Alternative Religion/ Library

I have never yet seen a sign in the works of Christian writers that they knew anything whatever of the real nature of these doctrinal mysteries. All alike are ignorant of the Tradition or Gnosis on which a true explanation depended. They assume the human history as the initial point of a new beginning, and ignore, or are ignorant of, that which lies beyond. When called upon to face the facts in broad daylight they themselves will be all in the dark, and will have to fight against them blindfold. But it is impossible to enter within range of understanding Paul's teaching until we do know something of the doctrines that were unfolded in the mysteries. It is impossible to comprehend the mystery of Paul's Christ without a fundamental knowledge of the Messianic mystery that had been from the Beginning. This was his mystery, which he would not make so much of if he had started with what are held to be plain historical gospel truths. He spoke the "Wisdom of God in a mystery that hath been hidden; which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory." The "mystery of Christ which in other generations was not made known." The "mystery which is Christ in you." His was the "revelation of the mystery which hath been kept in silence through times eternal." The fact is that Paul was a publisher of the ancient mysteries; that was why his enemies strove to kill him! He openly promulgated the Gnosis which had always been kept secret. But to comprehend him we must have some knowledge of the Messianic mystery, which had an origin in phenomena that are both natural and explicable. When one has worked at the subject for years, it can be explained in a few hours. The root of the Messiah's name is Mesi in Egyptian. One meaning, like that of the Christ in Greek and Messiach in Hebrew, is to anoint. But the fundamental signification is re-birth. The month, Mes-ore, was so named from the re-birth of the Inundation. The mam- mesi was the re-birth-place of the man or mummy. The evening meal on the first day of the New Year was the Mesiu, or festival of its birth. Cf. Sanskrit masa, for a moon or month, and masala for a year.

This re-birth could be very various in phenomena, and so was the typical Messiah or re-born one. The serpent called Mesi, the Sacred Word, was the Messiah by name, because the reptile sloughed its skin, and renewed itself. Hence the Serpent was a symbol of the Gnostic Christ. Re-birth was the manifestation and the personified Manifestor was the Messiah, under whichever type or in whatever phase of the phenomena. Re-birth of the Nile, of the light in the moon, of the time-cycle, or of the Dead, could have its Messiah! Hence the Messiah had a monthly re-birth in the lunar orb, and a solar one every year--with re-birth from the virgin mother in the Zodiac. But there was a more mysterious manifestation when the girl or boy attained pubescence, or re-birth, into womanhood and manhood. Here the Messiah is both male and female--Charis as well as Christ; Wisdom as well as the Word! According to the natural facts, at that period of re-birth was born the procreative power for further ensuring the future re-birth of the race. Men and women could reproduce themselves in this life. Hence the re-birth of the Anointed One, the Messiah of Adultship. But beyond these natural re-births, it was demonstrated in the spiritual mysteries of abnormal mediumship, that there was a spirit in man, or, at least, in some men, that could reproduce itself, or, by alliance with the power above, could be reproduced, or re-born, for the next life. This was the Christ of the Gnosis, the Messianic Manifestor in a psychical or spiritual phase; the Revealer, according to the mystery of Paul. That which he had received from no man, was communicated to him by this revelation of the Christ. But mark; in no one of these phases, elemental, Kronian, or human, could the Messiah, the Christ of the manifestation, become any one historic personage. Also, in the human phase, there is but one sense in which the Christ could be born of a virgin mother, and that can only be understood by taking the Christ as the Immortal in man, and supplementing it with the knowledge that the mother was the first recognized inspirer of the soul. When typified and made doctrinal, this mother, as quickener of the soul, this mother of the Horus, or Christ, may be said to be virgin in a region beyond that of physical contact in the fleshly human phase. In a final form, the Messiah was the immortal spirit in man, or the Christ within, according to the language of Paul. Those who understood these things could not take to, or be taken in by, historic Christianity; could only think of it as did Celsus when he says of the Christians: "Certain most impious errors are committed by them, which are due to their extreme ignorance, in which they have wandered away from the meaning of the divine enigmas"; and as did Porphyry, who denounced the Christian religion as a "blasphemy, barbarously bold." The Christian doctrine of being born again was derived without knowledge from this Gnostic re-birth, which was the conversion of the total man, and his seven lower souls, into a likeness of his supreme or divine self, with the eighth one, the Christ-spirit, as the reproducer for eternal life. Paul sometimes claims that he possesses this Christ-nature, this Revealer within, because, according to the Gnostics, humanity could attain to the divine altitude, and demonstrate upon the Mount of Transfiguration the immortal element in the nature of man. The Christian world let go, and lost this basis that Paul found in natural, though supra-normal fact, when it ignorantly substituted the modus operandi of miracle applied to a physical resurrection.

But, as we have seen, this manifestor of the of the re-birth might be feminine as well as masculine. In fact, the female announcer was first, and there are mystical reasons for this in nature. In Hebrew, the Holy Spirit, or ruach, is of a feminine gender. The soul is female. Some of the Gnostic sects assigned the soul to the female nature, and made their Charis not only anterior, but superior, to the Christ. In the Book of Wisdom it is Sophia herself who is the pre-Christian Savior of mankind. It was Wisdom that men are taught, and she is the Saviour through knowledge and good works. Whereas the Christ was turned into a Savior through faith. The same Tree of Knowledge that supplied the fruit which damned the primal pair in the Genesis, is the Tree of Wisdom in the Apocrypha, where Wisdom, personified as the Tree, exclaims, "I am the mother of fair love, and fear, and knowledge, and holy hope. Come unto me all ye that be desirous of me, and fill yourselves with my fruits. For my memorial is sweeter than honey, and mine inheritance than the honey-comb. He that obeyeth me shall never be confounded." This complete reversal of the Christian belief is to be found in the Hidden Wisdom! Such was the interpretation, by the men who knew, of that Fable on which the Fall of Man was based by those who have imposed on us with their ignorance, and made us blind with their belief. Wisdom is the renewer and renovator of all things, and it is she who confers immortality on man; she who is the Christ as bringer to re-birth. The Gnostic Marcus maintained that Charis was superior to "all things" or Totum; and Charis, the female Christ, was the illuminating spirit of his teaching, as when he is made to say to his mediums:-- "Behold, Charis has descended upon thee; open thy mouth and prophesy; open thy mouth and thou shalt prophecy." Apply this to the Spirit as male, instead of female, and you have the Christ, or illuminating spirit of Paul. It was a question of priority in the type, and belonged to a mystical interpretation of natural phenomena. The blood of Charis preceded the blood of Christ, and but for the purification by the blood of Charis, there would have been no doctrine of the purification of souls by the blood of Christ. The Eucharist was a celebration of Charis before it was assigned to the Christ.

Again, Paul's Christ is identified with the angel Metatron, as the Messiah who followed the Israelites in the wilderness. Thus he makes the angel masculine. But in the Targumists' traditions the Well of Miriam takes the place of this sustaining Christ, who was the spiritual rock according to Paul. In the gospel of the Egyptians, quoted by Clement Alexander, the Lord says: "I am come to destroy the works of the Woman." The two manifestors, male and female, are continued by the "Shepherd of Hermas," which some of the Fathers regarded as a divinely inspired scripture. Here the spirit, or Logos, who is an old woman-- i.e., the ancient Wisdom--in one vision, becomes the son of God in another! Of her it is said: "She is an old woman, because she was the first of all creation, and the world was made by her." Wisdom, the woman, was first; she was the mother of God. Christ, the son, was second; then he superseded the female in one representation; in another he was blended with her, and consequently portrayed in the image of both sexes, as a spiritual type. The Wisdom or Sophia of the Gnostics was first at the head of the seven pre-planetary powers, and was called "Ogdoas," as mother of the first and inferior Hebdomad; next the Christ was made the head as manifestor of the seven later planetary powers, called by them the superior Hebdomad, he being the outcome of a later creation, and representative of the Fatherhood in heaven, which followed the fatherhood established on earth; and that same Gnostic manifestor of the seven powers or Gods had been Iu in Egypt, Iao in Phœnicia, Assur in Assyria, and the Buddha or Agni in India, ages on ages earlier.

Now Paul was opposed to those Gnostics who exalted the feminine type of the soul--the female as bringer to re-birth hereafter. He repudiated it, and proclaimed his Christ. His Word, Logos or Messiah, is strictly masculine. In India this type would be Lingaic versus the Yonian. He maintains that the "Word by Wisdom knew not God." This is exactly the same as saying that at one time men only recognised the motherhood in heaven, and did not know who were their own fathers on earth. The Lord is the spirit, the Christ is the spirit, he declares; not Sophia, not the wisdom of a feminine nature. Christ, he affirms, is both the "power and the wisdom of God." He proclaims all the treasures of Sophia and of the Gnosis to be contained in the Christ, and says the Christ has been "made unto us Wisdom." The Christ has taken her place. Again, his glorifying is not in fleshly Wisdom, not in the female Charis, but in the grace of God (2 Cor. i. 12). For the female Wisdom had been according to the flesh, the woman or mother being of the flesh fleshly; and Paul, as Gnostic or Kabbalist, had been acquainted with the fleshly Wisdom, one of whose mysteries appertained to feminine periodicity, which he now repudiates when he says: "Even though we have known Christ (or the manifestor) after the flesh, yet now we know so no more." Here it cannot be pretended that Paul ever knew the personal Christ in the flesh, and therefore some other fact has to be encountered. However interpreted, he is speaking doctrinally, and not of two historic characters. Paul's is the Gnostic Christ as the Second Adam; the man from heaven, whose type superseded the man of earth. Paul knew well enough that Adam was not a man in the literal sense; he was the typical man of the flesh; the son of the woman; and as was the type, such was the antitype, when he calls his Christ the second Adam, the later spiritual type of man, and of the Father above. Neither were, or could be, historic personages. To use his own words, "These things are an allegory." In her most occult phase the feminine messenger was a Word that could be made flesh; for she was the flesh-maker, the mother of Matter. But this was on physiological grounds alone. Hence she was superseded by the masculine messenger; the spirit that could never be made flesh. None but the initiated in these matters could possibly know what was meant by this transfer of type, and substitution of the Lord for the Lady, the Christ for Wisdom, the second Adam for the first. But there it is truth-like at the bottom of the well; the source of so much difficulty found in the depths of Paul's writings. And this contention of Paul on behalf of one Gnostic dogma against another has been made to look as if he were fervently fighting for an Historic Jesus.

This transfer of type is not limited to Paul! For instance, the Vine was a feminine symbol. Wisdom says, "As the Vine brought I forth" (Ecc. xxiv. 17); and in the Book of Proverbs Sophia cries, "Come eat of my bread, and drink of the wine I have mingled." The Fig-Tree in Egypt was the figure of the Lady of Heaven, who is portrayed as the Tree of Life and Knowledge, in the act of feeding souls. She literally gives her body as the Bread and her blood as the Wine of Life! In the later Ptolemeian times this Tree was assigned to Sophia or Wisdom! which shows the link between Egypt and Greece. The superseding of Sophia is also illustrated in the cursing of the fruitless Fig-tree by the Canonical Christ, where the Parable of Mythology is represented as a human history. In John's Gospel the type has been transferred, just as the sayings were, to the masculine nature, and the Christ becomes the bread and wine of life. In the Apocrypha it is Sophia who is "The brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness!" (Wisdom vii. 26.) In the Epistle to the Hebrews the Christ takes the place of Sophia. He is called the "effulgence of the glory" of God, the "very image of his substance." Nevertheless, the male Christ could no more be made flesh in a man than Sophia or Charis could have previously been incarnated in an historical woman. You cannot understand one half without the other. Both must be taken together. The doctrine is doubly and wholly opposed to any and all historical personality.

But, we have not yet completely mastered the entire Mystery of Paul for modern use; and it is not possible for any one but the phenomenal Spiritualist, who knows that the conditions of trance and clairvoyance are facts in nature; only those who have evidence that the other world can open and lighten with revelations, and prove its palpable presence, visibly and audibly; only those who except the teaching that the human consciousness continues in death, and emerges in a personality that persists beyond the grave; only such, I say, are qualified to comprehend the mystery, or receive the message, once truly delivered to men by the Spiritualist Paul, but which was thoroughly perverted by the Sarkolators, the founders of the fleshly faith. In the first place he was an Initiate in the Gnostic Mysteries, called Kabbalist in Hebrew. He tells us how exceedingly jealous for the traditions he had been, which must have included the traditional interpretation of the mysteries and of the Gnosis or hidden Wisdom. He was a perfected Adept. He knew the nature of the Kronian Christ, and of the Spiritual Christ, according to the Gnosis. Beyond that, Paul, on his own testimony, was an abnormal Seer, subject to the conditions of trance. He could not remember if certain experiences occurred to him in the body or out of it! This trance condition was the origin and source of his revelations, the heart of his mystery, his infirmity in which he gloried--in short, his "thorn in the flesh." He shows the Corinthians that his abnormal condition, ecstasy, illness, madness (or what not), was a phase of spiritual intercourse in which he was divinely insane--insane on behalf of God--but that he was rational enough in his relationship to them. He says: "I will come to visions and revelations of the Lord. I knew a man in Christ fourteen years ago (whether in the body I know not; or whether out of the body I know not; God knoweth), such an one caught up even in the third heaven" --on behalf of that man he will glory. "And by reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations, wherefore that I should not be exalted over much, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, that I should not be exalted over much." Paul's Thorn in the Flesh has been attributed to lechery, and to sore eyes; but no Christian commentator known to me has ever connected it with abnormal phenomena, except as miracle. The Marcionites said the Mystery was manifested to Paul by revelation. Paul says the same. By this abnormal mode the Mystery was revealed to him in person. His eyes were opened, so that he could see for himself the truth that was taught in the Mysteries. If a Spirit appeared in vision to Paul, that would positively prove the re-birth for a future life, and constitute the revelation of his Messianic mystery. Paul's Christ, the Lord, is the spirit; his gospel is that of spiritual revelation, the chief mode of manifestation being abnormal, as it was, and had been, in the Gnostic mysteries.

The Gnostic Christ was the Immortal Spirit in man, which first demonstrated its existence by means of abnormal or spiritualistic phenomena. It did not and could not depend on any single manifestation in one historic personality. And when Paul says, "I knew a man in Christ," we see that to be in Christ is to be in the condition of trance, in the spirit, as they phrased it, in the state that is common to what is now termed mediumship.

Being in the trance condition, or in Christ, as he calls it, he was caught up to the third heaven, and could not determine whether he was in the body or out of the body. Here he identifies his Christ with a condition of being, and that condition with the abnormal phenomena known to some of us who have studied Modern Spiritualism. This is the Gnostic Christ, not the Christ of any special historic personality, who is supposed to have manifested only once upon a time, and once for all. The Christ of the Gnosis, of Philo and of Paul preceded Christianity, and is sure to supersede it, because it is based upon facts known in nature and verifiable to-day. It was those who were entirely ignorant of those subtle and obscure facts, unfolded in the Mysteries, who became Christians in the modern sense, and believed, because they were blind. Paul was both a Seer and a Knower. He became one of the public demonstrators of the facts, just like any itinerant medium of our time. He says to the Galatians: "Ye know that because of an infirmity of the flesh, I preached the gospel unto you the first time, and that which was a temptation to you in my flesh, ye despised not nor rejected (or spat out); but ye received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus!" This infirmity of the flesh was his tendency to fall into trance. When it first occurred, at a given date, he received his revelation and began to preach his own gospel. He talked and taught as do the mediums in trance to-day. He received his revelations--visions and revelations of the Lord--and gave proofs of the Christ, or spirit, speaking within him, speaking through him, when he was in trance. And on this ground they received him as an angel of God--they received him as the Christ. This Christ, personated by Paul as the revealer in trance, was of necessity the Gnostic Christ, the Spirit of God, as he often calls it, the Christ that spoke through him, founded on what is now termed spirit control, but not based on the spirit of any Jesus of Nazareth. His Christ is the spirit which revealed itself abnormally in, and through him, so that he "spoke the wisdom and the words which the spirit teacheth; he spoke mysteries in the spirit." His Christ was the same spirit that "hath a diversity of workings" in various spirit manifestations. "To one it gives the word of wisdom; to another, the word of knowledge; to another, faith; to another, gifts of healing; to another, miraculous powers; to another, prophesy; to another, seeing of spirits; to another, the gift of tongues, and to another, their interpretation." And as this was the Christ, that always had been so manifested, nothing depended upon any historical character. All that was real, that is, spiritual, would be the same afterwards as it had been before. Nothing did depend on it, and historical Christianity itself is but a vast interpolation, the greatest of all obstacles to mental development and the unity of the human race.

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