Blavatsky H.P. - The Roots of Ritualism in Church and Masonry: Difference between revisions

We may begin by the origin of the word God. What is the real and primitive meaning of the term? Its meanings and etymologies are as many as they are various. One of them shows the word derived from an old Persian and mystic term goda. It means “itself,” or something self-emanating from the absolute Principle. The root word was godan—whence Wodan, Woden, and Odin, the Oriental radical having been left almost unaltered by the Germanic races. Thus they made of it gott, from which the adjective gut—“good,” as also the term götze, or idol, were derived. In ancient Greece, the word Zeus and Theos led to the Latin Deus. This goda, the emanation, is not, and cannot be, identical with that from which it radiates, and is, therefore, but a periodical, finite manifestation. Old Aratus, who wrote “full of Zeus are all the streets and the markets of man; full of Him is the sea and the harbours,”<ref>{{HPB-CW-comment|[Aratus Solensis is meant here. This passage occurs at the very opening of his Phaenomena. In Loeb Classical Series, G. R. Mair’s translation is as follows: “From Zeus let us begin, him do we mortals never leave unnamed; full of Zeus are all the streets and all the marketplaces of men; full is the sea and the heavens thereof . . .”—Compiler.]}}</ref> did not limit his deity to such a temporary reflection on our terrestrial plane as Zeus, or even its antetype—Dyaus, but meant, indeed, the universal, omnipresent Principle. Before the radiant god Dyaus (the sky) attracted the notice of man, there was the Vedic Tad (“that”) which, to the Initiate and philosopher, would have no definite name, and which was the absolute Darkness that underlies every manifested radiancy. No more than the mythical Jupiter—the later reflection of Zeus—could Sûrya, the Sun, the first manifestation in the world of Maya and the Son of Dyaus, fail to be termed {{Page aside|68}}“Father” by the ignorant. Thus the Sun became very soon interchangeable and one with Dyaus; for some, the “Son,” for others, the “Father” in the radiant sky; Dyaus-Pitar, the Father in the Son, and the Son in the Father, truly shows, however, his finite origin by having the Earth assigned to him as a wife. It is during the full decadence of metaphysical philosophy that Dyâva-prithivi, “Heaven and Earth,” began to be represented as the Universal cosmic parents, not alone of men, but of the gods also. From the original conception, abstract and poetical, the ideal cause fell into grossness. Dyaus, the sky, became very soon Dyaus or Heaven, the abode of the “Father,” and finally, indeed, that Father himself. Then the Sun, upon being made the symbol of the latter, received the title of Dina-Kara, “day-maker,” of Bhaskara, “light-maker,” now the Father of his Son, and vice versa. The reign of ritualism and of anthropomorphic cults was henceforth established and finally degraded the whole world, retaining supremacy to the present civilized age.

Such being the common origin, we have but to contrast the two deities—the god of the Gentiles and the god of the Jews—on their own revealed WORD; and judging them on their respective definitions of themselves, conclude intuitively which is the nearest to the grandest ideal. We quote Colonel Ingersoll, who brings Jehovah and Brahma parallel with each other. The former, “from the clouds and darkness of Sinai,” said to the Jews:—

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me . . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” [Exod. xx, 3, 5.] Contrast this with the words put by the Hindu into the mouth of Brahm: “I am the same to all mankind. They who honestly serve other gods, involuntarily worship me. I am he who partaketh of all worship, and I am the reward of all worshippers.” Compare these passages. The first, a dungeon where crawl the things begot of jealous slime; the other, great as the domed firmament inlaid with suns . . .”

The “first” is the god who haunted Calvin’s fancy, when he added to his doctrine of predestination that of Hell being {{Page aside|69}}paved with the skulls of unbaptized infants. The beliefs and dogmas of our churches are far more blasphemous in the ideas they imply than those of the benighted Heathen. The amours of Brahmâ, under the form of a buck, with his own daughter, as a deer, or of Jupiter with Leda, under that of a swan, are grand allegories. They were never given out as a revelation, but known to have been the products of the poetic fancy of Hesiod and other mythologists. Can we say as much of the immaculate daughters of the god of the Roman Catholic Church—Anna and Mary? Yet, even to breathe that the Gospel narratives are allegories too, as they would be most sacrilegious were they accepted in their dead letter, constitutes in a Christian born the acme of blasphemy.

Verily, they may whitewash and mask as much as they like the god of Abraham and Isaac, they shall never be able to disprove the assertion of Marcion, who denied that the God of Hate could be the same as the “Father of Jesus.” Heresy or not, but the “Father in Heaven” of the Churches remained since then a hybrid creature; a mixture between the Jove of the Pagan mobs and the “jealous God” of Moses, exoterically the SUN, whose abode is in Heaven, or the sky esoterically. Does he not give birth to LIGHT “that shineth in Darkness,” to the Day, the bright Dyaus, the Son, and is he not the MOST HIGH—Deus Caelum? And is it not again Terra, the “Earth,” the ever immaculate as the ever prolific Virgin who, fecundated by the ardent embraces of her “Lord”—the fructifying rays of the Sun, in this terrestrial sphere, the mother of all that lives and breathes on her vast bosom? Hence, the sacredness of her products in Ritualism—the bread and the wine. Hence also, the ancient messis, the great sacrifice to the goddess of harvest (Ceres Eleusina, the Earth again): messis, for the Initiates, missa for the profane,<ref>From pro, “before,” and fanum, “the temple,” i.e., the non-initiates who stood before the fane, but dared not enter it.—(Vide the Works of Ragon.)</ref> now transformed into the Christian mass or liturgy. The ancient oblation of the fruits of the Earth to {{Page aside|70}}the Sun, the Deus Altissimus, “the Most High,” the symbol of the G.A.O.T.U. of the Masons to this day, became the foundation of the most important ritual among the ceremonies of the new religion. The worship offered to Osiris-Isis (the Sun and the Earth),<ref>The Earth, and the Moon, its parent, are interchangeable. Thus all the lunar goddesses were also the representative symbols of the Earth.—Vide The Secret Doctrine, Symbolism.</ref> to Bel and the cruciform Astarte of the Babylonians; to Odin or Thor and Frigga, of the Scandinavians; to Belen and the Virgo Paritura of the Celts; to Apollo and the Magna Mater of the Greeks; all these couples having the same meaning, passed bodily to, and were transformed by, the Christians into the Lord God or the Holy Ghost descending upon the Virgin Mary.

Deus Sol or Solus, the Father, was made interchangeable with the Son: the “Father” in his noon glory, he became the “Son” at Sunrise, when he was said to “be born.” This idea received its full apotheosis annually on December the 25th, during the Winter Solstice, when the Sun—hence the solar gods of all the nations—was said to be born. Natalis solis invicti. And the “precursor” of the resurrecting Sun grows, and waxes strong, until the vernal equinox, when the god Sol begins its annual course, under the sign of the Ram or the Lamb, the first lunar week of the month. The 1st of March was feasted throughout all pagan Greece, as its neomenia was sacred to Diana. Christian nations celebrate their Easter, for the same reason, on the first Sunday that follows the full moon, at the Vernal Equinox. With the festivals of the Pagans, the canonicals of their priests and Hierophants were copied by Christendom. Will this be denied? In his Life of Constantine Eusebius confesses—thus saying, perhaps, the only truth he ever uttered in his life—that “in order to render Christianity more attractive to the Gentiles, the priests [of Christ] adopted the exterior vestments and ornaments used in the pagan cult.” He might have added “their rituals” and dogmas also.  

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