Isis Unveiled by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page 1]] ISIS UNVEILED.
PART TWO. -- RELIGION.
CHAPTER I.
"Yea, the time cometh, that whomsoever killeth you, will
think that he doeth God service." -- Gospel according
to John, xvi. 2.
"Let him be ANATHEMA . . . who shall say
that human Sciences ought to be pursued in such a spirit of freedom
that one may be allowed to hold as true their assertions even
when opposed to revealed doctrines." -- Ecumenical Council
of 1870.
"GLOUC. -- The Church! Where is it?"
-- King Henry VI., Act i., Sc. 1.
IN the United States of America, sixty thousand
(60,428) men are paid salaries to teach the Science of God and
His relations to His creatures.
These men contract to impart to us the knowledge which treats
of the existence, character, and attributes of our Creator; His
laws and government; the doctrines we are to believe and the duties
we are to practice. Five thousand (5,141) of them,* with the prospect
of 1273 theological students to help them in time, teach this
science according to a formula prescribed by the Bishop of Rome,
to five million people. Fifty-five thousand (55,287) local and
travelling ministers, representing fifteen different denominations,**
each contradicting the other upon more or less vital theololical
questions, instruct, in their respective doctrines, thirty-three
million (33,500,000) other persons. Many of these teach according
to the canons of the cis-Atlantic branch of an establishment which
acknowledges a daughter of the late Duke of Kent as its spiritual
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* These figures are copied from the "Religious Statistics
of the United States for the year 1871."
** These are: The Baptists, Congregationalists, Episcopalians,
Northern Methodists, Southern Methodists, Methodists
various, Northern Presbyterians, Southern Presbyterians,
United Presbyterians, United Brethren, Brethren in Christ, Reformed
Dutch, Reformed German, Reformed Presbyterians, Cumberland Presbyterians.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 2 ISIS UNVEILED.
head. There are many hundred thousand Jews; some thousands of
Orientals of all kinds; and a very few who belong to the Greek
Church. A man at Salt Lake City, with nineteen wives and more
than one hundred children and grandchildren, is the supreme spiritual
ruler over ninety thousand people, who believe that he is in frequent
intercourse with the gods -- for the Mormons are Polytheists as
well as Polygamists, and their chief god is represented as living
in a planet they call Colob.
The God of the Unitarians is a bachelor; the Deity of the Presbyterians,
Methodists, Congregationalists, and the other orthodox Protestant
sects a spouseless Father with one Son, who is identical with
Himself. In the attempt to outvie each other in the erection of
their sixty-two thousand and odd churches, prayer-houses, and
meeting-halls, in which to teach these conflicting theological
doctrines, $354,485,581 have been spent. The value of the Protestant
parsonages alone, in which are sheltered the disputants and their
families, is roughly calculated to approximate $54,115,297. Sixteen
million (16,179,387) dollars, are, moreover, contributed every
year for current expenses of the Protestant denominations only.
One Presbyterian church in New York cost a round million; a Catholic
altar alone, one-fourth as much!
We will not mention the multitude of smaller sects, communities,
and extravagantly original little heresies in this country which
spring up one year to die out the next, like so many spores of
fungi after a rainy day. We will not even stop to consider the
alleged millions of Spiritualists; for the majority lack the courage
to break away from their respective religious denominations. These
are the back-door Nicodemuses.
And now, with Pilate, let us inquire, What is truth? Where is
it to be searched for amid this multitude of warring sects? Each
claims to be based upon divine revelation, and each to have the
keys of the celestial gates. Is either in possession of this rare
truth? Or, must we exclaim with the Buddhist philosopher, "There
is but one truth on earth, and it is unchangeable: and this is
-- that there is no truth on it!"
Though we have no disposition whatever to trench upon the ground
that has been so exhaustively gleaned by those learned scholars
who have shown that every Christian dogma has its origin in a
heathen rite, still the facts which they have exhumed, since the
enfranchisement of science, will lose nothing by repetition. Besides,
we propose to examine these facts from a different and perhaps
rather novel point of view: that of the old philosophies as esoterically
understood. These we have barely glanced at in our first volume.
We will use them as the standard by which to compare Christian
dogmas and miracles with the doctrines and phenomena of ancient
magic, and the modern "New Dispensation," as Spiritualism
is called by its votaries. Since the materialists deny the phenom-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 3 "THE CHURCH! WHERE IS IT?"
ena without investigation, and since the theologians in admitting
them offer us the poor choice of two palpable absurdities -- the
Devil and miracles -- we can lose little by applying to the theurgists,
and they may actually help us to throw a great light upon a very
dark subject.
Professor A. Butlerof, of the Imperial University of St. Petersburg,
remarks in a recent pamphlet, entitled Mediumistic Manifestations,
as follows: "Let the facts (of modern spiritualism)
belong if you will to the number of those which were more or less
known by the ancients; let them be identical with those which
in the dark ages gave importance to the office of Egyptian priest
or Roman augur; let them even furnish the basis of the sorcery
of our Siberian Shaman; . . . let them be all these, and, if they
are real facts, it is no business of ours. All the facts
in nature belong to science, and every addition to the
store of science enriches instead of impoverishing her. If humanity
has once admitted a truth, and then in the blindness of self-conceit
denied it, to return to its realization is a step forward and
not backward."
Since the day that modern science gave what may be considered
the death-blow to dogmatic theology, by assuming the ground that
religion was full of mystery, and mystery is unscientific, the
mental state of the educated class has presented a curious aspect.
Society seems from that time to have been ever balancing itself
upon one leg, on an unseen tight-rope stretched from our visible
universe into the invisible one; uncertain whether the end hooked
on faith in the latter might not suddenly break, and hurl it into
final annihilation.
The great body of nominal Christians may be divided into three
unequal portions: materialists, spiritualists, and Christians
proper. The materialists and spiritualists make common cause against
the hierarchical pretensions of the clergy; who, in retaliation,
denounce both with equal acerbity. The materialists are as little
in harmony as the Christian sects themselves -- the Comtists,
or, as they call themselves, the positivists, being despised and
hated to the last degree by the schools of thinkers, one of which
Maudsley honorably represents in England. Positivism, be it remembered,
is that "religion" of the future about whose founder
even Huxley has made himself wrathful in his famous lecture, The
Physical Basis of Life; and Maudsley felt obliged, in behalf
of modern science, to express himself thus: "It is no wonder
that scientific men should be anxious to disclaim Comte as their
law-giver, and to protest against such a king being set up to
reign over them. Not conscious of any personal obligation to his
writings -- conscious how much, in some respects, he has misrepresented
the spirit and pretensions of science -- they repudiate the allegiance
which his enthusiastic disciples would force upon them, and which
popular opinion is fast coming to think a natural one. They do
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 4 ISIS UNVEILED.
well in thus making a timely assertion of independence; for if
it be not done soon, it will soon be too late to be done well."*
When a materialistic doctrine is repudiated so strongly by two
such materialists as Huxley and Maudsley, then we must think indeed
that it is absurdity itself.
Among Christians there is nothing but dissension. Their various
churches represent every degree of religious belief, from the
omnivorous credulity of blind faith to a condescending and high-toned
deference to the Deity which thinly masks an evident conviction
of their own deific wisdom. All these sects believe more or less
in the immortality of the soul. Some admit the intercourse between
the two worlds as a fact; some entertain the opinion as a sentiment;
some positively deny it; and only a few maintain an attitude of
attention and expectancy.
Impatient of restraint, longing for the return of the dark ages,
the Romish Church frowns at the diabolical manifestations,
and indicates what she would do to their champions had she but
the power of old. Were it not for the self-evident fact that she
herself is placed by science on trial, and that she is handcuffed,
she would be ready at a moment's notice to repeat in the nineteenth
century the revolting scenes of former days. As to the Protestant
clergy, so furious is their common hatred toward spiritualism,
that as a secular paper very truly remarks: "They seem willing
to undermine the public faith in all the spiritual phenomena of
the past, as recorded in the Bible, if they can only
see the pestilent modern heresy stabbed to the heart."**
Summoning back the long-forgotten memories of the Mosaic laws,
the Romish Church claims the monopoly of miracles, and of the
right to sit in judgment over them, as being the sole heir thereto
by direct inheritance. The Old Testament, exiled by Colenso,
his predecessors and contemporaries, is recalled from its banishment.
The prophets, whom his Holiness the Pope condescends at last to
place, if not on the same level with himself, at least at a less
respectful distance,*** are dusted and cleaned. The memory of
all the diabolical abracadabra is evoked anew. The blasphemous
horrors perpetrated by Paganism, its
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* H. Maudsley: "Body and Mind."
** "Boston Sunday Herald," November 5, 1876.
*** See the self-glorification of the present Pope in the work
entitled, "Speeches of Pope Pius IX."
by Don Pascale de Franciscis; and the famous pamphlet of that
name by the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone. The latter quotes from the
work named the following sentence pronounced by the Pope: "My
wish is that all governments should know that I am speaking in
this strain. . . . And I have the right to speak, even
more than Nathan the prophet to David the king,
and a great deal more than St. Ambrose had to Theodosius"!!
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 5 PAGAN PHALLISM IN CHRISTIAN SYMBOLS.
phallic worship, thaumaturgical wonders wrought by Satan, human
sacrifices, incantations, witchcraft, magic, and sorcery are recalled
and DEMONISM is confronted with spiritualism for mutual
recognition and identification. Our modern demonologists conveniently
overlook a few insignificant details, among which is the undeniable
presence of heathen phallism in the Christian symbols. A strong
spiritual element of this worship may be easily demonstrated in
the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mother of
God; and a physical element equally proved in the fetish-worship
of the holy limbs of Sts. Cosmo and Damiano, at Isernia,
near Naples; a successful traffic in which ex-voto in
wax was carried on by the clergy, annually, until barely a half
century ago.*
We find it rather unwise on the part of Catholic writers to pour
out their vials of wrath in such sentences as these: "In
a multitude of pagodas, the phallic stone, ever and always assuming,
like the Grecian batylos, the brutally indecent form
of the lingham . . . the Maha Deva."** Before casting
slurs on a symbol whose profound metaphysical meaning is too much
for the modern champions of that religion of sensualism par
excellence, Roman Catholicism, to grasp, they are in duty
bound to destroy their oldest churches, and change the form of
the cupolas of their own temples. The Mahody of Elephanta, the
Round Tower of Bhangulpore, the minarets of Islam -- either rounded
or pointed -- are the originals of the Campanile column
of San Marco, at Venice, of the Rochester Cathedral, and of the
modern Duomo of Milan. All of these steeples, turrets, domes,
and Christian temples, are the reproductions of the primitive
idea of the lithos, the upright phallus. "The western
tower of St. Paul's Cathedral, London," says the author of
The Rosicrucians, "is one of the double lithoi
placed always in front of every temple, Christian as well
as heathen."*** Moreover, in all Christian Churches, "particularly
in Protestant churches, where they figure most conspicuously,
the two tables of stone of the Mosaic Dispensation are placed
over the altar, side by side, as a united stone, the tops of which
are rounded. . . . The right stone is masculine, the
left feminine." Therefore neither Catholics
nor Protestants have a right to talk of the "indecent forms"
of heathen monuments so long as they ornament their own churches
with the symbols of the Lingham and Yoni, and even write the laws
of their God upon them.
Another detail not redounding very particularly to the honor of
the Christian clergy might be recalled in the word Inquisition.
The torrents
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See King's "Gnostics," and other works.
** Des Mousseaux: "La Magie au XIXme Siecle,"
chap. i.
*** Hargrave Jennings: "The Rosicrucians," pp. 228-241.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 6 ISIS UNVEILED.
of human blood shed by this Christian institution, and
the number of its human sacrifices, are unparalleled in the annals
of Paganism. Another still more prominent feature in which the
clergy surpassed their masters, the "heathen," is sorcery.
Certainly in no Pagan temple was black magic, in its real
and true sense, more practiced than in the Vatican. While strongly
supporting exorcism as an important source of revenue, they neglected
magic as little as the ancient heathen. It is easy to prove that
the sortilegium, or sorcery, was widely practiced among
the clergy and monks so late as the last century, and is practiced
occasionally even now.
Anathematizing every manifestation of occult nature outside the
precincts of the Church, the clergy -- notwithstanding proofs
to the contrary -- call it "the work of Satan," "the
snares of the fallen angels," who "rush in and out from
the bottomless pit," mentioned by John in his kabalistic
Revelation, "from whence arises a smoke as the smoke
of a great furnace." "Intoxicated by its fumes,
around this pit are daily gathering millions of Spiritualists,
to worship at 'the Abyss of Baal.' "*
More than ever arrogant, stubborn, and despotic, now that she
has been nearly upset by modern research, not daring to interfere
with the powerful champions of science, the Latin Church revenges
herself upon the unpopular phenomena. A despot without a victim,
is a word void of sense; a power which neglects to assert itself
through outward, well-calculated effects, risks being doubted
in the end. The Church has no intention to fall into the oblivion
of the ancient myths, or to suffer her authority to be too closely
questioned. Hence she pursues, as well as the times permit, her
traditional policy. Lamenting the enforced extinction of her ally,
the Holy Inquisition, she makes a virtue of necessity. The only
victims now within reach are the Spiritists of France. Recent
events have shown that the meek spouse of Christ never disdains
to retaliate on helpless victims.
Having successfully performed her part of Deus-ex-Machina
from behind the French Bench, which has not scrupled
to disgrace itself for her, the Church of Rome sets to work and
shows in the year 1876 what she can do. From the whirling tables
and dancing pencils of profane Spiritualism, the Christian world
is warned to turn to the divine "miracles" of Lourdes.
Meanwhile, the ecclesiastical authorities utilize their time in
arranging for other more easy triumphs, calculated to scare the
superstitious out of their senses. So, acting under orders, the
clergy hurl dramatic, if not very impressive anathemas from every
Catholic diocese; threaten right and left; excommunicate and curse.
Per-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Des Mousseaux: "Hauts Phenomenes de la Magie."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 7 EXAMPLES OF PAPAL VITUPERATION.
ceiving, finally, that her thunderbolts directed even against
crowned heads fall about as harmlessly as the Jupiterean lightnings
of Offenbach's Calchas, Rome turns about in powerless
fury against the victimized proteges of the Emperor of
Russia -- the unfortunate Bulgarians and Servians. Undisturbed
by evidence and sarcasm, unbaffled by proof, "the lamb of
the Vatican" impartially divides his wrath between the liberals
of Italy, "the impious whose breath has the stench of the
sepulchre,"* the "schismatic Russian Sarmates,"
and the heretics and spiritualists, "who worship at
the bottomless pit where the great Dragon lies in wait."
Mr. Gladstone went to the trouble of making a catalogue of what
he terms the "flowers of speech," disseminated through
these Papal discourses. Let us cull a few of the chosen terms
used by this vicegerent of Him who said that, "whosoever
shall say Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell-fire."
They are selected from authentic discourses. Those who oppose
the Pope are "wolves, Pharisees, thieves, liars, hypocrites,
dropsical children of Satan, sons of perdition, of sin, and corruption,
satellites of Satan in human flesh, monsters of hell, demons incarnate,
stinking corpses, men issued from the pits of hell, traitors and
Judases led by the spirit of hell; children of the deepest pits
of hell," etc., etc.; the whole piously collected and published
by Don Pasquale di Franciscis, whom Gladstone has, with perfect
propriety, termed, "an accomplished professor of flunkeyism
in things spiritual."**
Since his Holiness the Pope has such a rich vocabulary of invectives
at his command, why wonder that the Bishop of Toulouse did not
scruple to utter the most undignified falsehoods about the Protestants
and Spiritualists of America -- people doubly odious to a Catholic
-- in his address to his diocese: "Nothing," he remarks,
"is more common in an era of unbelief than to see a false
revelation substitute itself for the true one, and minds
neglect the teachings of the Holy Church, to devote themselves
to the study of divination and the occult sciences." With
a fine episcopal contempt for statistics, and strangely confounding
in his memory the audiences of the revivalists, Moody and Sankey,
and the patrons of darkened seance-rooms, he utters the unwarranted
and fallacious assertion that "it has been proven that Spiritualism,
in the United States, has caused one-sixth of all the cases of
suicide and insanity." He says that it is not possible that
the spirits "teach either an exact science, because they
are lying demons, or a useful science, because the character
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Don Pasquale di Franciscis: "Discorsi del Sommo Pontefice
Pio IX.," Part i., p. 340.
** "Speeches of Pius IX.," p. 14. Am.
Edition.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 8 ISIS UNVEILED.
of the word of Satan, like Satan himself, is sterile." He
warns his dear collaborateurs, that "the writings
in favor of Spiritualism are under the ban"; and he advises
them to let it be known that "to frequent spiritual circles
with the intention of accepting the doctrine, is to apostatize
from the Holy Church, and assume the risk of excommunication";
finally, says he, "Publish the fact that the teaching of
no spirit should prevail against that of the pulpit of Peter,
which is the teaching of the Spirit of God Himself"!!
Aware of the many false teachings attributed by the Roman Church
to the Creator, we prefer disbelieving the latter assertion. The
famous Catholic theologian, Tillemont, assures us in his work
that "all the illustrious Pagans are condemned to the eternal
torments of hell, because they lived before the time
of Jesus, and, therefore, could not be benefited by the redemption"!!
He also assures us that the Virgin Mary personally testified to
this truth over her own signature in a letter to a saint. Therefore,
this is also a revelation -- "the Spirit of God Himself"
teaching such charitable doctrines.
We have also read with great advantage the topographical descriptions
of Hell and Purgatory in the celebrated treatise under
that name by a Jesuit, the Cardinal Bellarmin. A critic found
that the author, who gives the description from a divine vision
with which he was favored, "appears to possess all the knowledge
of a land-measurer" about the secret tracts and formidable
divisions of the "bottomless pit." Justin Martyr having
actually committed to paper the heretical thought that after all
Socrates might not be altogether fixed in hell, his Benedictine
editor criticises this too benevolent father very severely. Whoever
doubts the Christian charity of the Church of Rome in this direction
is invited to peruse the Censure of the Sorbonne, on
Marmontel's Belisarius. The odium theologicum blazes
in it on the dark sky of orthodox theology like an aurora borealis
-- the precursor of God's wrath, according to the teaching of
certain mediaeval divines.
We have attempted in the first part of this work to show, by historical
examples, how completely men of science have deserved the stinging
sarcasm of the late Professor de Morgan, who remarked of them
that "they wear the priest's cast-off garb, dyed to escape
detection." The Christian clergy are, in like manner, attired
in the cast-off garb of the heathen priesthood; acting
diametrically in opposition to their God's moral precepts,
but nevertheless, sitting in judgment over the whole world.
When dying on the cross, the martyred Man of Sorrows forgave his
enemies. His last words were a prayer in their behalf. He taught
his disciples to curse not, but to bless, even their foes. But
the heirs of
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 9 CATHOLIC BLASPHEMY AGAINST HEAVEN.
St. Peter, the self-constituted representatives on earth of that
same meek Jesus, unhesitatingly curse whoever resists their despotic
will. Besides, was not the "Son" long since crowded
by them into the background? They make their obeisance only to
the Dowager Mother, for -- according to their teaching -- again
through "the direct Spirit of God," she alone acts as
a mediatrix. The OEcumenical Council of 1870 embodied the teaching
into a dogma, to disbelieve which is to be doomed forever to the
'bottomless pit.' The work of Don Pasquale di Franciscis is positive
on that point; for he tells us that, as the Queen of Heaven owes
to the present Pope "the finest gem in her coronet,"
since he has conferred on her the unexpected honor of becoming
suddenly immaculate, there is nothing she cannot obtain from her
Son for "her Church."*
Some years ago, certain travellers saw in Barri, Italy, a statue
of the Madonna, arrayed in a flounced pink skirt over a swelling
crinoline! Pious pilgrims who may be anxious to examine
the regulation wardrobe of their God's mother may do so by going
to Southern Italy, Spain, and Catholic North and South America.
The Madonna of Barri must still be there -- between two vineyards
and a locanda (gin-shop). When last seen, a half-successful
attempt had been made to clothe the infant Jesus; they had covered
his legs with a pair of dirty, scollop-edged pantaloons. An English
traveller having presented the "Mediatrix" with a green
silk parasol, the grateful population of the contadini, accompanied
by the village-priest, went in procession to the spot. They managed
to stick the sunshade, opened, between the infant's back and the
arm of the Virgin which embraced him. The scene and ceremony were
both solemn and highly refreshing to our religious feelings. For
there stood the image of the goddess in its niche, surrounded
with a row of ever-burning lamps, the flames of which, flickering
in the breeze, infect God's pure air with an offensive smell of
olive oil. The Mother and Son truly represent the two most conspicuous
idols of Monotheistic Christianity!
For a companion to the idol of the poor contadini of
Barri, go to the rich city of Rio Janeiro. In the Church of the
Duomo del Candelaria, in a long hall running along one side of
the church, there might be seen, a few years ago, another Madonna.
Along the walls of the hall there is a line of saints, each standing
on a contribution-box, which thus forms a fit pedestal. In the
centre of this line, under a gorgeously rich canopy of blue silk,
is exhibited the Virgin Mary leaning on the arm of Christ. "Our
Lady" is arrayed in a very decollete blue satin
dress with short
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Vide "Speeches of Pope Pius IX.,"
by Don Pasq. di Franciscis; Gladstone's pamphlet on this book;
Draper's "Conflict between Religion and Science," and
others.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 10 ISIS UNVEILED.
sleeves, showing, to great advantage, a snow-white, exquisitely-moulded
neck, shoulders, and arms. The skirt equally of blue satin with
an overskirt of rich lace and gauze puffs, is as short as that
of a ballet-dancer; hardly reaching the knee, it exhibits a pair
of finely-shaped legs covered with flesh colored silk tights,
and blue satin French boots with very high red heels! The blonde
hair of this "Mother of God" is arranged in the latest
fashion, with a voluminous chignon and curls. As she
leans on her Son's arm, her face is lovingly turned toward her
Only-Begotten, whose dress and attitude are equally worthy of
admiration. Christ wears an evening dress-coat, with swallow-tail,
black trousers, and low cut white vest; varnished boots, and white
kid gloves, over one of which sparkles a rich diamond
ring, worth many thousands we must suppose -- a precious Brazilian
jewel. Above this body of a modern Portuguese dandy, is a head
with the hair parted in the middle; a sad and solemn face, and
eyes whose patient look seems to reflect all the bitterness of
this last insult flung at the majesty of the Crucified.*
The Egyptian Isis was also represented as a Virgin Mother by her
devotees, and as holding her infant son, Horus, in her arms. In
some statues and basso-relievos, when she appears alone
she is either completely nude or veiled from head to foot. But
in the Mysteries, in common with nearly every other goddess, she
is entirely veiled from head to foot, as a symbol of a mother's
chastity. It would not do us any harm were we to borrow from the
ancients some of the poetic sentiment in their religions, and
the innate veneration they entertained for their symbols.
It is but fair to say at once that the last of the true
Christians died with the last of the direct apostles. Max Muller
forcibly asks: "How can a missionary in such circumstances
meet the surprise and questions of his pupils, unless he may point
to that seed,** and tell them what Christianity was meant to be?
unless he may show that, like all other religions, Christianity
too, has had its history; that the Christianity of the nineteenth
century is not the Christianity of the middle ages, and that the
Christianity of the middle ages was not that of the early Councils;
that the Christianity of the early Councils was not that of the
Apostles, and that what has been said by Christ, that alone was
well said?"***
Thus we may infer that the only characteristic difference between
modern Christianity and the old heathen faiths is the belief of
the former in a personal devil and in hell. "The Aryan nations
had no devil," says Max Muller. "Pluto, though of a
sombre character, was a very
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The fact is given to us by an eye-witness who has visited the
church several times; a Roman Catholic, who felt perfectly horrified,
as he expressed it.
** Referring to the seed planted by Jesus and his Apostles.
*** "Chips," vol. i., p. 26, Preface.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 11 THE HELLS OF VARIOUS NATIONS.
respectable personage; and Loki (the Scandinavian), though a mischievous
person, was not a fiend. The German Goddess, Hell, too, like Proserpine,
had once seen better days. Thus, when the Germans were indoctrinated
with the idea of a real devil, the Semitic Seth, Satan or Diabolus,
they treated him in the most good-humored way."
The same may be said of hell. Hades was quite a different place
from our region of eternal damnation, and might be termed rather
an intermediate state of purification. Neither does the Scandinavian
Hel or Hela, imply either a state or a place of punishment;
for when Frigga, the grief-stricken mother of Bal-dur, the white
god, who died and found himself in the dark abodes of the shadows
(Hades) sent Hermod, a son of Thor, in quest of her beloved child,
the messenger found him in the inexorable region -- alas! but
still comfortably seated on a rock, and reading a book.* The Norse
kingdom of the dead is moreover situated in the higher latitudes
of the Polar regions; it is a cold and cheerless abode, and neither
the gelid halls of Hela, nor the occupation of Baldur present
the least similitude to the blazing hell of eternal fire and the
miserable "damned" sinners with which the Church so
generously peoples it. No more is it the Egyptian Amenthes, the
region of judgment and purification; nor the Onderah -- the abyss
of darkness of the Hindus; for even the fallen angels hurled into
it by Siva, are allowed by Parabrahma to consider it as an intermediate
state, in which an opportunity is afforded them to prepare for
higher degrees of purification and redemption from their wretched
condition. The Gehenna of the New Testament was a locality
outside the walls of Jerusalem; and in mentioning it, Jesus used
but an ordinary metaphor. Whence then came the dreary dogma of
hell, that Archimedean lever of Christian theology, with which
they have succeeded to hold in subjection the numberless millions
of Christians for nineteen centuries? Assuredly not from the Jewish
Scriptures, and we appeal for corroboration to any well-informed
Hebrew scholar.
The only designation of something approaching hell in the Bible
is Gehenna or Hinnom, a valley near Jerusalem, where
was situated Tophet, a place where a fire was perpetually kept
for sanitary purposes. The prophet Jeremiah informs us that the
Israelites used to sacrifice their children to Moloch-Hercules
on that spot; and later we find Christians quietly replacing this
divinity by their god of mercy, whose wrath will not
be appeased, unless the Church sacrifices to him her unbaptized
children and sinning sons on the altar of "eternal damnation"!
Whence then did the divine learn so well the conditions of hell,
as
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Mallet: "Northern Antiquities."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 12 ISIS UNVEILED.
to actually divide its torments into two kinds, the poena
damni and poenae sensus, the former being the privation of
the beatific vision; the latter the eternal pains
in a lake of fire and brimstone? If they answer us that it
is in the Apocalypse (xx. 10), we are prepared
to demonstrate whence the theologist John himself derived the
idea, "And the devil that deceived them was cast
into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and
the false prophet are and shall be tormented for ever and ever,"
he says. Laying aside the esoteric interpretation that the "devil"
or tempting demon meant our own earthly body, which after death
will surely dissolve in the fiery or ethereal elements,*
the word "eternal" by which our theologians interpret
the words "for ever and ever" does not exist in the
Hebrew language, either as a word or meaning. There is no Hebrew
word which properly expresses eternity; 
oulam, according to Le Clerc, only imports a time whose
beginning or end is not known. While showing that this word does
not mean infinite duration, and that in the Old Testament
the word forever only signifies a long time, Archbishop
Tillotson has completely perverted its sense with respect to the
idea of hell-torments. According to his doctrine, when Sodom and
Gomorrah are said to be suffering "eternal fire," we
must understand it only in the sense of that fire not being extinguished
till both cities were entirely consumed. But, as to hell-fire
the words must be understood in the strictest sense of infinite
duration. Such is the decree of the learned divine. For the duration
of the punishment of the wicked must be proportionate to the eternal
happiness of the righteous. So he says, "These (speaking
of the wicked) shall go away [[eis kolasin aionion]]
into eternal punishment; but the righteous [[eis
zoen aionion]] into life eternal."
The Reverend T. Surnden,** commenting on the speculations of his
predecessors, fills a whole volume with unanswerable arguments,
tending to show that the locality of Hell is in the sun. We
suspect that the reverend speculator had read the Apocalypse
in bed, and had the nightmare in consequence. There are two
verses in the Revelation of John reading thus: "And
the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun, and power was
given him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with
great heat, and blasphemed the name of God."*** This is simply
Pythagorean and kabalistic allegory. The idea is new neither with
the above-mentioned author nor with John. Pythagoras placed the
"sphere of purification in the sun," which sun, with
its sphere, he moreover
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Ether is both pure and impure fire. The composition
of the latter comprises all its visible forms, such as the "correlation
of forces" -- heat, flame, electricity, etc. The former is
the Spirit of Fire. The difference is purely alchemical.
** See "Inquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell,"
by Rev. T. Surnden.
*** Revelation xvi. 8-9.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 13 AUGUSTINE'S GEOCENTRIC HELL.
locates in the middle of the universe,* the allegory having a
double meaning: 1. Symbolically, the central, spiritual sun, the
Supreme Deity. Arrived at this region every soul becomes purified
of its sins, and unites itself forever with its spirit, having
previously suffered throughout all the lower spheres. 2. By placing
the sphere of visible fire in the middle of the universe,
he simply taught the heliocentric system which appertained to
the Mysteries, and was imparted only in the higher degree of initiation.
John gives to his Word a purely kabalistic significance, which
no "Fathers," except those who had belonged to the Neo-platonic
school, were able to comprehend. Origen understood it well, having
been a pupil of Ammonius Saccas; therefore we see him bravely
denying the perpetuity of hell-torments. He maintains that not
only men, but even devils (by which term he meant disembodied
human sinners), after a certain duration of punishment shall be
pardoned and finally restored to heaven.** In consequence of this
and other such heresies Origen was, as a matter of course, exiled.
Many have been the learned and truly-inspired speculations as
to the locality of hell. The most popular were those which placed
it in the centre of the earth. At a certain time, however, skeptical
doubts which disturbed the placidity of faith in this highly-refreshing
doctrine arose in consequence of the meddling scientists of those
days. As a Mr. Swinden in our own century observes, the theory
was inadmissible because of two objections: 1st, that a fund of
fuel or sulphur sufficient to maintain so furious and constant
a fire could not be there supposed; and, 2d, that it must want
the nitrous particles in the air to sustain and keep it alive.
"And how," says he, "can a fire be eternal, when,
by degrees, the whole substance of the earth must be consumed
thereby?"**
The skeptical gentleman had evidently forgotten that centuries
ago St. Augustine solved the difficulty. Have we not the word
of this learned divine that hell, nevertheless, is in the centre
of the earth, for "God supplies the central fire with air
by a miracle"? The argument is unanswerable,
and so we will not seek to upset it.
The Christians were the first to make the existence of Satan a
dogma of the Church. And once that she had established it, she
had to struggle for over 1,700 years for the repression of a mysterious
force which it was her policy to make appear of diabolical origin.
Unfortunately, in manifesting itself, this force invariably tends
to upset such a belief by the ridiculous discrepancy it presents
between the alleged cause and the effects. If the clergy have
not over-estimated the real power of
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Aristotle mentions Pythagoreans who placed the sphere of fire
in the sun, and named it Jupiter's Prison. See "De
Coelo," lib. ii.
** "De Civit. Dei," I, xxi., c. 17.
*** "Demonologia and Hell," p. 289.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 14 ISIS UNVEILED.
the "Arch-Enemy of God," it must be confessed that he
takes mighty precautions against being recognized as the "Prince
of Darkness" who aims at our souls. If modern "spirits"
are devils at all, as preached by the clergy, then they can only
be those "poor" or "stupid devils" whom Max
Muller describes as appearing so often in the German and Norwegian
tales.
Notwithstanding this, the clergy fear above all to be forced to
relinquish this hold on humanity. They are not willing to let
us judge of the tree by its fruits, for that might sometimes force
them into dangerous dilemmas. They refuse, likewise, to admit,
with unprejudiced people, that the phenomena of Spiritualism has
unquestionably spiritualized and reclaimed from evil courses many
an indomitable atheist and skeptic. But, as they confess themselves,
what is the use in a Pope, if there is no Devil?
And so Rome sends her ablest advocates and preachers to the rescue
of those perishing in "the bottomless pit." Rome employs
her cleverest writers for this purpose -- albeit they all indignantly
deny the accusation -- and in the preface to every book put forth
by the prolific des Mousseaux, the French Tertullian of our century,
we find undeniable proofs of the fact. Among other certificates
of ecclesiastical approval, every volume is ornamented with the
text of a certain original letter addressed to the very pious
author by the world-known Father Ventura de Raulica, of Rome.
Few are those who have not heard this famous name. It is the name
of one of the chief pillars of the Latin Church, the ex-General
of the Order of the Theatins, Consultor of the Sacred Congregation
of Rites, Examiner of Bishops, and of the Roman Clergy, etc.,
etc., etc. This strikingly characteristic document will remain
to astonish future generations by its spirit of unsophisticated
demonolatry and unblushing sincerity. We translate a fragment
verbatim, and by thus helping its circulation hope to merit the
blessings of Mother Church:*
"MONSIEUR AND EXCELLENT FRIEND:
"The greatest victory of Satan was gained on that day when
he succeeded in making himself denied.
"To demonstrate the existence of Satan, is to reestablish
one of the fundamental dogmas of the Church, which serve
as a basis for Christianity, and, without which, Satan would be
but a name. . . .
"Magic, mesmerism, magnetism, somnambulism, spiritualism,
spiritism, hypnotism . . . are only other names for SATANISM.
"To bring out such a truth and show it in its proper light,
is to unmask the enemy; it is to unveil the immense danger of
certain practices, reputed innocent; it is to deserve
well in the eyes of humanity and of religion.
"FATHER VENTURA DE RAULICA."
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Les Hauts Phenomenes de la Magie," p. v., Preface.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 15 THE BIOGRAPHERS OF THE DEVIL.
A--men!
This is an unexpected honor indeed, for our American "controls"
in general, and the innocent "Indian guides" in particular.
To be thus introduced in Rome as princes of the Empire of Eblis,
is more than they could ever hope for in other lands.
Without in the least suspecting that she was working for the future
welfare of her enemies -- the spiritualists and spiritists --
the Church, some twenty years since, in tolerating des Mousseaux
and de Mirville as the biographers of the Devil, and giving her
approbation thereto, tacitly confessed the literary copartnership.
M. the Chevalier Gougenot des Mousseaux, and his friend and collaborateur,
the Marquis Eudes de Mirville, to judge by their long titles,
must be aristocrats pur sang, and they are, moreover,
writers of no small erudition and talent. Were they to show themselves
a little more parsimonious of double points of exclamation following
every vituperation, and invective against Satan and his worshippers,
their style would be faultless. As it is, the crusade against
the enemy of mankind was fierce, and lasted for over twenty years.
What with the Catholics piling up their psychological phenomena
to prove the existence of a personal devil, and the Count de Gasparin,
an ancient minister of Louis Philippe, collecting volumes of other
facts to prove the contrary, the spiritists of France have contracted
an everlasting debt of gratitude toward the disputants. The existence
of an unseen spiritual universe peopled with invisible beings
has now been demonstrated beyond question. Ransacking the oldest
libraries, they have distilled from the historical records the
quintessence of evidence. All epochs, from the Homeric ages down
to the present day, have supplied their choicest materials to
these indefatigable authors. In trying to prove the authenticity
of the miracles wrought by Satan in the days preceding the Christian
era, as well as throughout the middle ages, they have simply laid
a firm foundation for a study of the phenomena in our modern times.
Though an ardent, uncompromising enthusiast, des Mousseaux unwittingly
transforms himself into the tempting demon, or -- as he is fond
of calling the Devil -- the "serpent of Genesis."
In his desire to demonstrate in every manifestation the presence
of the Evil One, he only succeeds in demonstrating that Spiritualism
and magic are no new things in the world, but very ancient twin-brothers,
whose origin must be sought for in the earliest infancy of ancient
India, Chaldea, Babylonia, Egypt, Persia, and Greece.
He proves the existence of "spirits," whether these
be angels or devils, with such a clearness of argument and logic,
and such an amount
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 16 ISIS UNVEILED.
of evidence, historical, irrefutable, and strictly authenticated,
that little is left for spiritualist authors who may come after
him. How unfortunate that the scientists, who believe neither
in devil nor spirit, are more than likely to ridicule M. des Mousseaux's
books without reading them, for they really contain so many facts
of profound scientific interest!
But what can we expect in our own age of unbelief, when we find
Plato, over twenty-two centuries ago, complaining of the same?
"Me, too," says he, in his Euthyphron, "when
I say anything in the public assembly concerning divine things,
and predict to them what is going to happen, they ridicule
as mad; and although nothing that I have predicted has proved
untrue, yet they envy all such men as we are. However, we
ought not to heed, but pursue our own way."
The literary resources of the Vatican and other Catholic repositories
of learning must have been freely placed at the disposal of these
modern authors. When one has such treasures at hand -- original
manuscripts, papyri, and books pillaged from the richest heathen
libraries; old treatises on magic and alchemy; and records of
all the trials for witchcraft, and sentences for the same to rack,
stake, and torture, it is mighty easy to write volumes of accusations
against the Devil. We affirm on good grounds that there are hundreds
of the most valuable works on the occult sciences, which are sentenced
to eternal concealment from the public, but are attentively read
and studied by the privileged who have access to the Vatican Library.
The laws of nature are the same for heathen sorcerer as for Catholic
saint; and a "miracle" may be produced as well by one
as by the other, without the slightest intervention of God or
devil.
Hardly had the manifestations begun to attract attention in Europe,
than the clergy commenced their outcry that their traditional
enemy had reappeared under another name, and "divine miracles"
also began to be heard of in isolated instances. First they were
confined to humble individuals, some of whom claimed to have them
produced through the intervention of the Virgin Mary, saints and
angels; others -- according to the clergy -- began to suffer from
obsession and possession; for the Devil must
have his share of fame as well as the Deity. Finding that, notwithstanding
the warning, the independent, or so-called spiritual
phenomena went on increasing and multiplying, and that these manifestations
threatened to upset the carefully-constructed dogmas of the Church,
the world was suddenly startled by extraordinary intelligence.
In 1864, a whole community became possessed of the Devil. Morzine,
and the awful stories of its demoniacs; Valleyres, and the narratives
of its well-authenticated exhibitions of sorcery; and those of
the Presbytere de Cideville curdled the blood in Catholic veins.
Strange to say, the question has been asked over and over again,
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 17 WHY THERE ARE NO MIRACLES IN RUSSIA.
why the "divine" miracles and most of the obsessions
are so strictly confined to Roman Catholic dioceses and countries?
Why is it that since the Reformation there has been scarcely one
single divine "miracle" in a Protestant land? Of course,
the answer we must expect from Catholics is, that the latter are
peopled by heretics, and abandoned by God. Then why are
there no more Church-miracles in Russia, a country whose religion
differs from the Roman Catholic faith but in external forms of
rites, its fundamental dogmas being identically the same, except
as to the emanation of the Holy Ghost? Russia has her accepted
saints and thaumaturgical relics, and miracle-working images.
The St. Mitrophaniy of Voroneg is an authenticated miracle-worker,
but his miracles are limited to healing; and though hundreds upon
hundreds have been healed through faith, and though the
old cathedral is full of magnetic effluvia, and whole generations
will go on believing in his power, and some persons will
always be healed, still no such miracles are heard of in Russia
as the Madonna-walking, and Madonna letter-writing, and statue-talking
of Catholic countries. Why is this so? Simply because the emperors
have strictly forbidden that sort of thing. The Czar, Peter the
Great, stopped every spurious "divine" miracle with
one frown of his mighty brow. He declared he would have no
false miracles played by the holy icones (images
of saints), and they disappeared forever.*
There are cases on record of isolated and independent phenomena
exhibited by certain images in the last century; the latest was
the bleeding of the cheek of an image of the Virgin, when a soldier
of Napoleon cut her face in two. This miracle, alleged to have
happened in 1812, in the days of the invasion by the "grand
army," was the final farewell.**
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Dr. Stanley: "Lectures on the Eastern Church," p.
407.
** In the government of Tambov, a gentleman, a rich landed proprietor,
had a curious case happen in his family during the Hungarian campaign
of 1848. His only and much-beloved nephew, whom, having no children,
he had adopted as a son, was in the Russian army. The elderly
couple had a portrait of his -- a water-color painting -- constantly,
during the meals, placed on the table in front of the young man's
usual seat. One evening as the family, with some friends, were
at their early tea, the glass over the portrait, without any one
touching it, was shattered to atoms with a loud explosion. As
the aunt of the young soldier caught the picture in her hand she
saw the forehead and head besmeared with blood. The guests, in
order to quiet her, attributed the blood to her having cut her
fingers with the broken glass. But, examine as they would, they
could not find the vestige of a cut on her fingers, and no one
had touched the picture but herself. Alarmed at her state of excitement
the husband, pretending to examine the portrait more closely,
cut his finger on purpose, and then tried to assure her that it
was his blood and that, in the first excitement, he had touched
the frame without any one remarking it. All was in vain, the old
lady felt sure that Dimitry was killed. She began to have masses
said for him daily at the village church, and arrayed [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 18 ISIS UNVEILED.
But since then, although the three successive emperors have been
pious men, their will has been respected, and the images and saints
have remained quiet, and hardly been spoken of except as connected
with religious worship. In Poland, a land of furious ultramontanism,
there were, at different times, desperate attempts at miracle-doing.
They died at birth, however, for the argus-eyed police were there;
a Catholic miracle in Poland, made public by the priests, generally
meaning political revolution, bloodshed, and war.
Is it then, not permissible to at least suspect that if, in one
country divine miracles may be arrested by civil and military
law, and in another they never occur, we must search
for the explanation of the two facts in some natural cause, instead
of attributing them to either god or devil? In our opinion --
if it is worth anything -- the whole secret may be accounted for
as follows. In Russia, the clergy know better than to bewilder
their parishes, whose piety is sincere and faith strong without
miracles; they know that nothing is better calculated than the
latter to sow seeds of distrust, doubt, and finally of skepticism
which leads directly to atheism. Moreover the climate is less
propitious, and the magnetism of the average population too positive,
too healthy, to call forth independent phenomena;
and fraud would not answer. On the other hand, neither in Protestant
Germany, nor England, nor yet in America, since the days of the
Reformation, has the clergy had access to any of the Vatican secret
libraries. Hence they are all but poor hands at the magic of Albertus
Magnus.
As for America being overflowed with sensitives and mediums, the
reason for it is partially attributable to climatic influence
and especially to the physiological condition of the population.
Since the days of the Salem witchcraft, 200 years ago, when the
comparatively few settlers had pure and unadulterated blood in
their veins, nothing much had been heard of "spirits"
or "mediums" until 1840.* The phenomena then first appeared
among the ascetic and exalted Shakers, whose religious aspirations,
peculiar mode of life, moral purity, and physical chastity all
led to the production of independent phenomena of a psychological
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from next page]] the whole household in deep
mourning. Several weeks later, an official communication was received
from the colonel of the regiment, stating that their nephew was
killed by a fragment of a shell which had carried off the upper
part of his head.
* Executions for witchcraft took place, not much later than a
century ago, in other of the American provinces. Notoriously there
were negroes executed in New Jersey by burning at the stake --
the penalty denounced in several States. Even in South Carolina,
in 1865, when the State government was "reconstructed,"
after the civil war, the statutes inflicting death for witchcraft
were found to be still unrepealed. It is not a hundred years since
they have been enforced to the murderous letter of their text.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 19 THE PHYSICO-PSYCOLOGICAL AMERICAN TYPE.
as well as physical nature. Hundreds of thousands, and even millions
of men from various climates and of different constitutions and
habits, have, since 1692, invaded North America, and by intermarrying
have substantially changed the physical type of the inhabitants.
Of what country in the world do the women's constitutions bear
comparison with the delicate, nervous, and sensitive constitutions
of the feminine portion of the population of the United States?
We were struck on our arrival in the country with the semi-transparent
delicacy of skin of the natives of both sexes. Compare a hard-working
Irish factory girl or boy, with one from a genuine American family.
Look at their hands. One works as hard as the other; they are
of equal age, and both seemingly healthy; and still, while the
hands of the one, after an hour's soaping, will show a skin little
softer than that of a young alligator, those of the other, notwithstanding
constant use, will allow you to observe the circulation of the
blood under the thin and delicate epidermis. No wonder, then,
that while America is the conservatory of sensitives the majority
of its clergy, unable to produce divine or any other miracles,
stoutly deny the possibility of any phenomena except those produced
by tricks and juggling. And no wonder also that the Catholic priesthood,
who are practically aware of the existence of magic and spiritual
phenomena, and believe in them while dreading their consequences,
try to attribute the whole to the agency of the Devil.
Let us adduce one more argument, if only for the sake of circumstantial
evidence. In what countries have "divine miracles" flourished
most, been most frequent and most stupendous? Catholic Spain,
and Pontifical Italy, beyond question. And which more than these
two, has had access to ancient literature? Spain was famous for
her libraries; the Moors were celebrated for their profound learning
in alchemy and other sciences. The Vatican is the storehouse of
an immense number of ancient manuscripts. During the long interval
of nearly 1,500 years they have been accumulating, from trial
after trial, books and manuscripts confiscated from their sentenced
victims, to their own profit. The Catholics may plead that the
books were generally committed to the flames; that the treatises
of famous sorcerers and enchanters perished with their accursed
authors. But the Vatican, if it could speak, could tell a different
story. It knows too well of the existence of certain closets and
rooms, access to which is had but by the very few. It knows that
the entrances to these secret hiding-places are so cleverly concealed
from sight in the carved frame-work and under the profuse ornamentation
of the library-walls, that there have even been Popes who lived
and died within the precincts of the palace without ever suspecting
their existence. But these Popes were neither Sylvester II.,
Benedict IX., John XX., nor
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 20 ISIS UNVEILED.
the VIth and VIIth Gregory;
nor yet the famous Borgia of toxicological memory. Neither were
those who remained ignorant of the hidden lore friends of the
sons of Loyola.
Where, in the records of European Magic, can we find cleverer
enchanters than in the mysterious solitudes of the cloister? Albert
Magnus, the famous Bishop and conjurer of Ratisbon, was never
surpassed in his art. Roger Bacon was a monk, and Thomas Aquinas
one of the most learned pupils of Albertus. Trithemius, Abbott
of the Spanheim Benedictines, was the teacher, friend, and confidant
of Cornelius Agrippa; and while the confederations of the Theosophists
were scattered broadcast about Germany, where they first originated,
assisting one another, and struggling for years for the acquirement
of esoteric knowledge, any person who knew how to become the favored
pupil of certain monks, might very soon be proficient in all the
important branches of occult learning.
This is all in history and cannot be easily denied. Magic, in
all its aspects, was widely and nearly openly practiced by the
clergy till the Reformation. And even he who was once called the
"Father of the Reformation," the famous John Reuchlin,*
author of the Mirific Word and friend of Pico di Mirandola,
the teacher and instructor of Erasmus, Luther, and Melancthon,
was a kabalist and occultist.
The ancient Sortilegium, or divination by means of Sortes
or lots -- an art and practice now decried by the clergy
as an abomination, designated by Stat. 10 Jac. as
felony,** and by Stat. 12 Carolus II excepted
out of the general pardons, on the ground of being sorcery
-- was widely practiced by the clergy and monks. Nay, it
was sanctioned by St. Augustine himself, who does not "disapprove
of this method of learning futurity, provided it be not used for
worldly purposes." More than that, he confesses having practiced
it himself.***
Aye; but the clergy called it Sortes Sanctorum, when
it was they who practiced it; while the Sortes Praenestinae,
succeeded by the Sortes Homericae and Sortes
Virgilianae, were abominable heathenism, the
worship of the Devil, when used by any one else.
Gregory de Tours informs us that when the clergy resorted to the
Sortes their custom was to lay the Bible on
the altar, and to pray the Lord that He would discover His will,
and disclose to them futurity in one of the verses of the book.
Gilbert de Nogent writes that in his days
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Vide the title-page on the English translation of Mayerhoff's
"Reuchlin und Seine Zeit," Berlin, 1830. "The Life
and Times of John Reuchlin, or Capnion, the Father of the German
Reformation," by F. Barham, London, 1843.
** Lord Coke: 3 "Institutes," fol. 44.
*** Vide "The Life of St. Gregory of Tours."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 21 EPISCOPAL DIVINATION BY THE "LOT."
(about the twelfth century) the custom was, at the consecration
of bishops, to consult the Sortes Sanctorum, to thereby
learn the success and fate of the episcopate. On the other hand,
we are told that the Sortes Sanctorum were condemned
by the Council of Agda, in 506. In this case again we are left
to inquire, in which instance has the infallibility of the Church
failed? Was it when she prohibited that which was practiced by
her greatest saint and patron, Augustine, or in the twelfth century,
when it was openly and with the sanction of the same Church practiced
by the clergy for the benefit of the bishop's elections? Or, must
we still believe that in both of these contradictory cases the
Vatican was inspired by the direct "spirit of God"?
If any doubt that Gregory of Tours approved of a practice that
prevails to this day, more or less, even among strict Protestants,
let them read this: "Lendastus, Earl of Tours, who was for
ruining me with Queen Fredegonde, coming to Tours, big with evil
designs against me, I withdrew to my oratory under a deep concern,
where I took the Psalms, . . . My heart revived within
me when I cast my eyes on this of the seventy-seventh Psalm:
'He caused them to go on with confidence, whilst the sea
swallowed up their enemies.' Accordingly, the count spoke not
a word to my prejudice; and leaving Tours that very day, the boat
in which he was, sunk in a storm, but his skill in swimming saved
him."
The sainted bishop simply confesses here to having practiced a
bit of sorcery. Every mesmerizer knows the power of will during
an intense desire bent on any particular subject. Whether
in consequence of "co-incidents" or otherwise, the opened
verse suggested to his mind revenge by drowning. Passing the remainder
of the day in "deep concern," and possessed by this
all-absorbing thought, the saint -- it may be unconsciously --
exercises his will on the subject; and thus while imagining in
the accident the hand of God, he simply becomes a sorcerer exercising
his magnetic will which reacts on the person feared; and the count
barely escapes with his life. Were the accident decreed by God,
the culprit would have been drowned; for a simple bath could not
have altered his malevolent resolution against St. Gregory had
he been very intent on it.
Furthermore, we find anathemas fulminated against this lottery
of fate, at the council of Varres, which forbids "all ecclesiastics,
under pain of excommunication, to perform that kind of divination,
or to pry into futurity, by looking into any book, or writing,
whatsoever." The same prohibition is pronounced at the councils
of Agda in 506, of Orleans, in 511, of Auxerre in 595, and finally
at the council of Aenham in 1110; the latter condemning "sorcerers,
witches, diviners, such as occasioned death by magical operations,
and who practiced fortune-telling by the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 22 ISIS UNVEILED.
holy-book lots"; and the complaint of the joint clergy against
de Garlande, their bishop at Orleans, and addressed to Pope Alexander
III., concludes in this manner: "Let your
apostolical hands put on strength to strip naked the
iniquity of this man, that the curse prognosticated on the day
of his consecration may overtake him; for the gospels being opened
on the altar according to custom, the first words were:
and the young man, leaving his linen cloth, fled from them
naked."*
Why then roast the lay-magicians and consulters of books, and
canonize the ecclesiastics? Simply because the mediaeval as well
as the modern phenomena, manifested through laymen, whether produced
through occult knowledge or happening independently, upset the
claims of both the Catholic and Protestant Churches to divine
miracles. In the face of reiterated and unimpeachable evidence
it became impossible for the former to maintain successfully the
assertion that seemingly miraculous manifestations by the "good
angels" and God's direct intervention could be produced exclusively
by her chosen ministers and holy saints. Neither could the Protestant
well maintain on the same ground that miracles had ended with
the apostolic ages. For, whether of the same nature or not, the
modern phenomena claimed close kinship with the biblical ones.
The magnetists and healers of our century came into direct and
open competition with the apostles. The Zouave Jacob, of France,
had outrivalled the prophet Elijah in recalling to life persons
who were seemingly dead; and Alexis, the somnambulist, mentioned
by Mr. Wallace in his work,** was, by his lucidity, putting to
shame apostles, prophets, and the Sibyls of old. Since the burning
of the last witch, the great Revolution of France, so elaborately
prepared by the league of the secret societies and their clever
emissaries, had blown over Europe and awakened terror in the bosom
of the clergy. It had, like a destroying hurricane, swept away
in its course those best allies of the Church, the Roman Catholic
aristocracy. A sure foundation was now laid for the right of individual
opinion. The world was freed from ecclesiastical tyranny by opening
an unobstructed path to Napoleon the Great, who had given the
deathblow to the Inquisition. This great slaughter-house of the
Christian Church -- wherein she butchered, in the name of the
Lamb, all the sheep arbitrarily declared scurvy -- was in ruins,
and she found herself left to her own responsibility and resources.
So long as the phenomena had appeared only sporadically, she had
always felt herself powerful enough to repress the consequences.
Super-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Translated from the original document in the Archives of Orleans,
France; also see "Sortes and Sortilegium"; "Life
of Peter de Blois."
** "Miracles and Modern Spiritualism."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 23 MIRACLES BY THE LAITY.
stition and belief in the Devil were as strong as ever, and Science
had not yet dared to publicly measure her forces with those of
supernatural Religion. Meanwhile the enemy had slowly but surely
gained ground. All at once it broke out with an unexpected violence.
"Miracles" began to appear in full daylight, and passed
from their mystic seclusion into the domain of natural law, where
the profane hand of Science was ready to strip off their sacerdotal
mask. Still, for a time, the Church held her position, and with
the powerful help of superstitious fear checked the progress of
the intruding force. But, when in succession appeared mesmerists
and somnambulists, reproducing the physical and mental phenomenon
of ecstasy, hitherto believed to be the special gift of saints;
when the passion for the turning tables had reached in France
and elsewhere its climax of fury; when the psychography -- alleged
spiritual -- from a simple curiosity had developed itself and
settled into an unabated interest, and finally ebbed into religious
mysticism; when the echoes aroused by the first raps of Rochester,
crossing the oceans, spread until they were re-percussed from
nearly every corner of the world -- then, and only then, the Latin
Church was fully awakened to a sense of danger. Wonder after wonder
was reported to have occurred in the spiritual circles and the
lecture-rooms of the mesmerists; the sick were healed, the blind
made to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear. J. R. Newton
in America, and Du Potet in France, were healing the multitude
without the slightest claim to divine intervention. The great
discovery of Mesmer, which reveals to the earnest inquirer the
mechanism of nature, mastered, as if by magical power, organic
and inorganic bodies.
But this was not the worst. A more direful calamity for the Church
occurred in the evocation from the upper and nether worlds of
a multitude of "spirits," whose private bearing and
conversation gave the direct lie to the most cherished and profitable
dogmas of the Church. These "spirits" claimed to be
the identical entities, in a disembodied state, of fathers, mothers,
sons, and daughters, friends and acquaintances of the persons
viewing the weird phenomena. The Devil seemed to have no objective
existence, and this struck at the very foundation upon which the
chair of St. Peter rested.* Not a spirit except the mocking manni-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* There were two chairs of the titular apostle at Rome. The clergy,
frightened at the uninterrupted evidence furnished by scientific
research, at last decided to confront the enemy, and we find the
"Chronique des Arts" giving the cleverest, and at the
same time most Jesuitical, explanation of the fact. According
to their story, "The increase in the number of the
faithful decided Peter upon making Rome henceforth the centre
of his action. The cemetery of Ostrianum was too distant and would
not suffice for the reunions of the Christians. The motive
which had induced the Apostle to confer on Linus and Cletus
successively the episcopal character, in order to render
them capa- [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 24 ISIS UNVEILED.
kins of Planchette would confess to the most distant relationship
with the Satanic majesty, or accredit him with the governorship
of a single inch of territory. The clergy felt their prestige
growing weaker every day, as they saw the people impatiently shaking
off, in the broad daylight of truth, the dark veils with which
they had been blindfolded for so many centuries. Then finally,
fortune, which previously had been on their side in the long-waged
conflict between theology and science, deserted to their adversary.
The help of the latter to the study of the occult side of nature
was truly precious and timely, and science has unwittingly widened
the once narrow path of the phenomena into a broad highway. Had
not
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] ble of sharing the solicitudes
of a church whose extent was to be without limits, led naturally
to a multiplication of the places of meeting. The particular residence
of Peter was therefore fixed at Viminal; and there was established
that mysterious Chair, the symbol of power and truth. The august
seat which was venerated at the Ostrian Catacombs was not, however,
removed. Peter still visited this cradle of the Roman Church,
and often, without doubt, exercised his holy functions there.
A second Chair, expressing the same mystery as the first,
was set up at Cornelia, and it is this which has come down to
us through the ages."
Now, so far from it being possible that there ever were two genuine
chairs of this kind, the majority of critics show that Peter never
was at Rome at all; the reasons are many and unanswerable. Perhaps
we had best begin by pointing to the works of Justin Martyr. This
great champion of Christianity, writing in the early part of the
second century in Rome, where he fixed his abode, eager
to get hold of the least proof in favor of the truth for which
he suffered, seems perfectly unconscious of St. Peter's existence!!
Neither does any other writer of any consequence mention him in
connection with the Church of Rome, earlier than the days of Irenaeus,
when the latter set himself to invent a new religion, drawn from
the depths of his imagination. We refer the reader anxious to
learn more to the able work of Mr. George Reber, entitled "The
Christ of Paul." The arguments of this author are conclusive.
The above article in the "Chronique des Arts," speaks
of the increase of the faithful to such an extent that
Ostrianum could not contain the number of Christians. Now, if
Peter was at Rome at all -- runs Mr. Reber's argument -- it must
have been between the years A.D. 64 and 69; for at 64 he was at
Babylon, from whence he wrote epistles and letters to Rome, and
at some time between 64 and 68 (the reign of Nero) he either died
a martyr or in his bed, for Irenaeus makes him deliver the Church
of Rome, together with Paul (! ?) (whom he persecuted and quarrelled
with all his life), into the hands of Linus, who became
bishop in 69 (see Reber's "Christ of Paul," p. 122).
We will treat of it more fully in chapter iii.
Now, we ask, in the name of common sense, how could the faithful
of Peter's Church increase at such a rate, when
Nero trapped and killed them like so many mice during his reign?
History shows the few Christians fleeing from Rome, wherever they
could, to avoid the persecution of the emperor, and the "Chronique
des Arts" makes them increase and multiply! "Christ,"
the article goes on to say, "willed that this visible sign
of the doctrinal authority of his vicar should also have its portion
of immortality; one can follow it from age to age in the documents
of the Roman Church." Tertullian formally attests its existence
in his book "De Praescriptionibus." Eager to learn everything
concerning so interesting a subject, we would like to be shown
when [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 25 HISTORY OF THE CHAIR OF PETER.
this conflict culminated at the nick of time, we might have seen
reproduced on a miniature scale the disgraceful scenes of the
episodes of Salem witchcraft and the Nuns of Loudun. As it was,
the clergy were muzzled.
But if Science has unintentionally helped the progress of the
occult phenomena, the latter have reciprocally aided science herself.
Until the days when newly-reincarnated philosophy boldly claimed
its place in the world, there had been but few scholars who had
undertaken the difficult task of studying comparative theology.
This science occupies a domain heretofore penetrated by few explorers.
The necessity which it involved of being well acquainted with
the dead languages, necessarily limited the number of students.
Besides, there was less popular need for it so long as people
could not replace the Christian orthodoxy by something more tangible.
It is one of the most undeniable facts of psychology, that the
average man can as little exist out of a religious element of
some kind, as a fish out of the water. The voice of truth, "a
voice stronger than the voice of the mightiest thunder,"
speaks to the inner man in the nineteenth century of the Christian
era, as it spoke in the corresponding century B.C. It is a useless
and unprofitable task to offer to humanity the choice between
a future life and annihilation. The only chance that remains for
those friends of human progress who seek to establish for the
good of mankind a faith, henceforth stripped entirely of superstition
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] did Christ
WILL anything of the kind? However: "Ornaments of ivory
have been fitted to the front and back of the chair, but only
on those parts repaired with acacia-wood. Those which cover the
panel in front are divided into three superimposed rows, each
containing six plaques of ivory, on which are engraved various
subjects, among others the 'Labors of Hercules.' Several of the
plaques were wrongly placed, and seemed to have been affixed to
the chair at a time when the remains of antiquity were employed
as ornaments, without much regard to fitness." This is the
point. The article was written simply as a clever answer to several
facts published during the present century. Bower, in his "History
of the Popes" (vol. ii., p. 7), narrates that in the year
1662, while cleaning one of the chairs, "the 'Twelve Labors
of Hercules' unluckily appeared engraved upon it," after
which the chair was removed and another substituted. But in 1795,
when Bonaparte's troops occupied Rome, the chair was again examined.
This time there was found the Mahometan confession of faith, in
Arabic letters: "There is no Deity but Allah, and Mahomet
is his Apostle." (See appendix to "Ancient Symbol-Worship,"
by H. M. Westropp and C. Staniland Wake.) In the appendix Prof.
Alexander Wilder very justly remarks as follows: "We presume
that the Apostle of the Circumcision, as Paul, his great rival,
styles him, was never at the Imperial City, nor had a successor
there, not even in the ghetto. The 'Chair of Peter,' therefore,
is sacred rather than apostolical. Its sanctity proceeded,
however, from the esoteric religion of the former times of Rome.
The hierophant of the Mysteries probably occupied it on the day
of initiations, when exhibiting to the candidates the Petroma
(stone tablet containing the last revelation made by the
hierophant to the neophyte for initiation)."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 26 ISIS UNVEILED.
and dogmatic fetters is to address them in the words of Joshua:
"Choose ye this day whom you will serve; whether the gods
which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood,
or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell."*
"The science of religion," wrote Max Muller in 1860,
"is only just beginning. . . . During the last fifty years
the authentic documents of the most important religions in the
world have been recovered in a most unexpected and almost
miraculous manner.** We have now before us the Canonical
books of Buddhism; the Zend-Avesta of Zoroaster is no
longer a sealed book; and the hymns of the Rig-Veda have
revealed a state of religions anterior to the first beginnings
of that mythology which in Homer and Hesiod stands before us as
a mouldering ruin."***
In their insatiable desire to extend the dominion of blind faith,
the early architects of Christian theology had been forced to
conceal, as much as it was possible, the true sources of the same.
To this end they are said to have burned or otherwise destroyed
all the original manuscripts on the Kabala, magic, and
occult sciences upon which they could lay their hands. They ignorantly
supposed that the most dangerous writings of this class had perished
with the last Gnostic; but some day they may discover their mistake.
Other authentic and as important documents will perhaps reappear
in a "most unexpected and almost miraculous manner."
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Joshua xxiv., 15.
** One of the most surprising facts that have come under our observation,
is that students of profound research should not couple the frequent
recurrence of these "unexpected and almost miraculous"
discoveries of important documents, at the most opportune moments,
with a premeditated design. Is it so strange that the custodians
of "Pagan" lore, seeing that the proper moment had arrived,
should cause the needed document, book, or relic to fall as if
by accident in the right man's way? Geological surveyors and explorers
even as competent as Humboldt and Tschuddi, have not discovered
the hidden mines from which the Peruvian Incas dug their treasure,
although the latter confesses that the present degenerate Indians
have the secret. In 1839, Perring, the archaeologist, proposed
to the sheik of an Arab village two purses of gold, if he helped
him to discover the entrance to the hidden passage leading to
the sepulchral chambers in the North Pyramid of Doshoor. But though
his men were out of employment and half-starved, the sheik proudly
refused to "sell the secret of the dead," promising
to show it gratis, when the time would come for it.
Is it, then, impossible that in some other regions of the
earth are guarded the remains of that glorious literature of the
past, which was the fruit of its majestic civilization? What is
there so surprising in the idea? Who knows but that as the Christian
Church has unconsciously begotten free thought by reaction against
her own cruelty, rapacity, and dogmatism, the public mind may
be glad to follow the lead of the Orientalists, away from Jerusalem
and towards Ellora; and that then much more will be discovered
that is now hidden?
*** "Chips from a German Workshop," vol. i., p. 373;
Semitic Monotheism.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 27 WHAT WAS SAVED FROM THE BRUCKION.
There are strange traditions current in various parts of the East
-- on Mount Athos and in the Desert of Nitria, for instance --
among certain monks, and with learned Rabbis in Palestine, who
pass their lives in commenting upon the Talmud. They
say that not all the rolls and manuscripts, reported in history
to have been burned by Caesar, by the Christian mob, in 389, and
by the Arab General Amru, perished as it is commonly believed;
and the story they tell is the following: At the time of the contest
for the throne, in 51 B.C., between Cleopatra and her brother
Dionysius Ptolemy, the Bruckion, which contained over seven hundred
thousand rolls, all bound in wood and fire-proof parchment,
was undergoing repairs, and a great portion of the original manuscripts,
considered among the most precious, and which were not duplicated,
were stored away in the house of one of the librarians. As the
fire which consumed the rest was but the result of accident, no
precautions had been taken at the time. But they add, that several
hours passed between the burning of the fleet, set on fire by
Caesar's order, and the moment when the first buildings situated
near the harbor caught fire in their turn; and that all the librarians,
aided by several hundred slaves attached to the museum, succeeded
in saving the most precious of the rolls. So perfect and solid
was the fabric of the parchment, that while in some rolls the
inner pages and the wood-binding were reduced to ashes, of others
the parchment binding remained unscorched. These particulars were
all written out in Greek, Latin, and the Chaldeo-Syriac dialect,
by a learned youth named Theodas, one of the scribes employed
in the museum. One of these manuscripts is alleged to be preserved
till now in a Greek convent; and the person who narrated the tradition
to us had seen it himself. He said that many more will see it
and learn where to look for important documents, when a certain
prophecy will be fulfilled; adding, that most of these works could
be found in Tartary and India.* The monk showed us a copy of the
original, which, of course, we could read but poorly, as we claim
but little erudition in the matter of dead languages. But we were
so particularly struck by the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* An after-thought has made us fancy that we can understand what
is meant by the following sentences of Moses of Chorene: "The
ancient Asiatics," says he, "five centuries before our
era -- and especially the Hindus, the Persians, and the Chaldeans,
had in their possession a quantity of historical and scientific
books. These works were partially borrowed, partially translated
in the Greek language, mostly since the Ptolemies had established
the Alexandrian library and encouraged the writers by their liberalities,
so that the Greek language became the deposit of all the sciences"
("History of Armenia"). Therefore, the greater part
of the literature included in the 700,000 volumes of the Alexandrian
Library was due to India, and her next neighbors.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 28 ISIS UNVEILED.
the vivid and picturesque translation of the holy father, that
we perfectly remember some curious paragraphs, which run, as far
as we can recall them, as follows: -- "When the Queen of
the Sun (Cleopatra) was brought back to the half-ruined city,
after the fire had devoured the Glory of the World; and
when she saw the mountains of books -- or rolls -- covering the
half-consumed steps of the estrada; and when she perceived
that the inside was gone and the indestructible covers alone remained,
she wept in rage and fury, and cursed the meanness of her fathers
who had grudged the cost of the real Pergamos for the inside as
well as the outside of the precious rolls." Further, our
author, Theodas, indulges in a joke at the expense of the queen
for believing that nearly all the library was burned; when, in
fact, hundreds and thousands of the choicest books were safely
stored in his own house and those of other scribes, librarians,
students, and philosophers.
No more do sundry very learned Copts scattered all over the East
in Asia Minor, Egypt, and Palestine believe in the total destruction
of the subsequent libraries. For instance, they say that out of
the library of Attalus III. of Pergamus, presented
by Antony to Cleopatra, not a volume was destroyed. At that time,
according to their assertions, from the moment that the Christians
began to gain power in Alexandria -- about the end of the fourth
century -- and Anatolius, Bishop of Laodicea, began to insult
the national gods, the Pagan philosophers and learned theurgists
adopted effective measures to preserve the repositories of their
sacred learning. Theophilus, a bishop, who left behind him the
reputation of a most rascally and mercenary villain, was accused
by one named Antoninus, a famous theurgist and eminent scholar
of occult science of Alexandria, with bribing the slaves of the
Serapion to steal books which he sold to foreigners at great prices.
History tells us how Theophilus had the best of the philosophers,
in A.D. 389; and how his successor and nephew, the no less infamous
Cyril, butchered Hypatia. Suidas gives us some details about Antoninus,
whom he calls Antonius, and his eloquent friend Olympus, the defender
of the Serapion. But history is far from being complete in the
miserable remnants of books, which, crossing so many ages, have
reached our own learned century; it fails to give the facts relating
to the first five centuries of Christianity which are preserved
in the numerous traditions current in the East. Unauthenticated
as these may appear, there is unquestionably in the heap of chaff
much good grain. That these traditions are not oftener communicated
to Europeans is not strange, when we consider how apt our travellers
are to render themselves antagonistic to the natives by their
skeptical bearing and, occasionally, dogmatic intolerance. When
exceptional men like some archaeologists, who knew how to win
the
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 29 THE HIDDEN LIBRARY AT ISHMONIA.
confidence and even friendship of certain Arabs, are favored with
precious documents, it is declared simply a "coincidence."
And yet there are widespread traditions of the existence of certain
subterranean, and immense galleries, in the neighborhood of Ishmonia
-- the "petrified City," in which are stored numberless
manuscripts and rolls. For no amount of money would the Arabs
go near it. At night, they say, from the crevices of the desolate
ruins, sunk deep in the unwatered sands of the desert, stream
the rays from lights carried to and fro in the galleries by no
human hands. The Afrites study the literature of the antediluvian
ages, according to their belief, and the Djin learns from the
magic rolls the lesson of the following day.
The Encyclopedia Britannica, in its article on Alexandria,
says: "When the temple of Serapis was demolished . . . the
valuable library was pillaged or destroyed; and twenty
years afterwards* the empty shelves excited the
regret . . . etc." But it does not state the subsequent fate
of the pillaged books.
In rivalry of the fierce Mary-worshippers of the fourth century,
the modern clerical persecutors of liberalism and "heresy"
would willingly shut up all the heretics and their books in some
modern Serapion and burn them alive.** The cause of this hatred
is natural. Modern research has more than ever unveiled the secret.
"Is not the worship of saints and angels now," said
Bishop Newton, years ago, "in all respects the same that
the worship of demons was in former times? The name only is different,
the thing is identically the same . . . the very same temples,
the very same images, which were once consecrated to Jupiter and
the other demons, are now consecrated to the Virgin Mary and other
saints . . . the whole of Paganism is converted and applied to
Popery."
Why not be impartial and add that "a good portion of it was
adopted by Protestant religions also"?
The very apostolic designation Peter is from the Mysteries.
The hierophant or supreme pontiff bore the Chaldean title Peter,
or interpreter. The names Phtah, Peth'r, the residence of
Balaam, Patara, and Patras, the names of oracle-cities, pateres
or pateras and, perhaps,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Bonamy says in "La Bibliotheque d'Alexandrie," quoting,
we suppose, the Presbyter Orosius, who was an eye-witness, "thirty
years later."
** Since the above was written, the spirit here described has
been beautifully exemplified at Barcelona, Spain, where the Bishop
Fray Joachim invited the local spiritualists to witness a formal
burning of spiritual books. We find the account in a paper called
"The Revelation," published at Alicante, which sensibly
adds that the performance was "a caricature of the memorable
epoch of the Inquisition."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 30 ISIS UNVEILED.
Buddha,* all come from the same root. Jesus says: "Upon this
petra I will build my Church, and the gates, or rulers
of Hades, shall not prevail against it"; meaning by petra
the rock-temple, and by metaphor, the Christian Mysteries;
the adversaries to which were the old mystery-gods of the underworld,
who were worshipped in the rites of Isis, Adonis, Atys, Sabazius,
Dionysus, and the Eleusinia. No apostle Peter was ever
at Rome; but the Pope, seizing the sceptre of the Pontifex
Maximus, the keys of Janus and Kubele, and adorning his Christian
head with the cap of the Magna Mater, copied from that
of the tiara of Brahmatma, the Supreme Pontiff of the Initiates
of old India, became the successor of the Pagan high priest, the
real Peter-Roma, or Petroma.**
The Roman Catholic Church has two far mightier enemies than the
"heretics" and the "infidels"; and these are
-- Comparative Mythology and Philology. When such eminent divines
as the Rev. James Freeman Clarke go so much out of their way to
prove to their readers that "Critical Theology from the time
of Origen and Jerome . . . and the Controversial Theology during
fifteen centuries, has not consisted in accepting on authority
the opinions of other people," but has shown, on the contrary,
much "acute and comprehensive reasoning," we can but
regret that so much scholarship should have been wasted in attempting
to prove that which a fair survey of the history of theology upsets
at every step. In these "controversies" and critical
treatment of the doctrines of the Church one can certainly find
any amount of "acute reasoning," but far more of a still
acuter sophistry.
Recently the mass of cumulative evidence has been re-inforced
to an extent which leaves little, if any, room for further controversy.
A conclusive opinion is furnished by too many scholars to doubt
the fact that India was the Alma-Mater, not only of the
civilization, arts, and sciences, but also of all the great religions
of antiquity; Judaism, and hence Christianity, included. Herder
places the cradle of humanity in India, and shows Moses as a clever
and relatively modern compiler of the ancient Brahmanical
traditions: "The river which encircles the country (India)
is the sacred Ganges, which all Asia considers as the paradisaical
river. There, also, is the biblical Gihon, which is none else
but the Indus. The Arabs call it so unto this day, and the names
of the countries watered by it are yet existing among the Hindus."
Jacolliot claims to have translated every ancient palm-leaf manuscript
which he had the fortune of being allowed by the Brahmans of the
pagodas to see. In one of his
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* E. Pococke gives the variations of the name Buddha as: Bud'ha,
Buddha, Booddha, Butta, Pout, Pote, Pto, Pte, Phte, Phtha, Phut,
etc., etc. See "India in Greece," Note, Appendix, 397.
** The tiara of the Pope is also a perfect copy of that of the
Dalai-Lama of Thibet.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 31 ORIGIN OF THE PAPAL TIARA AND KEYS.
translations, we found passages which reveal to us the undoubted
origin of the keys of St. Peter, and account for the subsequent
adoption of the symbol by their Holinesses, the Popes of Rome.
He shows us, on the testimony of the Agrouchada Parikshai,
which he freely translates as "the Book of Spirits"
(Pitris), that centuries before our era the initiates
of the temple chose a Superior Council, presided over by
the Brahm-atma or supreme chief of all these Initiates. That
this pontificate, which could be exercised only by a Brahman who
had reached the age of eighty years;* that the Brahm-atma was
sole guardian of the mystic formula, resume of every
science, contained in the three mysterious letters,
which signify creation, conservation, and transformation.
He alone could expound its meaning in the presence of the
initiates of the third and supreme degree. Whomsoever among these
initiates revealed to a profane a single one of the truths, even
the smallest of the secrets entrusted to his care, was put to
death. He who received the confidence had to share his fate.
"Finally, to crown this able system," says Jacolliot,
"there existed a word still more superior to the mysterious
monosyllable -- A U M, and which rendered him
who came into the possession of its key nearly the equal of Brahma
himself. The Brahm-atma alone possessed this key, and transmitted
it in a sealed casket to his successor.
"This unknown word, of which no human power could, even to-day,
when the Brahmanical authority has been crushed under the Mongolian
and European invasions, to-day, when each pagoda has its Brahm-atma**
force the disclosure, was engraved in a golden triangle
and preserved in a sanctuary of the temple of Asgartha, whose
Brahm-atma alone held the keys. He also bore upon his tiara two
crossed keys supported by two kneeling Brahmans, symbol of
the precious deposit of which he had the keeping. . . . This word
and this triangle were engraved upon the tablet of the ring that
this religious chief wore as one of the signs of his dignity;
it was also framed in a golden sun on the altar, where every morning
the Supreme Pontiff offered the sacrifice of the sarvameda, or
sacrifice to all the forces of nature."***
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* It is the traditional policy of the College of Cardinals to
elect, whenever practicable, the new Pope among the oldest valetudinarians.
The hierophant of the Eleusinia was likewise always an old man,
and unmarried.
** This is not correct.
*** "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 28.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 32 ISIS UNVEILED.
Is this clear enough? And will the Catholics still maintain that
it was the Brahmans of 4,000 years ago who copied the ritual,
symbols, and dress of the Roman Pontiffs? We would not feel in
the least surprised.
Without going very far back into antiquity for comparisons, if
we only stop at the fourth and fifth centuries of our era, and
contrast the so-called "heathenism" of the third Neo-platonic
Eclectic School with the growing Christianity, the result may
not be favorable to the latter. Even at that early period, when
the new religion had hardly outlined its contradictory dogmas;
when the champions of the bloodthirsty Cyril knew not themselves
whether Mary was to become "the Mother of God," or rank
as a "demon" in company with Isis; when the memory of
the meek and lowly Jesus still lingered lovingly in every Christian
heart, and his words of mercy and charity vibrated still in the
air, even then the Christians were outdoing the Pagans in every
kind of ferocity and religious intolerance.
And if we look still farther back, and seek for examples of true
Christism, in ages when Buddhism had hardly superseded
Brahmanism in India, and the name of Jesus was only to be pronounced
three centuries later, what do we find? Which of the holy pillars
of the Church has ever elevated himself to the level of religious
tolerance and noble simplicity of character of some heathen? Compare,
for instance, the Hindu Asoka, who lived 300 B.C., and the Carthaginian
St. Augustine, who flourished three centuries after Christ. According
to Max Muller, this is what is found engraved on the rocks of
Girnar, Dhauli, and Kapurdigiri:
"Piyadasi, the king beloved of the gods, desires that the
ascetics of all creeds might reside in all places. All
these ascetics profess alike the command which people should exercise
over themselves, and the purity of the soul. But people have
different opinions and different inclinations."
And here is what Augustine wrote after his baptism: "Wondrous
depth of thy words! whose surface, behold! is before us, inviting
to little ones; yet are they a wondrous depth, O my God, a wondrous
depth! It is awful to look therein; yes . . . an awfulness of
honor, and a trembling of love. Thy enemies [read Pagans] thereof
I hate vehemently; Oh, that thou wouldst slay them
with thy two-edged sword, that they might no longer be enemies
to it; for so do I love to have them slain."
Wonderful spirit of Christianity; and that from a Manichean converted
to the religion of one who even on his cross prayed for his enemies!
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Translated by Prof. Draper for "Conflict between Religion
and Science"; book xii.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 33 THE ANCIENT OF DAYS.
Who the enemies of the "Lord" were, according to the
Christians, is not difficult to surmise; the few inside the Augustinian
fold were His new children and favorites, who had supplanted in
His affections the sons of Israel, His "chosen people."
The rest of mankind were His natural foes. The teeming multitudes
of heathendom were proper food for the flames of hell; the handful
within the Church communion, "heirs of salvation."
But if such a proscriptive policy was just, and its enforcement
was "sweet savor" in the nostrils of the "Lord,"
why not scorn also the Pagan rites and philosophy? Why draw so
deep from the wells of wisdom, dug and filled up to brim by the
same heathen? Or did the fathers, in their desire to imitate the
chosen people whose time-worn shoes they were trying to fit upon
their feet, contemplate the reenaction of the spoliation-scene
of the Exodus? Did they propose, in fleeing from heathendom
as the Jews did from Egypt, to carry off the valuables of its
religious allegories, as the "chosen ones" did the gold
and silver ornaments?
It certainly does seem as if the events of the first centuries
of Christianity were but the reflection of the images thrown upon
the mirror of the future at the time of the Exodus. During the
stormy days of Irenaeus the Platonic philosophy, with its mystical
submersion into Deity, was not so obnoxious after all to the new
doctrine as to prevent the Christians from helping themselves
to its abstruse metaphysics in every way and manner. Allying themselves
with the ascetical therapeutae -- forefathers and models of the
Christian monks and hermits, it was in Alexandria, let it be remembered,
that they laid the first foundations of the purely Platonic trinitarian
doctrine. It became the Plato-Philonean doctrine later, and such
as we find it now. Plato considered the divine nature under a
three-fold modification of the First Cause, the reason
or Logos, and the soul or spirit of the universe. "The
three archial or original principles," says Gibbon,* "were
represented in the Platonic system as three gods, united with
each other by a mysterious and ineffable generation." Blending
this transcendental idea with the more hypostatic figure of the
Logos of Philo, whose doctrine was that of the oldest
Kabala, and who viewed the King Messiah, as the metatron, or "the
angel of the Lord," the Legatus descended in flesh,
but not the Ancient of Days Himself;** the Christians
clothed with this mythical representation of the Mediator for
the fallen race of Adam, Jesus, the son of Mary. Under this unexpected
garb his personality was all but lost. In the modern Jesus of
the Christian Church, we find the ideal of the imaginative Irenaeus,
not the adept
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
** "Sohar Comment.," Gen. A. 10; "Kabbal. Denud.,"
i., 528.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 34 ISIS UNVEILED.
of the Essenes, the obscure reformer from Galilee. We see him
under the disfigured Plato-Philonean mask, not as the disciples
heard him on the mount.
So far then the heathen philosophy had helped them in the building
of the principal dogma. But when the theurgists of the third Neo-platonic
school, deprived of their ancient Mysteries, strove to blend the
doctrines of Plato with those of Aristotle, and by combining the
two philosophies added to their theosophy the primeval doctrines
of the Oriental Kabala, then the Christians from rivals
became persecutors. Once that the metaphysical allegories of Plato
were being prepared to be discussed in public in the form of Grecian
dialectics, all the elaborate system of the Christian trinity
would be unravelled and the divine prestige completely upset.
The eclectic school, reversing the order, had adopted the inductive
method; and this method became its death-knell. Of all things
on earth, logic and reasonable explanations were the most hateful
to the new religion of mystery; for they threatened to unveil
the whole ground-work of the trinitarian conception; to apprise
the multitude of the doctrine of emanations, and thus destroy
the unity of the whole. It could not be permitted, and it was
not. History records the Christ-like means that were
resorted to.
The universal doctrine of emanations, adopted from time immemorial
by the greatest schools which taught the kabalistic, Alexandrian,
and Oriental philosophers, gives the key to that panic among the
Christian fathers. That spirit of Jesuitism and clerical craft,
which prompted Parkhurst, many centuries later, to suppress in
his Hebrew Lexicon the true meaning of the first word
of Genesis, originated in those days of war against the
expiring Neo-platonic and eclectic school. The fathers had decided
to pervert the meaning of the word "daimon,"*
and they dreaded above all to have the esoteric and true
meaning of the word Rasit unveiled to the multitudes;
for if once the true sense of this sentence, as well as that of
the Hebrew word asdt (translated in the Septuagint "angels,"
while it means emanations),** were understood rightly, the
mystery of the Christian trinity would have crumbled, carrying
in its downfall the new religion into the same heap of ruins with
the ancient Mysteries. This is the true reason why dialecticians,
as well as Aristotle himself, the "prying philosopher,"
were ever obnoxious to Christian theology. Even Luther, while
on his work of reform, feeling the ground insecure under his feet,
notwithstanding that the dogmas had
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "The beings which the philosophers of other peoples distinguish
by the name 'Daemons,' Moses names 'Angels,' " says Philo
Judaeus. -- "De Gigant," i. 253.
** Deuteronomy xxxiii. 2., 
is translated "fiery law" in the English Bible.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 35 ORPHEAN VIEWS OF ETHER.
been reduced by him to their simplest expression, gave full vent
to his fear and hatred for Aristotle. The amount of abuse he heaped
upon the memory of the great logician can only be equalled --
never surpassed -- by the Pope's anathemas and invectives against
the liberals of the Italian government. Compiled together, they
might easily fill a copy of a new encyclopaedia with models for
monkish diatribes.
Of course the Christian clergy can never get reconciled with a
doctrine based on the application of strict logic to discursive
reasoning? The number of those who have abandoned theology on
this account has never been made known. They have asked questions
and been forbidden to ask them; hence, separation, disgust, and
often a despairing plunge into the abyss of atheism. The Orphean
views of ether as chief medium between God and created
matter were likewise denounced. The Orphic AEther recalled too
vividly the Archeus, the Soul of the World, and the latter
was in its metaphysical sense as closely related to the emanations,
being the first manifestation -- Sephira, or Divine Light. And
when could the latter be more feared than at that critical moment?
Origen, Clemens Alexandrinus, Chalcidius, Methodius, and Maimonides,
on the authority of the Targum of Jerusalem, the orthodox
and greatest authority of the Jews, held that the first two words
in the book of Genesis -- B-RASIT, mean Wisdom, or
the Principle. And that the idea of these words meaning
"in the beginning" was never shared
but by the profane, who were not allowed to penetrate any deeper
into the esoteric sense of the sentence. Beausobre, and after
him Godfrey Higgins, have demonstrated the fact. "All things,"
says the Kabala, "are derived from one great Principle,
and this principle is the unknown and invisible God.
From Him a substantial power immediately proceeds, which is the
image of God, and the source of all subsequent emanations.
This second principle sends forth, by the energy (or
will and force) of emanation, other
natures, which are more or less perfect, according to their different
degrees of distance, in the scale of emanation, from the First
Source of existence, and which constitute different worlds, or
orders of being, all united to the eternal power from which they
proceed. Matter is nothing more than the most remote effect
of the emanative energy of the Deity. The material world
receives its form from the immediate agency of powers far beneath
the First Source of Being* . . . Beausobref** makes St. Augustine
the Manichean say thus: 'And if by Rasit we understand
the active Principle of the creation, instead of its
beginning, in such a case we will clearly perceive that
Moses never meant to say
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Rees's "Encyclopaedia," art. Kabala.
** "Histor. Manich.," Liv. vi., ch. i., p. 291.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 36 ISIS UNVEILED.
that heaven and earth were the first works of God. He only said
that God created heaven and earth through the Principle, who
is His Son. It is not the time he points to, but to the
immediate author of the creation.' Angels, according to Augustine,
were created before the firmament, and according to the
esoteric interpretation, the heaven and earth were created after
that, evolving from the second Principle or the Logos
-- the creative Deity. "The word principle,"
says Beausobre, "does not mean that the heaven and earth
were created before anything else, for, to begin with, the angels
were created before that; but that God did everything through
His Wisdom, which is His Verbum, and which the Christian
Bible named the Beginning," thus
adopting the exoteric meaning of the word abandoned to the multitudes.
The Kabala -- the Oriental as well as the Jewish -- shows
that a number of emanations (the Jewish Sephiroth)
issued from the First Principle, the chief of which was
Wisdom. This Wisdom is the Logos of Philo, and Michael, the
chief of the Gnostic Eons; it is the Ormazd of the Persians; Minerva,
goddess of wisdom, of the Greeks, who emanated from the head
of Jupiter; and the second Person of the Christian Trinity. The
early Fathers of the Church had not much to exert their imagination;
they found a ready-made doctrine that had existed in every theogony
for thousands of years before the Christian era. Their trinity
is but the trio of Sephiroth, the first three kabalistic lights
of which Moses Nachmanides says, that "they have
never been seen by any one; there is not any defect in them,
nor any disunion." The first eternal number is the Father,
or the Chaldean primeval, invisible, and incomprehensible chaos,
out of which proceeded the Intelligible one. The
Egyptian Phtah, or "the Principle of Light -- not
the light itself, and the Principle of Life, though himself no
life." The Wisdom by which the Father created the
heavens is the Son, or the kabalistic androgynous Adam
Kadmon. The Son is at once the male Ra, or Light of Wisdom,
Prudence or Intelligence, Sephira, the female part of
Himself; while from this dual being proceeds the third emanation,
the Binah or Reason, the second Intelligence -- the Holy Ghost
of the Christians. Therefore, strictly speaking, there is a TETRAKTIS
or quaternary, consisting of the Unintelligible First monad, and
its triple emanation, which properly constitute our Trinity.
How then avoid perceiving at once, that had not the Christians
purposely disfigured in their interpretation and translation the
Mosaic Genesis to fit their own views, their religion,
with its present dogmas, would have been impossible? The word
Rasit, once taught in its new sense of the Principle and
not the Beginning, and the anathematized doctrine of
emanations accepted, the position of the second trinitarian personage
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 37 THE FIRST EMANATION OF EN-SOPH.
becomes untenable. For, if the angels are the first divine
emanations from the Divine Substance, and were in existence before
the Second Principle, then the anthropomorphized Son
is at best an emanation like themselves, and cannot be God hypostatically
any more than our visible works are ourselves. That these
metaphysical subtleties never entered into the head of the honest-minded,
sincere Paul, is evident; as it is furthermore evident, that like
all learned Jews he was well acquainted with the doctrine of emanations
and never thought of corrupting it. How can any one imagine that
Paul identified the Son with the Father, when
he tells us that God made Jesus "a little lower than
the angels" (Hebrews ii. 9), and a little higher
than Moses! "For this MAN was counted worthy of more
glory than Moses" (Hebrews iii. 3). Of whatever,
or how many forgeries, interlined later in the Acts, the
Fathers are guilty we know not; but that Paul never considered
Christ more than a man "full of the Spirit of God" is
but too evident: "In the arche was the Logos,
and the Logos was adnate to the Theos."
Wisdom, the first emanation of En-Soph; the Protogonos,
the Hypostasis; the Adam Kadmon of the kabalist, the Brahma of
the Hindu; the Logos of Plato, and the "Beginning"
of St. John -- is the Rasit -- 
,
of the Book of Genesis. If rightly interpreted it overturns,
as we have remarked, the whole elaborate system of Christian theology,
for it proves that behind the creative Deity, there was
a HIGHER god; a planner, an architect; and that the former was
but His executive agent -- a simple POWER!
They persecuted the Gnostics, murdered the philosophers, and burned
the kabalists and the masons; and when the day of the great reckoning
arrives, and the light shines in darkness, what will they have
to offer in the place of the departed, expired religion? What
will they answer, these pretended monotheists, these worshippers
and pseudo-servants of the one living God, to their Creator?
How will they account for this long persecution of them who were
the true followers of the grand Megalistor, the supreme great
master of the Rosicrucians, the FIRST of masons. "For he
is the Builder and Architect of the Temple of the universe; He
is the Verbum Sapienti."*
"Every one knows," wrote the great Manichean of the
third century, Fauste, "that the Evangeliums were written
neither by Jesus Christ,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "The altogether mystical coloring of Christianity harmonized
with the Essene rules of life and opinions, and it is not improbable
that Jesus and John the Baptist were initiated into the Essene
Mysteries, to which Christianity may be indebted for many a form
of expression; as indeed the community of Therapeutae, an offspring
of the Essene order, soon belonged wholly to Christianity"
("Yost," i., 411 -- quoted by the author of "Sod,
the Son of the Man").
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 38 ISIS UNVEILED.
nor his apostles, but long after their time by some unknown persons,
who, judging well that they would hardly be believed when telling
of things they had not seen themselves, headed their narratives
with the names of the apostles or of disciples contemporaneous
with the latter."
Commenting upon the subject, A. Franck, the learned Hebrew scholar
of the Institute and translator of the Kabala, expresses
the same idea. "Are we not authorized," he asks, "to
view the Kabala as a precious remnant of religious philosophy
of the Orient, which, transported into Alexandria, got mixed to
the doctrine of Plato, and under the usurped name of Dionysius
the Areopagite, bishop of Athens, converted and consecrated by
St. Paul, was thus enabled to penetrate into the mysticism of
the mediaeval ages?"*
Says Jacolliot: "What is then this religious philosophy of
the Orient, which has penetrated into the mystic symbolism of
Christianity? We answer: This philosophy, the traces of which
we find among the Magians, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Hebrew
kabalists and the Christians, is none other than that of the Hindu
Brahmans, the sectarians of the pitris, or the spirits
of the invisible worlds which surround us."**
But if the Gnostics were destroyed, the Gnosis, based
on the secret science of sciences, still lives. It is the earth
which helps the woman, and which is destined to open her mouth
to swallow up mediaeval Christianity, the usurper and assassin
of the great master's doctrine. The ancient Kabala, the
Gnosis, or traditional secret knowledge, was never without
its representatives in any age or country. The trinities of initiates,
whether passed into history or concealed under the impenetrable
veil of mystery, are preserved and impressed throughout the ages.
They are known as Moses, Aholiab, and Bezaleel, the son of Uri,
the son of Hur, as Plato, Philo, and Pythagoras, etc. At the Transfiguration
we see them as Jesus, Moses, and Elias, the three Trismegisti;
and three kabalists, Peter, James, and John -- whose revelation
is the key to all wisdom. We found them in the twilight of
Jewish history as Zoroaster, Abraham, and Terah, and later as
Henoch, Ezekiel, and Daniel.
Who, of those who ever studied the ancient philosophies, who understand
intuitionally the grandeur of their conceptions, the boundless
sublimity of their views of the Unknown Deity, can hesitate for
a moment to give the preference to their doctrines over the incomprehensible
dogmatic and contradictory theology of the hundreds of Christian
sects? Who that ever read Plato and fathomed his [[To On]],
"whom no person has seen except the Son,"
can doubt that Jesus was a disciple of the same
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* A. Franck: "Die Kabbala."
** "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 39 PLATO'S PRUDENT RESERVE.
secret doctrine which had instructed the great philosopher? For,
as we have shown before now, Plato never claimed to be the inventor
of all that he wrote, but gave credit for it to Pythagoras, who,
in his turn, pointed to the remote East as the source whence he
derived his information and his philosophy. Colebrooke shows that
Plato confesses it in his epistles, and says that he has taken
his teachings from ancient and sacred doctrines!* Moreover, it
is undeniable that the theologies of all the great nations dovetail
together and show that each is a part of "one stupendous
whole." Like the rest of the initiates we see Plato taking
great pains to conceal the true meaning of his allegories. Every
time the subject touches the greater secrets of the Oriental Kabala,
secret of the true cosmogony of the universe and of the ideal,
preexisting world, Plato shrouds his philosophy in the profoundest
darkness. His Timaeus is so confused that no one but
an initiate can understand the secret meaning. And Mosheim
thinks that Philo has filled his works with passages directly
contradicting each other for the sole purpose of concealing the
true doctrine. For once we see a critic on the right track.
And this very trinitarian idea, as well as the so bitterly denounced
doctrine of emanations, whence their remotest origin? The answer
is easy, and every proof is now at hand. In the sublime and profoundest
of all philosophies, that of the universal "Wisdom-Religion,"
the first traces of which, historical research now finds in the
old pre-Vedic religion of India. As the much-abused Jacolliot
well remarks, "It is not in the religious works of antiquity,
such as the Vedas, the Zend Avesta, the Bible,
that we have to search for the exact expression of the ennobling
and sublime beliefs of those epochs."**
"The holy primitive syllable, composed of the three letters
A ---- U ---- M.,
in which is contained the Vedic Trimurti (Trinity), must be kept
secret, like another triple Veda," says Manu, in book xi.,
sloka 265.
Swayambhouva is the unrevealed Deity; it is the Being existent
through and of itself; he is the central and immortal germ of
all that exists in the universe. Three trinities emanate and are
confounded in him, forming a Supreme unity. These trinities,
or the triple Trimurti, are: the Nara, Nari, and Viradyi
-- the initial triad; the Agni, Vaya, and Sourya -- the
manifested triad; Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, the creative
triad. Each of these triads becomes less metaphysical and
more adapted to the vulgar intelligence as it descends. Thus the
last becomes but the symbol in its concrete expression; the necessarianism
of a purely meta-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Asiat. Trans.," i., p. 579.
** Louis Jacolliot: "The Initiates of the Ancient Temples."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 40 ISIS UNVEILED.
physical conception. Together with Swayambhouva, they are the
ten Sephiroth of the Hebrew kabalists, the ten Hindu
Prajapatis -- the En-Soph of the former, answering to the great
Unknown, expressed by the mystic A U M
of the latter.
Says Franck, the translator of the Kabala:
"The ten Sephiroth are divided into three classes, each
of them presenting to us the divinity under a different aspect,
the whole still remaining an indivisible Trinity.
"The first three Sephiroth are purely intellectual in metaphysics,
they express the absolute identity of existence and thought, and
form what the modern kabalists called the intelligible world --
which is the first manifestation of God.
"The three that follow, make us conceive God in one of their
aspects, as the identity of goodness and wisdom; in the other
they show to us, in the Supreme good, the origin of beauty and
magnificence (in the creation). Therefore, they are named the
virtues, or the sensible world.
"Finally, we learn, by the last three Sephiroth, that the
Universal Providence, that the Supreme artist is also absolute
Force, the all-powerful cause, and that, at the same time,
this cause is the generative element of all that is. It
is these last Sephiroth that constitute the natural world,
or nature in its essence and in its active principle.
Natura naturans."*
This kabalistic conception is thus proved identical with that
of the Hindu philosophy. Whoever reads Plato and his Dialogue
Timaeus, will find these ideas as faithfully re-echoed by
the Greek philosopher. Moreover, the injunction of secrecy was
as strict with the kabalists, as with the initiates of the Adyta
and the Hindu Yogis.
"Close thy mouth, lest thou shouldst speak of this (the
mystery), and thy heart, lest thou shouldst think aloud; and if
thy heart has escaped thee, bring it back to its place, for such
is the object of our alliance" (Sepher Jezireh,
Book of Creation).
"This is a secret which gives death: close thy mouth lest
thou shouldst reveal to the vulgar; compress thy brain lest something
should escape from it and fall outside" (Agrouchada-Parikshai).
Truly the fate of many a future generation hung on a gossamer
thread, in the days of the third and fourth centuries. Had not
the Emperor sent in 389 to Alexandria a rescript -- which was
forced from him by the Christians -- for the destruction of every
idol, our own century would never have had a Christian mythological
Pantheon of its own. Never
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Franck: "Die Kabbala."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 41 MARY-VIRGIN ONLY ISIS RECHRISTENED.
did the Neo-platonic school reach such a height of philosophy
as when nearest its end. Uniting the mystic theosophy of old Egypt
with the refined philosophy of the Greeks; nearer to the ancient
Mysteries of Thebes and Memphis than they had been for centuries;
versed in the science of soothsaying and divination, as in the
art of the Therapeutists; friendly with the acutest men of the
Jewish nation, who were deeply imbued with the Zoroastrian ideas,
the Neo-platonists tended to amalgamate the old wisdom of the
Oriental Kabala with the more refined conceptions of
the Occidental Theosophists. Notwithstanding the treason of the
Christians, who saw fit, for political reasons, after the days
of Constantine, to repudiate their tutors, the influence of the
new Platonic philosophy is conspicuous in the subsequent adoption
of dogmas, the origin of which can be traced but too easily to
that remarkable school. Though mutilated and disfigured, they
still preserve a strong family likeness, which nothing can obliterate.
But, if the knowledge of the occult powers of nature opens the
spiritual sight of man, enlarges his intellectual faculties, and
leads him unerringly to a profounder veneration for the Creator,
on the other hand ignorance, dogmatic narrow-mindedness, and a
childish fear of looking to the bottom of things, invariably leads
to fetish-worship and superstition.
When Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, had openly embraced the
cause of Isis, the Egyptian goddess, and had anthropomorphized
her into Mary, the mother of God; and the trinitarian controversy
had taken place; from that moment the Egyptian doctrine of the
emanation of the creative God out of Emepht began to be tortured
in a thousand ways, until the Councils had agreed upon the adoption
of it as it now stands -- the disfigured Ternary of the kabalistic
Solomon and Philo! But as its origin was yet too evident, the
Word was no longer called the "Heavenly man,"
the primal Adam Kadmon, but became the Logos -- Christ,
and was made as old as the "Ancient of the Ancient,"
his father. The concealed WISDOM became
identical with its emanation, the DIVINE THOUGHT,
and made to be regarded coequal and coeternal with its first manifestation.
If we now stop to consider another of the fundamental dogmas of
Christianity, the doctrine of atonement, we may trace it as easily
back to heathendom. This corner-stone of a Church which had believed
herself built on a firm rock for long centuries, is now excavated
by science and proved to come from the Gnostics. Professor Draper
shows it as hardly known in the days of Tertullian, and as having
"originated among the Gnostic heretics."* We
will not permit ourselves to contradict such a
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See "Conflict between Religion and Science," p. 224.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 42 ISIS UNVEILED.
learned authority, farther than to state that it originated
among them no more than their "anointed" Christos
and Sophia. The former they modelled on the original of the "King
Messiah," the male principle of wisdom, and the latter on
the third Sephiroth, from the Chaldean Kabala,* and
even from the Hindu Brahma and Sara-asvati,** and the Pagan Dionysus
and Demeter. And here we are on firm ground, if it were only because
it is now proved that the New Testament never appeared
in its complete form, such as we find it now, till 300 years after
the period of apostles,*** and the Sohar and other kabalistic
books are found to belong to the first century before our era,
if not to be far older still.
The Gnostics entertained many of the Essenean ideas; and the Essenes
had their "greater" and "minor" Mysteries
at least two centuries before our era. They were the Isarim
or Initiates, the descendants of the Egyptian hierophants,
in whose country they had been settled for several centuries before
they were converted to Buddhistic monasticism by the missionaries
of King Asoka, and amalgamated later with the earliest Christians;
and they existed, probably, before the old Egyptian temples were
desecrated and ruined in the incessant invasions of Persians,
Greeks, and other conquering hordes. The hierophants had their
atonement enacted in the Mystery of Initiation ages before
the Gnostics, or even the Essenes, had appeared. It was known
among hierophants as the BAPTISM OF BLOOD,
and was considered not as an atonement for the "fall of man"
in Eden, but simply as an expiation for the past, present, and
future sins of ignorant but nevertheless polluted mankind. The
hierophant had the option of either offering his pure and sinless
life as a sacrifice for his race to the gods whom he hoped to
rejoin, or an animal victim. The former depended entirely on their
own will. At the last moment of the solemn "new birth,"
the initiator passed "the word" to the initiated, and
immediately after that the latter had a weapon placed in his right
hand, and was ordered to strike.**** This is
the true origin of the Christian dogma of atonement.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See "Sohar"; "Kab. Den."; "The Book
of Mystery," the oldest book of the kabalists; and Milman:
"History of Christianity," pp. 212, 213-215.
** Milman: "History of Christianity," p. 280. The Kurios
and Kora are mentioned repeatedly in "Justin
Martyr." See p. 97.
*** See Olshausen: "Biblischer Commentar uber sammtliche
Schriften des Neuen Testaments," ii.
**** There is a wide-spread superstition (?), especially
among the Slavonians and Russians, that the magician or
wizard cannot die before he has passed the "word" to
a successor. So deeply is it rooted among the popular beliefs,
that we do not imagine there is a person in Russia who has not
heard of it. It is but too easy to trace the origin of this superstition
to the old Mysteries which had been for ages spread all over [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 43 THE SORCERER'S TERRIFYING DEATH-BED.
Verily the "Christs" of the pre-Christian ages were
many. But they died unknown to the world, and disappeared as silently
and as mysteriously from the sight of man as Moses from the top
of Pisgah, the mountain of Nebo (oracular wisdom), after he had
laid his hands upon Joshua, who thus became "full of the
spirit of wisdom" (i.e., initiated).
Nor does the Mystery of the Eucharist pertain to Christians alone.
Godfrey Higgins proves that it was instituted many hundreds of
years before the "Paschal Supper," and says that "the
sacrifice of bread and
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] the globe. The ancient
Variago-Rouss had his Mysteries in the North as well
as in the South of Russia; and there are many relics of the by-gone
faith scattered in the lands watered by the sacred Dnieper, the
baptismal Jordan of all Russia. No Znachar (the knowing
one) or Koldoun (sorcerer), male or female, can die in
fact before he has passed the mysterious word to some one. The
popular belief is that unless he does that he will linger and
suffer for weeks and months, and were he even finally to get liberated,
it would be only to wander on earth, unable to quit its region
unless he finds a successor even after death. How far the belief
may be verified by others, we do not know, but we have seen a
case which, for its tragical and mysterious denoument,
deserves to be given here as an illustration of the subject in
hand. An old man, of over one hundred years of age, a peasant-serf
in the government of S----, having a wide reputation as a sorcerer
and healer, was said to be dying for several days, and still unable
to die. The report spread like lightning, and the poor old fellow
was shunned by even the members of his own family, as the latter
were afraid of receiving the unwelcome inheritance. At last the
public rumor in the village was that he had sent a message to
a colleague less versed than himself in the art, and who, although
he lived in a distant district, was nevertheless coming at the
call, and would be on hand early on the following morning. There
was at that time on a visit to the proprietor of the village a
young physician who, belonging to the famous school of Nihilism
of that day, laughed outrageously at the idea. The master
of the house, being a very pious man, and but half inclined to
make so cheap of the "superstition," smiled -- as the
saying goes -- but with one corner of his mouth. Meanwhile the
young skeptic, to gratify his curiosity, had made a visit to the
dying man, had found that he could not live twenty-four hours
longer, and, determined to prove the absurdity of the "superstition,"
had taken means to detain the coming "successor" at
a neighboring village.
Early in the morning a company of four persons, comprising the
physician, the master of the place, his daughter, and the writer
of the present lines, went to the hut in which was to be achieved
the triumph of skepticism. The dying man was expecting his liberator
every moment, and his agony at the delay became extreme. We tried
to persuade the physician to humor the patient, were it for humanity's
sake. He only laughed. Getting hold with one hand of the old wizard's
pulse, he took out his watch with the other, and remarking in
French that all would be over in a few moments, remained absorbed
in his professional experiment. The scene was solemn and appalling.
Suddenly the door opened, and a young boy entered with the intelligence,
addressed to the doctor, that the koum was lying dead
drunk at a neighboring village, and, according to his orders,
could not be with "grandfather" till the next day.
The young doctor felt confused, and was just going to address
the old man, when, as quick as lightning, the Znachar snatched
his hand from his grasp and raised himself in bed. His deep-sunken
eyes flashed; his yellow-white beard and hair streaming round
his livid face made him a [[Footnote continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 44 ISIS UNVEILED.
wine was common to many ancient nations."* Cicero mentions
it in his works, and wonders at the strangeness of the rite. There
had been an esoteric meaning attached to it from the first establishment
of the Mysteries, and the Eucharistia is one of the oldest rites
of antiquity. With the hierophants it had nearly the same significance
as with the Christians. Ceres was bread, and Bacchus
was wine; the former meaning regeneration of life from
the seed, and the latter -- the grape -- the emblem of wisdom
and knowledge; the accumulation of the spirit of things, and the
fermentation and subsequent strength of that esoteric knowledge
being justly symbolized by wine. The mystery related to the drama
of Eden; it is said to have been first taught by Janus, who was
also the first to introduce in the temples the sacrifices of "bread"
and "wine" in commemoration of the "fall into generation"
as the symbol of the "seed." "I am the vine, and
my Father is the husbandman," says Jesus, alluding to the
secret knowledge that could be imparted by him. "I will drink
no more of the fruit of the vine until that day that I drink it
new in the kingdom of God."
The festival of the Eleusinian Mysteries began in the month of
Boedromion, which corresponds with the month of September, the
time of grape-gathering, and lasted from the 15th to the 22d of
the month, seven days.** The Hebrew festival of the Feast
of Tabernacles began on the 15th and ended on the 22d of the month
of Ethanim, which Dunlap shows as derived from Adonim, Adonia,
Attenim, Ethanim;*** and this feast is named in Exodus (xxiii.
16) the feast of ingatherings. "All the men of Israel
assembled unto King Solomon at the feast in the month Ethanim,
which is the seventh."****
Plutarch thinks the feast of the booths to be the Bacchic rites,
not the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] dreadful sight. One
instant more, and his long, sinewy arms were clasped round the
physician's neck, as with a supernatural force he drew the doctor's
head closer and closer to his own face, where he held him as in
a vise, while whispering words inaudible to us in his
ear. The skeptic struggled to free himself, but before he had
time to make one effective motion the work had evidently been
done; the hands relaxed their grasp, and the old sorcerer fell
on his back -- a corpse! A strange and ghostly smile had settled
on the stony lips -- a smile of fiendish triumph and satisfied
revenge; but the doctor looked paler and more ghastly than the
dead man himself. He stared round with an expression of terror
difficult to describe, and without answering our inquiries rushed
out wildly from the hut, in the direction of the woods. Messengers
were sent after him, but he was nowhere to be found. About sunset
a report was heard in the forest. An hour later his body was brought
home, with a bullet through his head, for the skeptic had blown
out his brains!
What made him commit suicide? What magic spell of sorcery had
the "word" of the dying wizard left on his mind? Who
can tell?
* "Anacalypsis"; also Tertullian.
** "Anthon," art. Eleusinia.
*** Dunlap: "Musah, His Mysteries," p. 71.
**** Kings, viii. 2.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 45 THE HEBREW KADESHIM.
the Eleusinian. Thus "Bacchus was directly called upon,"
he says. The Sabazian worship was Sabbatic; the
names Evius, or Hevius, and Luaios are identical with Hivite
and Levite. The French name Louis is the Hebrew Levi;
Iacchus again is Iao or Jehovah; and Baal or Adon, like Bacchus,
was a phallic god. "Who shall ascend into the hill (the high
place) of the Lord?" asks the holy king David, "who
shall stand in the place of his Kadushu 
"?
(Psalms xxiv. 3). Kadesh may mean in one sense to devote,
hallow, sanctify, and even to initiate or to set apart; but
it also means the ministers of lascivious rites (the Venus-worship)
and the true interpretation of the word Kadesh is bluntly rendered
in Deuteronomy xxiii. 17; Hosea iv. 14; and
Genesis xxxviii., from verses 15 to 22. The "holy"
Kadeshuth of the Bible were identical as to the duties
of their office with the Nautch-girls of the later Hindu pagodas.
The Hebrew Kadeshim or galli lived "by the house
of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove,"
or bust of Venus-Astarte, says verse the seventh in the twenty-third
chapter of 2 Kings.
The dance performed by David round the ark was the "circle-dance"
said to have been prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries.
Such was the dance of the daughters of Shiloh (Judges xxi.
21, 23 et passim), and the leaping of the
prophets of Baal (I Kings xviii. 26). It was simply a
characteristic of the Sabean worship, for it denoted the motion
of the planets round the sun. That the dance was a Bacchic frenzy
is apparent. Sistra were used on the occasion, and the taunt of
Michael and the king's reply are very expressive. "The king
of Israel uncovered himself before his maid-servants as one of
the vain (or debauched) fellows shamelessly uncovereth
himself." And he retorts: "I will play (act wantonly)
before 
, and I will be
yet more vile than this, and I will be base in my own sight."
When we remember that David had sojourned among the Tyrians and
Philistines, where their rites were common; and that indeed he
had conquered that land away from the house of Saul, by the aid
of mercenaries from their country, the countenancing and even,
perhaps, the introduction of such a Pagan-like worship by the
weak "psalmist" seems very natural. David knew nothing
of Moses, it seems, and if he introduced the Jehovah-worship it
was not in its monotheistic character, but simply as that of one
of the many gods of the neighboring nations -- a tutelary deity
to whom he had given the preference, and chosen among "all
other gods."
Following the Christian dogmas seriatim, if we concentrate our
attention upon one which provoked the fiercest battles until its
recognition, that of the Trinity, what do we find? We meet it,
as we have shown, northeast of the Indus; and tracing it to Asia
Minor and Europe, recognize it among every people who had anything
like an established re-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 46 ISIS UNVEILED.
ligion. It was taught in the oldest Chaldean, Egyptian, and Mithraitic
schools. The Chaldean Sun-god, Mithra, was called "Triple,"
and the trinitarian idea of the Chaldeans was a doctrine of the
Akkadians, who, themselves, belonged to a race which was the first
to conceive a metaphysical trinity. The Chaldeans are a tribe
of the Akkadians, according to Rawlinson, who lived in Babylonia
from the earliest times. They were Turanians, according to others,
and instructed the Babylonians into the first notions of religion.
But these same Akkadians, who were they? Those scientists who
would ascribe to them a Turanian origin, make of them the inventors
of the cuneiform characters; others call them Sumerians; others
again, respectively, make their language, of which (for very good
reasons) no traces whatever remain -- Kasdean, Chaldaic, Proto-Chaldean,
Kasdo-Scythic, and so on. The only tradition worthy of credence
is that these Akkadians instructed the Babylonians in the Mysteries,
and taught them the sacerdotal or Mystery-language. These Akkadians
were then simply a tribe of the Hindu-Brahmans, now called Aryans
-- their vernacular language, the Sanscrit* of the Vedas; and
the sacred or Mystery-language, that which, even in our
own age, is used by the Hindu fakirs and initiated Brahmans in
their magical evocations.** It has been, from time immemorial,
and still is employed by the initiates of all countries, and the
Thibetan lamas claim that it is in this tongue that appear the
mysterious characters on the leaves and bark of the sacred Koumboum.
Jacolliot, who took such pains to penetrate the mysteries of the
Brahmanical initiation in translating and commenting upon the
Agrouchada-Parikshai, confesses the following:
"It is pretended also, without our being able to verify the
assertion, that the magical evocations were pronounced in a particular
language, and that it was forbidden, under pain of death, to translate
them into vulgar dialects. The rare expressions that we have been
able to catch like -- L'rhom, h'hom, sh'hrum, sho'rhim, are
in fact most curious, and do not seem to belong to any known idiom."***
Those who have seen a fakir or a lama reciting his mantras and
con-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Let us remember in this connection that Col. Vans Kennedy has
long ago declared his opinion that Babylonia was once the seat
of the Sanscrit language and of Brahmanical influence.
** " 'The Agrouchada-Parikshai,' which discloses, to a certain
extent, the order of initiation, does not give the formula of
evocation," says Jacolliot, and he adds that, according to
some Brahmans, "these formulae were never written, they were
and still are imparted in a whisper in the ear of the adepts"
("mouth to ear, and the word at low breath,"
say the Masons). -- "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p.
108.
*** "Le Spiritisme dans le Monde," p. 108.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 47 IS JACOLLIOT AN UNMITIGATED HUMBUG?
jurations, know that he never pronounces the words audibly when
preparing for a phenomenon. His lips move, and none will ever
hear the terrible formula pronounced, except in the interior of
the temples, and then in a cautious whisper. This, then, was the
language now respectively baptized by every scientist, and, according
to his imaginative and philological propensities, Kasdeo-Semitic,
Scythic, Proto-Chaldean, and the like.
Scarcely two of even the most learned Sanscrit philologists are
agreed as to the true interpretation of Vedic words. Let one put
forth an essay, a lecture, a treatise, a translation, a dictionary,
and straightway all the others fall to quarrelling with each other
and with him as to his sins of omission and commission. Professor
Whitney, greatest of American Orientalists, says that Professor
Muller's notes on the Rig Veda Sanhita "are far
from showing that sound and thoughtful judgment, that moderation
and economy which are among the most precious qualities of an
exegete." Professor Muller angrily retorts upon his critics
that "not only is the joy embittered which is the inherent
reward of all bona fide work, but selfishness, malignity,
aye, even untruthfulness, gain the upper hand, and the
healthy growth of science is stunted." He differs "in
many cases from the explanations of Vedic words given by Professor
Roth" in his Sanscrit Dictionary, and Professor
Whitney shampooes both their heads by saying that there are, unquestionably,
words and phrases "as to which both alike will hereafter
be set right."
In volume i. of his Chips, Professor Muller stigmatizes
all the Vedas except the Rik, the Atharva-Veda
included, as "theological twaddle," while Professor
Whitney regards the latter as "the most comprehensive and
valuable of the four collections, next after the Rik."
To return to the case of Jacolliot. Professor Whitney brands
him as a "bungler and a humbug," and, as we remarked
above, this is the very general verdict. But when the Bible
dans l'Inde appeared, the Societe Academique de Saint Quentin
requested M. Textor de Ravisi, a learned Indianist, ten years
Governor of Karikal, India, to report upon its merits. He was
an ardent Catholic, and bitterly opposed Jacolliot's conclusions
where they discredited the Mosaic and Catholic revelations; but
he was forced to say: "Written with good faith, in an easy,
vigorous, and passionate style, of an easy and varied argumentation,
the work of M. Jacolliot is of absorbing interest . . . a learned
work on known facts and with familiar arguments."
Enough. Let Jacolliot have the benefit of the doubt when such
very imposing authorities are doing their best to show up each
other as incompetents and literary journeymen. We quite agree
with Professor Whitney that "the truism, that [for European
critics?] it is far easier to pull to
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 48 ISIS UNVEILED.
pieces than to build up, is nowhere truer than in matters affecting
the archeology and history of India."*
Babylonia happened to be situated on the way of the great stream
of the earliest Hindu emigration, and the Babylonians were one
of the first peoples benefited thereby.** These Khaldi were the
worshippers of the Moon-god, Deus Lunus, from which fact we may
infer that the Akkadians -- if such must be their name -- belonged
to the race of the Kings of the Moon, whom tradition shows as
having reigned in Pruyay -- now Allahabad. With them the trinity
of Deus Lunus was manifested in the three lunar phases, completing
the quaternary with the fourth, and typifying the death of the
Moon-god in its gradual waning and final disappearance. This death
was allegorized by them, and attributed to the triumph of the
genius of evil over the light-giving deity; as the later nations
allegorized the death of their Sun-gods, Osiris and Apollo, at
the hands of Typhon and the great Dragon Python, when the sun
entered the winter solstice. Babel, Arach, and Akkad are names
of the sun. The Zoroastrian Oracles are full and explicit
upon the subject of the Divine Triad. "A triad of Deity shines
forth throughout the whole world, of which a Monad is the head,"
admits the Reverend Dr. Maurice.
"For from this Triad, in the bosoms, are all things governed,"
says a Chaldean oracle. The Phos, Pur, and Phlox, of Sanchoniathon,***
are Light, Fire, and Flame, three manifestations of the Sun who
is one. Bel-Saturn, Jupiter-Bel, and Bel or Baal-Chom
are the Chaldean trinity;**** "The Babylonian Bel was regarded
in the Triume aspect of Belitan, Zeus-Belus (the mediator) and
Baal-Chom who is Apollo Chomaeus. This was the Triune aspect of
the 'Highest God,' who is, according to Berosus, either El (the
Hebrew), Bel, Belitan, Mithra, or Zervana, and has the name [[Pater]],
"the Father."***** The Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva,******
corresponding to Power, Wisdom, and Justice, which answer in their
turn
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* W. D. Whitney: "Oriental and Linguistic Studies, The Veda,
etc."
** Jacolliot seems to have very logically demonstrated the absurd
contradictions of some philologists, anthropologists, and Orientalists,
in regard to their Akkado and Semito mania. "There
is not, perhaps, much of good faith in their negations,"
he writes. "The scientists who invent Turanian peoples know
very well that in Manu alone, there is more of veritable
science and philosophy than in all that this pretended Semitism
has hitherto furnished us with; but they are the slaves of a path
which some of them are following the last fifteen, twenty, or
even thirty years. . . . We expect, therefore, nothing of the
present. India will owe its reconstitution to the scientists of
the next generation" ("La Genese de l'Humanite,"
pp. 60-61).
*** Cory: "Anc. Frag."
**** Movers: "Phoinizer," 263.
***** Dunlap: "Sp. Hist. of Man," p. 281.
****** Siva is not a god of the Vedas, strictly speaking.
When the Vedas were written, he held the rank of Maha-Deva
or Bel among the gods of aboriginal India.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 49 THE TRINITIES OF VARIOUS RELIGIONS.
to Spirit, Matter, Time, and the Past, Present, and Future, can
be found in the temple of Gharipuri; thousands of dogmatic Brahmans
worship these attributes of the Vedic Deity, while the severe
monks and nuns of Buddhistic Thibet recognize but the sacred trinity
of the three cardinal virtues: Poverty, Chastity, and
Obedience, professed by the Christians, practiced by
the Buddhists and some Hindus alone.
The Persian triplicate Deity also consists of three persons, Ormazd,
Mithra, and Ahriman. "That is that principle," says
Porphyry,* "which the author of the Chaldaic Summary
saith, 'They conceive there is one principle of all things,
and declare that is one and good.' " The Chinese
idol Sanpao, consists of three equal in all respects;** and the
Peruvians "supposed their Tanga-tanga to be one in three,
and three in one," says Faben.*** The Egyptians have their
Emepht, Eicton, and Phta; and the triple god seated on the Lotos
can be seen in the St. Petersburg Museum, on a medal of the Northern
Tartars.
Among the Church dogmas which have most seriously suffered of
late at the hands of the Orientalists, the last in question stands
conspicuous. The reputation of each of the three personages of
the anthropomorphic godhead as an original revelation to the Christians
through Divine will, has been badly compromised by inquiry into
its predecessors and origin. Orientalists have published more
about the similarity between Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Christianity
than was strictly agreeable to the Vatican. Draper's assertion
that "Paganism was modified by Christianity, Christianity
by Paganism,"**** is being daily verified. "Olympus
was restored but the divinities passed under other names,"
he says, treating of the Constantine period. "The more powerful
provinces insisted on the adoption of their time-honored conceptions.
Views of the trinity in accordance with the Egyptian traditions
were established. Not only was the adoration of Isis under a new
name restored, but even her image, standing on the crescent moon,
reappeared. The well-known effigy of that goddess with the infant
Horus in her arms has descended to our days, in the beautiful
artistic creations of the Madonna and child."
But a still earlier origin than the Egyptian and Chaldean can
be assigned to the Virgin "Mother of God," Queen of
Heaven. Though Isis
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "De Antro Nympharum."
** "Navarette," book ii., c. x.
*** "On the Origin of Heathen Idolatry."
**** Isis and Osiris are said, in the Egyptian sacred books, to
have appeared (i.e., been worshipped), on earth, later
than Thot, the first Hermes, called Trismegistus, who
wrote all their sacred books according to the command of God or
by "divine revelation." The companion and instructor
of Isis and Osiris was Thot, or Hermes II., who
was an incarnation of the celestial Hermes.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 50 ISIS UNVEILED.
is also by right the Queen of Heaven, and is generally represented
carrying in her hand the Crux Ansata composed of the mundane cross,
and of the Stauros of the Gnostics, she is a great deal younger
than the celestial virgin, Neith. In one of the tombs of the Pharaohs
-- Rhameses, in the valley of Biban-el-Molouk, in Thebes, Champollion,
Junior, discovered a picture, according to his opinion the most
ancient ever yet found. It represents the heavens symbolized by
the figure of a woman bedecked with stars. The birth of the Sun
is figured by the form of a little child, issuing from the bosom
of its "Divine Mother."
In the Book of Hermes, "Pimander" is enunciated
in distinct and unequivocal sentences, the whole trinitarian dogma
accepted by the Christians. "The light is me," says
Pimander, the DIVINE THOUGHT. "I am the nous or
intelligence, and I am thy god, and I am far older than the human
principle which escapes from the shadow. I am the germ of thought,
the resplendent WORD, the SON of GOD. Think that
what thus sees and hears in thee, is the Verbum of the
Master, it is the Thought, which is God the Father. . . . The
celestial ocean, the AETHER, which flows from
east to west, is the Breath of the Father, the life-giving Principle,
the HOLY GHOST!" "For they are not at all separated
and their union is LIFE."
Ancient as may be the origin of Hermes, lost in the unknown days
of Egyptian colonization, there is yet a far older prophecy, directly
relating to the Hindu Christna, according to the Brahmans. It
is, to say the least, strange that the Christians claim to base
their religion upon a prophecy of the Bible, which exists
nowhere in that book. In what chapter or verse does Jehovah, the
"Lord God," promise Adam and Eve to send them a Redeemer
who will save humanity? "I will put enmity between thee and
the woman," says the Lord God to the serpent, "and between
thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt
bruise his heel."
In these words there is not the slightest allusion to a Redeemer,
and the subtilest of intellects could not extract from them, as
they stand in the third chapter of Genesis, anything
like that which the Christians have contrived to find. On the
other hand, in the traditions and Manu, Brahma promises directly
to the first couple to send them a Saviour who will teach them
the way to salvation.
"It is from the lips of a messenger of Brahma, who will be
born in Kuroukshetra, Matsya, and the land of Pantchola, also
called Kanya-Cubja (mountain of the Virgin), that all men on earth
will learn their duty," says Manu (book ii., slokas
19 and 20).
The Mexicans call the Father of their Trinity Yzona, the Son Bacab,
and the Holy Ghost Echvah, "and say they received it (the
doctrine)
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 51 PAGAN RITES AND DOGMAS ADOPTED BY CHRISTIANS.
from their ancestors."* Among the Semitic nations we can
trace the trinity to the prehistorical days of the fabled Sesostris,
who is identified by more than one critic with Nimrod, "the
mighty hunter." Manetho makes the oracle rebuke the king,
when the latter asks, "Tell me, O thou strong in fire, who
before me could subjugate all things? and who shall after me?"
And the oracle saith thus: "First God, then the Word, and
then 'the Spirit.' "**
In the foregoing lies the foundation of the fierce hatred of the
Christians toward the "Pagans" and the theurgists. Too
much had been borrowed; the ancient religions and the
Neo-platonists had been laid by them under contribution sufficiently
to perplex the world for several thousand years. Had not the ancient
creeds been speedily obliterated, it would have been found impossible
to preach the Christian religion as a New Dispensation, or the
direct Revelation from God the Father, through God the Son, and
under the influence of God the Holy Ghost. As a political exigence
the Fathers had -- to gratify the wishes of their rich converts
-- instituted even the festivals of Pan. They went so far as to
accept the ceremonies hitherto celebrated by the Pagan world in
honor of the God of the gardens, in all their primitive
sincerity.*** It was time to sever the connection.
Either the Pagan worship and the Neo-platonic theurgy, with all
ceremonial of magic, must be crushed out forever, or the Christians
become Neo-platonists.
The fierce polemics and single-handed battles between Irenaeus
and the Gnostics are too well known to need repetition. They were
carried on for over two centuries after the unscrupulous Bishop
of Lyons had uttered his last religious paradox. Celsus, the Neo-platonist,
and a disciple of the school of Ammonius Saccas, had thrown the
Christians into perturbation, and even had arrested for a time
the progress of proselytism by successfully proving that the original
and purer forms of the most important dogmas of Christianity were
to be found only in the teachings of Plato. Celsus accused them
of accepting the worst superstitions of Paganism, and of interpolating
passages from the books of the Sybils, without rightly understanding
their meaning. The accusations were so plausible, and the facts
so patent, that for a long time no Christian writer had ventured
to answer the challenge. Origen, at the fervent request of his
friend, Ambrosius, was the first to take the defense in hand,
for, having belonged to the same Platonic school of Ammonius,
he was considered the most competent man to refute the well-founded
charges. But his eloquence failed, and the only remedy that could
be found was to destroy the writings of
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Lord Kingsborough: "Ant. Mex.," p. 165.
** "Ap. Malal.," lib. i., cap. iv.
*** Payne Knight: "Phallic Worship."
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 52 ISIS UNVEILED.
Celsus themselves.* This could be achieved only in the fifth century,
when copies had been taken from this work, and many were those
who had read and studied them. If no copy of it has descended
to our present generation of scientists, it is not because there
is none extant at present, but for the simple reason that the
monks of a certain Oriental church on Mount Athos will neither
show nor confess they have one in their possession.** Perhaps
they do not even know themselves the value of the contents of
their manuscripts, on account of their great ignorance.
The dispersion of the Eclectic school had become the fondest hope
of the Christians. It had been looked for and contemplated with
intense anxiety. It was finally achieved. The members were scattered
by the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The Celsus above mentioned, who lived between the second and
third centuries, is not Celsus the Epicurean. The latter wrote
several works against Magic, and lived earlier, during the reign
of Hadrian.
** We have the facts from a trustworthy witness, having no interest
to invent such a story. Having injured his leg in a fall from
the steamer into the boat in which he was to land at the Mount,
he was taken care of by these monks, and during his convalescence,
through gifts of money and presents, became their greatest friend,
and finally won their entire confidence. Having asked for the
loan of some books, he was taken by the Superior to a large cellar
in which they keep their sacred vessels and other property. Opening
a great trunk, full of old musty manuscripts and rolls, he was
invited by the Superior to "amuse himself."
The gentleman was a scholar, and well versed in Greek and Latin
text. "I was amazed," he says, in a private letter,
"and had my breath taken away, on finding among these old
parchments, so unceremoniously treated, some of the most valuable
relics of the first centuries, hitherto believed to have been
lost." Among others he found a half-destroyed manuscript,
which he is perfectly sure must be a copy of the "True Doctrine,"
the [[Aogos ale thes]] of Celsus, out of which Origen
quoted whole pages. The traveller took as many notes as he could
on that day, but when he came to offer to the Superior to purchase
some of these writings he found, to his great surprise, that no
amount of money would tempt the monks. They did not know what
the manuscripts contained, nor "did they care," they
said. But the "heap of writing," they added, was transmitted
to them from one generation to another, and there was a tradition
among them that these papers would one day become the means of
crushing the "Great Beast of the Apocalypse," their
hereditary enemy, the Church of Rome. They were constantly quarrelling
and fighting with the Catholic monks, and among the whole "heap"
they knew that there was a "holy" relic which
protected them. They did not know which, and so in their doubt
abstained. It appears that the Superior, a shrewd Greek, understood
his bevue and repented of his kindness, for first of
all he made the traveller give him his most sacred word of honor,
strengthened by an oath he made him take on the image of the Holy
Patroness of the Island, never to betray their secret, and never
mention, at least, the name of their convent. And finally, when
the anxious student who had passed a fortnight in reading all
sorts of antiquated trash before he happened to stumble over some
precious manuscript, expressed the desire to have the key, to
"amuse himself" with the writings once more, he was
very naively informed that the "key had been lost,"
and that they did not know where to look for it. And thus he was
left to the few notes he had taken.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 53 A SAINT BUTCHERED, AND BUTCHERS SAINTED.
hand of the monsters Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, and his
nephew Cyril -- the murderer of the young, the learned, and the
innocent Hypatia!*
With the death of the martyred daughter of Theon, the mathematician,
there remained no possibility for the Neo-platonists to continue
their school at Alexandria. During the life-time of the youthful
Hypatia her friendship and influence with Orestes, the governor
of the city, had assured the philosophers security and protection
against their murderous enemies. With her death they had lost
their strongest friend. How much she was revered by all who knew
her for her erudition, noble virtues, and character, we can infer
from the letters addressed to her by Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais,
fragments of which have reached us. "My heart yearns for
the presence of your divine spirit," he wrote in 413 A.D.,
"which more than anything else could alleviate the bitterness
of my fortunes." At another time he says: "Oh, my mother,
my sister, my teacher, my benefactor! My soul is very sad. The
recollection of my children I have lost is killing me. . . . When
I have news of you and learn, as I hope, that you are more fortunate
than myself, I am at least only half-unhappy."
What would have been the feelings of this most noble and worthy
of Christian bishops, who had surrendered family and children
and happiness for the faith into which he had been attracted,
had a prophetic vision disclosed to him that the only friend that
had been left to him, his "mother, sister, benefactor,"
would soon become an unrecognizable mass of flesh and blood, pounded
to jelly under the blows of the club of Peter the Reader -- that
her youthful, innocent body would be cut to pieces, "the
flesh scraped from the bones," by oyster-shells and the rest
of her cast into the fire, by order of the same Bishop Cyril he
knew so well -- Cyril, the CANONIZED Saint!!**
There has never been a religion in the annals of the world with
such a bloody record as Christianity. All the rest, including
the traditional fierce fights of the "chosen people"
with their next of kin, the idolatrous tribes of Israel, pale
before the murderous fanaticism of the alleged followers of Christ!
Even the rapid spread of Mahometanism before the conquering sword
of the Islam prophet, is a direct consequence of the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See the historical romance of Canon Kingsley, "Hypatia,"
for a highly picturesque account of the tragical fate of this
young martyr.
** We beg the reader to bear in mind that it is the same Cyril
who was accused and proved guilty of having sold the gold and
silver ornaments of his church, and spent the money. He pleaded
guilty, but tried to excuse himself on the ground that he had
used the money for the poor, but could not give evidence of it.
His duplicity with Arius and his party is well known. Thus one
of the first Christian saints, and the founder of the Trinity,
appears on the pages of history as a murderer and a thief!
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 54 ISIS UNVEILED.
bloody riots and fights among Christians. It was the intestine
war between the Nestorians and Cyrilians that engendered Islamism;
and it is in the convent of Bozrah that the prolific seed was
first sown by Bahira, the Nestorian monk. Freely watered by rivers
of blood, the tree of Mecca has grown till we find it in the present
century overshadowing nearly two hundred millions of people. The
recent Bulgarian atrocities are but the natural outgrowth of the
triumph of Cyril and the Mariolaters.
The cruel, crafty politician, the plotting monk, glorified by
ecclesiastical history with the aureole of a martyred saint. The
despoiled philosophers, the Neo-platonists, and the Gnostics,
daily anathematized by the Church all over the world for long
and dreary centuries. The curse of the unconcerned Deity hourly
invoked on the magian rites and theurgic practice, and the Christian
clergy themselves using sorcery for ages. Hypatia, the
glorious maiden-philosopher, torn to pieces by the Christian mob.
And such as Catherine de Medicis, Lucrezia Borgia, Joanna of Naples,
and the Isabellas of Spain, presented to the world as the faithful
daughters of the Church -- some even decorated by the Pope with
the order of the "Immaculate Rose," the highest emblem
of womanly purity and virtue, a symbol sacred to the Virgin-mother
of God! Such are the examples of human justice! How far less blasphemous
appears a total rejection of Mary as an immaculate goddess, than
an idolatrous worship of her, accompanied by such practices.
In the next chapter we will present a few illustrations of sorcery,
as practiced under the patronage of the Roman Church.
Chapter 2
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