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Blavatsky H.P. - The Esoteric Character of the Gospels (continued in December, 1887, and February, 1888) (view source)

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{{Style P-Quote|These Christian Mysteries, ignorantly explained to be inexplicable, can be explained by Gnosticism and Mythology, but in no other way. It is not that they are insoluble by human reason, as their incompetent, howsoever highly paid, expounders now-a-days pretend. That is but the puerile apology of the unqualified for their own helpless ignorance—they who have never been in possession of the gnosis or science of the Mysteries by which alone these things can be explained in accordance with their natural genesis. In Egypt only can we read the matter to the root, or identify the origin of the Christ by nature and by name, to find at last that the Christ was the Mummy-type, and that our Christology is mummified mythology. [pp. 13-14.] (Agnostic Annual.) 40}}

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The above is an explanation on purely scientific evidence, but, perhaps, a little too materialistic, just because of that science, notwithstanding that the author is a well-known Spiritualist. Occultism pure and simple finds the same mystic elements in the Christian as in other faiths, though it rejects as emphatically its dogmatic and historic character. It is a fact that in the terms (See Acts, v, 42; ix, 34; I Cor., iii, 11, etc.), the article Ò designating “Christos,” proves it simply a surname, like that of Phocion, who is referred to as (Plutarch, Vitae).41 Still, the personage (Jesus) so addressed—whenever he lived—was a great Initiate and a “Son of God.”

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The above is an explanation on purely scientific evidence, but, perhaps, a little too materialistic, just because of that science, notwithstanding that the author is a well-known Spiritualist. Occultism pure and simple finds the same mystic elements in the Christian as in other faiths, though it rejects as emphatically its dogmatic and historic character. It is a fact that in the terms ''Ἰησοῦς ὁ χριστός'' (See Acts, v, 42; ix, 34; I Cor., iii, 11, etc.), the article Ò designating “Christos,” proves it simply a surname, like that of Phocion, who is referred to as ''Φωκίων ὁ χρηστός'' (Plutarch, Vitae).41 Still, the personage (Jesus) so addressed—whenever he lived—was a great Initiate and a “Son of God.”

For, we say it again, the surname Christos is based on, and the story of the Crucifixion derived from, events that preceded it. Everywhere, in India as in Egypt, in Chaldea as in Greece, all these legends were built upon one and the same primitive type; the voluntary sacrifice of the logoi—the rays of the one LOGOS, the direct manifested emanation from the One ever-concealed Infinite and Unknown—whose rays incarnated in mankind. They consented to fall into matter, and are, therefore, called the “Fallen Ones.” This is one of those great mysteries which can hardly be touched upon in a magazine article, but shall be noticed in a separate work of mine, The Secret Doctrine, very fully.

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Having said so much, a few more facts may be added to the etymology of the two terms. being the verbal adjective in Greek of , “to be rubbed on,” {{Page aside|201}}

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Having said so much, a few more facts may be added to the etymology of the two terms. ''Χριστός'' being the verbal adjective in Greek of ''χρίω'', “to be rubbed on,” {{Page aside|201}}as ointment or salve, and the word being finally brought to mean “the Anointed One,” in Christian theology; and Kri, in Sanskrit, the first syllable in the name of Krishna, meaning “to pour out, or rub over, to cover with,” <ref>Hence the memorialising of the doctrine during the MYSTERIES. The pure monad, the “god” incarnating and becoming Chrêstos, or man, on his trial of life, a series of those trials led him to the crucifixion of flesh, and finally into the Christos condition.</ref> among many other things, this may lead one as easily to make of Krishna, “the anointed, one.” Christian philologists try to limit the meaning of Krishna’s name to its derivation from Krish, “black”; but if the analogy and comparison of the Sanskrit with the Greek roots contained in the names of Chrêstos, Christos, and Chrishna, are analyzed more carefully, it will be found that they are all of the same origin.<ref>On the best authority the derivation of the Greek Christos is shown from the Sanskrit root ghrish, “rub”; thus: gharsh-â-mi-to, “to rub,” and ghrish-˜a-s, “flayed, sore.” Moreover, Krish, which means in one sense to plough and make furrows, means also to cause pain, “ to torture, to torment,” and ghrish-˜a-s, “rubbing”—all these terms relating to Chrêstos and Christos conditions. One has to die in Chrêstos, i.e., kill one’s personality and its passions, to blot out every idea of separateness from one’s “Father,” the Divine Spirit in man; to become one with the eternal and absolute Life and Light (SAT) before one can reach the glorious state of Christos, the regenerated man, the man in spiritual freedom.</ref>

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{{Style P-Quote|In “Böckh’s Christian Inscriptions, numbering 1,287, there is no single instance of an earlier date than the third century wherein the name is not written Chrêst or Chreist. [“The Name and Nature of the Christ,” by G. Massey, The Agnostic Annual.] 42}}

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Yet none of these names can be unriddled, as some Orientalists imagine, merely with the help of astronomy and the knowledge of zodiacal signs in conjunction with phallic symbols. Because, while the sidereal symbols of the mystic characters or personifications in Purânas or Bible, fulfil astronomical functions, their spiritual anti-types rule invisibly, but very effectively, the world. They exist as abstractions on the higher plane, as manifested {{Page aside|202}}ideas on the astral, and become males, females and androgyne powers on this lower plane of ours. Scorpio, as Chrêstos-Meshiac, and Leo, as Christos-Messiah, antedated by far the Christian era in the trials and triumphs of Initiation during the Mysteries, Scorpio standing as symbol for the latter, Leo for the glorified triumph of the “sun” of truth. The mystic philosophy of the allegory is well understood by the author of The Source of Measures, who writes:

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{{Style P-Quote|. . . . . One [Chrêstos], as causing himself to go down into the pit [of Scorpio, or incarnation in the womb], for the salvation of the world; this was the sun shorn of his golden rays, and crowned with blackened <ref>The Orientalists and Theologians are invited to read over and study the allegory of Viśwakarman, the “ Omnificent,” the Vedic God, the architect of the world, who sacrificed himself to himself or the world, after having offered up all worlds, which are himself, in a “Sarva Medha” (general sacrifice)—and ponder over it. In the Purânic allegory, his daughter Yoga-siddha, “Spiritual consciousness,” the wife of Surya, the Sun, complains to him of the too great effulgence of her husband; and Viśwakarman, in his character of Takshaka, “wood cutter and carpenter,” placing the Sun upon his lathe, cuts away a part of his brightness. Surya looks, after this, crowned with dark thorns instead of rays, and becomes Vikarttana (“shorn of his rays”). All these names are terms which were used by the candidates when going through the trials of Initiation. The Hierophant-Initiator personated Viśwakarman, the father, and the general artificer of the gods (the adepts on earth), and the candidate—Surya, the Sun, who had to kill all his fiery passions and wear the crown of thorns while crucifying his body before he could rise and be re-born into a new life as the glorified “Light of the World”—Christos. No Orientalist seems to have ever perceived the suggestive analogy, let alone to apply it!</ref> ones (symbolizing this loss), as the thorns: The other was the triumphant Messiah, mounted up to the summit of the arch of heaven, personated as the Lion of the tribe of Judah. In both instances he had the cross; once in humiliation (or the son of copulation), and once holding it in his control, as the law of creation, He being Jehovah. . . .43}}

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{{Style P-No indent|in the scheme of the authors of dogmatic Christianity. For, as the same author shows further, John, Jesus and even Apollonius of Tyana “were but epitomizers of the {{Page aside|203}}history of the same sun, under differences of aspect or condition.” * 44 The explanation, he says,}}

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{{Style P-Quote|is simple enough, when it is considered that the names Jesus, Hebrew : <ref>The author of The Source of Measures thinks that this “serves to explain why it has been that the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, by Philostratus, has been so persistently kept back from translation and from popular reading. Those who have studied it in the original have been forced to the comment that either the Life of Apollonius has been taken from the New Testament, or that the New Testament narratives have been taken from the Life of Apollonius, because of the manifest sameness of the means of construction of the narratives” (p. 260).</ref>, and Apollonius, or Apollo, are alike names of the sun in the heavens; and necessarily the history of the one, as to his travels through the signs, with the personifications of his sufferings, triumphs, and miracles, could be but the history of the other, where there was a wide-spread, common method of describing those travels by personification.45}}

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The fact that the Secular Church was founded by Constantine, and that it was a part of hid decree “that the venerable day of the Sun should be the day set apart for the worship of Jesus Christ as Sun-day,” shows that they knew well in that “Secular Church” that the allegory rested “upon an astronomical basis,” as the author affirms.46 Yet, again, the circumstance that both Purânas and Bible are full of solar and astronomical allegories, does not militate against that other fact that all such scriptures in addition to these two are closed books to the scholars “having authority.” (!) Nor does it affect that other truth, that all those systems are not the work of mortal man, nor are they his invention in their origin and basis.

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Thus “Christos,” under whatever name, means more than Karest, a mummy, or even the “anointed” and the elect of theology. Both of the latter apply to Chrêstos, the man of sorrow and tribulation, in his physical, mental, and psychic conditions, and both relate to the Hebrew Meshiach (from whence Messiah) condition, as the word is {{Page aside|204}}etymologised <ref>“The word '''שיה''': shiach, is in Hebrew the same word as a verbal, signifying to go down into the pit. As a noun, it also means pit, place of thorns; also, the complaining word. The hifil participle of this word is ( * : /, or Meshiach, or the Greek Messias, or Christ, and means ‘he who causes to go down into the pit’” 47 (or hell, in dogmatism). In esoteric philosophy, this going down into the pit has the most mysterious significance. The Spirit “Christos,” or rather the “Logos” (read Logoi), is said to “go down into the pit,” when it incarnates in flesh, is born as a man. After having robbed the Elohim (or gods) of their secret, the pro-creating “fire of life,” the Angels of Light are shown cast down into the pit or abyss of matter, called Hell, or the bottomless pit, by the kind theologians. This, in Cosmogony and Anthropology. During the Mysteries, however, it is the Chrêstos, neophyte (as man), etc., who had to descend into the crypts of Initiation and trials; and finally, during the hours of which the new Initiate has the last and final mysteries of being divulged to hi. Hades, Scheol, or Patala, are all one. The same takes place in the East now, as took place 2,000 years ago in the West, during the MYSTERIES.</ref> by Fuerst, and the author of The Source of Measures, p. 255. Christos is the crown of glory of the suffering Chrêstos of the mysteries, as of the candidate to the final UNION, of whatever race and creed. To the true follower of the SPIRIT OF TRUTH, it matters little, therefore, whether Jesus, as man and Chrêstos, lived during the era called Christian, or before, or never lived at all. The Adepts, who lived and died for humanity, have existed in many and all the ages, and many were the good and holy men in antiquity who bore the surname or title of Chrêstos before Jesus of Nazareth, otherwise Jesus (or Jehoshua) Ben Pandira was born.<ref>Several classics bear testimony to this fact. Lucian (Iupp. Conf., 16) says ''Φωκίων ο χρηστός'', and ''Φωκίων ὁ ἐπικλην (λεγόμενος, surnamed)'' ''χρηστός''.48 In Phaedrus, 266 E, it is written, “you mean Theodorus the Chrêstos.” ''Τὸν χρηστὸν λέγεις Θεόδωρον''. Plutarch shows the same; and ''Χρηστος''––Chrêstos, is the proper name (see the word in Thesaur. Steph.)49 of an orator and disciple of Herodes Atticus.</ref> Therefore, one may be permitted to conclude, with good reason, {{Page aside|205}}that Jesus, or Jehoshua, was like Socrates, like Phocion, like Theodorus, and so many others surnamed Chrêstos, i.e., the “good, and excellent,” the gentle, and the holy Initiate, who showed the “way” to the Christos condition, and thus became himself “the Way” in the hearts of his enthusiastic admirers. The Christians, as all the “Hero-worshippers,” have tried to throw into the back-ground all the other Chrêstoi, who have appeared to them as rivals of their Man-God. But if the voice of the MYSTERIES has become silent for many ages in the West, if Eleusis, Memphis, Antium, Delphi, and Crêsa have long ago been made the tombs of a Science once as colossal in the West as it is yet in the East, there are successors now being prepared for them. We are in 1887 and the nineteenth century is close to its death. The twentieth century has strange developments in store for humanity, and may even be the last of its name

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<center>[Lucifer, Vol. I, No. 6, February, 1888, pp. 490-496]</center>

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No one can be regarded as a Christian unless he professes or is supposed to profess, belief in Jesus, by baptism, and in salvation, “through the blood of Christ.” To be considered a good Christian, one has, as a conditio sine qua non, to show faith in the dogmas expounded by the Church and to profess them; after which a man is at liberty to lead a private and public life on principles diametrically opposite to those expressed in the Sermon on the Mount. The chief point and that which is demanded of him is, that he should have––or pretend to have––a blind faith in, and veneration for, the ecclesiastical teachings of his special Church.

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“Faith is the key of Christendom,” {{Page aside|206}}saith Chaucer, and the penalty for lacking it is as clearly stated as words can make it, in St. Mark’s Gospel, Chapter xvi, verse 16th: “He that believeth and is baptised shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.”

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It troubles the Church very little that the most careful search for these words in the oldest texts during the last centuries, remained fruitless; or, that the recent revision of the Bible led to a unanimous conviction in the truth-seeking and truth-loving scholars employed in that task, that no such un-Christ-like sentence was to be found, except in some of the latest, fraudulent texts. The good Christian people has assimilated the consoling words, and they had become the very pith and marrow of their charitable souls. To take away the hope of eternal damnation, for all others except themselves, from these chosen vessels of the God of Israel, was like taking their very life. The truth-loving and God-fearing revisers got scared; they left the forged passage (an interpolation of eleven verses, from the 9th to the 20th), and satisfied their consciences with a foot-note remark of a very equivocal character, one that would grace the work and do honour to the diplomatic faculties of the craftiest Jesuits. It tells the “believer” that:––

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{{Style P-Quote|The two oldest Greek manuscripts, and some other authorities omit from ver. 9 to the end. Some other authorities have a different ending to the Gospel<ref>Vide “The Gospel according to St. Mark,” in the revised edition printed for the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, 1881.</ref>}}

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But the two “oldest Greek MSS.” omit the verses nolens volens, as these have never existed. And the learned and truth-loving revisers know this better than any of us do; yet the wicked falsehood is printed at the very seat of Protestant Divinity, and it is allowed to go on, glaring into the faces of coming generations of students of theology and, hence, intot hose of their future parishioners. Neither can be, nor are they deceived by it, yet both pretend belief in the authenticity of the cruel words worthy of a {{Page aside|207}}theological Satan. And this Satan-Moloch is their own God of infinite mercy and justice in Heaven, and the incarnate symbol of love and charity on Earth––blended in one!

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Truly mysterious are you paradoxical ways, oh––Churches of Christ!

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I have no intention of repeating here stale arguments and logical exposés of the whole theological scheme; for all this has been done, over and over again, and in a most excellent way, by the ablest “Infidels” of England and America. But I may briefly repeat a prophecy which is a self-evident result of the present state of men’s minds in Christendom. Belief in the Bible literally, and in a carnalised Christ, will not last a quarter of a century longer. The Churches will have to part with their cherished dogmas, or the 20th century will witness the downfall and ruin of all Christendom, and with it, belief even in a Christos, as pure Spirit. The very name has now become obnoxious, and theological Christianity must die out, never to resurrect again in its present form. This, in itself, would be the happiest solution of all, were there no danger from the natural reaction which is sure to follow: crass materialism will be the consequence and the result of centuries of blind faith, unless the loss of old ideals is replaced by other ideals, unassailable, because universal, and built on the rock of eternal truths instead of the shifting sands of human fancy. Pure immateriality must replace, in the end, the terrible anthropomorphism of those ideals in the conceptions of our modern dogmatists. Otherwise, why should Christian dogmas––the perfect counterpart of those belonging to other exoteric and pagan religions––claim any superiority? The bodies of all these were built upon the same astronomical and physiological (or phallic) symbols.

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Astrologically, every religious dogma the world over, may be traced to, and located in, the Zodiacal signs and the Sun. And so long as the science of comparative symbology or any theology has only two keys to open the mysteries of religious dogmas––and these two only very partially mastered, how can a line demarcation be drawn, or any difference made between the religious of say, Chrishna {{Page aside|208}}and Christ. between salvation through the blood of the “first-born primeval male” of one faith, and that of the “only begotten Son” of the other, far younger, religion?

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Study the Vedas: read even the superficial, often disfigured writings of our great Orientalists, and thing over what you will have learnt. Behold Brahmans, Egyptian Hierophants, and Chaldean Magi, teaching several thousand years before our era that the gods themselves had been only mortals (in previous births) until they won their immortality by offering their blood to their Supreme God or chief. The Book of the Dead teaches that mortal man “became one with the gods through an interflow of a common life in the common blood of the two.” Mortals gave the blood of their first-born sons in sacrifice to the Gods. In his Hinduism, p. 36, Professor Monier Williams, translating from the Taittiriya Brâhmana, writes:––”By means of the sacrifice the gods obtained heaven.” And in the Tandya Brâhmana:––”The lord of creatures (prajâ-pati) offered himself a sacrifice for the gods.” . . . And again in the Satapatha Brâhmana:––”He who, knowing this, sacrifices with the Purusha-medha, or the sacrifice of the primeval male, becomes everything.”

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Whenever I hear the Vedic rites discussed and called “disgusting human sacrifices,” and cannibalism (sic), I feel always inclined to ask, where’s the difference? Yet there is one, in fact; for while Christians are compelled to accept the allegorical (though, when understood, highly philosophical) drama of the New Testament Crucifixion, as that of Abraham and Isaac literally,<ref>Vide “The Soldier’s Daughter,” in this number, by the Rev. T. G. Headley, and notice the desperate protest of this true Christian, against the literal acceptance of the “blood sacrifices,” “Atonement by blood,” etc., in the Church of England. The reaction begins: another sign of the time.50</ref> Brahmanism––its philosophical schools at any rate––teaches its adherents, that his (pagan) sacrifice of the “primeval male” is a purely allegorical and philosophical symbol. Read in their dead-letter meaning, the four gospels are simply slightly altered versions of what the {{Page aside|209}}Church proclaims as Satanic plagiarism (by anticipation) of Christian dogmas in Pagan religions. Materialism has a perfect right to find in all of them the same sensual worship and “solar” myths as anywhere else. Analysed and criticised superficially and on its dead-letter face, Professor Joy (Man before Metals, pp. 189-190) finding in the Swastika, the crux ansata, and the cross pure and simples, mere sexual symbols––is justified in speaking as he does Seeing that

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{{Style P-Quote|The father of the sacred fire [in India] bore the name of Twashtri, that is the divine carpenter who mad the Swastika and the Pramanthâ, whose friction produced the divine child Agni (in Latin Ignis); that his mother was named Maya; he himself, styled Akta (anointed, ''χριστός'') after the priests had poured upon his head the spirituous soma and on his body butter purified by sacrifice. . . .seeing all this he has a full right to remark that:}}

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{{Style P-Quote|. . . . . the close resemblance which exists between certain ceremonies of the worship of Agni and certain rites of the Catholic religion may be explained by their common origin, at least up to a certain point. Agni in the condition of Akta (anointed) is suggestive of Christ; Maya, Mary, his mother; Twashtri, St. Joseph, the carpenter of the Bible.}}

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Has the professor of the Science Faculty of Toulouse explained anything by drawing attention to that which anyone can see? Of course not. But if, in his ignorance of the esoteric meaning of the allegory he has added nothing to human knowledge, he has on the other hand destroyed faith in many of his pupils in both the “divine origin” of Christianity and its Church and helped to increase the number of Materialists. For surely, no man, once he devotes himself to such comparative studies, can regard the religion of the West in any light but that of a pale and enfeebled copy of older and nobler philosophies.

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The origin of all religions––Judaeo-Christianity included––is to be found in a few primeval truths, not one of which can be explained apart from all the others, as each is a complement of the rest in some one detail. And they are all, more or less, broken rays of the same Sun of truth, and their beginnings have to be sought in the archaic records of the Wisdom-Religion. Without the {{Page aside|210}}light of the latter, the greatest scholars can see but the skeletons thereof covered with masks of fancy, and based mostly on personified Zodiacal signs.

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A thick film of allegory and blinds, the “dark sayings” of fiction and parable, thus covers the original esoteric texts from which the New Testament––as now known––was compiled. Whence, then, the Gospels, the life of Jesus of Nazareth? Has it not been repeatedly stated that no human, mortal brain could have invented the life of the Jewish Reformer, followed by the awful drama on Calvary? We say on the authority of the esoteric Eastern School, that all this came from the Gnostics, as far as the name Christos and the astronomico-mystical allegories are concerned, and from the writings of the ancient Tanaïm as regards the Kabalistic connection of Jesus or Joshua, with the Biblical personifications. One of these is the mystic esoteric name of Jehovah––not the present fanciful God of the profane Jews ignorant of their own mysteries, the God accepted by the still more ignorant Christians––but the compound Jehovah of the pagan Initiation. This is proven very plainly by the glyphs or mystic combinations of various signs which have survived to this day in the Roman Catholic hieroglyphics.

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The Gnostic Records contained the epitome of the chief scenes enacted during the mysteries of Initiation, since the memory of man; though even that was given out invariably under the garb of semi-allegory, whenever entrusted to parchment of paper. But the ancient Tanaïm, the Initiates from whom the wisdom of the Kabala (oral tradition) was obtained by the later Talmudists, had in their possession the secrets of the mystery-language, and it is in this language that the Gospels were written.<ref>Thus while the three Synoptics display a combination of the pagan Greek and Jewish symbologies, the Revelation is written in the mystery language of the Tanaïm––the relic of Egyptian and Chaldean wisdom––and St. John’s Gospels is purely Gnostic.</ref> He alone who has mastered the esoteric cypher of antiquity––the secret meaning of the numerals, a common property at one time of all nations––has the full proof of the genius {{Page aside|211}}which was displayed in the blending of the purely Egypto-Jewish, Old Testament allegories and names, and those of the pagan-Greek Gnostics, the most refined of all the mystics of that day. Bishop Newton proves it himself quite innocently, by showing that “St. Barnabas, the companion of St. Paul, in his epistle (ch. ix) discovers . . . . the names of Jesus crucified in the number 318,” namely, Barnabas finds it in the mystic Greek I H T––the tau being the glyph of the cross. On this, a Kabalist, the author of an unpublished MS. on the Key of Formation of the Mystery Language, observes:51

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{{Style P-Quote|But this is but a play upon the Hebrew letters Jod, Cheth, and Shin, from whence the I H S as the monogram of Christ coming down to our day, and this read as: '''יהש''' or 381, the sum of the letter being 318 or the number of Abraham and his Satan, and of Joshua and his Amalek. True it is also the number of Jacob and his antagonist as could be shown. Godfrey Higgins gives the authority for the number 608. It is the number of Melchizedek’s name, for the value of the last in 304 and Melchizedek was the priest of the Most High God, without beginning nor ending of days.}}

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The solution and secret of Melchizedek are found in the fact that.

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{{Style P-Quote|It has been said in the ancient Pantheons the two planets which had existed from eternity [aeonic eternity], and were eternal, were the sun and the moon, or Osiris and Isis, hence this term of without beginning nor ending of days. 304 multiplied by two is 608. So also the numbers are in the word Seth, who was a type of the year. There are a number of authorities for the number 888 as applying to the name of Jesus Christ, and as said this is in antagonism to the 666 of the Anti-Christ. . . . . The stable value in the name of Joshua was the number 365, the indication of the solar year, while Jehovah delighted in being the indication of the lunar year––and Jesus Christ was both Joshua and Jehovah in the Christian Pantheon. . . .}}

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This is but an illustration to our point to prove that the Christian application of the compound name Jesus-Christ is all based on Gnostic and Eastern mysticism. It was only right and natural that Chroniclers like the initiated Gnostics, pledged to secrecy, should viel or cloak the final meaning of their oldest and most sacred teachings. The right of the Church fathers to cover the whole with an epitheme of euhemerized fancy is rather {{Page aside|212}}more dubious.<ref>“The Claim of Christianity to possess Divine Authority rests on the ignorant Belief that the Mystical Christ could and did become a person, whereas the Gnosis proves the Corporeal Christ to be only a counterfeit Presentment of the Trans-Corporeal Man; consequently, Historical portraiture is, and ever must be, a fatal mode of falsifying and discrediting the Spiritual Reality.” (G. Massey, “Gnostic and History Christianity.”)</ref> The Gnostic Scribe and Chronicler deceived no one. Every Initiate into the Archaic gnosis––whether of the pre-Christian or post-Christian period––knew well the value of every word of the “mystery-language.” For these Gnostics––the inspirers of primitive Christianity––were “the most polite, the most learned and most wealthy of the Christian name,” as Gibbon has it.52 Neither they, nor their humbler followers, were in danger of accepting the dead letter of their own texts. But it was different with the victims of the fabricators of what is now called orthodox and historic Christianity. Their successors have all been made to fall into the mistakes of the “foolish Galatians” reproved by Paul, who, as he tells them (Gal., iii, 1-5), having begun (by believing) in the Spirit (of Christos), “ended by believing in the flesh,”––i.e., a corporeal Christ. For such is the true meaning of the Greek sentence, “ἐναρξάμενοι πνεύματι νῦν σαρκὶ.”<ref>This sentence analyzed means “Shall you, who in the beginning looked to the Christ-Spirit, now end by believing in a Christ of flesh,” or it means nothing. The verb ''ἐπιτελουμαι'' has not the meaning of “becoming perfect,” but of “ending by,” becoming so. Paul’s lifelong struggle with Peter and others, and what he himself tells of his vision of a spiritual Christ and not of Jesus of Nazareth, as in the Acts––are so many proofs of this.</ref>53 That Paul was a gnostic, a founder of a new sect of gnosis which recognized, as all other gnostic sects did, a “Christ-Spirit,” though it went against its opponents, the rival sects, is sufficiently clear to all but dogmatists and theologians. Nor is it less clear that the primitive teachings of Jesus, whenever he may have lived, could be discovered only in Gnostic teachings; against which discovery, the falsifiers who dragged down Spirit into matter, thus degrading the noble philosophy {{Page aside|213}}of primeval Wisdom-Religion, have taken ample precautions from the first. The works of Basilides alone––”the philosopher devoted to the contemplation of Divine things,” as Clement describes him––the 24 volumes of his Interpretations upon the Gospels––were all burned by order of the Church, Eusebius tells us (Hist. Eccles., Book IV, chap. 7). 54

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As these Interpretations were written at a time when the Gospels we have now, were not yet in existence,<ref>See Supernatural Religion, Vol. II, chap. “Basilides.”55</ref> here is a good proof that the Evangel, the doctrines of which were delivered to Basilides by the Apostle Matthew, and Glaucias, the disciple of Peter (Clemens Alexandrinus, Strom., VII, ch. xvii), 56 must have differed widely from the present New Testament. Nor can these doctrines be judged by the distorted accounts of them left to posterity by Tertullian. Yet even the little this partisan fanatic gives, shows the chief gnostic doctrines to be identical, under their own peculiar terminology and personations, with those of the Secret Doctrine of the East. For,

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{{Style P-Quote|. . . . . Discussing Basilides, the “pious, god-like, theosophic philosopher,” as Clement of Alexandria thought him, Tertullian exclaims: “After this, Basilides, the heretic, broke loose.<ref>It was asked in Isis Unveiled “were not the views of the Phrygian Bishop Montanus, also deemed a HERESY by the Church of Rome? It is quite extraordinary to see how easily that Church encourages the abuse of one heretic, Tertullian, against another heretic, Basilides, when the abuse happens to further her own object.” [IsisUnveiled, II, 189, fnote.]</ref> He asserted that there is a Supreme God, by name Abraxas, by whom Mind [Mahat] was created whom the Greeks called Nous. From her emanated the Word; from the Word, Providence; from Providence, Virtue and Wisdom; from these two again, Virtues, Principalities,<ref>“Does not Paul himself speak of ‘Principalities and Powers in heavenly places’ (Ephesians, iii, 10; i, 21), and confess that there be gods many and Lords many (Kurioi)? And angels, powers (Dunameis), and Principalities? (See I Corinthians, viii, 5; and Epistle to Romans,viii, 38)” [Isis Unveiled, II, 189, fnote.]</ref> and Powers were made; thence infinite productions and emissions of angels. Among the lowest angels, indeed, and those that made this world, {{Page aside|214}}he sets last of all the god of the Jews, whom he denies to be God himself, affirming that he is but one of the angels.” <ref>Tertullian, Liber de praescriptione haereticorum.57 It is undeniably owing only to a remarkably casuistical, sleight-of-hand-like argument that Jehovah, who in the Kabala is simply a Sephiroth, the third, left-hand power among the Emanations (Binah), has been elevated to the dignity of the One absolute God. Even in the Bible he is but one of the Elohim (See Genesis, iii, 22, “The Lord God” making no difference between himself and others).</ref> (Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, p. 189.)}}

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Another proof of the claim that the Gospel of Matthew in the usual Greek texts is not the original gospel written in Hebrew, is given by no less an authority than St. Jerome (or Hieronymus). The suspicion of a conscious and gradual euhemerization of the Christ principle ever since the beginning, grows into a conviction, once that one becomes acquainted with a certain confession contained in Book II of the Comment. to Matthew by Hieronymus. For we find in it the proofs of a deliberate substitution of the whole gospel, the one now in the Canon having been evidently re-written by this too zealous Church Father.<ref>This is history. How far that re-writing of, and tampering with, the primitive gnostic fragments which are now become the New Testament, went, may be inferred by reading Supernatural Religion which went through over twenty-three editions, if I mistake not. The host of authorities for it given by the author, is simply appalling. The list of the English and German Bible critics alone seems endless.58</ref> He says that he was sent toward the close of the fourth century by “their Felicities,” the Bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus to Caesarea, with the mission to compare the Greek text (the only one they ever had) with the Hebrew original version preserved by the Nazarenes in their library, and to translate it. He translated it, but under protest; for, as he says, the Evangel “exhibited matter not for edification, but for destruction.” <ref>The chief details are given in Isis Unveiled, Vol. II, pp. 180-83. Truly faith in the infallibility of the Church must be stone-blind—or it could not have failed being killed and—dying.</ref> The “destruction” of what? Of the dogma {{Page aside|215}}that Jesus of Nazareth and the Christos are one—evidently; hence for the “destruction” of the newly planned religion.<ref>See Hieronymus, De viris inlustribus liber, cap. 3; H. Olshausen, Nachweis der Echtheit der sämmtlichen Schriften des Neuen Testaments, p. 35.59 The Greek text of Matthew’s Gospel is the only one used or ever possessed by the Church.</ref> In this same letter the Saint (who advised his converts to kill their fathers, trample on the bosom that fed them, by walking over the bodies of their mothers, if the parents stood as an obstacle between their sons and Christ)—admits that Matthew did not wish his gospel to be openly written, hence that the MS. was a secret one. But while admitting also that this gospel “was written in Hebrew characters and by the hand of himself” (Matthew), yet in another place he contradicts himself and assures posterity that as it was tampered with, and re-written by a disciple of Manichaeus, named Seleucus.. “the ears of the Church properly refused to listen to it.”60

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No wonder that the very meaning of the terms Chrêstos and Christos, and the bearing of both on “Jesus of Nazareth,” a name coined out of Joshua the Nazar, has now become a dead letter for all with the exception of non-Christian Occultists. For even the Kabalists have no original data now to rely upon. The Zohar and the Kabala have been remodelled by Christian hands out of recognition; and were it not for a copy of the Chaldean Book of Numbers there would remain no better than garbled accounts. Let not our Brothers, the so-called Christian Kabbalists of England and France, many of whom are Theosophists, protest too vehemently; for this is history (See Munk). It is as foolish to maintain, as some German Orientalists and modern critics still do, that the Kabala has never existed before the day of the Spanish Jew, Moses de León, accused of having forged this pseudograph in the 13th century, as to claim that any of the Kabalistical works now in our possession are as original as they were when Rabbi Shimon Ben Yochai delivered the “tradition” to his son and followers. Not a single [one] {{Page aside|216}}of these books is immaculate, none has escaped mutilation by Christian hands. Munk, one of the most learned and able critics of his day on this subject, proves it, while protesting as we do, against the assumption that it is a post-Christian forgery, for he says:

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{{Style P-Quote|It appears evident to us . . . . that the compiler made use of ancient documents, and among these of certain Midraschîm or collections of traditions and Biblical expositions, which we do not now possess.61}}

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After which, quoting from Tholuck (l.c., PP. 24 and 31 ),62 he adds:

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{{Style P-Quote|Hây Gaôn, who died in 1038, is to our knowledge the first author who developed the theory of the sephiroth, and he gave to them the names which we find again to be among the Kabalists (cf. Jellinek, Moses ben Schem-tob de Leon, etc., p. 13, note 5); 63 this doctor, who had frequent intercourse with the Syrian and Chaldean Christian savants, was enabled by these last to acquire a knowledge of some of the Gnostic writings.}}

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Which “Gnostic writings” and esoteric tenets passed part and parcel into the Kabalistic works, with many more modern interpolations that we now find in the Zohar, as Munk well proves. That Kabala is Christian now, not Jewish.

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Thus, what with several generations of most active Church Fathers ever working at the destruction of old documents and the preparation of new passages to be interpolated in those which happened to survive, there remains of the Gnostics—the legitimate offspring of the Archaic Wisdom-religion—but a few unrecognisable shreds. But a particle of genuine gold will glitter for ever; and, however garbled the accounts left by Tertullian and Epiphanius of the Doctrines of the “Heretics,” an occultist can yet find even in them traces of those primeval truths which were once universally imparted during the mysteries of Initiation. Among other works with most suggestive allegories in them, we have still the so-called Apocryphal Gospels, and the last discovered as the most precious relic of Gnostic literature, a fragment called Pistis-Sophia, “Knowledge-Wisdom.”64

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In my next article upon the Esoteric character of the Gospels, I hope to be able to demonstrate that those who {{Page aside|217}}translate Pistis by “Faith,” are utterly wrong. The word “faith” as grace or something to be believed in through unreasoned or blind faith, is a word that dates only since Christianity. Nor has Paul ever used this term in this sense in his Epistles; and Paul was undeniably —an INITIATE.

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<center>(''To be continued'') <ref>{{HPB-CW-comment|[As far as could be ascertained, this essay was never completed.—Compiler.]}}</ref></center>

Sergey

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