Hated not to finish on this demonstration of symbology.
So under the conception of the divided function of motherhood it can be said that man's future Christhood is conceived in the womb of Isis and brought to birth from the womb of Nephthys, the second mother, the immediate incubator and gestator of the Christly power in the world. One might analogize the situation by thinking of a human child as first conceived in the minds, or in the love of its parents and later born from the womb of its physical mother. For this life has two births and must have a mother for each. It is conceived by the mother and born by the daughter. Life is spiritually conceived and physically born. Man is born first as man, by water, the sea of primordial matter, in whose depths he is conceived; then he is reborn later as god, by the fire of spirit, emerging with biological life out of the womb of the sea, the Water-Mother.
The two mothers can be sharply distinguished as these two forms of matter in the following delineation: the first or virgin mother is matter in its first creative form; invisible, inorganic,unsubstantial (in our sense) and subatomic. The second mother is matter in its later evolved form as visible, organic, substantial and atomic. The first mother, virgin though she is, generated her child, organic matter, who by virtue of her "immaculate conception" was confusedly still called
"virgin." And this daughter, grown to adulthood by evolution, became the second, or "Fish Mother," and in her turn produced, not now a daughter, but her Son, the masculinity indicating a spiritual and
not a further physical progeny, the birth of Mind from matter.
As hinted a moment ago, this genealogy or divine lineage is found in the New Testament of Christianity. The first mother, corresponding to Isis is Anna, and the second mother is her daughter Mary, who bears the Christos, Jesus. Anna and Mary are the Isis and Nephthys of the Christian dispensation. And it is a question whether the Christian Anna and the Hebrew Hannah are not immediate derivatives from the Egyptian An, Ani, Anu. An was an alphabetical glyph for existent
being. Ani was the name of the human entity evolving to deity in the Book of the Dead. Anu will come to astonishing significance a little farther on.
THE HOUSE OF BREAKING BREAD
The first, or virgin birth was depicted as taking place on the western side of the zodiac, in the house or womb of the Virgin Mother, Virgo. This allocation was due to the fact that it is in the west that the
sun, universal symbol and embodiment of the fire of spirit, descends each evening into the earth and water that represented the body in which the soul incarnated, this body itself being composed of
those two elements, earth and water. So man is, zodiacally, born in the water, as natural man, on the western side; and is to be reborn, or regenerated, as spiritual man, at the end of the cycle, on the
eastern side. Spirit's descent into water (of the body) on the west makes it man physical; its later resurrection on the east makes it man spiritual, man deified. Says the text of old Egypt: "Pepi saileth
with Ra to the eastern side of heaven, where the gods are born." This is the death and resurrection of the god, the basic theme in all religions. It is simply incarnation and return to heaven. It is the descent of Messiah into "Egypt" and his exodus back to spirit, historicized in the Scriptures as "Canaan. Further browsing in the ancient tomes brings to light links of connection between the zodiacal pictorialization and the Bible. The chief one is found in the symbol of bread in connection with both Virgo and Pisces. Pisces is the house of the Fishes by name, but it is not commonly known that in the astrological portraiture Virgo was the house of Bread. This is indicated by several items of the typology. Many centuries ago in the precession of the equinoxes the end of the year was marked by
the position of the great Dog Star Sirius, brilliant heavenly symbol of the divinity in man. Precisely at midnight of December 24 this bright sun stood on the meridian line running from the zenith to the
south. At the same moment there was rising on the eastern horizon the constellation of the Virgin, bearing in her left arm the Christ child, symbol of the Christhood coming to function in man; and in her right hand she clasped the great star Spica (Latin: a head or "spike" of wheat), symbol of that same deity coming as the celestial food for man. It must be remembered that the Gospel Christ told us that, if we would have eternal life, we must virtually eat his body as our divine food, and drink his blood. Hence typism represented him as coming in the form and nature of man, the human babe; and coming as spiritual food emblemed by wheat. The Gospel Christos describes the supernal gift of the spirit in the words: "This is that bread which came down from heaven, that if a man eat of it he shall hunger no more." Jesus took the same symbol, a loaf, and, breaking it into fragments, gave a morsel to each of his disciples, saying it was his (spiritual) body, broken for them.
We now have Virgo established as the House of Bread and Pisces as the House of the Fishes. The characterization of the two houses can now be brought along to a more specific evolutionary reference. Just what are these "houses"? What do they represent? As already set forth, they are
poetic graphs for the two states of matter. But now they are to be shown to stand for something in immediate relation to man's life. It should not appear too extravagant a declaration if the evidence
warrants our assertion that in the ultimate resolution of their meaning, they are in the allegory to be considered as the human body itself! For these physical bodies of ours consist of matter in both its visible and invisible forms. As St. Paul tells us, we have a natural and a spiritual body. Man's body itself houses the two mothers. The human body is this double house of Bread and of Fish.
The next link is seen when it is considered that the physical body is for the soul the house of death and in its regenerative phase, the house of rebirth. It is the house into which the spirit descends and
in which it suffers a more or less complete obscuration of its powers in the darkness of its tomb of matter. It is the house in which for an initial period it lies in a state of relative "death," out of which it
is to arise in a new birth, or resurrection, on the opposite side of the cycle. A significant passage from the Book of the Dead recites, alluding to the Horus (Christ) principle: "Who cometh forth from
the dusk and whose birth is in the house of death." This applies to the incarnating soul. In the recondite esoteric sense of the archaic Scriptures the soul "dies" on entering the body in incarnation,
but has a resurrection from this "death" and its rebirth, or the tomb of the crucified Christ and the womb of his second birth.
As we could expect, the Egyptians had a name for the body as the locus of these evolutionary transactions, which carry the central meaning of all theology. This name now rises out of the dim
mists of ancient Egyptian religious lore to enlighten all modern Biblical studentship. This city of the body, wherein the sun of soul sank to its death on the cross of matter to re-arise in a new generation, was called the city of the sun, which in Greek became Heliopolis, but was in the Egyptian Anu. The name was, of course, given to an actual Egyptian town, where the rites of the death, burial and resurrection of Osiris, or Horus, were yearly enacted. But the name bore a theological significance before it designated a geographical city,--as indeed did most Biblical names of localities.
The significant name is obviously composed of Nu, the name for the Mother-Heaven, or empty space, or the abyss of nothingness out of the bosom of which creation emanates. The A (alpha privative) means, as it does in thousands of words, "not." It is prefixed to a host of words to negate an affirmative meaning, as a-theistic, a-moral, a-symmetrical, a-mnesia. A-nu would then mean literally "not-nothingness," or a world of concrete actuality. The negation of a negative posits an affirmative. It refers thus to our world of physical manifestation. Precisely such a world it is in which
units of virginal consciousness go to their "death" and again rise out of it. Says God in the Old Testament: "I cast down to death and I raise up again." Anu is then the physical body of mortals on
earth. The soul descends out of the waters of the abyss, or the Nun, which is simply space in its primordial undifferentiation. So Nu (neuter), Nun (masculine), Nut (feminine) is the cosmic negative,
the name and sign of all non-being. When life is reintegrated at the end of each cycle of out-going and return in the completeness of its restored unity, it is negative. It is the Nun. When it is differentiated as spirit and matter, it is neuter. To manifest its potential life it must disintegrate its unity, segregate itself into the duality of spirit and matter, establish positive-negative tension and from that split up into infinite multiplicity.
Here we are brought face to face with the important Biblical sense of the word "multiply." To exhibit its infinite creative resources, life must multiply itself endlessly. The unitary life of deity must break
itself up into infinite fragments if it is to fill empty space with a multitude of worlds and beings of diversified natures. The primal sea, or Mother must engender a multitudinous progeny, to spawn the
limitless schools of organic "fish-worlds." This is the meaning of the promise given to Abraham that his seed should "multiply" until it filled the earth with offspring countless as the sands and the stars.
And if the life divine was symbolized by bread as the type of the first birth, and by fish as the type of the second, then we might expect to find in old religious typology the allegory of a Christ personage multiplying loaves and fishes to feed a multitude! Should we be astonished then, when we do find that the Gospel Jesus does this very thing? The leads to the significance of the two numbers woven into the story are not too clear. But since the bread symbol
pertains to Virgo, mother of the natural man, the five loaves may have been intended to refer to man's five senses, while the two fishes could have represented the two natures unified by the second
birth.
This is astonishing enough in all conscience. But even it yields in wonder to the next item of comparative religion data, which came to our notice as a further tie between the Bible and antecedent Egyptian mythology. Who can adequately estimate the seriousness of the challenge which this finding of scholarship throws down to Gospel historicity? For a thrilling discovery indeed it was which brought to notice a passage in the Book of the Dead that referred to Anu as "the place of multiplying bread!"
Here, then, in the long-silent tomes of old Egypt was found the original, the prototype, of the "miracle" of the loaves and the fishes in the Gospels of Christianity. In the light of this correlation of
material it is seen that a new and enlightening meaning must be read into this New Testament episode. The revelation indeed makes it necessary to lift the incident quite out of the realm of history
and orient it into that of allegory. For at last we are given a lens of proper focus through which to read aright, for the first time in centuries, the hidden sense of the Gospel narrative. We see that Anu,
as the physical body, is the place wherein the unity of the Christly power is broken into an infinite number of fragments, which are distributed out among a multitude of God's children enhungered
after a three-days fast. This latter detail can readily be taken as referring to the deprivation of spiritual food suffered by souls in their sojourn in the three elemental kingdoms, mineral, vegetable
and animal, before attaining to the plane of mind. St. Paul lends authority to this rendering in saying that before we develop the Christ-mind, we are in bondage to the elements (in several passages the "elementals") of the world, meaning the powers of nature as yet unillumined by mind.
Here are all the components of the inner meaning of the Christian Eucharist: the broken, but multiplied fragments of the body of the god, distributed to feed hungry humanity. And as humanity is
composed of twelve groups of conscious units struggling on the road to divinization, there were gathered
up twelve baskets of fragments. For in the synthesis of all powers to be evolved in the process of
deification, the twelve aspects of the Christ consciousness are finally reintegrated, or "gathered up" in
one climactic unity.
One must ask what it can mean to the future of Christianity to realize now that this episode of the ostensible life of Jesus is found to be the Judean republication of an antique Egyptian allegory, completely unhistorical in character.
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