THE “NEW GOSPEL OF INTERPRETATION”

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VIII.

The Bible Declares Ecclesiasticism to

Be of Diabolical Origin

Even were it the fact that sorcery had ceased to be practised by priesthoods, none the less would Ecclesiasticism still represent the survival of the system thus originated and devised. The following are among the expressions whereby Scripture refers to the practice and the influences represented by it. The expressions in question have hitherto baffled the theologians. “Prince of the powers of the air;” “principalities and powers;” “rulers of the darkness of this world;” “spiritual wickedness in high places;” “synagogue of Satan;” (1)

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“that old serpent which deceiveth the whole earth;” “that great city Babylon, by whose sorceries were all nations deceived;” “the beast coming up out of the earth, doing great wonders, and deceiving them that dwell on the earth by the miracles which he had power to do in sight of the beast (Ecclesiasticism) which had risen out of the sea” – the Church’s depraved spiritual consciousness – and which, after receiving a “deadly wound” at the hands of Christ, had recovered to work such horrors on the earth that the seer, beholding them in anticipation, “wept because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book” which exposed in advance the whole mystery, the understanding of which would have saved the world the awful history which has been that of Christendom under ecclesiastical domination, by opening men’s eyes to its true source and character.

It is to the diabolical derivation of Ecclesiasticism that Jesus refers when, addressing the whole order of those who sought to kill him, and who subsequently did kill him, he calls them a “generation of vipers” – meaning the brood of the Serpent of Eden – and says, “Ye are of your father the devil,” adding, in identification of the priest with the principle denoted by Cain, that “he was a liar and a murderer from the beginning.” It is the same with the expressions, “that wicked one,” “the man of sin,” “the mystery of iniquity,” and “son of perdition,” “who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he, as God, sitteth in the temple of God, making himself to appear as God;” “who letteth, and will let, until he be taken out of the way,” and “whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming.” These are expressions which, taken in connection with the declaration that such coming shall be in the “clouds of heaven, with power and great glory,” imply the advent of a new

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gospel of interpretation which shall be so potent in logic, and so luminous in exposition, as shall win full conviction from the minds of men, to the complete discomfiture of Ecclesiasticism and its backers. For, by the clouds of heaven is meant man’s restored understanding of things spiritual, which shall follow on the restoration of the “woman,” intuition.

But, inasmuch as it is man’s extremity that constitutes the divine opportunity – because so long as he deems himself whole he will have no physician – it was necessary first that the “two beasts,” Ecclesiasticism and its ally Sorcery, should have done their worst in the production of a humanity which, being made wholly in the image of the not-God, is described as bearing on forehead and in hand – that is, showing in thought and act – the “mark of the beast,” the symbol of man not merely rudimentary and unregenerate through lack of evolution, but utterly degenerate by self-degradation and no longer man but fiend, such as he has so largely become, and doomed to be rejected of the planetary kosmos, and consigned for extinction to the outermost sphere. Hence his distinction by the number 666, the sum of the units in the degrees of the decans of the zodiac.

Meanwhile, Ecclesiasticism, described as the “woman arrayed” – not in the “white linen” denotive of a pure intuition – but “in purple and scarlet,” denotive of empire founded in bloodshed, holds unclean intercourse with the “kings of the earth” – man’s lower motives – and seated on the beast whose seven heads and ten horns denote the seven deadly sins and the images inverted and become diabolical of the ten Elohim or Sephiroth of God – bears on her forehead the lethal talisman ever found by Ecclesiasticism so potent a device to smite with impotence the human mind, and adopted, therefore, by it when operating in the sphere of science no less than in that of religion. This is the

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inscription “Mystery, Babylon the Great, Mother of harlots and abominations of the earth.” For whether spelt “Mystery” or “Unknowable,” it is the same thing; and that which it denotes is the twofold blasphemy, – the blasphemy against man of denying to him any faculty of understanding; and the blasphemy against God of denying to Him the power of self-manifestation, self-revelation, self-individuation, which is involved in the denial to man of such faculty.

And whereas such is that “abomination of desolation,” the recognition of which, “standing in he holy place” of the Spirit, was declared by Daniel and Jesus alike to be the sign of the end, saying “When ye shall see, then is the end near, even at the doors,” – for it had been there unseen ever since the Fall – it must surely be inferred that the end is now imminent.

When it is considered that the description in question is that which Jesus himself, speaking by his “angel” through the disciple called “the beloved” and “the divine,” gives of the future of his own church, and that it further describes Ecclesiasticism as “drunken with the blood of the saints and of the martyrs of Jesus” – sons, like himself of the “woman” intuition – the failure hitherto to recognise the subject of a portraiture so exact is explicable only on the supposition of some overpowering glamour emitted from the “pit” expressly in order to blind men’s eyes to it.

That such exposition as has here been made has at length become possible, is yet another token of the nearness of the end. For it proves that the powers of evil have been so far weakened as to be no longer able to blind and to silence. It is the modern revolt against Ecclesiasticism in religion that has done this. So long as it held undivided sway the forces of the pit were invincible. For man could not become receptive to the celestial. But the revolt of the intellect against Ecclesiasticism in one form, though re-establishing it in

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another, that of science, has made of it a house divided against itself, with the usual result, and rendered possible the re-opening of that intercourse with the celestial which it is the especial endeavour of the infernal to prevent. The condition of such divine intercourse is that which is described as the “drying up of the river Euphrates, that the way of the kings of the East may be prepared.” For by the “Euphrates” is denoted, in the last book of the Bible as in the first, the human will, and by the “kings of the East” the principles in virtue of which man knows and understands. (1) Only when that “great river,” the river of man’s will is “dried up” by being sublimated and made one with the divine will, is he accessible to the light which has its rise in that spiritual “East” whence the Bible always represents the divine glory as coming. Now, the distinctive tenet of the spirits of the infernal, and that, therefore, whereby their terrestrial correspondents may be known, is the assertion of Force or Will, as the sole factor in existence. In other words, they deny absolutely the essential principle of Being represented by the Woman. This is a denial which involves the two capital sins called “Anti-Christ” and the “Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,” as will be shown by the definition presently to be given of them. When also it will appear that the Bible lays both of these sins to the charge of Ecclesiasticism, thereby also identifying it with the powers of evil implied in the term Sorcery.

NOTES

(23:1) As the Seventh of the creative Elohim, the “Spirit of the Fear of the Lord,” or Reverence, and the angel, therefore, of the outermost sphere of the kosmos, the principle called Satan is recognised in the Bible under two opposite aspects, good and evil. In this treatise he is referred to only in his latter capacity. For a full exposition of the import and functions of Satan, and of the distinction between Satan and the “Devil,” see Clothed with the Sun, II, xv (“The Secret of Satan”), and The Perfect Way, III, 9-15.

(27:1) The four rivers of Eden being the four constituent principles of the kosmos, the Spirit or Will, the Soul or Substance, the Astral or Magnetic and Mental, and the Material or Bodily and Physical. They have their correspondence in the four elements. See The Perfect Way, VI, 4-7, &c.