EASTER : BIRTHDAY OF THE GODS
BY Alvin Boyd Kuhn
"For since by man came death, By man came also the resurrection of the dead."
EASTER OUR FUTURE GOAL !
SOUL IN NATURE'S WOMB !
IF CHRIST BE NOT RISEN !
THE SEED OF DIVINITY !
THE DATE OF THE RESURRECTION !
THE RESURRECTION BODY !
THE MATING OF SUN AND MOON !
THE SPRINGTIME OF THE SOUL !
SKYLARK AT HEAVEN'S GATE !
When one begins even faintly to gain some sound intellectual comprehension of the deep import of the Easter festival, the challenge to express its message of consummative exaltation for the human spirit must strike the mind with dismay. Marvellous as words are to embody concepts of the mind, they here fail signally to carry to the inner level of consciousness the reality of the experience which the Easter halleluiahs and hosannas are designed to celebrate. It may even be said truly that the meaning of the great festival of the vernal equinox is to be registered not at all in the domain of mental concepts, even when these yield full cognitive understanding, but is to be realized in the sphere of transcendental recognitions that belong more to feeling than to thought.
Yet, even when the experience is allocated to the realm of feeling, it is feeling elevated to the seventh degree above what the word commonly connotes in human psychology. It is a feeling that may be said to overpass the mind and soar into the heaven of mystical ravishment of the soul in supernal delights. Yet it is feeling that is generated by the mind itself, the child of pure cognition, so clear in its insights that they lift the soul into the very ecstasy of lucid discernment of exalted blessedness. Even at its highest peak of realization for mortals at the present human stage the grade and dynamic force of sentiency which the Easter message can adumbrate is only a faint morning glow of the full sun of divine glory which the future evolution of man's consciousness is destined to bring to reality. The best that our minds can give us now of our eventual divinization is only by the faintest analogy seen as a foretaste of rapture that will greet us at the summit of our mount of attainment. The mind can formulate a fairly true and correct construction of the issues and elements combining to bring us to the shining Hill of the Lord, can even see in what fashion the powers of deific unfoldment will open out for us a grander vision of beatitude. Yet this is only an outline, a diagram. The signs and symbols of its overpowering reality of being can not by sheer mental genius be transformed into conscious immediacy of experience until the human shall find himself transfigured by the inner radiance of his own final Easter morn.
In venturing upon the attempt to portray the significance of the Easter event one is moved to repeat as an invocation the lines of Tennyson inspired by his observation of the waves breaking eternally on the ocean strand:
Break, break, break on thy cold gray stones, O sea!
And would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
If language, employing the very remarkable psychic witchery of words, falls short of expressing the wonder of our apotheosization, the one remaining mode of expressing the profundity and the majesty of our uplift is song. The best that mortals can do, standing thus in prospect of their destined home of glory, is to throw all the unction of their mind and soul into rapturous contemplation of the delights of an imperishable Eden and pour it out in the measures and rhythms of joyous song. Human throats should well nigh burst with strains of praise as human hearts rise in anticipation of that glory which shall be theirs. Surely the least that men can do is to raise to the heavens their anthems, their chorals, their oratorios to hail in annual memorial their divinization to be.
For, be it said at the outset, Easter celebrates an event that is yet to be, not an event that is past. To the inevitable extent that past events lose their cogency for deep impressiveness and become shadowy and unrealized memories, the mighty power of the Easter occasion loses its pungent goad to conscious recognitions in proportion as its celebration is taken to be the commemoration of an event that has long ago happened and passed into history. It will therefore amaze most readers to be shown that no less an authority than St. Paul (in 2 Timothy 2:16-
The great religion of the Western world suffered a fatal loss when from about the third century down to the present the cryptic sense of a purely dramatic representation of man's still unattained burgeoning into godhood on the bright morn of his evolutionary Easter was buried and forgotten under the ignorant misconception of the event as the physical arising of one man's human body from its rocky hillside tomb on a given first Easter dawn. If that is what, under Christian persuasion, we are to believe happened two thousand years ago and that is what we are asked to assume that the great equinoctial memorial celebrates, then the ceremony of halleluiah merely embellishes the memory of an event long gone, whose cosmically heralded universal deification of human life is in fact to be searched for in vain in the record of history since it occurred. Christian history records not a trace of the fulfilment of that human glorification which the epochal event was proclaimed as promising. Every choral in the intervening centuries rang with the exultant cry that "Death is swallowed up in victory. The grave has lost its sting. Man no more shall die. Christ's resurrection gave man his immortality." Yet death has seized every man born since that day and the cemetery graves still hold their dead.
It is as St. Paul has said: the majesty, the beauty and the true exultation that alone can lift the human soul to the heights on every recurring Easter morning inheres in the certain knowledge that the Easter glory is still the goal of our progressive march up the hill of being. Our shining goal still gleams afar in the distant horizon of our vision, an undimmed star of our radiant future.
Easter is the ceremonial that crowns all the other religious festivals of the year with its springtime halo of resurrected life. It is to dramatize the final end in victory of man's long struggle through the inferior kingdoms of matter and bodily incarnation in grades of fleshly existence. Other festivals around the year memorialize the various stages of this slow progress through the recurring round of the cycles of manifestation. Easter commemorates the end in triumph, all lower obstacles overcome, all "enemies" conquered, all darkness of ignorance vanquished, all fruits and the golden harvest of developed powers garnered in the eternal barn of an inner holy of holies of consciousness, all battles won, peace with aeonial victory assured at last.
The fight is o'er, the battle done,
The victory of life is won!
The song of triumph hath begun,-
Halleluiah!
The Greek word for the resurrection is anastasis, the "standing up," "the up-
Using solar symbolism and analogues in depicting the divine soul's peregrinations round the cycles of existence, the little sun of radiant spirit in man being the perfect parallel of the sun in the heavens, and exactly copying its movements, the ancient Sages marked the four cardinal "turns" of its progress round the zodiacal year as epochal stages in soul evolution. As all life starts with conception in mind, later to be extruded into physical manifestation, so the soul that is to be the god of a human being is conceived in the divine mind at the station in the zodiac marking the date of June 21. This is at the "top" of the celestial arc, where mind is most completely detached from matter, meditating in all its "purity."
Then the swing of the movement begins to draw it "downward" to give it the satisfaction of its inherent yearning for the Maya of experience which alone can bring its latent capabilities for the evolution of consciousness to manifestation. Descending then from June it reaches on September 21 the point where its direction becomes straight downward and it there crosses the line of separation between spirit and matter, the great Egyptian symbolic line of the "horizon," and becomes incarnated in material body. Conceived in the aura of Infinite Mind in June, it enters the realm of mortal flesh in September. It is born then as the soul of a human; but at first and for a long period it lies like a seed in the ground before germination, inert, unawakened, dormant, in the relative sense of the word, "dead." This is the young god lying in the manger, asleep in his cradle of the body, or as in the Jonah-
Once in the body, the soul power is weighed in the scales of the balance, for the line of the border of the sign of Libra, the Scales, runs across the September equinoctial station. For soul is now equilibrated with body and out of this balance come all the manifestations of the powers and faculties of consciousness. It is soul's immersion in body and its equilibration with it that brings consciousness to function.
Then on past September, like any seed sown in the soil, the soul entity sinks its roots deeper and deeper into
matter, for at its later stages of growth it must be able to utilize the energy of matter's atomic force to effectuate its ends for its own spiritual aggrandizement. It is itself to be lifted up to heights of cosmic consciousness, but no more than an oak can exalt its majestic form to highest reaches without the dynamic energization received from the earth at its feet can soul rise up above body without drawing forth the strength of body's dynamo of power. Down, down it descends then through the October, November and December path of the sun, until it stands at the nadir of its descent on December 21.
Here it has reached the turning-
So the winter solstice signalizes the end of "death" and the rebirth of life in a new generation. It therefore was inevitably named as the time of the "birth of the Divine Sun" in man; the Christ-
We've quaffed the soma bright
And are immortal grown;
We've entered into light
And all the gods have known.
Easter, then, is the climactic festival of all the year, since it, signalizes the consummation of all man's life in triumph and bliss transcending present knowing. It is set in the calendar to intimate to the feeble human intellect the wonder of the transfiguration of our earthly life from periodical decay and death into immortal grandeur of being. At his Easter man leaves forever the kingdom of mortality, of his attachment to the elements of the world, and steps across the golden threshold into the Paradise of a conscious bliss that indeed is not too extravagantly poetized as a home of crystal radiance and bright seraphic beatitude sweetened by transporting music.
At the point symbolized by September 21 in his cyclical evolution the divine soul is born into humanity, making its descent from the realms of the Father's kingdom of noumenal being. If, as says Shakespeare of man, "my mind to me a kingdom is," so the Father's brooding mind is the mental kingdom of the universe, that substrate of conscious purpose which permeates, in fact structuralizes, the whole animate creation, as its constituent urge and driving force. It is that energy of the Eternal Will which, as primary Cause, stamps its form and nature upon the movement of all conscious life, first manifesting as unconscious, or subconscious, directive toward the achievement of its ends, then becoming gradually more clearly conscious of its own purpose and effort, as creatural experience aligns developing mind with the Logos of the cosmos.
Unseen as yet by general religion, it was necessary for God's sons, who must start as mortals to gain immortality, to descend into matter and be long subjected to its sluggish dominance. Ignorantly and mistakingly has conventional religion, in its hasty, superficial and erratic interpretation of Biblical material, assumed that this ostracism of his children by God himself to lower worlds remote from the Father's benignant presence, was somehow a sad consequence of the children's wayward errancy and an untoward and disastrous misadventure of primal mankind. The truth envisages no such direful miscarriage of the plans of Eternal Mind. God's mental progeny could well be entrusted to the tutelary custodianship of nature, indeed injected into her maternal womb, since nature was from the first and eternally ensouled by the Father's energic mind power, and all nature's processes exhibited the divine design at work in open manifestation. God could safely consign his youthful offspring to the educative guardianship of the "old nurse," Mother Nature. For as a pedagogue Mother Nature could never misteach her divine pupils, herself being the preceptress, the living exemplar and expression of the cosmic mind.
At the September point the soul enters what the ancients called its "feminine phase," as it was in its youth and under the care of its maternal, or material, parent. It became the infant prince of a future kingship, being for its tutelage and education in its childhood stage, and, as St. Paul says (4 Galatians), "under tutors and guardians until the time appointed of the Father," at which time it would have developed its capacity for kingly rule of the lower elements of its dominion over man's life. Thus the apostle says that though it is (potentially) Lord of all, it is at this stage in servitude to the elements (or elementals) of the lower worlds until the day of its enthronement. In this bondage to the laws of physics, the powers of matter, which is strictly for its education, it is the unawakened soul in an animal body. As Plato puts it, it is through its body an animal, while through its mind it is a god. It is then what St. Paul distinguishes as the "first" or "natural" man, the man of animal propensities, obeying the lusts of the flesh and the urges of the "carnal mind," these being the instincts of the body in which it is ensconced.
So one might say that at September the soul is born "from above,"-
Book of the Dead, designating the soul by one of its several specific titles, Pepi: "Pepi saileth with Ra to the eastern side of heaven, where the gods are born."
We, as souls, go to our "death" in matter at the equinox; at the winter solstice we cease "dying" to matter and are quickened to incipient renewal of life; at the spring equinox we rise to supernal life in exuberance of blessedness. Only when the soul has traversed this aeonial path round the numberless cycles of existence can it know the full reality of its Easter deification.
By apt and striking symbols the Sages of old sought to impress dull mortal thought with imagery suggestive of new birth. They pointed to the chick pecking its way out of its shell; the snake shedding its old skin and coming forth sleek and shining; the locust bursting out of its old body and winging its way up into the light and air; the beetle emerging out of the earth; the butterfly from the cocoon; the hibernating bear awaking from his sleep in the hollow tree; the emergence of all life from the egg. Hence the egg became the basic symbol of the festival, as the young god breaks finally the shell of his human body to effect his delivery from the flesh and be released into the absolute freedom of the spirit. The rabbit was brought in as concomitant symbol because, like the pomegranate in the vegetable kingdom, its exuberant fecundity made it an apt emblem of the boundless productivity of life. For God's children, under the Biblical designation of Israelites, or children of Israel, were destined to be as numberless as the stars of heaven or the seashore sands.
The Book of the Dead (so called by the German scholar Lepsius) has for its Egyptian title the hieroglyph Pert em Heru, the translation of which is given variously as "The Day of Manifestation," or, more exactly, "The Coming Forth by Day," referring to the emergence of Horus, the Egyptian Christ, from the dark underworld of Amenta into the upper kingdom of light. Light here, as universally in both Scripture and poetry, must be taken in its apt reference to spiritual illumination or the expanded powers of consciousness. Like Jesus, Horus had been overpowered by the darkness of the underworld and Sut its Overlord, which are just the life of nature. In the person of his Father Osiris, he had been crucified, dead and buried. Now in the enchanting wizardry of the spring of a cycle of conscious growth, he had risen from the tomb of bodily "death." He had rent the veil of the temple of his mortal flesh and stood out arrayed in new garments of shining radiance. He had thrown off his grave clothes, the cerements of "death", and walked out of the sepulcher of clay clothed in the imperishable robes of solar light.
The day of resurrection,
Earth tell it out abroad
The Passover of gladness,
The Passover of God.
From death to life eternal,
From earth unto the sky,
Our Christ hath brought us over
With hymns of victory.
But alas, and again alas, the consummative festival that was in its origin and in its deep esoteric conception designed to impress annually, in the thrilling springtime rebirth of earth's vegetation, the recognition of the apocalyptic glorification of humanity at its eventual evolutionary Easter day, and therefore was intended to serve
as a potent psychological agency of moving power in the race's own push to divinity, has almost totally missed its high objective, because from about the degenerate third century of the Christian era the dull mind of Western humanity has mistaken the festival's message as having meaning only in reference to the alleged resurrection of one single man in remote history. That which was formulated to bring cogent realization to all men of their ultimate apotheosization in glory has sunk to the dimensions of the anniversary celebration of one single event in past history,-
The judgment here expressed that the perversion, yea the transmogrification of the meaning of the Scriptural dramas and allegories into ostensible objective history allegedly localized in Judea in the first Christian century (and Old Testament history antecedent to that time) has been courageously endorsed by no less an authority in modern thought than the most eminent psychologist, Carl G. Jung, who sums up the gist of the position here advanced in the following paragraphs:
"The Imitatio Christi will forever have this disadvantage: we worship a man as a divine model, embodying the deepest meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make real the profound meaning present in ourselves.
"If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the other hand, that God is a mighty activity within my own soul, at once I must concern myself with him."
In a later work (Psychology and Alchemy, p. 7) Jung has elaborated this trenchant expression in greater specification. These pronouncements from the great psychologist stand out in modern study as judgments of the most arresting momentousness. They stand as a forthright challenge to the system of Christianity in its ground-
"I am speaking, therefore, not of the deepest and best understanding of Christianity, but of the superficialities and disastrous misunderstandings that are plain for all to see. The demand made by the Imitatio Christi-
The sincere effort to emulate the Son of God, the psychologist affirms, should edify, spiritualize and exalt the individual Christian. But, and not too strangely, he says it does not work out to this result. And it fails to do so precisely in proportion to the intensity of the effort exerted to push the imitative enterprise outward and focus it upon the external historical model. To achieve true efficacy in religious worship, he implies, the intensity of effort must be directed to stirring to life a power resident within. The cause of failure is the outward direction of the devotion. The very act of imitation of an external model turns the edifying force away from its proper objective, the inner man. The worship of an outer god leaves the divinity within untouched, unknown and unawakened. To adore the exterior paragon, by so much leaves unrealized the potential perfectibility of the soul itself.
While it can be contended-
IF CHRIST BE NOT RISEN . . . .
A thousand times has Christianity proclaimed that if the Christ-
"But for ourselves we must admit that we can no longer think in such terms. To be exact, the majority of Christians at the present time do not really believe in a resurrection of the flesh on the last day."
And hence they do not believe it happened in the case of Jesus in year 33 A.D. Weiss, whom many rate as the greatest of modern theological critics and exegetists, indeed cuts through the restraints of orthodox caution and boldly asserts that-
And he then cites the verses in Hosea 6:I ff, as the origin of the tradition. The second verse runs: "After two days will he revive us; in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight." Even with this (and other similar verses in Old Testament "prophecy") as legendary background of claimed divine forecast of the Christian dispensation in history, one must ask by what justification the literary fulfillers of prophecy twisted the divine promise of a resurrection clearly stated to be the happy destiny of all of "us," into the objectivized history of one single human. Debate may rage until doomsday, but there is only one answer to this challenge, the only one that will measure up to the demands of truth: a background of spiritual tradition, which clearly dramatized the apotheosization of all humanity, was by ignorant men converted into the quasi-
In other works we have incontestably shown that so-
The author of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament is in the book's very title called "The Preacher." In ancient Egyptian religious books which dramatized the forms and stages of the divinization of man, there was a character always called "The Speaker." He it was who played the part of the Christ-
As showing the auspicious drift of modern exegetists toward a sane and rational reading of the Scriptures, what Weiss adds on the resurrection is much too valuable to be skipped. Referring again to Jesus, and citing the disposition of the orthodox to think that his resurrection must be differentiated from what ours is to be, and thus warranting a treatment on different and special grounds, he says:
"Had we no other evidence of his victory over death than that of our own departed, the whole thing would fall into uncertainty. This objection really touches the essential point. If his immortality is no different from ours, it can scarcely be used any longer as proof of our hope for the life to come."
This view, continues the theologian, flunks the hope and faith of steadfast believers, who therefore cling tenaciously to the old view that the Gospel narratives still provide adequate grounds for their indoctrinated belief that Jesus was physically restored to life. But the exegetist goes on: "Unfortunately it is to be feared that this support will never again appear as firm and immovable as it did to our forefathers. In some form or other, even among the most ardent believers, doubt has begun to undermine the narrative of the Gospels. And when we are admonished that we must 'believe' these narratives, the admonition lacks sense and meaning today. The word 'believe' is misused in such a connection. It is simply misapplied to a fact in the past. [How amazingly this statement corroborates St. Paul's asseveration that the resurrection is not to be considered a past event!] Either a fact is established beyond all doubt -
What the learned German scholar is courageously expressing in all his critique of the resurrection doctrine is the conviction, to which his penetrating discernment forced him, that the Gospel narrative of the Easter mystery is strictly not narrative at all in the sense of literary record of outward physical event, but is dramatic or poetic figurism of the consummative exaltation which all humanity is destined to achieve at the cycle's end. The Christ's ritualistic arising out of "death" is literary type-
The effort to confirm the position that the true original significance of the Easter memorial can not be made to derive from a literal or physical interpretation of the resurrection "event" has carried the essay afield from the main elucidation of the essential meaning of Easter. But it was imperative that it be shown conclusively how the import of the observance has deplorably miscarried into a melange of false beliefs. It can be stated concisely that the whole devastating debacle of sense and truth ensued from the egregious blunder -
The resurrection had not come. But the human mind needed the psychological spur and goad, or the allure of an enchanting vision of its high calling in the perfection of its Christly nature, to inspire it to the life of righteous-
But this incarnational "death" of soul in body became horribly distorted into the physical death of Jesus' quivering flesh on a wooden cross. The wood of the alleged cross on Golgotha stands as quite an apt symbol of the woodenness of the crass misinterpretation of the Fundamentalists. Likewise another beautiful poetic symbol, the three hours of darkness over the earth from the sixth to the ninth hour, i.e., figuratively from the aeonial Christmas birth to Easter resurrection (the three dark months of winter), has generated in the minds of misled "believers" the actual darkness of the Western theological understanding. This darkness has brought, not three hours, but many centuries of what the historians have been constrained to dub the "Dark Ages" of Christian Europe. The Biblical prophecy that "darkness shall cover the earth and gross darkness the people has been all too realistically and tragically fulfilled, at least for the Western world, by this staggering miscarriage of recondite symbolism into implausible and impossible "history."
For that which "died" on the cross of matter was no single individual man, but the divine nucleus of soul apportioned out among all men. It was sent forth by the heavenly Father to be the spiritual grain of wheat planted in the ground of human flesh, therein to lie long in inertness and "death," until resurrected by the rebirth of its dormant powers in the springtime turn of the cycle. And this distortion of the message of the Good Friday and the Easter rituals into the commemoration of the crucifixion and resuscitation of one human body has destroyed -
Remote as it may at first seem in its relevance to the subject, the ark and deluge allegory contains the seed-
In the case of the individual man the body is the organic vehicle of soul's manifestation, and the soul is the body's life. On body's dissolution the life (soul) withdraws into the "ark" of an inner spiritual body (which does not decay), from which as seed it will emerge to begin the next cycle of physical life. But as soul, in the words of Greek philosophy, "imparts of its excellent nature to the beings of secondary rank," it thus suffers the diminution or loss of its higher strain of life in sacrifice to the lower, the body. It "dies" that body may live, and that more abundantly. From this aeonial "death," which spirit, the god in us, suffers on our be half, it must in the turn of the cycle be resurrected. While immersed in body, body profits by, lives on, the "death" of soul; when the body is dissolved at what we call death, the soul regains its lost Paradise in disembodied being in the heavens. Each in turn "dies" to restore life to its polarized brother. Just as truly it must be seen that flesh dies that soul may live again, as that soul "dies" that body may live again. This is why we sing at Easter-
From death to life eternal, From earth unto the sky-
only "life eternal" should be understood as "life aeonial," i.e., enduring throughout the aeon,
or cycle; not eternal in the sense of a heavenly life forever.
Browning has discerned the unsoundness of the philosophy which exalts spirit to the heights
and defames matter and body as its enemies:
Let us not always say 'Spite of this flesh today
I stove, made head, gained ground upon the whole.'
As the bird wings and sings, Let us cry: 'All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul.
Flesh and soul find themselves locked inseparably in the marriage bonds of polarity here in body. Philosophies that place all value on spirit and decry and degrade the flesh are convicted of gross misplacement of emphasis. All the ordinances of ancient systems that dramatized animal sacrifice as a form of worship were designed to stress the fact that the life of the animal body of man is likewise a sacrificial oblation for the uplift of the soul.
All esoteric wisdom-
It is said that all Scripture is given for edification. Of first importance then it is to realize that the basic edifying item of truth the Scriptures enshrine (in myth, allegory, drama and symbol) is this underlying universal principle: the descent, the "death" in ark-
Scriptural composition and ancient mythology are twins, both chanting the same theme-
The indisputable true resolution of the whole frightfully muddled theology is found in the simple fact that the poetic scenario of an evolutionary step from humanity to divinity that was of course never anything but universal to the race at all times, came through ignorance to be interpreted as an event in the career of the one man Jesus. What was depicted as conveying meaning for all men came to be misunderstood as the life experience of but one man. So the Western world has walked in the fog of a dense hallucination for lo these many centuries, of which sorry fact its outward history bears dismal testimony in the record of bigotry, superstition, persecution, hatred, war and the most fiendish inhumanity ever to be entered in the world's annals.
Nothing short of such a hypnotism by pious credulity as has been exhibited in Christendom from the third century to the present could ever account for the slavish mental acceptance by the sheepish millions of Western Christians of the unconscionable idea that one man's physical death could exert the tiniest iota of influence to change any individual's karmic relation to his cosmic problem of sin and salvation. For if it could be that the suffering of one could in the least measure later the status of all other men's moral relation to the law of life, the moral equilibrium of the universe would be disrupted. Not only can the action of another than himself not relieve any man of the full onus of his moral accountability, but there would immediately be chaos in the spiritual sphere if it were possible. The two ineffaceable and unalterable realities of the world were, to the great philosopher, Emanuel Kant, "the starry heavens above and the moral law within." The Christian dogma of the vicarious atonement, a digest as it were of the alleged basic fact of the conquest of death (in its physical sense, be it remembered) by the (physical) resurrection of Jesus long ago, would -
And what dismay must it also bring to the Christian world to have now to face, not only its own scholars' rejection of the historical resurrection narrative, by giving it a subjective instead of an objective interpretation, but also the increasing conviction of exegetists that the resurrection never occurred at all, with even the very existence of the man Jesus falling under ever-
Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn;
The cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain
Unless within thyself it be set up again.
Likewise any believer who looks to the Gospel scenario of the resurrection as the already pledged certitude of his own individual escape of (physical) death, must henceforth know that he is hugging to his soul a fantastic delusion. For in spite of millions of voices raised each Easter to chant
Our Lord is risen, We, too, shall rise,-
ostensibly in the same presumed bodily manner -
Our Lord may have risen! We never shall rise.
As a sheer conclusion of simple logic, it could long ago have been known, as the most irrefutable dialectical outcome from the premises, that a physical resurrection, likewise a physical death, could not affect or alter in the minutest degree the moral order and stability of the world of sentient beings. Therefore it should long ago have been concluded that the "death" and the "resurrection" that were central in every national epic, myth and Scriptural allegory, as well as in all tribal ceremonial, must be understood as a figurative or pictorialized representation of another "death" and "resurrection," that were never real in concrete factuality, but were perennial as spiritual realities of all human life. That recognition, which was the achievement of early Sages who inspired the Scriptures, would have kept the common mind of the Western world in sane balance. Alas! That balance was violently unsettled from the fateful third century onward, and we have by no means even yet, in religion and psychology, in theology and philosophy, emerged from its darksome shadows. Both our Christmas and our Easter are dimmed in their joyousness by the lowering delusion of a totally false reference of the dramatism.
In vindication of the position here supported, that no man's single death could reorient all other men's relation to their moral and evolutionary destiny, we have, in confirmation of Johannes Weiss' sagacious pronouncement the very recent statement of one who stood at the very summit of ecclesiastical position in the Protestant world, the Rt. Rev. Ralph W. Inge, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, in his late volume, The End of an Age (p. 162): "This emphasis on religious experience as the seat of authority obviously alters the center of gravity in apologetics. The traditional approach is from miracle to faith. We used to be told that our religion stands or falls with the discovery of the empty tomb. This is a disastrous line of argument, for not only does a miraculous event require a cogency of evidence, which from the nature of the case is not to be had, but it is not clear how the resuscitation of a dead body can prove anything either as to the divinity of Him who was restored for a few days to earthly life, or how this miracle can guarantee our own participation in eternal life, since our bodies will return to dust. Miracle, many of us now believe with Goethe, is the child, not the parent of faith . . . The details of what happened nineteen hundred years ago are not essential to our faith as Christians, and certainty about them is not available."
No apology is needed for injecting into our effort to limn the glory and sublimity of the Easter imagery a digression into the field of theological debate or polemics. For no attempt to orient the majestic import of Easter in its proper sphere of mental-
This, the esoteric understanding of the Easter significance, was in the early days so clear and evident that, be it known as historically a fact, the primitive Christians, for the first three and one-
Pagan usage, however, had designated the winter solstice as the date of the rebirth of the solar god in the year, and it is evident that by 345 A.D. The concensus of common tradition forced the Christian party to conform to the Pagan calendar of festivals. And all this strongly points to the obvious recognition that neither the vernal nor the winter date was fixed with the remotest reference to the actual calendar date of a babe's human birth. The question always debated in esoteric circles was whether the birthday should be set at the equinox or at the solstice; never was it -
What we have to discern in all this is that the content of meaning conceived by the millions of devotees as to the Easter festival, and therefore the misguided spirit of its celebration, are all one hollow travesty, yes, mockery of the true significance. It has been twisted into a gross fantastic and deadening misinterpretation of a truly sublime and transcendent fact, or epoch, in the living drama of the human evolution. The millions go on believing in the resurrection of a corpse (though we have Weiss' assurance that they really do not believe it), which they have been told guarantees their own similar rehabilitation after decease. Yet their common sense and their own observation make them wonder why such a doctrine was ever promulgated. So the glorious potential of even the vicarious realization of Easter joys is dissolved out in wonder, doubt, bafflement of logic and all-
No, Easter cannot mean a physical resurrection, for such is not in the order of nature, as Dean Inge flatly states. We find the Book of Ecclesiastes saying: "The body returns to dust, but the soul to God who gave it." Likewise St. Paul declares (1 Cor. I5:35) that "some man will say, How are the dead raised up; and with what body do they come?" And the apostle then gives the answer to this pivotal question, which, had his Church heeded it, would have spared it the agonising doubt and confusion that has plagued it for centuries. "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body." And he reminds us that we have a spiritual body. That Church which he, rather than the Jesus whom he seems never to have heard of, (since he never once mentions him as a living person), is said to have founded, has never unreservedly endorsed his claim to our possession of a sublimated body of spirit essence, as being a bit too "theosophical." But since flesh and blood can not inherit the kingdom of God, the soul must be resurrected in a body of imperishable ethereal substance, which will not dissolve with that of the flesh. Had Christian development held fast to the basic data of the archaic science of the soul, of which the ancient Sages were adepts, the theology of the Church would have preserved knowledge of the inner bodies of rarefied essence that shared existence with the outer sheath of flesh, the "coat of skin" of the Genesis allegory. The ancient Egyptians laid down the particulars of the structure of man's interior constitution. The universe was build on number, asserted Pythagoras; and the basic number underlying all life on earth was seven. Partaking of the nature of this life, man had seven bodies, and the Egyptians described, graded and named them (from the coarsest to the finest): the khat, or khabit; the ren, or name; the sekhem; the ba; the ka; the sahu and the khu.
At the present stage man's consciousness ranges over the four lower levels, as these are the only ones develop-
And Oh! That body of our resurrection! That body of many names, yet all reflecting the ineffable splendor of the sun! Truly it is to be a body woven of the impalpable texture of solar glory. It is that shining garment of the redeemed, who exult before the regained throne of God "in robes of light arrayed." It is the radiant vesture of the righteous, who, the Scripture says, "shall shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father." It is that garment without a seam, woven of the imperishable cloth of sunlight. It is the spiritual body which St. Paul insists we possess by virtue of our sonship of the heavenly Father. Again he describes it as that house or tabernacle with which we wait to be clothed upon from above; that house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens, in whose construction there was heard neither sound of hammer, axe or any tool of iron; that house that Wisdom hath builded on its seven pillars (Proverbs). IT is that radiant Augoeides of the Greeks, the glorious sahu or khu of the Egyptians, the Shekinah of the Hebrews. It is that body of the infant Christ in us, which every thought, word and deed of kindliness, graciousness, brotherhood and love causes to shine with ever increasing beauty, and which every mean, sordid, selfish and brutal motive causes to dim and flicker low. It is that body whose essence will transmute all the gross elements of sensuality and brutishness into the beauteous flame of glowing love. For it is a fiery alembic in which all the baser ingredients of the old Adam, first or natural man, will be thrice refined to spiritual purity. It is that high atomic potency of which one of our hymns sings:
The flame shall not hurt thee! I only design Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine.
It is the etherealized substance which, when brought to bright pitch, will transfigure the mortal part of man so that, like the Christ's, his face will "shine as the sun and his garments will become white as the light." It is the robe of our immortality which we don to appear in beauty when we return to the Father. Or it is the scarlet robe with which the Father hastens to clothe us as we return victorious from our adventure in the rougher country of earth.
No man can be told a fact of more transcendent importance to his life than that in his physical body, as in a womb, he is now slowly gestating this body of the infant god which he is to be. And this is that glory-
Mention has already been made of the fact that in the early Christian centuries up to 345 A.D. The community of the "brethren" celebrated the birth of their Sun-
To begin with, the date of Easter is a moveable one, not fixed to a calendar day. It may fall on any Sunday between March 22 and April 23, and is bound to shift each year. So again it must be noted that no moveable date could be considered the anniversary of a historical event. If it were such there would have been no resort to a shifting date. Likewise no zodiacal configuration would have been made a guiding consideration. The dating is clearly and purely semantic.
It is generally, first of all, not known why the twenty-
The date of Easter has been set in relation to considerations having to do with the conjunction of the two celestial orbs that give light to the earth, the one by day, the other by night -
Easter, then, is fixed to fall on the first Sunday coming on or after the first full moon occurring on or after the vernal equinox. If there happens to be a full moon on March 20, the date must wait twenty-
The base of the symbolic reference is the fact that in all archaic and arcane philosophy the sun and moon typified respectively the divine spiritual and the earthly physical natures in man. The deep secret of the entire matter lies buried under the forgotten datum of ancient knowledge that the spiritual Christ, man's higher deity, his innermost soul, is generated, birthed and glorified in the constitution of the mortal human through the wedlock, or conjunction of the two natures, the divine and the human. Therefore the analogical science of old, searching in outer nature for the vivid types of the inner reality of man's experience, turned first to the spring of the year, when nature herself staged the immortal drama of rebirth in the outer scene. "Dead" nature, life congealed to dormancy in winter's icy clutch, put on its resurrection in the spring. Easter must therefore come in the season of resurrected nature.
And for the union of the two great bodies, typifying the marriage and copulation of soul and body to give birth to the divine child in man, the celebration must be dated relative to the conjunction of sun and moon closest after the equinoctial date. The copulation taking place at the dark day of the moon's round of twenty-
And finally, as this child of the spiritual sun and moon is destined for solar glorification, as he is spiritual-
The conjunction of sun and moon at the dark of the moon impregnates the lunar orb with the seed of divine light and in two weeks she brings this child of the sun to full maturity. Easter, then, carries in its significance the poetry of spring, of the equinox,-
From one point of view it is legitimate to surmise that as the early Christians confused the Christmas quickening with birth symbolism and placed the birth of the Sun of God in March, so possibly they likewise were confused about the festival of forty days which commemorated the period of incubation of life-
We have in fact in our year of commemorative days a period of forty days, beginning with the fall equinox of September 21 and ending on October 31. This "autumn Lent" is terminated by our Hallowe'en carousal on October 31, and this is followed on the following day, November 1, by All Souls' Day, or All Saints' Day, the more ancient Michaelmas. In England Hallowe'en was formerly called Nutcracker's Night. The four cardinal "corners" of the zodiac were dedicated to the four chief Angles of the Presence, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael and Uriel. Michael's station was at the fall equinox. It could be affirmed that the period of forty days in the fall is the true Lent. This will no doubt be refuted by orthodox religionism, which will point to the etymological derivation of Lent from the German Lenz, meaning "spring." The evidence is not at hand to support a claim that this German word is not the partent of "Lent."
The change of a "z" to a "t" is not frequent in language derivatives. But even if the claimed source be correct, it does not alter the fact that the symbolic elements of the Ember Days and the soul's descent to darkness and destitution of light in the bodily milieu down here would suggest autumn as the fitting time for dramatizing the crucifixion, death and burial and all the gloom of Passion Week, as well as the whole of Lent. The observance of Lent in the spring, when beyond all argument the psychological intimations of the Lenten message and motive are entirely out of accord with the spirit of nature springing to new life in every blade of grass, bud and leaf, in growing sunshine and beauty on every side, must be considered an anachronism of the sorriest and most glaring ineptitude. Certainly in the long run it has gone far to dim the sun of happy springtime joyousness in all the life of Christianity.
By every suggestion of symbolism the Christ-
"Rise up, my love; my fair one, and come away. For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle [dove] is heard in our land. The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away."
These inspiring lines must be taken as a part of the dramatism which represented the life of the soul in matter. It is indeed the Easter theme-
Beyond all argument, as it would be inappropriate to stage the ritualism of resurrection in autumn (although fruit gathering and harvest home festivals do in a measure just that), so it is an error to set the crucifixion, the fasting, the scourging, the privation of happy life in the spring. Likewise it appears that by some further inadvertence or misconception the Christian leadership introduced Palm Sunday ahead of its proper time in festival ordination. In the Christian year it stands a week before Easter, and thus falls five days ahead of the crucifixion. By all the logic of analogy the soul's entry in triumph into the "holy city" of higher being, with choraled halleluiahs and floral carpets to welcome it, marks the final consummation of the whole long run of its pilgrimage through the kingdoms of matter and its return to heave above. In one view it even represents a later stage than Easter itself. For the latter portrays the final release of soul from its prison of flesh; the entry into the Holy City must dramatize its reascension to its celestial home. It seems utterly inept to introduce it ahead of the crucifixion. This Christian arrangement presents the illogical sequence of final reunion of the soul with its heavenly home, then the crucifixion, which surely is the pain of its immersion in the body on earth, and then its release from body. As Easter depicts its release from the prison of matter, Palm Sunday must point to the later release from earth altogether. Palm Sunday should therefore supplement and complete the Easter event, bringing it to its ultimate conclusion in the world above. As intimated, the crucifixion should come in the fall, and Easter and Palm Sunday should follow as crowning triumph in the vernal season.
There is only one way by which the allocation of Lent's forty days to the spring may possibly be saved the charge of anachronism. It has to do with the significance of the number forty. This number, which occurs sixty-
Now it would obviously be impossible to institute a festival of forty days to cover in its symbolism the autumn gloom of the crucifixion motive and terminate with the springtime joy of Easter resurrection, for forty days will not reach from autumn beginning to spring end. To do this would require a whole six-
Likewise, as the numbers three and seven also carried the intimations of soul's life in body, it seemed proper to insert periods of three and seven days in the place where their termination would also coincide with Easter morning. This gave us the seven days of Passion Week and the "three days" in the tomb, if the actual time from Friday morning to Sunday morning can be called three days. As all's well that ends well, all three periods, Lent, Passion Week and the days in the tomb end the drama with the burst of Easter glory.
The Fundamentalist will challenge us to declare the authenticity of all this semantic flourish. To him the events were historical occurrences, and they came when they occurred, not being obligated to fall in with the scheme of poetic nature symbolism. The only answer needed to rebut this contention is that, if he will study with sufficient assiduity the history of ancient religious literature which produced his venerated Bible and discover the strange methodology of religious writing in that remote age, he will see that which will disconcert his entire system of Scriptural interpretation,-
Have we not seen that the reality of our eventual resurrection is foreshadowed by the vernal chanting of birds, the leafing of trees, the outburst of life from wintry thraldom? Can we not see it also in the insect's bursting out of its old shell, rending the veil of its temple; in the snake's shedding of its old skin and coming forth in a sleek new body -
Ages before Christianity took over and ruinously travestied the secret traditions of a primeval revelation by outrageous literalization of pictured truth, nature herself had staged so impelling a drama of the Easter resurrection that nothing within the pale of human genius can do more than faintly copy its impressiveness. We owe the knowledge of it to the sapient Egyptians, who manifested almost a sixth psychic sense in discerning in the characteristic traits of animals many striking analogies with abstract verities. Perhaps in no one respect have they revealed a more astonishing correspondence between animal trait and cosmical law than in the case of the cynocephalus, or dog-
Mere words can add little to what nature has staged in her pantomime. In the mute action of the ape life was promising the gift of speech with the rise of intellect. At the sheer symbolic rise of the emblem of divine light the animal creation gave first expression of the instinct to communicate ideas by speech. It was the foreshadowing of a far later stage of advancement, when, one whole kingdom farther uplifted, the human was to stage the drama of his rising into a supernal realm of being under the symbol of the Easter resurrection. As the physical light rose on the sight of the animal, the latter felt the stir of the impulse to frame ideas in speech. As the spiritual light is rising in the mind of man, he feels the stir of the impulse to embrace and express immortal life and immortal love. The physical sun caused the cynocephalus to break into speech; the sun of mind caused the man to consummate the powers of speech. When the sun of the spiritual resurrection at last breaks upon the soul, all speech will be transcended by lightning flashes of perfect cognition.
Easter meaning and Easter ecstasy will forever elude us if we can not understand it as the drama, not of one man's history long passed and historically demonstrated as powerless to give us the immortality it has been presumed to promise, but of our own life history, the scenario of our transfiguration yet to come. If we chant at Easter the unfolding of the portals everlasting, it can be only to refer to our own opening the doors of sense to the entry of spirit. If we acclaim the Christ's triumph over decay, it can mean only that a potency of Christly consciousness within our own natures will not perish with our flesh, but will live on in higher vehicles, returning to earth many times to build up their perfection. If we sing of the Savior's taking captivity captive, it is that we can develop this more dynamic power of godliness and with it subdue and govern the carnal nature that held us captive, stepping out into freedom as the fiery power of spirit melts down the chains that bound us. If we commemorate the Lord's bursting the gates of hell and flinging wide the bolted bars to release the captives that sat in darkness, it is that we shall in ecstasy abandon the last body of our earthly incarnation and soar to freedom. When nature bursts out of her winter's "death" and arrays herself in new and glistening garments, it is the sign that we, too, shall burst out of our underworld confinement and come forth clothed with light.
But only by lifting the reference of all its imagery from ostensible ancient history and making it the drama of our own experience will the great festival be able to exercise its exalting efficacy upon our spirit. After all St. Paul is grandly right: if Christ be not risen, then is our faith vain. For if Christ be not risen in us, risen out of the pettiness, the sordidness, the ignorance, rapacity, greed and the fell instincts of our brute nature, to breathe in the pure air of graciousness, godliness and love, then indeed is our faith in the resurrection vain and empty. If he be not risen in us, then truly enough we have no part in the resurrection. Without this transformation in our own natures, we keep the Christ still bound in his cerements of "death" in the only tomb in which he ever lay "dead"-
The Judean myth is a supremely beautiful emblemism of the miracle of the resurrection. But if we for a moment permit it to lure us into the belief that another man's alleged conquest of death in the long past in any degree relieves us of the evolutionary task of achieving our own resurrection, the myth becomes the source of a tragic psychological calamity for us. For to the extent to which we look to a man, or a miracle, or any power outside ourselves, to that extent we will let the sleeping divinity within us lie unawakened. Our great psychologist Jung has set this forth with the courage of a crusader for truth.
Never has the logical purport of the twenty-
In the light of this elucidation provided by Greek philosophy the baffling mystery of Paul's language in the letter to the Romans stands revealed in full clarity. There are two "men" in our constitution, the first or natural man, first Adam, of the earth, earthly; and the second or spiritual man, the new Adam (Christ), born not of water (the physical body, which is seven-
But now emerges the thrilling second part of the verse, the sequel to the first clause, the mighty truth that again a blind theology has stubbornly refused to see. If by animal humanity came the "death" of divine soul, by the same element in man's make-
The ineffable tragedy of Western religious history lies in this unconscionable blunder of Christian theology in traducing surpassing spiritual allegory into ostensible personal history, in mistaking the central figure in the universal Mystery drama for a man of flesh in that history. When may it be realized that the actual divine power that was personified in drama and ritual by a human actor, can be resurrected from its torpor under the sluggish nature of the body and, thus lifted up, can, as its personification says, draw all men up with it? And when, too, will it be realized that the alleged personal man whom a hallucinated theology has mistakenly substituted for the spiritual actuality he only represented in the play, never could in the remotest degree be the means of effecting universal salvation? Once the depressing psychological blanket of two thousand years of mentality stupefied by the mirage of a personal man-
In the finale, we can then reiterate St. Paul's admonition to Timothy to shun the vain and profane babblings of such as Hymenaeus and Philetus, who greatly err in declaring the resurrection already past and thus weaken the potential of all men for the resurrection still to come.