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The Roman Church adopted the Angels and Archangels of the Celestial Allegory as its Saints, including Saint Bacchus and Saint Satan in place of Guardian Spirits that were once human beings.

A dogma of the Real Presence of the Historic Christ was now substituted for the Real Presence of Spirit Friends in the earlier communion.

The mysteries in which the early Christian Neophytes had been initiated into a lawful communion with the dead were gradually suppressed; and in the sixth century we find the doctrine of a communion with the saints was substituted for the practical intercourse with spirits. It happens that the time when the doctrine was inserted in the Creed coincides almost exactly with the suppression of the mysteries which were connected with the so-called Agapæ of the early Christians! The Agapæ were only a continuation of the ancient Pagan funeral feasts and Eucharistic rites in honor of the departed. Hence they were held in the cemeteries and catacombs in presence of the dead, where the mummy-type or the Karest was the Christ, as the image of rising again; the image that was carried round and pointed to as a cause for festive rejoicing at the Egyptian feast! In this way we can watch the false faith taking the place of the facts. And as the Gnostic sects and brotherhoods gave up the ghost, Historic Christianity assumed their glory. In this strange scene of transformation and dramatic illusion by some Satanic sleight of hand and turn of head, the afterglow of the ancient religions was changed into the dawn of the superseding faith, which was then proclaimed to be the fountain-head of all future enlightenment! or rather the waning light of ancient knowledge has been mistaken for the dawning of the New Belief; a dawn that was followed by the grey twilight that deepened into the thousand-years-long intellectual night of the Dark Ages.

It matters not what may be the relative share of responsibility attributable to knavery on the one hand and ignorance on the other, the fact remains that a huge and hideous mistake has been made, an irretrievable error committed in the name of Historic Christianity. For ages past the false faith did feed the flames of martyrdom with the fires of hell on pretext of giving light to them that it had covered with its smoke of torment and pall of darkness. And now the sun of a better day has arisen to put out the fires infernal, to disperse the clouds of human sighs, that have obscured the heavens so long, and to aid in drying the tears from our afflicted earth at last. Revelation, by means of Evolution, has now made known for ever that the fall of man was not historic fact. Humanity has not to bear the penalty eternally for a divine failure in the beginning of time. This world is not a prison-house of fallen beings. Consequently, the promised redemption and proffered mode of salvation are a vain delusion, and all in vain has the spirit of the living Christ within been compelled to drag the dead body of the corporeal Christ from the grave for the purpose of proving the history for the ignorant, until its corruption is a sickening stench in the nostrils of the nations, and there is a clamor for the burial that shall get rid of both together. The history of Christ as our impersonated Savior on earth, equally with the story of Adam's fall from Eden, is mythology misbelieved. The Old Testament was read backwards to be re-written as the New. The only original elements in this interpolation between the ancient Gnosis and modern science are those that prove false to the governing laws of the universe, and those facts of nature which make the sole true revelation. Theory avails nothing in the presence of the fact that Historic Christianity was founded on the "Resurrection of the Flesh," and that it has left the world where it was itself, after putting out the Gnostic Light, all in the dark concerning our spiritual continuity in death! Canon Gregory said only the other day if Jesus did not rise corporeally from the tomb, then that tomb must be the grave of Christianity. And the "Spectator" for August 13, 1887, speaking of the Greeks who died before the Resurrection was thus historically established, says:--"In the nature of things the Greeks could have had no sure hope of a glorious resurrection." Such was and is, when honestly confessed, the genuine Christian creed. It does seem to me as if those arch-forgers in Rome had subtly succeeded in converting that which was true in the old religion into a secret support for all that was false in the new. Gnostic Christianity was absolutely, fundamentally, and for ever opposed to the historic rendering, and yet the Gnostic doctrines of the fourth Gospel, and of Paul's and James' Epistles, have been allowed to remain under cover and control as spiritual forces artfully tethered to draw for the physical and anti-Gnostic Faith. I am sometimes compelled to say to myself it has been most devilishly done!--and so have we!

We have Spiritualists to-day who lay hold of the Scriptures, or can be laid hold of, by means of the Gnosis that remains there as a lure, and turn it to the account intended, that is, as a decoy towards accepting the history. And so when the risen Christ reappears in the actual body that is missing from the grave, they are prepared to explain away the physical fact by means of the spiritual Gnosis. In that way nothing is bottomed, and nothing can be really understood; but,--the purpose of the promoters, who were the founders of the falsehood, and who founded it well-nigh unfathomably,--their purpose continues to be fulfilled.

In writing to a Christian spiritualist the other day, I said, "I know no better way of waging the battle for Truth than arraying the facts face to face on either side and letting them fight it out." His reply was, "I do not believe in your facts because I do not know." Now, that is good firm ground to stand upon, however late in life we take the position. But, to be of any real service, we must apply the same reason all round! As an adherent of Historic Christianity, that writer has all along been a Believer in what he did not know to be facts; and a believer just because he did not know; and now he finds it too late, perhaps, to correct his early belief by means of later knowledge! All I ask is that people shall no longer believe because they do not know. No matter what they may call themselves--they are traitors to the Truth who will not face the facts or examine for themselves, but will go on repeating ignorantly, or in pious pigheadedness, the orthodox assumptions, and applying the hypotheses of accommodation to the Christian documents. You might as well expect to reach the next world by going round and round this, as to think of making ends meet by unifying the Gnostic religion with Historic Christianity. Phenomenal Spiritualists who go on philandering with the fallacies of the Christian faith, and want to make out that it is identical with Modern Spiritualism, have at last to face the great, indubitable fact that Historic Christianity was established as a non-Spiritualist and an anti-Spiritualistic religion! Its primary fact, its initial point of departure, its first bit of foothold for a new departure, was the acknowledgment of the physical resurrection of the dead Historic Christ. It is useless to try to wriggle out of that. The reappearance of the Corpus Christi is the fundamental fact of the Faith! The strings are pulled so that the Marionette Messiah may be forced to exclaim that he is not a bodiless ghost; not a boneless phantom; not a spirit anyway; and he offers the proof palpable that he is none of your Spiritualistic or Gnostic Christs, or the spirit of anybody! Moreover, this is the veritable dead body that is missing from the tomb! And still further, the passage in Luke has been altered from Marcion's "Gospel of the Lord" on purpose to substitute the Corporeal Christ of Historic Christianity for the Spiritual representation of the Gnostics. In Marcion's version the word phantasma is used, and this has not only been omitted by Luke; the phantom is made to protest very emphatically that he is not in anywise phantasmal, but is a being of flesh and blood even as they are; and after demonstrating the fact, clinches it by asking if they have got anything there for him to eat! The entire fabric of the new faith rested upon the reality of a physical resurrection; and it is too late now to shift the basis of the edifice by trying to lift it bodily, like the city of Chicago, on to the higher and surer ground of Spiritualism, so as to find a firmer basis for it and all its weight of errors! We can trace the very bifurcation and fresh starting-point of the new faith in the account given of the resurrection in the Canonical Gospels. They proclaimed the resurrection of the dead in Jesus and through him only! The historic Jesus who alone had power to open the gateways of the grave, and who had personally left with Peter the keys that lock up heaven and open hell. There was nothing to constitute a new faith in a spiritual resurrection. That was already the common property of the Gnostics, whether called Pagans or Christians. That was according to the natural fact, and here only was the miracle, in the dead body rising again to prove the presence and the power of the divinity. Such is the religious foundation, for which the Christians are responsible Trustees!

As a Spiritualist, then, I assert that the new Christian dispensation was founded upon the death and burial of the ancient spiritualism; or upon the gagging of it and getting it underground dead or alive! And the tomb out of which a corporeal Christ was believed to have emerged as the Savior of the World, and brought immortality to light by a physical resurrection from the dead, has been the burial-place of genuine Spiritualism for 1800 years. For this reason the defenders of the faith were bound to make war upon the facts of phenomenal spiritualism, and persecute and put the psychical demonstrators to death, which they did with a consuming fury so long as they were allowed.

The terrible craze that was caused by this perversion of the ancient wisdom has sown the germs of insanity broadcast, and half-filled the world with pious lunatics for whom it offers no cure, and who are still told to look forward for an asylum in the world to come. But such pernicious teaching will make people as insane for another life as for this! Here, or hereafter, falsehood must be fraudulent, though it may be found out too late! What of the myriads of suffering souls who have been forced to wear the blinkers of ignorance all through this life for fear they should learn to see for themselves--who were drugged and deceived from birth till death with the nostrums of a false deluding faith. What of them when they awake from their stupor in death to find out that they have been foully, cruelly hocused with a creed that was an illusion for this life and a delusion for the next.

Delusion that is perfectly complete

For those who die to find out the deceit!

If the teachers of the fleshly cult could but see how their fallacies dissolve in death--how the false ideal set up in this life dislimns and fades as the terrible light of reality whitens in the next; if they could but see that mournful multitude of the helplessly deceived who staked their all upon the truth of what they had been taught and find they have lost because the teaching was false! If you could see them wander up and down on the other side of the dark river and wring their hands over their blighted hopes and broken hearts; hear the pitiful wailings for the Christ that is no more objective there than he was here--for the visionary glory that they may not grasp, the distant rainbows, never reached, that weep themselves away in tears--for the lifeboat gone to wreck on the wrong shore because of the false beacon-lights. If you could only dream how these poor souls desire to have the deception made known on this side of life--how they want to send some word of warning to their friends--how they will almost hiss at me through the mouths of mediums whenever they have the chance, as if their fierce feelings had turned into tongues of flame, praying for us to work on faster and cry louder against the established lie, for time is getting short and the helpers are few, and the atmosphere around each live soul is so deathly dense with indifference! This would be unbearable but for those calm other voices of the Gnostics who in this life walked our world lords of themselves with "inward glory crowned," and who lived on after the Gnosis was suppressed and the ancient oracles made dumb--who live on yet, and are working with us still--who fill and inflate us at times with their influence, as if each single soul of us were a hundred thousand ( "cent mille," as his men used to call Napoleon). It is they who are joining hands with us to-day to bridge over that dark gulf betwixt two worlds which the historic and fleshly faith first excavated, and has been deepening and widening now for eighteen centuries.

This is the Resurrection Day of the pre-Christian Gnosticism, as shown by the recent revival of Spiritualism, by the restoration of the Tree of Knowledge, by the elevation of Womankind, instead of the Fall of man; and we are living witnesses of the fact that

"Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again,

The eternal years of God are hers;

But Error, wounded, writhes with pain,

And dies among his worshippers!"

NOTE.

I have been asked whether I am able to explain by means of the Egyptian Mythos, the two diverse statements in the Gospel according to Luke and the Book of Acts concerning the ascension of Jesus into Heaven. In Luke the risen Christ is "carried up into Heaven" on the third day following the crucifixion. In the Acts he is not "taken up" into Heaven until the fortieth day, or after forty days! Such serious discrepancies as these are forever irreconcilable as history, but they are found to contain the very facts that reconstitute the Mythos.

The resurrection of Osiris at the Autumn equinox was lunar; at the vernal equinox it was solar. After he was betrayed to his death, when the sun was in the sign of Scorpio, he rose again on the third day as Lord of Light in the moon, or as Horus, the child of the mother-moon. The solar resurrection was at the vernal equinox when the sun entered the first of the upper signs and Orion rose. This time it was in the character of the second Horus, the adult of 30 years; and this second resurrection followed the forty days of mourning for the suffering God which were celebrated in the Mysteries, and survive in a Christianized form as our Lent. And just as the myth of the double Horus in the two characters of the child of 12 years, and the adult Horus of 30 years, has been continued in the Gospels to furnish the two phases in the life of Jesus, so have the two different resurrections with their correct dates been applied to the Christ made historical.

Thus interpreted by means of the Mythos these two versions of one alleged fact tend to corroborate my explanation already made that the two different dates for the crucifixion given in the otherwise irreconcilable accounts belong to the luni-solar reckoning in the same luni-solar myth. In Egyptian the signs of a half-moon and fourteen days are identical; and in the dark half of the moon Osiris was torn into fourteen parts. Therefore the 14th of the lunar month was the day of full moon. Whereas in the soli-lunar month of thirty days the 15th was the middle of the month. Now the crucifixion or the crossing at Easter was and still is determined by the day of full moon. This will be on the 14th of the month of twenty-eight days in the reckoning by the moon only, but on the 15th of the month according to the soli-lunar reckoning. The 14th of the month would be the lunar reckoning of Anup = John, and the 15th that of Taht-Mati = Mathew in the two forms of the Egyptian Mythos. Both reckonings were extant in two different cults and both were separately continued by the Eastern and Western Churches for the one day of the crucifixion. Both cannot be historically correct, but they are both astronomically true. Both could be made to meet at a given point in the total combination which was determined by the conjunction of the sun and moon at the equinox as the day of full moon. But the two different dates for the mid-month remained, and these are represented by the traditions of two different dates for the crucifixion. Both the lunar and the solar dates could be utilized by the Mythos, in which there were two crucifixions and two resurrections, though these will bear witness for the single fact of the historical crucifixion. As we have seen, the two ascensions of Osiris on the third day and at the end of forty days, have been preserved, and are repeated as historical transactions. Two different Crosses were also contained in the Christian Iconography as the cross of Autumn and of Easter; and although we may not be able to show two crucifixions in the Canonical Gospels, nevertheless the total matter of the Mythos is there. When Jesus was led up into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, and to suffer during forty days, we have the parallel to the struggle between Osiris and Sut, which was celebrated during the forty days of mourning in the mysteries. Moreover, there were two days of death or crucifixion kept in Rome until the present century, when the dead Christ used to be laid out and exhibited on the Thursday before Good Friday; and two days of resurrection were also celebrated in the two Sabbaths on Saturday and Sunday. As the Apostolic Constitutions show, both of these days were continued for the two weekly holidays of the Christians, Saturday being the day of rising again on the 7th day of the week in the lunar cult; Sunday, the Sabbath of the 8th day, according to the solar resurrection. Such are the fundamental facts; and, to my thinking, they are of sufficient force to cleave the Canonical history right in two, each half being then claimed by the Mythos. Here, as elsewhere, the Mythos does explain the fact, but only by abolishing the history. From beginning to end the ascertainable facts are astronomical, and interpretable solely by means of the Gnostic explanation of the Egyptian Mythos, which always denied, because it disproved, the alleged human history.

The same correspondent desires to know whether I would exclude the Bible from our children's schools. Most certainly. I would have the Bible-basis superseded for all future teaching as unscientific, immoral, and false to the facts in nature. The mass of people who are Bible-taught never get free from the erroneous impressions stamped on their minds in their infancy, so that their manhood or womanhood can have no intellectual fulfillment, and millions of them only attain mentally to a sort of second childhood.

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