Yule and Noel
The Saga of Christmas
Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D.
Electronically
typed and edited by Juan Schoch for educational research purposes. I can be
contacted at [email protected]. I will be greatly indebted to the individual
who can put me in touch with the Estate of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and/or any of
the following works:
The
Mighty Symbol of the Horizon, Nature as Symbol, The Tree of Knowledge, The
Rebellion of the Angels, The Ark and the Deluge, The True Meaning of Genesis,
The Law of the Two Truths, At Sixes and Sevens, Adam Old and New, The Real and
the Actual, Immortality: Yes - But How?, The Mummy Speaks at Last, Symbolism of
the Four Elements, Through Science to Religion, Creation in Six Days?, Rudolph
Steiner's "Mystery of Golgotha", Krishnamurti
and Theosophy, A. B. Kuhn's graduation address at Chambersburg Academy
"The Lyre of Orpheus", A. B. Kuhn's unpublished autobiography, Great
Pan Returns.
1
(blank)
2
YULE AND NOEL
The Birthday of Humanity
Could any statement fall on the mind
of the general reader with greater astonishment and incredulity than the
assertion here and now to be made that while everybody has celebrated the great
festival of Christmas year after year for some seventeen centuries, nobody
truly and profoundly knows what it means? It is questionable whether a single
person could be found today who would be able to give a sound and supportable
elucidation of the significance of the traditional rites and celebratory
customs connected with the annual observance of the solstitial
holiday. In millions of homes the head of the household, with suppressed anticipation
of delight, drags into the house a green pine tree and in happy mood labors
late into the night of December twenty-fourth to
decorate it with shining baubles and gifts. Yet it is safe to say that not in
centuries has a single one of these celebrants entertained the remotest idea of
the origin and inner meaning of his customary procedure. It is done because it
has become fixed in the communal mind as traditional routine. Few even pause to
wonder how or why the several usages have come to prevail, and would be
surprised if some one raised the question. Now and again a newspaper article
will venture to relate the origin of one or another customary feature, but
cloaks the account in uncertainty and conjecture. The symbolism of the pine
tree, the mistletoe and the Yule log traces back, it will say, to Celtic or
Nordic provenance, but as to vouchsafing any authentic intelligence as to the
inner significance of the rites mentioned, it makes little pretence at
knowledge. It is
3
necessary to add that in such attempts to throw some
light on ancient customs connected with the festival most of the explanation
advanced falls wide of the mark of truth.
If question was asked why the
Christmas pine tree is trimmed with bright objects, or why a gold star is
usually hung atop the highest branch, there would be complete innocence and a
blank stare. If it was inquired why the two strongly contrasted colors of red
and green were universally accepted as traditionally appropriate to the
festival, similar default of knowledge would be encountered. Even the practice
of presenting the Yuletide gifts to family members and friends is not too clear
to the average person, although there is a hazy impression that it somehow is
connected with the sentiment of God's great gift of his Son to redeem mankind.
It would be asking far too much explicit question why the Norse and the
Anglo-Saxons at an earlier time used to drag in and burn the Yule log on the
old-time hearth, and why they scattered parched wheat upon the doorstep or the
hearth-stone of the house. Equally vain would it be to ask why they suspended a
twig of mistletoe under which lovers might steal a kiss. And what the
significance of the candle set in the window to send its tiny gleam abroad in
the dark night of December? Perhaps some one might venture the explanation that
it symbolized the light brought to the world by the birth of the Christ, to
shed his benignant rays upon a benighted humanity.
4
IS CHRISTMAS A CHRISTIAN FESTIVAL?
For centuries in Western countries
Christmas has been proclaimed to be a purely Christian celebration,
commemorating the birth of the Christ, the Savior of mankind, in ancient
This is the common belief, the
general understanding. How far it falls short of the truth will constitute
5
the astounding revelation of this brochure. So
far from its being true that Christianity captured Paganism in its Christmas
institution, the fact of history is that as regards the mode of the Christmas
celebration, it was Paganism that captured Christianity. For the astounding
truth about the matter is that the entire body of meaning foisted upon the
festival by Christianity has missed the mark of true significance by many a
mile, while for a comprehension of the primordial motives expressed in and by
the ritual and symbolical customs and rites, we have to go back to the
mysteries of occult Pagan formulations. To the substantiation of this epochal
pronouncement the present essay will be dedicated.
This declaration virtually asserts
that Christmas finds its true and more potent spiritual significance for us
when treated as a Pagan rather than as a Christian ordination. The inferences
from this deduction are not dodged. They will be openly accepted and confirmed
in their general correctness. The claim is here advanced that not through
Christian but through Pagan forms of celebration and channels of understanding
does this great solstitial ceremony derive its
highest moving and uplifting moral and spiritual power. Christianity has
diverted the true original meaning off into dead-end by-paths. This has
happened because it has lost the underlying sense of the Pagan formulations.
The sad result is that nobody in Christian lands has the dimmest conception of
the true significance of the striking rituals and symbols that still prevail to
mark this as the most cherished festival of the Christian year. This is a
strange and anomalous phenomenon indeed.
6
CHRISTMAS ON MARCH 25.
In the first place there is the
matter of the date, the year, month and day of the anniversary and the
celebration. In all Christian understanding the assumption is that Christmas
commemorates the birth of the infant Jesus at a given place and hour. It is
perhaps well enough known that the exact time of this event is not a matter of
historical record, and therefore the anniversary character of the celebration
is hardly any longer considered. It is kept in the dark background of silence
because to agitate it opens the door to scores of pertinent questions for which
religionists have no authentic answers. The twenty-fifth day of December is
accepted now as a token date of the birth, though few even pause to
wonder any more what led to the selection of this date, if it is not to be held
to be the actual birthday of the Galilean Messiah.
In the case of a festival of such
importance and prominence as Christmas, it is a thing of no light
insignificance that the Christian Church keeps from its people the simple and
singular fact that the early Christians celebrated the birth of their Savior
for over the first three and a half centuries on March 25. It is to be
questioned whether its clergy are generally aware of this fact definitely and
succinctly. It would involve the revelation of their faith's early kinship with
Paganism. It is therefore kept from publicity. But the words of the decree
issued by the Pope of Christendom, Julian II, in the year 345 A.D., are still
to be read, and they inform us that in that year he decreed that henceforth it
was fitting that the followers of the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, should
unite with the followers of Mithra and of Bacchus in
celebrating the rebirth of the deity under
7
solar symbolism at the winter solstice! Here again
it is historically established that even the day and date of the Christmas
event was not an original Christian institution, but was an accommodation of
Christian practice to Pagan observance. In this same decree it is logically
established that the date is not set as an anniversary commemoration, since the
only consideration governing its selection is astrological symbolism! No
pretence is made that it is to be regarded as the natal day of the Son of God
in human body.
Surely it is of first importance to
inquire why, before Pope Julian's decree, Christian practice had set the
celebration of the Savior's birth on March 25. Here, too, the dominant motives
are found to be primarily astrological. March brings the vernal equinox, and
the most moving dramatic rituals of the ancient Pagan religion were consummated
on or about March 21, the date of the sun's crossing northward over the
equatorial meridian. Annually at this epoch every allegorical representation of
the aeonial cycle of soul's involvement in matter and
body came to final stage and to victory with the sun's ascent out of the
darkness of winter, typifying the soul's resurrection out from under the thraldom of "death" in mortal bodies. This was in
fact the final and climactic act in the drama of the birth of the Son of God
from out its material womb of flesh. Hence it came to be regarded in Pagan
modes of pictorializing spiritual processes as the
true birth of spirit, the conception having taken place back on September 21
and the "quickening" from "death" having occurred on
December 21,--all in zodiacal symbolism.
As the advent of the human child
from the mother's womb is as virtually a resurrection as any readily
conceivable, so the resurrection symboled by the passing
over the line of division between heaven (spirit) and
8
earth (matter) by the sun on March 21 could just
as permissibly be classified as a birth. Every birth is a resurrection, every
resurrection a new birth. It requires no special genius to poetize the vernal
equinox as the birthday of the sun of spring, and, following solar symbolism,
the birthday of the spiritual or deific "sun" in the constitution of
man. Hence on the pattern of nature symbolism March 21 was held to be the
birthday of the Messiah. From the first the Christians had joined with the
Pagans in commemorating at the equinox of spring a festival called Lady's Day,
outwardly in honor of nature's rebirth from the universal Mother Earth,
esoterically in token of the rebirth of "dead" spiritual
consciousness according to the inner teachings of the Mysteries. The Christians
thus celebrated it for almost three and a half centuries, an exceptional item
of no slight historical significance. The statement to this effect is made by
Clement of Alexandria and others of the early Christian writers. It is
confirmed by the Julian decree. It can be affirmed, then, that the Christian
celebration of the festival on December 25 dates from the year 345 A.D.
But why the
twenty-fifth days of March and December, and not the twenty-first (or
twenty-second)? Here is a
question which, as far as general knowledge goes, has found no authoritative
answer.
The reason is to be found, no doubt,
in the peculiarity of ancient celebratory custom. It is in fact the same reason
which prescribed the mythical "three days" in which the Son of God
lay in the tomb between death and resurrection. "As Jonas was three days and nights in the belly of the whale, so must
the Son of Man be three days in the bowels of the earth." These three
"days" of the incarnational immersion of
spirit in the three kingdoms of matter, mineral, vegetable and ani-
9
mal, were held to be of such major
significance in the ritualism of archaic religion that many of the more important
festivals commemorating the soul's crucial experiences in the flesh were
instituted as three-day ceremonies, the first day marking the entry of soul
into matter's domain, and the third day consummating its rising out of that
realm of "death." In Old Testament prophecies, it was again and again
stated that we would rise out of the tomb of "death" in these
physical bodies "on the third day." As Hosea (6:2) has it:
"Come let us return unto the Lord: for he will bind us up. After two days
will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in
his sight." After spending three "days and
nights," or periods of incubation and release, in the three lower kingdoms
of nature, spirit-soul would awaken from its aeonial
submergence in the dark unconsciousness of matter and come to its birth into
more expanded being in the mind and heart of mankind. So the Gospel allegory
represented the Christ as emerging from the boat and walking forth on the water
(the body is seven-eighths water!) to save his disciples from sinking in the
sea "in the fourth watch of the night." Incarnation has always been symboled as the night-time and the winter-time of the soul,
its light and life, like the sun's, going "dead" in the coldness and
darkness of matter.
Hence at all the four cardinal
points of the zodiac, June, September, December and March, the great ceremonial
festivals were set at three days length, beginning on the twenty-first or
twenty-second of the month, and culminating three days later on the twenty-fifth,
or "after three days."
It has been indicated that the early
Christians who commemorated the Savior's birth on March twenty-fifth
10
were not in reality totally misconceiving the
significance of the festival appropriate to that date. Even more cogently than
Christmas, Easter is the birthday of the Christ grade of sentient being.
The distinction between the commemorative values of the two dates is to be
found in the allegorical picturing of the Christ's development at the two
emblematic seasons. On December twenty-fifth the Christ is born as an infant.
Not having been here before, he then makes his first appearance in the life of
animal humanity, or has his first awakening in the womb of body. As a new-born
power he is yet the undeveloped potential of Christliness,
the babe in swaddling clothes, the princeling, the king-to-be. He is germinally,
seminally, the King of Glory.
But in March he has become a
full-grown deity, the king on his throne wielding all the fulness
of his divine prerogative in the life of man. The Christ-child has matured into
fulness of the stature of the nature of God, the infant deity has deployed into expression the total
possibility of his deific genius. To summarize it tersely, he is in December
the Christ awakened in the womb of matter; in March he is the Christ
awakened out of the womb of matter. In one he is the babe; in the other
the man-Christ, exercising complete lordship over the physical life of his
body.
Indeed, in the true sense of a
birth, Christmas is less the birth-time than it is the time of what was called
the "quickening."
11
figured the birth of the divine sun-of-soul at the
December solstice, following upon its conception in the cosmic mind at the June
solstice. Descending from the June point of generation in God-mind, it entered
into matter at the September equinox, which would signalize its physical
conception in Mother Nature's womb. From September 21 on to March it endured
its embodiment in matter, its period of incubation or gestation preparatory to
its ultimate birth at Easter. But from September on down to December it plunged
deeper and deeper into the darkness of bodily "imprisonment." It lost
daily to the powers of matter, growing more inert, the spiritual awareness
sinking into a sleep or coma as it was progressively submerged under the
dominance of the flesh. In this its deepest immersion in matter all ancient allegorism depicted the Christos
as lying inert in "death." From this aeonial
"death" its resurrection would come at Easter, its preliminary
quickening at Christmas.
The significant item of this dramatism is that at the December solstice the sun-of-soul
halts its descent and stands for a time balanced and equilibrated with the
powers of matter. The inertia of matter, offering resistance to the energies of
spirit, brings the downward movement of soul into matter to a full stop, and
for the period of the solstice holds it immovable in its embrace. It is at this
point and in this stabilized condition that the soul of the spiritual energy
which has gone "dead" in matter is suddenly "quickened" out
of its torpid state and feels the first touch of its awakening to birth for a
new cycle of growth. Having "descended into hell," (as the creed has
it) he now awakes to an incipient awareness of his position and the
consciousness of his new-born strength. That which lay buried in the tomb of
"death" is now quickened in its womb of new birth. And as a
mother-to-be suddenly feels the stirring of the
12
embryonic babe within her, so Mother Matter feels the
same stirring of new-born mind and the Christly impulse within her domain. As
Christmas at the winter solstice
then memorializes this quickening of the foetal
Christ within the heart, mind and soul of humanity. It stages a festival of
rejoicing at the knowledge that in the circuit of alternate involution and
evolution, the deific solar power of Christliness,
making its round of descent into the body and return, has ended the long period
of its lifeless insensibility as mere seed of divinity in the soil of mortal
body, is now quickened out of its spell of "death" and awakened to
the glorious conquest of life in a new cycle of growth. The season thus
commemorates the birth to activity of the Christ-mind in the nature and body of
mankind. It is to be remembered always that it is only the birth of that
Christ-mind, the deific power in its infancy, in its first unsure reachings and gropings amidst the
strong elemental surges of the irrational and passional
nature of the flesh. But it is no longer lifeless, inert, speechless, dumb and
blind, as ancient symbolism pictured it in this condition. It is awakened to
catch the sense of events and the significance of experience. It is ready to
respond in ever increasing intelligence to the impacts of environment and
sensuous life, and drain out of them their moral value for its perfection.
This delineation is of crucial
importance for general comprehension and for its psychological beneficence,
because a very faulty conception of the "birth of Christ" and the
"coming of Messiah" has widely ingrained the bland assumption that by
the alleged historical event of Bethlehem birth the Christ influence has indeed
been injected into the body and soul of human life. All
13
ancient presupposition that centered upon the
Messianic fulfilment contemplated the immediate
spiritualization and transfiguration of the world's elan
and morale upon this postulated advent of the only-born Son of God. This
opinion has altered but little in the succeeding time to the present. Vague
Christian belief credits this "birth of Christ" with bringing the
first true light to shine in heathen darkness, and credulously propagates the
legend that the world has been elevated to higher level of righteousness and spirituality
as a result of this event of two thousand years ago.
14
THE ADVENT AT THE SOLSTICE
A more competent envisagement of the
symbolic intimations, however, accentuates the thesis that what is celebrated
at Christmas is but the first awakening of that Christ power that slept within
the confines of the mortal nature until the turn of the cycle at the solstitial point of evolution. In the first chapter of I
Samuel it is said of Hannah, who, like Sarah and Elizabeth, was to bear the
Christ-child in her old age, that "at the turn of the year she bore her
son." Mother Nature gives birth to the Messianic consciousness at the turn
of the cycle of the aeonial "year," where
involution comes to a halt and after the period of solstitial
motionlessness swings around as on a pivot and takes initial new direction
upward toward evolution. But human fancy has not been sharp enough to preserve
the subtle distinction between the occult sense of the soul's
"quickening" out of its antecedent "death" and its
"birth" as an active power in the world. What might be called a
confusion of tropes has come in to befuddle common understanding. There are
several senses in which the "quickening" may be conceived as the
Christ's "birth." It is by no means inappropriate to think of the
cosmic event signalized by the Christmas allegorism
as the birth of the Christ, if one is schooled to moderate the conception with
the knowledge that the Christ motivation is under Yuletide symbolism conceived
as only at the inception of its objective kingship in history, and that only
the lives of humans individually and collectively will set the Prince of Peace
on the throne of human life in the world.
As said, all expectation of
Messiah's coming in the ancient world envisaged the immediate transfiguration
of humanity by divine grace and the near beatification of world history by the
cosmic event. How egregiously
15
fallacious and irrational this high anticipation has
been can now be seen in historical retrospect from the present. Not only did
the proclaimed birth of Christ by the Christian movement not make the slightest
appreciable change in the tone and character of mundane history at the time
(indeed it seems not even to have been heard of for close to two hundred years
after its declared incidence), but the record of history for the two thousand
years since the great divine oblation, and more particularly as manifested in
and among the nations blessed with the message of that Redeemer, is one whose
blackness and shocking inhumanity exceeds anything of the kind in all world
annals of the past. History in effect enforces the conclusion that the coming
of Messiah in the form of a historical birth, so far from inaugurating in the
world an epoch of light, peace and charity among nations, has been followed by
the long night of what the historians have seen fit to designate the "Dark
Ages." If Messiah had truly come in the Bethlehem event and come in the
commonly accepted sense, as having brought by his personal presence the benison
of divine grace, light and truth to the world, his long-heralded,
breathlessly-awaited and celestially-proclaimed advent has culminated as the
world's supreme disappointment.
The Christian thesis of the Savior's
historical birth in
Two facts stand out as proving the
fixed date to be erroneous,--assuming that there was the birth of a di-
16
vine personage about whose life the Gospels were
elaborated. One is the discovered date of the death of Herod, Tetrarch of
Galilee, in the year 4 B.C. The other is the recorded time of the rulership of "Cyrenius,"
governor in Syria when the Roman tax was levied which took Mary and Joseph to
Bethlehem, so that the divine birth, heralded in Scripture, might occur at that
village to fulfil ancient prophecy. This time is
found, on certified governmental record of Syrian history, to have been between
the years 13 and 11 B.C. Herod and Cyrenius (found to
be written Quirinus in the Roman records) were both
mentioned (by Matthew) as reigning when Jesus was born. The date set for
the birth is therefore found to be at least four years too late to have
included Herod's effort to destroy the infant Christ by the (now generally
admitted unhistorical) "Slaughter of the Innocents," and some
twelve or thirteen years too late to have transpired "when Cyrenius was governor in
With these two enforced corrections
a host of other minor, though still important, conclusions and speculations
that have become officially accepted as Christian history must perforce be
thrown out, being confused by the two known dates. Indeed some of the
disclaimers reach beyond minor items and put in jeopardy some of the basic
claims on which the entire fabric of Christian historization
rests. The frankness of Church leadership in facing the implications of these
emendations has not been open and sincere. It is deemed best to let the
disclosures pass with as little publicity as possible.
Having engrafted so much Pagan usage
upon its own tree, it is little wonder that Christianity has evolved and
preserved so little of the meaning of these extraneous
17
and exotic customs which most of the northern
countries of
And this covert apprehension and
subterfuge is by no means groundless. Indeed the revelation of the true
esoteric magnificence of the spiritual and theological conceptions adumbrated
and allegorized by the Nordic-Teutonic-Celtic-Saxon festival usages will be
seen to present a definite challenge to the whole authenticity of the Christian
system, not so much as presenting the light and beauty of a rival or opponent
religion, as in lending to the Christian revelation the representations of the
meanings of its own celebratory elements, which it has lost or never
known and published. In fact the startling asseveration can be made that the
medley of Pagan ritual forms connected with Christmas carries a truer and more
illuminating message of the inner significance of the gala day than do the
distinctly Christian elucidations. This line of pursuit indeed runs so deep
into the context of Christmas dramatism and symbolism
as to come close to demonstrating that there is nothing in the celebration that
is exclusively Christian at all, every single item being traceable to Pagan
origins. Such a flat and drastic statement will be severely challenged. The
present essay will stand as an answer to that challenge.
18
THE ANCIENT LINEAGE OF CHRISTMAS
The fundamental theses underlying
the solstitial festival of deific rebirth trace back
primarily to ancient Judaism, and back of that to the archaic Egyptian theurgical science. Ubiquitous in
What becomes indubitably clear from
searching study of these old texts is that the Messianic "coming"
they refer to is the advent into the evolving life of humanity on this earth
plane of a form, grade or degree of consciousness which was not generable in
the order of nature itself, but was the flowering to maturity of the conscious
potential inherent in a seed of divine mind implanted in the natural order from
above. As any mother has to receive the seminal essence of a new birth and
mature it to its generation, so the maternal order of nature, the material
world, had to be impregnated at a point of readiness in its evolution with the
seed of a divine grade of mind, give it birth and rear it to its maturity. Its
reception in utero would be signalized
zodiacally at the September date, its birth at the December period and its
rearing and growth completed at the March consummation. But in the salient
features of the symbolism its birth would be allocated to the December
solstice. Christmas would celebrate the emergence of the divine order of
conscious mind in the human race, the inception of the human grade of being to
crown the
19
former pure animal level of subconscious and
instinctive existence. It marked the entry of mind, reason, and the whole vast
potential of the activity of thought into human motivation, installing the
intellect as king over human action. The interior meaning of Christmas can
never be realistically grasped until it is understood that it celebrates the
coming of mind as King over the lower instincts, appetencies and passions of
the primitive animal stage of biological evolution. The Christmas advent of the
Prince of Peace would eventuate finally in the Easter crowning of the King of
Love, for mind was to be glorified in the end by the sweet aura and radiant
light of divine Love.
Of infinite significance it is to
know that in all the antecedent and "prophetic" literature and
religious ritual stemming into Judaism and Christianity from the venerable lore
of old Egypt, the constructions dealing with the Messianic coming indubitably
refer to this advent of the new higher dispensation that would supervene on
earth from the birth of the thinking principle in human action, and just as
indubitably can not be taken to refer to the physical birth of any personalized
Christ or Messiah. Study of the ancient field of religious literature reveals
no prevalence of the notion that Messiah would come on earth in the form of a
human babe and man-Christ until about the second and third centuries of the
Christian era, and then predominantly only in the region around the Eastern end
of the Mediterranean Sea. Tersely, it can be stated as verifiable truth that
the conception of the Christ-Messiah as a human being of flesh and blood had
not been extant in the ancient world until it took form in the degenerate philosophical
period of the early Christian centuries. From the heyday of Greek philosophical
brilliance in Plato's age some five hundred years before this there had ensued
a tragic de-
20
cline and decay in spiritual wisdom, which Sir
Gilbert Murray has famously characterized by his phrase "the failure of
nerve" on the part of the Greek mind. And it was at the very lowest ebb of
the philosophical spirit that a phenomenon occurred which cast the shadow of
ignorance that deepened into the "Dark Ages" of Medieval Europe. It
was at this epoch that the conception of Christos-Messiah
as a principle of higher consciousness was transmogrified into the form of a
man-God Savior, the Christ as principle turned into the Christ as a man.
This was the supreme tragedy of human cultural history. It generated and
released the frenzy that was to burn the Alexandrian library, murder Hypatia and Bruno, close up the Platonic Academies and end
the benignant light of an archaic spiritual wisdom older than ancient
Fully five thousand years before a
Hebrew maid Mary nursed an infant of
21
into the study of this remote background of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptural literature to be impressed with
the pivotal significance of findings such as these, for they are multitudinous
and staggering in their implications.
The setting of the sun or a star in
the west had been for long centuries the symbol of the descent of soul into
incarnation as similarly the alternate rising of sun or star in the east at
morning had allegorized the resurrection or rebirth of soul out of its burial
in the dark cave of fleshly body. The three stars in the hunter's belt in the
constellation of Orion had been from remote times denominated the "Three
Kings" who attended the birth of the coming Lord. The figure of the Christ
born among animals, or exposed to be saved by animals in a stable or a cave, was common at a very early period. The symbolism of
22
her old age, as did both Sarah and Hannah bear
their sons Isaac and Samuel, carries a significance that has not been properly
envisaged. The reference to the zodiacal sign of Aries, the Ram, in the items
of the Christ featured as the "Lamb of God" and the shepherds with
their flocks in Christmas pageantry, has been entirely overlooked, as have also
the obvious Piscean implications of the Christ's twelve disciples chosen as
"fishermen," and the Greek characterization of the early Christians
as "little fishes" and the Christ figure himself as Ichthys, the Fish Avatar of deity. In the precession of the
equinoxes the sun was entering the sign of Pisces, the Fishes, about the time
of the founding of Christianity, and we are quite ignorant today as to the
concern of ancient religious interest with both astrological and natural
symbolic representation. To interpret ancient Scriptures solely from the
historical point of reference and ignore the poetic, figurative and emblematic,
will contort their cryptic esoteric significance into gross caricature of real
meaning.
Then there is the item of the name
of the location of the Gospel birth. One is now in position to say that if the
divine babe's birthplace had been localized in
23
the human body blood (since it is actually sea
water and is red!), so the "
24
THE RED AND THE GREEN
Having woven again the threads of
connection of the great festival with its primal sources in ancient symbolic
science, the way is clear to delineate as lucidly as possible the basic
significations of the various rites, modes and symbols of the customary
celebration. The explanation of the meaning of the two vividly contrasting
colors which stand as the "theme colors" of Christmas, red and green, seems the most proper item with which to begin the
exegesis. And the basic rationale underneath these colors will itself formulate
the essential ground-scheme for the interpretation of most of the other
symbolic features.
No treatise can dissertate upon such
a matter as the birth of the Christ without blue-printing a chart of the
interrelation of the several diverse but interlocked natures which enter into
the constitution of man, the human-divine composite. The true--but long
lost--bases of sound religious philosophy are to be located in the realm of
anthropology. Religious experience is a phenomenon transpiring within the
elements of human nature. It is, so to say, a psychosomatic ferment amongst the
sensual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual components of man's compound
existence.
Most graphically described, man is,
in Plato's analysis, half god and half animal; a god by virtue of his mind, an
animal by virtue of his body. He is a god inhabiting the body of an animal. He is
thus fabricated out of four separate natures, which are interfused and
interrelated in one organism. He is in toto a
combination in one physical form of four organic entifications
of being or consciousness, the physical, the emotional, the mental and the
spiritual, each functioning in and through its own
25
distinct body, which in each case is composed of
matter in a state of atomic texture and organization consonant with its degree
of fineness or coarseness in the evolutionary scale. These four bodies are
maintained in communal relation to each other within the confines of the outer
physical frame by the play of affinities and atomic energizations
that life and nature readily, if mysteriously, succeed in regulating, the finer
bodies interpenetrating and animating the coarser. Their diversity of structure
is seen as a matter of the differences in frequency, wave-length and other
modes of vibration of the four grades of matter composing them.
The two coarser and, in the
evolutionary sense, lower bodies and their activated types of consciousness
constitute what ancient arcane science denominated the lower, or natural man,
called in Pauline Christianity the first Adam, or the "man of the earth,
earthy," while the two finer and higher ones composed the "spiritual
man," the second Adam, Paul's "Lord from heaven." The first two,
symboled respectively by earth and water, united to
form man physical; the second two, emblemed by air
and fire, constituted man spiritual. The four united man earthly with heavenly
man. When the Bible poetically says that heaven and earth have kissed each
other, it refers to the union of the two natures in the body and life of
mankind.
Man's complete constitution, then,
consisted of four natures so conjoined as to make him a dual creature, with a
material body composed of earth and water, and a spiritual body composed of air
(Latin spiritus means "air")
and fire, with the former housing the latter, but being animated and ensouled by it. As religion is the relation between man's
physical-animal nature and that of this indwelling god within him, the gist of
all meanings presented in the Scriptures and theology relates to
26
the interplay between these two co-tenants of
the physical body, the psyche and the soul.
This analysis prepares the ground
for the explication of the red and green colors so vividly flaunted in the Yule
display. The strongly contrasting yet complementary green leaves and red
berries of the holly branch are not only beautiful to the sense, but stand as
mentally cogent types of the two natures in man. Green is the universal color
of nature on this planet, at least in the vegetable realm. It therefore
symbolizes the first or natural man, the man whose life, like that of green
leafage, is drawn up out of the earth. On the other side red typifies the
second Adam, or man spiritual, because the age-old and invariable symbol of
spirit universal throughout the world was fire; and red is the common
color of fire. The red stands for the fiery essence of divine spirit, the soul
of man.
The Christmas
message that is mutely but eloquently spoken by the holly sprig is indeed a
moving sermon. It
bespeaks the life, history and composition of the human soul, for it presents
in dumb pantomime the growth of man natural as the green stem and its leaves,
and then the generation out of these raw natural elements of man spiritual, as
the fiery red product flowing at the summit. The colorful holly branch thus
depicts man's potential divine spirit as the beautiful flower and fruit of a
physical growth in the natural order.
Man can gaze upon the holly tree and
see his own life-drama mirrored in outline and in miniature, or as the analogue
of all natural process. His body is the growth and evolution of a rudimentary
nucleus of life over a long period. It is his natural self, grown under the
order of the world of nature and the operation of natural law. But in the fulness of time, it, too, bears its glorious fruit at the
topmost reach of its "green" body,
27
which in the case of man is the head. And this fruit
of the tree of life when fully ripened, were it visible to all human eyes,
would be seen flashing out in the form of a radiant crown of ineffable
spiritual beauty efflorescent in the purest of colors.
In both nature and in man the first
or natural order of creation gives birth at its apex to the second or spiritual
man. The physical creation, the "mother," labors to generate her son,
the conscious creation, the Logos. As the spiritual body or bodies in which
this spiritual consciousness is instrumentalized are
constituted of the glowing radiance of solar light, the color of fire is the
most apt earthly symbolic representation of their nature. The world of green
nature bears on its top branch the bright red of the spirit. If one can
imaginatively see all this in the holly, or the poinsettia, or the barberry,
one will find these emblematic objects the mental goad to realizations of the
most potent cathartic virtue. They unite the mental and the emotional through
the subtle power of an aesthetic dynamism. They portray vividly the birth of
the Christ in man as the burgeoning of red fire of spirit at the top of the
green stem of the natural bodily life.
Here we have the basis of the old
English legend of the blossoming of the thorntree at Glastonberry at Christmas. It is symbolism. The tree of
nature, here the thornbush, is proclaimed to put
forth its bloom at the winter solstice, as precisely at this point in the cycle
where involution (the soul's descent) turns into evolution (the soul's reascent), the Christ-child of noetic
consciousness is born. The thornbush was in all
likelihood chosen as carrying on the Old Testament allegory of the thornbush of Exodus aflame with divine fire.
With the tree introduced as typograph of man's natural self, the elucidation comes to
the Christmas pine
28
tree. And well may the German folksong carol its
adoration of the firtree's perennial greenness!
O Tannenbaum!
O Tannenbaum! (O fir-tree! O fir-tree!
Wie green sind
deine Blaetter! How green
are thy leaves!)
For here nature is green, not only
for the seasonal cycle of summer, but all the year round. The life of nature,
preparatory as it always is to the birth of consciousness, is in its essence
everlasting. Matter is indestructible, though its forms of manifestation may
continually change. The root essence of material substance is imperishable. It
is always a potency, latent during the alternate
periods of non-manifestation, active during the opposite cycles of spirit's
waking existence.
Perhaps fancy will not stray too far
afield into whimsicality when it likens the darker
shades of the pine's winter green or former years' growth to the dullness of
matter in the inactive or latent state, while seeing in the brighter shades of
the green of the summer's new growth an emblem of the more radiant energization of matter when ensouled
by bright spirit in the cycles of manifestation. In the temperate and frigid
zones nature has provided a type of the eternality of life and matter in
never-fading greenness of the northern pine. Symbol of the immortality of life,
it brings into the Christmas ritual much the same significance as the green of
the holly. It represents outdoor or wild nature, thus again typifying the first
or natural man in the human constitution.
29
THE GOD DOMESTICATES THE ANIMAL
But for Yuletide ceremonialism the
pine is cut down and brought in and set up in human habitations. What can this
betoken other than the bringing of the natural man within the pale and the aura
of the influence of the god-nature in the human being? In the life of the human
when body is ensouled by the more potent dynamic of
spiritual consciousness, the external bodily nature is in the full sense of the
word being domesticated by the divine Self that is from above. The implanted
heavenly grade of mind, as it develops, takes the natural under its care and
tutelage and labors patiently to transmute its norm of consciousness from crude
animal instinct to intelligence and reason. The wild animal nature is being
tamed and transformed by the impacts upon it of the influences of "the
Lord from heaven," whose ruling motivations are those of benevolence and
love-wisdom. In the Old Testament it was Esau, and in the New it was John the
Baptist, both of whom stood as the type figure of the first or natural man, who
lived in the wilds of external nature. Untamed wild brutish nature is to be
tamed and gradually changed into the likeness of its spiritual tutor. In the
transfer of a product of outdoor nature into the human dwelling there is
signalized the bringing of the "wild beast" segment of man's dual
composition under the influence of the divine-human grade of mind and
subjecting it to the impact of the forces that will in time convert it from
brute to human. Eventually superhuman glory awaits it.
But the semantic dramatism
does not stop with the bringing of the green pine into the home. When the outer
man is brought within the radiation of the soul's more uplifting powers, it
does not long remain bleak and
30
bare in its greenness. It becomes in the
transforming process lighted up with divine glories. The crowning of the
human-animal with supernal grandeur of bright spirit is dramatized by the
decoration of the green branches of the tree with glittering objects. Not only
is the product of raw nature introduced into the human domicile; it is
bedizened with every sort of tinsel and gaudy brilliance. And atop its central
bough is hung the great gold star!
If the mind of the ordinary
householder who trims the Yule tree could have any full measure of the deeper
significance of this bright decking of the Christmas pine as an evolutionary
transaction within the range of his own nature, no ritual in all the year's
round of festivals could possibly engender a more dynamic exaltation of his
spirit than this task of the late hours of Christmas eve. For it poetizes with
aesthetic beauty the drama of the inner life of man himself. It enacts in
reality the living processes by which man's own bodily organism, itself a tree
of natural growth, lights up within its own organic structure a series of
glowing centers of glinting radiance, which the Hindus have called chakras, or "wheels." They are
described as saucer-like in shape and of a coruscating brilliance, as they
shine within the watery confines of the body. When the ancient Sages speak of
the soul's coming to earth to "kindle a flame within the tomb of the
body;" and the Egyptian books announce its coming to generate "a
burning within the sea," they are not indulging in extravagant flings of
fancy, but are pictorializing actual processes that
ensue upon the spirit's transfiguring operation within the physical body.
In fact it is to be understood that
deity enters the stable of the animal-human body at its birth, and as its
latent powers of divinity unfold their capabilities into
31
activity and work their magical effect upon the
physical organism, it succeeds finally in lighting up twelve lamps of a
radiance never seen on land or sea, which shine within the orbit of the
branches of the tree of man's life. In a word, one may say that the physical
tree of man's body is lighted up with the fires of divinity at the extremity of
the twelve branches of his development.
In the Kabalistic literature of the
Hebrews there is the great Sephirothal Tree, with the
three higher and the seven lower lights enkindled upon its ten distinct
branches of radiation. And this cosmical tree is but the macrocosmic replica of
what is repeated in miniature in the human microcosm. The mighty work of great
Deity is to cause light to shine out of the abysmal darkness. If that Power can
generate in fish living in deep-sea darkness a light that makes their world
clear to vision, so it can cause the lights of spiritual intelligence to glow
within the divinized body of man. Humanity is to generate twelve divine lights
upon the branches of its tree of life. This is set forth with explicit
exactness in the last chapter in the Christian Bible, Revelation 22,
where it is said that the tree of life shall bear twelve manner
of fruits upon its branches, and its leaves shall be for the healing of the
nations.
Again a striking passage from the
Bible, in the language of
32
And the power that will cause these
twelve lights to glow upon the branches of the organic human tree is just that
spirit of good-will, love and fellowship that is denominated the
"Christmas spirit." As the transfiguring grace of the lower power
lights up the human countenance, so in positive physical reality will the rule
of brotherhood and charity in the conscious life of mankind generate these
twelve beacons of the divine love-light in evolving human nature.
The birth of the Christos in the consciousness of
humanity will cause the collective tree of human nature to be miraculously
trimmed with lights that will illumine the pathway of world history ever more
brilliantly unto the day of man's deification. "I will clothe thee with
light as with a garment," says the God of the Old Testament. He might have
paraphrased it: "I will trim the twelve branches of your nature tree with
the lights of the Christ-born radiance of love. "For
'Christmas' means 'Christ-birth.'" The mas is
from the Egyptian mes "to be born." Mess-iah means the "(new) born Iah"
(Jah), or Jehovah,--God.
And God might have added: "I
will crown your tree of brilliance with the super-bright Star atop the central
branch." Yes; for the twelve branch lights are the lesser lights, and the
great light of the Christ consciousness glows in supreme glory in the center of
all. On the Mount of Transfiguration, as recounted in the early
Gnostic-Christian work, the Pistis Sophia,
Jesus, seated in the midst of the twelve disciples, is transfigured with
supernal brightness in their center.
33
form like the petals of a fiery lotus, so that
the ancients called it "the thousand-petaled
lotus in the head" of divinized man. This is the pure beauteous flame of
divine love and compassion which has its glorious birth in the head of man the
human, and is the bright
Instead of the gold star on the
topmost limb, ancient ingenuity also devised the figure of the one branch of
the tree that put forth golden leaves--the Golden Bough. This was used to
symbolize the Christos nature, whose golden light of
spiritual splendor become the glorious end product of the whole natural
creation, which, St. Paul says, groans and travails in the pains of parturition
until it manifests the Sons of God, or the Christ. It is a most significant
fact that in many tongues the word for "gold" is the same as the word
for "light." In the Hebrew "light" is aor,
in French "gold" is or, in Latin aurum, giving us
the English ore. The Egyptian Hor-us
is the golden light of the divine Christ grade of brilliance. That his name
for centuries was Iusa before it was Horus,
bespeaks again the direct source of the later name, Jesus.
34
Greek and Roman mythologies made the
golden bough the passport in the hands of the heroes who would adventure into
the dark depths of the Stygian "underworld," whose mislocation by the scholars for centuries has thrown all
exegetical effort sadly awry of true comprehension and interpretation. Not only
was it the hero's passport of entry into the nether world of Sheol, Amenta, Hades and hell, but it was his necessary
exit-permit from those same umbrageous grots and caverns where the shades of
the "dead" flitted about in the darksome recesses of semi-night. His
possession of the powers symbolized by the bough of spiritual gold alone
guaranteed his emergence in safety from this underrealm
of fleshly dusk.
35
THE YULE-LOG AND THE MISTLETOE
In much the same broad significance
as the pine tree comes the symbolism of the Yule Log.
As the log again portrays outdoor nature, its ritual treatment within the house
differs only in form from that of the green pine by the brightness of the
ornaments. In the case of the log the "fire" is actually produced, as
the wooed is placed directly on the hearth and burned. Here the emblemism of being "consumed in the fire" is
introduced. All Bible students are familiar with this figure of the lower,
coarser elements of man's composition, the dross and the chaff, being cast into
the fiery furnace and utterly consumed. This carries the significance here. The
log of wood, creation of the natural world, speaks of the natural man with all
his gross propensities springing from the carnal nature. Under so many names
and figures in the old Scriptures these are to be defeated, routed and slain by
the sword of the spirit of God. The "animal" was to be burned upon
the four-square altar of the doubly-dual nature of man. In this world of
mingled soul and body fires, flames of pure spiritual consciousness being
smudged by lurid flames of the sensual instincts, the mightier potency of the
diviner flame conquers in the end and coarse matter is burned out, leaving the
flame clear and beauteous. The Egyptians called the body wherein these two
fires contend for mastery "the crucible of the great house of flame."
Again they denominated the earth, or the earthy body of man, "the Pool of
the Double Fire." The chaff is cast into the fiery furnace of earthly
passion and consumed. The burning of the Yule log on the hearth in the old days
36
stands as beautiful typism
of this great segment of the festival's meaning.
Then there is the strong suggestive
symbolism of its being burned on the hearth in the home of humans. It is
obvious that the word "hearth" is closely connected with
"heart." The hearth well represents in the house the innermost holy
of holies of the sacred temple of religion. It is in the deepest mind and soul
of the human that this conversion of the lower elements of his nature into the
all-consuming fire of redeeming love takes place. The hearth of old times was
the center and, so to say, the altar of the family life. Fitting and impressive
it is, then, that the Yule log be laid upon the hearth and in the very heart of
the home be lighted up and transformed into the type of spiritual and deific
essence.
High up on the great oak grew the
mistletoe, so uniquely employed by the Druids--whose name is derived from the
Greek word meaning "oak"--as a symbol of the divine elevation of the
soul in man. Its semantic import stems from the fact that it is a parasite and
grows aloft on the branches of its host. Of most pertinent significance it is
that it does not draw its sustenance directly from the earth, but secondarily
lives upon a growth that does extract its strength and nutriment of energy
transmuted from earthly elements, in combination with the vital essences it can
abstract from the air, the sun and the rain.
From these basic data the plant
becomes an apt figure of the Christos. For the
Christ-self grows high up on the tree of the natural life, and likewise must
draw its sustenance from what the nature-growth has drawn up from earth and
converted into forms of nourishment for its rootage
and support. This phase of the imagery will glow more brilliantly in the light
of the candle sym-
37
bol. But it shines out clearly here as well. The
Christ nature can not evolve and blossom to mature loveliness unless sustained
from below by the products of the life of the physical organism. It is, in a
strictly symbolic sense also a parasite, living on the physical body of its
host. The divine plan countenances this interdependence of host and guest on
the successive planes of nature. A lower material organism must play host to a higher life energy, while the latter on its part ensouls the form that sustains it in the dual relationship.
The idea of lovers kissing under the
mistletoe sprig accentuates the conception that the birth of the Christ follows
upon the union of the two lovers in man's nature, the spirit-soul and the body-soul.
The mistletoe suggests the Christ, born high up on the evolutionary tree of
life, subsisting upon that tree's natural elements, and generated by the union
of the "female" physical components of the tree's life derived from
the soil with the "male" spiritual principles of the air and the sun.
On our planet there is no life generable without the union of these four
elements. The mistletoe symbolizes this union of the human and divine, or male
and female, elements, the "kissing" or commingling of which bring the
Christ to his birth.
38
THE PARCHED WHEAT
A Nordic custom of the Christmas
celebration that has fallen into desuetude was that of sprinkling wheat on the
doorstep outside the house or upon the hearth inside, or of parching wheat in
the fire of the Yule log. It should need no dissertation to elucidate the
significance of wheat and its edible product, bread, in religious literature.
John, Paul, the Christ figure himself and many another allegorist of the
spiritual life have made wheat and bread the great central symbol of the divine
soul in man. "This is that bread which came down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall hunger no more." The Christos says that his (spiritual) body is the bread of
life, broken into pieces that all may eat of it, and that all who will eat of
it shall have eternal life.
But the allegorical genius of the
ancients pictured the unground and unbaked grain as
the "raw" or undeveloped germ of future Christhood, the seed of
divinity that had to undergo planting in the soil of human nature, initial
"death" in that dark underworld, then germination, growth and
eventual ripening of its manifold harvest in the perfected product. This
process wrote the history of the youthful Sons of God as they first descended into
incarnation, being planted in the ground of human life, "dying" as
divinities to be reborn as men, regaining their
39
wheat grain, needing to be ground, mealed, baked and made nourishing for man. So St. Paul
says: "And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body which shall be, but bare grain, it
may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: But God giveth
it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body." This is
to remind us that God does not plant in our nature the full-grown tree of the
Christ consciousness, but only its seed potential. Failure to recognize this
true element in religious ideology has led to untold fanaticism and dementia.
This "bare grain" of
inexperienced and undeveloped divinity is to suffer maceration, to be refined,
then mixed with "water," then baked and finally eaten by man for his
eternal nutriment. Have we sufficient analogical skill to see that the
grinding, the milling, the flouring of the raw grain is just the breaking up of
the unity of Christhood on its own high level, as it is fragmented in its
division and partition amongst the bodies of mortals, and its crushing between
the good and evil of the rough human experience undergone in its life as the ensouling principle in mortal bodies? The Christ himself in
the drama says that we must eat his "body which is broken for you."
In the apocryphal Epistle of
Ignatius to the Romans there is found one of the most striking analogical
depictions of this process in all Christian literature, in the passage in which
the soul, speaking, says: "For I am the wheat of God; and I shall be
ground between the teeth of the wild beasts that I may be found the pure bread
of Christ." Ground between the teeth of the wild animals indeed is its
fate, for the allegory refers to these animal bodies of ours within whose
constitution it makes its earthly sojourn. The bare wheat grain is the descending
virgin soul of divinity; the animals are these
40
bodies of ours; the grinding is the
crushing and bruising between the upper and the nether millstone of our dual
nature; the water that cements the flour into cake form is the watery nature of
the body; the fire that bakes the cakes is the double fire of heavenly flames
of love and the murky flares of the "earthly, sensual, devilish"
lower self that rage within us; and the "pure bread of Christ" is the
finally perfected and fully nourishing cake of the divine soul glorified. God
plants the wheat grains of his generated children in the soil of humanity, and
looks to see the milling and the cake-baking take place in the "crucible
of the great house of flame." The Egyptian Book of the Dead tells
of the soul being "moistened with water and roasted with fire in the
underworld." And the underworld, let mystified scholars be enlightened at
last, is this world of ours.
A shorter symbol, or analogue, that
quite well carried the same broad meaning was the parching of the raw wheat
grains. Parched wheat is itself a tasty and nutritious edible. So that to
scatter wheat about the door, or to parch it on the hearth, especially in the
flames of the Yule log, was to dramatize faithfully the purifying and
divinizing experience of the soul in the progress of its development of the
Christ nature through life in the flesh.
41
THE CANDLE IN THE WINDOW
And the candle with its encircling
halo of mystical radiance--what is its message of beauty and significance? More
wonderfully even than the pine tree and the Yule hearth-fire and the holly does
this enlightening symbol of the Christ-birth announce its meaning for the
intelligence of thinking man. Here is the flame that connotes the fire of
deific being in the mortal constitution. It is attached to and holds its
connection with the body of animal tallow by means of the wick, tipped
by flame at its top, but immersed deeply in a body of animal derivation below.
The wick corresponds to the animal soul, or psyche, which in the human organism
is the connecting principle between spirit-soul and physical body. Then there
is the solid body of oil-rich material from the animal world. The candle thus
constitutes an almost exact reduplication of the organization of the three
bodies in man.
The power of spirit, represented by
the flame, is imparted to the wick by the energies of intelligence in an order
of conscious being far transcending the physical world. From the wick it is
brought into relation with the tallow, typifying the lower world. In the
meeting of these two, flame and tallow, takes place the physical-chemical
operation that should speak in voluble tones to the mystical sense of mankind.
By the power inherent in its nature the flame is able to act upon the tallow so
as to change its state from solid to liquid, then from liquid to gaseous, and
in this form convert it, transmute it, into the essence of its own magically
powerful nature. Thus it continues to feed upon the strength of the elements
below it in the structure and so perpetuates its existence in the manifest
world.
42
The parallel with man's life is
perfect. The flame of divine spirit at the summit of his nature communicates
itself through the intermediary wick of the human-animal soul to the elements
of the animal-body itself. These it continues to refine and sublimate through
its efficacious contact with their more sluggish nature, until in the end it
converts them "into the likeness of its own glorious body," as
The philosophical moral of this
elucidation is all too likely to be missed by those "spiritual"
cultists of the present day who most need to be impressed with what the
wondrous analogue has to teach them in correction of their overweening
laudation of "spirit" and corresponding derogation of
"matter." One who has ever deeply reflected on the candle flame as he
sees it replenished, refueled by the contribution of baser matter to its
maintenance can never again join the blatant chorus of philosophical
condemnation of matter. Without matter to feed its life, spirit could not for a moment maintain its connection with living experience in
the world, and its own evolution would be at a standstill. All too much of
unschooled philosophy has berated matter, decried spirit's alliance with it and
characterized the
43
soul's relation to it as its sin and fall into
degradation. Orthodox theology has tainted its systematism
with the same allegation of the "fall" into matter and generation.
But all this is simply an unbalanced
and unintelligent mishandling of subtle elements of the old cosmic dramas.
Soul's linkage with matter in incarnation is the natural and wholly salutary
and beneficent planting of a seed in its proper soil. Without the union of seed
and soil there can be no new growth. The human body and its sensuous life
provide the fertile soil; the unit of soul consciousness is the divine seed.
Spirit must be able to relate itself to matter so as to be able to draw upon
the sustaining power of the energy in the atom if it is to establish itself
anew in a cycle of growth.
It is time the endless prattle of
ages against what early Christian doctrinism called "the malignancy of
matter" be silenced by the fuller understanding
of the eternal role of benignant purpose which matter plays in the cosmic
evolutionary economy. God produced his material creation, sun, moon, stars,
earth, animals, vegetation, man; and pronounced it
good. Only erring half-taught religionists have pronounced it evil. The
religion that has implanted the universal idea that man was born in sin because
the soul came to share the life of the flesh has projected a most baleful
influence into the stream of human ideology. Man's life would rise many grades in the scale of dignity and happiness if he
would cease to despise his body. Of a surety his flesh is not to dominate him.
But it is to be honored for the indispensable and noble service which it
performs together with the soul. A sound philosophy will not heap contumely on
the flesh, the handmaid of the soul.
44
THE STAR IN THE EAST
The star of
The Messiah comes not as a single
unit of consciousness, but as a threefold power. It is Spirit-Soul-Mind; three
in one, yet one in three. He comes, so to say, and his advent brings his three
aspects to manifestation; or he comes as these three. Spirit, as
manifest in the flesh, is ever a trinity of faculties. Its lowest facet, the
only one that comes immediately into the brain consciousness, is Mind. Above
that stands Soul, and still higher is Spirit. As these three rays of his power
may be said to constitute his coming in three forms, they are said to accompany
him to earth. And as their combined development is what in reality brings him
here, they are said to come to pay homage to him. They combine to consummate
his greatness and completeness. In the Gospel allegory this relation to him
came out as "worship."
As to the star--what is it? Can it
be taken astronomically? Again and most emphatically, no! Even staid
astronomers, deluded by the commonly assumed historicity of the Gospel story,
have childishly gone on record as affirming that "somewhere near" the
time of Jesus' birth there was an exceptional and rare conjunction of five of
the planets. Only a few years ago we
45
witnessed the interesting spectacle of five of the
planets closely bunched in the western sky of evening. The phenomenon brought
no birth of divinity, with the most savage of all wars going on at the time.
The guileless astronomers had overlooked the statement in Matthew's Gospel
that made their guessing weird and preposterous. "Now the star came and
stood over the place where the young child was." Let us picture
Jupiter--itself some hundred times larger than the earth,--Saturn, Mars,
Neptune and Uranus, all crowding in the heavens directly above the tiny stable
in
The Star of Bethlehem is the bright
radiance of the divine soul shining in the innermost recesses of evolving human
minds, and rising with man as he emerges, symbolically on the east, from out
the dark night of his immersion in matter and body. As it grows to its adult
state the soul becomes a shining star of bright ray in the human head. When it
shines forth there arises the gleam of its
manifestations as the three "spiritual magicians." The bursting out
of the light of this triple star upon infant humanity, as the race begins to
incorporate Christly principle in its action, is naturally pictured as bringing
the three Mages or Sages of wisdom to the earthly cradle where, all meanly
wrapped in swaddling clothes of earthly flesh, he lies pictured as the infant
at the beginning of his career to redeem animal man to divinity. Their offering
of gifts of incense, sweet myrrh and gold betokened their contribution to his
unified completeness. Gold emblems the highest life of spirit; incense is the
sweet odor of balsam treated with fire, the symbol of nature transmuted by
soul; and myrrh is
46
the sweet-savored vegetable that typifies the
natural contribution to the life of spirit.
Somewhat akin in significance to the
red holly berry and the poinsettia was the red rose of Christmas symbolism. Pictured on the cross at the junction of the two arms, it emblemed the Christ-birth as the product of spirit and
matter "crossed" in the life of man. Like the
I know a rose-tree spring
As men of old were
singing.
From Jesse came the shoot
That bore a blossom bright
Amid the cold of winter,
When half-spent was the night.
By ancient symbolic reckoning the solstitial period in December marked the half-way point in
the "night" of the soul's incarnation. And it was precisely at this
point, also by symbolic connotations, that the Christ principle ended its sleep
of "death" in matter and was quickened to a new birth. The Christ was
the red rose flowering at
47
"CAROL, BROTHERS, CAROL"
The carols of Christmas must have
their due place in the exposition. These musical ballads that thousands of
throats send throbbing in sincere joyousness up to the rafters of churches
embody man's most blithesome expression of his Christmas spirit. Many are
magnificent beyond words. If all those who sing could catch the faintest true
conception of the awesome burden of the profounder esoteric significance of the
sonorous phrases chorused at the Yuletide, their hearts and minds would fairly
palpitate with the overmastering realization of the grandeur of the
human-divine epic hidden in these majestic runes.
A Christmas Eve service in an
48
upward path of return to heaven. The December
solstice is the hinge on which descending soul swings around at the nadir; the
June solstice is likewise the hinge of the sun at its upper turn. But the
Christ is born in the "winter."
What is perhaps the most salient
feature accentuated in the carols generally has been little noted. It is the
oft-repeated linking of heaven and earth together in the jubilee, to stress
mightily the fact that both hemispheres of life were beneficiaries of the great
gift of Christhood to the world of men. The first verse of the fine old hymn, Joy
to the World, well exemplifies this feature:
Joy to the world, the Lord is come!
Let earth receive her king!
Let every heart prepare him room
And heaven and nature sing!
Heaven and earth are exhorted to
sing together. We must ask why heaven is to join in rejoicing over the advent
of divinity to this planet. Here we come back to the holly, the pine tree and
the Yule log. Both nature on the one side and consciousness on the other were
to be blessed by the descent of Messiah to earth. Nature, in the form and
person of her top-most product, man physical, was to receive as her honored
guest the spark of celestial fire, which under her tutelage would eventually
elevate the natural man to the order and rank of divine intelligence. Nature
was to have the germinal potential of soul implanted in her bosom, and only
this tie gave it the chance to rise in the scale of developing being. It was
indeed the great aeonial occasion for nature's
rejoicing. She was to be elevated from blind instinct to mind.
As to heaven, it was the grand
cosmic opportunity for those citizens of heaven, those deific mind-born Sons of
God, to link their potential capabilities with the gen-
49
erative powers of matter and nature in human bodies,
and thus achieve a new birth and further growth in the eternal advance. For
both heaven's sons and nature's creation it was equally the grand event of all
the ages. Well indeed might man and nature unite to celebrate the high festival. It meant a nearer approach to godhood for both,
and full apotheosization for those already at the threshold
of divinity. It was God's gift to them of a new reach and range of life that
would in the event lift each to a higher kingdom of being, an expanded
dimension of consciousness. If this is not the due occasion for both heaven and
nature to rejoice, then creation furnishes no adequate ground for jubilation.
This analysis underlies the reason
why the Christ's advent was proclaimed from heaven to men on earth. It rang
from the skies. "Heaven's arches rang" with the
exultant shouts of the celestial hosts, and "earth gave back the
sound" from its plains below. Earth sent back to heaven the echo of
its joyous halleluiahs, resounding throughout the empyrean. The hosts of the
twelve legions of angels, sons of the God-Mind, who were preparing to migrate
downward to our planet, would in the round of the aeon
return rejoicing, victors over "death," having burst asunder the bars
and gates of this lower "hell." It was the festal day of all the
earth and no less the gala day for the angelic hosts above. The festival would
lack its true import unless both men and angels alike realized its meaning in
both spheres of being. For the event meant a new heaven for spirits of light
and a new earth brightened with heavenly glory for men.
So angels in the
clouds of heaven announced the coming to shepherds abiding in the fields,
keeping watch over their flocks by night. As the Messiah coming in this era of the zodiacal cycle was to come in
the sign of Aries, the Ram, when he was to be heralded as the
50
Lamb of God, slain from the
foundation of the world, inevitably the drama personified these humans who were
to domesticate and care for this tender Lamb in its infancy as
"shepherds." So the annunciation was made to shepherds in the fields,
in the night and winter of incarnation. It is said that no sheep are ever
watched out in the fields of
The pageantry of snowy winter
attending the Messiah's birth is of course altogether Northern and astrological
symbolism. It depicts the winter solstice and the Northern winter with its snow
and all its poetic incitements. But the true sense of all this has been lost.
The iciness of the season is the outward arctic symbol of the cold deadness of
the soul when it has gone to its torpid sleep of inertness, its
"hibernation" under nature's chilling spell and lies wrapped in
unconsciousness, like the wheat grains in winter's soil, until awakened to new life
and regeneration by April's strengthening sun.
At the solstice the sun stands still
for a period of about ten days, neither losing nor gaining in its light. Here
is the astrological symbol of spirit's equalized relation with matter, when it
is weighed in the scales of the exact balance or equilibration between the
forces of soul and body. Humanity at its present state stands at precisely this
point of stabilization between the powers of soul and those of sense. In this
close relation the opportunity is afforded to both these elements to consummate
their interlocking and their "marriage" and produce the Christ-child
as their offspring. Thus the solstice of winter is the zodiacal portraiture of
every aspect of the relation of soul to body, out of which the Christos is to have its new generation.
Like the sun of late December, the
unit of soul-mind
51
has gone as far down the scale into matter's
depths as it can go. There it stands, held fast by the equilibrated powers of
matter. The two conflict and war with each other until
their reconciliation is effected through the intermediary offices of the Christ
as its power evolves. And the final at-one-ment is
achieved as the two learn to synchronize their natures. With the harmony thus
established comes the peace on earth and good-will among men that the angels
announced to the shepherds.
But the horrid scroll of history
since the first century belies any historical reference to the meaning of
Messiah's coming at a given epoch in a given personality, and sets the seal of
truth on the hypothesis that the Gospel story is the dramatic representation of
man's total evolution to divinity, a goal which is yet to be achieved in
anything like its fulness. It is far better to know
that Messiah has not yet come--in the final sense of an overt event in
objective history--than to cherish the common belief that he has come, and that
succeeding history has displayed more in human savagery than any age before it.
If what has eventuated in history since the divine event fulfills the meaning
of Messiah's birth, there is little about which to sing halleluiahs and bedeck
the hall with holly. The hope of humanity is in the realization that the Christ
is yet to come, and to come not in any manger bed or chamber of luxury, but to
reign as King of Love in the lives of individuals and in the statecraft of the
nations. To proclaim that Messiah has come--and left the world groveling in
brutish lust for butchery--would be to crush man's spirit in despair.
The failure of two thousand "blithe
Noels" to bring the Christly spirit to birth in the world is easily
accounted for. Taken as overt historical event occurring personally to one man,
and not understood as the implanta-
52
tion of the "bare grain" of the future
growth of godliness in all hearts, the mighty cathartic and transforming force
of the accolade to infant deity went out from all hearts and dissipated
itself upon the imagined figure of this one alleged personage, when it was
intended that it should go inward to work its benign efficacy upon all
souls. The Christ was objectively heralded but not subjectively received. He
was hailed out there in history, but not welcomed into the inn of each heart.
Homage was lavished upon his physical personality, when his spiritual body
should have been sacrificially eaten and psychically assimilated. The enormous
collective stream of psychic adoration doubtless focused over the mythical
stable in
The historization
of the drama and the beautiful allegory swallowed up the spiritual efficacy of
the annual ritual, and therefore simply failed to carry home to any minds the
pivotal truth on which its beneficent leavening of humanity entirely depended.
The nub of the great sweeping significance was the cardinal truth that
53
unless the Christ be born, loved, reared and
exalted as ruler in the conscious life of every individual mortal, his birth
has not been brought to pass. One birth in
Be born in us today.
If Christmas does not implant the
spirit of divine love ever more deeply in all souls, it is celebrated in vain.
And never will the festival of gladness generate its high cathartic power to
spiritualize the race until, instead of the physical birth of one babe in the
impossible Bethlehem story (taken as history), the anniversary at the solstice
speaks volubly to every intelligent human of the birth within the area of his
own consciousness of the soul of divine graciousness and compassion.
54
This Egyptian background can not be
discounted as the genuine source of the "miracle" in which Jesus
feeds the five thousand enhungered gathering by multiplying
the loaves and fishes. The Greeks named Anu Heliopolis, the "city of the sun," the spiritual
city where the
55
sun of divine soul went to its "death"
and had its resurrection. Anu in the Egyptian system
was the place of increasing the divine bread of eternal life! And this
"city" is finally the human body itself, where soul first goes
to its "death," then has its glorious resurrection. Likewise this
"city" is Beth-lehem, the house of
bread, when the zodiacal symbolism is transferred from Egyptian to Hebrew name
and type.
What little there is to Christmas
that can be claimed as distinctively Christian is itself marred by misguided
comprehension of its relevance and quite erroneous application of its symbolism. It is almost a wholly Pagan festival that we
celebrate. The dire tragedy is that we no longer have the perspicacity to
discern in it the transcendent glory of the original Pagan significations. The
gala-day of all human-divine history goes off as a mere anniversary celebration
in the spirit of a worldly carnival. That few observe it in the exalted
appreciation of its profound mystical values bespeaks the depths of our
philosophical failure and the decay of our culture.
56
YULE AND NOEL
It remains to build up the structure
of the two familiar names attached closely to the Christmas gaiety. They are Yule
and Noel. Nowhere has there been seen any scholar's derivation of Yule
from its obvious philological sources. It almost incontestably springs from
the ancient Egyptian name of Deity, IU, meaning "(the Deity) who
comes," and the Hebrew EL, "God." Its total rendering
would then read: "The Deity that comes as God," or, more simply,
"the coming God." The Egyptians many times called Horus,
or Iusa, "he who comes regularly and
continually," and in hymns he is hailed and appealed to as "The
Comer!" IU is the verb meaning "to come." In course of
Nordic and Anglic transmission, the IU became YU
and the EL more phonetically conjoined to it as LE, giving us
in the end YULE. As the Divinity under zodiacal symbolism
"came" at the winter solstice, the late December period became
designated as the Yuletide and its festival "the Yule."
As to Noel, adopted as the
French name for Christmas, the same terminal el unites here with the
Greek root of all words meaning divine knowledge, the primal root of the Greek
verb gignosko, "to know," and
the no in the English word "know." No is the Greek stem
meaning the divine noetic mind of God, or in essence and potentiality the mind of the Christ.
The Greek word for "mind" is itself Nous,
meaning of course the cosmic Mind. Noel would then mean "the
mind of God," as manifested in his Son or Sons born on earth. The birthday
of the Christly principle was allocated to the winter solstice. When,
therefore, choirs chant joyously "Sing We All Noel!",
the import is that we mortals can in this festive celebration exult in the
birth or initial advent of that same mind which was also in Christ into the
scope
57
of our conscious life. And certainly earth
offers nothing more worthy of rhapsodic song from mortal lips than this event.
If we fail to rise to ecstatic joy over the contemplation of this crucial
episode in our racial history, we are "stocks and stones, and worse than
senseless things" indeed.
So potent, however, is a symbolic
ritual that, even though the millions who enact the annual ceremonials and go
to the considerable labor and sacrifice of presenting the round of gifts year
after year have little or no real conception of the explicit meaning of their
activities, they still catch something of the inexplicable impressiveness of
the occasion. In spite of the fact that the meaning escapes the individual
celebrant as a commemoration of an evolutionary crisis and the end and
beginning of distinct epochs, and adumbrates a spiritual transformation that he
can consummate for himself, still the sheer beauty of the symbolism and imagery
of the memorial, standing in their purely external form, reaches deeply into
the psychic consciousness and stirs there profound intimations of human
brother-hood and the love emotion. For a few short hours on December
twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth the Christian world is brought to some measure
of realization of the loveliness of charity and fraternity. Worldly cares,
anxieties and concerns of the daily struggle are forgotten for an interlude,
while elders enter into the glee of childhood elated over engaging toys. A
brief foretaste of what it would be to live in a world of amity and heartfelt
good-will is enjoyed, a bit wonderingly. But all too quickly the glow of humanism
fades, the carols give way to the prevalent decadent
"pep music," and the daily interests and the tone of secularity crowd
out the new-born Christ spirit from the heart.
Christmas is the salvation to a
large extent of what true Christian spirit is extant. Its anticipatory eager-
58
ness and the momentary touch of fellowship
engendered by it keep the soul of brotherhood from threatened extinction in the
modern world of science and engrossment in the externalities of existence.
But it is the earnest presentment of
this essay that if to the external beauty of the Yuletide ritualism there was
added the full intellectual apprehension of the precise symbolic significance
of all the conventional customs perpetuated in beautiful traditional fashion
every year, there would be released from out the subliminal depths of man's
divine subconscious potential such a flood of Christly love, born of beauty and
understanding combined, as would sweep Christianity into the hearts and minds
of the age. This would come because it would touch and bestir in man's deeper
nature the latent powers of the Christ consciousness themselves. With their
awakening would come the birth and later the adult development of the Christ mind. It would bring the spiritualization of the world, the apotheosization of humanity.
The force of ritual is powerful in
its sheer outward performance. Even when its forms and movements are without
rational appeal, they stir the soul to feelings of beauty. But if there was
added the still more potent force that would flow in powerfully from the mind's
clear grasp of the symbolic intimations of the rites, the operation would lift
the very soul to moments of ineffable exaltation. This is precisely the
psychological element lacking in the festival's annual incidence, the one
factor requisite to make it the efficacious channel of spiritual purgation and
uplift.
The mind is unquestionably the
central dynamo of all psychological energizations.
But merely outward feelings sensually excited by pageantry, no matter how beautiful
in themselves, can not bestir the soul's deepest
59
sensibilities as profoundly and as lastingly as can the
logical cognitions of understanding. Philosophy is the mother of understanding
and that in turn of affectional states, and these set
the norm and tenor of individual stability and psychic integration, the health
of the mind carrying the health of the body with it.
Instead of being merely a periodic
recurrence of gifting and a happy time for children, with a few carols thrown
in, Christmas could be the occasion of a veritable annual re-baptism of the
conscious mind in a flood of supernal benignancy released from the hovering Oversoul of divinity, the immanent-transcendent God within
man, that would constitute a periodical cathartic purification of the soul and
a dynamic regeneration of the spirit in the body. It carries an ordination of
ancient wisdom designed to utilize astronomical features of the season to
impress upon human understanding the significance for man himself of all that
which the outer natural phenomena can adumbrate for him of the interrelation of
soul-consciousness and mundane body.
Like the winter sun, his own
sun-soul has gone down into the underworld of material darkness and lies
"dead" and inert in that cave of earth. The solstice tells him that
for the period of the human evolution that soul of his is bound in with matter
in a state of stabilization, or equilibration of its energies. For a long
time--pictured by the ten days of the solstice--that soul, a divine unit in its
own right--will wage an even battle with the elemental powers of this plane of
existence. But slowly the cycle will swing around past its solstice, the soul
will begin to gain on the inertia of matter and the sluggish inhibitions of
body; and finally it will have put all material powers under its feet, and
emerge victor over "death" and the "grave."
60
ANGELIC SONGS ARE RINGING
These ennobling truths the seasonal
festival will impress upon human intellection with ever more realistic cogency;
until the tree, the holly, the lights and star, the candle, the cradled babe,
the carols and the organ will release such a tide of sweeping realizations in
man's psychic realm as will cause his heart to throb in thrilled ecstasy, with
access of a more than joyous sense of brotherhood of mortals linked together in
the bonds of cosmic beneficence. A choir marching past him in a church aisle,
with each singer carrying a lighted candle, and pouring out the strains of
Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,
Glory to the
New-Born King.
will lift the psyche close to the level where
truly the song of angelic voices might be caught in mystic enchantment. And as
surges of transcendent emotion of beauty, love and goodness inundate his mind,
he will indeed realize what in truth it means to give glory to the new-born
King. For it will carry far beyond the mere outward idea of paying homage to a
babe in remote time and place--beautiful though this is as symbol--and cause to
glow within the breast that star of inner light that lighteth
every man that cometh into the world.
There are those who have been
impressed with this view of the Yule festival and who mentally assent to its
essential correctness. But they demur to it as a detraction
from the psychic force and impressiveness of the holiday if it is thus reduced
to a psychological and intellectual realization and not invigorated with its
significance as the commemoration of a historical event of transcendent
importance. They raise the demurrer that
61
to denude it of all outer dress of historical association
and leave it standing as mere drama of an internal and purely subjective
ideation in consciousness sadly detracts from the realistic and affecting
unction of the festival.
To this there must be entered here a
vigorous counter-claim. No mistake could be greater than this assumption.
History has now demonstrated that the impressive power of the festival, when
based on its alleged historical foundations, has fallen short of the saving
efficacy it should have yielded. The fact, strange but true, is that not only
would the rituals not lose their dynamic dramatic power from the
understanding that they are outward symbolizations of an internal
spiritualizing process and not historical events reviewed in commemoration, but
they would take on a tenfold greater force of psychic beatification from the
recognition that it is a birth in all men and not in one single historical
individual that they celebrate. Instead of going flat and meaningless because
this view attaches no single event of history to them, the ritual would rise to
unimaginable heights of exalting emotional power from the knowledge that they
memorialize not one, but all spiritual rebirth in history, past and still to
come. When the mind catches the universal and at the same time personal meaning
and reference of the customs, the beauty of the observance will lift the
consciousness to ineffable mystical experience. The weight of cosmic
recognitions and intuitions of transcendent insight could become almost
insupportable. It is a strange and illogical argument to contend that the
profounder intellectual comprehension of the rites would diminish their
force and their moving power. While the outer historical significance is
lessened or even entirely dismantled, the Nativity legend and all the mythical
episodes of the
62
festival's background would be vested with a greater
and more cogent aura of psychic pertinence than before. They would become
lovelier than ever, since the mind has freighted them with meanings of dynamic
import to the soul of the celebrant himself. They would bring their meaning and
significance home to the individual and they would remain with him as a leaven
of divinizing ferment from one Yule to the other.
The name, dignity and authority of
"king" stands in much disesteem and disrepute
in the world today. But the world sadly lacks the basis of that proper homage
and worshipful reverence which it should never fail to accord to the true and
rightful King of Righteousness, whose birth and later rising with healing in
his wings the great Yuletide festival was set to commemorate. Until moderns can
join their voices with angelic choirs caroling eternal praise to this King
and thus by their own divine initiative seat him at last on the throne of the
nations, the continued celebration of Christmas can avail little. Can there be any question whether it were better to hail a king in
ancient
The supreme message of the Yule is
that we have been given, deep within the confines of our own natures, a divine
babe of consciousness to raise from infancy to the fulness of the stature of his godly nature. His coming has
linked us with the skies, for he is a child of celestial kingliness. Hence it
is that the dominant note of Christmas joyousness is the uniting of our earthly
voices with the choirs of heaven. Those choirs are chanting
63
halleluiahs in jubilation over the gift of heaven to
earth; on her part earth must lift her voice to hail in utter joy the advent of
her divine visitant from the empyrean. So the Yule resounds with the strains of
"angels bending near the earth, to touch their harps of gold;" of
hosts of heavenly citizens caroling "Peace on earth, good-will to
men." And, in the deepest sense of its sublime connotation, the symbolism
of angelic hosts filling the skies of Christmas-time with soul-lifting music
must be translated psychically into the realities of surges of mystical
sweetness sweeping through the upper areas of the human soul. For the angelic
voices that man can hear are the echoes in his own consciousness of the
outpouring of divine radiations of Love and Light from the mind of God. And man
in his upward march must ultimately provide the wondrous answer to the question
couched in the lines of the Christmas hymn:--
Hark! What mean those holy voices
Sweetly sounding through the skies?
64