Rest of Platonic philosphy.
Otherwise the
latter would be completely hidden and obscured; or rather it would not
really exist, and would not possess any reality. It is the variety of
sense-effects which illustrates the greatness of the intelligible
principle, whose nature publishes itself by the beauty of its works."
We are on earth, then, to come to self-consciousness as divinities, but to
do it by working through and with an animal. We are here to educate,
refine, humanize and finally divinize, an animal! We are in bodies, which
properly are not ours, but those of the animal soul, who is our appetitive
or instinctual lower self. We are assigned the duty of "taming" this
creature and conforming it to ways of intelligence and brotherhood. We must
teach it the better way of curbing its savage instincts, its lusts and
greed inherited from its wild experience in the animal orders, and must
lead it upward to a final assimilation into the nature of the angel, its
tutor. Little wonder the task can not be done in a single incarnation!
But how was the god to link his higher nature with the body of the animal
so far below his stature? The very fundamentals of religion are interwoven
with the answer to this question. For religions grew out of this relation
between the god and his animal protege. Religions were not
9
originally forms of mere cult sentimentalism and piety. They were regimes
of ritual and ethical practice designed to keep man in memory of his divine
estate, and to hold him to the obligations of the "broad oaths fast sealed"
(Empedocles) of his covenant to raise up the lower self, while keeping
himself "unspotted from the world."
The technique of his incarnation is philosophically described under the
terms of the great Law of Incubation. This is announced in the Bible in
John's verse: "Unless a grain of corn (wheat) fall into the ground and die,
it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." Also it is
seen in Paul's description of the resurrection in I. Corinthians, 15: "What
you sow cannot come to life unless it die." These texts proclaim the great
truth of evolution, missed by scientific eyes, that each kingdom of nature
is linked to the kingdom below it for the nourishment of its life. The
vegetable kingdom is rooted in mineral soil, the animal is sustained on
vegetable matter, the human is built up physically of animal and vegetable
elements, and in their turn the lower divine beings must take rootage in
the human bodies. As the acorn can not develop its oak potentialities
unless it descend and be buried in the dark damp soil of the mineral
kingdom, so the angels of God can not evolve to higher perfection of their
divinity unless they undergo experience in human bodies. This is the simple
law which is the philosophical basis of the incarnation, at once its
explanation and its justification. The son of man must descend into the
bowels of the earth for three "days" (aeons), one in the mineral kingdom,
one in the vegetable and one in the animal, before he rises out of matter
again as a god in the perfection of his spiritual nature in the human
kingdom. In the old scripture the advent of the god always occurs about
"the fourth watch of the night," which symbols the human kingdom, as it is
fourth in order. "As Jonas was three days in the belly of the whale, so
must the son of man be three days in the bowels of the earth,"--in the
lower kingdoms of evolution, not in a literal rocky tomb! We shall have
light on the ancient scriptures when we follow the forms of the old
symbolism.
The coming of the god to inhabit the body of an animal is in all respects
equivalent to his death and burial, analogous to the death of the old seed
in the ground, and is necessary if he is to rebeget himself anew as the
risen son of the slain father. For when he steps into the lower body, he
loses all the freedom of his glorious life as a spirit, and comes "under
the law" that rules on the plane of physical matter. He is subject to all
the vicissitudes of climate, bodily needs and the hardships of imprisonment
in a body of flesh. In brief, he is in hell, and the grave or tomb they
speak of is nothing more than his physical body. This is the first great
mystery of ancient theology, lost since the third century, and now restored
through occult discovery. The words tomb and womb are of the same origin
and have the same significance. To
10
be born from the womb of a mortal mother is to enter the tomb of mortal
life. Many passages from Greek philosophy will confirm this interpretation.
Spirit, then, must be buried and die in matter, to reproduce its new
generation. The divine son must come to birth in the womb of Maria (the sea
of matter). "Matter is the mother of the gods," said an ancient sage; as
spirit is their father. The seminal seed of divinity must be sown in the
body of flesh. It is sown to die, or as Paul says, "in corruption; it must
rise in incorruption." It must be sown a mortal body, and be raised a
spiritual body. Paul, who was an Orphic Mystery initiate, was simply giving
one of the old symbols of the descent and resurrection of the god in mortal
life.
But the god did not come as an adult. What life cycle starts at maturity?
He came as a god in potentiality only, a god in embryo, a seedling god, in
fact a baby god. The Christmas or advent festival celebrates the birth of
an infant Christ. He is the Christ-child, the Krist Kingle (Kindel,
Kindlein, little child--German), the Jesu Bambino of Italy, and the child
Horus of ancient Egypt. The greatest truth that we humans can be told is
that the Christ principle is born in us as a foetus in the womb of our
physical bodies, struggling to be delivered! The physical body of each
person is the womb of the Christ. "I groan and travail with you in pain,"
says Paul, "till Christ be formed within you." Nature, says John, groaneth
and travaileth in pain until now, when it is to give birth to the god or
Christ. And Paul says again, "For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to
be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven," the spiritual body of
our resurrection, the house not built with hands, but in consciousness and
character for when the foetal god is delivered at its final Easter morn
from its imprisonment in the physical body, it must have fashioned for
itself a temple or sanctuary, of imperishable elements, "eternal in the
heavens," as its future abode. This is the temple we are masonically
building out of the materials of incarnational experience,--thought, word
and deed, day by day and life by life. This is the mystic temple in whose
building, as says I Kings, "there was heard neither sound of hammer, axe
nor any tool of iron." This is the temple that Jesus says he could build
up, if destroyed, in three "days" or aeons of natural evolution. It is the
glorious house we fashion for the soul out of the spiritual essence of
human life. Every moral lesson learned, every item of character developed,
has contributed to its heightened power to build this body of
indestructible light.
In comparison with it the physical body is named "the garment of shame" and
"the body of this death." It must be dissolved in the fervent heat of the
inner spirit, to free the radiant body of solar glory within. For the god,
it is a matter of shame and degradation to be
11
housed in the carnal body and subject to its animal impulses. In the body
he is nailed to the cross of matter, and the worst of his painful sacrifice
and of his humbling himself to be born of a virgin is his subjection to the
carnal appetites of the animal. He must wage a valiant warfare to avoid
falling under the complete domination of these massive impulses, until he
finally brings the god to adulthood, and has prepared the new subtle
garment of light to be the eternal home of the soul after its resurrection.
He must finally dissolve the physical elements of the veil of the temple,
and the "ekstasis" (ecstasy) described as the consummation of the drama of
initiation in the Mysteries. The word ecstasy literally means "standing
out," and it referred to the actual freeing of the soul from the physical
body. It is the resurrection, when the tomb of flesh is broken asunder, the
gates of death are opened, and the dead are raised incorruptible. One
reason for the egg as a symbol of Easter is the likeness of the spiritual
experience to a chick's pecking its way out of its shell to effect its
birth. Christmas is the quickening of the foetus in the womb; Easter is the
actual birth of the human ego into the new kingdom of spiritual light. It
is a delivery; whence the ancient philosophy was at times designated as
midwifery. Socrates said he was a midwife, presiding at the birth of the
soul into truth.
This glorious body, the Augoeides of the Greeks and the Sahu of the
Egyptians, can be built up only from the union of spirit and body in the
human kingdom. For it is formed on its material side from the particles of
radiant essence generated from the cells of the body, at the center of
which even modern science now declares there are "radiogens" on intensely
hot nuclei of solar fire. (See statement of Dr. Geo. W. Crile, of the
Cleveland Laboratories.) No new birth of higher life can be generated save
by the interaction or conjunction of spirit and matter in some organic
form. Man is the kingdom where these two meet to be joined in one higher
union. Paul states this clearly when he says "the wall of partition between
the two natures must be broken down, and the two made one in one body."
Having seen that the first great law of human life is the Law of
Incubation, we are prepared now to see the operation of the other great law
of nature and principle of Platonic philosophy, the application of which to
the doctrines of religion will immediately throw them all in clear light.
Especially will it illuminate that great doctrine of the Christian Church,
its most significant rite, the Eucharist. Had this principle of ancient
philosophy been kept in the knowledge of the early Church, Christianity
would not now be the outcast from modern intelligent appreciation that it
is. With this single principle restored, theology may again lift up its
bowed head and take its ancient position of kingship among human interests.
12
We refer to the Law of Dismemberment. It is the method of the Law of
Incubation as Reincarnation is the method of Karma. When one sees how
extensively it was featured in the Book of the Dead and other books of
wisdom, it becomes next to incomprehensible how it fell into total
desuetude in the Christian system. For it is the key to the divinity of man
and the humanity of the god. It is the basic principle beneath our
understanding of all Christology. It gives us the entire rationale of the
incarnation.
Briefly the Law of Dismemberment is thus set forth: as a principle of
Plato's philosophy it is the division or partition of unit divine nature or
essence into multiple fragments, the breaking up of the Oneness of God into
many portions or gods. As the principle back of the incarnation, it is the
breaking of the unified life of the god on his own high plane into
fragments for the sake of taking lodgment in multiple bodies. Plato informs
us that as the one life flows forth or descends into manifestation, the
farther it proceeds from its source in homogeneity, the weaker is its power
and the more numerous is its fragmentation. At each step of the descent it
must suffer a reduction of its total force, which can only be effected by
"partition" into fragments. The Great Light breaks up into lesser lights,
the Great Fire into lesser sparks. A perfect analogy is seen in the letting
fall of any large compact body of water or other liquid from a high place;
it is thrown into infinite small particles by the opposition of the air and
other causes. Deity breaks up into fragments as it descends, and according
to the New Testament miracle there were twelve groups of these "fragments."
How could the total power and enormous energy of the god be embodied in the
brain and nervous system of a single human body? It would "blow out the
fuse" of any man to be suddenly subjected to the full dynamic power of such
an energy as that represented by a god. One does not feed a child a whole
loaf of bread, but gives it only fragments. So we are fed on the broken
bread of life. How again could the deific nature and power be made
universally accessible to all men, or distributed amongst them, without
dividing itself into fragments, so that a portion might be given to each
individual? It is supremely simple; yet this simple principle underlying
all theology has been lost out of Christian doctrinism. And the world has
been rent with bitter warfare, and much of the foulest inhumanity to man
ever known has been perpetrated, because this basic understanding was lost
out of theology. The full power of divinity is too high for us to sustain;
it would wreck our organism. So we receive each one a reduced portion--all
we can contain.
Again the oak tree is our mentor in spiritual truth. To propagate itself
the great tree divides its unific life into a thousand little nuclei, each
of which when dropped into the soil of the kingdom below it, has the
potentiality of reproducing the whole of its parent. So with the
13
god. He breaks his Oneness into fragments, and drops a seed, or infant
Christ, into each human breast. This is Paul's "fulness of the stature of
Christ." The child Jesus must grow to the stature of the Christ, or the
adult god.
Tennyson knew of the Law of Dismemberment in its spiritual sense when he
wrote in In Memoriam:
We are but broken lights of thee,
And thou, O Lord, art all in all.
The myths of the ancient gods in many cases convey this deep meaning in the
form of the (symbolic) cutting of the body of the god in pieces, which are
scattered over the earth, later to be reassembled by the Son, who restores
the deity whole. Even with these fables of Osiris, Dionysus, Tammuz, Mithra
and many others hinting at the plain truth, Christian blindness has gone on
perverting the basic meaning of the Eucharist.
The principle explains for the first time also the significance of the
phrase, the Lord of Hosts. As each Lord divides into a host of fragments,
it is a simple matter to see him in his divided totality as a Lord of a
Host. Plato indeed says, "Each superior god becomes the leader of a
multitude, engendered from himself," his split fragments.
But the most astonishing corroboration of this Platonic Theosophy is found
in the Bible itself at the very heart of the Lord's own ordination of the
Eucharist. Is it possible to comprehend the crassness that has made
generations of Christian theologians miss the clearly expressed doctrine of
dismemberment in their own Book of Wisdom? Hardly.
In I Corinthians (11:23, ff) Paul distinctly states the proclamation to him
by the Lord himself (in spiritual vision) of the festival of the Eucharist,
"I pass on to you what I received from the Lord himself, namely, that on
the night he was betrayed the Lord Jesus took a loaf, and after thanking
God he broke it, saying, "This means my body broken for you; do this in
memory of me." Here is the bread of divine life offered to man, and the
Lord first broke it!" If the Christian Church had all along known what "the
broken body of our Lord" meant in terms of Platonic philosophy, the whole
course of western history would have been altered mightily. Instead it
quarreled over the Greek word rendered "broken" in futile negation of its
true meaning, and missed the true gleam of the light of the world.
The Eucharistic symbolism of eating the Lord's body has likewise been
missed. What can it mean beyond partaking spiritually of his spiritual
nature? "God is a spirit" and he can be assimilated only spiritually. To
convey this idea to dull mortal comprehension the ancient sages devised the
outward rite, actually eating symbolic bread and drinking symbolic wine,
and Christian literalists have argued (and fought) for centuries over the
question whether the actual life of deity
14
was or was not in the elements themselves! In the light of such situations
as this--and it can be duplicated in scores of other doctrines--how can any
one fail to see the world's need of the Ancient Wisdom, and the restoration
of the luminous Platonic Theosophy?
John has told us in ringing passages about "that bread which came down from
heaven, whereof if a man eat he shall hunger no more." "For he who eateth
my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life." It is impossible to
realize save by long study and reflection to what extent the literalization
of the Bible and the Gospel narrative has deprived the human mind of the
intellectual nourishment on which it was expected to feed. None but one who
has examined these ancient allegories and seen point by point how they have
been turned into fruitless and meaningless miracles and earthly incidents,
can appreciate the enormity of the miscarriage of ancient truth in its
symbolic transmission to modern "intelligence." It is, when fully seen, the
most monstrous prodigy of ignorance and superstition perhaps in human
history. The ancients used outward nature and human actions to type
spiritual truth. We have converted their spiritual allegories into the
merest outward husk of truth, because Christianity became predominantly a
movement among the ignorant.
A phrase in the Lord's ordination of the Eucharist gives us the text for
the final principle of Plato's system that has to do with Christian
theology. "Do this in remembrance of me," he said. Here again ignorance has
beclouded a great truth and a great light. For here was an announcement by
the Lord himself of Plato's other great doctrine--so mystifying to the
modern savants--the doctrine of Reminiscence. If Washington or Lincoln had
left an institution expressly designated by them as a means of perpetuating
their memory, we would regard them as being actuated by a huge vanity. Was
Jesus a vainglorious person, as the words of Paul make him, if an
historical character, to appear? No; Paul was expressing a grand truth of
Platonic wisdom, when he wrote of the light which came to him in this
spiritual vision. Religion was designed primarily on no other motivation
than as a means of putting into practice this phase of Platonic philosophy.
Religion was not originally merely a "system of worship." It had far deeper
bases. It was instituted to save the hosts of fragmented gods in mortal
bodies from the dire fate of losing their divinity. For they were
threatened with total forgetfulness of their real nature. Religion was
designed to be a set of psychological exercises which would subtly revive
and stimulate the memory of their former celestial state. One of the Nine
Muses was Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory, and Mercury had the function of
awakening dead memories. Horus in Egypt came to awaken the memory of his
father Osiris in the grave. From these connotations we are enabled to
discern a totally new force of meaning in our word "remember." If
15
the gods on coming to save humanity were "dismembered" or fragmented into
individuals, then the resurrection or return to their primal unity in their
glorification at the end of the aeon would naturally be a "re-membering" of
divided parts. We express the same idea in our other word for the same
thing, "re-collecting." The brotherhood of humanity consists simply in this
reassembling in a common spirit of unity the individualized fragments of
the twelve Lords of Hosts, the twelve tribes of Israel. Horus is said to
have come to reconstitute his dismembered father. Translated from allegory
to spiritual meaning this can signify only that the Christ spark in us is
to grow and expand until it fuses by its fiery power into the great
universal spirit of wisdom and love that is to animate the race. Paul told
us we are all members of one body, of which Christ is the head; but habits
of literal thought have prevented us from sensing this in an intellectual
or spiritual way. Our minds and hearts are to be fused in one great spirit
of love and harmony, as we enhance the glory of the god shining within us
ever more brightly unto the day of perfection. As we separated in our
descent into body, so we merge again into a mighty unity as we ascend back
to the father of lights. This is the reconstitution of the dismembered
suffering god, broken upon the cross of matter, in order that we lower men
might ascend into the kingdom of intellect and spirit. The reconstitution
is indeed the re-membering our broken divinity, the re-collection of the
scattered fragments of the broken body of the Divine Lord. Only by the
study of ancient origins in philosophy can we see the grand spiritual sense
back of these figures and terms. All symbols had their origin in simple
ideas, which, however, were the expressions of the loftiest truths of early
wisdom.
This reassembling of the scattered fragments is the basis and genius of
human brotherhood. The individuals of the race, being of one identical
essence, are kindred in nature. But being attached to animal bodies, the
god is subject to the separative selfish tendencies of the lower man, until
he educates this pupil to the higher motivations of altruism and community
of interest with others. As an animal he wars with his fellows, is jealous
and self-seeking, under the evolutionary impulse of self-preservation
brought up from former experience in the animal grades. But as a god he
revives the memory of his kinship with his celestial mates, and in the glow
of that warm recognition that his brother is himself, he learns to look
upon his fellow-man with that love which is described as the cement of the
universe.
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