Related Texts • Paul the Gnostic Opponent of Peter • The Hypostasis of the Archons • The Gospel of Marcion Related Subjects • Gnosticism • Hermeticism • Alchemy • Rosicrucianism

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In his large love for the dumb things this Hindu Ideal Redeemer is greater, and stoops lower than the would-be Savior of human beings alone, and only the Jewish part of them, who is portrayed as the Canonical Christ. But cui bono? when it is only an Ideal and that Ideal takes the place of possible reality. These false Ideals are forever fatal to human verity. What has the worship of Mary ever done for woman in the character of wife? You cannot live by a Lay figure. When once we know it to be unreal, whether as the Christ, or Buddha, or Madonna, it becomes a type that we cannot print from any longer, because it fails to impress deeply enough.

Whether considered as the God made human, or as man made divine, this character never existed as a person. That pre-historic Ideal Christ of the Gnosis had always personated the divine in human form, the Immortal incarnated, the Majesty within superior to all the physical conditions without, with power to bear and serve, to serenely suffer the ills of flesh, become a sacrifice and glory in the Cross of its earthly suffering.

Spiritual mediums were considered to be a kind of intermediate beings, because they first demonstrated the existence of a living link betwixt the divine mind and matter in the human form. But the original intermediate being was the spiritual nature itself, called the Son of God, the Christ within, which constituted that living link in whomsoever it existed. No human medium could become the Christ of the Gnosis, who represented a principle which could only become a person in a future state of being--never in this world. So was it before the history alleged to have been lived, and so the fact remains to-day, and for ever. The historical was an impossible mode of realizing that which could only be a spiritual possibility; and thus the truth according to the Gnosis has been refracted in the falsehood according to the History.

The Gnostic Christ was the real founder of Christianity! This was the Christ of the first Christians, and this was their model man, the Ideal meek and lowly one, which the writers of the Gospels have sought to realize in the form of historic personality. This lunar, solar, mystical, or spiritual type could not be made historical in the creed of those who knew, i.e. , the Gnostics. But it was humanized; it was turned into a one person, who became the one Christ in this world, and the one spirit of all others, for those who did not know. For the earliest appeal of the new faith was made to men who were so ignorant, according to the record, that when they had just witnessed a rising from the dead of certain historic characters, they did not comprehend what this rising again from the dead should mean!

Historic Christianity had retained possession of a dead Christ, the mere husk of the grub, together with a vague belief in the butterfly; and if you, likewise, believe in its one dead grub, you may cultivate the hope of some day, also, becoming a butterfly. But, for the Gnostics, the transformation from the chrysalis condition of matter to the spiritual was a natural fact of which they had an ever-present vitalizing consciousness. They were transforming and seeking attainment all their life through; and their Christ was the representative type of that transformation of the mortal into an immortal.

Historic Christianity abolished the Gnostic spiritualism for all who accepted the false belief! Henceforth there was but one spirit, that of the historic Bringer of Immortality to Light; and, if any apparition appeared to the abnormal or normal vision, it would be the historic Christ for ever after! It was so with the vision of Paul, which was reported and perverted in the Book of Acts. When his inner eyes were opened he saw spirits--as Swedenborg and many others are reported to have done--whereupon they avowed he had seen the risen Jesus, their only witness for a spirit-world! So has it been with the non-Spiritualists ever since, for whom an apparition must be the Christ. In an island near Rotterdam, says Renan, the peasants believe that Christ comes to the bed of death to assure the elect of their justification. In point of fact many see him! On the other hand, the Buddhist "Lotus" declares that thousands of Buddhas show their faces to the virtuous man at the moment of his decease, which proves the Buddhas to be spirits. So has it been with the ecstatics and mediums in all the religious sects. Whenever they saw a spirit they saw Jesus the Christ their Savior, because they knew of no other spirit or name--the history being established for the other world as well as in this--and so one delusion was bound to support the other; the true vision was made untrue; and all the facts of spiritualism have been falsified and turned into lying witnesses, to substantiate the truth of the Gospel history. All such manifestations as had previously occurred and had been attributed to the spirits of the departed, were now ascribed to the power of Christ, in whose name the prophesying was performed, the healing effected, and the mental medicine dispensed. Henceforth there was to be no other name under heaven but this. In this name only were the Gentiles to have hope. Redemption was made dependent on this name; cripples were cured, the blind made to see, devils were cast out, the dead raised, sins remitted, souls saved, and eternal life ensured by belief on this name supposed to be New. At the mention of this name the dead arose up out of their graves, and, according to the testimony of Irenæus, they survived amongst the living many years! So much more potent was faith than fact. The earlier spiritualism was founded upon facts in nature, which did not need the desperate expedient of a miracle to explain. But in the later cult the more the miracle the larger loomed the supernatural, and the broader were the foundations for the belief that was based on faith instead of facts, and on Materialism plus Miracle.

They accounted for the spiritual phenomena of the Gnostics by declaring, as Justin Martyr did, that when the devil and the demons knew that Christ was believed on, and that he was expected "in every race," they put forth Simon, Menander, and the other Gnostics to deceive the multitude with magic. Because Spiritualism was naturally and for ever at war with the historical misinterpretation, Justin asserts that after the ascension of Christ into Heaven, the demons put forward certain men like Simon to declare that they were the Gods. Whereas, historic Christianity proclaimed them to be devils; and devils they have remained ever since, according to the false belief.

The founders of the Catholic Church were the de-Spiritualizers of primitive Christianity, and the destroyers of the Gnostic religion as such, by placing their ban upon all Spiritualistic phenomena! The foundations of the ancient cult were to be built upon no longer.

In the recently discovered Didaché or the "Teaching of the Apostles," the facts of Spiritualism are admitted, and the practices of the prophets are recognized. They are spoken of as "ordering a table in the spirit," and of "assembling together for a Cosmic mystery." But those are the true mediums alone who have the "manners of the Lord;" and the law as laid down in these Didaché is:--"Thou shalt not play the mage! Thou shalt not practice witchcraft"--or spirit-intercourse. No prophet that speaks as one of the possessed is to be tried or tolerated. "Every sin shall be forgiven, but this sin shall not be forgiven." It was now and henceforth to be Spiritualism without spirits, abstract and ideal, not tangible or real, an article of faith versus fact. We see from the Epistle of John how mortally afraid of Gnostic Spiritualism were the founders of the historical fraud. "Many deceivers are gone forth into the world that confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh." These words of John state the Gnostic position. Their Christ had not so come, and could not be carnalized. These Gnostics were in the world long before they heard of such a doctrine; but when they did they denied and opposed it. This, says John, is the anti-Christ. But, "every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit which annulleth Jesus is not of God. And this is the spirit of the anti-Christ whereof ye have heard that it cometh, and now it is in the world already."

A story is told of two early English saints, one of whom was supposed to have died. They were about to bury him, when, as he was being lowered into the grave, face upward and uncovered, he opened wide his ghostly staring eyes and told them he had only fallen into a trance. He had been into the other world, and found that what they were preaching about it in this was not true. There was no "Fall of Man," he said. "There is no hell," he cried; "no personal Christ--no Redeemer." But here his fellow-saint outside the grave interposed--"For God's sake fill in the earth and stop the blasphemer's mouth!" They did so, and the rest of his revelation remained unknown. That was how the Catholic Christians dealt with the Gnostic Spiritualists when they had the power. They would shut up the living mouth of the Spirit-world, because the reports from the other side were fatal to the Historic fiction. They broke down the bridge between the two worlds, and proclaimed a great gulf fixed forever, which could only be crossed by faith in the Historic Jesus. Here the movement of Historic Christianity was a direct and deliberate shunting of the human mind from off the main line, the highway of its natural development, and running it head first into all sorts of bye-ways and blind alleys, from which we have had to turn back and grope out again as best we could for any progress to be made.

Historic Christianity originated with turning the Gnostic and Esoteric teachings inside out and externalizing the mythical allegory in a personal human history. All that was interior with the knowers was made objective; all that was spiritual in significance was embodied to be made palpable for the ignorant. A corporeal Christ was substituted for the trans-corporeal man--a Christ whose advent was without, instead of the one that must be evolved within--a personal Savior who died for all, instead of the Christ that was the living Spirit working within all. It was remarked by Augustine (de Civ. Dei, 7, 24) that the Gnostics "promised eternal life to anybody"--that is, with them the soul of man was an eternal principle, and the resurrection was not cunningly reserved for the elect who accepted the Historic belief. The Gnostic claimed to be illuminated by the presence of the Christ within; the Christian, according to Justin, by the name of the Christ without. And a very curious mental link of connection between the genuine Gnostic and the counterfeit Historic Christ is apparent in the Ignatian Epistle to the Smyrneans. The writer says--"I know that even after his resurrection he was in the flesh, and I believe that he is so still." Now this combines both, after a fashion.

The writer is seeking to establish the history against those who denied that the Christ could be made a man. In doing this, he has recourse to the Gnostic Christ, who always was in the flesh, or matter, as the salt of soul, and the only spiritual Savior from death and dissolution. Speaking from his Gnostic standpoint, Paul declared to the historic Christians who followed John and Peter, that God had sent them a working of error, that they should believe a lie, because they rejected the truth as it was according to his spiritual Gospel! The lie was established by externalizing the Christ that can only dwell within--by successfully falsifying for a time that truth which is true for ever. In this way, you see, that the coming of the Holy Spirit, which always had been within, was henceforth to be without. Thus, the descent of the Holy Ghost upon Jesus, in Jordan, is an external transaction. The Holy Spirit that comes from heaven in the form of a dove--a Gnostic type of the Spirit; that is, of both sexes--or, later on, as a whirlwind, in which the Gust and Ghost are one. In the course of this conversion of the inner to the outer, we are told that the Holy Ghost, which always had been extant with the Gnostics, was not yet given, because the Historical Jesus was not yet glorified; but after he had risen from the grave, and returned bodily to the disciples, he breathed upon them, and said, "Receive ye the Holy Ghost." And again: the Holy Ghost, as an external effusion, could not be given until after forty days; whereas, in the Essenic Mysteries, the body of the disciple became the temple of the Holy Ghost when he had reached the sixth stage of interior progress. This shows the literalizers of the legend, the rationalizers of the mythos, the anti-mystics, the Exoterists, externalizing the Gnosis, and converting the matter of it into human history. There was to be neither Spirit within nor Spirit-world without for the ignorant Christians, until the resurrection and ascension of Jesus had historically established both.

Two distinct charges are brought against the Carnalizers by Tatian in the second century. He cries out shame upon the Catholic Church, and exclaims, "You have given the Nazarite wine to drink, and commanded the prophets, saying, 'Prophesy not.'" They were debauching the Christian community and destroying the primitive Nazarite purity which Tertullian claimed for the Christians when he said, "We are they of whom it is written, 'Their Nazarites are whiter than snow.'" Next, they have determined to put an end to practical spiritualism on behalf of the new faith; and this is treated by Tatian as part of a subtle scheme for destroying the purity and spirituality of that Christianity which was primitive and non-historic, too!

The transformations of the Pagan cult into the Christian, and of the Gnostic into the historical representation, were effected behind the veil identifiable as the "Discipline of the Secret," the strictness of which was only relaxed after the fourth century, when the Truth had been hidden in a fog of falsehood; the inner mysteries turned to an outer mist, that made confusion cunningly complete.

The Gnostic Spiritualism was declared illegal and impious. The objective realities of the phenomenal Spiritualists, which had heretofore furnished the one bit of foothold in natural fact for a belief in the future life, were now discarded on behalf of the more subjective idealities derived from a faith that was founded by means of a fraudulent history mis-translated from a mystical fable.

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