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(p. 142)
CHAPTER V
THE RECAPITULATION
THE first compendious
statement of the doctrine which it was intended to restore, was given to us at
Paris in the summer of
We had been following our respective tasks (1) for several months without any
open or special illumination, and I had written enough to make a considerable
volume in exposition of the principles which appeared to me to be those on
which, in order to be a book of the soul, the Bible ought to be constructed, and
by which, therefore, it must be interpreted. It was not intended for
publication, but as an exercise for myself, being purely tentative; though I was
conscious of being aided by the occasional suggestion of ideas which served as
points of light and guidance. Meanwhile, I was entirely without help from books;
for, besides being desirous of evolving the whole from my own consciousness, as
in the case of the demonstration of any mathematical problem, I was not aware of
any books which would help me; the little I knew of Swedenborg at this time –
who was the only writer known to me as a worker in a
(p.
143)
similar direction – having failed to make much impression on me. I could
accept his general principles, but not his particular applications of them. I
felt also that the sources of the knowledges vouchsafed to us, far transcended
those to which Swedenborg had access. And I accounted for the length of the
interval which had elapsed without any larger measure of light being vouchsafed,
by supposing that it was intended for me to exhaust my own resources first.
The time had come when these were exhausted, and I was reduced to the conviction
that if the work was to be carried any further, assistance must be rendered,
whether for confirmation, for correction, or for extension. And on retiring to
rest one night, (1) painfully oppressed by the sense of my own lack, and the
prolonged absence of the needed light, I stood at the open window, and in the
presence of a sky resplendent with the stars mentally addressed to those whom we
were wont to speak of as the Gods, and of whose presence I seemed to be dimly
conscious, a strong expression of my need, declaring my utter inability to
advance another step unassisted. Having done which I went to bed, but in a mood
the reverse of sanguine; so many were the months for which they had been silent.
In the course of the following day, “Mary” – who knew nothing either of my need
or of my adjuration of the preceding night, and could not of herself have helped
me – found herself under an access of exaltation of faculty which she described
as resembling what might be produced by a
(p.
144)
draught of spiritual champagne. For she felt herself at her very best,
having all her knowledge at her finger-ends. The expression recurred to my mind
some time afterwards on our receiving an explanation of the “New Wine of
Dionysos” in the ancient mysteries. In this state she went down to the schools,
where an examination in her subjects was being held in order to see how the
candidates comported themselves, and to compare them with herself; for it was an
oral examination. From this she returned home in high delight, declaring that
she could have answered every question asked, and far better than any of the
students had done. I hoped that her state might be an indication of the renewal
of her illuminations. But the events of the evening put all thoughts in this
direction entirely out of my mind. For, as if poisoned by the atmosphere of the
schools, she was seized with an attack of sickness so intense and prolonged as
seriously to endanger her life through the exhaustion induced. And it was a late
hour – past midnight – before she could be left alone.
Nevertheless she was up betimes in the morning, and on our meeting handed me a
paper which she had written in pencil on waking, saying it was something she had
read in her sleep, and asking if it was anything that I wanted, as she had
written it down so rapidly that she scarcely observed what it was about, and she
had not had time to read it over and think about it. Having read it, I found
that it met my every difficulty, and shed on the Bible a light which rendered it
luminous from beginning to end, disclosing it as pervaded by a system of thought
which, when once seen, was as obvious as it had previously been unsuspected.
(p.
145)
And while it confirmed me in respect of principles and method, it
corrected both of us in respect of sundry particulars. It even referred directly
to one of my tentative hypotheses, at once negativing it and giving another
altogether satisfactory. This was my supposition of Adam and Eve as possibly
denoting spirit and matter. The following is the writing: –
“If, therefore, they be Mystic Books, they ought also to have a mystic
consideration. But the fault of most writers lieth in this, – that they
distinguish not between the books of Moses the prophet, and those books which
are of an historical nature. And this is the more surprising because not a few
of such critics have rightly discerned the esoteric character, if not indeed the
true interpretation, of the story of Eden; yet have they not applied to the
remainder of the allegory the same method which they found to fit the beginning;
but soon as they are over the earlier stanzas of the poem, they would have the
rest of it to be of another nature.
“It is, then, pretty well established and accepted of most authors, that the
legend of Adam and Eve, and of the miraculous tree and the fruit which was the
occasion of death, is, like the story of Eros and Psyche, and so many others of
all religions, a parable with a hidden, that is, with a mystic meaning. But so
also the legend which follows concerning the sons of these mystical parents, the
story of Cain and Abel his brother, the story of the Flood, of the Ark, of the
saving of the clean and unclean beasts, of the rainbow, of the twelve sons of
Jacob, and, not stopping there, of the whole relation concerning the flight out
of Egypt. For it is not to be supposed that the two sacrifices offered to God by
the sons of Adam, were real sacrifices, any more than it is to be supposed that
the apple which caused the doom of mankind, was a real apple. It ought to be
known, indeed, for the right understanding of the mystical books, that in their
esoteric
(p.
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sense they deal not with material things, but
with spiritual realities; and that as Adam is not a man, nor Eve a woman, nor
the tree a plant in its true signification, so also are not the beasts named in
the same books real beasts, but that the mystic intention of them is implied.
When, therefore, it is written that Abel took of the firstlings of his flock to
offer unto the Lord, it is signified that he offered that which a lamb implies,
and which is the holiest and highest of spiritual gifts. Nor is Abel himself a
real person, but the type and spiritual presentation of the race of the
prophets; of whom, also, Moses was a member, together with the Patriarchs. Were
the prophets, then, shedders of blood? God forbid; they dwelt not with things
material, but with spiritual significations. Their lambs without spot, their
white doves, their goats, their rams, and other sacred creatures, are so many
signs and symbols of the various graces and gifts which a mystic people should
offer to Heaven. Without such sacrifices is no remission of sin. But when the
mystic sense was lost, then the carnage followed, the prophets ceased out the
land, and the priests bore rule over the people. Then, when again the voice of
the prophets arose, they were constrained to speak plainly, and declared in a
tongue foreign to their method, that the sacrifices of God are not the flesh of
bulls or the blood of goats, but holy vows and sacred thanksgiving, their
mystical counterparts. As God is a spirit, so also are His sacrifices spiritual.
What folly, what ignorance, to offer material flesh and drink to pure power and
essential being! Surely in vain have the prophets spoken, and in vain have the
Christs been manifested!
“Why will you have Adam to be spirit, and Eve matter, since the mystic books
deal only with spiritual entities? The tempter himself even is not matter, but
that which gives matter the precedence. Adam is, rather, intellectual force: he
is of earth. Eve is the moral conscience: she is the mother of the living.
Intellect, then, is the male, and Intuition the female principle. And the sons
of Intuition,
(p.
147)
herself fallen, shall at last recover the Truth,
and redeem all things. By her fault, indeed, is the moral conscience of humanity
made subject to the intellectual force, and thereby all manner of evil and
confusion abounds, since her desire is unto him, and he rules over her until
now. But the end foretold by the seer is not far off. Then shall the Woman be
exalted, clothed with the Sun, and carried to the throne of God. And her sons
shall make war with the dragon, and have victory over him. Intuition, therefore,
pure and a virgin, shall be the mother and redemptress of her fallen sons, whom
she bore under bondage to her husband the intellectual force.” (1)
This marvellously luminous exposition, she then told me, had been read by her in
a book she had found in a library which she had visited in sleep, the owner of
which was a courtly old gentleman in the costume of the last century. The leaves
of the book were of silver and reflected her back to herself as she read. I took
this as symbolising the Intuition. The event proved that her host was no other
than Swedenborg, and that – as her Genius informed us – she had been enabled,
“under the magnetism of Swedenborg’s presence, to recover a memory of no small
value,” thus confirming my surmise about its intuitional character. The event
proved also that it was Swedenborg’s doctrine, but without his limitations. We
ardently desired a continuation of it, and on the next night but one, she
received the following addition to it: –
“Moses, therefore, knowing the mysteries of the religion of the Egyptians, and
having learned of their occultists the value and signification of all sacred
birds and beasts, delivered like mysteries to his own people. But certain of the
sacred animals of
(p.
148)
And he taught his initiated the spirit of the
heavenly hieroglyphs, and bade them, when they made festival before God, to
carry with them in procession, with music and with dancing, such of the sacred
animals as were, by their interior significance, related to the occasion. Now,
of these beasts he chiefly selected males of the first year, without spot or
blemish, to signify that it is beyond all things needful that man should
dedicate to the Lord his intellect and his reason, and this from the beginning,
and without the least reserve. And that he was very wise in teaching this, is
evident from the history of the world in all ages, and particularly in these
last days. For what is it that has led men to renounce the realities of the
spirit, and to propagate false theories and corrupt sciences, denying all things
save the appearance which can be apprehended by the outer senses, and making
themselves one with the dust of the ground? It is their intellect which, being
unsanctified, has led them astray; it is the force of the mind in them, which,
being corrupt, is the cause of their own ruin, and of that of their disciples.
As, then, the intellect is apt to be the great traitor against heaven, so also
it is the force by which men, following their pure intuition, may also grasp and
apprehend the truth. For which reason it is written that the Christs are subject
to their mothers. Not that by any means the intellect is to be dishonoured; for
it is the heir of all things, if only it be truly begotten and be no bastard.
“And besides all these symbols, Moses taught the people to have beyond all
things an abhorrence of idolatry. What, then, is idolatry, and what are false
gods?
“To make an idol is to materialise spiritual mysteries. The priests, then, were
idolaters, who coming after Moses, and committing to writing those things which
he by word of mouth had delivered unto Israel, replaced the true things
signified, by their material symbols, and shed innocent blood on the pure altars
of the Lord.
“They also are idolaters who understand the things of sense where the things of
the spirit are alone implied, and
(p.
149)
who conceal the true features of the Gods with
material and spurious presentations. Idolatry is materialism, the common and
original sin of men. Which replaces spirit by appearance, substance by illusion,
and leads both the moral and intellectual being into error, so that they
substitute the nether for the upper, and the depth for the height. It is that
false fruit which attracts the outer senses, the bait of the serpent in the
beginning of the world. Until the mystic man and woman had eaten of this fruit,
they knew only the things of the spirit and found them suffice. But after their
fall, they began to apprehend matter also, and gave it the preference, making
themselves idolaters. And their sin, and the taint begotten of that false fruit,
have corrupted the blood of the whole race of men, from which corruption the
sons of God would have redeemed them.”
She had received this, also in sleep, as one of a class of neophytes seated in
an ancient amphitheatre of white stone, and listening to a lecture delivered by
a man in priestly garb, of which they took notes the while. She complained that
her notes had disappeared on waking, thus preventing her from rendering what she
had heard as perfectly as she could have wished; for she had trusted to her
notes for it.
The more we pondered these communications, the higher was our appreciation of
them. We felt that the “veil of Moses” was at length “taken away” as promised,
and we had been enabled to tap a reservoir of boundless wisdom and knowledge.
For we found in them the longed-for solution of the purpose and nature of the
Bible and Christianity, and the key to man’s spiritual history. The method of
the Bible-writers, the meaning of idolatry, the secret of the Cain and Abel feud
between priest and prophet, as the ministers respectively of the sense-nature
and of the intuition,
(p.
150)
and the process whereby the religion of Jesus had become distorted into
the orthodoxy which has usurped his name; – all these things were now clear to
us as the demonstration of a proposition in geometry, the witness of which was
in our own minds. And we, too, we rejoiced to think, were of the school of the
prophets, in that with all the force of our minds we had “exalted the Woman,”
Intuition, and refused to make the word of God of none effect by priestly
traditions.
Not the least marvelous element in the case was the faculty whereby the seeress
had been able to reproduce, after waking, with such evident faithfulness the
things seen and heard at so great length in sleep. In reply to my questionings
she said that the words seemed to show themselves to her again as she wrote.
Discoursing with her Genius on this subject of memory, she received the
following, which is valuable also for its recognition of the mystical import of
the Bible narratives, and confirmation of
“Concerning memory; why should there any more be a difficulty in respect of it?
Reflect on this saying, – ‘Man sees as he knows.’ To thee the deeps are more
visible than the surfaces of things; but to men generally the surfaces only are
visible. The material can perceive only the material, the astral the astral, and
the spiritual the spiritual. It all resolves itself, therefore, into a question
of condition and of quality. Thy hold on matter is but slight, and thine organic
memory is feeble and treacherous. It is hard for thee to perceive the surfaces
of things and to remember their aspect.
(p.
151)
But thy spiritual perception is the stronger for
this weakness, and the profound is that which thou seest the most readily. It is
hard for thee to understand and to retain the memory of material facts: but
their meaning thou knowest instantly and by intuition, which is the memory of
the soul. For the soul takes no pains to remember; she knows divinely. Is it not
said that the immaculate woman brings forth without a pang? The sorrow and
travail of conception belong to her whose desire is unto ‘Adam’.”
The following sentences sum up the conclusions to which, by degrees, we were
led. The first two paragraphs are from an exposition concerning the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception which we considered as one of the most sublime and
momentous of all her illuminations. (1)
“All that is true is spiritual. No dogma is real that is not spiritual. If it be
true, and yet seem to you to have a material signification, know that you have
not solved it. It is a mystery. Seek its interpretation. That which is true is
for Spirit alone.
“For matter shall cease and all that is of it, but the Word of the Lord shall
endure for ever. And how shall it remain except it be purely spiritual, since
when matter ceases, it would then be no longer comprehensible?
“For, though matter is eternally the mode whereby spirit manifests itself,
matter is not itself eternal.”
“The church has all the truth, but the priests have materialised it, making
religion idolatry, and themselves and their people idolaters.”
“In their real and divinely intended sense, its doctrines are eternal verities,
founded in the nature of Being. As ecclesiastically propounded, they are
blasphemous absurdities.”
(p.
152)
“The Bible was written by intuitionalists, for intuitionalists, and from the
intuitionalist standpoint. It has been interpreted by externalists, for
externalists, and from the externalist standpoint. The most occult and mystical
of books, it has been expounded by persons without occult knowledge or mystical
insight.”
Thus gradually but surely we learnt that Ecclesiastical education has rigidly
excluded from its curriculum all those branches of study which could throw light
on the real nature of existence, and consists in learning what other men have
said who, themselves, did not know, but were mere hearsay scholars lacking the
witness in themselves.
We marvelled much as to how the priesthoods will comport themselves when
compelled to recognise the fact that a New Gospel of Interpretation has actually
been vouchsafed from the world celestial in correction of their perversion and
mutilation of the former Gospel of Manifestation, and suppression of the true
doctrine of salvation. Will Cain and Caiaphas still have the dominion, and
ecclesiasticism be as ready to crucify the Christ on his second coming as it was
on his first? And if not, how will it find courage to face the world with the
humiliating confession that all through the long ages of its history, while
arrogantly claiming to be the faithful and infallible minister of the Gospel of
Christ, it has persistently withheld that gospel, and, losing the key to its
meaning, has substituted for the wholesome “bread” of divine truth, the “stones”
of innutritious
(p.
153)
because unintelligible dogmas; and for the “fish” of the living waters,
the “serpents” of the letter which kills? And that when men have rightly
suspected that Christianity has failed, not because it is false, but because it
has been falsified, and have sought to their own inner light for the truth of
which ecclesiasticism had defrauded them, it dealt out to them pitiless anathema
and persecution, making the earth a scene of torture and slaughter in assertion
of the right of the priesthoods to teach a wrong?
That the work committed to us implied nothing less than the fulfilment of the
prophecies of which the promise of the Second Coming of Christ was the
culmination, while intimated to us from the outset was gradually unfolded into
full assurance, and we were enabled to see that the very terms in which it was
couched implied a spiritual advent, and one which should disclose the perfect
system at once of science, philosophy, morality, and religion, of which Christ
is both the foundation and the consummation. For the “clouds of heaven” in which
it was to take place, were no other than the heaven of the kingdom within man of
his restored spiritual consciousness. “That wicked one”, “the son of perdition”,
and “mystery of iniquity” then to be revealed and destroyed, was no other than
the inspiring evil spirit of an ecclesiasticism which had received indeed its
doctrines from above, but their interpretation and application from below.
(p.
154)
And the “Spirit of His mouth”, and the “Brightness of His Coming” were no
other than a new Word of God, in the form of a New Gospel of Interpretation, so
potent in its logic and so luminous in its exposition as to indicate the Logos
Himself as its source, and the “Woman” Intuition, “clothed with the Sun” of full
illumination, as its revealer.
We saw, too, that with this “Woman” thus rehabilitated, God’s “Two Witnesses,” –
who have so long lain dead in the streets of “that great city” wherein the Lord,
the divinity in man, is ever systematically crucified; the city of the world’s
system as fashioned and controlled by an ecclesiasticism shrouded in the
three-fold veil of Blood, Idolatry, and the Curse of Eve, – will rise and stand
on their feet, and ascend to the heaven of their proper supremacy, vice Lucifer deposed and
fallen.
And in them Lucifer himself will regain his lost state, vindicating his
title to be called the Light-bearer, the bright and morning star, the herald and
bringer-in of the perfect day of the Lord God. For, as the Intellect, he is the
heir of all things, if only he be begotten of the Spirit, and be no bastard
engendered of the Sense-Nature.
For – as we had come to learn – God’s Two Witnesses in man are ever the
Intellect and the Intuition, when duly unfolded and united in a pure spirit.
Under such conditions the
(p.
155)
the holy city of his own regenerate nature. But divorced from her, the
Intuition, and – leagued with the Sense-Nature – knowing matter only and the
body, the Intellect becomes “prince of devils” in man, the maker of men into
fiends, and of the earth into a hell. Wherefore his fall from the heaven of his
power, on the advent of that whole Humanity, of whom it is said, “the Man is not
without the Woman, nor the Woman without the Man, in the Lord”, the humanity of
intellect and intuition combined, has ever been exultingly hailed in
anticipation by all true seers and prophets.
The chief points of the doctrine, the prospect of the restoration of which has
thus been the sustaining hope of the percipient faithful in all ages, may be
summarised as follows: –
The doctrine which, first and foremost, it is the purpose of the Bible to
affirm, and of the Christ to demonstrate, and in which reason entirely concurs,
is no other than that of the divine potentialities of man, belonging to him in
virtue of the nature of his constituent principles, the force and the substance
of existence. These are the duality of the “heavens” which God is said to
“create”, meaning to put forth from Himself “in the beginning,” and of the
mutual interaction of which all things are the product, varying according to the
plane of operation, alike for creation and redemption, generation and
regeneration.
(p.
156)
And that which Jesus really affirmed in the memorable but little
understood words, “ye must be born again, or from above, of Water and the Spirit,” was
both the possibility and the necessity to all men of realising the potential
divinity belonging to them in virtue of the divinity of their constituent
principles. And in affirming this he affirmed both the necessity and the
possibility to every man of being born exactly as he himself, as typical man
regenerate is said to have been born, of Virgin Mary and Holy Ghost, and also
his own identity in kind with all other men. And he affirmed, moreover, the
utter falsity of that priest-constructed system, which, ignoring Regeneration,
insists on Substitution, as the means of salvation. For “Virgin Mary”, and “Holy
Ghost”, are but the mystical synonyms with “Water and the Spirit”, for the
substance and force, or soul and spirit, of which, man is constituted, in their
divine because pure condition, the product of which in man is the new regenerate
selfhood called, as by St. Paul, the “Christ within”. Begotten in man as matrix,
of the pure spirit and substance which are God, this new selfhood is son at once
of God and of man; and in him God and man are “reconciled” or “at-oned”. And
that man is said to be saved by his blood, is because the “blood of God” is pure
spirit, and it is the pure spirit in the man that saves him; and that he is
called the only-begotten
(p.
157)
Son of God, is not because God begets no other of his kind, but because
God, as God, begets directly none of any other kind.
This, then, as we came to learn, and to recognise as having learned it in our
own long-past lives, is the doctrine which Jesus came to teach and to
demonstrate in his own person. Matter is spirit, being spiritual substance,
projected by force of the divine Will into conditions and limitations, and made
exteriorly cognisable. And being spirit it can revert to the condition of
spirit. In virtue of the divinity of his constituent principles, man has within
himself the seed of his own regeneration, and the power to effectuate it. He has
in him, this is to say, the potentiality of divinity realisable at will. And the
secret and method of the achievement – which is no other than the secret and
method of Christ – is inward purification and unfoldment, the unfoldment of the
capacities, mental, moral, and spiritual, of his nature, of which inward
purification is the first and essential condition. Thus is the Finding of Christ
the realisation of the Ideal, and Christ is for every man the summit of his own
evolution.
Stated in terms of modern science, but correcting its
aberrations, the doctrine of Christ is in this wise. Evolution is the
manifestation of inherency. Owing to the divinity of the constituent principles
of existence, its Force and its Substance, both of which are God, the inherency
of existence is divine. Wherefore, as the manifestation of a divine inherency,
evolution is accomplished only by the attainment of divinity; and the cause of
evolution is the tendency of substance to revert from its secondary and
“created” condition of
(p.
158)
matter, to its original and divine condition of pure spirit. Wherefore
evolution is definable as the process of the individuation of Deity in and
through Humanity.
Such is the genesis of the Christ in man. And he is
called a Christ who, having accomplished this process in himself,
returns into earth-life when he has no need to do so for his own sake, out of
pure love to redeem, by showing to others their own equal divine potentialities
and the method of the realisation thereof.
This method consists in love, love of perfection, which
is God, for its own sake, and love for others. The process is entirely interior
to the individual. It consists in the sacrifice of the lower nature to the
higher in himself, and of himself for others in love. That which directly saves
the man is not the love of another for the man, but the love which he has in
himself. All that can be done by another is to kindle this love in him.
The philosophy of this doctrine of salvation by love
was formulated for us as follows: – “It is love which is the centripetal power
of the universe; it is by love that all creation returns into the bosom of God.
The force which projected all things is will, and will is the centrifugal power
of the universe. Will alone could not overcome the evil which results from the
limitations of matter; but it shall be overcome in the end by sympathy, which is
the knowledge of God in others, – the recognition of the omnipresent Self. This
is love.
(p.
159)
And it is with the children of the spirit, the servants of love, that the
dragon of matter makes war.” (1)
In making the means of salvation extraneous to the
individual, Sacerdotalism has defrauded man of his Saviour, making the first and
personal coming of Christ of none effect. Hence the necessity for the second and
spiritual coming represented by the New Gospel of Interpretation as was
foretold: – the coming which was to be in the clouds of the heaven of man’s
restored understanding; the Hermes within.
But the process of regeneration is a prolonged one,
extending over many earth-lives; and so also is the prior process of evolution,
whereby man reaches the stage at which he is amenable to regeneration. Wherefore
regeneration has for its corollary reincarnation. To tell man that he “must be
born again” spiritually, and deny him the requisite opportunities of experience,
which must be acquired in the body – seeing that regeneration is from out of the body – would be to
mock him.
This doctrine of a multiplicity of earth-lives is
implicit and sometimes explicit in the Bible. The notion that the Hebrews had no
belief in a future state because of the failure of commentators to discover it
in their Scriptures, is altogether futile. The permanence of the Ego was a
matter of course with them, saving only the Sadducees. And the Bible
contemplates the persistence of the individual soul through all the manifold
stages of its
(p.
160)
evolution, from the “Adam” stage to the “Christ” stage, saying, as by
Nevertheless the dogmas of the Church contain the
truth, but this is not as the Church has
(p.
161)
propounded them. And – to cite two crucial instances – so far from the
Church’s supreme dogmas, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of the
Blessed Virgin, having any personal or physical reference, they are prophecies
of the method of redemption for every individual soul. For, as the New Gospel of
Interpretation explicitly declares, restoring the Gnosis persistently rejected
by the builders of the orthodoxies: –
“The Immaculate Conception
is no other than the prophecy of the means whereby the universe shall be
redeemed. Maria – the sea of limitless space – Maria the Virgin, born herself
immaculate and without spot, of the womb of ages, shall in the fullness of time
bring forth the perfect man, who shall redeem the race. He is not one man, but
ten thousand times ten thousand, the Son of Man, who shall overcome the
limitations of matter, and the evil which is the result of the materialisation
of spirit. (1)
By the doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary we are secretly enlightened
concerning the generation of the soul, who is begotten in the womb of matter,
and yet from the first instant of her being is pure and incorrupt. (…) As the
Immaculate Conception is the foundation of the mysteries, so is the Assumption
their crown.
For the entire object and
end of kosmic evolution is precisely this triumph and apotheosis of the soul. In
the mystery presented by these dogmas, we behold the consummation of the whole
scheme of creation – the perpetuation and glorification of the individual human
ego. The grave – the material and astral consciousness, cannot retain the
immaculate Mother of God. She rises into the heavens; she assumes divinity. (…)
From end to end the mystery
(p.
162)
of the soul’s evolution – the history, that is,
of humanity and of the kosmic drama – is contained and enacted in the cultus of
the Blessed Virgin Mary. The acts and the glories of Mary are the one supreme
subject of the holy mysteries. (1)
“Allegory of stupendous
significance!” exclaimed the seeress’s illuminator when imparting to her the
mystery of the Immaculate Conception. Allegory of stupendous significance! With
which the
That such failure has been the rule and not the exception is the plea of the New
Gospel of Interpretation. For lack of comprehension of its own symbols the
Church has fallen into the disastrous errors of mistaking the man Jesus for the
Christ within every man, and Mary the mother of Jesus for the Virgin Mary the
mother of that Christ, committing in both instances idolatry by preferring the
form to the substance, persons to principles, and blinding men to the essential
truth implied.
FOOTNOTES
(142:1) A.K. was preparing for her
second Doctorat, and E.M. was elaborating out of his own consciousness “a key to
the interpretation especially of the initial chapters of Genesis.” (Life
of A.K., Vol. I, p. 264)
(143:1) On the 4th June, 1878. (Life
of A.K., Vol. I, p. 265)
(147:1) P.W., App. I.; C.W.S.,
(151:1) C.W.S.,
(159:1) From the exposition
concerning the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, referred to on p. 151; C.W.S.,
I. iii.
(161:1) From the exposition
concerning the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, referred to on p. 151; C.W.S.,
I. iii.
(162:1) From the exposition
concerning the Christian Mysteries given in full in Life of A.K., Vol. II, pp.
99-100.
(162:2) C.W.S.,
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