THE RED SEA IS YOUR BLOOD
"A lifetime devoted unremittingly to the study of the ancient
backgrounds of our modern Western religion has established beyond all possibility of error the conviction that the great Scriptures of antiquity on which our Occidental faiths have been built up have had
a remote Egyptian origin. The present treatise is an attempt to justify the truth of this statement by the revelation of the recondite significance covertly adumbrated in one of the most prominent of such archaic symbols found in the Bibles of both Judaism and Christianity,--the Red Sea.
Studied through the lens of a larger vision and a deeper understanding, it should, and eventually will be seen, to release the power of a new and far more vital message for the two religions that have harbored, all unsuspectingly, the hidden
dynamic of this archaic construction of semantic genius. This
revelation of the cryptic significance of the Red Sea in its Bible
usage could inaugurate another, and the most thoroughgoing,
reformation in Judaism and Christianity since the ancient days
of their origin. It could engender a New Enlightenment in the
life of religion and spiritual culture not only in the West, but in
the world at large."
A lifetime devoted unremittingly to the study of the ancient backgrounds of our modern Western religion has
established beyond all possibility of error the conviction that the great Scriptures of antiquity on which our
Occidental faiths have been built up have had a remote Egyptian origin and they purveyed their profound
message of truth and wisdom in a language of semantic crypticism that has first baffled, then deluded the minds
of all the theological savants, both Jewish and Christian, who have endeavored to interpret their esoteric
significance, for full two thousand years. The present treatise is an attempt to justify the truth of this statement
by the revelation of the recondite significance covertly adumbrated in one of the most prominent of such archaic
symbols found in the Bibles of both Judaism and Christianity, -- the RED SEA. At the moment of publication it is
believed that never in all the centuries since the days of Egypt's ancient glory has this occult meaning, involving,
as it does, the stake of the historicity of the Old Testament, with repercussions even for the narrative of the New
Testament, been known or published. It may therefore rightly lay claim to being certainly one of the most
significant revelations in the area of religious intelligence in twenty centuries at least. Almost alone in its single
power of truth it threatens to subvert the main theological supports of Judaism first and then Christianity. Such at
first sight would seem to be the effect of the tremendous implications of its disclosure at the present epoch in
world religion, particularly in Judaism and Christianity. This, however, would represent a narrow and myopic view
of its significance. Studied through the lens of a larger vision and a deeper understanding, it should, and
eventually will be seen, to release the power of a new and far more vital message for the two religions that have harbored, all unsuspectingly, the hidden dynamic of this archaic construction of semantic genius. This revelation of the cryptic significance of the Red Sea in its Bible usage could inaugurate another, and the most
thoroughgoing, reformation in Judaism and Christianity since the ancient days of their origin. It could engender a New Enlightenment
in the life of religion and spiritual culture not only in the West, but in the world at large.
The arcane profundity of the divine wisdom vouchsafed to early humanity by gods or at least by sages and seers of advanced human development, "holy men of old," as the Scriptures themselves rate them, was considered to be a treasure fit only to be preserved in a casket constructed of the golden material of transcendent imagery and
jewelled with gems of the sublimest and most majestic symbolism. Minds open to the vision of its truth and beauty designed that it be expressed in recondite forms and semantic devices, which, while they obscured its purport for the immature and undeveloped masses, intimated its dynamic significance and released its cathartic
power to the intelligent and the initiated. These devices were such literary "genres" as allegory, myth, drama, poetry, legend, epic fiction, imaginative tropes, number structures, star groupings and movements, and above all, nature symbols. The outer world of nature, which the seers knew to be the language of God's own expression of
true being and which lay concreted before our eyes, was looked to for all the expressive types needed to body forth the archetypes of eternal verity. Nature spoke the one language which could never utter falsehood. Hence the sacred literature abounds in naturographs, with such elementary natural objects employed to dramatize meaning as the tree, grass, earth, sky, water, air, fire, the stream, animal, bird, insect, reptile, stone, wood, metal, storm, wave, tide, rain, snow, desert, mountain, flower, bee, grape -- and the great sea. These natural objects and the phenomena of their living existence constituted a veritable language, and one need not hesitate to pronounce it the most completely meaningful language available to man. It is the tragedy of world culture that this semantic idiom has, like Latin, ancient Greek and other tongues, become a "dead language" and the books written in it stand as tomes of fast sealed mystery.
As a result the whole enterprise of theology and Scriptural interpretation has, for centuries, been befogged in intellectual confusion.
It is the purpose to deal in this essay with just one of the nature symbols that has found such general use in the Bibles of antiquity, and the attempt will be made to bring to light the pure gold of meaning esoterically hidden in its cryptic intimations. There is said to be gold in the chemical composition of sea water; it is possible to say that there is also intellectual gold of precious truth in what
sea water was intended to present to thought in the Scriptures. It is believed that one is fully warranted in prefacing the effort with the observation that the revelation here to be made constitutes one of the most astounding disclosures of occult knowledge to be found in all the
realm of the archaic religious literature of the world. The Red Sea.
In the very same century in which Christianity took its rise, in fact born almost in the same year as that claimed for the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, lived the Hebrew scholar and philosopher, Philo Judaeus. The statement will hardly be contradicted now that he had formulated a systematic code of interpretation of ancient sacred writings,
which, if it had been followed closely by scriptural exegetists, would have saved the science of theology from the confusion into which it has fallen ever since his day. It might even have prevented the schism between Judaism and its ungrateful daughter, Christianity, which was destined to drench the pages of two thousand years of religious history with needless rivers of blood. It would likewise have
obviated the causes which led both religions to break up into numberless sects and denominations, thus perpetuating the reign of sullen hatreds and bigotries of every sort. He elucidated the principle that the tomes of sacred writing bequeathed to early humanity by the gods or by men of far advanced evolutionary stature were susceptible of interpretation at four different levels of understanding:(1) the literal-physical; (2) the moral-sentimental; (3) the allegorical-intellectual; (4) the anagogical-mystical. That
is, the books of Holy Writ could be read as historical events; as moral instruction; as intellectual conception of truth; as the incitement to the most exalted spiritual mystical transports. Even before Philo's day the great and learned Jewish scholars and interpreters of the Torah, the Tanaim and Amoraim, had expounded the principle that he who reads the Scriptures only at the level of their surface meaning will never grasp the truth of the living Word of God, that only he who pierces the coarser veils to grasp a far deeper sense and experience a more vivid illumination of consciousness will receive the cathartic purification of his nature. They went so far as to say that he who was content with the surface meaning of the words was a fool and a simpleton. As long as religions cling to the lower rungs of the scale of interpretation of their Scriptures, there will be endless points of difference between them; if they will lift the sense to the upper third and fourth levels, the apparent outer grounds of difference will dissolve in the unity and harmony of a lofty conceptual enlightenment. The later philosophers Kant and Spinoza were to arrive at about this same basis of understanding. Philo himself so well succeeded in elucidating Scriptural meaning at the highest level that he was able to make a synthesis of the Hebrew Pentateuch, or first five books of the Old Testament, with the rationalistic systematism of the Platonic philosophy of the Greeks. It can with a great degree of plausibility be asserted that had his interpretative achievement been used as the basis of Biblical exegesis from that time, the catastrophic divergence of Christianity from its parent Judaism would have been avoided, and the world spared the gruesome horrors of two thousand years of persecution and slaughter.
The key and instrument for apprehension of the more exalted sense of Scripture was of course the allegorical approach to understanding. When one understands that one is reading a volume of spiritual truth expressed in the guise of allegories, one looks beyond or beneath the common connotation of the words to discern a transcendental significance that can be apprehended only mystically, or at least with the power of abstract conception. In the late second and early third centuries the two great Christian expositors of Scripture, Clement
and Origen, successive heads of the leading academy of Christian doctrinism, the famous school of Alexandria, endeavored valiantly to exalt the principles of Biblical exegesis to the highest Philonic level. Every historian of Christianity has had to devote a chapter or section of his work to an exposition of what is spoken of as "Origen's
allegories." To the detriment of all Christian history the historians almost with one accord, belittle the importance and significance of this chapter of the early life of the faith. On the contrary, it will some day be seen that the religion's failure to cultivate and perpetuate and further develop the methodology employed by these two great Fathers has been the saddest dereliction and most costly fatality of Christian history.
THE RETURN TO ALLEGORY
It is evident now that a keen recognition of this unfortunate eventuality in the early development of Christianity
has taken place quite recently in the Roman Catholic branch of the Christian establishment. The hierarchy of this great ecclesiastical system has obviously arrived at the decision to open the doors of Bible study to the allegorical approach and method for interpretation. Recent public utterances have voiced the policy of the Church of Rome that, since the Bible authors resorted to a wide variety of "literary forms," such as allegory, myth, drama and symbol, readers are free now to put their own interpretation upon the textual material. Allegory is bound in the end to convey to each reader the special sense which each is able to grasp, hence the attempt to confine the meaning to a stated and uniform exposition is futile at best. This move leaves every one at liberty to extract from the reading of Scripture the particular grade of conception of which each is capable.
Few realize the epochal significance of this strategy of the Catholic Church. It is a virtual confession that it was a mistake to have
failed to follow the lead of Philo, Clement and Origen. The deeper meaning of the great Scriptures is after all only to be caught by each reader in proportion to his receptive capabilities in the way of
spiritual-mystical realization. The pressures impinging upon intelligence today from the side of a more enlightened scholarship have made this recognition and concession necessary. To contend any longer that the Bible is to be taken with Fundamentalist literalism, and as in all parts factual history, would leave Catholicism
stranded high and dry on the banks, while the stream of a more intelligent, more meaningful and dynamic Scriptural exegesis has swept on by, carrying the world of culture with it out of reach of the old method. Lately, too, the trend back to allegorism has manifested itself sensationally in the Protestant wing of Christianity,
especially in the Episcopalian denomination.
To be continued |
