Didn't quite get thru on that last one so here goes:
THE HOUSE OF FISH
But new involvements arise and take us on into still more startling disclosures. The Hebrews fell heir
to the Egyptian wisdom and appropriated Egyptian material. They picked up the name Anu, and,
fitting it back into its zodiacal setting as Virgo, they called it the House of Bread. This led to their
adding to the name Anu their word for "house," which is beth. This yields us Beth-Anu. It is a fact of
common philological knowledge that when the ancient Greek and Egyptian "u" in a word is
transferred into English, it is invariably rendered as "y." For instance, the Greek word for "water" is
hudor. In all English words it becomes hydro. Shifting the "u" of Anu to the "y", Anu becomes Any,
so that Beth-Anu now stands before us as Bethany of the Gospels! Bethany, then, is just the sign of
Virgo, as "the House of Bread," the home of the great star Spica, the head of wheat!
But let us say "House of Bread" in ordinary Hebrew. What further amazement strikes us here as we
find this reads Beth-lehem. For "bread" in Hebrew is lehem. The Christ had the first of his two
births in Bethany, or Bethlehem, the astrological "House of Bread,"--the human body! And this, be it
noted at last, is the only place where it can be of any benefit to humanity.
Later it seems that the two signs, Virgo and Pisces, and their symbols, bread and fish, were almost
interchangeably confused or commingled in symbolic imagery. This was likely, in fact almost
inevitable, since the two signs represented the same human body as the two houses in which soul
died and was reborn, and the two processes are just the two phases of the one operation.
If Pisces is, then, the "house" in which the Christ in man comes to his birth, it is altogether pertinent to
ask if there are evidences in the Bible or Christianity that Jesus was represented under any of the
characteristics of the fish typology. Here we encounter material enough to provide another nine-days
wonder. For Jesus is decorated and haloed by the Piscean symbolism on every hand. His twelve
disciples were "fishermen!" In earlier Egyptian depiction the twelve were at one time or another
carpenters, reapers, harvesters, fruit gatherers, sailors, rowers, builders, masons, potters or keepers
of the twelve treasures of light. Jesus instructed Peter to find the gold in the fish's mouth; his last
"miracle" was the net-breaking draught of fishes; he declared that he would make them "fishers of
men." Also astrological ingenuity had delineated the River Eridanus (Jordan) as
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issuing from the mouth of the constellation of the Southern Fish and flowing north to the very feet of
Orion, starry symbol of the Christ, intimating that the stream of life issues forth from the organic
physical life of man and runs right up to the foot of divinity. The Bishop's mitre in Christianity is in the
shape of the mouth of a fish. In the catacombs under Rome the symbol of the two fishes crossed in
the "X" form was displayed on the forehead of the Christ image, at its feet, or on a plate on the alter
before it. And the Romans for several centuries dubbed the early Christians Pisciculi, "Little Fishes,"
members of the "Fish-Cult." Augustine and Tertullian both likened the Christian laity to "little fishes"
in the sea, Christ being the Great Fish, or Whale. And perhaps the crowning datum in all this
piscatorial Christianity is the fact that the Greeks denominated the Jesus Avatar figure as Ichthys, the
Fish. They would doubtless have alluded to any claimant at that time for the mantle of Messianic
messengership under the title of Ichthys, even if the Christian movement had not thrust on the world
the Gospel character of Jesus as humanized Savior. For ancient arcane science, resorting ever to
subtle types of representation, and all grounded on the circle of the zodiac, attached to the Messianic
figure the name, title and features of the zodiacal house in which the sun stood at the time, its sojourn
in each sign being two thousand one hundred and sixty years. When the sun was entering Pisces
ancient astrological observance would in any event have saluted the embodiment of the coming
god-power as Ichthys.
Still other startling correlations come to view. As has been here delineated, the Christ is the offspring
or creation of Divine Mind, first in the innermost bosom of Spirit-Matter, then entified in organic
bodily structure. Primeval space, as has been seen, was in Egyptian terms the Nun, the "waters of
the Nun." What Bible student does not know of "Joshua, son of Nun"? But so far has ignorance and
obscurantism gone with its deadly work in Biblical literalism that hardly any one knows with
definiteness that Joshua is just a variant (one of some ten or twelve) form of "Jesus." The phrase has
actually been found written in ancient texts as "Jesus, son of Nun." At any rate there is no question
and there can be none, that Joshua is Jesus, no less. This asserts that both names in various versions
of the Messianic legend stood for the one same typal figure representing man's coming deity. But the
wonder increases when we turn to the Hebrew alphabet and find that, while "M" is called and
spelled "Mem," and means "water," "N" is called and spelled "Nun," and means, of all astound-
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ing things, "fish." Jesus, then, is son of Pisces, the Fish-sign; as indeed he is in the Gospels
themselves.
And Horus, the Egyptian Christ, who is identical with the Jesus of the Gospels in some one hundred
and eighty particulars, performed at Anu a great "miracle." He raised his father Osiris from the dead,
calling unto him in the cave to rise and come forth, intimating that he was not dead but only sleeping.
Anu, as has been seen, became Bethany of the Gospels; and it was at Bethany that Jesus raised
Lazarus from the dead! And we run into another amazing link when, through Egyptian sources, we
are enabled to establish the identity of Lazarus. This is close to the greatest of all the marvels in this
chain of comparative data. For we find that the ancient designation of Osiris was Asar. Now the
Egyptians consistently expressed reverence for deity by prefixing the definite masculine article, "the,"
to the name of the chief of their gods. This was Osiris. Just as the Christians say, or should say, the
Christ, they said the Osiris. And there applies here another point of language usage not discovered
by scholars, but pertinent to our elucidation. It is that the definite masculine article, "the," connoted
deity in ancient writing. Our definite article, "the," is the root of the Greek word for God, the-os, to
which the Greeks prefixed their masculine article, ho theos. The Spanish article masculine, el, is the
Hebrew word for God. And the Greek masculine article ho, is a Chinese word for deity. To say "the
Osiris" was equivalent to saying "Lord Osiris."
So when the Hebrews took up the Egyptian names and titles they converted the name of "the
Osiris," or "Lord Osiris," directly into their own vernacular, with the result emerging as "El-Asar."
Then in turn the later Romans, speaking Latin, took up the same material that had come to them
through Hebrew hands and to "El-Asar" they added the common Latin termination of the second
declension masculine nouns in which most Roman men's names ended, namely "us;" and the result
was now "El-Asar-us." In time the initial "E" wore off, as the scholars phrase it, and the "s" in "Asar"
changed into its sister-letter "z," leaving us holding in our hands the "Lazarus" whom Jesus raised
from the dead at Bethany! So the allegorical raising of the Egyptian Osiris from death by his son, the
Christ of Egypt at the Egyptian Anu became the raising from death of the Hebrew Lazarus by the
Palestinian Christ at the Judean Bethany, and what was sublime spiritual dramatism became
incredible "history."
To support the contention that this derivation is not a fanciful invention or sheer coincidence, we find
the Egyptian "Azar" reappearing in the names of two of the Hebrew Priests in the Old Testament,
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Azar-iah and El(e)azar. The -iah (or -jah) appended to deific names substantially equated the
prefixed El in Hebrew usage. But a further and far more authoritative confirmation of the linkage was
found in one place in Renan's famous Life of Jesus (page 308). The French theologian displayed an
extraordinary knowledge of Judean history, geography, sociology and religion, and in connection
with the elucidation here presented this citation from his great book confronts the Christian exegesis
with a challenge which it may be difficult to fend off. We quote the passage as follows:
"The village of Bethany, in particular, situated at the summit of the hill upon the incline which
commands the Dead Sea and the Jordan, at a journey of an hour and a half from Jerusalem, was the
place especially beloved by Jesus."
Following this a numeral directs us to the note appended at the bottom of the page, in which the
reference is to Bethany:
"Now El-Azerie (from El-Azir, the Arabic name of Lazarus) in the Christian texts of the Middle
Ages, Lazarium."
On the next page (309), speaking of Mary he states:
"Her brother Eleazar, or Lazarus, was as much beloved by Jesus."
Here is indisputable evidence that the Egyptian connection with the name of Bethany clung to the
town up to the Middle Ages. Since it is agreed widely that John's Gospel is far more mystical and
spiritual and less historical than the other three, it is quite apparent that this reprint of an ancient
Egyptian allegory would be more likely to be included in John's Gospel and omitted from the three
synoptic ones. What can it mean to Christian theology that the story of the raising of Lazarus was
extant in Egyptian papyri possibly 5000 years B.C.?
Nor was Osiris, masquerading under the name of Lazarus, the only Egyptian personage present at
the scene of this supposed Christian "miracle." Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, under her ancient
designation of Meri, was present also. As the feminine counterpart of the male deity was dualized to
match the doubling of Horus as Horus the Elder (otherwise Osiris) and Horus the Younger, so the
Meri name was sometimes pluralized, becoming Merti. In Latin feminine form this became Mertae.
But in Hebrew it resolved into what in English was rendered as Martha. So even in the ancient
Egyptian transaction there were present the two Maries, or Mary and Martha, the sisters of
"Lazarus."
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A SIGNIFICANT SIX MONTHS
All this sets the stage for the crowning item in the correspondence. In the Gospel drama John the
Baptist enacts the role of the first-born or natural man, coming first to prepare the physical ground of
evolution for the advent of the second Adam, or Christ. He would therefore stand in the allegory as
the son of the Water Mother, Virgo, and under the astrological symbolism would be born at the
autumn equinox, or in his mother's house, which stands as that station in the zodiac. On the other
side of the cycle of descent, "death" and resurrection, would stand Jesus, the Christos, son of the
Fish Mother, born in his mother's house of the Fishes. These houses are six months apart on the
zodiacal chart!
Hence the whole edifice of Gospel historicity trembles under the impact of the strange dramatic
circumstance, given in the first chapter of Luke's Gospel, that the Annunciation to Mary of her
conception of the coming Christ by the Holy Spirit came in the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy
with John the Baptist. So we can see what the myth-makers devised for discerning intelligence in the
allegory in Luke. The natural man, having covered the zodiacal "six months" between his conception
and the date of his quickening into spiritual status in his evolution, was dramatized as being
"quickened" at a point exactly opposite from the point of the beginning of his life. Six months on the
chart would mark the end of an epoch begun opposite it. Six months, speaking purely zodiacally,
would terminate the period of mortal life and bring the natural man to the place of his deification. At
that point he would be represented as being quickened from natural to spiritual life. So then,
according to the Lukan account, when the mother of the true spiritual Christ, who had just been
impregnated by the Holy Ghost, came into the presence of the first mother, carrying her child at the
figurative completion of his cycle of physical evolution, and awaiting only the advent of the spiritual
Lord to be quickened into a new order of exalted being, he was dramatized as manifesting this
reawakening by the statement that "he leaped in his mother's womb." The Luke narration makes it
clear that the conception of Jesus had just taken place when Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth and
found her at the six months stage of her pregnancy. Mary's coming
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into the presence of Elizabeth is made the occasion of the natural man's leaping in his mother's
womb. When the Christos comes to the natural man the latter leaps into the higher kingdom of spirit.
It is but a simple matter of arithmetic to note that the last three months of Elizabeth's pregnancy with
John coincided with the first three of Mary's pregnancy with Jesus, bringing the birth of Jesus just six
months after that of John! So Luke has it. But it was in the zodiacal chart some thousands of years
before it could have "happened" in Judea. It had occurred zodiacally long before it could have
occurred historically. And the implication is overmastering that the supposed historical occurrence is
but a presumption of ignorance based on the zodiacal when that became circulated as history
among the unintelligent masses.
The final link of significant data, now to be presented is by no means a minor one. St. Paul declares
that we come to birth spiritually only as we die carnally, meaning that the quantum or quality of divine
character in us grows in proportion as the quantum of raw nature decreases. We increase deifically
as we decrease humanly; the god gains in power as the animal dies. So the structure of the allegory
depicted the spiritual man, Jesus, son of Nun, the "Fish," as increasing, while John, son of Virgo, the
Water Mother, decreases in stature. Astrologically, as a star or constellation sinks below the horizon
in the west, its opposite star or constellation would be rising in the east. As John, type of the first, the
natural man, went down (having completed his mission of preparing the way for his greater
successor), Jesus, type of the spiritual birth, rose on the world. So the narrative has John saying: "I
must decrease, but he must increase." In the descent of soul into the body spiritual power
decreases as physical life increases. But on the reverse arc of the cycle, or evolution, the physical
(John) decreases as the Christ power increases in its new round of growth.
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THE CHALLENGE TO CHRISTIANITY
No intelligent reader can peruse this assemblage of semantic data without being profoundly
impressed by at least two considerations of the most momentous gravity. He will see first that the
great principles of theology were presented, rather are concealed, it would be permissible to say,
under the cryptographic forms of astrological symbolism. Then he will be impressed beyond measure
by the incontestable evidence of the fact that Biblical events he had assumed were historical
occurrences in the first century A.D., were already written in time-worn books of the ancient
Egyptians thousands of years before, and that they were there not as objective history but as spiritual
allegory. And in the train of reflection that would follow upon these recognitions, how could he avoid
asking of his intelligence the question fraught with critical moment for the Christian faith: were then
the Gospels and Epistles of the Christian New Testament compositions originally written between
the years 40 to 80 of that first Christian century? In the face of the evidence here assembled, can
there be much doubt that these Gospels and Epistles were republications of old Egyptian religious
scripts, revamped and redacted doubtless by Judean influences, in the first century of our era? Does
Christian history make any authoritative pronouncement that would throw light on the question? In
spite of fanatical zeal to obliterate all trace of the derivation of its literary heritage from antecedent
Pagan sources, there has been permitted to survive for us a statement made by the man who himself
was chiefly instrumental in founding the Christian ecclesiastical system, the Christian historian and
bishop, Eusebius. In his famous Ecclesiastical History, chapter 17 of Book II, treating of the
Essenes, called Therapeutae in northern Egypt, he wrote:
"These ancient Therapeutae were Christians and their writings are our Gospels and Epistles."
As if to corroborate this declaration of the fourth-century Christian protagonist the Dead Sea scrolls
now rise out of the mists of pre-Christian time to certify beyond cavil that the New Testament
documents were products of the antecedent Pagan religions.
If Eusebius's statement and the evidence of the scrolls (and much other data) point to the ancient
origin of the Scriptures, there would
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then arise the further crucial question: for what reason were ancient Egyptian documents of secret
esoteric and occult spiritual lore, embodying the innermost teachings of the Magian and Sabean
astrological science, brought forth from their age-long sacred custodianship of the heirophants of the
Mysteries and spread broadcast to the world in that first Christian century? The answer to this query
is many-sided and complicated. But among other influences there was one certainly that can be
traced with considerable distinctness. This was the work of a philosopher too little credited with
importance. Philo Judaeus was born at or about the year 1 A.D. He labored in the early and middle
portions of the first century to effect a syncretism of Greek Platonism, Egyptian Hermeticism and
Mosaic Hebraism on occult theosophical bases. His work could have given a powerful stimulus to
the cultism of mystico-spiritual science throughout the mid-Eastern countries, as it apparently did lay
the foundations for the great Alexandrian philosophical center which, under the headship first of
Pantanus, then Clement and Origin, introduced these elements into Christianity. In the conjunction of
his effort with the currents of spiritual force emanating from such groups as the Essenes and the
Gnostics, we are as near to a correct answer as we perhaps ever shall be to the question of the
origin of Christianity and the publication in the first century of documents long in existence, but never
disseminated beyond secret guardianship in the occult societies until that time.
It therefore seems certainly to be within the bounds of distinct plausibility, indeed of imminent
probability, that the rise of Christianity is to be explained on the truly human and rational grounds of
a movement that was galvanized into momentum as the result of the first wide republication of the
secret and sacred books of the hierarchy of very ancient Egypt. Many astute investigators of the
provenance of the Gospels have been driven to the conclusion that the four included in the New
Testament canon were traceable to and based upon what they are pleased to call a "common
document," which obviously must antedate those building upon it. Almost to a certainty this
hypothesis points in the direction of a true solution of the problem of Gospel origins. Irenaeus, first
Christian Bishop of Gaul (France) in the second century, states that there was a multitude of Gospels
afloat in his day. It would be in accord with some positive data and many other well-grounded
assumptions if one were to posit the thesis that the four Gospels of the canon were based not
necessarily on any
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one "common document," but on the collective esoteric tradition coming down from old Egypt and
found extant in Irenaeus' "multitude of Gospels.
The historical fact that Christian scholarship has for seventeen centuries spent itself in the effort to
account for Christianity's upsurge and character formation entirely without reference to this mass of
literary lore of the antecedent world, out of whose very womb it actually was born, is to be seen
now as one of the most fantastically eccentric phenomena in all the religious history of mankind. It is
only to be accounted for by the factual circumstances that the Christian movement was from the start
motivated by a psychology of faith, emotional unction, pietistic zealotry of the most ignorant and
fanatical sort, gullible expectation of miracle and the supernatural, apocalyptic revelation with the
cosmic "end of the world," the ignorant literalization of Biblical allegorism,--all which element
bespeak the wholly unintellectual, unphilosophical character of the mentality and the psychology that
launched the faith, to which after a considerable time the name of the Greek deific principle, the
Christos, was attached. Beyond all contradiction this list of prime psychological factors in the
incipient push of Christianity explains its ignoring the whole great corpus of esoteric literature which
was unquestionably the garden bed of its growth. Furthermore the invincible repugnance which the
movement manifested to this body of the lore of a spiritual science at once too intellectual and
philosophical for the simple and uncritical folk who promulgated the Christian faith, attests volubly
the plebeian status of the movement and its personnel.
Let the modern mind essay to diagnose with an accuracy that these outer symptoms amply guarantee
the motif of a movement to promulgate a claimed divine revelation from the universal All-Father
himself, and it will see on what low and unworthy bases the system of Christianity does indeed rest.
Completely flouting the noblest and most authoritative characteristic of man's finest culture, his most
piquant afflations of aesthetic refinement, scorning the intellectual delight in the classical poetry and
philosophy of the great Graeco-Roman exaltation, including the two great Homeric and the Virgilian
epics, the rabid pietism of the early communicants of Christianity so filled its devotees with hatred of
the Pagan cultural treasures that they forced Jerome to recant his earlier statements of his addiction
to the classical literature, tore Augustine away from his interest in the
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philosophy of Plotinus and the esoteric theosophy of Manichaeism, led Tertullian to shriek "What has
Homer to do with the Gospels?", burned in a frenzy of wild rage the great Alexandrian library and
murdered the esoteric lecturer Hypatia as she took sanctuary at the altar and scraped the flesh off
her bones with oyster shells. Deeply inwrought in the texture of this anomalous aberration of good
human intelligence are to be found, still weaving the somber thread of the tragic story of the victory
of mass ignorance over sage wisdom, the true causes of the rise of Christianity.
The elucidation, then, of a large section of Scriptural text such as is here presented must be seen as
valuable and precious beyond all calculation. It reveals how the pietistic fanaticism that bred a hatred
of poetry, music and art, and a scorn of wholesome human pleasure which has held pretty solidly to
the present day, was generated by the twisting of the normal human mind into forms of weird
hallucination by the literalizing of myth, allegory, drama and natural and astrological symbolism in the
mind of the uncultured masses. This episodic debacle of religious culture that befell the ancient world
in the first three centuries of the Christian era (treated in full in the author's major work, Shadow of
the Third Century) is the crucial key to the understanding of the religious complication in the world
today. It is an odd, but a challenging reflection that one can not well escape on reading this
assemblage of amazing data of semantic significance, that half the world, and the half boasting more
or less justly of leadership in modern intelligence, has been thrown for over seventeen centuries
under the spell of a mental and psychological dementia that has given birth to the foulest superstition,
bigotry and inhuman savagery recorded in all history, and that this tragic outcome has ensued as the
result of the stupidity of a group of Galilean peasants in mistaking zodiacal history for veridical
history.
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