THE “NEW GOSPEL OF INTERPRETATION”

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XX.

The Zodiac, the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx and the Obelisk

THE Zodiacal sign of the incoming dispensation contains an augury appropriate to the purposes of this exposition. It is the New Interpretation that speaks.

“For when the Lord would enter into the holy city to celebrate his Last Supper with his disciples, he sent before him the fisherman Peter to meet the man of the coming sign.

“‘There shall meet you a man bearing a pitcher of water.’

“It is his Passover; for thenceforth the Sun must pass into a new sign.

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“After the Fish, the Water-carrier; but the Lamb of God remains always in the place of victory, being slain from the foundation of the world.

“For his place is the place of the Sun’s triumph.”

The symbol, then, of the incoming dispensation, and therein of this Society, is the sign of the constellation Aquarius; which, being interpreted, is the “sign of the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds of heaven” – man’s regenerated understanding – “with power and great glory,” bearing with him the waters of her – now recognised as co-divine – who, when pure from materiality, is the “Mother of God” in man, the soul and her intuition of the Spirit. Wherefore the Bible of the Zodiac – that “word written for ever in the heavens” above man, as in the heaven within him of his own soul and spirit – also bears testimony at once to the Duality in Unity, and to the necessity of the equal recognition of its two factors.

Already, in the sign of the Fish, which are two in number, had the same mystery been signified. But occultly only, as contained but not expressed or comprehended. Hence their representation as covered by the waters of the sea of the Astral, during the dispensation now passing away, to be manifested in the Celestial by that which is coming in.

And yet more than this. The Lord’s descent from heaven as represented in this sign, is also man’s ascent thereto. For by his recognition of the soul’s essential divinity, he has realised his own. In such simultaneous descent and ascent is fulfilled the anticipation of “Paul the Mystic,” when he says, “The Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, and with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first; then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.”

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In such manner the Church celestial will join – nay, for some, has already joined – with the Church terrestrial in the heights sublime of their pure thought, to exchange glad greetings over the earth’s near resurrection. For the second coming of Christ, which is the new birth or regeneration of the Church, is that “coming of the Lord to His own,” of whom, before, at the bidding of Ecclesiasticism, He was rejected for the “robber,” Barabbas; – he being so-called because the “son of their father, the Devil,” who have ever robbed man of his divine birthright. Such is the significance of the event called the “consummation of the prophetic age” and “the end of the world.” It closes the prophetic period, and ends the world in the Church by abolishing the worldliness of the Church, meaning materiality in the acceptance of things spiritual, and its three inseparables “blood, idolatry, and the curse of Eve.”

The Zodiac has two famous fellow-Bibles in which the same event is prophesied. These are the Bibles “written in stone” as the Zodiac in stars, of the great Pyramid and the Sphinx. For it is always “out of Egypt” that God “calls His Son,” in one or other of its aspects, whether as the appointed depository of celestial doctrine, or as the emblem of materiality. As read by the light of the New Interpretation, these symbols denote man’s ascent by evolution, in virtue of the divinity of his constituent principles, the one from the “dust of the ground,” the other from the “loins of the creature of prey;” his perfection being attained through, and demonstrated by, in the one, the king’s and queen’s chambers, and the coffer in the former; and in the other, by the head and breast of the woman. For in each case the dualism implied is that of Intellect and Intuition: the coffer is the standard measure of the perfect humanity; the “head corner-stone” of the Pyramid is “Christ,” the point of junction with divinity, where the material ends and the celestial is attained; and the

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gaze of the Sphinx – “staring right on with calm eternal eyes” over the deserts of Time – implies the soul’s patient waiting in calm assurance for the realisation of her destined divinity. The Obelisk is a kindred symbol denoting the descent of Spirit into the condition of matter, and its ascent there from individuated and divinised.

And so, through the New Interpretation, the prophesy of Isaiah finds literal fulfilment, and there is now an “altar to the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the Lord;” which are “for a sign and for a witness unto the Lord of hosts in the land of Egypt.” For only when interpreted do they become a sign and a witness. And that to which they testify is the spiritual nature and the Duality in Unity of Being, and the equilibrated co-operation of its two factors as the condition of man’s realisation of his proper divinity.

It may avert confusion for some to state explicitly that there is no question here of any equilibrium between Spirit and Matter. No equilibrium is possible between these, any more than between Substance and Shadow, Light and Darkness, Reality and Appearance, Eternity and Time. The equilibrium intended is between the two modes of Spirit itself, the two constituents of Being itself, Force and Substance; and between these in all their various manifestations, as will and love, mind and moral conscience, intellect and intuition, head and heart, man and woman, father and mother, conceived of as subsisting in one and the same cosmic entity. Spirit and matter are not two concepts of one and the same thing which can be balanced against each other; seeing that Matter is, itself, Spirit, being spiritual substance under manifestation – first as the astral ether, and, last, as matter – by means of Force or Will operating under the impulsion of Love. The conception of two self-subsistent, original, antagonistic principles,

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is an absurdity involving the beginning of the table of numbers with a two. The only real opposition is between Being and Not-Being. All that is, must be modes of the former. And the differences between these can be of degree and condition only. Hence the definition of Pantheism: – All things are God as to constituent principles; but not as to condition, because of Creation. God must be conceived of as subsisting under two modes, the Unmanifest and the Manifest, and in each alike a Duality in Unity. For without Force and Substance is no being. These two are the pillars of the temple of God whose Church is the Universe, at once the “Jachim and Boaz” and “pillars of Hercules,” which bear up alike the macrocosm and the microcosm. The disintegration of any entity involves no loss to them but the loss only of the individuality their resultant; and this only for the plane on which such disintegration occurs. There is no real death save spiritual death. And this is dependent upon the will of the individual concerned. “Why will ye die? I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth.”