Writings of H P Blavatsky
Cardiff
Theosophical Society in Wales
206 Newport Road, Cardiff, Wales, UK. CF24 -1DL
Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky (1831 – 1891)
The Founder of
Modern Theosophy
Roots of
Ritualism in
Church and
Masonry
By
H P Blavatsky
THEOSOPHISTS
are very often, and very unjustly too, accused of infidelity and even of
Atheism. This is a grave error, especially with regard to the latter charge.
In a large
society, composed of so many races and nationalities, in an association wherein
every man and woman is left to believe in whatever he or she likes, and to
follow or not to follow—just as they please—the religion they were born and
brought up in, there is but little room left for Atheism. As for “infidelity,”
it becomes a misnomer and a fallacy.
To show how absurd is the charge, in any case, it is sufficient to ask
our traducers to point out to us, in the whole civilized world, that person who
is not regarded as an “infidel” by some other person belonging to some
different creed. Whether one moves in highly respectable and orthodox circles,
or in a so-called heterodox “society,” it is all the same. It is a mutual
accusation, tacitly, if not openly, expressed; a kind of a mental game at
shuttlecock and battledore flung reciprocally, and in polite silence, at each
other’s heads. In sober reality, then, no theosophist any more than a non-theosophist
can be an infidel; while, on the other hand, there is no human being living who
is not an infidel in the opinion of some sectarian or other. As to the charge
of Atheism, it is quite another question.
What is
Atheism, we ask, first of all? Is it disbelief in and denial of the existence
of a God, or Gods, or simply the refusal to accept a personal deity on the
somewhat gushy definition of R. Hall, who explains Atheism as “a ferocious
system” because, “it leaves nothing above (?) us to excite awe, nor around us
to awaken tenderness” (!) If the former, then most of our members—the hosts in
India, Burmah, and elsewhere—would demur, as they believe in Gods and supernal
beings, and are in great awe of some of them. Nor would a number of Western
Theosophists fail to confess their full belief in Spirits, whether spatial or
planetary, ghosts or angels. Many of us accept the existence of high and low
Intelligences, and of Beings as great as any “personal” God. This is no occult
secret. What we confessed to in the November LUCIFER (editorial), we reiterate
again.
Most of us
believe in the survival of the Spiritual Ego, in Planetary Spirits and
Nirmanakayas, those great Adepts of the past ages, who, renouncing their right
to Nirvana, remain in our spheres of being, not as “spirits” but as complete
spiritual human Beings. Save their corporeal, visible envelope, which they
leave behind, they remain as they were, in order to help poor humanity, as far
as can be done without sinning against Karmic law. This is the “Great
Renunciation,” indeed; an incessant, conscious self-sacrifice throughout æons
and ages till that day when the eyes of blind mankind will open and, instead of
the few, all will see the universal truth.
These Beings,
may well be regarded as God and Gods—if they would but allow the fire in our
hearts, at the thought of that purest of all sacrifices, to be fanned into the
flame of adoration, or the smallest altar in their honour. But they will not.
Verily, “the secret heart is fair Devotion’s (only) temple,” and any other, in
this case, would be no better than profane ostentation.
Now with regard
to other invisible Beings, some of whom are still higher, and others far lower
on the scale of divine evolution. To the latter we will have nothing to say;
the former will have nothing to say to us: for we are as good as non-existent
for them.
The homogeneous
can take no cognizance of the
heterogeneous;
and unless we learn to shuffle off our mortal coil and commune with them
“spirit to spirit,” we can hardly hope to recognize their true nature.
Moreover, every
true Theosophist holds that the divine HIGHER SELF of every mortal man is of
the same essence as the essence of these Gods. Being, moreover, endowed with
free-will, hence having, more than they, responsibility, we regard the
incarnated EGO as far superior to, if not more divine than, any spiritual
INTELLIGENCE still awaiting incarnation. Philosophically, the reason for this
is obvious, and every metaphysician of the Eastern school will understand it.
The incarnated EGO has odds against it which do not exist in the case of a pure
divine Essence unconnected with matter; the latter has no personal merit,
whereas the former is on his way to final perfection through the trials of
existence, of pain and suffering. The shadow of Karma does not fall upon that
which is divine and unalloyed, and so different from us that no relation can
exist between the two.
As to those
deities which are regarded in the Hindu esoteric Pantheon as finite and
therefore under the sway of Karma, no true philosopher would ever worship them;
they are signs and symbols.
Shall we then
be regarded as atheists, only because while believing in Spiritual Hosts—those
beings who have to be worshipped in their collectivity as a personal God—we
reject them absolutely as representing the ONE Unknown? and because we affirm
that the eternal Principle, the ALL in ALL, or the Absoluteness of the
Totality, cannot be expressed by limited words, nor be symbolized by anything
with conditioned and qualificative attributes? Shall we, more over, permit to
pass without protest the charge against us of idolatry—by the Roman Catholics,
of all men? They, whose religion is as pagan as any other of the solar and
element worshippers; whose creed was framed out for them, cut and dry, ages
before the year I of Christian era; and whose dogmas and rites are the same as
those of every idolatrous nation—if any such nation still exists in spirit
anywhere at this day. Over the whole face of the earth, from the North to the
South Pole, from the frozen gulfs of Northland to the torrid plains of Southern
India, from Central America to Greece and Chaldea, the Solar Fire, as the
symbol of divine Creative Power, of Life and Love, was worshipped. The union of
the Sun (male element)with Earth and the Water (matter, the female element) was
celebrated in the temples of the whole Universe.
If Pagans had a
feast commemorative of this union—which they celebrated nine months ere the Winter
Solstice, when Isis was said to have conceived—so have the Roman Catholic
Christians. The great and holy day of the Annunciation, the day on which the
Virgin Mary “found favour with(her) God” and conceived “the Son of the
Highest,” is kept by Christians nine months before Christmas.
Hence, the
worship of the Fire, lights and lamps in the churches. Why? Because Vulcan, the
fire-God, married Venus, the daughter of the Sea; that the Magi watched over
the sacred fire in the East, and the Virgin-Vestals in the West. The Sun was
the “Father”; Nature, the eternal Virgin Mother: Osiris and Isis,
Spirit-Matter, the latter worshipped under each of its three states by Pagan
and Christian. Hence the Virgins—even in Japan—clothed with star-spangled blue,
standing on the lunar crescent, as symbolical of female Nature (in her three
elements of Air, Water, Earth); Fire or the male Sun, fecundating her yearly
with his radiant beams (the “cloven tongues like as of fire” of the Holy
Ghost).
In Kalevala the
oldest epic Poem of the Finns, of the pre-Christian antiquity of which there
remains no doubt in the minds of scholars, we read of the gods of Finland, the
gods of air and water, of fire and the forest, of Heaven and the Earth. In the
superb translation by J. M. Crawford, in Rune L (Vol. II) the reader will find
the whole legend of the Virgin Mary in Mariatta childof beauty,
Then the “Holy
Babe” disappears, and Mariatta is in search of him. She asks a star, “the
guiding star of Northland,” where her “holy baby lies hidden,” but the star
answers her angrily:--
If I knew, I
would not tell thee;
‘Tis thy child
that me created
Here to wander in the darkness,
All alone at eve towander,
Yonder is thy goldeninfant,
There thy holy babe liessleeping,
Hidden to his belt inwater,
Others named
him Son of Sorrow.
Is this a
post-Christian legend? Not at all; for, as said, it is essentially pagan in
origin and recognized as pre-Christian.
Hence, with
such data in hand in literature, the ever-recurring taunts of idolatry and
atheism, of infidelity and paganism, ought to cease. The term idolatry,
moreover, is of Christian origin. It was used by the early Nazarenes, during
the 2½ centuries of our era, against those nations who used temples and
churches, statues and images, because they, the early Christians themselves,
had neither temples, statues, nor images, all of which they abhorred. Therefore
the term “idolatrous” fits far better our accusers than ourselves, as this
article will show. With Madonnas on every cross road, their thousands of
statues, from Christs and Angels in every shape down to Popes and Saints, it is
rather a dangerous thing for a Catholic to taunt any Hindu or Buddhist with
idolatry. The assertion has now to be proved.
We may begin by
the origin of the word God. What is the real and primitive meaning of the term?
Its meanings and etymologies are as many as they are
various. One of
them shows the word derived from an old Persian and mystic term goda. It means
“itself,” or something self-emanating from the absolute Principle. The root
word was godan—whence Wodan, Woden, and Odin, the Oriental radical having been
left almost unaltered by the Germanic races. Thus they made of it gott, from
which the adjective gut—“good,” as also the term gotz, or idol, were derived. In
ancient Greece, the word Zeus and Theos led to the Latin Deus. This goda, the
emanation, is not, and cannot be, identical with that from which it radiates,
and is, therefore, but a periodical, finite manifestation.
Old Aratus, who
wrote “full of Zeus are all the streets and the markets of man; full of Him is
the sea and the harbours,” did not limit his deity to such a temporary
reflection on our terrestrial plane as Zeus, or even its antetype—Dyaus, but
meant, indeed, the universal, omnipresent Principle.
Before the
radiant god Dyaus (the sky) attracted the notice of man, there was the Vedic
Tad (“that”) which, to the Initiate and philosopher, would have no definite
name, and which was the absolute Darkness that underlies every manifested
radiancy. No
more than the mythical Jupiter—the latter reflection of Zeus—could Surya, the
Sun, the first manifestation in the world of Maya and the Son of Dyaus, fail to
be termed “Father” by the ignorant. Thus the Sun became very soon
interchangeable and one with Dyaus; for some, the “Son,” for others, the
“Father” in the radiant sky; Dyaus-Pitar, the Father in the Son, and the Son in
the Father, truly shows, however, his finite origin by having the Earth
assigned to him as a wife. It is during the full decadence of metaphysical
philosophy that Dyâva-prithivi “Heaven and Earth” began to be represented as
the Universal cosmic parents, not alone of men, but of the gods also. From the
original conception, abstract and poetical, the ideal cause fell into
grossness.
Dyaus, the sky,
became very soon Dyaus or Heaven, the abode of the “Father,” and finally,
indeed, that Father himself. Then the Sun, upon being made the symbol of the
latter, received the title of Dina-Kara “day-maker,” of Bhaskara
“light-maker,”
now the Father of his Son, and vice versa. The reign of ritualism and of
anthropomorphic cults was henceforth established and finally degraded the whole
world, retaining supremacy to the present civilized age.
Such being the
common origin, we have but to contrast the two deities—the god of the Gentiles
and the god of the Jews—on their own revealed WORD; and judging them on their
respective definitions of themselves, conclude intuitively which is the nearest
to the grandest ideal. We quote Colonel Ingersoll, who Jehovah and Brahma
parallel with each other. The former, “from the clouds and darkness of Sinai,”
said to the Jews:--
Thou shalt have
no other gods before me. . . . Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor
serve them; for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting
the iniquities of the fathers upon the
children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” Contrast
this with the words put by the
Hindu into the mouth of Brahm: “I am the
same to all mankind. They who honestly serve other gods, involuntarily worship
me. I am he who partaketh of all worship, and I am the reward of all
worshippers.”
Compare these
passages. The first, a dungeon where crawl the things begot of jealous slime;
the other, great as the domed firmament inlaid with suns. . . .
The “first” is
the god who haunted Calvin’s fancy, when he added to his doctrine of
predestination that of Hell being paved with the skulls of unbaptized infants.
The beliefs and dogmas of our churches are far more blasphemous in the ideas
they imply than those of the benighted Heathen. The amours of Brahmâ, under the
form of a buck, with his own daughter, as a deer, or of Jupiter with Leda,
under that of a swan, are grand allegories. They were never given out as a
revelation, but known to have been the products of the poetic fancy of Hesiod
and other mythologists. Can we say as much of the immaculate daughters of the
god of the Roman Catholic Church—Anna and Mary? Yet, even to breathe that the
Gospel narratives are allegories too, as they would be most sacrilegious were
they accepted in their dead letter, constitutes in a Christian born the acme of
blasphemy!
Verily, they
may whitewash and mask as much as they like the god of Abraham and Isaac, they
shall never be able to disprove the assertion of Marcion, who denied that the
God of Hate could be the same as the “Father of Jesus.” Heresy or not, but the
“Father in Heaven” of the Churches remained since then a hybrid creature; a
mixture between the Jove of the Pagan mobs and the “jealous God” of Moses,
exoterically the SUN, whose abode is in Heaven, or the sky, esoterically.
Does he not
give birth to LIGHT “that shineth in Darkness,” to the Day, the bright Dyaus,
the Son, and is he not the MOST HIGH—Deus Cœlum? And is it not again Terra, the
“Earth,” the ever immaculate as the ever prolific Virgin who,
fecundated by the ardent embraces of her “Lord”—the fructifying rays of
the Sun, becomes, in this terrestrial sphere, the mother of all that lives and
breathes on her vast bosom? Hence, the sacredness of her products in
Ritualism—the bread and the wine. Hence also, the ancient messis, the great
sacrifice to the goddess of harvest (Ceres Eleusina, the Earth again): messis,
for the Initiates, missa for the profane,1 now transformed into the Christian
mass or liturgy. The ancient oblation of the fruits of the Earth to the Sun,
the Deus Aitissimus, “the Most High,” the symbol of the G. A. O. T. U. of the
Masons to this day, became the foundation of the most important ritual among
the ceremonies of the new religion. The worship offered to Osiris-Isis (the Sun
andthe Earth),2 to Bel and the cruciform Astarte of the Babylonians; to Odin or
Thor and Friga, of the Scandinavians; to Belen and the Virgo Paritura of the
Celts; to Apollo and the Magna Mater of the Greeks; all these couples having
the same meaning, passed bodily to, and were transformed by, the Christians
into the Lord God or the Holy Ghost descending upon the Virgin Mary.
Deus Sol or
Solus, the Father, was made interchangeable with the Son: the “Father” in his
noon glory, he became the “Son” at Sun-rise, when he was said to “be born.”
This idea received its full apotheosis annually on December the 25th,
during the Vernal Solstice, when the Sun—hence the solar gods of all the
nations—was said to be born. Natalis solis invicte. And the “precursor” of the
resurrecting
Sun grows, and waxes strong, until the vernal equinox, when the god Sol begins
its annual course, under the sign of the Ram or the Lamb, the first lunar week
of the month. The 1st of March was feasted throughout all pagan
Greece, as its neomenia was sacred to Diana. Christian nations celebrate their
Easter, for the same reason, on the first Sunday that follows the full moon, at
the Vernal
Equinox. With the festivals of the Pagans, the canonicals of their priests and
Hierophants were copied by Christendom. Will this be denied? In his “Life of
Constantine” Eusebius confesses thus saying, perhaps, the only truth he ever
uttered in his life—that “in order to render Christianity more attractive to
the Gentiles, the priests (of Christ) adopted the exterior vestments and
ornaments used in the pagan cult.” He might have added “their rituals” and
dogmas also.
It is a matter
of History—however unreliable the latter—for a number of facts preserved by
ancient writers corroborate it, that Church Ritualism and
Freemasonry
have sprung from the same source, and developed hand in hand.
But as Masonry,
even with its errors and later innovations, was far nearer the truth than the
Church, the latter began very soon her persecutions against it. Masonry was, in
its origin, simply archaic Gnosticism, or early esoteric Christianity; Church
Ritualism was, and is, exoteric paganism, pure and simple—remodelled, we do not
say reformed. Read the works of Ragon, a Mason who forgot more than the Masons
of to-day know. Study, collating them together, the casual but numerous
statements made by Greek and Latin writers, many of whom were Initiates, most
learned Neophytes and partakers of the Mysteries. Read finally the elaborate
and venomous slanders of the Church Fathers against the Gnostics, the Mysteries
and their Initiates—and you may end by unravelling the truth.
It is a few
philosophers who, driven by the political events of the day, tracked and
persecuted by the fanatical Bishops of early Christianity—who had yet neither
fixed ritual nor dogmas nor Church—it is these Pagans who founded the latter.
Blending most
ingeniously the truths of the Wisdom-religion with the exoteric fictions so
dear to the ignorant mobs, it is they who laid the first foundations of
ritualistic Churches and of the Lodges of modern Masonry. The latter fact was
demonstrated by Ragon in his ANTE-OMNIÆ of the modern Liturgy compared with the
ancient Mysteries, and showing the rituals conducted by the early Masons; the
former may be ascertained by a like comparison of the Church canonicals, the
sacred vessels, and the festivals of the Latin and other Churches, with those
of the pagan nations. But Churches and Masonry have widely diverged since the
days when both were one. If asked how a profane can know it, the answer comes:
ancient and modern Freemasonry are an obligatory study with every Eastern
Occultist.
Masonry, its
paraphernalia and modern innovations (the Biblical Spirit in it especially)
notwithstanding, does good both on the moral and physical planes—or did so,
hardly ten years ago, at any rate.3 It was a true ecclesia in the sense
of fraternal
union and mutual help, the only religion in the world, if we regard the term as
derived from the word religare, “to bind” together, as it made all men
belonging to it “brothers”—regardless of race and faith. Whether with the
enormous wealth
at its command it could not do far more than it does now, is no business of
ours.
We see no
visible, crying evil from this institution, and no one yet, save the Roman
Church, has ever been found to show that it did any harm. Can Church
Christianity say as much? Let ecclesiastical and profane history answer the
question. For one, it has divided the whole mankind into Cains and Abels; it
has slaughtered millions in the name of her God—the Lord of Hosts, truly, the
ferocious Jehovah Sabbaoth—and instead of giving an impetus to civilization,
the favourite boast of her followers—it has retarded it during the long and
weary Mediæval ages. It is only under the relentless assaults of science and
the revolt of men trying to free themselves, that it began to lose ground and
could no longer arrest enlightenment. Yet has it not softened, as claimed, the
“barbarous spirit of Heathendom”? We say no, most emphatically.
It is
Churchianity with its odium theologicum, since it could no longer repress human
progress, which infused its lethal spirit of intolerance, its ferocious
selfishness, greediness, and cruelty into modern civilization under the mask of
cant and meek Christianity. When were the Pagan Cæsars more bloodthirsty or
more coolly cruel than are the modern Potentates and their armies? When did the
millions of the
Proletariat starve as they do now? When has mankind shed more tears and
suffered than at present?
Yes; there was
a day when the Church and Masonry were one. These were centuries of intense
moral reaction, a transitional period of thought as heavy as a nightmare, an
age of strife. Thus, when the creation of new ideals led to the apparent
pulling down of the old fanes and the destruction of old idols, it ended in
reality with the rebuilding of those temples out of the old materials,
and the erection of the same idols under new names. It was a universal
rearrangement and whitewashing—but only skin deep. History will never be able
to tell us—but tradition and judicious research do—how many semi-Hierophants
and even high Initiates were forced to become renegades in order to ensure the
survival of the secrets of Initiation. Prætextatus, pro-consul at
Achaia, is credited with remarking in the IVth century of our era, that “to
deprive the
Greeks of the sacred mysteries which bind together the whole mankind was
equivalent to depriving them of their life.” The Initiates took perhaps the
hint, and thus joining nolens volens the followers of the new faith,
then becoming all domineering, acted accordingly. Some hellenized Jewish
Gnostics did the same; and thus more than one “Clemens Alexandrinus”—a convert
to all appearance, an ardent Neo-Platonist and the same philosophical pagan at
heart—became the instructor of ignorant Christian Bishops. In short the convert
malgré lui blended the two external mythologies, the old and the new, and while
giving out the compound to the masses, kept the sacred truths for himself.
The kind of
Christians they made may be inferred from the example of Synesius, the
Neo-Platonist. What scholar is ignorant of the fact, or would presume to deny,
that the favourite and devoted pupil of Hypatia—the virgin-philosopher,
the martyr and
victim of the infamous Cyril of Alexandria—had not even been baptised when
first offered by the bishops of Egypt the Episcopalian See of the Ptolemaïd?
Every student is aware that, when finally baptised, after having accepted the
office proffered, it was so skin-deep that he actually signed his consent only
after his conditions had been complied with and his future
privileges
guaranteed.
What the chief
clause was, is curious. It was a sine quâ non condition that he was to be
allowed to abstain from professing the (Christian) doctrines, that he, the new
Bishop, did not believe in! Thus, although baptised and ordained in the degrees
of deaconship, priesthood, and episcopate, he never separated himself from his
wife, never gave up his Platonic philosophy, nor even his sport so strictly
forbidden to every other bishop. This occurred as late as the Vth century.
Such
transactions between initiated philosophers and ignorant priests of reformed
Judaism were numerous in those days. The former sought to save their
“mystery-vows” and personal dignity, and to do so they had to resort to a
much-to-be-regretted compromise with ambition, ignorance, and the rising wave
of popular fanaticism. They believed in Divine Unity, the ONE or Solus,
unconditioned and unknowable; and still they consented to render public homage
and pay reverence to Sol, the Sun moving among his twelve apostles, the I2
signs of the Zodiac, alias the 12 Sons of Jacob. The hoi polloi remaining
ignorant of the former, worshipped the latter, and in them, their old
time-honoured gods. To transfer that worship from the solar-lunar and other
cosmic deities to the Thrones, Archangels, Dominions, and Saints was no
difficult matter; the more so since the said sidereal dignities were received
into the new Christian Canon with their old names almost unchanged. Thus,
while, during Mass, the “Grand Elect” reiterated, under his breath, his
absolute adherence to the Supreme Universal Unity of the “incomprehensible
Workman,” and pronounced in solemn and loud tones the “Sacred Word” (now
substituted by the Masonic “Word at low breath”), his assistant proceeded with
the chanting of the Kyriel of names of those inferior sidereal beings whom the
masses were made to worship.
To the profane
catechumen, indeed, who had offered prayers but a few months or weeks before to
the Bull Apis and the holy Cynocephalus, to the sacred ibis and the hawk-headed
Osiris, St. John’s eagle4 and the divine Dove (witness of the
Baptism while
hovering over the Lamb of God), must have appeared as the most natural
development and sequence to his own national and sacred zoology, which he had
been taught to worship since the day of his birth.
It may thus be
shown that both modern Freemasonry and Church ritualism descend in direct line
from initiated Gnostics, Neo-Platonists, and renegade Hierophants of the Pagan
Mysteries, the secrets of which they have lost, but which have been
nevertheless preserved by those who would not compromise. If both Church and
Masons are willing to forget the history of their true origin, the theosophists
are not. They repeat: Masonry and the three great Christian religions are all
inherited goods. The “ceremonies and passwords” of the former, and the prayers,
dogmas, and rites of the latter, are travestied copies of pure Paganism (copied
and borrowed as diligently by the Jews), and of Neo-Platonic Theosophy. Also, that the
“passwords” used even now by Biblical Masons and connected with “the tribe of
Judah,” “Tubal-Cain,” and other Zodiacal dignitaries of the Old Testament, are
the Jewish aliases of the ancient gods of the heathen mobs, not of the gods of
the Hierogrammatists, the interpreters of the true mysteries.
That which
follows proves it well. The good Masonic Brethren could hardly deny that in
name they are Solicoles indeed, the worshippers of the Sun in heaven, in whom
the erudite Ragon saw such a magnificent symbol of the G.A.O.T.U.—which it
surely is. Only the trouble he had was to prove—which no one can—that the said
G. A. O. T. U. was not rather the Sol of the small exoteric fry of the
Pro-fanes than the Solus of the High Epoptai. For the secret of the fires of
SOLUS, the spirit of which radiates in the “Blazing Star,” is a Hermetic secret
which, unless a Mason studies true Theosophy, is lost to him
for ever. He has ceased to understand now, even the little indiscretions of
Tshuddi. To this day Masons and Christians keep the Sabbath sacred, and call it
the “Lord’s” day; yet they know as well as any that both Sunday, and the
Sonntag of Protestant England and Germany, mean the Sun-day or the day of the
Sun, as it meant 2,000 years ago.
And you,
Reverend and good Fathers, Priests, Clergymen, and Bishops, you who so
charitably call Theosophy
“idolatry” and doom its adherents openly and privately to eternal perdition,
can you boast of one single rite, vestment, or sacred vessel in church or
temple that does not come to you from paganism? Nay, to assert it would be too
dangerous, in
view, not only of history, but also of the confessions of your own priestly
craft.
Let us
recapitulate if only to justify our assertions.
“Roman
sacrificators had to confess before sacrificing,” writes du Choul. The priests
of Jupiter donned a tall, square, black cap (Vide Armenian and Greek modern priests),
the head dress of the Flamines. The black soutane of the
Roman Catholic priest is the black
hierocoraces, the loose robe of the Mithraic priests, so-called from being
raven coloured (raven, corax).
The King-Priest of Babylon had a golden
seal-ring and slippers kissed by the conquered potentates, a white mantle, a
tiara of gold, to which two bandelets were suspended. The popes have the
seal-ring and the slippers for the same use; a white satin mantle bordered with
golden stars, a tiara with two bejewelled bandelets suspended to it, etc., etc.
The white linen alb (alba vestis) is the garment of the priests of Isis: the
top of the heads of the priests of Anubis was shaven (Juvenal), hence the
tonsure; the chasuble of the Christian “Father” is the copy from the upper
garment of the Phoenician priest-sacrificers, a garment called calasiris, tied
at the neck and descending to their heels. The stole comes to our priests from
the female garment worn by the Galli, the male—Nautches of the temple, whose office
was that of the Jewish Kadashim; (Vide II Kings 23:7, for the true word) their
belt of purity (?) from the ephod of the Jews, and the Isiac cord; the priests
of Isis being vowed to chastity. (Vide Ragon, for details. )
The ancient pagans used holy water or lustrations to purify their
cities, fields, temples, and men, just as it is being done now in Roman
Catholic
countries. Fonts stood at the door of every temple, full of lustral
water and called favisses and aquiminaria. Before sacrificing, the pontiff or
the curion (whence the French curé), dipping a laurel branch into the lustral
water, sprinkled with it the pious congregation assembled, and that which was
then termed lustrica and aspergilium is now called sprinkler (or goupillon, in
French). The latter was with the priestesses of Mithra the symbol of the
Universal
lingam. Dipped during the Mysteries in lustral milk, the faithful were
sprinkled with it. It was the emblem of Universal fecundity; hence the use of
the holy water in Christianity, a rite of phallic origin. More than this; the
idea underlying it is purely occult and belongs to ceremonial magic.
Lustrations were performed by fire, sulphur, air, and water. To draw the
attention of the celestial gods, ablutions were resorted to; to conjure the
nether gods away, aspersion was used.
The vaulted
ceilings of cathedrals and churches, Greek or Latin, are often painted blue and
studded with golden stars, to represent the canopy of the
heavens. This
is copied from the Egyptian temples, where solar and star worship was
performed. Again, the same reverence is paid in Christian and Masonic
architecture to the Orient (or the Eastern point) as in the days of Paganism.
Ragon described
it fully in his destroyed volumes. The princeps porta, the door of the World,
and of the “King of Glory,” by whom was meant at first the Sun, and now his
human symbol, the Christ, is the door of the Orient, and faces the East in
every church and temple. It is through this “door of life”—the solemn pathway,
through which the daily entrance of the luminary into the oblong
square6 of the earth or the Tabernacle of the Sun is effected every
morning—that the “newly born” babe is ushered, and carried to the baptismal
font; and it is to the left of this edifice (the gloomy north whither
start the “apprentices,” and where the candidates got their trial by water)
that now the fonts, and in the days of old the well (piscinas) of lustral
waters, were placed in the ancient churches, which had been pagan fanes. The
altars of heathen Lutetia were buried, and found again under the choir of
Notre-Dame of Paris, its
ancient lustral
wells existing to this day in the said Church. Almost every great ancient
Church on the Continent that antedates the Middle Ages was once a pagan temple
in virtue of the orders issued by the Bishops and Popes of Rome. Gregory the
Great (Platine en sa Vie) commands the monk Augustine, his missionary in
England, in this wise: “Destroy the idols, never the temples!
Sprinkle them
with holy water, place in them relics, and let the nations worship in the
places they are accustomed to.” We have but to turn to the works of Cardinal
Baronius, to find in the year XXXVIth of his Annals his confession.
The Holy
Church, he says, was permitted to appropriate the rites and ceremonies used by
the pagans in their idolatrous cult, since she (the Church) expiated them by
her consecration! In the Antiquités Gaulises (Book II, Ch. 19) by Fauchet, we
read that the Bishops of France adopted and used the pagan ceremonies in order
to convert followers to Christ.
This was when
Gaul was still a pagan country. Are the same rites and ceremonies used now in
Christian France, and other Roman Catholic countries, still going on in
grateful remembrance of the pagans and their gods?
Up to the IVth
century the churches knew of no altars. Up to that date the altar was a table
raised in the middle of the temple, for purposes of Communion, or fraternal
repasts (the Cœna, as mass was originally said in the evening). In the
same way now the
table is raised in the “Lodge” for Masonic Banquets, which usually close the
proceedings of a Lodge and at which the resurrected Hiram Abifs, the “Widow’s
Sons,” honour their toasts by firing, a Masonic mode of transubstantiation.
Shall we call their banquet tables altars, also? Why not?
The altars were
copies from the ara maxima of pagan Rome. The Latins placed square and oblong
stones near their tombs, and called them ara, altar; they were consecrated to
the gods Lares and Manes. Our altars are a derivation from these
square stones, another form of the boundary stones known as the gods
Termini—the Hermeses, and the Mercuries, whence Mercurius quadratus,
quadriceps, quadrifrons, etc., etc., the four-faced gods, whose symbols
these square stones were, from the highest antiquity. The stone on which the
ancient kings of Ireland were crowned was such an “altar.” Such a stone is in
Westminster Abbey, endowed, moreover, with a voice. Thus our altars and thrones
descend directly from the priapic boundary stones of the pagans—the gods
termini.
Shall the
church-going reader feel very indignant if he is told that the Christians
adopted the pagan way of worshipping in a temple, only during the
reign of
Diocletianus? Up to that period they had an insurmountable horror for altars
and temples, and held them in abomination for the first 250 years of our era.
These primitive Christians were Christians indeed; the moderns are more pagan
than any ancient idolators. The former were the Theosophists of those days;
from IVth century they became Helleno-Judaic Gentiles minus the philosophy of
the Neo-Platonists. Read what Minutius Pelix says in the IIIrd century to the
Romans:--
You fancy that
we (Christians) conceal that which we worship because we will have neither
temples nor altars? But what image of God shall we raise, since Man is himself
God’s image? What temple can we build to the Deity, when the Universe, which is
Its work, can hardly contain It? How shall we enthrone the power of such
Omnipotence in a single building? Is it not far better to consecrate to the
Deity a temple in our heart and spirit?
But then the
Chrestians of the type of Minutius Felix had in their mind the commandment of
the MASTER-INITIATE, not to pray in the synagogues and temples as the hypocrites
do, “that they may be seen of men.” ( Matthew 6:5. )
They remembered
the declarations of Paul, the Apostle-Initiate, the “Master Builder” (I
Corinthians 3:10), that MAN was the one temple of God, in which the Holy Ghost,
the Spirit of God, dwelleth. (Ibid.) They obeyed the truly Christian
precepts,
whereas the modern Christians obey but the arbitrary canons of their respective
churches, and the rules of their Elders. “Theosophists are notorious Atheists,”
exclaims a writer in the “Church Chronicle.” “Not one of them is ever
known to attend divine service . . . the Church is obnoxious to them”;
and forthwith uncorking the vials of his wrath, he pours out their contents on
the infidel, heathen F.T.S. The modern Churchman stones the Theosophist as his
ancient forefather, the Pharisee of the “Synagogue of the Libertines” (Acts
6:9) stoned Stephen, for saying that which even many Christian Theosophists
say, namely that “the Most High dwelleth not intemples made with hands” (Ibid.
48); and they “suborn men” just as these iniquitous judges did (Ibid. II) to
testify against us.Forsooth, friends, you are indeed the righteous descendants
of your predecessors, whether of the colleagues of Saul, or of those of Pope
Leo X, the cynical author of the ever famous sentence: “How useful to us this
fable of Christ,” “Quantum nobis prodest hac fabula Christi!”
The “Solar
Myth” theory has become in our day stale—ad nauseam—repeated as we hear it from
the four cardinal points of Orientalism and Symbolism, and applied indiscriminately
to all things and all religions, except Church Christianity and state-religion.
No doubt the Sun was throughout the whole antiquity and since days immemorial
the symbol of the Creative Deity—with every nation, not with the Parsis alone;
but so he is with the Ritualists. As in days of old, so it is
now. Our
central star is the “Father” for the pro-fanes, the Son of the ever unknowable
Deity for the Epoptai. Says the same Mason, Ragon, “the Sun was the most
sublime and natural image of the GREAT ARCHITECT, as the most ingenious of all
the allegories under which the moral and good man (the true sage) had ever
endowed infinite and limitless Intelligence.” Apart from the latter assumption,
Ragon is right; for he shows this symbol gradually receding from the ideal so
represented and conceived, and becoming finally from a symbol the original, in
the minds of his ignorant worshippers. Then the great Masonic author proves
that it is the physical Sun which was regarded as both the Father and the Son by
the early Christians.
“Oh, initiated
Brethren,” he exclaims. “Can you forget that in the temples of the existing
religion a large lamp burns night and day? It is suspended in
front of the chief altar, the depository of
the ark of the Sun. Another lamp burning before the altar of the virgin-mother
is the emblem of the light of
the moon.
Clemens Alexandrinus tells us that the Egyptians were the first to establish
the religious use of the lamps. . . . Who does not know that the most sacred
and terrible duty was entrusted to the Vestals? If the Masonic temples are
lighted with three astral lights, the sun, the moon. and Episcopes (Wardens, in
French Surveillants), it is because one of the Fathers of Masonry, the learned
Pythagoras, ingenuously suggests that we should not speak of divine things
without a light. Pagans celebrated a festival of lamps called Lampadophorics in
honour of Minerva, Prometheus, and Vulcan. But Lactantius
and some of the
earliest fathers of the new faith complained bitterly of this pagan
introduction of lamps in the Churches; ‘If they deigned,’ writes Lactantius,
‘to contemplate that light which we call the SUN, they would soon recognise
that God has no need of their lamps.’ And Vigilantius adds: ‘Under the pretext
of religion the Church established a Gentile custom of lighting vile candles.
while the SUN is there illuminating us with a thousand lights. Is it not a
great honour for the LAMB OF GOD (the sun thus represented), which placed in
the middle of the throne (the Universe) fills it with the radiance of his
Majesty?’ Such passages prove to us that in those days the primitive Church
worshipped THE GREAT ARCHITECT OF THE WORLD in its image the SUN, sole of its kind.”
(The Mass and its Mysteries, pp. 19 and 20.)
Indeed, while
Christian candidates have to pronounce the Masonic oath turned to the East and
that their “Venerable” keeps in the Eastern corner, because the Neophytes were
made to do the same during the Pagan Mysteries, the Church has, in her turn,
preserved the identical rite. During the High Mass, the High-Altar (ara maxima)
is ornamented with the Tabernacle, or the pyx (the box in which the Host is
kept), and with six lighted tapers. The esoteric meaning of the pyx and
contents—the symbol of the Christ-Sun—is that it represents the resplendent
luminary, and the six tapers the six planets (the early Christians knowing of
no more), three on his right and three on his left. This is a copy of the seven
branched candlestick of the synagogue, which has an identical meaning. “Sol est
Dominus Meus” “the Sun is my Lord!” exclaims David in Psalm 95, translated very
ingeniously in the authorized version by “The Lord is a great God,” “a great
King above all Gods” (v. 3), or planets truly! Augustin Chalis is more sincere
in Philosophie des Religions Compareés (Vol. II, p. 18), when writes:
All are devs
(demons), on this Earth, save the God of the Seers (Initiates) the sublime IAO;
and if in Christ you see aught than the SUN, then you adore a dev, a phantom
such as are all the children of night.
The East being the cardinal point whence arises the luminary of the Day,
the great giver and sustainer of life, the creator of al that lives and
breathes on
this globe, what wonder if all the nation of the Earth worshipped in him
the visible agent of the invisible Principle and Cause; and that mass should be
said in the honour of him who is the giver of messis or “harvest.” But, between
worshipping the ideal as a whole, and the physical symbol, a part chosen to
represent that whole and the ALL, there is an abyss. For the learned Egyptian,
the Sun was the “eye” of Osiris, not Osiris him self; the same for the learned
Zoroastrians. For the early Christians the Sun became the Deity, in toto; and
by dint of casuistics, sophistry, and dogmas not to be questioned, the modern
Christian churches have contrived to force even the educated world to accept
the same, while hypnotising it into a belief that their god is the one living
true Deity, the maker of, not the Sun—a demon worshipped by the “heathen.” But
what may be the difference between a wicked demon, and the anthropomorphic God,
e.g., as represented in Solomon’s Proverbs? That “God,” unless poor, helpless,
ignorant men call upon him, when their “fear cometh as desolation” and their
“destruction as a whirlwind,” threatens them in such words as these “I will
laugh at your calamities, I will mock when your fear cometh!” (Prov. 1:27.)
Identify this God with the great Avatar on whom the Christian legend is hung;
make him one with that true Initiate who said, “Blessed are they that mourn;
for they shall be comforted”: and what is the result? Such identification alone
quite sufficient to justify the fiendish joy of Tertullian, who laughed and
rejoiced at the idea of his infidel next of kin roasting in hell-fire the
advice of Hieronymus to the Christian convert to trample over the body of his
pagan mother, if she seeks to prevent him leaving her for ever to follow
Christ; and it makes of all the Church tyrants, murderers, and omnes gentes of
the Inquisition, the grandest and noblest exemplars of practical Christianity
that have ever lived!
The ritualism
of primitive Christianity—as now sufficiently shown—sprang from ancient
Masonry. The latter was, in its turn, the offspring of the, then, almost dead
Mysteries. Of these we have now a few words to say.
It is well
known that throughout antiquity, besides the popular worship composed of the
dead-letter forms and empty exoteric ceremonies, every nation had its secret
cult known to the world as the MYSTERIES. Strabo, one among many others,
warrants for this assertion. (Vide Georg, lib. 10.) No one received admittance
into them save those prepared for it by special training. The neophytes instructed
in the upper temples were initiated into the final Mysteries in the crypts.
These instructions were the last surviving heirlooms of archaic wisdom, and it
is under the guidance of high Initiates that they were enacted. We use the word
“enacted” purposely; for the oral instructions at low breath were given only in
the crypts, in solemn silence and secrecy. During the public classes and
general teachings, the lessons in cosmogony and theogony were delivered in
allegorical representation, the modus operandi of the gradual evolution of
Kosmos, worlds, and finally of our earth, of gods and men, all was imparted in
a
symbolical way.
The great public performances during the festivals of the Mysteries, were
witnessed by the masses and the personified truths worshipped by the
multitudes—blindly. Alone the high Initiates, the Epoptœ, understood their
language and real meaning. All this, and so far, is well known to the world of
scholars.
It was a common
claim of all the ancient nations that the real mysteries of what is called so
unphilosophically, creation, were divulged to the elect of our (fifth) race by
its first dynasties of divine Rulers—gods in flesh, “divine
incarnations,”
or Avatars, so called. The last Stanzas, given from the Book of Dzyan in The
Secret Doctrine (Vol. II, p. 21 ), speak of those who ruled over the
descendants “produced from the holy stock,” and . . . “who re-descended, who
made peace with the fifth (race) who taught and instructed it.”
The phrase
“made peace” shows that there had been a previous quarrel. The fate of the
Atlanteans in our philosophy, and that of the prediluvians in the Bible,
corroborates the idea. Once more—many centuries before the Ptolemies—the same
abuse of the sacred knowledge crept in amongst the initiates of the Sanctuary
in Egypt. Preserved for countless ages in all their purity, the sacred
teachings of the gods, owing to personal ambition and selfishness, became
corrupted again.
The meaning of
the symbols found itself but too often desecrated by unseemly interpretations,
and very soon the Eleusinian Mysteries remained the only ones pure from
adulteration and sacrilegious innovations. These were in honour of (Ceres)
Demeter, or Nature, and were celebrated in Athens, the flowers of the intellect
of Asia Minor and Greece being initiated thereinto. In his 4th Book,
Zosimus states that these Initiates embraced the whole of mankind;7 while
Aristides calls the Mysteries the common temple of the earth.
It is to
preserve some reminiscence of this “temple,” and to rebuild it, if need be,
that certain elect ones among the initiated began to be set apart. This was
done by their High Hierophants in every century, from the time when the sacred
allegories showed the first signs of desecration and decay. For the
great Elusinia finally shared the same fate as the others. Their earlier
excellency
and purpose are described by Clement of Alexandria who shows the greater
Mysteries divulging the secrets and the mode of construction of the Universe,
this being the beginning, the end and the ultimate goal of human knowledge, for
in them was
shown to the initiated Nature and all things as they are. (Strom. 8.) This is
the Pythagorean Gnosis, Epictetus speaks
of these instructions in the highest terms: “All that is ordained therein was
established by our masters
for the
instruction of men and the correction of our customs.” (Apud Arrian. Dissert. lib. cap. 21.) Plato asserts in the
Phaedo the same: the object of the Mysteries was to re-establish the soul in
its primordial purity, or that state of perfection from which it had fallen.
But there came
a day when the Mysteries deviated from their purity in the same way as the
exoteric religions. This began when the State bethought itself, on the advice
of Aristogeiton (510 B.C.), of drawing from the Eleusinia a constant and
prolific source of income. A law was passed to that effect.
Henceforth, no
one could be initiated without paying a certain sum of money for the privilege.
That boon which
could hitherto be acquired only at the price of incessant, almost superhuman
effort, toward virtue and excellency, was now to be purchased for so much gold.
Laymen—and even priests themselves—while accepting the desecration lost
eventually their past reverence for the inner Mysteries, and this led to
further profanation of the Sacred Science. The rent made in the veil widened
with every century; and more than ever the Supreme Hierophants, dreading the
final publication and distortion of the most holy secrets of nature, laboured
to eliminate them from the inner programme, limiting the full knowledge thereof
but to the few. It is those set apart who soon became the only custodians of
the divine heirloom of the ages. Seven centuries later, we find Apuleius, his
sincere inclination toward magic and the mystical notwithstanding, writing in
his Golden Ass a bitter satire against the hypocrisy and debauchery of certain
orders of half-initiated priests. It is through him also, that we learn that in
his day (IInd century A.D.) the Mysteries had become so universal that persons
of all ranks and conditions, in every country, men, women, and children all
were initiated! Initiation had become as necessary in his day as baptism has
since become with the Christians; and, as the latter is now, so the former had
become then—i.e., meaningless, and a purely dead-letter ceremony of mere form.
Still later, the fanatics of the new religion laid their heavy hand on the
Mysteries.
The Epoptæ,
they “who see things as they are” disappeared one by one, emigrating into
regions inaccessible to the Christians. The Mystæ (from Mystes “or veiled”)
“they who see things only as they appear” remained very soon, alone, sole
masters of the situation.
It is the
former, the “set apart,” who have preserved the true secrets; it is the Mystæ,
those who knew them only superficially, who laid the first foundation stone of
modern masonry; and it is. from this half pagan, half converted primitive
fraternity of Masons that Christian ritualism and most of dogmas were born. Both
the Epoptæ and the Mystæ are entitled to the name of Masons: for both carrying
out their pledges to, and the injunction of their long departed Hierophants
and “Kings” rebuilt, the Epoptæ, their
“lower,” and the Mystæ, their “upper temples.
For such were
the irrespective appellations in antiquity, and are so to this day in certain
regions. Sophocles speaks in the Electra (Act 2) of the foundations of
Athens—the site of the Eleusinian Mysteries—as being the “sacred edifice of the
gods,” i.e. built by the gods. Initiation was spoken of as “walking into the
temple,” and “cleaning,” or rebuilding the temple referred to the body of an
initiate on his last and supreme trial. (Vide St. John’s Gospel, 2:19). The
esoteric doctrine, also, was sometimes called by the name of “Temple” and
popular exoteric religion, by that of “city.” To build a temple meant to found
an esoteric school; to “build a city temple” signified to establish a public
cult. Therefore, the true surviving “Masons” of the lower Temple, or the crypt,
the sacred place of initiation, are the only custodians of the true Masonic
secrets now lost to the world. We yield willingly to the modern Fraternity of
Masons the title of “Builders of the higher Temple,” as the à priori
superiority of the comparative adjective is as illusionary as the blaze of the
burning bush of Moses itself in the Templar’s Lodges.
The
misunderstood allegory known as the Descent into Hades, has wrought infinite
mischief. The exoteric “fable” of Hercules and Theseus descending into the
infernal regions; the journey thither of Orpheus, who found his way by the
power of his lyre (Ovid Metam.); of Krishna, and finally of Christ, who
“descended into Hell and the third day rose again from the dead”—was twisted
out of recognition by the non-initiated adapters of pagan rites and
transformers thereof, into Church rites and dogmas.
Astronomically,
this descent into hell symbolized the Sun during the autumnal equinox when
abandoning the higher sidereal regions—there was a supposed fight between him
and the Demon of Darkness who got the best of our luminary.
Then the Sun
was imagined to undergo a temporary death and to descend into the infernal
regions. But mystically, it typified the initiatory rites in the crypts of the
temple, called the Underworld. Bacchus, Herakles, Orpheus, Asklepios and all
the other visitors of the crypt, all descended into hell and ascended thence on
the third day, for all were initiates and “Builders of the lower Temple.” The
words addressed by Hermes to Prometheus, chained on the arid rocks of the
Caucasus—i. e., bound by ignorance to his physical body and devoured therefore
by the vultures of passion—apply to every neophyte, to every Chrestos on trial.
“To such labours look thou for no termination until the (or a) god shall appear
as a substitute in thy pangs and shall be willing to go both to gloomy Hades
and to the murky depths around Tartarus.” (Æschylus: Prometheus, 1027, ff.)
They mean simply that until Prometheus (or man) could find the “God,” or
Hierophant (the Initiator) who would willingly descend into the crypts of
initiation, and walk around Tartarus with him, the vulture of passion would
never cease to gnaw his vitals.8 Æschylus as a pledged Initiate could say no
more; but Aristophanes less pious, or more daring, divulges the secret to those
who are not blinded by a too strong preconception, in his immortal satire on
Heracles’ descent into Hell. (Frogs.) There we find the chorus of the “blessed
ones” (the initiated), the Elysian Fields, the arrival of Bacchus (the god
Hierophant) with Herakles, the reception with lighted torches, emblems of new
LIFE and RESURRECTION from the darkness of human ignorance to the light of
spiritual knowledge—eternal LIFE.
Every word of
the brilliant satire shows the inner meaning of the poet:
Wake, burning
torches .. . for thou comest
Shaking them in
thy hand, Iacche, Phosphoric star of the nightly rite.All such final
initiations took place during the night. To speak, therefore, of anyone as
having descended into Hades, was equivalent in antiquity to calling him a full
Initiate. To those who feel inclined to reject this explanation, I would offer
a query. Let them explain, in that case, the meaning of a sentence
in the sixth
book of Virgil’s Æneid. What can the poet mean, if not that which is asserted
above, when introducing the aged Anchises in the Elysian fields, he makes him
advise Æneas his son, to travel to Italy . . . where he would have to
fight in
Latium, a rude and barbarous people; therefore, he adds, before you venture
there “Descend into Hades,” i. e. get yourself initiated.
The benevolent
clericals, who are so apt to send us on the slightest provocation to Tartarus
and the infernal regions, do not suspect what good wishes for us the threat
contains; and what a holy character one must be before one gets into such
a sanctified
place.
It is not
pagans alone who had their Mysteries. Bellarmin (De Eccl. Triumph. lib. 2, cap.
14) states that the early Christians adopted, after the example of pagan ceremonies,
the custom of assembling in the church during the nights preceding their
festivals, to hold vigils or “wakes.” Their ceremonies were performed at first
with the most edifying holiness and purity. But very shortly after that, such
immoral abuses crept into these “assemblies” that the bishops found it
necessary to abolish them. We have read in dozens of works about the
licentiousness in the pagan religious festivals. Cicero is quoted (de Leg. lib.
2, cap. 15) showing Diagondas, the Theban, finding no other means of remedying
such disorders in the ceremonies than the suppression of the Mysteries
themselves. When we contrast the two kinds of celebrations, however, the Pagan
Mysteries hoary with age centuries before our era, and the Christian Agapæ and
others in a religion hardly born and claiming such a purifying influence on its
converts, we can only pity the mental blindness of its defenders and quote for
their benefit Roscommon, who asks:--
When you begin with somuch pomp and show,
Why is the end so little and so low? Primitive Christianity—being derived from
the primitive Masonry—had its grip. pass-words, and degrees of initiation.
“Masonry” is an old term but it came into use very late in our era. Paul calls
himself a “master-builder” and he was one.
The ancient Masons called themselves by various names and most of the
Alexandrian Eclectics, the Theosophists of Ammonias Saccas and the later
Neo-Platonists, were all virtually Masons. They were all bound by oath
to secrecy, considered themselves a Brotherhood, and had also their signs of
recognition. The Eclectics or Philaletheians comprised within their ranks the
ablest and most learned scholars of the day. as also several crowned heads.
Says the author of The Eclectic Philosophy:
Their doctrines
were adopted by pagans and Christians in Asia and Europe, and for a season
everything seemed favourable for a general fusion of religious belief. The
Emperors Alexander Severus and Julian embraced them. Their predominating
influence upon religious ideas excited the jealousy of the Christians of
Alexandria. The school was removed to Athens, and finally closed by the Emperor
Justinian. Its professors withdrew to Persia,9 where they made many disciples.
A few more
details may prove perchance, interesting. We know that the Eleusinian Mysteries
survived all others. While the secret cults of the minor gods such as the
Curates, the Dactyli, the worship of Adonis, of the Kabiri, and even those of
old Egypt had entirely disappeared under the revengeful and cruel hand of the
pitiless Theodosius,10 the Mysteries of Eleusis could not be so easily disposed
of. They were indeed the religion of mankind, and shone in all their ancient
splendour if not in their primitive purity. It took several centuries to
abolish them, and they could not be entirely suppressed before the year 396 of
our era.
It is then that
the “Builders of the higher, or City Temple” appeared first on the scene and
worked unrelentingly to infuse their rituals and peculiar dogmas into the
nascent and ever fighting and quarrelling church. The triple Sanctus of
the Roman
Catholic Mass is the triple S... S... S... of these early Masons, and is the
modern prefix to their documents or “any written balustre—the initial of
Salutem, or Health” as cunningly put by a Mason. “This triple masonic
salutation is the most ancient among their greetings.” (Ragon.)
But they did
not limit their grafts on the tree of the Christian religion to this alone.
During the Mysteries of Eleusis, wine represented Bacchus and
Ceres—wine and
bread, or corn.11 Now Ceresor Demeter was the female productive principle of
the Earth; the spouse of Father Æther, or Zeus; and Bacchus, the son of
Zeus-Jupiter, was his father manifested: in other words, Ceres and Bacchus were
the personifications of Substance and Spirit, the two vivifying principles in
Nature and on Earth. The hierophant Initiator presented symbolically, before
the final revelation of the mysteries, wine and bread to the candidate, who ate
and drank, in token that the spirit was to quicken matter: i.e. the divine
wisdom of the Higher-Self was to enter into and take possession of his inner
Self or Soul through what was to be revealed to him.
This rite was
adopted by the Christian Church. The Hierophant who was called the “Father,”
has now passed, part and parcel—minus knowledge—into the “Father” priest, who
to-day administers the same communion. Jesus calls himself a vine and his
“Father” the husbandman; and his injunction at the Last Supper shows his
thorough knowledge of the symbolical meaning (Vide infra, note) of bread and
wine, and his identification with the logoi of the ancients. “Whose eateth my
flesh and
drinketh my blood hath eternal life.” “This is a hard saying,” he adds. . . .
“The words (rhemata, or arcane utterances) that I speak unto you, they are
Spirit and they are Life.” They are; because “it is the Spirit that
quickeneth.” Furthermore these rhemata of Jesus are indeed the arcane
utterances of an Initiate.
But between
this noble rite, as old as symbolism, and its later anthropomorphic
interpretation, now known as transubstantiation, there is an abyss of
ecclesiastical
sophistry. With what force the exclamation—“Woe unto you lawyers. For ye have
taken away the key of knowledge,” (and will not permit even now gnosis to be
given to others); with what tenfold force, I say, it applies more now than
then. Aye; that gnosis, “ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were (and
are) entering ye prevented,” and still prevent. Nor has the
modern
priesthood alone laid itself open to this blame. Masons, the descendants, or at
any rate the successors, of the “Builders of the upper Temple” during the
Mysteries, they who ought to know better, will pooh-pooh and scorn any one
among their own brethren who will remind them of their true origin. Several
great modern Scholars and Kabalists, who are Masons, and could be named,
received worse than the cold shoulder from their Brethren. It is ever the same
old, old story. Even Ragon, the most . learned in his day among all the Masons
of our century, complains of it, in these words:--
All the ancient
narratives attest that the initiations in the days of old had an imposing
ceremonial, and became memorable for ever through the grand truths divulged and
the knowledge that resulted therefrom. And yet there are some modern Masons, of
half-learning, who hasten to treat as charlatans all those who successfully
remind of, and explain to them these ancient ceremonies! (Cours. Philos. p. 87 note [2].)
Vanitas
vanitatum! nothing is new under the sun. The “Litanies of the Virgin Mary”
prove it in the sincerest way. Pope Gregory I, introduces the worship of the
Virgin Mary and the Chalcedonian Council proclaim her the mother of God. But
the author of the Litanies had not even the decency (or is it the brains?) to
furnish her with any other than pagan adjectives and titles, as I shall
presently show. Not a symbol, not a metaphor of this famous Litany but belonged
to a crowd of goddesses; all Queens, Virgins, or Mothers; these three titles applying
to Isis, Rhea, Cybele, Diana, Lucifera, Lucina, Luna, Tellus, Latona triformis,
Proserpina, Hecate, Juno, Vesta, Ceres, Leucothea, Astarte, celestial Venus and
Urania, Alma Venus, etc., etc., etc.
Besides the
primitive signification of trinity (the esoteric, or that Father, Mother, Son)
does not this Western trimurti (three faces) mean in the masonic
pantheon: “Sun,
Moon, and the Venerable”? a slight alteration, forsooth, from the Germanic and
Northern Fire, Sun and Moon.
It is the
intimate knowledge of this, perchance, that made the Mason, J. M. Ragon
describe his profession of faith thus:
For me the Son
is the same as Horus, son of Osiris and Isis; he is the SUN who, every year
redeems the world from sterility and the universal death of the races.
And he goes on
to speak of the Virgin Mary’s particular litanies, temples, festivals, masses
and Church services, pilgrimages, oratories, Jacobins, Franciscans, vestals,
prodigies, ex voto, niches, statues, etc., etc., etc.
De Maleville, a
great Hebrew scholar and translator of Rabbinical literature, observes that the
Jews give to the moon all those names which, in the Litanies, are used to
glorify the Virgin. He finds in the Litanies of Jesus all the attributes of
Osiris—the Eternal Sun, and of Horus, the Annual Sun. And he proves it.Mater Christi is the mother
of the Redeemer of the old Masons, who is the Sun.
The hoi polloi
among the Egyptians, claimed that the child, symbol of the great central star,
Horus, was the Son of Osireth and Oseth, whose souls had ensouled, after their
death, the Sun and the Moon. Isis became, with the Phœnicians, Astarte, the
names under which they adored the Moon, personified as a woman adorned with
horns, which symbolised the crescent. Astarte was represented at the autumnal
equinox after her husband (the Sun’s) defeat by the Prince of Darkness, and
descent into Hades, as weeping over the loss of her consort, who is also her
son, as Isis does that of her consort, brother and son (Osiris-Horus). Astarte
holds in her hand a cruciform stick, a regular cross, and stands weeping on the
crescent moon.
The Christian
Virgin Mary is often represented in the same way, standing on the new moon,
surrounded by stars and weeping for her son juxta crucem lacrymosa dum pendebat
(Vide Stabat Mater Dolorosa). Is not she the heiress of Isis and Astarte? asks
the author.
Truly, and you
have but to repeat the Litany to the Virgin of the R. Catholic Church, to find
yourself repeating ancient incantations to Adonaïa (Venus), the mother of Adonis,
the Solar god of so many nations; to Mylitta (the Assyrian Venus), goddess of
nature; to Alilat, whom the Arabs symbolized by the two lunar horns; to Selene,
wife and sister of Helion, the Sun god of the Greeks; or, to the Magna Mater, .
. . honestissima, purissima, castissima, the Universal Mother of all
Beings—because SHE IS MOTHER NATURE.
Verily is Maria
(Mary) the Isis Myrionymos, the Goddess Mother of the ten thousand names! As
the Sun was Phœbus, in heaven, so he became Apollo, on earth, and Pluto in the
still lower regions (after sunset); so the moon was Phœbe in heaven, and Diana
on earth (Gœa, Latona, Ceres); becoming Hecate and Proserpine in Hades. Where
is the wonder then, if Mary is called regina virginum, “Queen of Virgins,” and
castissima (most chaste), when even the prayers offered to her at the sixth
hour of the morning and the evening are copied from those sung by the “heathen”
Gentiles at the same hours in honour of Phœbe and Hecate? The verse of the
“Litany to the Virgin,” stella matutina,12 we are informed, is a faithful copy
of a verse from the litany of the triformis of the pagans. It is at the Council
which condemned Nestorius that Mary was first titled as the “Mother of
God,” mater dei.
In our next, we shall have something to say about this famous Litany of
the Virgin, and show its origin in full. We shall cull our proofs, as we go
along, from the classics and the moderns, and supplement the whole from the
annals of religions as found in the Esoteric Doctrine. Meanwhile, we may add a
few more statements and give the etymology of the most sacred terms in
ecclesiastical ritualism.
Let us give a
few moments of attention to the assemblies of the “Builders of the upper
Temple” in early Christianity. Ragon has shown plainly to us the origin of the
following terms:--
(a) “The word
‘mass,’ comes from the Latin Messis—‘harvest,’ whence the noun Messias, ‘he who
ripens the harvest,’ Christ, the Sun.” (b) The word “Lodge” used by the Masons,
the feeble successors of the Initiates, has itsroot in loga, (loka, in
Sanskrit) a locality and a world;
and in the
Greek logos, the Word, a discourse; signifying in its full meaning “a place
where certain things are discussed.”
These
assemblies of the logos of the primitive initiated masons came to be called
synaxis, “gatherings” of the Brethren for the purpose of praying and
celebrating the cœna (supper) wherein only bloodless offerings, fruit and
cereals, were used. Soon after these offerings began to be called hostiœ or
sacred and pure hosties, in contrast to the impure sacrifices (as of prisoners
of war, hostes, whence the word hostage). As the offerings consisted of the harvest
fruits, the first fruits of messis, thence the word “mass.” Since no father of
the Church mentions, as some scholars would have it, that the word mass comes
from the Hebrew missah (oblatum, offering) one explanation is as good as the
other. For an exhaustive enquiry on the word missa and mizda, see King’s
Gnostics, pp. 124, et seq.
Now the word
synaxis was also called by the Greeks agyrmos,
(a collection of men, assembly). It referred to initiation into the
Mysteries. Both
words—synaxis
and agyrmos13--became obsolete with the Christians, and the word missa, or
mass, prevailed and remained. Theologians will have it, desirous as they are to
veil its etymology, that the term messias (Messiah) is derived from the Latin
word missus (messenger, the sent). But if so, then again it may be applied as
well to the Sun, the annual messenger, sent to bring light and new life to the
earth and its products. The Hebrew word for Messiah mâshiah (anointed, from
mashah, to anoint) will hardly apply to, or bear out the identity in the
ecclesiastical sense; nor will the Latin missa ( mass) derive well from that other
Latin word mittere, missum, “to send,” or “dismiss.”
Because the
communion service—its heart and soul—is based on the consecration and oblation
of the host or hostia (sacrifice), a wafer ( a thin, leaf-like bread)
representing the body of Christ in the Eucharist, and that such wafer of flour
is a direct development of the harvest or cereal offerings.
Again, the
primitive masses were cœneas (late dinners or suppers), which, from the simple
meals of
Romans, who “ washed, were anointed, and wore a cenatory garment” at dinner
became consecrated meals in memory of the last Supper of Christ.
The converted
Jews in the days of the Apostles met at their synaxes, to read the Evangels and
their correspondence (Epistles). St. Justin (150 A.D.) tells us that these
solemn assemblies were held on the day called Sun (Sunday, dies magnus), on
which days there were psalms chanted “collation of baptism with pure water and
the agapœ of the holy cœna with bread and wine.” What has this hybrid
combination of pagan Roman dinners, raised by the inventors of church dogmas to
a sacred mystery, to do with the Hebrew Messiah “he who causes to go down into
the pit” (or Hades), or its Greek transliteration Messias. As shown by Nork,
Jesus “was never anointed either as high priest or king,” therefore his name of
Messias cannot be derived from its present Hebrew equivalent. The less so,
since the word anointed, or “rubbed with oil” a Homeric term, is chris, and chrio,
both to anoint the body with oil. (See LUCIFER for 1887, “The Esoteric
Meaning of the Gospels.”)
Another high
Mason, the author of “The Source of Measures,” summarizes this imbroglio of the
ages in a few lines by saying:--
The fact is
there were two Messiahs: One, as causing himself to go down into the pit, for
the salvation of the world;14 this was the sun shorn of his golden rays and
crowned with blackened ones (symbolizing this loss) as the thorns. The other,
was the triumphant Messiah, mounted up to this summit of the arch of Heaven,
personated as the Lion of the tribe of Judah. In both instances he had the
cross. . . .”
At the
Ambarvales, the festivals in honour of Ceres, the Arval (the assistant of the
High Priest) clad in pure white, placing on the hostia (sacrificial heap) a
cake of corn, water and wine, tasted the wine of libation and gave to all
others
to taste. The
oblation (or offering) was then taken up by the High Priest.
It symbolized
the three kingdoms of Nature—the cake of corn (vegetable kingdom), the
sacrificial vase or chalice (mineral), and the pall (the scarf-like garment) of
the Hierophant, an end of which he threw over the oblation wine cup. This pall
was made of pure white lamb skins.
The modern
priest repeats, gesture for gesture, the acts of the pagan priest. He lifts up
and offers the bread to be consecrated; blesses the water that is to be put in
the chalice, and then pours the wine into it, incenses the altar, etc., etc.,
and going to the altar washes his fingers saying, “I will wash my hands among
the INNOCENT and encompass thy altar, O Lord.” He does so, because the ancient
and pagan priest did the same, saying, “I wash (with lustral water) my hands
among the INNOCENT (the fully initiated Brethren) and encompass thy altar, O
great Goddess” (Ceres). Thrice went the high priest round the altar loaded with
offerings, carrying high above his head the chalice covered with the end of his
snow-white lamb-skin. . . .
The consecrated
vestment worn by the Pope, the pall, “has the form of a scarf made of white
wool, embroidered with purple crosses.” In the Greek Church, the priest covers,
with the end of the pall thrown over his shoulder, the chalice.
The High Priest
of antiquity repeated thrice during the divine services his “O redemptor mundi”
to Apollo ‘the Sun’ his mater Salvatoris, to Ceres, the earth, his Virgo
paritura to the Virgin Goddess etc., and pronounced seven ternary
commemorations. (Hearken, O Masons!)
The ternary
number, so reverenced in antiquity, is as reverenced now, and is pronounced
five times during the mass. We have three introibo, three Kyrie eleison, three
mea culpa, three agnus dei, three Dominus Vobiscum. A true masonic series! Let
us add to this the three et cum spiritu tuo, and the Christian mass yields to
us the same seven triple commemorations. PAGANISM, MASONRY, and THEOLOGY—such
is the historical trinity now ruling the world sub rosa. Shall we close with a
Masonic greeting and say:--
Illustrious
officers of Hiram Abif, Initiates, and “Widow’s sons.”
The Kingdom of
Darkness and ignorance is fast dispelling, but there . are regions still
untouched by the hand of the scholar, and as black as the night of Egypt. Fratres, sobrii estote et vigilate!
1 From pro,
“before,” and fanum, “the temple,” i.e., the non-initiates who stood before the
fane, but dared not enter it.--(Vide the Works of Ragon.)
2 The Earth, and the Moon, its parent, are interchangeable. Thus all the
lunar goddesses were also the representative symbols of the Earth.—Vide The
Secret Doctrine, “Symbolism.”
3 Since the
origin of Masonry. the split between the British and American Masons and the
French “Grand Orient” of the “Widow’s Sons” is the first one that has ever
occurred. It bids fair to make of these two sections of Masonry a Masonic
Protestant and a Roman Catholic Church, as far as regards ritualism and
brotherly love,
at all events.
4 It is an error to say that John the Evangelist became the patron Saint
of Masonry only after the XVIth century, and it implies a double mistake.
Between John the “Divine,” the “Seer” and the writer of Revelation, and John
the Evangelist who is now shown in company of the Eagle, there is a great
difference, as the latter John is a creation of Irenæus, along with the fourth
gospel. Both were the result of the quarrel of the Bishop d Lyons with the
Gnostics, and no one will ever tell what was the real name of the writer of the
grandest of the Evangels.
But what we do know is, that the Eagle is the legal property of John,
the author of the Apocalypsis, written originally centuries B.C., and only
re-edited, before receiving canonical hospitality. This John, or Oannes, was
the accepted patron of all the Egyptian and Greek Gnostics (who were the early
Builders or Masons of “Solomon’s Temple,” as, earlier, of the Pyramids) from
the beginning of time. The Eagle was his attribute, the most archaic of
symbols—being the Egyptian Ah, the bird of Zeus, and sacred to the Sun with
every ancient people. Even the Jews adopted it among the Initiated Kabalists,
as “the symbol of the Sephirah Tiph-e-reth, the spiritual Æther or air,” says
Mr. Myer’s “Qabbalah.” With the Druids the eagle was the symbol of the Supreme
Deity, and again a portion of the cherubic symbol.
Adopted by the
pre-Christian Gnostics, it could be seen at the foot of the Tau in Egypt,
before
it was placed
in the Rose-Croix degree at the foot of the Christian cross. Pre-eminently the
bird of the Sun, the Eagle is necessarily connected with every solar god, and
is the symbol of every seer who looks into the astral light, and sees in it the
shadows of the Past, Present, and Future, as easily as the Eagle looks at the
Sun.
5 Except,
perhaps, the temples and chapels of dissident Protestants, which are built
anywhere, and used for more than one purpose. In America I know of chapels
hired for fairs and shows, and even theatres; to-day a chapel, the day after
sold for debts, and fitted for a gin shop or a public house. I speak of
chapels, of course, not of Churches and Cathedrals.
6 A Masonic
term; a symbol of the Arks of Noah, and of the Covenant, of the Temple of
Solomon, the Tabernacle, and the Camp of the Israelites, all built as “oblong
squares.” Mercury and Apollo were represented by oblong cubes and squares, and
so is Kaaba, the great temple at Mecca.
7 Says Cicero in de Nat. Deorum, lib. I—“omitto Eleusinam sanctam illam
et augustam; ab initiantur gentes orarum ultima.”
8 The dark region in the crypt, into which the candidate under
initiation was supposed to throw away for ever his worst passions and lusts.
Hence the allegories by Homer, Ovid, Virgil, etc., all accepted literally by
the modern scholar.
Phlegethon was the river in Tartarus into which the initiate was thrice
plunged by the Hierophant, after which the trials were over and the new man
born anew. He had left in the dark stream the old sinful man for ever, and
issued on the third day, from Tartarus, as an individuality, the personality
being dead.
Such characters as Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus, etc., are each a
personification of some human passion.
9And we may
add, beyond, to India and Central Asia, for we find their influence everywhere
in Asiatic countries.
10 The murderer
of the Thessalonians, who were butchered by this pious son of the Church.
11 Bacchus is
certainly of Indian origin. Pausanias shows him the first to lead an expedition
against India, and the first to throw a bridge over the Euphrates. “The cable ‘
which served to unite the two opposite shores being exhibited to this day,”
writes this historian, “it being woven from vine-branches and trainings of
ivy.” (X 29. 4.) Arrianus and Quintus-Curtius explained the allegory of
Bacchus’ birth from the thigh of Zeus, by saying that he was born on the Indian
Mount Meru (from thigh). We are aware
that Eratosthenes and Strabo
believed the
Indian Bacchus had been invented by flatterers to simply please Alexander,
believed to have conquered India as Bacchus is supposed to have done. But on
the other hand Cicero mentions the god as a Son of Thyoné and Nisus; and
Dionysus or means the god Dis from Mount
Nys in India. Bacchus crowned with ivy, or Kissos is Krishna, one of whose
names was Kissen. Dionysus was pre-eminently the god who was expected to
liberate the souls of men from their prisons of flesh—Hades and the human
Tartarus, in one of its symbolical senses.
Cicero calls
Orpheus a son of Bacchus, and there is a tradition which not only makes Orpheus
come from India (he being called dark,
of tawny complexion) but identifies him with Arjuna, the chela and adoptive son
of Krishna. (Vide Five
Years of Theosophy: “Was writing
known before Panini?”)
12The “Morning
Star,” or Lucifer, the name which Jesus calls himself in Rev. 22:16, and which
becomes, nevertheless, the name of the Devil, as soon as a theosophical journal
assumes it!
13 Hesychius gives the name (agyrmos) to the first day of the initiation
into the mystery of Ceres, goddess of harvest, and refers to it also under that
of Synaxis. The early Christians called their mass, before this term was
adapted, and the celebration of their mysteries—Synaxis, a word compounded from
sun “with,” and ago “I lead,” whence, the Greek synaxis or an assembly.
14From times
immemorial every initiate before entering on his supreme trial of initiation,
in antiquity as at the present time, pronounced these sacramental words . . .
“And I swear to give up my life for the salvation of my brothers, which
constitute the whole mankind if called upon, and to die in the defence of
truth. . . .”
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Preface
Theosophy and the Masters General Principles
The Earth Chain Body and Astral Body Kama – Desire
Manas Of Reincarnation Reincarnation Continued
Karma Kama Loka
Devachan
Cycles
Arguments Supporting Reincarnation
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Cosmogenesis Anthropogenesis Root Races
Ascended Masters After Death States
The Seven Principles of Man Karma
Reincarnation Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Colonel Henry Steel Olcott William Quan Judge
The Start of the Theosophical
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History of the Theosophical
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Theosophical Society Presidents
History of the Theosophical
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The Three Objectives of the
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H P Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine
Isis Unveiled by H P Blavatsky
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Mahatma Letters to A P Sinnett 1 - 25
A Modern Revival of Ancient Wisdom
(Selection of Articles by H P Blavatsky)
The Secret Doctrine – Volume 3
A compilation of H P Blavatsky’s
writings published after her death
Esoteric Christianity or the Lesser Mysteries
The Early Teachings of The Masters
A Collection of Fugitive Fragments
Fundamentals of the Esoteric Philosophy
Mystical,
Philosophical, Theosophical, Historical
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From Talks on the Path of Occultism - Vol. II
In the Twilight”
Series of Articles
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1898 in The
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from 1909-1913 in The Theosophist.
compiled from
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Letters and
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Body, Soul and Spirit Reincarnation Karma
Guide to the
Theosophy Wales King Arthur Pages
Arthur draws the Sword from the Stone
The Knights of The Round Table
The Roman Amphitheatre at Caerleon,
Eamont Bridge, Nr Penrith, Cumbria, England.
(History of the Kings of Britain)
The reliabilty of this work has long been a subject of
debate but it is the first definitive account of Arthur’s
Reign
and one which puts Arthur in a historcal context.
and his version’s political agenda
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth
The first written mention of Arthur as a heroic figure
The British leader who fought twelve battles
King Arthur’s ninth victory at
The Battle of the City of the Legion
King Arthur ambushes an advancing Saxon
army then defeats them at Liddington Castle,
Badbury, Near Swindon, Wiltshire, England.
King Arthur’s twelfth and last victory against the Saxons
Traditionally Arthur’s last battle in which he was
mortally wounded although his side went on to win
No contemporary writings or accounts of his life
but he is placed 50 to 100 years after the accepted
King Arthur period. He refers to Arthur in his inspiring
poems but the earliest written record of these dates
from over three hundred years after Taliesin’s death.
Mallerstang Valley, Nr Kirkby Stephen,
A 12th Century Norman ruin on the site of what is
reputed to have been a stronghold of Uther Pendragon
From
wise child with no earthly father to
Megastar
of Arthurian Legend
History of the Kings of Britain
Drawn from the Stone or received from the Lady of the Lake.
Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur has both versions
with both swords called Excalibur. Other versions
5th & 6th Century Timeline of Britain
From the departure of the Romans from
Britain to the establishment of sizeable
Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms
Glossary of
Arthur’s uncle:- The puppet ruler of the Britons
controlled and eventually killed by Vortigern
Amesbury, Wiltshire, England. Circa 450CE
An alleged massacre of Celtic Nobility by the Saxons
History of the Kings of Britain
Athrwys / Arthrwys
King of Ergyng
Circa 618 - 655 CE
Latin: Artorius; English: Arthur
A warrior King born in Gwent and associated with
Caerleon, a possible Camelot. Although over 100 years
later that the accepted Arthur period, the exploits of
Athrwys may have contributed to the King Arthur Legend.
He became King of Ergyng, a kingdom between
Gwent and Brycheiniog (Brecon)
Angles under Ida seized the Celtic Kingdom of
Bernaccia in North East England in 547 CE forcing
Although much later than the accepted King Arthur
period, the events of Morgan Bulc’s 50 year campaign
to regain his kingdom may have contributed to
Old Welsh: Guorthigirn;
Anglo-Saxon: Wyrtgeorn;
Breton: Gurthiern; Modern Welsh; Gwrtheyrn;
*********************************
An earlier ruler than King Arthur and not a heroic figure.
He is credited with policies that weakened Celtic Britain
to a point from which it never recovered.
Although there are no contemporary accounts of
his rule, there is more written evidence for his
existence than of King Arthur.
How Sir Lancelot slew two giants,
From Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
How Sir Lancelot rode disguised
in Sir Kay's harness, and how he
From Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
How Sir Lancelot jousted against
four knights of the Round Table,
From Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur
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Aardvark Theosophy
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Theosophy 206 Biography of William Q Judge
Theosophy Cardiff’s Face Book of Great Theosophists
Theosophy Evolution Theosophy Generally Stated
Biography of Helena Petrovna
Blavatsky
Cardiff
Theosophical Society in Wales