Isis Unveiled by H. P. Blavatsky -- Vol. 2
Theosophical University Press Online Edition
[[Vol. 2, Page 123]]
CHAPTER III.
"KING. -- Let us from point to point this
story know." -- All's Well That Ends Well. -- Act
v., Scene 3.
"He is the One, self-proceeding; and from Him all things
proceed.
And in them He Himself exerts His activity; no mortal
BEHOLDS HIM, but HE beholds
all!" -- Orphic Hymn.
"And Athens, O Athena, is thy own!
Great Goddess hear! and on my darkened mind
Pour thy pure light in measure unconfined;
That sacred light, O all-proceeding Queen,
Which beams eternal from thy face serene.
My soul, while wand'ring on the earth, inspire
With thy own blessed and impulsive fire!" -- PROCLUS;
TAYLOR: To Minerva.
"Now faith is the substance of things. . . . By
faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not,
when she had received the spies in peace." --
Hebrews xi. 1, 31.
"What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man hath faith,
and have not works? Can FAITH save him? . .
. Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works,
when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out
another way?" -- James ii. 14, 25.
CLEMENT describes Basilides, the Gnostic, as
"a philosopher devoted to the contemplation of divine things."
This very appropriate expression may be applied to many of the
founders of the more important sects which later were all engulfed
in one -- that stupendous compound of unintelligible dogmas enforced
by Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others, which is now termed Christianity.
If these must be called heresies, then early Christianity
itself must be included in the number. Basilides and Valentinus
preceded Irenaeus and Tertullian; and the two latter Fathers had
less facts than the two former Gnostics to show that their heresy
was plausible. Neither divine right nor truth brought about
the triumph of their Christianity; fate alone was propitious.
We can assert, with entire plausibility, that there is not one
of all these sects -- Kabalism, Judaism, and our present Christianity
included -- but sprung from the two main branches of that one
mother-trunk, the once universal religion, which antedated the
Vedaic ages -- we speak of that prehistoric Buddhism which merged
later into Brahmanism.
The religion which the primitive teaching of the early few apostles
most resembled -- a religion preached by Jesus himself -- is the
elder of these two, Buddhism. The latter as taught in its primitive
purity, and carried to perfection by the last of the Buddhas,
Gautama, based its
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 124 ISIS UNVEILED.
moral ethics on three fundamental principles. It alleged that
1, every thing existing, exists from natural causes; 2, that virtue
brings its own reward, and vice and sin their own punishment;
and, 3, that the state of man in this world is probationary. We
might add that on these three principles rested the universal
foundation of every religious creed; God, and individual immortality
for every man -- if he could but win it. However puzzling the
subsequent theological tenets; however seemingly incomprehensible
the metaphysical abstractions which have convulsed the theology
of every one of the great religions of mankind as soon as it was
placed on a sure footing, the above is found to be the essence
of every religious philosophy, with the exception of later Christianity.
It was that of Zoroaster, of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Jesus, and
even of Moses, albeit the teachings of the Jewish law-giver have
been so piously tampered with.
We will devote the present chapter mainly to a brief survey of
the numerous sects which have recognized themselves as Christians;
that is to say, that have believed in a Christos, or
an ANOINTED ONE. We will also endeavor to explain the latter appellation
from the kabalistic stand-point, and show it reappearing in every
religious system. It might be profitable, at the same time, to
see how much the earliest apostles -- Paul and Peter, agreed in
their preaching of the new Dispensation. We will begin with Peter.
We must once more return to that greatest of all the Patristic
frauds; the one which has undeniably helped the Roman Catholic
Church to its unmerited supremacy, viz.: the barefaced assertion,
in the teeth of historical evidence, that Peter suffered martyrdom
at Rome. It is but too natural that the Latin clergy should cling
to it, for, with the exposure of the fraudulent nature of this
pretext, the dogma of apostolic succession must fall to the ground.
There have been many able works of late, in refutation of this
preposterous claim. Among others we note Mr. G. Reber's, The
Christ of Paul, which overthrows it quite ingeniously. The
author proves, 1, that there was no church established at Rome,
until the reign of Antoninus Pius; 2, that as Eusebius and Irenaeus
both agree that Linus was the second Bishop of Rome, into whose
hands "the blessed apostles" Peter and Paul committed
the church after building it, it could not have been at any other
time than between A.D. 64 and 68; 3, that this interval of years
happens during the reign of Nero, for Eusebius states that Linus
held this office twelve years (Ecclesiastical History, book
iii., c. 13), entering upon it A.D. 69, one year after the death
of Nero, and dying himself in 81. After that the author maintains,
on very solid grounds, that Peter could not be in Rome A.D. 64,
for he was then in Babylon; wherefrom he
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 125 THE FICTION OF APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION.
wrote his first Epistle, the date of which is fixed by Dr. Lardner
and other critics at precisely this year. But we believe that
his best argument is in proving that it was not in the character
of the cowardly Peter to risk himself in such close neighborhood
with Nero, who "was feeding the wild beasts of the Amphitheatre
with the flesh and bones of Christians"* at that time.
Perhaps the Church of Rome was but consistent in choosing as her
titular founder the apostle who thrice denied his master at the
moment of danger; and the only one, moreover, except Judas, who
provoked Christ in such a way as to be addressed as the "Enemy."
"Get thee behind me, SATAN!" exclaims
Jesus, rebuking the taunting apostle.**
There is a tradition in the Greek Church which has never found
favor at the Vatican. The former traces its origin to one of the
Gnostic leaders -- Basilides, perhaps, who lived under Trajan
and Adrian, at the end of the first and the beginning of the second
century. With regard to this particular tradition, if the Gnostic
is Basilides, then he must be accepted as a sufficient authority,
having claimed to have been a disciple of the Apostle Matthew,
and to have had for master Glaucias, a disciple of St. Peter himself.
Were the narrative attributed to him authenticated, the London
Committee for the Revision of the Bible would have to add a new
verse to Matthew, Mark, and John, who tell the
story of Peter's denial of Christ.
This tradition, then, of which we have been speaking, affirms
that, when frightened at the accusation of the servant of the
high priest, the apostle had thrice denied his master, and the
cock had crowed, Jesus, who was then passing through the hall
in custody of the soldiers, turned, and, looking at Peter, said:
"Verily, I say unto thee, Peter, thou shalt deny me throughout
the coming ages, and never stop until thou shalt be old, and shalt
stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee and carry
thee whither thou wouldst not." The latter part of this sentence,
say the Greeks, relates to the Church of Rome, and prophesies
her constant apostasy from Christ, under the mask of false religion.
Later, it was inserted in the twenty-first chapter of John,
but the whole of this chapter had been pronounced a forgery,
even before it was found that this Gospel was never written
by John the Apostle at all.
The anonymous author of Supernatural Religion, a work
which in two years passed through several editions, and which
is alleged to have been written by an eminent theologian, proves
conclusively the spuriousness of the four gospels, or at least
their complete transformation in the hands
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "The Christ of Paul," p. 123.
** Gospel according to Mark, viii. 33.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 126 ISIS UNVEILED.
of the too-zealous Irenaeus and his champions. The fourth gospel
is completely upset by this able author; the extraordinary forgeries
of the Fathers of the early centuries are plainly demonstrated,
and the relative value of the synoptics is discussed with an unprecedented
power of logic. The work carries conviction in its every line.
From it we quote the following: "We gain infinitely more
than we lose in abandoning belief in the reality of Divine Revelation.
Whilst we retain, pure and unimpaired, the treasure of Christian
morality, we relinquish nothing but the debasing elements added
to it by human superstition. We are no longer bound to believe
a theology which outrages reason and moral sense. We are freed
from base anthropomorphic views of God and His government of the
Universe, and from Jewish Mythology we rise to higher conceptions
of an infinitely wise and beneficent Being, hidden from our finite
minds, it is true, in the impenetrable glory of Divinity, but
whose laws of wondrous comprehensiveness and perfection we ever
perceive in operation around us. . . . The argument so often employed
by theologians, that Divine revelation is necessary for man, and
that certain views contained in that revelation are required for
our moral consciousness, is purely imaginary, and derived from
the revelation which it seeks to maintain. The only thing absolutely
necessary for man is TRUTH, and to that, and
that alone, must our moral consciousness adapt itself."*
We will consider farther in what light was regarded the Divine
revelation of the Jewish Bible by the Gnostics, who yet
believed in Christ in their own way, a far better and less blasphemous
one than the Roman Catholic. The Fathers have forced on the believers
in Christ a Bible, the laws prescribed in which he was
the first to break; the teachings of which he utterly rejected;
and for which crimes he was finally crucified. Of whatever else
the Christian world can boast, it can hardly claim logic and consistency
as its chief virtues.
The fact alone that Peter remained to the last an "apostle
of the circumcision," speaks for itself. Whosoever else
might have built the Church of Rome it was not Peter. If
such were the case, the successors of this apostle would have
to submit themselves to circumcision, if it were but for the sake
of consistency, and to show that the claims of the popes are not
utterly groundless, Dr. Inman asserts that report says that "in
our Christian times popes have to be privately perfect,"**
but we do not know whether it is carried to the extent of the
Levitical Jewish law. The first fifteen Christian bishops of Jerusalem,
commencing with James and including Judas, were all circumcised
Jews.***
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Supernatural Religion," vol. ii., p. 489.
** "Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism," p.
28.
*** See Eusebius, "Ex. H.," bk. iv., ch. v.; "Sulpicius
Severus," vol. ii., p. 31.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 127 WHO AND WHAT WAS PETER?
In the Sepher Toldos Jeshu,* a Hebrew manuscript
of great antiquity, the version about Peter is different. Simon
Peter, it says, was one of their own brethren, though he had somewhat
departed from the laws, and the Jewish hatred and persecution
of the apostle seems to have existed but in the fecund imagination
of the fathers. The author speaks of him with great respect and
fairness, calling him "a faithful servant of the living God,"
who passed his life in austerity and meditation, "living
in Babylon at the summit of a tower," composing hymns, and
preaching charity. He adds that Peter always recommended to the
Christians not to molest the Jews, but as soon as he was dead,
behold another preacher went to Rome and pretended that Simon
Peter had altered the teachings of his master. He invented a burning
hell and threatened every one with it; promised miracles, but
worked none.
How much there is in the above of fiction and how much of truth,
it is for others to decide; but it certainly bears more the evidence
of sincerity and fact on its face, than the fables concocted by
the fathers to answer their end.
We may the more readily credit this friendship between Peter and
his late co-religionists as we find in Theodoret the
following assertion: "The Nazarenes are Jews, honoring the
ANOINTED (Jesus) as a just man and using the Evangel
according to Peter."** Peter was a Nazarene, according to
the Talmud. He belonged to the sect of the later Nazarenes,
which dissented from the followers of John the Baptist, and became
a rival sect; and which -- as tradition goes -- was instituted
by Jesus himself.
History finds the first Christian sects to have been either Nazarenes
like John the Baptist; or Ebionites, among whom were many of the
relatives of Jesus; or Essenes (Iessaens) the Therapeutae, healers,
of which the Nazaria were a branch. All these sects, which only
in the days of Irenaeus began to be considered heretical, were
more or less kabalistic. They believed in the expulsion of demons
by magical incantations, and practiced this method; Jervis terms
the Nabatheans and other such sects "wandering Jewish exorcists,"***
the Arabic word Nabae, meaning to wander, and the Hebrew
[[Heb char]] naba, to prophesy. The Talmud indiscrimi-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* It appears that the Jews attribute a very high antiquity to
"Sepher Toldos Jeshu." It was mentioned for the first
time by Martin, about the beginning of the thirteenth century,
for the Talmudists took great care to conceal it from the Christians.
Levi says that Porchetus Salvaticus published some portions of
it, which were used by Luther (see vol. viii., Jena Ed.). The
Hebrew text, which was missing, was at last found by Munster and
Buxtorf, and published in 1681, by Christopher Wagenseilius, in
Nuremberg, and in Frankfort, in a collection entitled "Tela
Ignea Satanae," or The Burning Darts of Satan (See Levi's
"Science des Esprits").
** Theodoret: "Haeretic. Fab.," lib. ii., 11.
*** Jervis W. Jervis: "Genesis," p. 324.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 128 ISIS UNVEILED.
nately calls all the Christians Nozari.* All
the Gnostic sects equally believed in magic. Irenaeus, in describing
the followers of Basilides, says, "They use images, invocations,
incantations, and all other things pertaining unto magic."
Dunlap, on the authority of Lightfoot, shows that Jesus was called
Nazaraios, in reference to his humble and mean external
condition; "for Nazaraios means separation, alienation from
other men."**
The real meaning of the word nazar 
signifies to vow or consecrate one's self to the service of God.
As a noun it is a diadem or emblem of such consecration,
a head so consecrated.*** Joseph was styled a nazar.****
"The head of Joseph, the vertex of the nazar among his
brethren." Samson and Samuel (
Semes-on and Sem-va-el) are described alike as nazars. Porphyry,
treating of Pythagoras, says that he was purified and initiated
at Babylon by Zar-adas, the head of the sacred college. May it
not be surmised, therefore, that the Zoro-Aster was the nazar
of Ishtar, Zar-adas or Na-Zar-Ad,***** being the same with
change of idiom? Ezra, or 
,
was a priest and scribe, a hierophant; and the first Hebrew colonizer
of Judea was 
Zeru-Babel
or the Zoro or nazar of Babylon.
The Jewish Scriptures indicate two distinct worships and religions
among the Israelites; that of Bacchus-worship under the mask of
Jehovah, and that of the Chaldean initiates to whom belonged some
of the nazars, the theurgists, and a few of the prophets.
The headquarters of these were always at Babylon and Chaldea,
where two rival schools of Magians can be distinctly shown. Those
who would doubt the statement will have in such a case to account
for the discrepancy between history and Plato, who of all men
of his day was certainly one of the best informed. Speaking of
the Magians, he shows them as instructing the Persian kings of
Zoroaster, as the son or priest of Oromasdes; and yet Darius,
in the inscription at Bihistun, boasts of having restored the
cultus of Ormazd and put down the Magian rites! Evidently there
were two distinct and antagonistic Magian schools. The oldest
and the most esoteric of the two being that which, satisfied with
its unassailable knowledge and secret power, was content to apparently
relinquish her exoteric popularity, and concede her supremacy
into the hands of the reforming Darius. The later Gnostics showed
the same prudent policy by accommodating themselves in every country
to the prevailing religious forms, still secretly adhering to
their own essential doctrines.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Lightfoot," 501.
** Dunlap: "Sod, the Son of the Man," p. x.
*** Jeremiah vii. 29: "Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and
cast it away, and take up a lamentation on high places."
**** Genesis xlix. 26.
***** Nazareth?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 129 THE ARISTAEUS -- EURYDIKE FABLE EXPLAINED.
There is another hypothesis possible, which is that Zero-Ishtar
was the high priest of the Chaldean worship, or Magian hierophant.
When the Aryans of Persia, under Darius Hystaspes, overthrew the
Magian Gomates, and restored the Masdean worship, there
ensued an amalgamation by which the Magian Zoro-astar became the
Zara-tushra of the Vendidad. This was not acceptable
to the other Aryans, who adopted the Vedic religion as distinguished
from that of Avesta. But this is but an hypothesis.
And whatever Moses is now believed to have been, we will demonstrate
that he was an initiate. The Mosaic religion was at best a sun-and-serpent
worship, diluted, perhaps, with some slight monotheistic notions
before the latter were forcibly crammed into the so-called "inspired
Scriptures" by Ezra, at the time he was alleged to have rewritten
the Mosaic books. At all events the Book of Numbers was
a later book; and there the sun-and-serpent worship is as plainly
traceable as in any Pagan story. The tale of the fiery serpents
is an allegory in more than one sense. The "serpents"
were the Levites or Ophites, who were Moses'
body-guard (see Exodus xxxii. 26); and the command of
the "Lord" to Moses to hang the heads of the people
"before the Lord against the sun," which is the emblem
of this Lord, is unequivocal.
The nazars or prophets, as well as the Nazarenes, were an anti-Bacchus
caste, in so far that, in common with all the initiated prophets,
they held to the spirit of the symbolical religions and offered
a strong opposition to the idolatrous and exoteric practices of
the dead letter. Hence, the frequent stoning of the prophets by
the populace and under the leadership of those priests who made
a profitable living out of the popular superstitions. Otfried
Muller shows how much the Orphic Mysteries differed from the popular
rites of Bacchus,* although the Orphikoi are known
to have followed the worship of Bacchus. The system of the purest
morality and of a severe asceticism promulgated in the teachings
of Orpheus, and so strictly adhered to by his votaries, are incompatible
with the lasciviousness and gross immorality of the popular rites.
The fable of Aristaeus pursuing Eurydike into the woods where
a serpent occasions her death, is a very plain allegory, which
was in part explained at the earliest times. Aristaeus is brutal
power, pursuing Eurydike, the esoteric doctrine, into the
woods where the serpent (emblem of every sun-god, and worshipped
under its grosser aspect even by the Jews) kills her; i.e.,
forces truth to become still more esoteric, and seek shelter in
the Underworld, which is not the hell of our theologians. Moreover,
the fate of Orpheus, torn to pieces by the Bacchantes, is
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Otfried Muller: "Historical Greek Literature," pp.
230-240.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 130 ISIS UNVEILED.
another allegory to show that the gross and popular rites are
always more welcome than divine but simple truth, and proves the
great difference that must have existed between the esoteric and
the popular worship. As the poems of both Orpheus and Musaeus
were said to have been lost since the earliest ages, so that neither
Plato nor Aristotle recognized anything authentic in the poems
extant in their time, it is difficult to say with precision what
constituted their peculiar rites. Still we have the oral tradition,
and every inference to draw therefrom; and this tradition points
to Orpheus as having brought his doctrines from India. As one
whose religion was that of the oldest Magians -- hence, that to
which belonged the initiates of all countries, beginning with
Moses, the "sons of the Prophets," and the ascetic nazars
(who must not be confounded with those against whom thundered
Hosea and other prophets) to the Essenes. This latter sect were
Pythagoreans before they rather degenerated, than became perfected
in their system by the Buddhist missionaries, whom Pliny tells
us established themselves on the shores of the Dead Sea, ages
before his time, "per saeculorum millia."
But if, on the one hand, these Buddhist monks were the first
to establish monastic communities and inculcate the strict observance
of dogmatic conventual rule, on the other they were also the first
to enforce and popularize those stern virtues so exemplified by
Sakya-muni, and which were previously exercised only in isolated
cases of well-known philosophers and their followers; virtues
preached two or three centuries later by Jesus, practiced by a
few Christian ascetics, and gradually abandoned, and even entirely
forgotten by the Christian Church.
The initiated nazars had ever held to this rule, which
had to be followed before them by the adepts of every age; and
the disciples of John were but a dissenting branch of the Essenes.
Therefore, we cannot well confound them with all the nazars spoken
of in the Old Testament, and who are accused by Hosea
with having separated or consecrated themselves to Bosheth;
which implied the greatest possible abomination. To infer, as
some critics and theologians do, that it means to separate one's
self to chastity or continence, is either to advisedly
pervert the true meaning, or to be totally ignorant of the Hebrew
language. The eleventh verse of the first chapter of Micah half
explains the word in its veiled translation: "Pass ye away,
thou inhabitant of Saphir, etc.," and in the original text
the word is Bosheth. Certainly neither Baal, nor Iahoh
Kadosh, with his Kadeshim, was a god of ascetic virtue,
albeit the Septuaginta terms them, as well as the galli
-- the perfected priests -- [[tetelesmenous]], the
initiated and the consecrated.*
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See "Movers," p. 683.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 131 THE NAZARS AND NAZIREATES.
The great Sod of the Kadeshim, translated in
Psalm lxxxix. 7, by "assembly of the saints,"
was anything but a mystery of the "sanctified"
in the sense given to the latter word by Webster.
The Nazireate sect existed long before the laws of Moses, and
originated among people most inimical to the "chosen"
ones of Israel, viz., the people of Galilee, the ancient olla-podrida
of idolatrous nations, where was built Nazara, the present
Nazareth. It is in Nazara that the ancient Nazoria or Nazireates
held their "Mysteries of Life" or "assemblies,"
as the word now stands in the translation,* which were but the
secret mysteries of initiation,** utterly distinct in their practical
form from the popular Mysteries which were held at Byblus in honor
of Adonis. While the true initiates of the ostracised
Galilee were worshipping the true God and enjoying transcendent
visions, what were the "chosen" ones about? Ezekiel
tells it to us (chap. viii) when, in describing what he saw, he
says that the form of a hand took him by a lock of his
head and transported him from Chaldea unto Jerusalem. "And
there stood seventy men of the senators of the house of Israel.
. . . 'Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients . . . do in
the dark?' " inquires the "Lord." "At the
door of the house of the Lord . . . behold there sat women weeping
for Tammuz" (Adonis). We really cannot suppose that the Pagans
have ever surpassed the "chosen" people in certain shameful
abominations of which their own prophets accuse them
so profusely. To admit this truth, one hardly needs even to be
a Hebrew scholar; let him read the Bible in English and
meditate over the language of the "holy" prophets.
This accounts for the hatred of the later Nazarenes for the orthodox
Jews -- followers of the exoteric Mosaic Law -- who are
ever taunted by this sect with being the worshippers of Iurbo-Adunai,
or Lord Bacchus. Passing under the disguise of Adoni-Iachoh
(original text, Isaiah lxi. 1), Iahoh and
Lord Sabaoth, the Baal-Adonis, or Bacchus, worshipped in the groves
and public sods or Mysteries, under the polishing hand
of Ezra becomes finally the later-vowelled Adonai of the Massorah
-- the One and Supreme God of the Christians!
"Thou shalt not worship the Sun who is named Adunai,"
says the Codex of the Nazarenes; "whose name is
also Kadush*** and El-El. This Adunai will elect
to himself a nation and congregate in crowds (his worship
will be exoteric) . . . Jerusalem will become the refuge and city
of the Abortive, who shall perfect themselves (circumcise)
with a sword . . . and shall adore Adunai."****
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Codex Nazaraeus," ii., 305.
** See Lucian: "De Syria Dea."
*** See Psalm lxxxix. 18.
**** "Codex Nazaraeus," i. 47.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 132 ISIS UNVEILED.
The oldest Nazarenes, who were the descendants of the Scripture
nazars, and whose last prominent leader was John the
Baptist, although never very orthodox in the sight of the scribes
and Pharisees of Jerusalem were, nevertheless, respected and left
unmolested. Even Herod "feared the multitude" because
they regarded John as a prophet (Matthew xiv. 5).
But the followers of Jesus evidently adhered to a sect which
became a still more exasperating thorn in their side. It appeared
as a heresy within another heresy; for while the nazars
of the olden times, the "Sons of the Prophets," were
Chaldean kabalists, the adepts of the new dissenting sect showed
themselves reformers and innovators from the first. The great
similitude traced by some critics between the rites and observances
of the earliest Christians and those of the Essenes may be accounted
for without the slightest difficulty. The Essenes, as we remarked
just now, were the converts of Buddhist missionaries who had overrun
Egypt, Greece, and even Judea at one time, since the reign of
Asoka the zealous propagandist; and while it is evidently to the
Essenes that belongs the honor of having had the Nazarene reformer,
Jesus, as a pupil, still the latter is found disagreeing with
his early teachers on several questions of formal observance.
He cannot strictly be called an Essene, for reasons which we will
indicate further on, neither was he a nazar, or Nazaria
of the older sect. What Jesus was, may be found in the
Codex Nazaraeus, in the unjust accusations of the Bardesanian
Gnostics.
"Jesu is Nebu, the false Messiah, the destroyer
of the old orthodox religion," says the Codex.*
He is the founder of the sect of the new nazars, and, as
the words clearly imply, a follower of the Buddhist doctrine.
In Hebrew the word naba means to speak of inspiration;
and 
is nebo, a
god of wisdom. But Nebo is also Mercury, and Mercury
is Buddha in the Hindu monogram of planets. Moreover, we
find the Talmudists holding that Jesus was inspired by the genius
of Mercury.**
The Nazarene reformer had undoubtedly belonged to one of these
sects; though, perhaps, it would be next to impossible to decide
absolutely which. But what is self-evident is that he preached
the philosophy of Buddha-Sakyamuni. Denounced by the later prophets,
cursed by the Sanhedrim, the nazars -- they were confounded with
others of that name "who separated themselves unto that shame,"***
they were secretly, if not openly persecuted by the orthodox synagogue.
It be-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Ibid.; Norberg: "Onomasticon," 74.
** Alph. de Spire: "Fortalicium Fidei," ii., 2.
*** Hosea ix. 10.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 133 BLUNDERS OF THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS.
comes clear why Jesus was treated with such contempt from the
first, and deprecatingly called "the Galilean." Nathaniel
inquires -- "Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?"
(John i. 46) at the very beginning of his career; and
merely because he knows him to be a nazar. Does not this
clearly hint, that even the older nazars were not really Hebrew
religionists, but rather a class of Chaldean theurgists? Besides,
as the New Testament is noted for its mistranslations
and transparent falsifications of texts, we may justly suspect
that the word Nazareth was substituted for that of nasaria,
or nozari. That it originally read "Can any good thing
come from a nozari, or Nazarene"; a follower of St. John
the Baptist, with whom we see him associating from his first appearance
on the stage of action, after having been lost sight of for a
period of nearly twenty years. The blunders of the Old Testament
are as nothing to those of the gospels. Nothing
shows better than these self-evident contradictions the system
of pious fraud upon which the super-structure of the Messiahship
rests. "This is Elias which was for to come,"
says Matthew of John the Baptist, thus forcing an ancient kabalistic
tradition into the frame of evidence (xi. 14). But when addressing
the Baptist himself, they ask him (John i. 21),
"Art thou Elias?" "And he saith I am not"!
Which knew best -- John or his biographer? And which is divine
revelation?
The motive of Jesus was evidently like that of Gautama-Buddha,
to benefit humanity at large by producing a religious reform which
should give it a religion of pure ethics; the true knowledge of
God and nature having remained until then solely in the hands
of the esoteric sects, and their adepts. As Jesus used oil
and the Essenes never used aught but pure water,* he cannot be
called a strict Essene. On the other hand, the Essenes were also
"set apart"; they were healers (assaya)
and dwelt in the desert as all ascetics did.
But although he did not abstain from wine he could have remained
a Nazarene all the same. For in chapter vi. of Numbers, we
see that after the priest has waved a part of the hair of a Nazorite
for a wave-offering before the Lord, "after that a Nazarene
may drink wine" (v. 20). The bitter denunciation by the reformer
of the people who would be satisfied with nothing is worded in
the following exclamation: "John came neither eating nor
drinking and they say: 'He hath a devil.' . . . The Son of Man
came eating and drinking, and they say: 'Behold a man gluttonous
and a wine-bibber.' " And yet he was an Essene and Nazarene,
for we not only find him sending a message to Herod, to say that
he was one of those who cast out demons, and who performed
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "The Essenes considered oil as a defilement," says
Josephus: "Wars," ii., p. 7.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 134 ISIS UNVEILED.
cures, but actually calling himself a prophet and declaring himself
equal to the other prophets.*
The author of Sod shows Matthew trying to connect the
appellation of Nazarene with a prophecy,** and inquires "Why
then does Matthew state that the prophet said he should be called
Nazaria?" Simply "because he belonged
to that sect, and a prophecy would confirm his claims to the Messiahship.
. . . Now it does not appear that the prophets anywhere state
that the Messiah will be called a Nazarene."***
The fact alone that Matthew tries in the last verse of chapter
ii. to strengthen his claim that Jesus dwelt in Nazareth merely
to fulfil a prophecy, does more than weaken the argument,
it upsets it entirely; for the first two chapters have sufficiently
been proved later forgeries.
Baptism is one of the oldest rites and was practiced by all the
nations in their Mysteries, as sacred ablutions. Dunlap seems
to derive the name of the nazars from nazah, sprinkling;
Bahak-Zivo is the genius who called the world into existence****
out of the "dark water," say the Nazarenes; and Richardson's
Persian, Arabic, and English Lexicon asserts that the
word Bahak means "raining." But the Bahak-Zivo
of the Nazarenes cannot be traced so easily to Bacchus, who "was
the rain-god," for the nazars were the greatest opponents
of Bacchus-worship. "Bacchus is brought up by the Hyades,
the rain-nymphs," says Preller;***** who shows, furthermore,
that****** at the conclusion of the religious Mysteries, the priests
baptized (washed) their monuments and anointed them with oil.
All this is but a very indirect proof. The Jordan baptism need
not be shown a substitution for the exoteric Bacchic
rites and the libations in honor of Adonis or Adoni -- whom the
Nazarenes abhorred -- in order to prove it to have been a sect
sprung from the "Mysteries" of the "Secret Doctrine";
and their rites can by no means be confounded with those of the
Pagan populace, who had simply fallen into the idolatrous and
unreasoning faith of all plebeian multitudes. John was the prophet
of these Nazarenes, and in Galilee he was termed "the Saviour,"
but he was not the founder of that sect which derived its tradition
from the remotest Chaldeo-Akkadian theurgy.
"The early plebeian Israelites were Canaanites and Phoenicians,
with
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Luke xiii. 32.
** Matthew ii. We must bear in mind that the Gospel according
to Matthew in the New Testament is not the original Gospel of
the apostle of that name. The authentic Evangel was for centuries
in the possession of the Nazarenes and the Ebionites, as we show
further on the admission of St. Jerome himself, who confesses
that he had to ask permission of the Nazarenes to translate
it.
*** Dunlap: "Sod, the Son of the Man."
**** "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. ii., p. 233.
***** Preller: vol. i., p. 415.
****** Ibid., vol. i., p. 490.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 135 VARIOUS MODES OF BAPTISM.
the same worship of the Phallic gods -- Bacchus, Baal or Adon,
Iacchos -- Iao or Jehovah"; but even among them there had
always been a class of initiated adepts. Later, the character
of this plebe was modified by Assyrian conquests; and, finally,
the Persian colonizations superimposed the Pharisean and Eastern
ideas and usages, from which the Old Testament and
the Mosaic institutes were derived. The Asmonean priest-kings
promulgated the canon of the Old Testament in contradistinction
to the Apocrypha or Secret Books of the Alexandrian Jews
-- kabalists.* Till John Hyrcanus they were Asideans (Chasidim)
and Pharisees (Parsees), but then they became Sadducees or Zadokites
-- asserters of sacerdotal rule as contradistinguished from rabbinical.
The Pharisees were lenient and intellectual, the Sadducees, bigoted
and cruel.
Says the Codex: "John, son of the Aba-Saba-Zacharia,
conceived by his mother Anasabet in her hundredth year,
had baptized for forty-two years** when Jesu
Messias came to the Jordan to be baptized with John's baptism.
. . . But he will pervert John's doctrine, changing the
baptism of the Jordan, and perverting the sayings of justice."***
The baptism was changed from water to that of the Holy
Ghost, undoubtedly in consequence of the ever-dominant idea of
the Fathers to institute a reform, and make the Christians distinct
from St. John's Nazarenes, the Nabatheans and Ebionites, in order
to make room for new dogmas. Not only do the Synoptics tell us
that Jesus was baptizing the same as John, but John's own disciples
complained of it, though surely Jesus cannot be accused of following
a purely Bacchic rite. The parenthesis in verse 2d of John iv.,
" . . . though Jesus himself baptized not," is so clumsy
as to show upon its face that it is an interpolation, Matthew
makes John say that he that should come after him would not baptize
them with water "but with the Holy Ghost and fire."
Mark, Luke, and John corroborate these words. Water, fire, and
spirit, or Holy Ghost, have all their origin in India, as we will
show.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The word Apocrypha was very erroneously adopted as doubtful
and spurious. The word means hidden and secret; but
that which is secret may be often more true than that which is
revealed.
** The statement, if reliable, would show that Jesus was between
fifty and sixty years old when baptized; for the Gospels make
him but a few months younger than John. The kabalists say that
Jesus was over forty years old when first appearing at the gates
of Jerusalem. The present copy of the "Codex Nazaraeus"
is dated in the year 1042, but Dunlap finds in Irenaeus (2d century)
quotations from and ample references to this book. "The basis
of the material common to Irenaeus and the 'Codex Nazaraeus' must
be at least as early as the first century," says the author
in his preface to "Sod, the Son of the Man," p. i.
*** "Codex Nazaraeus," vol. i., p. 109; Dunlap: Ibid.,
xxiv.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 136 ISIS UNVEILED.
Now there is one very strange peculiarity about this sentence.
It is flatly denied in Acts xix. 2-5. Apollos, a Jew
of Alexandria, belonged to the sect of St. John's disciples; he
had been baptized, and instructed others in the doctrines of the
Baptist. And yet when Paul, cleverly profiting by his absence
at Corinth, finds certain disciples of Apollos' at Ephesus, and
asks them whether they received the Holy Ghost, he is
naively answered, "We have not so much as heard whether there
be any Holy Ghost!" "Unto what then were you baptized?"
he inquires. "Unto John's baptism," they
say. Then Paul is made to repeat the words attributed to John
by the Synoptics; and these men "were baptized in the name
of the Lord Jesus," exhibiting, moreover, at the same instant,
the usual polyglot gift which accompanies the descent of the Holy
Ghost.
How then? St. John the Baptist, who is called the "precursor,"
that "the prophecy might be fulfilled," the great prophet
and martyr, whose words ought to have had such an importance in
the eyes of his disciples, announces the "Holy Ghost"
to his listeners; causes crowds to assemble on the shores of the
Jordan, where, at the great ceremony of Christ's baptism, the
promised "Holy Ghost" appears within the opened heavens,
and the multitude hears the voice, and yet there are disciples
of St. John who have "never so much as heard whether
there be any Holy Ghost"!
Verily the disciples who wrote the Codex Nazaraeus were
right. Only it is not Jesus himself, but those who came after
him, and who concocted the Bible to suit themselves,
that "perverted John's doctrine, changed the
baptism of the Jordan, and perverted the sayings of justice."
It is useless to object that the present Codex was written
centuries after the direct apostles of John preached. So were
our Gospels. When this astounding interview of Paul with
the "Baptists" took place, Bardesanes had not yet appeared
among them, and the sect was not considered a "heresy."
Moreover, we are enabled to judge how little St. John's promise
of the "Holy Ghost," and the appearance of the "Ghost"
himself, had affected his disicples, by the displeasure shown
by them toward the disciples of Jesus, and the kind of rivalry
manifested from the first. Nay, so little is John himself sure
of the identity of Jesus with the expected Messiah, that after
the famous scene of the baptism at the Jordan, and the oral assurance
by the Holy Ghost Himself that "This is my beloved
Son" (Matthew iii. 17), we find "the
Precursor," in Matthew xi., sending two of his disciples
from his prison to inquire of Jesus: "Art thou he that
should come, or do we look for another"!!
This flagrant contradiction alone ought to have long ago satisfied
reasonable minds as to the putative divine inspiration of the
New Testa-
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 137 JESUS A REFORMING NAZARIA.
ment. But we may offer another question: If baptism is
the sign of regeneration, and an ordinance instituted by Jesus,
why do not Christians now baptize as Jesus is here represented
as doing, "with the Holy Ghost and with fire," instead
of following the custom of the Nazarenes? In making these palpable
interpolations, what possible motive could Irenaeus have had except
to cause people to believe that the appellation of Nazarene, which
Jesus bore, came only from his father's residence at Nazareth,
and not from his affiliation with the sect of Nazaria, the
healers?
This expedient of Irenaeus was a most unfortunate one, for from
time immemorial the prophets of old had been thundering against
the baptism of fire as practiced by their neighbors, which imparted
the "spirit of prophecy," or the Holy Ghost. But the
case was desperate; the Christians were universally called Nazoraens
and Iessaens (according to Epiphanius), and Christ simply ranked
as a Jewish prophet and healer -- so self-styled, so accepted
by his own disciples, and so regarded by their followers. In such
a state of things there was no room for either a new hierarchy
or a new God-head; and since Irenaeus had undertaken the business
of manufacturing both, he had to put together such materials as
were available, and fill the gaps with his own fertile inventions.
To assure ourselves that Jesus was a true Nazarene -- albeit with
ideas of a new reform -- we must not search for the proof in the
translated Gospels, but in such original versions as
are accessible. Tischendorf, in his translation from the Greek
of Luke iv. 34, has it "Iesou Nazarene"; and
in the Syriac it reads "Iasoua, thou Nazaria."
Thus, if we take in account all that is puzzling and incomprehensible
in the four Gospels, revised and corrected as they now
stand, we shall easily see for ourselves that the true, original
Christianity, such as was preached by Jesus, is to be found only
in the so-called Syrian heresies. Only from them can we extract
any clear notions about what was primitive Christianity. Such
was the faith of Paul, when Tertullus the orator accused the apostle
before the governor Felix. What he complained of was that they
had found "that man a mover of sedition . . . a ringleader
of the sect of the Nazarenes";* and, while
Paul denies every other accusation, he confesses that "after
the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my
fathers."** This confession is a whole revelation.
It shows: 1, that Paul admitted belonging to the sect of the Nazarenes;
2, that he worshipped the God of his fathers, not the
trinitarian Christian God, of whom he knows nothing, and who was
not invented until after his death; and, 3, that this unlucky
confession satisfactorily explains why the treatise, Acts
of the Apostles, together with John's Revelation, which
at one
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Acts xxiv. 5.
** Ibid., 14.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 138 ISIS UNVEILED.
period was utterly rejected, were kept out of the canon of the
New Testament for such a length of time.
At Byblos, the neophytes as well as the hierophants were, after
participating in the Mysteries, obliged to fast and remain in
solitude for some time. There was strict fasting and preparation
before as well as after the Bacchic, Adonian, and Eleusinian orgies;
and Herodotus hints, with fear and veneration about the LAKE of
Bacchus, in which "they (the priests) made at night exhibitions
of his life and sufferings."* In the Mithraic sacrifices,
during the initiation, a preliminary scene of death was simulated
by the neophyte, and it preceded the scene showing him himself
"being born again by the rite of baptism."
A portion of this ceremony is still enacted in the present
day by the Masons, when the neophyte, as the Grand Master Hiram
Abiff, lies dead, and is raised by the strong grip of the lion's
paw.
The priests were circumcised. The neophyte could not be initiated
without having been present at the solemn Mysteries of the LAKE.
The Nazarenes were baptized in the Jordan; and could not be baptized
elsewhere; they were also circumcised, and had to fast before
as well as after the purification by baptism. Jesus is said to
have fasted in the wilderness for forty days, immediately after
his baptism. To the present day, there is outside every temple
in India, a lake, stream, or a reservoir full of holy water, in
which the Brahmans and the Hindu devotees bathe daily. Such places
of consecrated water are necessary to every temple. The bathing
festivals, or baptismal rites, occur twice every year;
in October and April. Each lasts ten days; and, as in ancient
Egypt and Greece, the statues of their gods, goddesses, and idols
are immersed in water by the priests; the object of the ceremony
being to wash away from them the sins of their worshippers which
they have taken upon themselves, and which pollute them, until
washed off by holy water. During the Aratty, the bathing ceremony,
the principal god of every temple is carried in solemn procession
to be baptized in the sea. The Brahman priests, carrying the sacred
images, are followed generally by the Maharajah -- barefoot, and
nearly naked. Three times the priests enter the sea;
the third time they carry with them the whole of the images. Holding
them up with prayers repeated by the whole congregation, the Chief
Priest plunges the statues of the gods thrice in the
name of the mystic trinity, into the water; after which
they are purified.** The Orphic hymn calls water the
greatest purifier of men and gods.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Herodotus," ii., p. 170.
** The Hindu High Pontiff -- the Chief of the Namburis, who lives
in the Cochin Land, is generally present during these festivals
of "Holy Water" immersions. He travels sometimes to
very great distances to preside over the ceremony.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 139 ADONIS WORSHIP AT BETHLEHEM.
Our Nazarene sect is known to have existed some 150 years B.C.,
and to have lived on the banks of the Jordan, and on the eastern
shore of the Dead Sea, according to Pliny and Josephus.* But in
King's Gnostics, we find quoted another statement by
Josephus from verse 13, which says that the Essenes had been established
on the shores of the Dead Sea "for thousands of ages"
before Pliny's time.**
According to Munk the term "Galilean" is nearly synonymous
with that of "Nazarene"; furthermore, he shows the relations
of the former with the Gentiles as very intimate. The populace
had probably gradually adopted, in their constant intercourse,
certain rites and modes of worship of the Pagans; and the scorn
with which the Galileans were regarded by the orthodox Jews is
attributed by him to the same cause. Their friendly relations
had certainly led them, at a later period, to adopt the "Adonia,"
or the sacred rites over the body of the lamented Adonis, as we
find Jerome fairly lamenting this circumstance. "Over Bethlehem,"
he says, "the grove of Thammuz, that is of Adonis, was casting
its shadow! And in the GROTTO where formerly the infant Jesus
cried, the lover of Venus was being mourned."***
It was after the rebellion of Bar Cochba, that the Roman Emperor
established the Mysteries of Adonis at the Sacred Cave in Bethlehem;
and who knows but this was the petra or rock-temple on
which the church was built? The Boar of Adonis was placed above
the gate of Jerusalem which looked toward Bethlehem.
Munk says that the "Nazireate was an institution established
before the laws of Musah."**** This is evident; as we find
this sect not only mentioned but minutely described in Numbers
(chap. vi.). In the commandment given in this chapter to
Moses by the "Lord," it is easy to recognize the rites
and laws of the Priests of Adonis.***** The abstinence and purity
strictly prescribed in both sects are identical. Both allowed
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Ant. Jud.," xiii., p. 9; xv., p., 10.
** King thinks it a great exaggeration and is inclined to believe
that these Essenes, who were most undoubtedly Buddhist monks,
were "merely a continuation of the associations known as
Sons of the Prophets." "The Gnostics and their Remains,"
p. 22.
*** St. Jerome: "Epistles," p. 49 (ad. Poulmam); see
Dunlap's "Spirit-History," p. 218.
**** "Munk," p. 169.
***** Bacchus and Ceres -- or the mystical Wine and
Bread, used during the Mysteries, become, in the "Adonia,"
Adonis and Venus. Movers shows that "Iao is Bacchus,"
p. 550; and his authority is Lydus de Mens (38-74); "Spir.
Hist.," p. 195. Iao is a Sun-god and the Jewish
Jehovah; the intellectual or Central Sun of the kabalists. See
Julian in Proclus. But this "Iao"
is not the Mystery-god.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 140 ISIS UNVEILED.
their hair to grow long* as the Hindu coenobites
and fakirs do to this day, while other castes shave their hair
and abstain on certain days from wine. The prophet Elijah, a Nazarene,
is described in 2 Kings, and by Josephus as "a hairy
man girt with a girdle of leather."** And John the Baptist
and Jesus are both represented as wearing very long hair.*** John
is "clothed with camel's hair" and wearing a girdle
of hide, and Jesus in a long garment "without any seams"
. . . "and very white, like snow," says Mark; the very
dress worn by the Nazarene Priests and the Pythagorean and Buddhist
Essenes, as described by Josephus.
If we carefully trace the terms nazar, and nazaret,
throughout the best known works of ancient writers, we will meet
them in connection with "Pagan" as well as Jewish adepts.
Thus, Alexander Polyhistor says of Pythagoras that he was a disciple
of the Assyrian Nazaret, whom some suppose to be Ezekiel.
Diogenes Laertius states most positively that Pythagoras, after
being initiated into all the Mysteries of the Greeks and barbarians,
"went into Egypt and afterward visited the Chaldeans and
Magi"; and Apuleius maintains that it was Zoroaster who instructed
Pythagoras.
Were we to suggest that the Hebrew nazars, the railing
prophets of the "Lord," had been initiated into the
so-called Pagan mysteries, and belonged (or at least a majority
of them) to the same Lodge or circle of adepts as those who were
considered idolaters; that their "circle of prophets"
was but a collateral branch of a secret association, which we
may well term "international," what a visitation of
Christian wrath would we not incur! And still, the case looks
strangely suspicious.
Let us first recall to our mind that which Ammianus Marcellinus,
and other historians relate of Darius Hystaspes. The latter, penetrating
into Upper India (Bactriana), learned pure rites, and stellar
and cosmical sciences from Brahmans, and communicated them to
the Magi. Now Hystaspes is shown in history to have crushed the
Magi; and introduced -- or rather forced upon them -- the pure
religion of Zoroaster, that of Ormazd. How is it, then, that an
inscription is found on the tomb
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Josephus: "Ant. Jud.," iv., p. 4.
** Ibid., ix.; 2 Kings, i. 8.
*** In relation to the well-known fact of Jesus wearing his hair
long, and being always so represented, it becomes quite startling
to find how little the unknown Editor of the "Acts"
knew about the Apostle Paul, since he makes him say in 1 Corinthians
xi. 14, "Doth not Nature itself teach you, that if a man
have long hair, it is a shame unto him?" Certainly
Paul could never have said such a thing! Therefore, if the passage
is genuine, Paul knew nothing of the prophet whose doctrines he
had embraced and for which he died; and if false -- how much more
reliable is what remains?
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 141 WHAT PHILOLOGY PROVES ABOUT ZOROASTER.
of Darius, stating that he was "teacher and hierophant of
magic, or Magianism?" Evidently there must be some historical
mistake, and history confesses it. In this imbroglio of names,
Zoroaster, the teacher and instructor of Pythagoras, can be neither
the Zoroaster nor Zarathustra who instituted sun-worship among
the Parsees; nor he who appeared at the court of Gushtasp (Hystaspes)
the alleged father of Darius; nor, again, the Zoroaster who placed
his magi above the kings themselves. The oldest Zoroastrian scripture
-- the Avesta -- does not betray the slightest traces
of the reformer having ever been acquainted with any of the nations
that subsequently adopted his mode of worship. He seems utterly
ignorant of the neighbors of Western Iran, the Medes, the Assyrians,
the Persians, and others. If we had no other evidences of the
great antiquity of the Zoroastrian religion than the discovery
of the blunder committed by some scholars in our own century,
who regarded King Vistaspa (Gushtasp) as identical with the father
of Darius, whereas the Persian tradition points directly to Vistaspa
as to the last of the line of Kaianian princes who ruled in Bactriana,
it ought to be enough, for the Assyrian conquest of Bactriana
took place 1,200 years B.C.*
Therefore, it is but natural that we should see in the appellation
of Zoroaster not a name but a generic term, whose significance
must be left to philologists to agree upon. Guru, in
Sanscrit, is a spiritual teacher; and as Zuruastara means in the
same language he who worships the sun, why is it impossible, that
by some natural change of language, due to the great number of
different nations which were converted to the sun-worship, the
word guru-astara, the spiritual teacher of sun-worship,
so closely resembling the name of the founder of this religion,
became gradually transformed in its primal form of Zuryastara
or Zoroaster? The opinion of the kabalists is that there was but
one Zarathustra and many guruastars or spiritual teachers,
and that one such guru, or rather huru-aster,
as he is called in the old manuscripts, was the instructor of
Pythagoras. To philology and our readers we leave the explanation
for what it is worth. Personally we believe in it, as we credit
on this subject kabalistic tradition far more than the explanation
of scientists, no two of whom have been able to agree up to the
present year.
Aristotle states that Zoroaster lived 6,000 years before Christ;
Hermippus of Alexandria, who is said to have read the genuine
books of the Zoroastrians, although Alexander the Great is accused
of having destroyed
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Max Muller has sufficiently proved the case in his lecture on
the "Zend-Avesta." He calls Gushtasp "the mythical
pupil of Zoroaster." Mythical, perhaps, only because the
period in which he lived and learned with Zoroaster is too remote
to allow our modern science to speculate upon it with any certainty.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 142 ISIS UNVEILED.
them, shows Zoroaster as the pupil of Azonak (Azon-ach, or the
Azon-God) and as having lived 5,000 years before the fall of Troy.
Er or Eros, whose vision is related by Plato in the Republic,
is declared by Clement to have been Zordusth. While the Magus
who dethroned Cambyses was a Mede, and Darius proclaims that he
put down the Magian rites to establish those of Ormazd, Xanthus
of Lydia declares Zoroaster to have been the chief of the Magi!
Which of them is wrong? or are they all right, and only the modern
interpreters fail to explain the difference between the Reformer
and his apostles and followers? This blundering of our commentators
reminds us of that of Suetonius, who mistook the Christians for
one Christos, or Crestos, as he spells it, and assured
his readers that Claudius banished him for the disturbance he
made among the Jews.
Finally, and to return again to the nazars, Zaratus is
mentioned by Pliny in the following words: "He was Zoroaster
and Nazaret." As Zoroaster is
called princeps of the Magi, and nazar signifies
separated or consecrated, is it not a Hebrew rendering of mag?
Volney believes so. The Persian word Na-zaruan means
millions of years, and refers to the Chaldean "Ancient of
Days." Hence the name of the Nazars or Nazarenes, who were
consecrated to the service of the Supreme one God, the kabalistic
En-Soph, or the Ancient of Days, the "Aged of the aged."
But the word nazar may also be found in India. In Hindustani
nazar is sight, internal or supernatural vision;
nazar band-i means fascination, a mesmeric or magical spell;
and nazaran is the word for sightseeing or vision.
Professor Wilder thinks that as the word Zeruana is nowhere
to be found in the Avesta, but only in the later Parsi
books, it came from the Magians, who composed the Persian sacred
caste in the Sassan period, but were originally Assyrians. "Turan,
of the poets," he says, "I consider to be Aturia, or
Assyria; and that Zohak (Az-dahaka, Dei-okes, or Astyages), the
Serpent-king, was Assyrian, Median, and Babylonian -- when those
countries were united."
This opinion does not, however, in the least implicate our statement
that the secret doctrines of the Magi, of the pre-Vedic Buddhists,
of the hierophants of the Egyptian Thoth or Hermes, and of the
adepts of whatever age and nationality, including the Chaldean
kabalists and the Jewish nazars, were identical from
the beginning. When we use the term Buddhists, we do
not mean to imply by it either the exoteric Buddhism instituted
by the followers of Gautama-Buddha, nor the modern Buddhistic
religion, but the secret philosophy of Sakyamuni, which in its
essence is certainly identical with the ancient wisdom-religion
of the sanctuary, the pre-Vedic Brahmanism. The "schism"
of Zoroaster, as it is called, is a
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 143 ZARATHUSTRA AND THE ZOROASTRIANS.
direct proof of it. For it was no schism, strictly speaking,
but merely a partially-public exposition of strictly monotheistic
religious truths, hitherto taught only in the sanctuaries, and
that he had learned from the Brahmans. Zoroaster, the primeval
institutor of sun-worship, cannot be called the founder of the
dualistic system; neither was he the first to teach the unity
of God, for he taught but what he had learned himself with the
Brahmans. And that Zarathustra and his followers, the Zoroastrians,
"had been settled in India before they immigrated into Persia,"
is also proved by Max Muller. "That the Zoroastrians and
their ancestors started from India," he says, "during
the Vaidik period, can be proved as distinctly as that the inhabitants
of Massilia started from Greece. . . . Many of the gods of the
Zoroastrians come out . . . as mere reflections and deflections
of the primitive and authentic gods of the Veda."*
If, now, we can prove -- and we can do so on the evidence of the
Kabala and the oldest traditions of the wisdom-religion,
the philosophy of the old sanctuaries -- that all these gods,
whether of the Zoroastrians or of the Veda, are but so
many personated occult powers of nature, the faithful
servants of the adepts of secret wisdom -- Magic -- we are on
secure ground.
Thus, whether we say that Kabalism and Gnosticism proceeded from
Masdeanism or Zoroastrianism, it is all the same, unless we meant
the exoteric worship -- which we do not. Likewise, and
in this sense, we may echo King, the author of the Gnostics,
and several other archaeologists, and maintain that both
the former proceeded from Buddhism, at once the simplest
and most satisfying of philosophies, and which resulted in one
of the purest religions of the world. It is only a matter of chronology
to decide which of these religions, differing but in external
form, is the oldest, therefore the least adulterated. But even
this bears but very indirectly, if at all, on the subject we treat
of. Already some time before our era, the adepts, except in India,
had ceased to congregate in large communities; but whether among
the Essenes, or the Neo-platonists, or, again, among the innumerable
struggling sects born but to die, the same doctrines, identical
in substance and spirit, if not always in form, are encountered.
By Buddhism, therefore, we mean that religion signifying
literally the doctrine of wisdom, and which by many ages antedates
the metaphysical philosophy of Siddhartha Sakyamuni.
After nineteen centuries of enforced eliminations from the canonical
books of every sentence which might put the investigator on the
true path, it has become very difficult to show, to the satisfaction
of exact science, that the "Pagan" worshippers of Adonis,
their neighbors, the Naza-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Max Muller: "Zend Avesta," 83.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 144 ISIS UNVEILED.
renes, and the Pythagorean Essenes, the healing Therapeutes,*
the Ebionites, and other sects, were all, with very slight differences,
followers of the ancient theurgic Mysteries. And yet by analogy
and a close study of the hidden sense of their rites
and customs, we can trace their kinship.
It was given to a contemporary of Jesus to become the means of
pointing out to posterity, by his interpretation of the oldest
literature of Israel, how deeply the kabalistic philosophy agreed
in its esoterism with that of the profoundest Greek thinkers.
This contemporary, an ardent disciple of Plato and Aristotle,
was Philo Judaeus. While explaining the Mosaic books according
to a purely kabalistic method, he is the famous Hebrew writer
whom Kingsley calls the Father of New Platonism.
It is evident that Philo's Therapeutes are a branch of the Essenes.
Their name indicates it -- [[Essaioc]], Asaya, physician.
Hence, the contradictions, forgeries, and other desperate expedients
to reconcile the prophecies of the Jewish canon with the Galilean
nativity and god-ship.
Luke, who was a physician, is designated in the Syriac texts as
Asaia, the Essaian or Essene. Josephus and Philo Judaeus
have sufficiently described this sect to leave no doubt in our
mind that the Nazarene Reformer, after having received his education
in their dwellings in the desert, and been duly initiated in the
Mysteries, preferred the free and independent life of a wandering
Nazaria, and so separated or inazarenized himself
from them, thus becoming a travelling Therapeute, a Nazaria, a
healer. Every Therapeute, before quitting his community, had to
do the same. Both Jesus and St. John the Baptist preached the
end of the Age;** which proves their knowledge of the secret computation
of the priests and kabalists, who with the chiefs of the Essene
communities alone had the secret of the duration of the cycles.
The latter were kabalists and theurgists; "they had their
mystic books, and predicted future events," says
Munk.***
Dunlap, whose personal researches seem to have been quite successful
in that direction, traces the Essenes, Nazarenes, Dositheans,
and some other sects as having all existed before Christ: "They
rejected pleasures, despised riches, loved one another, and
more than other sects, neg-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Philo: "De Vita. Contemp."
** The real meaning of the division into ages is esoteric
and Buddhistic. So little did the uninitiated Christians understand
it that they accepted the words of Jesus literally and
firmly believed that he meant the end of the world. There had
been many prophecies about the forthcoming age. Virgil, in the
fourth Eclogue, mentions the Metatron -- a new offspring, with
whom the iron age shall end and a golden one arise.
*** "Palestine," p. 525, et seq.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 145 THE PYTHAGOREAN UTTERANCES OF JESUS.
lected wedlock, deeming the conquest of the passions to be virtuous,"*
he says.
These are all virtues preached by Jesus; and if we are to take
the gospels as a standard of truth, Christ was a metempsychosist
"or re-incarnationist" -- again like
these same Essenes, whom we see were Pythagoreans in all their
doctrine and habits. Iamblichus asserts that the Samian philosopher
spent a certain time at Carmel with them.** In his discourses
and sermons, Jesus always spoke in parables and used metaphors
with his audience. This habit was again that of the Essenians
and the Nazarenes; the Galileans who dwelt in cities and villages
were never known to use such allegorical language. Indeed, some
of his disciples being Galileans as well as himself, felt even
surprised to find him using with the people such a form of expression.
"Why speakest thou unto them in parables?"*** they often
inquired. "Because, it is given unto you to know the Mysteries
of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given," was
the reply, which was that of an initiate. "Therefore, I speak
unto them in parables; because, they seeing, see not, and hearing,
they hear not, neither do they understand." Moreover, we
find Jesus expressing his thoughts still clearer -- and in sentences
which are purely Pythagorean -- when, during the Sermon on
the Mount, he says:
"Give ye not that which is sacred to the dogs,
Neither cast ye your pearls before swine;
For the swine will tread them under their feet
And the dogs will turn and rend you."
Professor A. Wilder, the editor of Taylor's Eleusinian Mysteries,
observes "a like disposition on the part of Jesus and
Paul to classify their doctrines as esoteric and exoteric, the
Mysteries of the Kingdom of God 'for the apostles,' and 'parables'
for the multitude. 'We speak wisdom,' says Paul, 'among them that
are perfect' (or initiated)."****
In the Eleusinian and other Mysteries the participants were always
divided into two classes, the neophytes and the perfect.
The former were sometimes admitted to the preliminary initiation:
the dramatic performance of Ceres, or the soul, descending to
Hades.***** But it was
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Sod," vol. ii., Preface, p. xi.
** "Vit. Pythag." Munk derives the name of the Iessaens
or Essenes from the Syriac Asaya -- the healers,
or physicians, thus showing their identity with the Egyptian Therapeutae.
"Palestine," p. 515.
*** Matthew xiii. 10.
**** "Eleusinian Mysteries," p. 15.
***** This descent to Hades signified the inevitable fate of each
soul to be united for a time with a terrestrial body. This union,
or dark prospect for the soul to find itself [[Footnote continued
on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 146 ISIS UNVEILED.
given only to the "perfect" to enjoy
and learn the Mysteries of the divine Elysium, the celestial
abode of the blessed; this Elysium being unquestionably the same
as the "Kingdom of Heaven." To contradict or reject
the above, would be merely to shut one's eyes to the truth.
The narrative of the Apostle Paul, in his second Epistle to
the Corinthians (xii. 3, 4), has struck several
scholars, well versed in the descriptions of the mystical rites
of the initiation given by some classics, as alluding most undoubtedly
to the final Epopteia.* "I knew
a certain man -- whether in body or outside of body, I
know not: God knoweth -- who was rapt into Paradise, and
heard things ineffable [[arheta remata]], which it is not
lawful for a man to repeat." These words have
rarely, so far as we know, been regarded by commentators as an
allusion to the beatific visions of an "initiated"
seer. But the phraseology is unequivocal. These things "which
it is not lawful to repeat," are hinted at
in the same words, and the reason for it assigned, is the same
as that which we find repeatedly expressed by Plato, Proclus,
Iamblichus, Herodotus, and other classics. "We speak WISDOM
only among them who are PERFECT," says Paul; the plain and
undeniable translation of the sentence being: "We speak of
the profounder (or final) esoteric doctrines of the Mysteries
(which were denominated wisdom) only among them who are
initiated."** So in relation to the "man
who was rapt into Paradise" -- and who was evidently Paul
himself*** -- the Christian word Paradise having replaced that
of Elysium. To complete the proof, we might recall the words of
Plato, given elsewhere, which show that before an initiate could
see the gods in their purest light, he had to become liberated
from his body; i.e., to separate his astral soul
from it.**** Apuleius also describes his initiation into the Mysteries
in the same way: "I approached the confines of death; and,
having trodden on the threshold of Proserpina, returned, having
been carried through all the elements. In the depths of midnight
I saw the sun glittering with a splendid light, together with
the infernal and supernal gods, and to these divinities
approaching, I paid the tribute of devout adoration."*****
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] imprisoned within the
dark tenement of a body, was considered by all the ancient philosophers
and is even by the modern Buddhists, as a punishment.
* "Eleusinian Mysteries," p. 49, foot-note.
** "The profound or esoteric doctrines of the ancients were
denominated wisdom, and afterward philosophy, and
also the gnosis, or knowledge. They related to the human
soul, its divine parentage, its supposed degradation from its
high estate by becoming connected with "generation"
or the physical world, its onward progress and restoration to
God by regenerations or . . . transmigrations." Ibid, p.
2, foot-note.
*** Cyril of Jerusalem asserts it. See vi. 10.
**** "Phaedrus," 64.
***** "The Golden Ass," xi.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 147 THE KABALISM OF THE APOCALYPSE.
Thus, in common with Pythagoras and other hierophant reformers,
Jesus divided his teachings into exoteric and esoteric. Following
faithfully the Pythagoreo-Essenean ways, he never sat at a meal
without saying "grace." "The priest prays before
his meal," says Josephus, describing the Essenes. Jesus also
divided his followers into "neophytes," "brethren,"
and the "perfect," if we may judge by the difference
he made between them. But his career at least as a public Rabbi,
was of a too short duration to allow him to establish a regular
school of his own; and with the exception, perhaps, of John, it
does not seem that he had initiated any other apostle. The Gnostic
amulets and talismans are mostly the emblems of the apocalyptic
allegories. The "seven vowels" are closely related to
the "seven seals"; and the mystic title Abraxas, partakes
as much of the composition of Shem Hamphirosh, "the
holy word" or ineffable name, as the name called: The word
of God, that "no man knew but he himself,"*
as John expresses it.
It would be difficult to escape from the well-adduced proofs that
the Apocalypse is the production of an initiated kabalist,
when this Revelation presents whole passages taken from
the Books of Enoch and Daniel, which latter
is in itself an abridged imitation of the former; and when, furthermore,
we ascertain that the Ophite Gnostics who rejected the Old
Testament entirely, as "emanating from an inferior
being (Jehovah)," accepted the most ancient prophets, such
as Enoch, and deduced the strongest support from this book for
their religious tenets, the demonstration becomes evident. We
will show further how closely related are all these doctrines.
Besides, there is the history of Domitian's persecutions of magicians
and philosophers, which affords as good a proof as any that John
was generally considered a kabalist. As the apostle was included
among the number, and, moreover, conspicuous, the imperial edict
banished him not only from Rome, but even from the continent.
It was not the Christians whom -- confounding them with the Jews,
as some historians will have it -- the emperor persecuted, but
the astrologers and kabalists.**
The accusations against Jesus of practicing the magic of Egypt
were numerous, and at one time universal, in the towns where he
was known. The Pharisees, as claimed in the Bible, had
been the first to fling it in his
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Apocalypse," xix. 12.
** See Suet. in "Vita. Eutrop.," 7. It is neither cruelty,
nor an insane indulgence in it, which shows this emperor in history
as passing his time in catching flies and transpiercing them with
a golden bodkin, but religious superstition. The Jewish astrologers
had predicted to him that he had provoked the wrath of Beelzebub,
the "Lord of the flies," and would perish miserably
through the revenge of the dark god of Ekron, and die like King
Ahaziah, because he persecuted the Jews.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 148 ISIS UNVEILED.
face, although Rabbi Wise considers Jesus himself a Pharisee.
The Talmud certainly points to James the Just as one
of that sect.* But these partisans are known to have always stoned
every prophet who denounced their evil ways, and it is not on
this fact that we base our assertion. These accused him of sorcery,
and of driving out devils by Beelzebub, their prince, with as
much justice as later the Catholic clergy had to accuse of the
same more than one innocent martyr. But Justin Martyr states on
better authority that the men of his time who were
not Jews asserted that the miracles of Jesus were performed
by magical art -- [[magike phantasia]] -- the very expression
used by the skeptics of those days to designate the feats of thaumaturgy
accomplished in the Pagan temples. "They even ventured to
call him a magician and a deceiver of the people," complains
the martyr.** In the Gospel of Nicodemus (the Acta
Pilate), the Jews bring the same accusation before
Pilate. "Did we not tell thee he was a magician?"***
Celsus speaks of the same charge, and as a Neo-platonist believes
in it.**** The Talmudic literature is full of the most minute
particulars, and their greatest accusation is that "Jesus
could fly as easily in the air as others could walk."*****
St. Austin asserted that it was generally believed that he had
been initiated in Egypt, and that he wrote books concerning magic,
which he delivered to John.****** There was a work called Magia
Jesu Christi, which was attributed to Jesus******* himself.
In the Clementine Recognitions the charge is brought
against Jesus that he did not perform his miracles as a Jewish
prophet, but as a magician, i.e., an initiate of the
"heathen" temples.********
It was usual then, as it is now, among the intolerant clergy of
opposing religions, as well as among the lower classes of society,
and even among those patricians who, for various reasons had been
excluded from any participation of the Mysteries, to accuse, sometimes,
the highest hierophants and adepts of sorcery and black magic.
So Apuleius, who
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* We believe that it was the Sadducees and not the Pharisees who
crucified Jesus. They were Zadokites -- partisans of the house
of Zadok, or the sacerdotal family. In the "Acts" the
apostles were said to be persecuted by the Sadducees, but never
by the Pharisees. In fact, the latter never persecuted any one.
They had the scribes, rabbis, and learned men in their numbers,
and were not, like the Sadducees, jealous of their order.
** "Dial.," p. 69.
*** Fabricius: "Cod. Apoc., N. T.," i., 243; Tischendorf:
"Evang. Ap.," p. 214.
**** Origen: "Cont. Cels.," II.
***** Rabbi Iochan: "Mag.," 51.
****** "Origen," II.
******* Cf. "August de Consans. Evang.," i.,
9; Fabric.: "Cod. Ap. N. T.," i., p. 305, ff.
******** "Recog.," i. 58; cf., p. 40.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 149 JESUS IN THE GARB OF A MAGICIAN.
had been initiated, was likewise accused of witchcraft, and of
carrying about him the figure of a skeleton -- a potent agent,
as it is asserted, in the operations of the black art. But one
of the best and most unquestionable proofs of our assertion may
be found in the so-called Museo Gregoriano. On the sarcophagus,
which is panelled with bas-reliefs representing the miracles of
Christ,* may be seen the full figure of Jesus, who, in the resurrection
of Lazarus, appears beardless "and equipped with a wand in
the received guise of a necromancer (?) whilst
the corpse of Lazarus is swathed in bandages exactly as an Egyptian
mummy."
Had posterity been enabled to have several such representations
executed during the first century when the figure, dress, and
every-day habits of the Reformer were still fresh in the memory
of his contemporaries, perhaps the Christian world would be more
Christ-like; the dozens of contradictory, groundless, and utterly
meaningless speculations about the "Son of Man" would
have been impossible; and humanity would now have but one religion
and one God. It is this absence of all proof, the lack of the
least positive clew about him whom Christianity has deified, that
has caused the present state of perplexity. No pictures of Christ
were possible until after the days of Constantine, when the Jewish
element was nearly eliminated among the followers of the new religion.
The Jews, apostles, and disciples, whom the Zoroastrians and the
Parsees had inoculated with a holy horror of any form of images,
would have considered it a sacrilegious blasphemy to represent
in any way or shape their master. The only authorized image of
Jesus, even in the days of Tertullian, was an allegorical representation
of the "Good Shepherd,"** which was no portrait, but
the figure of a man with a jackal-head, like Anubis.*** On this
gem, as seen in the collection of Gnostic amulets, the Good Shepherd
bears upon his shoulders the lost lamb. He seems to have a human
head upon his neck; but, as King correctly observes, "it
only seems so to the uninitiated eye." On closer
inspection, he becomes the double-headed Anubis, having one head
human, the other a jackal's, whilst his girdle assumes the form
of a serpent rearing aloft its crested head. "This figure,"
adds the author of the Gnostics, etc., "had two
meanings -- one obvious for the vulgar; the other mystical, and
recognizable by the initiated alone. It was perhaps the
signet of some chief
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* King's "Gnostics," p. 145; the author places this
sarcophagus among the earliest productions of that art which inundated
later the world with mosaics and engravings, representing the
events and personages of the "New Testament."
** "De Pudicitia." See "The Gnostics and their
Remains," p. 144.
*** Ibid., plate i., p. 200.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 150 ISIS UNVEILED.
teacher or apostle."* This affords a fresh proof that the
Gnostics and early orthodox (?) Christians were
not so wide apart in their secret doctrine. King deduces
from a quotation from Epiphanius, that even as late as
400 A.D. it was considered an atrocious sin to attempt to represent
the bodily appearance of Christ. Epiphanius** brings it as an
idolatrous charge against the Carpocratians that "they kept
painted portraits, and even gold and silver images, and
in other materials, which they pretended to be portraits
of Jesus, and made by Pilate after the likeness of Christ. . .
. These they keep in secret, along with Pythagoras, Plato, and
Aristotle, and setting them all up together, they worship and
offer sacrifices unto them after the Gentiles' fashion."
What would the pious Epiphanius say were he to resuscitate and
step into St. Peter's Cathedral at Rome! Ambrosius seems also
very desperate at the idea -- that some persons fully credited
the statement of Lampridius that Alexander Severus had in his
private chapel an image of Christ among other great philosophers.
"That the Pagans should have preserved the likeness of Christ,"
he exclaims, "but the disciples have neglected to do so,
is a notion the mind shudders to entertain, much less to believe."
All this points undeniably to the fact, that except a handful
of self-styled Christians who subsequently won the day, all the
civilized portion of the Pagans who knew of Jesus honored him
as a philosopher, an adept whom they placed on the same
level with Pythagoras and Apollonius. Whence such a veneration
on their part for a man, were he simply, as represented by the
Synoptics, a poor, unknown Jewish carpenter from Nazareth? As
an incarnated God there is no single record of him on this earth
capable of withstanding the critical examination of science; as
one of the greatest reformers, an inveterate enemy of every theological
dogmatism, a persecutor of bigotry, a teacher of one of the most
sublime codes of ethics, Jesus is one of the grandest and most
clearly-defined figures on the panorama of human history. His
age may, with every day, be receding farther and farther back
into the gloomy and hazy mists of the past; and his theology --
based on human fancy and supported by untenable dogmas may, nay,
must with every day lose more of its unmerited prestige; alone
the grand figure of the philosopher and moral reformer instead
of growing paler will become with every century more pronounced
and more clearly defined. It will reign supreme and universal
only on that day when the whole of humanity recognizes but one
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* This gem is in the collection of the author of "The Gnostics
and their Remains." See p. 201.
** "Heresies," xxvii.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 151 THE LONG-HAIRED NAZARENES.
father -- the UNKNOWN ONE above -- and one brother -- the whole
of mankind below.
In a pretended letter of Lentulus, a senator and a distinguished
historian, to the Roman senate, there is a description of the
personal appearance of Jesus. The letter itself, written in horrid
Latin, is pronounced a bare-faced forgery; but we find therein
an expression which suggests many thoughts. Albeit a forgery it
is evident that whosoever invented it has nevertheless tried to
follow tradition as closely as possible. The hair of Jesus is
represented in it as "wavy and curling . . . flowing down
upon his shoulders," and as "having a parting in
the middle of the head after the fashion of the Nazarenes."
This last sentence shows: 1. That there was such a tradition,
based on the biblical description of John the Baptist, the Nazaria,
and the custom of this sect. 2. Had Lentulus been the author
of this letter, it is difficult to believe that Paul should never
have heard of it; and had he known its contents, he would never
have pronounced it a shame for men to wear their hair
long,* thus shaming his Lord and Christ-God. 3. If Jesus did wear
his hair long and "parted in the middle of the forehead,
after the fashion of the Nazarenes (as well as John, the only
one of his apostles who followed it), then we have one good reason
more to say that Jesus must have belonged to the sect of the Nazarenes,
and been called NASARIA for this reason and not
because he was an inhabitant of Nazareth; for they never wore
their hair long. The Nazarite, who separated himself
unto the Lord, allowed "no razor to come upon his head."
"He shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of
his head grow," says Numbers (vi. 5). Samson was
a Nazarite, i.e., vowed to the service of God, and in
his hair was his strength. "No razor shall come upon his
head; the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb"
(Judges xiii. 5). But the final and most reasonable conclusion
to be inferred from this is that Jesus, who was so opposed to
all the orthodox Jewish practices, would not have allowed
his hair to grow had he not belonged to this sect, which in the
days of John the Baptist had already become a heresy in the eyes
of the Sanhedrim. The Talmud, speaking of the Nazaria,
or the Nazarenes (who had abandoned the world like Hindu yogis
or hermits) calls them a sect of physicians, of wandering exorcists;
as also does Jervis. "They went about the country, living
on alms and performing cures."** Epiphanius says that the
Nazarenes come next in heresy to the Corinthians whether having
existed "before them or after them, nevertheless synchronous,"
and then adds that "all Christians at that time were
equally called Nazarenes"!***
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* 1 Cor. xi. 14.
** See the "Israelite Indeed," vol. ii., p. 238; "Treatise
Nazir."
*** "Epiph. ed. Petar," vol. i., p. 117.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 152 ISIS UNVEILED.
In the very first remark made by Jesus about John the Baptist,
we find him stating that he is "Elias, which was for to come."
This assertion, if it is not a later interpolation for the sake
of having a prophecy fulfilled, means again that Jesus was a kabalist;
unless indeed we have to adopt the doctrine of the French spiritists
and suspect him of believing in reincarnation. Except the kabalistic
sects of the Essenes, the Nazarenes, the disciples of Simeon Ben
Iochai, and Hillel, neither the orthodox Jews, nor the Galileans,
believed or knew anything about the doctrine of permutation.
And the Sadducees rejected even that of the resurrection.
"But the author of this restitutionis was Mosah,
our master, upon whom be peace! Who was the revolutio (transmigration)
of Seth and Hebel, that he might cover the nudity of his Father
Adam -- Primus," says the Kabala.*
Thus, Jesus hinting that John was the revolutio, or
transmigration of Elias, seems to prove beyond any doubt
the school to which he belonged.
Until the present day uninitiated Kabalists and Masons believe
permutation to be synonymous with transmigration and metempsychosis.
But they are as much mistaken in regard to the doctrine of the
true Kabalists as to that of the Buddhists. True, the Sohar
says in one place, "All souls are subject to transmigration
. . . men do not know the ways of the Holy One, blessed be He;
they do not know that they are brought before the tribunal, both
before they enter this world and after they quit it," and
the Pharisees also held this doctrine, as Josephus shows (Antiquities,
xviii. 13). Also the doctrine of Gilgul, held to
the strange theory of the "Whirling of the Soul," which
taught that the bodies of Jews buried far away from the Holy Land,
still preserve a particle of soul which can neither rest nor quit
them, until it reaches the soil of the "Promised Land."
And this "whirling" process was thought to be accomplished
by the soul being conveyed back through an actual evolution of
species; transmigrating from the minutest insect up to the largest
animal. But this was an exoteric doctrine. We refer the
reader to the Kabbala Denudata of Henry Khunrath; his
language, however obscure, may yet throw some light upon the subject.
But this doctrine of permutation, or revolutio, must
not be understood as a belief in reincarnation. That Moses was
considered the transmigration of Abel and Seth, does not imply
that the kabalists -- those who were initiated at least
-- believed that the identical spirit of either of Adam's sons
reappeared under the corporeal form of Moses. It only shows what
was the mode of expression they used when hinting at one of the
profoundest mysteries of the Oriental Gnosis, one of the most
majestic arti-
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Kabbala Denudata," ii., 155; "Vallis Regia,"
Paris edition.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 153 WHEN A "GOD" BECOMES INCARNATE.
cles of faith of the Secret Wisdom. It was purposely veiled so
as to half conceal and half reveal the truth. It implied that
Moses, like certain other god-like men, was believed to have reached
the highest of all states on earth: -- the rarest of all psychological
phenomena, the perfect union of the immortal spirit with the terrestrial
duad had occurred. The trinity was complete. A god
was incarnate. But how rare such incarnations!
That expression, "Ye are gods," which, to our biblical
students, is a mere abstraction, has for the kabalists a vital
significance. Each immortal spirit that sheds its radiance upon
a human being is a god -- the Microcosmos of the Macrocosmos,
part and parcel of the Unknown God, the First Cause of which it
is a direct emanation. It is possessed of all the attributes of
its parent source. Among these attributes are omniscience and
omnipotence. Endowed with these, but yet unable to fully manifest
them while in the body, during which time they are obscured, veiled,
limited by the capabilities of physical nature, the thus divinely-inhabited
man may tower far above his kind, evince a god-like wisdom, and
display deific powers; for while the rest of mortals around him
are but overshadowed by their divine SELF, with every
chance given to them to become immortal hereafter, but no other
security than their personal efforts to win the kingdom of heaven,
the so chosen man has already become an immortal while yet on
earth. His prize is secured. Henceforth he will live forever in
eternal life. Not only he may have "dominion"* over
all the works of creation by employing the "excellence"
of the NAME (the ineffable one) but be higher in this life, not,
as Paul is made to say, "a little lower than the angels."**
The ancients never entertained the sacrilegious thought that such
perfected entities were incarnations of the One Supreme and for
ever invisible God. No such profanation of the awful Majesty entered
into their conceptions. Moses and his antitypes and types were
to them but complete men, gods on earth, for their gods (divine
spirits) had entered unto their hallowed tabernacles, the purified
physical bodies. The disembodied spirits of the heroes and sages
were termed gods by the ancients. Hence, the accusation of polytheism
and idolatry on the part of those who were the first to anthropomorphize
the holiest and purest abstractions of their forefathers.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Psalms viii.
** This contradiction, which is attributed to Paul in Hebrews,
by making him say of Jesus in chapter i., 4: "Being made
so much better than the angels," and then immediately
stating in chapter ii. 9, "But we see Jesus, who was made
a little lower than the angels," shows how unscrupulously
the writings of the apostles, if they ever wrote any, were tampered
with.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 154 ISIS UNVEILED.
The real and hidden sense of this doctrine was known to all the
initiates. The Tanaim imparted it to their elect ones, the Isarim,
in the solemn solitudes of crypts and deserted places. It was
one of the most esoteric and jealously guarded, for human nature
was the same then as it is now, and the sacerdotal caste as confident
as now in the supremacy of its knowledge, and ambitious of ascendancy
over the weaker masses; with the difference perhaps that its hierophants
could prove the legitimacy of their claims and the plausibility
of their doctrines, whereas now, believers must be content
with blind faith.
While the kabalists called this mysterious and rare occurrence
of the union of spirit with the mortal charge entrusted to its
care, the "descent of the Angel Gabriel" (the latter
being a kind of generic name for it), the Messenger of Life,
and the angel Metatron; and while the Nazarenes termed the
same Abel-Zivo,* the Delegatus sent by the Lord of Celsitude,
it was universally known as the "Anointed Spirit."
Thus it is the acceptation of this doctrine which caused the Gnostics
to maintain that Jesus was a man overshadowed by the Christos
or Messenger of Life, and that his despairing cry from the cross
"Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani," was wrung from him at
the instant when he felt that this inspiring Presence had finally
abandoned him, for -- as some affirmed -- his faith had also
abandoned him when on the cross.
The early Nazarenes, who must be numbered among the Gnostic sects,
believing that Jesus was a prophet, held, nevertheless, in relation
to him the same doctrine of the divine "overshadowing,"
of certain "men of God," sent for the salvation of nations,
and to recall them to the path of righteousness. "The Divine
mind is eternal," says the Codex,** "and
it is pure light, and poured out through splendid and immense
space (pleroma). It is Genetrix of the AEons. But one of
them went to matter (chaos) stirring up confused (turbulentos)
movements; and by a certain portion of heavenly light
fashioned it, properly constituted for use and appearance, but
the beginning of every evil. The Demiurge (of matter) claimed
divine honor.** Therefore Christus ("the anointed"),
the prince of the AEons (powers), was sent (expeditus), who taking
on the person of a most devout Jew, Iesu, was to conquer
him; but who having laid it (the body) aside,
departed on high." We will explain further on the full
significance of the name Christos and its mystic meaning.
And now, in order to make such passages as the above more intelligible,
we will endeavor to define, as briefly as possible, the dogmas
in
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Codex Nazaraeus," i. 23.
** Ibid., preface, p. v., translated from Norberg.
*** "According to the Nazarenes and Gnostics, the Demiurge,
the creator of the material world, is not the highest God."
(See Dunlap: "Sod, the Son of the Man.")
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 155 BASILIDES, THE BRIGHT SUN OF GNOSTICISM.
which, with very trifling differences, nearly all the Gnostic
sects believed. It is in Ephesus that flourished in those days
the greatest college, wherein the abstruse Oriental speculations
and the Platonic philosophy were taught in conjunction. It was
a focus of the universal "secret" doctrines; the weird
laboratory whence, fashioned in elegant Grecian phraseology, sprang
the quintessence of Buddhistic, Zoroastrian, and Chaldean philosophy.
Artemis, the gigantic concrete symbol of theosophico-pantheistic
abstractions, the great mother Multimamma, androgyne and patroness
of the "Ephesian writings," was conquered by Paul; but
although the zealous converts of the apostles pretended to burn
all their books on "curious arts," [[ta perierga]],
enough of these remained for them to study when their first zeal
had cooled off. It is from Ephesus that spread nearly all the
Gnosis which antagonized so fiercely with the Irenaean
dogmas; and still it was Ephesus, with her numerous collateral
branches of the great college of the Essenes, which proved to
be the hot-bed of all the kabalistic speculations brought by the
Tanaim from the captivity. "In Ephesus," says Matter,
"the notions of the Jewish-Egyptian school, and the semi-Persian
speculations of the kabalists had then recently come to swell
the vast conflux of Grecian and Asiatic doctrines, so there is
no wonder that teachers should have sprung up there who strove
to combine the religion newly preached by the apostle with the
ideas there so long established."
Had not the Christians burdened themselves with the Revelations
of a little nation, and accepted the Jehovah of Moses, the
Gnostic ideas would never have been termed heresies; once
relieved of their dogmatic exaggerations the world would have
had a religious system based on pure Platonic philosophy, and
surely something would then have been gained.
Now let us see what are the greatest heresies of the
Gnostics. We will select Basilides as the standard for our comparisons,
for all the founders of other Gnostic sects group round him, like
a cluster of stars borrowing light from their sun.
Basilides maintained that he had all his doctrines from the Apostle
Matthew, and from Peter through Glaucus, the disciple of the latter.*
According to Eusebius,** he published twenty-four volumes of Interpretations
upon the Gospels,*** all of which were burned, a
fact which makes us suppose that they contained more truthful
matter than the school of Irenaeus was prepared to deny. He asserted
that the unknown,
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* Clemens: "Al. Strom." vii., 7, § 106.
** H. E., iv. 7.
*** The gospels interpreted by Basilides were not our present
gospels, which, as it is proved by the greatest authorities, were
not in his days in existence. See "Supernatural Religion,"
vol. ii., chap. Basilides.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 156 ISIS UNVEILED.
eternal, and uncreated Father having first brought forth Nous,
or Mind, the latter emanated from itself -- the Logos.
The Logos (the Word of John) emanated in its turn Phronesis,
or the Intelligences (Divine-human spirits). From Phronesis
sprung Sophia, or feminine wisdom, and Dynamis --
strength. These were the personified attributes of the Mysterious
godhead, the Gnostic quinternion, typifying the five spiritual,
but intelligible substances, personal virtues or beings external
to the unknown godhead. This is preeminently a kabalistic idea.
It is still more Buddhistic. The earliest system of the Buddhistic
philosophy -- which preceded by far Gautama-Buddha -- is based
upon the uncreated substance of the "Unknown," the A'di
Buddha.* This eternal, infinite Monad possesses, as proper to
his own essence, five acts of wisdom. From these it, by five separate
acts of Dhyan, emitted five Dhyani Buddhas; these, like A'di Buddha,
are quiescent in their system (passive). Neither A'di, nor either
of the five Dhyani Buddhas, were ever incarnated, but seven of
their emanations became Avatars, i.e., were incarnated
on this earth.
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* The five make mystically ten. They are androgynes. "Having
divided big body in two parts, the Supreme Wisdom became male
and female" ("Manu," book i., sloka 32). There
are many early Buddhistic ideas to be found in Brahmanism.
The prevalent idea that the last of the Buddhas, Gautama, is the
ninth incarnation of Vishnu, or the ninth Avatar, is
disclaimed partially by the Brahmans, and wholly rejected by the
learned Buddhist theologians. The latter insist that the worship
of Buddha possesses a far higher claim to antiquity than any of
the Brahmanical deities of the Vedas, which they call
secular literature. The Brahmans, they show, came from other countries,
and established their heresy on the already accepted popular deities.
They conquered the land by the sword, and succeeded in burying
truth, by building a theology of their own on the ruins of the
more ancient one of Buddha, which had prevailed for ages. They
admit the divinity and spiritual existence of some of the Vedantic
gods; but as in the case of the Christian angel-hierarchy they
believe that all these deities are greatly subordinate, even to
the incarnated Buddhas. They do not even acknowledge the creation
of the physical universe. Spiritually and invisibly it
has existed from all eternity, and thus it was made merely visible
to the human senses. When it first appeared it was called forth
from the realm of the invisible into the visible by the impulse
of A'di Buddha -- the "Essence." They reckon twenty-two
such visible appearances of the universe governed by Buddhas,
and as many destructions of it, by fire and water in regular successions.
After the last destruction by the flood, at the end of the precedent
cycle -- (the exact calculation, embracing several millions of
years, is a secret cycle) the world, during the present age of
the Kali Yug -- Maha Bhadda Calpa -- has been ruled successively
by four Buddhas, the last of whom was Gautama, the "Holy
One." The fifth, Maitree-Buddha, is yet to come. This latter
is the expected kabalistic King Messiah, the Messenger of Light,
and Sosiosh, the Persian Saviour, who will come on a white
horse. It is also the Christian Second Advent. See "Apocalypse"
of St. John.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 157 GNOSTICISM HIGHLY REVERENTIAL TOWARD
THE DEITY.
Describing the Basilidean system, Irenaeus, quoting the Gnostics,
declares as follows:
"When the uncreated, unnamed Father saw the corruption
of mankind, he sent his first-born Nous, into the world,
in the form of Christ, for the redemption of all who believe in
him, out of the power of those who fabricated the world (the Demiurgus,
and his six sons, the planetary genii). He appeared amongst men
as the man, Jesus, and wrought miracles. This Christ did not
die in person, but Simon the Cyrenian suffered in his stead,
to whom he lent his bodily form; for the Divine Power,
the Nous of the Eternal Father, is not corporeal, and
cannot die. Whoso, therefore, maintains that Christ has died,
is still the bondsman of ignorance; whoso denies the same, he
is free, and hath understood the purpose of the Father."*
So far, and taken in its abstract sense, we do not see anything
blasphemous in this system. It may be a heresy against
the theology of Irenaeus and Tertullian,** but there is certainly
nothing sacrilegious against the religious idea itself, and it
will seem to every impartial thinker far more consistent with
divine reverence than the anthropomorphism of actual Christianity.
The Gnostics were called by the orthodox Christians, Docetae,
or Illusionists, for believing that Christ did not, nor could,
suffer death actually -- in physical body. The later Brahmanical
books contain, likewise, much that is repugnant to the reverential
feeling and idea of the Divinity; and as well as the Gnostics,
the Brahmans explain such legends as may shock the divine dignity
of the Spiritual beings called gods by attributing them to Maya
or illusion.
A people brought up and nurtured for countless ages among all
the psychological phenomena of which the civilized (!) nations
read, but reject as incredible and worthless, cannot well expect
to have its religious system even understood -- let alone appreciated.
The profoundest and most transcendental speculations of the ancient
metaphysicians of India and other countries, are all based on
that great Buddhistic and Brahmanical principle underlying the
whole of their religious metaphysics -- illusion of the
senses. Everything that is finite is illusion, all that which
is eternal and infinite is reality. Form, color, that which we
hear and feel, or see with our mortal eyes, exists only so far
as it can be conveyed to each of us through our senses. The universe
for a man born blind does not exist in either form or color, but
it exists in its privation (in the Aristotelean sense),
and is a reality for the spiritual senses
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Irenaeus," i. 23.
** Tertullian reversed the table himself by rejecting, later in
life, the doctrines for which he fought with such an acerbity
and by becoming a Montanist.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 158 ISIS UNVEILED.
of the blind man. We all live under the powerful dominion of phantasy.
Alone the highest and invisible originals emanated from
the thought of the Unknown are real and permanent beings, forms,
and ideas; on earth, we see but their reflections; more or less
correct, and ever dependent on the physical and mental organization
of the person who beholds them.
Ages untold before our era, the Hindu Mystic Kapila, who is considered
by many scientists as a skeptic, because they judge him with their
habitual superficiality, magnificently expressed this idea in
the following terms:
"Man (physical man) counts for so little, that hardly anything
can demonstrate to him his proper existence and that of nature.
Perhaps, that which we regard as the universe, and the divers
beings which seem to compose it, have nothing real, and are but
the product of continued illusion -- maya -- of our senses."
And the modern Schopenhauer, repeating this philosophical idea,
10,000 years old now, says: "Nature is non-existent, per
se. . . . Nature is the infinite illusion of our senses."
Kant, Schelling, and other metaphysicians have said the same,
and their school maintains the idea. The objects of sense being
ever delusive and fluctuating, cannot be a reality. Spirit alone
is unchangeable, hence -- alone is no illusion. This is pure Buddhist
doctrine. The religion of the Gnosis (knowledge), the
most evident offshoot of Buddhism, was utterly based on this metaphysical
tenet. Christos suffered spiritually for us, and far
more acutely than did the illusionary Jesus while his body was
being tortured on the Cross.
In the ideas of the Christians, Christ is but another name for
Jesus. The philosophy of the Gnostics, the initiates, and hierophants
understood it otherwise. The word Christos, [[Christos]],
like all Greek words, must be sought in its philological origin
-- the Sanscrit. In this latter language Kris means sacred,*
and the Hindu deity was named Chris-na (the pure or the sacred)
from that. On the other hand, the Greek Christos bears
several meanings, as anointed (pure oil, chrism)
and others. In all languages, though the synonym of the word
means pure or sacred essence, it is the first emanation of the
invisible Godhead, manifesting itself tangibly in spirit. The
Greek Logos, the Hebrew Messiah, the
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* In his debate with Jacolliot upon the right spelling of the
Hindu Christna, Mr. Textor de Ravisi, an ultramontane Catholic,
tries to prove that the name of Christna ought to be written Krishna,
for, as the latter means black, and the statues of this deity
are generally black, the word is derived from the color. We refer
the reader to Jacolliot's answer in his recent work, "Christna
et le Christ," for the conclusive evidence that the name
is not derived from the color.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 159 MARCION, THE NOBLE HERESIARCH.
Latin Verbum, and the Hindu Viradj (the son) are identically the
same; they represent an idea of collective entities -- of flames
detached from the one eternal centre of light.
"The man who accomplishes pious but interested acts (with
the sole object of his salvation) may reach the ranks of the devas
(saints);* but he who accomplishes, disinterestedly, the
same pious acts, finds himself ridden forever of the five elements"
(of matter). "Perceiving the Supreme Soul in all beings and
all beings in the Supreme Soul, in offering his own soul in sacrifice,
he identifies himself with the Being who shines in his own splendor"
(Manu, book xii., slokas 90, 91).
Thus, Christos, as a unity, is but an abstraction: a general idea
representing the collective aggregation of the numberless spirit-entities,
which are the direct emanations of the infinite, invisible, incomprehensible
FIRST CAUSE -- the individual
spirits of men, erroneously called the souls. They are the divine
sons of God, of which some only overshadow mortal men -- but this
the majority -- some remain forever planetary spirits, and some
-- the smaller and rare minority -- unite themselves during life
with some men. Such God-like beings as Gautama-Buddha, Jesus,
Tissoo, Christna, and a few others had united themselves with
their spirits permanently -- hence, they became gods on earth.
Others, such as Moses, Pythagoras, Apollonius, Plotinus, Confucius,
Plato, Iamblichus, and some Christian saints, having at intervals
been so united, have taken rank in history as demi-gods and leaders
of mankind. When unburthened of their terrestrial tabernacles,
their freed souls, henceforth united forever with their spirits,
rejoin the whole shining host, which is bound together in one
spiritual solidarity of thought and deed, and called "the
anointed." Hence, the meaning of the Gnostics, who, by saying
that "Christos" suffered spiritually for humanity, implied
that his Divine Spirit suffered mostly.
Such, and far more elevating were the ideas of Marcion, the great
"Heresiarch" of the second century, as he is termed
by his opponents. He came to Rome toward the latter part of the
half-century, from A.D. 139-142, according to Tertullian, Irenaeus,
Clemens, and most of his modern commentators, such as Bunsen,
Tischendorf, Westcott, and many others. Credner and Schleiermacher**
agree as to his high and irreproachable personal character, his
pure religious aspirations and elevated views. His influence must
have been powerful, as we find
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* There is no equivalent for the word "miracle," in
the Christian sense, among the Brahmans or Buddhists. The only
correct translation would be meipo, a wonder, something
remarkable; but not a violation of natural law. The "saints"
only produce meipo.
** "Beitrage," vol. i., p. 40; Schleiermacher: "Sammil.
Werke," viii.; "Einl. N. T.," p. 64.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 160 ISIS UNVEILED.
Epiphanius writing more than two centuries later that in his time
the followers of Marcion were to be found throughout the whole
world.*
The danger must have been pressing and great indeed, if we are
to judge it to have been proportioned with the opprobrious epithets
and vituperation heaped upon Marcion by the "Great African,"
that Patristic Cerberus, whom we find ever barking at the door
of the Irenaean dogmas.** We have but to open his celebrated refutation
of Marcion's Antitheses, to acquaint ourselves
with the fine-fleur of monkish abuse of the Christian
school; an abuse so faithfully carried through the middle ages,
to be renewed again in our present day -- at the Vatican. "Now,
then, ye hounds, yelping at the God of Truth, whom the apostles
cast out, to all your questions. These are the bones of contention
which ye gnaw," etc.*** "The poverty of the Great African's
arguments keeps pace with his abuse," remarks the author
of Supernatural Religion.**** "Their (the
Father's) religious controversy bristles with misstatements, and
is turbid with pious abuse. Tertullian was a master of his style,
and the vehement vituperation with which he opens and often interlards
his work against 'the impious and sacrilegious Marcion,' offers
anything but a guarantee of fair and legitimate criticism."
How firm these two Fathers -- Tertullian and Epiphanius -- were
on their theological ground, may be inferred from the curious
fact that they intemperately both vehemently reproach "the
beast" (Marcion) "with erasing passages from the Gospel
of Luke which never were in Luke at all."*****
"The lightness and inaccuracy," adds the critic, "with
which Tertullian proceeds, are all the better illustrated by the
fact that not only does he accuse Marcion falsely, but he
actually defines the motives for which he expunged a passage
which never existed; in the same chapter he also similarly
accuses Marcion of erasing (from Luke) the saying
that Christ had not come to destroy the law and the prophets,
but to fulfill them, and he actually repeats the charge on two
other occasions.****** Epiphanius also commits the mistake of
reproaching Marcion with omitting from Luke what is only
found in Matthew."*******
Having so far shown the amount of reliance to be placed in the
Patristic literature, and it being unanimously conceded by the
great majority of biblical critics that what the Fathers fought
for was not truth, but their own interpretations and
unwarranted assertions,******** we will now
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Epiph. Haera.," xlii., p. 1.
** Tertullian: "Adv. Marc.," ii. 5; cf. 9.
*** Ibid., ii. 5.
**** Vol. ii., p. 105.
***** Ibid., vol. ii., p. 100.
****** "Adv. Marc.," iv., 9, 36.
******* "Supernatural Religion," p. 101; Matthew v.
17.
******** This author, vol. ii., p. 103, remarks with great justice
of the "Heresiarch" Marcion, "whose high personal
character exerted so powerful an influence upon his [[Footnote
continued on next page]]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 161 THE TWO FACTIONS IN THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH.
proceed to state what were the views of Marcion, whom Tertullian
desired to annihilate as the most dangerous heretic of
his day. If we are to believe Hilgenfeld, one of the greatest
German biblical critics, then "From the critical standing-point
one must . . . consider the statements of the Fathers of the Church
only as expressions of their subjective view, which itself
requires proof."*
We can do no better nor make a more correct statement of facts
concerning Marcion than by quoting what our space permits from
Supernatural Religion, the author of which bases his assertions
on the evidence of the greatest critics, as well as on his own
researches. He shows in the days of Marcion "two broad parties
in the primitive Church" -- one considering Christianity
"a mere continuation of the law, and dwarfing it into an
Israelitish institution, a narrow sect of Judaism"; the other
representing the glad tidings "as the introduction of a new
system, applicable to all, and supplanting the Mosaic dispensation
of the law by a universal dispensation of grace." These two
parties, he adds, "were popularly represented in the early
Church, by the two apostles Peter and Paul, and their antagonism
is faintly revealed in the Epistle to the Galatians."**
[[Footnotes(s)]]----------------------------------------------------------
[[Footnote continued from previous page]] own time," that
"it was the misfortune of Marcion to live in an age when
Christianity had passed out of the pure morality of its infancy;
when, untroubled by complicated questions of dogma, simple faith
and pious enthusiasm had been the one great bond of Christian
brotherhood, into a phase of ecclesiastical development in which
religion was fast degenerating into theology, and complicated
doctrines were rapidly assuming the rampant attitude which led
to so much bitterness, persecution, and schism. In later times
Marcion might have been honored as a reformer, in his own he was
denounced as a heretic. Austere and ascetic in his opinions, he
aimed at superhuman purity, and, although his clerical adversaries
might scoff at his impracticable doctrines regarding marriage
and the subjugation of the flesh, they have had their parallels
amongst those whom the Church has since most delighted to honor,
and, at least, the whole tendency of his system was markedly towards
the side of virtue." These statements are based upon Credner's
"Beitrage," i., p. 40; cf. Neander: "Allg. K. G.,"
ii., p. 792, f.; Schleiermacher, Milman, etc., etc.
* Justin's "Die Evv.," p. 446, sup. B.
** But, on the other hand, this antagonism is very strongly
marked in the "Clementine Homilies," in which Peter
unequivocally denies that Paul, whom he calls Simon the Magician,
has ever had a vision of Christ, and calls him "an
enemy." Canon Westcott says: "There can be no doubt
that St. Paul is referred to as 'the enemy' " ("On the
Canon," p. 252, note 2; "Supernatural Religion,"
vol. ii., p. 35). But this antagonism, which rages unto the present
day, we find even in St. Paul's "Epistles." What can
be more energetic than such like sentences: "Such are false
apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into
the apostles of Christ. . . . I suppose I was not a whit behind
the very chiefest apostle" (2 Corinthians, xi.). "Paul,
an apostle not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ
and God the Father, who raised him from the dead . .
. but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the
Gospel [Footnote continued on next page]
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 162 ISIS UNVEILED.
Marcion, who recognised no other Gospels than a few Epistles
of Paul, who rejected totally the anthropomorphism of the
Old Testament, and drew a distinct line of demarcation
between the old Judaism and Christianity, viewed Jesus neither
as a King, Messiah of the Jews, nor the son of David, who was
in any way connected with the law or prophets, "but, a divine
being sent to reveal to man a spiritual religion, wholly new,
and a God of goodness and grace hitherto unknown." The "Lord
[[Footnote(s)]]------------------------------------------------------------
[Footnote continued from previous page] of Christ . . . false
brethren. . . . When Peter came to Antioch I withstood him
to his face, because he was to be blamed. For before that certain
came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles, but when
they were come he withdrew, fearing them which were of the circumcision.
And the other Jews dissembled . . . insomuch that Barnabas also
was carried away with their dissimulation,"
etc., etc. (Galat. i and ii.). On the other hand, we find
Peter in the "Homilies," indulging in various complaints
which, although alleged to be addressed to Simon Magus, are evidently
all direct answers to the above-quoted sentences from the Pauline
Epistles, and cannot have anything to do with Simon.
So, for instance, Peter said: "For some among the Gentiles
have rejected my lawful preaching, and accepted certain lawless
and foolish teaching of the hostile men (enemy)"
-- Epist. of Peter to James, § 2. He says further: "Simon
(Paul) . . . who came before me to the Gentiles . . . and I have
followed him as light upon darkness, as knowledge upon ignorance,
as health upon disease" ("Homil.," ii. 17). Still
further, he calls him Death and a deceiver (Ibid.,
ii. 18). He warns the Gentiles that "our Lord and Prophet
(?) (Jesus) announced that he
would send from among his followers, apostles to deceive.
"Therefore, above all, remember to avoid every apostle,
or teacher, or prophet, who first does not accurately compare
his teaching with that of James, called the brother of our Lord"
(see the difference between Paul and James on faith, Epist.
to Hebrews, xi., xii., and Epist. of James, ii.). "Lest the
Evil One should send a false preacher . . . as he has sent to
us Simon (?) preaching a counterfeit of truth in the name of our
Lord, and disseminating error" ("Hom." xi., 35;
see above quotation from Gal. 1, 5). He then denies Paul's assertion,
in the following words: "If, therefore, our Jesus indeed
appeared in a vision to you, it was only as an irritated adversary.
. . . But how can any one through visions become wise in teaching?
And if you say, 'it is possible,' then I ask, wherefore did the
Teacher remain for a whole year and discourse to those who were
attentive? And how can we believe your story that
he appeared to you? And in what manner did he appear to you,
when you hold opinions contrary to his teaching? . . . For you
now set yourself up against me, who am a firm rock, the foundation
of the Church. If you were not an opponent, you would not
calumniate me, you would not revile my teaching . . . (circumcision?)
in order that, in declaring what I have myself heard from the
Lord, I may not be believed, as though I were condemned.
. . . But if you say that I am condemned, you blame God who revealed
Christ to me." "This last phrase," observes the
author of "Supernatural Religion," " 'if you say
that I am condemned,' is an evident allusion to Galat. ii, 11,
'I withstood him to the face, because he was condemned' "
("Supernatural Religion," p. 37). "There cannot
be a doubt," adds the just-quoted author, "that the
Apostle Paul is attacked in this religious romance as the great
enemy of the true faith, under the hated name of Simon the Magician,
whom Peter follows everywhere for the purpose of unmasking and
confuting him" (p. 34). And if so, then we must believe that
it was St. Paul who broke both his legs in Rome when flying in
the air.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 163 JESUS IGNORES JEHOVAH.
God" of the Jews in his eyes, the Creator (Demiurgos), was
totally different and distinct from the Deity who sent Jesus to
reveal the divine truth and preach the glad tidings, to bring
reconciliation and salvation to all. The mission of Jesus -- according
to Marcion -- was to abrogate the Jewish "Lord," who
"was opposed to the God and Father of Jesus Christ as
matter is to spirit, impurity to purity."
Was Marcion so far wrong? Was it blasphemy, or was it intuition,
divine inspiration in him to express that which every honest heart
yearning for truth, more or less feels and acknowledges? If in
his sincere desire to establish a purely spiritual religion, a
universal faith based on unadulterated truth, he found it necessary
to make of Christianity an entirely new and separate system from
that of Judaism, did not Marcion have the very words of Christ
for his authority? "No man putteth a piece of new cloth into
an old garment . . . for the rent is made worse. . . . Neither
do men put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break,
and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish; but they
put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved."
In what particular does the jealous, wrathful, revengeful God
of Israel resemble the unknown deity, the God of mercy preached
by Jesus; -- his Father who is in Heaven, and the Father
of all humanity? This Father alone is the God of spirit and purity,
and, to compare Him with the subordinate and capricious Sinaitic
Deity is an error. Did Jesus ever pronounce the name of Jehovah?
Did he ever place his Father in contrast with this severe
and cruel Judge; his God of mercy, love, and justice, with the
Jewish genius of retaliation? Never! From that memorable day when
he preached his Sermon on the Mount, an immeasurable void opened
between his God and that other deity who fulminated his commands
from that other mount -- Sinai. The language of Jesus is unequivocal;
it implies not only rebellion but defiance of the Mosaic "Lord
God." "Ye have heard," he tells us, "that
it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever
shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
Ye have heard that it hath been said [by the same "Lord God"
on Sinai]: Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you; Love your enemies, bless them that
curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which
despitefully use you, and persecute you" (Matthew v.).
And now, open Manu and read:
"Resignation, the action of rendering good for evil,
temperance, probity, purity, repression of the senses, the
knowledge of the Sastras (the holy books), that
of the supreme soul, truthfulness and abstinence from anger, such
are the ten virtues in which consists duty. . . . Those who
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 164 ISIS UNVEILED.
study these ten precepts of duty, and after having studied them
conform their lives thereto, will reach to the supreme condition"
(Manu, book vi., sloka 92).
If Manu did not trace these words many thousands of years
before the era of Christianity, at least no voice in the whole
world will dare deny them a less antiquity than several centuries
B.C. The same in the case of the precepts of Buddhism.
If we turn to the Pratimokska Sutra and other religious
tracts of the Buddhists, we read the ten following commandments:
1. Thou shalt not kill any living creature.
2. Thou shalt not steal.
3. Thou shalt not break thy vow of chastity.
4. Thou shalt not lie.
5. Thou shalt not betray the secrets of others.
6. Thou shalt not wish for the death of thy enemies.
7. Thou shalt not desire the wealth of others.
8. Thou shalt not pronounce injurious and foul words.
9. Thou shalt not indulge in luxury (sleep on soft beds or be
lazy).
10. Thou shalt not accept gold or silver.*
"Good master, what shall I do that I may have eternal life?"
asks a man of Jesus. "Keep the commandments." "Which?"
"Thou shalt do no murder, Thou shalt not commit adultery,
Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness,"**
is the answer.
"What shall I do to obtain possession of Bhodi? (knowledge
of eternal truth)" asks a disciple of his Buddhist master.
"What way is there to become an Upasaka?" "Keep
the commandments." "What are they?" "Thou
shalt abstain all thy life from murder, theft, adultery, and lying,"
answers the master.***
Identical injunctions are they not? Divine injunctions, the living
up to which would purify and exalt humanity. But are they more
divine when uttered through one mouth than another? If it is god-like
to return good for evil, does the enunciation of the precept by
a Nazarene give it any greater force than its enunciation by an
Indian, or Thibetan philosopher? We see that the Golden Rule was
not original with Jesus; that its birth-place was India. Do what
we may, we cannot deny Sakya-Muni Buddha a less remote antiquity
than several centuries before the birth of Jesus. In seeking a
model for his system of ethics why should Jesus have gone to the
foot of the Himalayas rather than to the foot of
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* "Pratimoksha Sutra," Pali Burmese copy; see also "Lotus
de la Bonne Loi," translated by Burnouf, p. 444.
** Matthew xix. 16-18.
*** "Pittakatayan," book iii., Pali Version.
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 165 JEHOVAH IDENTIFIED WITH BACCHUS.
Sinai, but that the doctrines of Manu and Gautarna harmonized
exactly with his own philosophy, while those of Jehovah were to
him abhorrent and terrifying? The Hindus taught to return good
for evil, but the Jehovistic command was: "An eye for
an eye" and "a tooth for a tooth."
Would Christians still maintain the identity of the "Father"
of Jesus and Jehovah, if evidence sufficiently clear could be
adduced that the "Lord God" was no other than the Pagan
Bacchus, Dionysos? Well, this identity of the Jehovah at Mount
Sinai with the god Bacchus is hardly disputable. The name 
is Yava or Iao, according to Theodoret, which is the secret
name of the Phoenician Mystery-god;* and it was actually
adopted from the Chaldeans with whom it also was the secret name
of the creator. Wherever Bacchus was worshipped there was a tradition
of Nysa and a cave where he was reared. Beth-San or Scythopolis
in Palestine had that designation; so had a spot on Mount Parnassus.
But Diodorus declares that Nysa was between Phoenicia and Egypt;
Euripides states that Dionysos came to Greece from India; and
Diodorus adds his testimony: "Osiris was brought up in Nysa,
in Arabia the Happy; he was the son of Zeus, and was named from
his father (nominative Zeus, genitive Dios) and
the place Dio-Nysos" -- the Zeus or Jove of Nysa. This identity
of name or title is very significant. In Greece Dionysos was second
only to Zeus, and Pindar says:
"So Father Zeus governs all things, and Bacchus he governs
also."
But outside of Greece Bacchus was the all-powerful "Zagreus,
the highest of gods." Moses seems to have worshipped him
personally and together with the populace at Mount Sinai; unless
we admit that he was an initiated priest, an adept, who
knew how to lift the veil which hangs behind all such exoteric
worship, but kept the secret. "And Moses built an altar,
and called the name of it Jehovah-NISSI"!
or Iao-Nisi. What better evidence is required to show
that the Sinaitic god was indifferently Bacchus, Osiris, and Jehovah?
Mr. Sharpe appends also his testimony that the place where Osiris
was born "was Mount Sinai, called by the Egyptians Mount
Nissa." The Brazen Serpent was a nis, 
,
and the month of the Jewish Passover nisan.
If the Mosaic "Lord God" was the only living God, and
Jesus His only Son, how account for the rebellious language of
the latter? Without hesitation or qualification he sweeps away
the Jewish lex talionis and substitutes for
it the law of charity and self-denial. If the Old Testament
[[Footnote(s)]] -------------------------------------------------
* See Judges xiii. 18, "And the angel of the Lord said unto
him: Why askest thou after my name, seeing it is SECRET?"
[[Vol. 2, Page]] 166 ISIS UNVEILED.
is a divine revelation, how can the New Testament be?
Are we required to believe and worship a Deity who contradicts
himself every few hundred years? Was Moses inspired, or was Jesus
not the son of God? This is a dilemma from which the
theologians are bond to rescue us. It is from this very dilemma
that the Gnostics endeavored to snatch the budding Christianity.
Justice has been waiting nineteen centuries for intelligent commentators
to appreciate this difference between the orthodox Tertullian
and the Gnostic Marcion. The brutal violence, unfairness, and
bigotry of the "great African" repulse all who accept
his Christianity. "How can a god," inquired Marcion,
"break his own commandments? How could he consistently prohibit
idolatry and image-worship, and still cause Moses to set up the
brazen serpent? How command: Thou shalt not steal, and then order
the Israelites to spoil the Egyptians of their gold and
silver?" Anticipating the results of modern criticism, Marcion
denies the applicability to Jesus of the so-called Messianic prophecies.
Writes the author of Supernatural Religion:* "The
Emmanuel of Isaiah is not Christ; the 'Virgin,' his mother, is
simply a 'young woman,' an alma of the temple; and the sufferings
of the servant of God (Isaiah lii. 13 - liii. 3) are
not predictions of the death of Jesus."**
[[Footnote(s)]]---------------------------------------------------------------
* Vol. ii., p. 106.
** Emmanuel was doubtless the son of the prophet himself, as described
in the sixth chapter; what was predicted, can only be interpreted
on that hypothesis. The prophet had also announced to Ahaz the
extinction of his line. "If ye will not believe, surely ye
shall not be established." Next comes the prediction of the
placing of a new prince on the throne -- Hezekiah of Bethlehem,
said to have been Isaiah's son-in-law, under whom the captives
should return from the uttermost parts of the earth. Assyria should
be humbled, and peace overspread the Israelitish country, compare
Isaiah vii. 14-16; viii. 3, 4; ix. 6, 7; x. 12, 20, 21; xi.; Micah
v., 2-7. The popular party, the party of the prophets, always
opposed to the Zadokite priesthood, had resolved to set aside
Ahaz and his time-serving policy, which had let in Assyria upon
Palestine, and to set up Hezekiah, a man of their own, who should
rebel against Assyria and overthrow the Assur-worship and Baalim
(2 Kings xv. 11). Though only the prophets hint this, it being
cut out from the historical books, it is noticeable that Ahaz
offered his own child to Moloch, also that he died at the age
of thirty-six, and Hezekiah took the throne at twenty-five, in
full adult age.
Chapter 4
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