Isis unveiled, Volume 2 (of 2), Theology

As Typhon was the dark shadow of his brother Osiris, so Python is the evil side of Apollo, the bright god of visions, the seer and the soothsayer. He is killed by Python, but kills him in his turn, thus redeeming humanity from sin. It was in memory of this deed that the priestesses of the sun-god enveloped themselves in the snake-skin, typical of the fabulous monster. Under its exhilarating influence—the serpent’s skin being considered magnetic—the priestesses fell into magnetic trances, and “receiving their voice from Apollo,” they became prophetic and delivered oracles.

Again Apollo and Python are one and morally androgynous. The sun-god ideas are all dual, without exception. The beneficent warmth of the sun calls the germ into existence, but excessive heat kills the plant. While playing on his seven-stringed planetary lyre, Apollo produces harmony; but, as well as other sun-gods, under his dark aspect he becomes the destroyer, Python.

St. John is known to have travelled in Asia, a country governed by Magi and imbued with Zoroastrian ideas, and in those days full of Buddhist missionaries. Had he never visited those places and come in contact with Buddhists, it is doubtful whether the Revelation would have been written. Besides his ideas of the dragon, he gives prophetic narratives entirely unknown to the other apostles, and which, relating to the second advent, make of Christ a faithful copy of Vishnu.

Thus Ophios and Ophiomorphos, Apollo and Python, Osiris and Typhon, Christos and the Serpent, are all convertible terms. They are all Logoi, and one is unintelligible without the other, as day could not be known had we no night. All are regenerators and saviours, one in a spiritual, the other in a physical sense. One insures immortality for the Divine Spirit; the other gives it through regeneration of the seed. The Saviour of mankind has to die, because he unveils to humanity the great secret of the immortal ego; the serpent of Genesis is cursed because he said to matter, “Ye shall not die.” In the world of Paganism the counterpart of the “serpent” is the second Hermes, the reïncarnation of Hermes Trismegistus.

It has been repeatedly stated by the Christian missionaries in Ceylon and India that the people are steeped in demonolatry; that they are devil-worshippers, in the full sense of the word. Without any exaggeration we say that they are no more so than the masses of uneducated Christians. But even were they worshippers of (which is more than believers in) the Devil, yet there is a great difference between the teachings of their clergy on the subject of a personal devil and the dogmas of Catholic preachers and many Protestant ministers also. The Christian priests are bound to teach and impress upon the minds of their flock the existence of the Devil, and the opening pages of the present chapter show the reason why. But not only will the Cingalese Oepasampala, who belong to the highest priesthood, not confess to belief in a personal demon but even the Samenaira, the candidates and novices, would laugh at the idea. Everything in the external worship of the Buddhists is allegorical and is never otherwise accepted or taught by the educated pungis (pundits). The accusation that they allow, and tacitly agree to leave the poor people steeped in the most degrading superstitions, is not without foundation; but that they enforce such superstitions, we most vehemently deny. And in this they appear to advantage beside our Christian clergy, who (at least those who have not allowed their fanaticism to interfere with their brains), without believing a word of it, yet preach the existence of the Devil, as the personal enemy of a personal God, and the evil genius of mankind.

St. George’s Dragon, which figures so promiscuously in the grandest cathedrals of the Christians, is not a whit handsomer than the King of Snakes, the Buddhist Nammadānam-nāraya, the great Dragon. If the planetary Demon Rawho, is believed, in the popular superstition of the Cingalese, to endeavor to destroy the moon by swallowing it; and if in China and Tartary the rabble is allowed, without rebuke, to beat gongs and make fearful noises to drive the monster away from its prey during the eclipses, why should the Catholic clergy find fault, or call this superstition? Do not the country clergy in Southern France do the same, occasionally, at the appearance of comets, eclipses, and other celestial phenomena? In 1456, when Halley’s comet made its appearance, “so tremendous was its apparition,” writes Draper, “that it was necessary for the Pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space, terror-stricken by the maledictions of Calixtus III., and did not venture back for seventy-five years!”[983]

We never heard of any Christian clergyman or Pope trying to disabuse ignorant minds of the belief that the Devil had anything to do with eclipses and comets; but we do find a Buddhist chief priest saying to an official who twitted him with this superstition: “Our Cingalese religious books teach that the eclipses of the sun and moon denote an attack of Rahu[984] (one of the nine planets) not by a devil.”[985]

The origin of the “Dragon” myth so prominent in the Apocalypse and Golden Legend, and of the fable about Simeon Stylites converting the Dragon, is undeniably Buddhistic and even pre-Buddhistic. It was Gautama’s pure doctrines which reclaimed to Buddhism the Cashmerians whose primitive worship was the Ophite or Serpent worship. Frankincense and flowers replaced the human sacrifices and belief in personal demons. It became the turn of Christianity to inherit the degrading superstition about devils invested with pestilential and murderous powers. The Mahâvansa, oldest of the Ceylonese books, relates the story of King Covercapal (cobra-de-capello), the snake-god, who was converted to Buddhism by a holy Rahat;[986] and it is earlier, by all odds, than the Golden Legend which tells the same of Simeon the Stylite and his Dragon.

It is a fact worthy of remark, that so long as the initiate kept silent “on what he knew,” he was perfectly safe. So was it in days of old, and so it is now. As soon as the Christian God, emanating forth from Silence, manifested himself as the Word or Logos, the latter became the cause of his death. The serpent is the symbol of wisdom and eloquence, but it is likewise the symbol of destruction. “To dare, to know, to will, and be silent,” are the cardinal axioms of the kabalist. Like Apollo and other gods, Jesus is killed by his Logos;[988] he rises again, kills him in his turn, and becomes his master. Can it be that this old symbol has, like the rest of ancient philosophical conceptions, more than one allegorical and never-suspected meaning? The coincidences are too strange to be results of mere chance.

And now that we have shown this identity between Michael and Satan, and the Saviours and Dragons of other people, what can be more clear than that all these philosophical fables originated in India, that universal hot-bed of metaphysical mysticism? “The world,” says Ramatsariar, in his comments upon the Vedas, “commenced with a contest between the Spirit of Good and the Spirit of Evil, and so must end. After the destruction of matter evil can no longer exist, it must return to naught.”[989]

In the Apologia, Tertullian falsifies most palpably every doctrine and belief of the Pagans as to the oracles and gods. He calls them, indifferently, demons and devils, accusing the latter of taking possession of even the birds of the air! What Christian would now dare doubt such an authority? Did not the Psalmist exclaim: “All the gods of the nations are idols;” and the Angel of the School, Thomas Aquinas, explains, on his own kabalistic authority, the word idols by devils? “They come to men,” he says, “and offer themselves to their adoration by operating certain things which seem miraculous.”[990]

The Fathers were prudent as they were wise in their inventions. To be impartial, after having created a Devil, they set to creating apocryphal saints. We have named several in preceding chapters; but we must not forget Baronius, who having read in a work of Chrysostom about the holy Xenoris, the word meaning a pair, a couple, mistook it for the name of a saint, and proceeded forthwith to create of it a martyr of Antioch, and went on to give a most detailed and authentic biography of the “blessed martyr.” Other theologians made of Apollyon—or rather Apolouôn—the anti-Christ. Apolouôn is Plato’s “washer,” the god who purifies, who washes off, and releases us from sin, but he was thus transformed into him “whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon”—Devil!

Max Müller says that the serpent in Paradise is a conception which might have sprung up among the Jews, and “seems hardly to invite comparison with the much grander conceptions of the terrible power of Vritra and Ahriman in the Veda and Avesta.” With the kabalists the Devil was always a myth—God or good reversed. That modern Magus, Eliphas Levi, calls the Devil l’ivresse astrale. It is a blind force like electricity, he says; and, speaking allegorically, as he always did, Jesus remarked that he “beheld Satan like lightning fall from Heaven.”

The clergy insist that God has sent the Devil to tempt mankind; which would be rather a singular way of showing his boundless love to humanity! If the Supreme One is really guilty of such unfatherly treachery, he is worthy, certainly, of the adoration only of a Church capable of singing the Te Deum over a massacre of St. Bartholomew, and of blessing Mussulman swords drawn to slaughter Greek Christians!

The great dissimilarity which exists between the various conceptions of the Devil is really often ludicrous. While bigots will invariably endow him with horns, tail, and every conceivable repulsive feature, even including an offensive human smell,[991] Milton, Byron, Goethe, Lermontoff,[992] and a host of French novelists have sung his praise in flowing verse and thrilling prose. Milton’s Satan, and even Goethe’s Mephistopheles, are certainly far more commanding figures than some of the angels, as represented in the prose of ecstatic bigots. We have but to compare two descriptions. Let us first award the floor to the incomparably sensational des Mousseaux. He gives us a thrilling account of an incubus, in the words of the penitent herself: “Once,” she tells us, “during the space of a whole half-hour, she saw distinctly near her an individual with a black, dreadful, horrid body, and whose hands, of an enormous size, exhibited clawed fingers strangely hooked. The senses of sight, feeling, and smell were confirmed by that of hearing!!”[993]

Let the reader then fancy, if he can, this superb chimera, this ideal of the rebellious angel become incarnate Pride, crawling into the skin of the most disgusting of all animals! Notwithstanding that the Christian catechism teaches us that Satan in propria persona tempted our first mother, Eve, in a real paradise, and that in the shape of a serpent, which of all animals was the most insinuating and fascinating! God orders him, as a punishment, to crawl eternally on his belly, and bite the dust. “A sentence,” remarks Levi, “which resembles in nothing the traditional flames of hell.” The more so, that the real zoölogical serpent, which was created before Adam and Eve, crawled on his belly, and bit the dust likewise, before there was any original sin.

Apart from this, was not Ophion the Daimon, or Devil, like God called Dominus?[994] The word God (deity) is derived from the Sanscrit word Deva, and Devil from the Persian daëva, which words are substantially alike. Hercules, son of Jove and Alcmena, one of the highest sun-gods and also Logos manifested, is nevertheless represented under a double nature, as all others.[995]

The Agathodæmon, the beneficent dæmon,[996] the same which we find later among the Ophites under the appellation of the Logos, or divine wisdom, was represented by a serpent standing erect on a pole, in the Bacchanalian Mysteries. The hawk-headed serpent is among the oldest of the Egyptian emblems, and represents the divine mind, says Deane.[997]

Jesus is tempted on the mountain by the Devil, who promises to him kingdoms and glory if he will only fall down and worship him (Matthew iv. 8, 9). Buddha is tempted by the Demon Wasawarthi Mara, who says to him as he is leaving his father’s palace: “Be entreated to stay that you may possess the honors that are within your reach; go not, go not!” And upon the refusal of Gautama to accept his offers, gnashes his teeth with rage, and threatens him with vengeance. Like Christ, Buddha triumphs over the Devil.[1001]

In the Bacchic Mysteries a consecrated cup was handed around after supper, called the cup of the Agathodæmon.[1002] The Ophite rite of the same description is evidently borrowed from these Mysteries. The communion consisting of bread and wine was used in the worship of nearly every important deity.[1003]

In connection with the semi-Mithraic sacrament adopted by the Marcosians, another Gnostic sect, utterly kabalistic and theurgic, there is a strange story given by Epiphanius as an illustration of the cleverness of the Devil. In the celebration of their Eucharist, three large vases of the finest and clearest crystal were brought among the congregation and filled with white wine. While the ceremony was going on, in full view of everybody, this wine was instantaneously changed into a blood-red, a purple, and then into an azure-blue color. “Then the magus,” says Epiphanius, “hands one of these vases to a woman in the congregation, and asks her to bless it. When it is done, the magus pours out of it into another vase of much greater capacity with the prayer: “May the grace of God, which is above all, inconceivable, inexplicable, fill thy inner man, and augment the knowledge of Him within thee, sowing the grain of mustard-seed in good ground.[1004] Whereupon the liquor in the larger vase swells and swells until it runs over the brim.”[1005]

In connection with several of the Pagan deities which are made after death, and before their resurrection to descend into Hell, it will be found useful to compare the pre-Christian with the post-Christian narratives. Orpheus made the journey,[1006] and Christ was the last of these subterranean travellers. In the Credo of the Apostles, which is divided in twelve sentences or articles, each particular article having been inserted by each particular apostle, according to St. Austin[1007] the sentence “He descended into hell, the third day he rose again from the dead,” is assigned to Thomas; perhaps, as an atonement for his unbelief. Be it as it may, the sentence is declared a forgery, and there is no evidence “that this creed was either framed by the apostles, or indeed, that it existed as a creed in their time.”[1008]

It is the most important addition in the Apostle’s Creed, and dates since the year of Christ 600.[1009] It was not known in the days of Eusebius. Bishop Parsons says that it was not in the ancient creeds or rules of faith.[1010] Irenæus, Origen, and Tertullian exhibit no knowledge of this sentence.[1011] It is not mentioned in any of the Councils before the seventh century. Theodoret, Epiphanius, and Socrates are silent about it. It differs from the creed in St. Augustine.[1012] Ruffinus affirms that in his time it was neither in the Roman nor in the Oriental creeds (Exposit. in Symbol. Apost. § 10). But the problem is solved when we learn that ages ago Hermes spoke thus to Prometheus, chained on the arid rocks of the Caucasian mount:

This god was Herakles, the “Only-Begotten One,” and the Saviour. And it is he who was chosen as a model by the ingenious Fathers. Hercules—called Alexicacos—for he brought round the wicked and converted them to virtue; Soter, or Saviour, also called Neulos Eumelos—the Good Shepherd; Astrochiton, the star-clothed, and the Lord of Fire. “He sought not to subject nations by force but by divine wisdom and persuasion,” says Lucian. “Herakles spread cultivation and a mild religion, and destroyed the doctrine of eternal punishment by dragging Kerberus (the Pagan Devil) from the nether world.” And, as we see, it was Herakles again who liberated Prometheus (the Adam of the pagans), by putting an end to the torture inflicted on him for his transgressions, by descending to the Hades, and going round the Tartarus. Like Christ he appeared as a substitute for the pangs of humanity, by offering himself in a self-sacrifice on a funereal-burning pile. “His voluntary immolation,” says Bart, “betokened the ethereal new birth of men.... Through the release of Prometheus, and the erection of altars, we behold in him the mediator between the old and new faiths.... He abolished human sacrifice wherever he found it practiced. He descended into the sombre realm of Pluto, as a shade ... he ascended as a spirit to his father Zeus in Olympus.”

So much was antiquity impressed by the Heraklean legend, that even the monotheistic (?) Jews of those days, not to be outdone by their contemporaries, put him to use in their manufacture of original fables. Herakles is accused in his mythobiography of an attempted theft of the Delphian oracle. In Sepher Toldos Jeschu, the Rabbins accuse Jesus of stealing from their Sanctuary the Incommunicable Name!

Therefore it is but natural to find his numerous adventures, worldly and religious, mirrored so faithfully in the Descent into Hell. For extraordinary daring of mendacity, and unblushing plagiarism, the Gospel of Nicodemus, only now proclaimed apocryphal, surpasses anything we have read. Let the reader judge.

At the beginning of chapter xvi., Satan and the “Prince of Hell” are described as peacefully conversing together. All of a sudden, both are startled by “a voice as of thunder” and the rushing of winds, which bids them to lift up their gates for “the King of Glory shall come in.” Whereupon the Prince of Hell hearing this “begins quarrelling with Satan for minding his duty so poorly, as not to have taken the necessary precautions against such a visit.” The quarrel ends with the prince casting Satan “forth from his hell,” ordering, at the same time, his impious officers “to shut the brass gates of cruelty, make them fast with iron bars, and fight courageously lest we be taken captives.”

“And the divine (?) prophet David cried out, saying: ‘Did not I, when on earth, truly prophesy?’” After this, another prophet, namely holy Isaiah spake in like manner, “Did not I rightly prophesy?” etc. Then the company of the saints and prophets, after boasting for the length of a chapter, and comparing notes of their prophecies, begin a riot, which makes the Prince of Hell remark that, “the dead never durst before behave themselves so insolently towards us” (the devils, xviii. 6); feigning the while to be ignorant who it was claiming admission. He then innocently asks again: “But who is the King of Glory?” Then David tells him that he knows the voice well, and understands its words, “because,” he adds, “I spake them by his Spirit.” Perceiving finally that the Prince of Hell would not open the “brass doors of iniquity,” notwithstanding the king-psalmist’s voucher for the visitor, he, David, concludes to treat the enemy “as a Philistine, and begins shouting: ‘And now, thou filthy and stinking prince of hell, open thy gates.... I tell thee that the King of Glory comes ... let him enter in.’”

While he was yet quarrelling the “mighty Lord appeared in the form of a man” (?) upon which “impious Death and her cruel officers are seized with fear.” Then they tremblingly begin to address Christ with various flatteries and compliments in the shape of questions, each of which is an article of creed. For instance: “And who art thou, so powerful and so great who dost release the captives that were held in chains by original sin?” asks one devil. “Perhaps, thou art that Jesus,” submissively says another, “of whom Satan just now spoke, that by the death of the Cross thou wert about to receive the power over death?” etc. Instead of answering, the King of Glory “tramples upon Death, seizes the Prince of Hell, and deprives him of his power.”

Then begins a turmoil in Hell which has been graphically described by Homer, Hesiod, and their interpreter Preller, in his account of the Astronomical Hercules Invictus, and his festivals at Tyre, Tarsus, and Sardis. Having been initiated in the Attic Eleusinia, the Pagan god descends into Hades and “when he entered the nether world he spread such terror among the dead that all of them fled!”[1013] The same words are repeated in Nicodemus. Follows a scene of confusion, horror, and lamenting. Perceiving that the battle is lost, the Prince of Hell turns tail and prudently chooses to side with the strongest. He against whom, according to Jude and Peter, even the Archangel Michael “durst not bring a railing accusation before the Lord,” is now shamefully treated by his ex-ally and friend, the “Prince of Hell.” Poor Satan is abused and reviled for all his crimes both by devils and saints; while the Prince is openly rewarded for his treachery. Addressing him, the King of Glory says thus: “Beelzebub, the Prince of Hell, Satan the Prince shall now be subject to thy dominion forever, in the room of Adam and his righteous sons, who are mine ... Come to me, all ye my saints, who were created in my image, who were condemned by the tree of the forbidden fruit, and by the Devil and death. Live now by the wood of my cross; the Devil, the prince of this world is overcome (?) and Death is conquered.” Then the Lord takes hold of Adam by his right hand, of David by the left, and “ascends from Hell, followed by all the saints,” Enoch and Elias, and by the “holy thief.”[1014]