SUNS OF INTELLECT. The egg, as a primitive type of birth and rebirth, finds intriguing relation to this exegesis. As the couvade figured the return of the father’s powers in the embryo of his child, incarnation betokened the return of the soul to its egg state. Oh! Sun in his egg! is an exclamation in the Ritual. The image used represented the return of the sun or the dead (Massey) to the egg-state in the underworld for the rehatching, or the couvade. And this furnishes the answer to Nicodemus’ question: the soul must return again and again to the egg state, to be rehatched--which is what has again been intimated in the ark symbolism. Man--the god in man--is as it were a grub worm hatched in the earth, and, expanding his wings of spirit as he emerges like the chrysalis, flies away with body glistening in the golden light of morning. The sun-god arising is thus addressed: Adoration to thee, who arisest out of the golden and givest light to the earth! The sun was emblemed as the winged scarab. And the beetle follows the sun, keeping in the angle of its direct rays, from morning till evening. The Christ is the sun of righteousness. In Gnostic iconography the child Horus reappears as the mummy-babe wearing the solar disk. The sun is again typified by the hawk, with a disk encircled by an uraeus on its head. Seven apes stand, four in front and three behind, denoting that the sun has put under or behind him three of the elementary powers, but faces the conquest of the other four in man. The Ur from which Abraham, the first emanation from the Father, came forth, means the original sea of elemental fire. And when the emanation has gone to its death and rebirth in matter, it has become a new creature and is given a new name. The injection of the solar principle into material creation lends to mythology or primitive theology its most striking analogies and types. This is confirmed by Max Müller, who writes (Selected Essays, Vol. I, 604): As soon as Suryas or Helios appears as a masculine form, we are in the very thick of mythology. Suryas or Helios is the sun. Mythology deals with the presence of this kingly force in life, its fight for sovereignty and its dominance over the lower powers. It is the central personage in all earthly myth and drama. The phoenix, dying and being reborn from its own ashes, depicts the death of the sun power in mortality and its renaissance from the grave. The Egypto-Gnostics affirmed: Seven powers glorify the Word. These were the seven nature spirits, which out of gratitude to the Propator, had each contributed of his best gift to the production of the most perfect being, the Christ aeon. Like the golden bough and the star atop the Christmas tree, he became the beauteous flower at the summit of creation, comprehending and synthesizing all lower elements in himself. He was thus the King of Glory. After this consummation the heaven of seven divisions is described as rolling up like a scroll and passing away. Then the new heaven and the new earth are inaugurated. When the contents of the seventh bowl are poured out, the book of life is sealed with the seven seals, and the angel announces: Behold I make all things new. A zodiac of twelve signs was then requisite to portray the life experience of the god in man. In the Book of Exodus we see the one God Ihuh superseding all the other gods, El-Shadai and the Elohim, when he assumes the suzerainty and orders that a sanctuary be built in which he shall be lifted up. This shrine or tabernacle was to be the hitherto unknown body of solar glory, or body of the resurrection, that temple not to be built with hands, eternal in the heavens of consciousness. He subdues the dwellers in the darkness and there is none who can resist his power in the horizon. He shineth like a new king in the East. The great god who is there is Ra himself . . . the water of Maati is the road by which Atum-Ra goes to traverse the fields of divine harvest. The Book of the Dead is primarily a sketch of the journey of the solar spark through the underworld across the Pool of Pant, or Lake of Maati, by night. The soul follows the track of the all-conquering sun, who is the cleaver of the way or opener of roads through the tangled thickets of sense life. He builds a dwelling of light for those who dwell in the darkness. The Egyptians are in gloom, but the Israelites have light in their dwellings. The home of light for the glorified is Ammah, the place of no more night. When we realize that the Israelites were not an earth race, but a host of sun-fragments of intellect in incarnation, we can catch the sublime imputations in these figurative details of scripture. The six (later seven) supplanted powers that come under the sway of the central sun of mind become the attendants or companions or associates of the sun-god. They are depicted as seven doves that hover around Jesus in utero, the seven solar rays that flash about his head, the seven lambs or rams with him in the mount, the seven as stars with Jesus in their midst, the seven as fishers in his boat, and finally the seven who as communicants solemnized the Eucharist with the loaves and fishes in the mortuary meal of the Roman catacombs. The Pistis Sophia, furnishing much valuable material deleted from the Gospels, describes Jesus, after superseding the seven foundation pillars of the world, as passing through the twelve signs of the zodiac, mentioning each by name, and gathering a portion of the light from each to incorporate in his own person. He says that he took the twelve saviors of the treasure of light and bound them into the bodies of your mothers. This is to say that he circumscribed the operation of the twelve deific powers in bodies of mortal flesh. He was thus to judge the twelve tribes of Israel, or twelve segmentations of divine intelligence; those rays of cosmic mind which figure as the twelve tribes, sons, stars, brothers, kings, reapers, rowers, fishermen, sowers, and twelve voices and teachers. All these had begun as powers of light in the physical domain, and were in the end endowed with spiritual status with Jesus in the Father’s kingdom. The Christ became the rose in the center of twelve knights. And, says Paul, the whole creation groaneth and travaileth to bring forth these twelve Sons of God, or powers of spiritual light. Chapter XX The Lost Light: An Interpretation of Ancient Scriptures (1940) Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D --------------------------- Couvade means going under cover. ---- Couvade the mimicking of childbirth by the father while it is taking place, a custom in some Native South American societies. ---------- Couvade is a term was coined by anthropologist E.B. Tylor in 1865 to describe certain rituals fathers in several cultures adopt during pregnancy. The term couvade is borrowed from French (where it is derived from the verb couver to brood, hatch); the use in the modern sense derives from a misunderstanding of an earlier idiom faire la couvade, which meant to sit doing nothing. For example, Cantabri people custom in which the father, during or immediately after the birth of a child, took to bed, complained of having labour pains, and was accorded the treatment usually shown women during pregnancy or after childbirth. Similarly, in Papua New Guinea, fathers built a hut outside the village and mimics the pains of labour until the baby is born. Similar rituals occur in other cultural groups in Thailand, Russia, China and many indigenous groups in the Americas. In some cultures, sympathetic pregnancy is attributed to efforts to ward off demons or spirits from the mother or seek favour of supernatural beings for the child. Couvade has been reported by travelers throughout history... From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Posted on: Fri, 18 Oct 2013 15:28:16 +0000
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