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The speaker, in the Ritual asks: "Who art thou then, Lord of the Silent Body? I have come to see him who is in the serpent, eye to eye, and face to face." "Lord of the Silent Body" is a title of the Osiris. "Who art thou then, Lord of the Silent Body?" is asked and left unanswered. This character is also assigned to the Christ. The High Priest said unto him, "Answerest thou nothing?" "But Jesus held his peace." Herod questioned him in many words, but he answered him nothing. He acts the prescribed character of "Lord of the Silent Body."

The transaction in the sixth hour of the night of the Crucifixion is expressly inexplicable. In the Gospel we read:--"Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour." The sixth hour being midnight, that shows the solar nature of the mystery, which has been transferred to the sixth hour of the day in the Gospel.

It is in the seventh hour the mortal struggle takes place between the Osiris and the deadly Apophis, or the great serpent, Haber, 450 cubits long, that fills the whole heaven with its vast enveloping folds. The name of this seventh hour is "that which wounds the serpent Haber." In this conflict with the evil power thus portrayed the Sun-God is designated the "Conqueror of the Grave," and is said to make his advance through the influence of Isis, who aids him in repelling the serpent or devil of darkness. In the Gospel, Christ is likewise set forth in the supreme struggle as "Conqueror of the Grave," for "the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept arose;" and Mary represents Isis, the mother, at the cross. It is said of the great serpent, "There are those on earth who do not drink of the waters of this serpent, Haber," which may be paralleled with the refusal of the Christ to drink of the vinegar mingled with gall.

When the God has overcome the Apophis Serpent, his old nightly, annual, and eternal enemy, he exclaims, "I come! I have made my way! I have come like the sun, through the gate of the one who likes to deceive and destroy, otherwise called the 'viper.' I have made my way! I have bruised the serpent, I have passed."

But the more express representation in the mysteries was that of the annual sun as the Elder Horus, or Atum. As Julius Firmicus says: "In the solemn celebration of the mysteries, all things in order had to be done which the youth either did or suffered in his death."

Diodorus Siculus rightly identified the "whole fable of the underworld," that was dramatised in Greece, as having been copied "from the ceremonies of the Egyptian funerals," and so brought on from Egypt into Greece and Rome. One part of this mystery was the portrayal of the suffering Sun-God in a feminine phase. When the suffering sun was ailing and ill, he became female, such being a primitive mode of expression. Luke describes the Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane as being in a great agony, "and his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling to the ground." This experience the Gnostics identified with the suffering of their own hemorrhoidal Sophia, whose passion is the original of that which is celebrated during Passion week, the "week of weeping in Abtu," and which constitutes the fundamental mystery of the Rosy Cross, and the Rose of Silence.

In this agony and bloody sweat the Christ simply fulfils the character of Osiris Tesh-Tesh, the red sun, the Sun-God that suffers his agony and bloody sweat in Smen, whence Gethsmen, or Gethsemane. Tesh means the bleeding, red, gory, separate, cut, and wounded; tesh-tesh is the inert form of the God whose suffering, like that of Adonis, was represented as feminine, which alone reaches a natural origin for the type. He was also called Ans-Ra, or the sun bound up in linen.

So natural were the primitive mysteries!

My attention has just been called to a passage in Lycophron, who lived under Ptolemy Philadelphus between 310 and 246 B.C. In this Heracles is referred to as

"That three-nighted lion, whom of old

Triton's fierce dog with furious jaw devoured,

Within whose bowels, tearing of his liver,

He rolled, burning with heat, though without fire,

His head with drops of sweat bedewed all o'er."

This describes the God suffering his agony and sweat, which is called the "bloody flux" of Osiris. Here the nights are three in number. So the Son of Man was to be three nights as well as three days in the "heart of the earth." In the Gospels this prophecy is not fulfilled; but if we include the night of the bloody sweat, we have the necessary three nights, and the Mythos becomes perfect. In this phase the suffering Sun was the Red Sun, whence the typical Red Lion.

As Atum, the red sun is described as setting from the Land of Life in all the colours of crimson, or Pant, the red pool. This clothing of colours is represented as a "gorgeous robe" by Luke; a purple robe by Mark; and a robe of scarlet by Matthew. As he goes down at the Autumn Equinox, he is the crucified. His mother, Nu, or Meri, the heaven, seeing her son, the Lord of Terror, greatest of the terrible, setting from the Land of Life, with his hands drooping, she becomes obscure, and there is great darkness over all the land, as at the crucifixion described by Matthew, in which the passing of the Lord of Terror is rendered by the terrible or "loud cry" of the Synoptic version. The Sun-God causes the dead, or those in the earth, to live as he passes down into the under-world, because, as he entered the earth, the tombs were opened, i.e., figuratively. But it is reproduced literally by Matthew.

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