Christianity, as a system of exclusive sacred truth or a unique revelation of divine wisdom, is already reeling under the impact of
one blow after another dealt it by the study of Comparative Religion and Comparative Mythology. The "deadly parallels" found
to run so consistently and so strikingly between the life of the Gospel Jesus and the legends of some twenty or more
antecedent Christly figures or Sun-gods, in the role of world-saviors, are rapidly piling up the evidence that tends to jeopardize
the validity of the entire body of Gospel narrative as history. It is beginning to dawn on intelligent and informed students that the
New Testament Gospels are not the biography of any "person" or living character at all, but are old dramatic books of the
religious Brotherhoods, portraying, not the "life" of any man, but only the spiritual history of a typical figure. All previous
Messianic characters, or Sun-gods, were only such typal dramatizations of man's inner life, under the form of a representative
"history". The Christs were simply ideal figures held up before men to provide them with an inspiring picture of their own
attainable perfection. Unbelievable as it may appear, it is the fact of history that with the lapse of time and the decay of
philosophical culture, the more ignorant came to take these dramatic heroes for actually living persons. And a designing
priestcraft, either itself now sunken in similar ignorance, or motivated by piety or knavery, or both, found it advantageous to the
interests of a worldly ecclesiastical system to connive at the misunderstanding. At any rate, the Gospels, which were only
spiritual allegories (see the writings of Philo, Clement and Origen, and note Paul's statement that the story of Abraham, Sarah
and Hagar "is an allegory"), were about the third century converted into literal history. And it was at this juncture that the
ancient meaning of the term "death" passed out of the ken of even the most learned of the leaders of Christianity, and with it fled
all possibility of retaining or regaining the deep inner sense of the scheme of theology.
The appeal of early Christianity to the ignorant masses, and the popularization of its tenets, which were originally drawn from
the esoteric schools and Mysteries (see any good text on Christian origins), quickly led to the obscuration of all but the most literal sense of scriptural material. Christianity smothered out the ancient
Wisdom-Religion or Gnosis, and by garbling the interpretation of purely spiritual teachings, wrecked the machinery of the
arcane science. The main shift of the wrecked cabalistic mechanism was the cryptic connotation of "death". Its restoration at
this time will go far to reconstruct the venerable enginery of spiritual wisdom. It may force Christianity to admit its pagan
sources, and thereby pave the way for a return to the primal purity and sublimity it boasted when it first issued from lofty pagan
springs. It will tend to bring Christianity humbly knocking at the doors of the ancient pagan temples, which misguided zeal
closed in the fifth century. For the Ancient or Ageless Wisdom, taught in the arcane schools of old, has had a modern rebirth,
and Christianity will find its salvation from almost universal distrust by recognizing in the occult movement the spirit of its original motivation.
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