Here is some more of the "Rest of the Story."
Again, Paul's Christ is identified with the angel Metatron, as the Messiah who followed the Israelites in the wilderness. Thus he makes the angel masculine. But in the Targumists' traditions the Well of
Miriam takes the place of this sustaining Christ, who was the spiritual rock according to Paul. In the gospel of the Egyptians, quoted by Clement Alexander, the Lord says: "I am come to destroy the
works of the Woman." The two manifestors, male and female, are continued by the "Shepherd of Hermas," which some of the Fathers regarded as a divinely inspired scripture. Here the spirit, or
Logos, who is an old woman--i.e., the ancient Wisdom--in one vision, becomes the son of God in another! Of her it is said: "She is an old woman, because she was the first of all creation, and the world was made by her." Wisdom, the woman, was first; she was the mother of God. Christ, the son, was second; then he superseded the female in one representation; in another he was blended with her, and consequently portrayed in the image of both sexes, as a spiritual type. The
Wisdom or Sophia of the Gnostics was first at the head of the seven pre-planetary powers, and was called "Ogdoas," as mother of the first and inferior Hebdomad; next the Christ was made the head as manifestor of the seven later planetary powers, called by them the superior Hebdomad, he being the outcome of a later creation, and representative of the Fatherhood in heaven, which followed the fatherhood established on earth; and that same Gnostic manifestor of the seven powers or Gods had been Iu in Egypt, Iao in Phœnicia, Assur in Assyria, and the Buddha or Agni in India, ages on ages earlier.
Now Paul was opposed to those Gnostics who exalted the feminine type of the soul--the female as bringer to re-birth hereafter. He re pudiated it, and proclaimed his Christ. His Word, Logos or
Messiah, is strictly masculine. In India this type would be Lingaic versus the Yonian. He maintains that the "Word by Wisdom knew not God." This is exactly the same as saying that at one time men
only recognised the motherhood in heaven, and did not know who were their own fathers on earth. The Lord is the spirit, the Christ is the spirit, he declares; not Sophia, not the wisdom of a feminine
nature. Christ, he affirms, is both the "power and the wisdom of God." He proclaims all the treasures of Sophia and of the Gnosis to be contained in the Christ, and says the Christ has been "made unto us Wisdom." The Christ has taken her place. Again, his glorifying is not in fleshly Wisdom, not in the female Charis, but in the grace of God (2 Cor. i. 12). For the female Wisdom had been according to the flesh, the woman or mother being of the flesh fleshly; and Paul, as Gnostic
or Kabbalist, had been acquainted with the fleshly Wisdom, one of whose mysteries appertained to feminine periodicity, which he now repudiates when he says: "Even though we have known Christ
(or the manifestor) after the flesh, yet now we know so no more." Here it cannot be pretended that Paul ever knew the personal Christ in the flesh, and therefore some other fact has to be encountered. However interpreted, he is speaking doctrinally, and not of two historic characters.
Paul's is the Gnostic Christ as the Second Adam; the man from heaven, whose type superseded the man of earth. Paul knew well enough that Adam was not a man in the literal sense; he was the typical man of the flesh; the son of the woman; and as was the type, such was the antitype, when he calls his Christ the second Adam, the later spiritual type of man, and of the Father above. Neither were, or
could be, historic personages. To use his own words, "These things are an allegory." In her most occult phase the feminine messenger was a Word that could be made flesh; for she was the flesh-maker, the mother of Matter. But this was on physiological grounds alone. Hence she was
superseded by the masculine messenger; the spirit that could never be made flesh. None but the initiated in these matters could possibly know what was meant by this transfer of type, and substitution of the Lord for the Lady, the Christ for Wisdom, the second Adam for the first. But there it is truth-like at the bottom of the well; the source of so much difficulty found in the depths of Paul's writings. And this contention of Paul on behalf of one Gnostic dogma against another has been made to look as if he were fervently fighting for an Historic Jesus.
This transfer of type is not limited to Paul! For instance, the Vine was a feminine symbol. Wisdom says, "As the Vine brought I forth" (Ecc. xxiv. 17); and in the Book of Proverbs Sophia cries,
"Come eat of my bread, and drink of the wine I have mingled." The Fig-Tree in Egypt was the figure of the Lady of Heaven, who is pourtrayed as the Tree of Life and Knowledge, in the act of
feeding souls. She literally gives her body as the Bread and her blood as the Wine of Life! In the later Ptolemeian times this Tree was assigned to Sophia or Wisdom! which shows the link between
Egypt and Greece. The superseding of Sophia is also illustrated in the cursing of the fruitless Fig-tree by the Canonical Christ, where the Parable of Mythology is represented as a human history. In
John's Gospel the type has been transferred, just as the sayings were, to the masculine nature, and the Christ becomes the bread and wine of life. In the Apocrypha it is Sophia who is "The brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, and the image of his goodness!" (Wisdom vii. 26.) In the Epistle to the
Hebrews the Christ takes the place of Sophia. He is called the "effulgence of the glory" of God, the "very image of his substance." Nevertheless, the male Christ could no more be made flesh in
a man than Sophia or Charis could have previously been incarnated in an historical woman. You cannot understand one half without the other. Both must be taken together. The doctrine is doubly and wholly opposed to any and all historical personality.
But, we have not yet completely mastered the entire Mystery of Paul for modern use; and it is not possible for any one but the phenomenal Spiritualist, who knows that the conditions of trance and
clairvoyance are facts in nature; only those who have evidence that the other world can open and lighten with revelations, and prove its palpable presence, visibly and audibly; only those who except
the teaching that the human consciousness continues in death, and emerges in a personality that persists beyond the grave; only such, I say, are qualified to comprehend the mystery, or receive the
message, once truly delivered to men by the Spiritualist Paul, but which was thoroughly perverted by the Sarkolators, the founders of the fleshly faith. In the first place he was an Initiate in the Gnostic
Mysteries, called Kabbalist in Hebrew. He tells us how exceedingly jealous for the traditions he had been, which must have included the traditional interpretation of the mysteries and of the Gnosis or
hidden Wisdom. He was a perfected Adept. He knew the nature of the Kronian Christ, and of the Spiritual Christ, according to the Gnosis. Beyond that, Paul, on his own testimony, was an abnormal
Seer, subject to the conditions of trance. He could not remember if certain experiences occurred to him in the body or out of it! This trance condition was the origin and source of his revelations, the
heart of his mystery, his infirmity in which he gloried--in short, his "thorn in the flesh." He shows the Corinthians that his abnormal condition, ecstasy, illness, madness (or what not), was a phase of
spiritual intercourse in which he was divinely insane--insane on behalf of God--but that he was rational enough in his relationship to them. He says: "I will come to visions and revelations of the
Lord. I knew a man in Christ fourteen years ago (whether in the body I know not; or whether out of the body I know not; God knoweth), such an one caught up even in the third heaven"--on behalf of that man he will glory. "And by reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations, wherefore that I should not be exalted over much, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me, that I should not be exalted over much." Paul's Thorn in the Flesh has been attributed to lechery, and to sore eyes; but no Christian commentator
known to me has ever connected it with abnormal phenomena, except as miracle. The Marcionites said the Mystery was manifested to Paul by revelation. Paul says the same. By this abnormal mode the Mystery was revealed to him in person. His eyes were opened, so that he could see for himself the truth that was taught in the Mysteries. If a Spirit appeared in vision to Paul, that would positively prove the re-birth for a future life, and constitute the revelation of his Messianic mystery. Paul's Christ, the Lord, is the spirit; his gospel is that of spiritual revelation, the chief mode of manifestation being abnormal, as it was, and had been, in the Gnostic mysteries.
The Gnostic Christ was the Immortal Spirit in man, which first demonstrated its existence by means of abnormal or spiritualistic phenomena. It did not and could not depend on any single manifestation
in one historic personality. And when Paul says, "I knew a man in Christ," we see that to be in Christ is to be in the condition of trance, in the spirit, as they phrased it, in the state that is common
to what is now termed mediumship.
Being in the trance condition, or in Christ, as he calls it, he was caught up to the third heaven, and could not determine whether he was in the body or out of the body. Here he identifies his Christ with
a condition of being, and that condition with the abnormal phenomena known to some of us who have studied Modern Spiritualism. This is the Gnostic Christ, not the Christ of any special historic personality, who is supposed to have manifested only once upon a time, and once for all. The Christ of the Gnosis, of Philo and of Paul preceded Christianity, and is sure to supersede it, because it is based upon facts known in nature and verifiable to-day. It was those who were entirely ignorant of those subtle and obscure facts, unfolded in the Mysteries, who became Christians in the modern sense, and believed, because they were blind. Paul was both a Seer and a Knower. He became one of the public demonstrators of the facts, just like any itinerant medium of our time. He says to the Galatians: "Ye know that because of an infirmity of the flesh, I preached the gospel unto you the first time, and that which was a temptation to you in my flesh, ye despised not nor rejected (or spat out); but ye received me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus!" This infirmity of the flesh was his tendency to fall into trance. When it first occurred, at a given date, he received his
revelation and began to preach his own gospel. He talked and taught as do the mediums in trance to-day. He received his revelations--visions and revelations of the Lord--and gave proofs of the Christ, or spirit, speaking within him, speaking through him, when he was in trance. And on this ground they received him as an angel of God--they received him as the Christ. This Christ, personated by Paul as the revealer in trance, was of necessity the Gnostic Christ, the Spirit of God,
as he often calls it, the Christ that spoke through him, founded on what is now termed spirit control, but not based on the spirit of any Jesus of Nazareth. His Christ is the spirit which revealed itself
abnormally in, and through him, so that he "spoke the wisdom and the words which the spirit teacheth; he spoke mysteries in the spirit." His Christ was the same spirit that "hath a diversity of workings" in various spirit manifestations. "To one it gives the word of wisdom; to another, the word of knowledge; to another, faith; to another, gifts of healing; to another, miraculous powers; to another, prophesy; to another, seeing of spirits; to another, the gift of tongues,
and to another, their interpretation." And as this was the Christ, that always had been so manifested, nothing depended upon any historical character. All that was real, that is, spiritual, would be the same afterwards as it had been before. Nothing did depend on it, and historical Christianity itself is but a vast interpolation, the greatest of all obstacles to mental development and the unity of the human race. One more illustration that Paul was outside the ring of conspirators who were the founders, as forgers, of Historic Christianity in Rome, and I shall have done.
The Christ proclaimed by Peter and James was the mythical Messiah of the Time-cycles, the ever-coming one, converted into an historical character; hence he who was supposed to have just come still remained the Coming One. He himself is made to say that he is coming before the then present generation shall have passed away.
Apart from the mythos and its meaning, there was no other coming, or end of the Times, of the age, Æon, or world! The Kronian allegory can only apply to the Kronian Christ, as the metaphorical manifestor of the Eternal in the sphere of time, who could neither be made flesh nor assume historic personality. This was known to Paul as an Adept. Such things were an Allegory; but it was not known to those who preached that "other gospel." James asserts that "the coming of the Lord is
at hand." John declares that it is the Last Hour. In the Second Epistle of Peter we find the writer mentions Paul by name, and replies to his Epistles. He is covertly trying to counteract the influence of
Paul's teaching on a matter of such importance as the second coming of Christ, and the immediate ending of the world. In the first chapter he proclaims that the end of all things is at hand. Here he
says that mockers are asking, "Where is the promise of his coming?" They forget the cataclysms and deluges by which the previous heavens and earth have perished. This time the end will come
with a universal conflagration, and, according to promise, "We look for new heavens and a new earth." . . . "Our beloved brother, Paul, has been speaking of these things. . . . According to the wisdom given to him he wrote unto you; as also in his Epistles, speaking in them in these things; wherein are some things hard to understand, which the ignorant and unsteadfast wrest (as also the other scriptures) unto their own destruction." The subject-matter here is the nature of the time-cycles, and the mythical destruction by flood and fire, which Paul as an Adept knew to be typical and allegorical. Peter mistakes them for literal realities. Being an outsider, he did not understand the Wisdom or Gnosis of Paul, but says it is misleading, inasmuch as the ignorant wrest it unto their own destruction. Peter had also said the day of the Lord will come as a thief. To this we have direct replies from Paul. "Concerning the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that aught be written unto you. For yourselves know perfectly well that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day
should overtake you as a thief; for ye are all sons of light and sons of the day; we are not of the night nor of the darkness"--as were those foolish Physicalists, the Petrine A-Gnostics. And again he says to the Thessalonians--"Now we beseech you, brethren, touching the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our gathering together unto him, that ye be not quickly shaken from your mind, nor yet be troubled either by spirit, or by word, or by epistle as from us! as that day of the Lord is present at hand. Let no man beguile you in any wise;" give no heed to that ignoramus' gobemoucherie! Then follows a break in the sense. But a falling away is to come first, and the Man of Sin must be revealed or exposed; the son of perdition, "he that opposeth and exalteth himself against all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he sitteth in the Temple of God setting himself forth as God." That, I say, is St. Paul's opposer, Peter, who was set up in the Church of Rome. "Remember ye not that when I was with you I told you these things. And now ye know that which restraineth to the end that he may be revealed in his own season. For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work only until he that restraineth now shall be taken out of the way. And then shall be revealed the Lawless one whom the Lord Jesus shall slay with the breath of his mouth, and bring to nought by the manifestation of his coming, (him) whose
'coming' is according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceit of unrighteousness for them that are perishing, because they received not the love of truth that they might be saved; and for this cause God sendeth them a working of error that they should believe a lie." In both quotations the subject-matter identifies Peter as palpably as if Paul had named him. He is replying to the teaching of one particular man who is
proclaiming the "Coming" of the Christ and the day of the Lord, or end of the world, as being close at hand. He says in effect--Do not be troubled or beguiled by any such ignorant trash. The Lord will
not come in his sense, and cannot come in mine, except that man of sin be revealed. No one has ever dared to dream that this "Man of Sin" is Peter himself! But the person aimed at is considered capable of forging epistles in the name of Paul; thus attributing this kind of teaching to him, and making him father it whilst Paul was yet living. This "man of sin" and "son of perdition" has set himself up in the temple of God, setting himself forth as God. This is no emperor Nero, but a portrait of Peter, the life-long enemy of Paul; he whose preaching is concerning signs and lying wonders, such as the stories about the end of the world, the passing away of the heavens with a great noise, the dissolution of the elements with fervent heat, and the burning up of the earth with all the works therein, and other teachings of this cataclysmalist, which Paul denounces as delusive, and knows to be a lie! This misleader of men is restrained for the time being by Paul himself, but when he departs Peter will reveal himself or be revealed in his true colours, and the Thessalonians will then see what Paul has known all along, and against which he had warned them once before, i.e., against that working of error and belief in a lie, which we now know by name as Historic Christianity.
It is here, then, that we can peer right down into the deep, dark gulf that divided Peter from Paul, of which we get such a lightning glimpse in the Clementine Homilies. These writings were inspired by
the faction of Peter. By them Paul is designated the "Hostile Man"; his own epithet, Anomas, the Lawless, is there flung back at him by Peter, who denounces the puerile preaching of the man that is
his enemy, and who says: "Thou hast opposed thyself as an Adversary against me, the firm rock, the foundation of the Church." Paul's conversion, by means of abnormal vision, is attributed to the false Christ, the Gnostic and Spiritualist opposed to an Historic Christ. In Homily 17, Peter is obviously hitting at Paul and his visions when he asks: "Can anyone be instituted to the office of a teacher through visions?" Paul is treated as the arch-enemy of the Christ crucified--he is the very Anti-Christ. He will be the author of some great heresy which is expected to break out in the future.
Peter is said to have declared that Christ instructed the disciples not to publish the only true and genuine gospel for the present, because the false teacher must arise, who would publicly proclaim the
false gospel of the Anti-Christ that was the Christ of the Gnostics. "As the true Prophet has told us, the false gospel must come from a certain misleader;" and so they were to go on secretly promulgating the true gospel, until this false preacher had passed away. This true gospel was confessedly "held in reserve, to be secretly transmitted for the rectification of future heresies."
They knew well enough what had to come out, if Paul's preaching, proclaimed in his original Epistles. It was Paul whom they had reason to fear. Hence those who were the followers of Peter and James anathematized him as the great apostate, and rejected his Epistles.
Justin Martyr never once mentions this founder of Christianity, never once refers to the writings of Paul. Strangest thing of all is it that the book of the Acts, which is mainly the history of Paul, should
contain no account of his martyrdom or death in Rome! The gulf, however, cannot be completely fathomed, except on the grounds that there was no personal Christ, and that Paul was the natural
opponent of the men who were setting up the Christ made flesh for the salvation of the world that never was lost. My conclusion is, that fabricated evidence is the sole support of Historic Christianity
which can be derived from the Epistles of Paul; that the manipulation for an ulterior purpose, which is so obvious in the book of Acts, was far more subtly and fundamentally applied to his Epistles and doctrines; that they have been worked over as thieves manipulate stolen linen when they pick out the marks of ownership to escape from detection; that false doctrines have been foisted into the original
text, which seems to have been withheld for a century after the writer's death, until the leaven of falsehood had done its fatal work. The problem of the plotters and forgers in Rome was how to
convert the mythical Christology into historic Christianity, and when Paul's Epistles were permitted to emerge from obscurity in a collection, what had occurred was the restoration of the carnalised Christ, that "other Jesus" who was repudiated by Paul in his
own lifetime. Paul felt or feared, and foretold that this would be the case when once he was removed out of the way. He saw the mystery of lawlessness already at work--the falsifiers sending forth letters
as if from himself--and we have seen what Paul foresaw! the problem of the plotters who forged the foundations of the Church in Rome was how to successfully blend the Christ Jesus of the Gnostics, of the pre-Christian Apocrypha, of Philo, and of Paul, with that Corporeal Christ and impossible personality, in whom they ignorantly believed, through a blind literalisation of mythology, so as to make the historic look like the true starting-point, and the Gnostic interpretation becomes a later heresy. This was finally effected when the declaration of John--that "the Word was made flesh and
dwelt among us"--had been accepted as the genuine Gospel, and that which had been an impossibility for the Gnostics was an accomplished fact for those who knew no better than to believe. The Gospel, according to John, was concocted and calculated to serve as a harmonising amalgam of doctrines that were fundamentally opposed. In this Amalgam they tried to mix the "gall and honey," so that, if "well shaken before taken," it might be swallowed by the followers on both
sides. But there was a great gulf forever fixed between the Gnostic Christology and Historic Christianity. It was a gulf that never could be soundly bridged, and never has been plumbed, or bottomed, or filled in. The bodies of two million martyrs of free-thought, put to death as heretics, in Europe alone, and all the blood that has ever been shed in Christian wars, have failed to fill that gulf, which waits as ever wide-jawed for its prey. Across that gulf the Christian Church was erected upon supports on either side. On one side stood those pillars of the Church which were seen by Paul in Jerusalem. On the other was Paul himself, the pillar that stood alone. A difference the most radical and profound divided him from the other apostles, Cephas, John, and James. From the first they were on two sides of the chasm that could not be closed; and the Prædicatio Petri declares that
Peter and Paul remained unreconciled till death. The great work of the first centuries was how to bridge the chasm over, or at least how to conceal it from the eyes of the world in later times. This
could only be done by resting on Paul as a prop and buttress on the one side and Peter on the other, which had to be done by converting or perverting the Epistles of the Gnostic Paul into a support for
Historic Christianity. In that way the Church was founded. It was built as a bridge across the gulf, and the Pope of Rome appointed and aptly designated Pontifex Maximus. It was reared above the chasm lying darkly lurking like an open grave below, and to-day, as ever, the Christian world is horribly haunted with the fear that a breath or two of larger intellectual life, a too audible utterance of
free-er thought, a dose of mental dynamite may bring the edifice of error down in wreck and ruin to fill that gulf at last, over which it was so perilously founded from the first. |
