Story continued:
Further scrutiny of such data brings to light links of connection with 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 Virgo in astrological symbology was the house of Bread. This is indicated by several items of ancient 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, mighty celestial
symbol of the divinity in man. Precisely at midnight of December 24 it
stood on the meridian line from the zenith to Egypt. At the same moment there arose 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 the great star Spica (Latin, a head, or "spike" of wheat), symbol of that same divinity coming as celestial food for man. It must ever be remembered that the Gospel Jesus told us we had virtually to eat his body as food, and drink his blood, if we would inherit eternal life. So typism represented him as coming in the form of man, the babe Christ, and as food for man, the wheat. John speaks of the Christ principle 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
broke a loaf into fragments and gave to his disciples, saying that it was his body, broken for them.
We now have Virgo established as the house of Bread and Pisces as the house of Fish. But the characterization of the two houses must be brought along to a more specific evolutionary reference. What are these "houses," thus delineated? They are, as at first, the two states of matter, but now to be taken in immediate reference to the life of man on earth. They are in the final stage of the meaning man's body itself, which consists of matter in both its invisible and its visible forms. For man has a natural body and a spiritual body. Man's body itself houses the two mothers. The body is this double house of Bread and of Fish.
And the next link is seen when it is considered that this 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 to its partial obscuration in the darkness of the grave of matter, into the night of death, or incarnation, 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: "Who cometh forth from the dusk, and whose birth is in the house of death"--referring to the incarnating soul. In a spiritual sense the soul "dies" on entering the body in incarnation, but has a new birth in it as it later resurrects from it. The body is therefore the house of his death and rebirth, or the place of his crucifixion and
resurrection.
And the Egyptians had a name for the body as the locus of these
transformations, which carry the central meaning of all theologies. This name now rises out of the dim mists of ancient Egyptian books to enlighten all modern Bible comprehension. This city of the body, where the sun of soul sank to its death on the cross of matter, to rearise in a new birth, was called the city of the sun, or in Greek, Heliopolis, but in the Egyptian, ANU. The name was given to an actual Egyptian city, where the rites of the death, burial and resurrection of Osiris or Horus were enacted each year; but the name bore a theological significance before it was given to a geographical town.
The name is obviously made up of NU, the name for the mother heaven, or empty space, or abyss of nothingness, and Alpha privative, meaning, as in thousands of words, "not." A-NU would then mean "not-nothingness," or a world of concrete actuality, the world of physical
substantial manifestation. Precisely such a world it is in which units of virginal consciousness go to their death and rise again. A-NU is then the physical body of man on earth. The soul descends out of the waters of the abyss of the NUN, or space in its undifferentiated unity, which is the sign and name of all things negative. The NUN is indeed our "none." Life in the completeness of its unity is negative. To become positively manifest it must differentiate itself into duality, establish positive-negative
tension, and later split up into untold multiplicity. This brings out the significance of the Biblical word "multiply." Life can not manifest itself in concrete forms until it multiplies itself endlessly. Unit life of deity must break itself up into infinite fragments in order to fill empty space with a multitude of worlds and beings of different natures. The primal Sea or Mother must engender a multitudinous progeny, to spawn the limitless shoals of organic fish-worlds. This is the meaning of the promise given to Abraham, that his seed should multiply till it filled the earth with offspring countless as the sands of the seashore. And if life was symboled
by bread, as the first birth, and by fish, as the second, then we might expect to find in old religious typology the allegory of a Christ figure multiplying loaves and fishes! Are we surprised to find that the Gospel Jesus does this very thing, multiplying the fish loaves and two small fishes to feed a multitude!
This is astonishing enough in all conscience, but it yields in wonder to the next datum of Comparative Religion which came to our notice as a further tie between the Bible and antecedent Egyptian mythology. Who can adequately measure the seriousness of the challenge which this item of scholarship presents to Gospel historicity? For a discovery of sensational interest came to light when a passage was found in the Book of the Dead which gave to Anu the characteristic designation, "the place of multiplying bread"! Here 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. And a meaning never before apprehended had to be read into this New Testament wonder. At last we were instructed to catch in the miracle the sense that the physical body, as A-NU, was the place where the corpus of the Christ's deific power was broken into an infinite number of fragments and distributed out among a multitude of creatures, enhungered after a three-days' fast, or deprivation of the food of spiritual life in their sojourn in the three kingdoms, the mineral, vegetable and animal, before reaching the plane of mind. Here are all the elements 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 divine conscious units, there were gathered up twelve baskets of fragments! And this episode of the Christ's ostensible life is found to be Egyptian in origin and meaning and symbolic in character!
But new implications arise and lead us on to more startling disclosures. The Hebrews came along 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 required their adding to ANU their word for "house," which, as anyone knows, is Beth. This yields us Beth-Anu. Now it is a fact of common philological knowledge that the ancient Greek and Egyptian "U" is rendered as "Y" when the words are brought over into
English. The "U" became a "Y," and Beth-Anu now stands before us as the Bethany of the Gospels! Bethany is thus 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
astonishment strikes us here, as we find it reads Beth-Lehem (Lechem,
Lekhem), for lechem, lekhem, is bread in everyday Hebrew. The Christ was born in Bethany or Bethlehem, the astrological "house of Bread." (Later it seems that the two signs, Virgo and Pisces, and their symbols, bread and fish, were almost interchangeably confused or commingled in the symbolic imagery. This was natural, since the two signs represented the same body of man in its two aspects of dying and being reborn, and the two processes are confusedly interblended.)
If Pisces is then the "house" in which the Christ in man comes to his
birth, it is pertinent to ask if there are evidences in the Bible or
Christianity that Jesus was colored with the fish typology. Here we
encounter material enough to provide another nine-days' wonder. For we find the Gospel Jesus marked with many items of the Piscean symbology. He picks his twelve disciples from the ranks of fishermen (in Egypt they were as well carpenters, reapers, harvesters, sailors, rowers, builders, masons, potters, etc.); he told Peter to find the gold in the fish's mouth; he performed the miraculous draught of fishes; he declared that he would make them "fishers of men." In the catacombs under Rome the symbol of the two fishes crossed was displayed on the Christ's forehead, at his feet, or on a plate on the altar before him. And the Romans for several centuries dubbed the early Christians Pisciculi, or "Little Fishes," members of the "fish-cult." And the Greeks denominated the Gospel Jesus as Ichthys, the Fish. All this fish symbolism can not be explained away as sheer incident material. It is the product of ancient custom, which figured the Christs under the symbolism of the reigning sign of the zodiac, according to the precession of the equinoxes. |
