Jane is too picky for me. posted some of that mighty gospel refutation
and she didn't like it. Since this is ask God, not Jane or Dll, I am asking God and anyuone else if suits them.
MAN'S TWO BIRTHS - ZODIACAL SYMBOLISM IN THE GOSPEL OF LUKE
Three ancient and long-discredited sciences have experienced a surprising renaissance in the modern day: symbolism, alchemy and astrology. The last particularly has come into widespread vogue, but
on a basis which still inclines conservative positivism in science, scholarship and orthodox religion to regard it as closely allied with "popular superstition." In its predictive or "fortune-telling" aspect it is generally looked upon askance. But there is another facet of it in which it has pertinence and value that has not been recognized in its modern revival and on which perhaps its most legitimate claim to
consideration should properly rest. This is its function as symbolic theology. It is beyond question that the great ancient design of the zodiac is a wondrously conceived graph aimed to depict the structure of the Logos, the pattern or creative evolution, the essential constitution of the universe and the course of the current of life in the cosmos, and by analogy in man the microcosmic replica of the macrocosm. Almost infinite nuances of significance have been
adumbrated in those twelve signs or houses of the zodiac and the thirty-six other constellations, as well as in the semantic pictorializations which ancient sagacity and an ingenuity born of a sapient understanding of the profounder truth of life conceived and drew around those star clusters in the heavens. The uranograph, or chart of the skies, was incontestably the first of all Bibles, pictorially edited. Not quite simply and patently, but still most luminously for the initiated who held the recondite keys to the symbolic lexicon of ancient writing, it can be affirmed that all Bibles are but amplifications and elaborations of the original volume of ideography that was first written on the open slate of the sky, then charted in the zodiac and the planispheres carved on the ceilings of ancient temples and later transferred to earth and inscribed in scrolls, tablets and parchments. Man, adjured
the old Scriptures, was to fashion his new body of spiritual glory "after the pattern of the heavens," the frame of the heavenly or zodiacal man, the primal Adam Kadmon. And a cryptic graph of the nature and history of this celestial Personage was sketched by
the enlightened Sages in the configurated star groups. Zodiac comes from the Greek word zodion, meaning a small animal zootype, or living symbol of the microcosmic life of man, who is indeed made
in the image and likeness of the Divine Man pictured in the cosmic heavens. Man's little physical body is a miniature copy of the universal body of God. The illimitable frame of cosmic Man was
outlined in the scroll of the skies, the solar systems and galaxies being living cell clusters in his immeasurable organism.
The almost endless intimations of vital significance inwrought into the structure of these Gestalt configurations carry the essence of the esoteric import of the Scriptures. But there is one group of
zodiacal items that strikes so deeply into the heart of general theology that its constituent particulars are assembled here as a striking and challenging exemplification of the methodology of the archaic science which is in truth the "lost key to the Scriptures." This presentation will serve as introduction to a vast body of evidence which will prove beyond controversy that Biblical theology rests more completely on astrological symbology than has been discerned in any age since the ancient day. The republication of this outline will come as a matter of the greatest momentousness, enforcing as it must a new approach through a new avenue of technology to the proper interpretation of the Bibles, yielding a quite new and revolutionary orientation of their true meaning. These items trace the
unsuspected and crucial significance of two of the twelve signs, Virgo and Pisces, in the heart of the New Testament narrative. Let the reader picture before him the circle of the zodiac, with the house
of Virgo at the western or right end of the equatorial meridian line drawn horizontally through the center and intersecting the circle on the east and west, and with the house of Pisces directly opposite
it on the left and eastern end. The simple fact that they stand opposite to each other and six months apart will presently be seen to dramatize cosmological and anthropological truth of the most basic
and, in our present state of ignorance, astonishing pertinence and importance.
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THE TWO MOTHERS OF THE CHRISTS
The exposition must begin with the perplexing and hitherto unexplained item of ancient religious myth
that the Christs, the Sun-Gods, the Messiahs were generally allegorized as having had two mothers!
How, one asks, can there possibly be rational significance in such a predication? It has been put out
of serious consideration as just another of the extravagant conceptions of ancient primitive
unintelligence, just some more of the rubbish of fantastic Pagan superstition. It will therefore come as
a surprise and shock if an intelligent re-examination forces us to realize that in profundity of
knowledge and semantic skill in portraying it ancient perspicuity so far surpassed our own in this field
of anthropological science that we are found to be the ones still immersed in primitive superstition,
not the ancients.
This dual maternal parentage of the Messianic characters should not have appeared so outlandish
and bizarre, seeing that the Gospel Jesus himself, dramatic figure of the divine principle in man,
categorically announced this very feature in declaring to Nicodemus that "you must be born again."
The startled Nicodemus asks if this means that he must enter a second time into his mother's womb
and experience a second birth in the natural manner. Jesus, implying that this idea would be
preposterous, replies that you "must be born of water and the spirit." It must be noted here that the
Latin word spiritus, translated "spirit" in many passages, means also "air," "breath" or "wind." Taken
in connection with the great basic usage in Scriptural symbolism of the four primary elements, earth,
water, air and fire, this "air" symbol at once assumes a position of the deepest revelatory moment.
The body of the physical, natural first man, of the earth, earthy, was symbolically conceived as being
composed of the two lower, or coarser of these four elements, earth and water; while air and fire,
representing mind and spirit, commingled to constitute the higher, or spiritual man, the second Adam,
or the Christ. Jesus' statement to Nicodemus could then as meaningfully have been phrased "born of
water and air." Thus we can see a new signification in the statement of John the Baptist, in which he
uses three of the four elements to symbolize his meaning when he said that he, the forerunner of the
greater Christ, baptizes us with the two lower elements, water and
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earth (but omitting earth, which should have gone with it); but that the mightier power of spirit that is
to supervene after his preparatory work has been accomplished, will baptize us "with the Holy
Spiritus (air) and with fire."
Jesus thus affirms that we have two births, necessitating two mothers, and John adds the
corroborating datum that we have two baptisms.
Since man's spirit-soul is an indestructible fragment of God's own eternal spirit, truly a tiny spark of
that cosmic Intelligence and Love which we call the Mind of God, the ancient symbologists typified
the divine element in man by fire, and in contrast, emblemed the lower human elements by water.
The fiery essence of soul is housed in a tenement of flesh and matter, which is seven-eighths water
by actual composition. The crossing of rivers and seas and the immersion of solar heroes in water in
the olden mythologies, and the rite of baptism in organic religion signified nothing beyond the fact of
the soul's immersion in a physical body of watery composition in its successive incarnations.
Under the terms of this evolutionary condition man is distinctly a creature compounded of two
natures, a "higher" spiritual and a "lower" sensual, a divine and a human, a mortal and an immortal,
and by symbolism a fiery and a watery, the two being conjoined in a relationship of mutual
beneficence, in the organic body of the lower physical self. Says Heraclitus: "Man is a portion of
cosmic fire, imprisoned in a body of earth and water." Describing man, Plato wrote: "Through body
it is an animal; through intellect it is a God." In creating man God implanted the germ of a fiery
spiritual principle of conscious being in the watery confines of physical bodies. This is the truest
description of man that anthropology can present. All problems spring from that foundation and for
solution are referable back to it.
Man is, then, a natural creature and a god in combination. Our natural part administers to our
spiritual part the rite of baptism by water; our nascent spiritual self is to give us the later baptism by
(air and) fire. We are born first as the natural man; then as the spiritual, the latter crowning the
former. Or we are born first by water, then by fire. Of vital significance at this point are two
statements by St. Paul: "That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural"; and "First that
which is natural, then that which is spiritual." Again he says: "For the natural man comprehendeth not
the things of the
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spirit; neither can he." Of course he can not; for he is not yet at that higher mount of evolution, and
he must be transformed, transfigured, lifted up into a superior world of conscious dimension before
he can cognize spiritual things. Evolution will thus transform him, and nothing else will.
Utilizing astrological ground facts for the depiction of cosmic truths, the ancient astrologers localized
the birth of the natural man in the zodiacal house of Virgo, and that of the spiritual man in the
opposite house of Pisces. These, then, were the houses of the two mothers of life's progeny. The
first was the Virgo (Virgin) Mother, the primeval symbol of the "Virgin Mary" thousands of years
before Christ. Virgo gave man his natural birth by water, and became known as the
"Water-Mother;" Pisces, the Fishes by name, gave him his birth by the "fish," or in the sign of the
Fishes, and was denominated the "Fish-Mother." The Virgin Mothers are all identified with water as
symbol, and their various names, such as Meri, Mary, Myra, Myrrha, Miriam, Moira, Venus (born
of the sea-foam stirred up between the knees of Jupiter as he waded through the seas), Tiamat and
Thallath (Greek for "sea.") are designations for water or the sea. On the other side there are the Fish
Avatars of Vishnu, such as the Babylonian Ioannes, or Dagon ("fish" in Hebrew is dag); and the
goddesses Atergatis and Semiramis were actually called "fish-Mothers." Virgo stood as the mother
of birth by water, or the birth of man the first, earthy, in a watery body. Pisces stood as the mother
of birth by the spirit, or by fire, or the birth of man the second, described by St. Paul as "the Lord
from heaven." Man's physical body is the high product of a biological evolution that actually started
in the ocean water! And the blood in man's veins is still identical in chemical composition with sea
water. Virgo was poetized as the Water Mother of the natural man; Pisces as the Fish Mother of the
spiritual man. So Virgo was the first of the two mothers of the god-to-be in the life of mankind;
Pisces was the second.
CONCEIVED IN HEAVEN--BORN ON EARTH
In spite of the presence of these significant data standing for all to read in mythology and the
Scriptures, any profound grasp of the interior intimations was missed because the true relevance of
the symbolic sense of both water and the fish had never been glimpsed. Prominent as the fish symbol
has been in Christian literature of the inceptive period, no one has seemed to divine its enlightening
cryptic import. It is of astonishing revelatory character. Water is the type of natural birth because all
natural birth proceeds in and from water. All first life on our globe originated in sea water, and all
vegetation must have water to maintain its life. The fish is a birth in and from water, and it therefore
stands patently as the generic type of organic life issuing out of the inorganic! The fish typifies life
embodied in a physical organic structure, subsisting in a sea of inorganic matter. Organic life is born
out of the inorganic just as the fish is born out of the water. It is the child of the water-as-mother.
And if organic life (the "Fish") is in its turn to become mother, its child will be mind and spiritual
consciousness, son of the Fish Mother. Water is thus the mother of natural physical life, and organic
physical body becomes the mother of later evolving divine mind.
Now, strangely enough, water is the type of another essence, which is even more than water a
universal mother of life, namely matter. Matter is the virginal mother of all life in the aboriginal
genesis. All things are generated in the womb of primordial matter, the "first old genetrix" of the
Egyptians, Apt, Hathor, Meri, Isis. And it is by a consideration of the nature of matter and its
evolution that we are enabled at last to arrive at a true comprehension of the double motherhood of
the god nature. For this universal matter-mother is now known to exist in two vastly different states,
at each of which, at two different levels, it generates its child. Primordial matter, the sea of (to us)
empty space, is the first mother of all living forms. This is the primal "abyss of the waters" in Genesis.
The Latin word for "mother" is our very word "matter," with one "t" left out--mater. And how close
to "matter" is "water!" And matter organized and structuralized over patterns of divine conception is
the second mother, genetrix of spiritual mind.
In the sagacious dramatism of arcane writing the two mothers were always presented in pairs. They
were designated the "two mothers," or sometimes the "two divine sisters" of the god character. Or
they were the wife and sister of the central deity, as Juno was wife and sister of Jupiter, and Isis was
wife and sister of Osiris. Others were Venus, Ishtar, Cybele, Mylitta. In ancient Egypt they were first
Apt and Neith, later Isis and Nephthys. Gerald Massey relates Neith to "net," the device to catch
fish! Clues to their function are found in the great Egyptian Book of the Dead, and there it was that
the mystery of this double motherhood of life was solved. For here it is revealed that the function of
motherhood was, so to say, bisected into two phases, so that, of the two mothers, Isis and
Nephthys, each was seen to have performed but one-half of the function of motherhood of the infant
god, thus requiring the two of them to consummate the birth. For the text reads: "Isis conceived him;
Nephthys gave him birth." Again, with a shift of the suggestive symbolism, it is said: "Isis bore him;
Nephthys suckled him." Even with these elucidative data the full sweep of the true import was not
caught until a further clarification was found in another verse, which ran: "Heaven conceived him; the
Tuat brought him forth." With this came the brilliant flash of clear insight into the mystery. For
"heaven" is precisely the place, or the state of the first matter-mother, the "firmament" of empty
space, and in the bosom of this first mother form the unit potential of the seed of divine mind-to-be is
conceived. All later potency of a godly mind is latent in the depths of sub-atomic matter. "The shape
of things to come" in the evolution of universal life is archetypically conceived at the arc of the cycle
when spirit and matter, as yet undifferentiated, are identical and homogeneous. Spirit yet slumbers in
dreamless unconsciousness, and matter exists only as what the Hindus call Mulaprakriti, the "root of
matter." All things are initially conceived in the innermost heart of primordial Being, where spirit as
Father and matter as Mother are yet One. Being is then Father-Mother, not Father and Mother.
This is mirrored in the Egyptian statement that Isis conceived Horus, the Christ-to-be. Matter was
the womb of the first conception, and Nephthys was to give birth to what Isis conceived. Isis is
therefore the true Virgin of the world, because she is matter in its virginal state, matter still subsistent,
and not yet existent, unable to be paired off as the opposite pole of spirit and hence unwed. As
virgin, she has
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not yet given birth to the Christ. That role will be performed by Nephthys, matter impregnated by
spirit. Cosmically and evolutionarily speaking, Isis is the young girl who can not marry and bear the
Christ; Nephthys is that same young girl grown to womanhood and able to produce her child. In the
same sense in which we say that the child is father of the man it can be said that Isis is the mother of
Nephthys. And we shall see that this legend of the two mothers, the second being the daughter of the
first, is found intact in the New Testament Gospel story.
If heaven, in the sense of virginal matter, conceived the divine consciousness principle, what is the
"Tuat" that brought it forth? It must be equivalent to Nephthys. This locality is the Egyptian
designation for earth, or matter in its substantial evolved form which can finally bring spiritual
consciousness to manifest expression. It is matter in its physical form. Isis was matter subsistent in
the form of "empty space;" Nephthys was atomic matter, existent as visible structural form, or the
"fish." The fish is seen to be the type of organic matter floating in the sea of inorganic first matter, the
"waters of the firmament." We see the physical worlds floating about in the sea of empty space like
fish in the water. The physical universe is that Great Fish in the sea of infinite Being which contains
the germ of the Jonah consciousness (for Jonah is another figure of the Jesus or Christ
consciousness) and which will transport it across the sea of evolving life and spew it out on the
farther shore of higher Mind. This great universe is the second form of matter and hence is the
second mother, Nephthys. It is the developed bodies of organic matter that give birth to the Logos in
the macrocosm and to the Christos, a seed unit of that same Logos, in man the microcosm. Man's
physical body, with brain and nervous system organized to give expression to that grade of mind
denominated the Christ consciousness, is the divine Fish of the mythologic tradition of early
Christianity. One needs only to refer to the Greek designation of the Christos of the precessional
period of Pisces as Ichthys the Fish to be amazed at the play of the symbolism in the ancient day
precisely when Christianity was being formulated. For the sun had entered the sign of the Fishes
about 255 B.C.
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