Part 2 — CHAPTER IV. (continued 2)

Paul, believing in all such occult powers in the world “unseen,” but ever “present,” says: “Ye walked according to the Æon of this world, according to the Archon (Ilda-Baoth, the Demiurg) that has the domination of the air,” and “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the dominations, the powers; the lords of darkness, the mischievousness of spirits in the upper regions.” This sentence, “Ye were dead in sin and error,” for “ye walked according to the Archon,” or Ilda-Baoth, the God and creator of matter of the Ophites, shows unequivocally that: 1st, Paul, notwithstanding some dissensions with the more important doctrines of the Gnostics, shared more or less their cosmogonical views on the emanations; and 2d, that he was fully aware that this Demiurge, whose Jewish name was Jehovah, was not the God preached by Jesus. And now, if we compare the doctrine of Paul with the religious views of Peter and Jude, we find that, not only did they worship Michael, the Archangel, but that also they reverenced Satan, because the latter was also, before his fall, an angel! This they do quite openly, and abuse the Gnostics[388] for speaking “evil” of him. No one can deny the following: Peter, when denouncing those who are not afraid to speak evil of “dignities,” adds immediately, “Whereas angels, which are greater in power and might, bring not railing accusations against them (the dignities) before the Lord” (ii. 11). Who are the dignities? Jude, in his general epistle, makes the word as clear as day. The dignities are the DEVILS!! Complaining of the disrespect shown by the Gnostics to the powers and dominions, Jude argues in the very words of Peter: “And yet, Michael, the Archangel, when contending with the devil, he disputed about the body of Moses, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke thee” (i. 9). Is this plain enough? If not, then we have the Kabala to prove who were the dignities.

Considering that Deuteronomy tells us that the “Lord” Himself buried Moses in a valley of Moab (xxxiv. 6), “and no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day,” this biblical lapsus linguæ of Jude gives a strong coloring to the assertions of some of the Gnostics. They claimed but what was secretly taught by the Jewish kabalists themselves; to wit: that the highest supreme God was unknown and invisible; “the King of Light is a closed eye;” that Ilda-Baoth, the Jewish second Adam, was the real Demiurge; and that Iao, Adonai, Sabaoth, and Eloi were the quaternary emanation which formed the unity of the God of the Hebrews—Jehovah. Moreover, the latter was also called Michael and Samael by them, and regarded but as an angel, several removes from the Godhead. In holding to such a belief, the Gnostics countenanced the teachings of the greatest of the Jewish doctors, Hillel, and other Babylonian divines. Josephus shows the great deference of the official Synagogue in Jerusalem to the wisdom of the schools of Central Asia. The colleges of Sora, Pumbiditha, and Nahaidea were considered the headquarters of esoteric and theological learning by all the schools of Palestine. The Chaldean version of the Pentateuch, made by the well-known Babylonian divine, Onkelos, was regarded as the most authoritative of all; and it is according to this learned Rabbi that Hillel and other Tanaïm after him held that the Being who appeared to Moses in the burning bush, on Mount Sinai, and who finally buried him, was the angel of the Lord, Memro, and not the Lord Himself; and that he whom the Hebrews of the Old Testament mistook for Iahoh was but His messenger, one of His sons, or emanations. All this establishes but one logical conclusion—namely, that the Gnostics were by far the superiors of the disciples, in point of education and general information; even in a knowledge of the religious tenets of the Jews themselves. While they were perfectly well-versed in the Chaldean wisdom, the well-meaning, pious, but fanatical as well as ignorant disciples, unable to fully understand or grasp the religious spirit of their own system, were driven in their disputations to such convincing logic as the use of “brute beasts,” “sows,” “dogs,” and other epithets so freely bestowed by Peter.

Since then, the epidemic has reached the apex of the sacerdotal hierarchy. From the day when the founder of Christianity uttered the warning, that he who shall say to his brother, “Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell-fire,” all who have passed as its leaders, beginning with the ragged fishermen of Galilee, and ending with the jewelled pontiffs, have seemed to vie with each other in the invention of opprobrious epithets for their opponents. So we find Luther passing a final sentence on the Catholics, and exclaiming that “The Papists are all asses, put them in whatever form you like; whether they are boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, hashed, they will be always the same asses.” Calvin called the victims he persecuted, and occasionally burned, “malicious barking dogs, full of bestiality and insolence, base corrupters of the sacred writings,” etc. Dr. Warburton terms the Popish religion “an impious farce,” and Monseigneur Dupanloup asserts that the Protestant Sabbath service is the “Devil’s mass,” and all clergymen are “thieves and ministers of the Devil.”

The same spirit of incomplete inquiry and ignorance has led the Christian Church to bestow on its most holy apostles, titles assumed by their most desperate opponents, the “Hæretics” and Gnostics. So we find, for instance, Paul termed the vase of election “Vas Electionis,” a title chosen by Manes,[389] the greatest heretic of his day in the eyes of the Church, Manes meaning, in the Babylonian language, the chosen vessel or receptacle.[390]

So with the Virgin Mary. They were so little gifted with originality, that they copied from the Egyptian and Hindu religions their several apostrophes to their respective Virgin-mothers. The juxtaposition of a few examples will make this clear.

Hindu. Egyptian. Roman Catholic.

Litany of our Lady Nari: Virgin. (Also Devanaki.) Litany of our Lady Isis: Virgin. Litany of our Lady of Loretto: Virgin.

1. Holy Nari—Mariāma, Mother of perpetual fecundity. Holy Isis, universal mother—Muth. Holy Mary, mother of divine grace.

2. Mother of an incarnated God—Vishnu (Devanaki). Mother of Gods—Athyr. Mother of God.

3. Mother of Christna. Mother of Horus. Mother of Christ.

4. Eternal Virginity—Kanyabâva. Virgo generatrix—Neith. Virgin of Virgins.

5. Mother—Pure Essence, Akasa. Mother-soul of the universe—Anouké. Mother of Divine Grace.

6. Virgin most chaste—Kanya. Virgin sacred earth—Isis. Virgin most chaste.

7. Mother Taumatra, of the five virtues or elements. Mother of all the virtues—Thmei, with the same qualities. Mother most pure. Mother undefiled. Mother inviolate. Mother most amiable. Mother most admirable.

8. Virgin Trigana (of the three elements, power or richness, love, and mercy). Illustrious Isis, most powerful, merciful, just. (Book of the Dead.) Virgin most powerful. Virgin most merciful. Virgin most faithful.

9. Mirror of Supreme Conscience—Ahancara. Mirror of Justice and Truth—Thmei. Mirror of Justice.

10. Wise Mother—Saraswati. Mysterious mother of the world—Buto (secret wisdom). Seat of Wisdom.

11. Virgin of the white Lotos, Pedma or Kamala. Sacred Lotos. Mystical Rose.

12. Womb of Gold—Hyrania. Sistrum of Gold. House of Gold.

13. Celestial Light—Lakshmi. Astarté (Syrian), Astaroth (Jewish). Morning Star.

14. Ditto. Argua of the Moon. Ark of the Covenant.

15. Queen of Heaven, and of the universe—Sakti. Queen of Heaven, and of the universe—Sati. Queen of Heaven.

16. Mother soul of all beings—Paramatma. Model of all mothers—Athor. Mater Dolorosa.

17. Devanaki is conceived without sin, and immaculate herself. (According to the Brahmanic fancy.) Isis is a Virgin Mother. Mary conceived without sin. (In accordance with later orders.)

If the Virgin Mary has her nuns, who are consecrated to her and bound to live in chastity, so had Isis her nuns in Egypt, as Vesta had hers at Rome, and the Hindu Nari, “mother of the world hers.” The virgins consecrated to her cultus—the Devadasi of the temples, who were the nuns of the days of old—lived in great chastity, and were objects of the most extraordinary veneration, as the holy women of the goddess. Would the missionaries and some travellers reproachfully point to the modern Devadasis, or Nautch-girls? For all response, we would beg them to consult the official reports of the last quarter century, cited in chapter II., as to certain discoveries made at the razing of convents, in Austria and Italy. Thousands of infants’ skulls were exhumed from ponds, subterranean vaults, and gardens of convents. Nothing to match this was ever found in heathen lands.

Christian theology, getting the doctrine of the archangels and angels directly from the Oriental Kabala, of which the Mosaic Bible is but an allegorical screen, ought at least to remember the hierarchy invented by the former for these personified emanations. The hosts of the Cherubim and Seraphim, with which we generally see the Catholic Madonnas surrounded in their pictures, belong, together with the Elohim and Beni Elohim of the Hebrews, to the third kabalistic world, Jezirah. This world is but one remove higher than Asiah, the fourth and lowest world, in which dwell the grossest and most material beings—the klippoth, who delight in evil and mischief, and whose chief is Belial!

Explaining, in his way, of course, the various “heresies” of the first two centuries, Irenæus says: “Our Hæretics hold ... that Propator is known but to the only-begotten son, that is to the mind” (the nous). It was the Valentinians, the followers of the “profoundest doctor of the Gnosis,” Valentinus, who held that “there was a perfect Aiôn, who existed before Bythos, or Buthon (the Depth), called Propator.” This is again kabalistic, for in the Sohar of Simon Ben Iochaï, we read the following: “Senior occultatus est et absconditus; Microprosopus manifestus est, et non manifestus” (Rosenroth: The Sohar Liber Mysteries, iv., 1).

In the religious metaphysics of the Hebrews, the Highest One is an abstraction; he is “without form or being,” “with no likeness with anything else.”[391] And even Philo calls the Creator, the Logos who stands next God, “the SECOND God.” “The second God who is his WISDOM.”[392] God is NOTHING, he is nameless, and therefore called Ain-Soph—the word Ain meaning nothing.[393] But if, according to the older Jews, Jehovah is the God, and He manifested Himself several times to Moses and the prophets, and the Christian Church anathematized the Gnostics who denied the fact—how comes it, then, that we read in the fourth gospel that “No man hath seen God AT ANY TIME, but the only-begotten Son ... he hath declared him?” The very words of the Gnostics, in spirit and substance. This sentence of St. John—or rather whoever wrote the gospel now bearing his name—floors all the Petrine arguments against Simon Magus, without appeal. The words are repeated and emphasized in chapter vi.: “Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he (Jesus) hath seen the Father” (46)—the very objection brought forward by Simon in the Homilies. These words prove that either the author of the fourth evangel had no idea of the existence of the Homilies, or that he was not John, the friend and companion of Peter, whom he contradicts point-blank with this emphatic assertion. Be it as it may, this sentence, like many more that might be profitably cited, blends Christianity completely with the Oriental Gnosis, and hence with the KABALA.

While the doctrines, ethical code, and observances of the Christian religion were all appropriated from Brahmanism and Buddhism, its ceremonials, vestments, and pageantry were taken bodily from Lamaism. The Romish monastery and nunnery are almost servile copies of similar religious houses in Thibet and Mongolia, and interested explorers of Buddhist lands, when obliged to mention the unwelcome fact, have had no other alternative left them but, with an anachronism unsurpassed in recklessness, to charge the offense of plagiarism upon the religious system their own mother Church had despoiled. This makeshift has served its purpose and had its day. The time has at last come when this page of history must be written.