utterly dependent on its surroundings of life, constitutional heredity--physical as well as mental--and on the nature of the "spirits" it attracts around itself. A blessing or a curse, as fate will have it, unless the medium is purified of earthly dross.
The reason why in every age so little has been generally known of the mysteries of initiation, is twofold. The first has already been explained by more than one author, and lies in the terrible penalty following the least indiscretion. The second, is the superhuman difficulties and even dangers which the daring candidate of old had to encounter, and either conquer, or die in the attempt, when, what is still worse, he did not lose his
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
"Ben Asai looked and--lost his sight.
"Ben Zoma looked and--lost his reason.
"Acher made depredations in the plantation" (mixed up the whole and failed). "But Akiba, who had entered in peace, came out of it in peace, for the saint whose name be blessed had said, 'This old man is worthy of serving us with glory.' "
"The learned commentators of the Talmud, the Rabbis of the synagogue, explain that the garden of delight, in which those four personages are made to enter, is but that mysterious science, the most terrible of sciences for weak intellects, which it leads directly to insanity," says A. Franck, in his Kabbala. It is not the pure at heart and he who studies but with a view to perfecting himself and so more easily acquiring the promised immortality, who need have any fear; but rather he who makes of the science of sciences a sinful pretext for worldly motives, who should tremble. The latter will never withstand the kabalistic evocations of the supreme initiation.
The licentious performances of the thousand and one early Christian sects, may be criticised by partial commentators as well as the ancient Eleusinian and other rites. But why should they incur the blame of the theologians, the Christians, when their own "Mysteries" of "the divine incarnation with Joseph, Mary, and the angel" in a sacred trilogue used to be enacted in more than one country, and were famous at one time in Spain and Southern France? Later, they fell like many other once secret rites into the hands of the populace. It is but a few years since, during every Christmas week, Punch-and-Judy-boxes, containing the above named personages, an additional display of the infant Jesus in his manger, were carried about the country in Poland and Southern Russia. They were called Kaliadovki, a word the correct etymology of which we are
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
If that abstract sentiment called Christian charity prevailed in the Church, we would be well content to leave all this unsaid. We have no quarrel with Christians whose faith is sincere and whose practice coincides with their profession. But with an arrogant, dogmatic, and dishonest clergy, we have nothing to do except to see the ancient philosophy--antagonized by modern theology in its puny offspring--Spiritualism--defended and righted so far as we are able, so that its grandeur and sufficiency may be thoroughly displayed. It is not alone for the esoteric philosophy that we fight; nor for any modern system of moral philosophy, but for the inalienable right of private judgment, and especially for the ennobling idea of a future life of activity and accountability.
We eagerly applaud such commentators as Godfrey Higgins, Inman, Payne Knight, King, Dunlap, and Dr. Newton, however much they disagree with our own mystical views, for their diligence is constantly being rewarded by fresh discoveries of the Pagan paternity of Christian symbols. But otherwise, all these learned works are useless. Their researches only cover half the ground. Lacking the true key of interpretation they see the symbols only in a physical aspect. They have no password to cause the gates of mystery to swing open; and ancient spiritual philosophy is to them a closed book. Diametrically opposed though they be to the clergy in their ideas respecting it, in the way of interpretation they do little more than their opponents for a questioning public. Their labors tend to strengthen materialism as those of the clergy, especially the Romish clergy, do to cultivate belief in diabolism.
If the study of Hermetic philosophy held out no other hope of reward, it would be more than enough to know that by it we may learn with what perfection of justice the world is governed. A sermon upon this text is preached by every page of history. Among all there is not one that conveys a deeper moral than the case of the Roman Church. The divine law of compensation was never more strikingly exemplified than in the
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of
70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162.
70:** St. Augustine: "City of God."
70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii.
71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres."
71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street.
71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39.
74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum.
74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend."
74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290.
74:**** Thirteenth century.
76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852.
76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177.
77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler.
77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia."
79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan.
80:* "Supernatural Religion."
81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen."
81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi.
82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64.
83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses?
83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God?
83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y.
85:* "Paul and Plato."
85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168.
85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy.
85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc.
86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435.
87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano.
87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172.
87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88.
88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface.
88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62.
88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv.
89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37.
89:** Ibid.
90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor.
90:** "Paul and Plato."
90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst."
90:**** I Corin., iii. 10.
91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy.
91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school.
91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus.
92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist.
92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90.
93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct.
93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90.
93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria.
94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured.
94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918.
95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71.
95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27.
96:* Ibid., p. 76.
96:** Initiates and seers.
96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook.
96:**** "The Heathen Religion."
97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283.
97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv.
98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others.
99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians."
101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor.
101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life.
102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies."
103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68.
103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79.
105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations."
107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires.
107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers.
107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits.
108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250.
108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism."
109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton.
109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York).
110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez.
110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411.
111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ."
112:* "Enead," i., book viii.
113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380.
113:** Verses 33-41.
114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64.
114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms:
Namo Buddhaya,
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows:
Nan-won Fho-tho-ye,
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!
See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286.
114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
In burning the works of the theurgists; in proscribing those who affect their study; in affixing the stigma of demonolatry to magic in general, Rome has left her exoteric worship and Bible to be helplessly riddled by every free-thinker, her sexual emblems to be identified with coarseness, and her priests to unwittingly turn magicians and even sorcerers in their exorcisms, which are but necromantic evocations. Thus retribution, by the exquisite adjustment of divine law, is made to overtake this scheme of cruelty, injustice, and bigotry, through her own suicidal acts.
True philosophy and divine truth are convertible terms. A religion which dreads the light cannot be a religion based on either truth or philosophy--hence, it must be false. The ancient Mysteries were mysteries to the profane only, whom the hierophant never sought nor would accept as proselytes; to the initiates the Mysteries became explained as soon as the final veil was withdrawn. No mind like that of Pythagoras or Plato would have contented itself with an unfathomable and incomprehensible mystery, like that of the Christian dogma. There can be but one truth, for two small truths on the same subject can but constitute one great error. Among thousands of exoteric or popular conflicting religions which have been propagated since the days when the first men were enabled to interchange their ideas, not a nation, not a people, nor the most abject tribe, but after their own fashion has believed in an Unseen God, the First Cause of unerring and immutable laws, and in the immortality of our spirit. No creed, no false philosophy, no religious exaggerations, could ever destroy that feeling. It must, therefore, be based upon an absolute truth. On the other hand, every one of the numberless religions and religious sects views the Deity after its own fashion; and, fathering on the unknown its own speculations, it enforces these purely human outgrowths of overheated imagination on the ignorant masses, and calls them "revelation." As the dogmas of every religion and sect often differ radically, they cannot be true. And if untrue, what are they?
"The greatest curse to a nation," remarks Dr. Inman, "is not a bad religion, but a form of faith which prevents manly inquiry. I know of no nation of old that was priest-ridden which did not fall under the swords
Footnotes
55:* "La Demonomanie, ou traite des Sorciers." Paris, 1587.
61:* Dr. W. G. Soldan: "Geschichte der Hexenprocesse, aus den Quellen dargestellt," Stuttgart, 1843.
61:** Frederick Forner, Suffragan of Bamberg, author of a treatise against heretics and sorcerers, under the title of "Panoplia Armaturoe Dei."
61:*** "Sorcery and Magic," by T. Wright, M.A., F.S.A., etc., Corresponding Member of the National Institute of France, vol. ii., p. 185.
62:* Besides these burnings in Germany, which amount to many thousands, we find some very interesting statements in Prof. Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science." On page 146, he says: "The families of the convicted were plunged into irretrievable ruin. Llorente, the historian of the Inquisition, computes that Torquemada and his collaborators, in the course of eighteen years, burned at the stake 10,220 persons, 6,860 in effigy, and otherwise punished 97,321! . . . With unutterable disgust and indignation, we learn that the papal government realized much money by selling to the rich, dispensations to secure them from the Inquisition."
65:* "Sorcery and Magic"; "The Burnings at Wurzburg," p. 186.
66:* And retinted in the blood of the millions murdered in his name--in the no less
innocent blood than his own, of the little child-witches!
67:* St. Augustine: "City of God," i, xxi., ch. vi.; des Mousseaux: "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons."
68:* A correspondent of the London "Times" describes the Catalonian exorcist in the following lines:
"About the 14th of October it was privately announced that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen years of age, of the lower class, having long been afflicted with 'a hatred of holy things,' the senior priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit would cure her of her disease. The exhibition was to be held in a church frequented by the best part of the community. The church was dark, but a sickly light was shed by wax lights on the sable forms of some eighty or a hundred persons who clustered round the presbyterio, or sanctuary, in front of the altar. Within the little enclosure or sanctuary, separated from the crowd by a light railing, lay, on a common bench, with a little pillow for her head to recline upon, a poorly-clad girl, probably of the peasant or artisan class; her brother or husband stood at her feet to restrain her (at times) frantic kicking by holding her legs. The door of the vestry opened; the exhibitor--I mean the priest--came in. The poor girl, not without just reason, 'had an aversion to holy things,' or, at least, the 400 devils within her distorted body had such an aversion, and in the confusion of the moment, thinking that the father was 'a holy thing,' she doubled up her legs, screamed out with twitching mouth, her whole body writhing, and threw herself nearly off the bench. The male attendant seized her legs, the women supported her head and swept out her dishevelled hair. The priest advanced and, mingling familiarly with the shuddering and horror-struck crowd, said, pointing at the suffering child, now sobbing and twitching on the bench, 'Promise me, my children, that you will be prudent (prudentes), and of a truth, sons and daughters mine, you shall see marvels.' The promise was given. The exhibitor went to procure stole and short surplice (estola y roquete), and returned in a moment, taking his stand at the side of the 'possessed with the devils,' with his face toward the group of students. The order of the day's proceedings was a lecture to the bystanders, and the operation of exorcising the devils. 'You know,' said the priest, 'that so great is this girl's aversion to holy things, myself included, that she goes into convulsions, kicks, screams, and distorts her body the moment she arrives at the corner of this street, and her convulsive struggles reach their climax when she enters the sacred house of the Most High.' Turning to the prostrate, shuddering, most unhappy object of his attack, the priest commenced: 'In the name of 70:* Louis Jacolliot: "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 162. 70:** St. Augustine: "City of God." 70:*** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. ii. 71:* Des Mousseaux: "Table des Matieres." 71:** "Demonologia"; London, 1827, J. Bumpus, 23 Skinner Street. 71:*** "Traite Preparatif a l'Apologie pour Herodote," c. 39. 74:* De Missa Privata et Unctione Sacerdotum. 74:** See the "Life of St. Dominick" and the story about the miraculous Rosary; also the "Golden Legend." 74:*** James de Varasse, known by the Latin name of James de Voragine, was Vicar General of the Dominicans and Bishop of Genoa in 1290. 74:**** Thirteenth century. 76:* "Rituale Romanum," pp. 475-478. Parisiis, 1852. 76:** "Moeurs et Pratiques des Demons," p. 177. 77:* See the narrative selected from the "Golden Legend," by Alban Butler. 77:** See the "Golden Legend"; "Life of St. Francis"; "Demonologia." 79:* "The Mythology of the Hindus," by Charles Coleman. Japan. 80:* "Supernatural Religion." 81:* Neither do we, if by true religion the world shall at last understand the adoration of one Supreme, invisible, and Unknown Deity, by works and acts, not by the profession of vain human dogmas. But our intention is to go farther. We desire to demonstrate that if we exclude ceremonial and fetish worship from being regarded as essential parts of religion, then the true Christ-like principles have been exemplified, and true Christianity practiced since the days of the apostles, exclusively among Buddhists and "heathen." 81:** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. xvi. 82:* "Discourses of Miracles wrought in the Roman Catholic Church; or a full Refutation of Dr. Stillingfleet's unjust Exceptions against Miracles." Octavo, 1676, p. 64. 83:* After this, why should the Roman Catholics object to the claims of the Spiritualists? If, without proof, they believe in the "materialization" of Mary and John, for Ignatius, how can they logically deny the materialization of Katie and John (King), when it is attested by the careful experiments of Mr. Crookes, the English chemist, and the cumulative testimony of a large number of witnesses? 83:** The "Mother of God" takes precedence therefore of God? 83:*** See the "New Era" for July, 1875. N. Y. 85:* "Paul and Plato." 85:** See "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," p. 168. 85:*** Creature of salt, air, water, or of any object to be enchanted or blessed, is a technical word in magic, adopted by the Christian clergy. 85:**** "Rom. Rit.," edit. of 1851, pp. 291-296, etc., etc. 86:* "Rom. Rit.," pp. 421-435. 87:* See "Art-Magic," art. Peter d'Abano. 87:** "Ritual," pp. 429-433; see "La Magie au XIXme Siecle," pp. 171, 172. 87:*** "Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie," vol. ii., p. 88. 88:* "Conferences," by Le Pere Ventura, vol. ii., part i., p. lvi., Preface. 88:** "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 62. 88:*** "De Baptismo Contra Donatistas," lib. vi., ch. xliv. 89:* "Conflict, etc.," p. 37. 89:** Ibid. 90:* "Paul and Plato," by A. Wilder, editor of "The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," of Thomas Taylor. 90:** "Paul and Plato." 90:*** See Taylor's "Eleus. and Bacchic Myst." 90:**** I Corin., iii. 10. 91:* In its most extensive meaning, the Sanscrit word has the same literal sense as the Greek term; both imply "revelation," by no human agent, but through the "receiving of the sacred drink." In India the initiated received the "Soma," sacred drink, which helped to liberate his soul from the body; and in the Eleusinian Mysteries it was the sacred drink offered at the Epopteia. The Grecian Mysteries are wholly derived from the Brahmanical Vedic rites, and the latter from the ante-vedic religious Mysteries--primitive Buddhist philosophy. 91:** It is needless to state that the Gospel according to John was not written by John but by a Platonist or a Gnostic belonging to the Neo-platonic school. 91:*** The fact that Peter persecuted the "Apostle to the Gentiles," under that name, does not necessarily imply that there was no Simon Magus individually distinct from Paul. It may have become a generic name of abuse. Theodoret and Chrysostom, the earliest and most prolific commentators on the Gnosticism of those days, seem actually to make of Simon a rival of Paul, and to state that between them passed frequent messages. The former, as a diligent propagandist of what Paul terms the "antitheses of the Gnosis" (1st Epistle to Timothy), must have been a sore thorn in the side of the apostle. There are sufficient proofs of the actual existence of Simon Magus. 92:* "Introd. to Eleus. and Bacchic Mysteries," p. x. Had we not trustworthy kabalistic tradition to rely upon, we might be, perhaps, forced to question whether the authorship of the Revelation is to be ascribed to the apostle of that name. He seems to be termed John the Theologist. 92:** Bunsen: "Egypt's Place in Universal History," vol. v., p. 90. 93:* See de Rouge: "Stele," p. 44; PTAR (videus) is interpreted on it "to appear," with a sign of interrogation after it--the usual mark of scientific perplexity. In Bunsen's fifth volume of "Egypte," the interpretation following is "Illuminator," which is more correct. 93:** Bunsen's "Egypt," vol. v., p. 90. 93:*** It is the property of a mystic whom we met in Syria. 94:* The Priests of Isis were tonsured. 94:** See "Ancient Faiths," vol. ii., pp. 915-918. 95:* "The Gnostics and their Remains," p. 71. 95:** See illustration in Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 27. 96:* Ibid., p. 76. 96:** Initiates and seers. 96:*** The augur's, and now bishop's, pastoral crook. 96:**** "The Heathen Religion." 97:* "Peres du Desert d'Orient," vol. ii., p. 283. 97:** Justin Martyr: "Quaest.," xxiv. 98:* See Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries"; Porphyry and others. 99:* Franck: "Die Kabbala." 101:* "Mysteries of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Assyrians." 101:** "Divine Legation of Moses"; The "Eleusinian Mysteries" as quoted by Thos. Taylor. 101:*** This expression must not be understood literally; for as in the initiation of certain Brotherhoods it has a secret meaning, hinted at by Pythagoras, when he describes his feelings after the initiation and tells that he was crowned by the gods in whose presence he had drunk "the waters of life"--in Hindu, a-bi-hayat, fount of life. 102:* This original and very long sermon was preached in a church at Brooklyn, N. Y., on the 15th day of April, 1877. On the following morning, the reverend orator was called in the "Sun" a gibbering charlatan; but this deserved epithet will not prevent other reverend buffoons doing the same and even worse. And this is the religion of Christ! Far better disbelieve in him altogether than caricature one's God in such a manner. We heartily applaud the "Sun" for the following views: "And then when Talmage makes Christ say to Martha in the tantrums: 'Don't worry, but sit down on this ottoman,' he adds the climax to a scene that the inspired writers had nothing to say about. Talmage's buffoonery is going too far. If he were the worst heretic in the land, instead of being straight in his orthodoxy, he would not do so much evil to religion as he does by his familiar blasphemies." 103:* "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 68. 103:** Ibid., pp. 78, 79. 105:* Louis Jacolliot: "Phenomenes et Manifestations." 107:* Pisatshas, daemons of the race of the gnomes, the giants and the vampires. 107:** Gandarbas, good daemon, celestial seraphs, singers. 107:*** Asuras and Nagas are the Titanic spirits and the dragon or serpent-headed spirits. 108:* See Arnolius: "Op. Cit.," pp. 249, 250. 108:** See Inman's "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism." 109:* Introduction to Taylor's "Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries," published by J. W. Bouton. 109:** Illustrated figures "from an ancient Rosary of the blessed Virgin Mary, printed at Venice, 1524, with a license from the Inquisition." In the illustrations given by Dr. Inman the Virgin is represented in an Assyrian "grove," the abomination in the eyes of the Lord, according to the Bible prophets. "The book in question," says the author, "contains numerous figures, all resembling closely the Mesopotamian emblem of Ishtar. The presence of the woman therein identifies the two as symbolic of Isis, or la nature; and a man bowing down in adoration thereof shows the same idea as is depicted in Assyrian sculptures, where males offer to the goddess symbols of themselves" (See "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p. 91. Second edition. J. W. Bouton, publisher, New York). 110:* See King's "Gnostics," pp. 91, 92; "The Genealogy of the Blessed Virgin Mary," by Faustus, Bishop of Riez. 110:** Prinseps quotes Dubois, "Edinburgh Review," April, 1851, p. 411. 111:* "Manu," book I., sloka 32: Sir W. Jones, translating from the Northern "Manu," renders this sloka as follows: "Having divided his own substance, the mighty Power became half male, half female, or nature active and passive; and from that female he produced VIRAJ." 112:* "Enead," i., book viii. 113:* "Commentary upon the Republic of Plato," p, 380. 113:** Verses 33-41. 114:* "Phaedrus," p. 64. 114:** The Supreme Buddha is invoked with two of his acolytes of the theistic triad, Dharma and Sanga. This triad is addressed in Sanscrit in the following terms: Namo Buddhaya, while the Thibetan Buddhists pronounce their invocations as follows: Nan-won Fho-tho-ye, See also "Journal Asiatique," tome vii., p. 286. 114:*** The body of man--his coat of skin--is an inert mass of matter, per se; it is but the sentient living body within the man that is considered as the man's body
Namo Dharmaya,
Namo Sangaya,
Aum!
Nan-won Tha-ma-ye,
Nan-won Seng-kia-ye,
Aan!