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LETTER X

 

THE BRIGHTNESS OF HIS GLORY AND

THE EXPRESS IMAGE OF HIS PERSON

 

            HAVING got, either in idea or in reality, subjectively in our consciousness or objectively in history, a man whose character and career suggest to us the element of infinity in power and goodness; and having by him discovered the capacity of our race for attaining perfection, real or imagined, and having thereby won exemption from eternal condemnation, how shall we give vent to our heart’s promptings to adore him as a God, how institute divine worship in his honour? Having a theology and a religion, worship inevitably follows.

 

            Not enough that we make him in the image of our own little best. As Son at once of God and man, the universe contains no element too noble to be pressed into his service, no symbol too exalted to be converted to his worship.

 

            Here, dull and unimaginative that we are, we should, if left to our own resources, find ourselves at once brought to a standstill through lack of a rule by which to fashion the expression of our adoration.

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It was not so in the days of old when, not yet civilised and artificial, men lived in immediate dependence upon the physical order of the universe. Buried in the streets of towns, unconscious of the operations of nature on which our very existence depends, and heeding the changes of the seasons chiefly for their effects on our social life, we can little realise the vivid interest taken by primitive peoples in the march of the sun, and in his varied yet regular operations throughout the year. Not for us in these days is his rising the daily advent, or the winter solstice the yearly birth, of a god. Inhabiting a temperate climate, and sheltered in substantial dwellings, we dread not his noonday rays as the darts of irresistible power; warmed by clothing and fire, and cheered by artificial light, we hail not his victory over the cold and darkness of winter as a rescue and redemption for ourselves; nor, nourished by the commerce that flows from afar through a thousand artificial channels, do we watch eagerly for the alternate beams and showers which alike proceed from him, in fear or hope of starvation or plenty.

 

            Surely, if there be anywhere a visible manifestation of God which can be accepted as ‘the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person,’ it is in the kingly orb on which we depend utterly for light and life, and all things needful to existence. What then but the sun can represent for us and

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suggest all that we require in the way of symbolism and worship, when we would fulfil the impulses which bid us adore the Perfection whereby we ourselves are made perfect?

 

            It is the sun, then, that we must press into our service, and not ours only, but his whom we delight to honour, if his worship is to reach the supremest heights accessible to humanity.

 

            You have demanded of me the Keys of the Creeds. I gave you before the key to their moral side, in the worship of perfection. I give you now the key to their physical side. It is the worship of the sun. The sun and, as I have already indicated, the organs of sex, are the fundamental symbols of every religious worship known to us, each alike catholic in their acceptance, their necessity, and their functions. It was impossible for me to enter fully into detail respecting the second. Neither is it essential to my purpose to do so, seeing that, although incorporated with the basis of ecclesiastical Christianity, and discoverable by those who choose to search for it, it does not practically affect either its doctrine or its ritual; its function being purely antiquarian and æsthetic.

 

            Far otherwise is it with the sun, whose course to this day not only controls both our secular and ecclesiastical calendars, and the character and times of the festivals held in honour of Christ, but coincides

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with the main circumstances narrated of his life, from his conception and birth to his ascension and reception into heaven.

 

            So little is there strange and recondite in these facts, that it is a perpetual marvel among the initiated how even the least incredulous of the laity contrive to ignore them, – a marvel not unmixed with apprehension as to the result that would follow from their becoming enlightened. The blind impetuosity, on the other hand, with which Protestant sects indignantly denounce ‘idolatry,’ pagan or catholic, while themselves offering palpable homage to the sun under the name of Christ, is to us a never-failing source of amusement.

 

 

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LETTER XI

 

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD

 

            INDIA, Persia, Egypt, Syria, Greece, and many more countries of the ancient world, place themselves at our disposal the moment we seek to explore the mysteries of the solar culte. I will commence with Persia, under the influences of whose philosophy the Jews, in their captivity, finally abandoned their passion for the grosser idolatries of Syria; and after their release collated their legends, and rewrote what they are pleased to call their history.

 

            The rule was to personify the sun under the form of a benefactor to mankind, and to narrate his annual career as a moral and philosophic tale. The Persian magians accounted to the populace for the introduction of evil into the world by a fable of a serpent tempting the first woman to pluck a forbidden apple. This act, as the apple ripens late in autumn, was of course followed by the prevalence of winter, with darkness and cold – the kingdom of the evil principle – and necessitated the adoption of clothing. The mischief thus brought about could only be remedied by

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the agency of the sun, whom they identified with the principle of good. Hence they supposed the incarnation of the sun in the person of Mithra. This Mithra was set forth as born of a virgin in a cave at the winter solstice, and as accompanied by a retinue of twelve persons, who represented the months. Having vanquished the prince of darkness, who under guise of a serpent had seduced the woman, and having lost his life in the contest, Mithra descended into hell – or under side of the earth – and at the spring equinox rose again and ascended into heaven, opening to man the gates of light and redeeming him from the oppression of the evil one.

 

            Mithra was represented as born of a virgin because the constellation Virgo was on the horizon at the time of the sun’s birth. And because the sun was then in the sign of Aries – then known as the Lamb – at the vernal equinox, which governs the year, Mithra was called the Lamb of God, and the Lamb that takes away the evils of the world. The serpent that causes all the mischief by bringing in the winter is Scorpio, the constellation of the later autumn.

 

            Zoroaster, the reputed author of the sacred books called the Zend-Avesta, where this system of theogony is found, is variously reckoned to have lived from one to six thousand years before the Christian era. He was a pure and ardent monotheist, but compelled by way of solving the problem of evil

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to ascribe a dual nature to deity. Like all the great men of antiquity, from being an historical he grew into a dogmatical personage, – an immediate emanation from the supreme Being. Such was Alexander; such Plato, who was said to be the child of Apollo, and born of a virgin named Perictione. Ariston, who was betrothed to her, postponed his marriage because Apollo appeared to him in a dream and told him that she was with child. Genius was for the ancients ever associated with a divine origin.

 

            The religion founded in honour of Mithra was provided with the sacraments of baptism, penance, the eucharist, consecration, and others. Its novices were subjected to a severely ascetic regime. Chastity and virginity were accounted sacred; and it contained the doctrines of the Fall, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Resurrection.

 

            Passing to Egypt, we find the sungod Osiris, a member of a triune godhead – product of Egyptian metaphysics – coming upon earth for the benefit of mankind, and gifted with the titles Manifestor of God and Revealer of Truth. Born of a divine virgin, he was persecuted and put to death through the malevolence of the Evil one, namely winter or darkness. He was buried and rose again, and returning to heaven became the judge of all men. Such was the Man-god of the Egyptians, whose worship pervaded the country that gave tone and colour, if not

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actual birth to the Gospels, and which gradually paled and died out before the ascendancy of Christianity.

 

            Already will you have perceived in the coincidences between the histories of these Sun-gods and that of the Christ of the calendar and creeds, evidences that the same compulsion which dominated the expression of the pagan faiths controlled also the Christian. The surprise you confess at the notion of there being any coincidence between the festivals of the Church and the solar phenomena would have been astounding to me, but that a long experience of the determined blindness of ordinary Christian folk, where an account of their faith is concerned, and of their utter indifference to its truth, has taught me to be surprised at nothing in that relation.

 

            To no less a person than Sir Isaac Newton the world owes both the first suggestion that the Christian festivals were determined upon an astronomical basis, and a detailed list of instances of correspondence. Even he, however, resolutely closed his eyes to the inevitable inference; and like his great brother in science, Faraday, declined to submit the basis of his faith to the test of his understanding.

 

            The day assigned to the birth of the Sun-god of all the other religions was the same as that assigned, without a particle of historical evidence, by the Church to Christ. The shortest day being December 21, his birthday is put on the twenty-fifth, the

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first day that shows any elongation, and which is therefore the actual commencement of the year; while the twenty-first, on which the sun reaches its lowest point, when his worshippers are supposed to be filled with alarm lest their lord and master fail to rise again, is assigned to the doubting apostle Thomas. In the corresponding worship in Syria, it was the custom to lament the Sun-god Adonis as actually dead at this time, and needing to be reborn into life.

 

            Well, Christmas has come, and the sun is born; but winter has still a long career to run, and consequently, the sun, as yet a feeble infant, has to undergo a series of struggles with the powers of darkness. And so, just as we find the infant Christ exposed to the perils celebrated on Innocents’ Day, we find the various representatives of the sun with difficulty and danger emerging into childhood. In the case of the Hindu deity, Crishna, who was cradled among shepherds, and greeted at his birth by an angelic chorus, a massacre of children was ordered by a jealous king, in exact correspondence with the slaughter afterwards ascribed to Herod. In every case, however, the Sun-god escapes all dangers, and grows in stature and in favour with God and man, the days gradually gaining on the nights as he rises higher above the horizon, until the spring equinox, when they are equal.

 

            This period of equality constitutes in all the solar religions a serious crisis in the god’s history, and it

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becomes an anxious question for his adorers whether he on whom their very existence depends will still be able to make good his way against the powers of darkness; or whether the world will be thrust back into the region of winter, and never more see sweet summer skies.

 

            For a time things seem to go against him, and mankind are in despair. The change to the southwest rainy monsoon brings equinoctial storms which hide the sun from their sight. He has succumbed to his foe. They fast long and mourn him dead. But being a god he cannot be holden of death. Nay, by his dying he shall prove himself to be conqueror over death, and his very death shall be a blessing and redemption for the nations; for the rains by which the sun has been obscured are essential to the life of the eastern world.

 

            Thus hope returns, and despair is changed to joy, as from a point still higher in the heavens than that at which he had disappeared, he shines out with new and greater effulgence. His rising is followed by his final triumph and continued ascent towards the zenith, his kingdom of heaven, whence, in the heat and fruitfulness of summer, he sends down sustenance and comfort for men.

 

But during the equinoctial period of the sun’s rising and ascension he is in the constellation of the Lamb, as Aries used to be called. This also is his

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time to pass over the equinoctial line from the southern tropic to ours. Now does the orb of day begin to attain his full powers. Thus, in the Apocalypse we find the Lamb adored in the presence of the throne by four living creatures, the cardinal constellations of the heavens, and twenty-four elders or hours, who fall down before him, crying, ‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.’ For the symbolism of the Apocalypse, that sublime hymn of invective against Rome and idealisation of the future glories of Israel, shows itself to be mainly derived from the solar phenomena, especially as exhibited in the worships of Mithra and Osiris. What but the constellation that ushers in the winter is the Serpent or Scorpion which afflicts the earth five months, and whose tail draws a third part of the stars of heaven?

 

            Not less susceptible of a solar interpretation are the miracles ascribed to Christ. Thus the conversion of water into wine represents the formation of the juice of the grape out of the rains by the sun’s action. The production of food, as in the extraordinary draught of fishes and the feeding of the five thousand, illustrates the sun’s fertilising influence on land and water. In the stilling of the tempest we have an example of the dependence of the weather on the sun. It is the sun that, by affording light, gives sight to the eye. He is the

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universal healer of disease, able by darting his rays afar to impart renewed vitality at a distance, as in the cases of the nobleman’s son and centurion’s servant. He it is that raises from the dead to new life the body buried in the ground. While in the blasting of the barren fig-tree we see the blighting effect of the sun’s heat on a feeble and rootless vegetation.

 

            The rule in the calendar is to dedicate to some apostle the day of the sun’s entry into a new sign. And – as pointed out by St. Augustine in his sermon on the nativity of St. John – the saying of the Baptist, herald of the sun that is to be, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease,’ procured for him his place in the calendar as lord of the waning year. For his festival is held on June 24, the last day of the summer solstice, and that from which the days begin to decrease; while from that of Christ, at the opposite pole of the year, the days grow in length. Peter and Paul, the most zealous of the apostles, are placed together on the 29th of the same month, when the sun enters the station of greatest heat; while the phrase, ‘who by transgression fell and so went to his proper place,’ applied to Judas, is exactly descriptive of the month of February – dedicated to the successor of Judas – which by transgressing or passing over a day, falls into its proper place in the year.

 

            The notable part played by the constellation Virgo in the celestial scheme could not fail to procure its

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identification with the ideal woman of the new dispensation. Osiris, Mithra, Bacchus, Christ, are all represented as having been born at the moment of midnight, between Christmas eve and Christmas day, in a cave or stable. At this moment the constellation Virgo is cut exactly in half by the eastern horizon, the sun itself being beneath the earth in the sign of Capricorn; or Stable of Augeas, the cleansing of which constituted one of the labours of Hercules – who also represented the sun. Justin Martyr boasts that Christ was born when the sun takes its birth in the Stable of Augeas, coming as a second Hercules to cleanse a foul world. The appearance of the celestial Virgin above the horizon at this time is thus indicated in the third Rosary: ‘Let us contemplate how the B. V. M., when the time of her delivery was come, brought forth our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, at midnight, and laid him in a manger.’ And Eusebius says he was born underground.

 

            Even the names assigned by gospel or legend to the grandparents of Christ, on the mother’s side, seem to bear a solar signification; Heli being a contraction of the Greek Helios, the sun; and Anna the feminine of Annus, the year. And it so happens that, July 26, the day devoted to the latter in the calendar, was the new year’s day of ancient Egypt.

 

            Returning to the Virgin herself, we find that the Church celebrates her Assumption ‘into the heavenly

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chamber in which the King of kings sits on his starry seat,’ on August 15. This is exactly the time of the disappearance of the zodiacal constellation Virgo, called by the Greeks Astræa. And the period during which the constellation is so wholly absorbed in the brightness of the sun’s rays as to be invisible in the heavenly field, is seven days, – or the period during which Miriam (or Mary), the virgin of the Old Testament, was compelled to hide her leprous face in the camp of Israel. Three weeks pass ere the sun has moved sufficiently to allow the entire constellation to be seen. The day on which Virgo’s head emerges from his rays – September 8 – is the day appointed for the nativity of the B. V. M.

 

            The sun’s place at the vernal equinox is not now in Aries, as it was at the beginning of our era, but has moved on to Pisces. It was previously in Taurus. The shifting of the zodiac by a sign occupies, 2151 years. It is thus that while Mithraism, Osirisism, and, following them, Judaism, had the bull and the lamb, the ‘golden calf’ and ‘paschal lamb,’ for their symbols, Christianity adopted the lamb and the fish.

 

            The division of the sun’s path among the stars, into the constellations which form the Zodiac, was made and known throughout the East, and dominated its religious myths, at a period so remote that Ptolemy declared it hopeless even in his time to seek for its origin.

 

 

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LETTER XII

 

THE APOSTASY

 

            THUS, for both the worshippers of the solar deity and for those of Christ the same ‘cardinal doctrines’ of the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Death, Resurrection, and Ascension, held equally good. And the fact is indisputable that neither the claim raised for Jesus as being the Messiah of the Jews, nor that of being the incarnate Logos, the Word made flesh, of the Alexandrian Neoplatonists, of whom I will tell you by and by, nor even the fierce denunciations of eternal tortures against all who did not believe in him, and the assurance of salvation for all who did, would have secured for him popular recognition and acceptance in the absence of his identification with the sun, and therefore as the legitimate successor of Mithra, Osiris, Adonis, and all the numerous other human forms under which the sun was worshipped.

 

            Not among the populace only did the principle of the old religion thus retain its vitality, but many strenuous attempts were made by influential persons to restore it to supremacy. Among these was a

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notable attempt made by the imperial family of Severus, especially by the female members of it, instigated no doubt by the priesthood of the decaying faith. Jealous of the Jewish Christ, and perceiving the necessity of a new incarnation to restore the prestige of their religion, these princesses sought to elevate Apollonius of Tyana, a remarkable character, said to have lived during the whole of the first century, to the desired place, and to that end claimed for him the distinction of being the latest incarnation of the solar deity.

 

            The worship of Christ as a god, continued, however, to gain ground against all competitors; until at length the power, moral, political, and ecclesiastical of the system as a religion, made it expedient for the State to recognise it and incorporate it with itself. And thus it came that under Constantine Christianity was erected into a complete system combining all that was essential and vital in the systems it was called on to supplant.

 

            I have shown you the correspondences between the course of the sun and the histories ascribed to the various personages in whom he was held to have been incarnate, and those of Christ. The authoritative promulgation of the Nicene Creed by the Council presided over by the politic Constantine, cannot but have confirmed the world in its ancient beliefs. Light and life, the objects of worship from the beginning,

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are set forth in this document as of the essence of God, ‘maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible,’ through the agency of his ‘only begotten Son,’ – the grand orb in which for us all light and life giving warmth are centred and expressed, which may further be said to be begotten of the supreme source of things, – ‘the Father, before all worlds, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father: by whom all things were made’ as agent for the Father, even all terrestrial life, by the action of the solar rays on the earth’s crust. Then we have the sun’s annual history. ‘Who for us men and for our salvation’ from death by the cold and darkness of winter, ‘came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost,’ the wind, or atmosphere. For to the ancients the course of the sun lay, not above and beyond, but through the atmosphere, the breathing of which is essential to life, while its movement, or wind, is directly due to the influence of the sun’s heat.

 

            But the Holy Ghost must have a spouse, by whom to produce the human expression of the Only-begotten. To the warm winds of spring breathing on the surface of earth, ‘the frolic wind that breathes the spring,’ is due all life, vegetable and animal; and from them the earth, ever virgin, receives her impregnation, at the season accorded by the Church to the annunciation of the Virgin Mary – the spring

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equinox – precisely nine months before Christmas day.

 

            So the sun is made man, and in man’s form undergoes on earth the vicissitudes to which he is subject in the heavens. He ‘suffers death’ on a machine universally regarded as an emblem of life and symbol of the sexual order of nature. ‘He is buried’ out of sight, as is his prototype during the spring storms and rains. But not for long. For presently ‘he rises again, and ascends into heaven,’ mounting higher and higher as midsummer approaches, and takes the post of honour ‘on the right hand of the Father’ of Light, as supreme arbiter of life and death, or ‘judge of quick and dead;’ – for the sun has but to withdraw his rays and the world is wrapped in death; to restore them and it blossoms into life: – ‘whose kingdom shall have no end.’

 

            The Nicene creed was composed at two different times, for two special objects. The first part belongs to the Council of Nice, and was written to condemn the doctrine of Arius, who affirmed Christ to be a mere creature, though the first of creatures, and not of the substance of the Father. The second portion, with the exception of the phrase ‘and the Son,’ was written half a century afterwards, to define the nature and functions of the Holy Ghost in opposition to the teaching of Macedonius. The attempt to define these things at all, and still more the imposition

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of them by authority, have been fraught with mischief incalculable to mankind, and will never cease to be so until mankind is brought to see the real nature of the contention, and the unpractical character of the subject. Even now eastern and western Christendom are hopelessly divided on the question of the procession of the Holy Ghost. The Nicene creed, in virtue of a later addition, takes the western side, and affirms his double procession from the Father and the Son, a development in which the eastern Church declines to follow it. Seeing that the wind, personified by the third person of the Trinity, is due alike to the universal principle of light and life, that is, to the Father; and to the sun, in whom he takes visible form, the Nicene creed as we have it, is manifestly in the right. So that by the solar analogy as well as by that of sex, the doctrine of the single procession of the Holy Ghost shows itself to be untenable.

 

            Let me again remind you that these two provinces of nature have suggested the matter or controlled the expression of every system of theology the world has seen. So that the Nicene creed will hold good of all incarnations whatever until the world gives practical recognition to the facts long since proclaimed to it by astronomical science. For, so far from descending and dying and rising again, and undergoing the other changes on which the theologies are built,

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the sun remains fixed in the centre of the solar system, and the whole of the phenomena of the seasons are due to a change of position in the axis of the earth itself. To this you must add the consideration that as ours is but one of an innumerable host of suns and systems, whatever theological system we assign to one, we must assign to all, allowing only for local peculiarities.

 

            Of the peculiar value attached to the atmosphere by the Orientals, and therefore of the importance of the personification of that element in their theological systems, we can judge from the fact that the Sanscrit root of the word for God in the Latin, Greek, and other derived tongues, signifies equally breath. The Greek Pneuma, and the Sanscrit Div, the root of deity and divine, have an identical meaning in the air. The world was supposed to live by a process of breathing, and the thoughts of men’s minds were regarded as inspired together with their breath.

 

            But on whatever ground Christianity obtained acceptance as the new rule of faith, whether from pagans as constituting a new form of sun-and-sex worship; from Jews as the fulfilment of the Law and Prophets, and the reign of the Messiah; or from philosophers as a complement to metaphysics, in that it seemed to demonstrate what metaphysics had only postulated, and by a practical instance to bridge the gulf between the finite and the infinite; whether,

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again, it obtained acceptance from the masses in virtue of the supernatural physical powers with which Christ, in common with all the other Sun-gods, was credited; from moralists, through their recognising in the teaching ascribed to Christ a standard of conduct of absolute perfection; or from theologians, on the ground of his proclaiming the spiritual nature of God and his own identity therewith, and living consistently with such claim; – in no case does the rule fail to hold good, that in exalting him into a god, all these classes but exalted that which they deemed best in humanity, and so made God in their own image, only divested of limitations.

 

            If proof were wanted of the affection still entertained in the fourth century for the old religion, and of the moral advance made by men through the contemplation of a life of earnestness, purity, and unselfishness, such as was presented to them of Christ, we have it in the attempt of Julian to undo the work of Constantine and reinstate paganism. Constantine, an ardent worshipper of the sun, whom he chose to be his tutelar deity, adopted on the grandest scale the principle of ‘concurrent endowment,’ and established Christianity in connection with sun worship. Julian, similarly devoted, sought to reestablish sun worship in connection with Christianity. That is, he wished to retain the old creed and ritual under their true and original forms, but with

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the additional spirituality, morality, simplicity, and purity acquired by the recent generations from the contemplation of a life that was beautiful all round; a life which the Jewish Christians had learnt, under Neoplatonic influences, to regard as that of the incarnate Logos, or the Word made flesh, of their Jehovah; but which the rest of the world insisted on regarding as a new and more noble incarnation of the sun.

 

            Both sides could adduce what must have seemed to them irresistible reasons for their views. The Pagan could point triumphantly to the heavens for the visible origin and sustainer of life, who already in the persons of Crishna, Mithra, Osiris, Hercules, Bacchus, Apollo, Adonis, and many others, had condescended to man’s estate to redeem mankind from evil.

 

            And the Jew, whose temperament and history disposed him to lay the principal stress on the moral side of things, could point to his Law, with its strenuous insistance on perfect physical purity: to his prophets, with their ardent inculcation of spiritual perfection: and now to his Christ, with his fulfilment of the requirements of both as the translator of all perfection from the abstract into the concrete, from the infinite into the finite, the ideal into the real, God into Man.

 

            Viewed in this relation the story of the Transfiguration

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possesses a profound significance. In it we have Christ, taking Peter, John, and James, representing respectively zeal, love, and works, for his witnesses, and meeting Moses and Elias, the representatives of the Law and the Prophets, ‘in glory.’ In the company of these two he is recognised by a divine voice as the ‘beloved Son of God,’ the fulfilment and completion of the dispensations represented by Moses and Elias, resuming in himself all the perfections contemplated by them, and constituting therefore a satisfactory solution of the problem their supersession had been to the Jewish mind.

 

            It is true that the occurrence is alluded to only in the three Gospels which are of exclusively Jewish origin, and is not mentioned in the Epistle ascribed to James, nor in the fourth Gospel, which bears the name of John, nor in his Epistles. The omission as regards John is important as an indication that the fourth Gospel was the work not of any dweller in Palestine, but of some foreign Neoplatonist, who was more concerned to identify Christ with the Logos of the Alexandrian school, than to save the credit of the Law and Prophets of the Jews.