SOUL IN NATURES WOMB At the September point the soul enters what the ancients called its feminine phase, as it was in its youth and under the care of its maternal, or material, parent. It became the infant prince of a future kingship, being for its tutelage and education in its childhood stage, and, as St. Paul says (4 Galatians), under tutors and guardians until the time appointed of the Father, at which time it would have developed its capacity for kingly rule of the lower elements of its dominion over mans life. Thus the apostle says that though it is (potentially) Lord of all, it is at this stage in servitude to the elements (or elementals) of the lower worlds until the day of its enthronement. In this bondage to the laws of physis, the powers of matter, which is strictly for its education, it is the unawakened soul in an animal body. As Plato puts it, it is through its body an animal, while through its mind it is a god. It is then what St. Paul distinguishes as the first or natural man, the man of animal propensities, obeying the lusts of the flesh and the urges of the carnal mind, these being the instincts of the body in which it is ensconced. So one might say that at September the soul is born from above,--the Bible phrase--into animality; at December it is awakened enough to be born at the next higher stage, humanity; and at Easter in March it is reborn into the still higher kingdom of the immortal gods. If September is the birthday of man the human who is potentially divine, March is the birthday of man as a god. Easter is the birthday of the gods. Says the hoary Book of the Dead, designating the soul by one of its several specific titles, Pepi: Pepi saileth with Ra to the eastern side of heaven, where the gods are born. We, as souls, go to our death in matter at the equinox; at the winter solstice we cease dying to matter and are quickened to incipient renewal of life; at the spring equinox we rise to supernal life in exuberance of blessedness. Only when the soul has traversed this aeonial path round the numberless cycles of existence can it know the full reality of its Easter deification. By apt and striking symbols the Sages of old sought to impress dull mortal thought with imagery suggestive of new birth. They pointed to the chick pecking its way out of its shell; the snake shedding its old skin and coming forth sleek and shining; the locust bursting out of its old body and winging its way up into the light and air; the beetle emerging out of the earth; the butterfly from the cocoon; the hibernating bear awaking from his sleep in the hollow tree; the emergence of all life from the egg. Hence the egg became the basic symbol of the festival, as the young god breaks finally the shell of his human body to effect his delivery from the flesh and be released into the absolute freedom of the spirit. The rabbit was brought in as concomitant symbol because, like the pomegranate in the vegetable kingdom, its exuberant fecundity made it an apt emblem of the boundless productivity of life. For Gods children, under the Biblical designation of Israelites, or children of Israel, were destined to be as numberless as the stars of heaven or the seashore sands. The Book of the Dead (so called by the German scholar Lepsius) has for its Egyptian title the hieroglyph Pert em Heru, the translation of which is given variously as The Day of Manifestation, or, more exactly, The Coming Forth by Day, referring to the emergence of Horus, the Egyptian Christ, from the dark underworld of Amenta into the upper kingdom of light. Light here, as universally in both Scripture and poetry, must be taken in its apt reference to spiritual illumination or the expanded powers of consciousness. Like Jesus, Horus had been overpowered by the darkness of the underworld and Sut its Overlord, which are just the life of nature. In the person of his Father Osiris, he had been crucified, dead and buried. Now in the enchanting wizardry of the spring of a cycle of conscious growth, he had risen from the tomb of bodily death. He had rent the veil of the temple of his mortal flesh and stood out arrayed in new garments of shining radiance. He had thrown off his grave clothes, the cerements of death, and walked out of the sepulcher of clay clothed in the imperishable robes of solar light. The day of resurrection, Earth tell it out abroad The Passover of gladness, The Passover of God. From death to life eternal, From earth unto the sky, Our Christ hath brought us over With hymns of victory. But alas, and again alas, the consummative festival that was in its origin and in its deep esoteric conception designed to impress annually, in the thrilling springtime rebirth of earths vegetation, the recognition of the apocalyptic glorification of humanity at its eventual evolutionary Easter day, and therefore was intended to serve as a potent psychological agency of moving power in the races own push to divinity, has almost totally missed its high objective, because from about the degenerate third century of the Christian era the dull mind of Western humanity has mistaken the festivals message as having meaning only in reference to the alleged resurrection of one single man in remote history. That which was formulated to bring cogent realization to all men of their ultimate apotheosization in glory has sunk to the dimensions of the anniversary celebration of one single event in past history,--which even St. Paul warns us is not past. All the fervor of majestic significance and all the instigation to nobility of life that were designed to grip all hearts and minds when celebrated under the almost magical mental spur of the vernal transformation of nature, has been run out into the drain and emerged as a mere sentimental celebration of a past event in one mans shadowy life. And when the celebration each year is over, the event is quickly forgotten, as is similarly and for the same reason the case with Christmas. Never will these two great symbolic festivals exert their truly divine potential for human uplift until, instead of being staged as memorials of past events in the life of a Galilean peasant of two thousand years ago, they are sensed as dramatizing, the one, the incipient birth of a Christly consciousness, the other, the ultimate exaltation of that consciousness in the interior life of all humanity. Never were they supposed to be taken as memorials of objective history; they are eternally living memorials of our subjective history, in the past, now and in the future. The judgment here expressed that the perversion, yea the transmogrification of the meaning of the Scriptural dramas and allegories into ostensible objective history allegedly localized in Judea in the first Christian century (and Old Testament history antecedent to that time) has been courageously endorsed by no less an authority in modern thought than the most eminent psychologist, Carl G. Jung, who sums up the gist of the position here advanced in the following paragraphs: The Imitatio Christi will forever have this disadvantage: we worship a man as a divine model, embodying the deepest meaning of life, and then out of sheer imitation we forget to make real the profound meaning present in ourselves. If I accept the fact that a god is absolute and beyond all human experience, he leaves me cold. I do not affect him, nor does he affect me. But if I know, on the other hand, that God is a mighty activity within my own soul, at once I must concern myself with him. In a later work (Psychology and Alchemy, p. 7) Jung has elaborated this trenchant expression in greater specification. These pronouncements from the great psychologist stand out in modern study as judgments of the most arresting momentousness. They stand as a forthright challenge to the system of Christianity in its ground-claims as the religion wielding the highest moral-spiritual influence in the sphere of psychology. This Imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) embodied the faiths supreme mode of the manifestation of its beneficent power to exalt the life of its votaries. Yet this, its mightiest arm of unction and its sharpest sword of the spirit, Jung asserts is the feeblest of its psychological instruments, a very vacuum indeed where real power should be at work. The Church of Christ is certain that it has fulfilled the highest demand, the ultimate proof of the incontestable efficacy of its code of doctrinal affirmations, when it asserts to the world that in the force of its followers sincere and consecrated effort to imitate the divine model in Christ Jesus, the man, it has presented the most direct and dynamic power of uplift in all the range of religious ideals. What, it has asked a thousand times, can compare for downright practical efficacy with the earnest effort of good people to imitate the paragon of Christliness, the Christ-man himself? Jung is not unaware of the pregnancy of the question; he surely has canvassed it from all quarters. Yet he reiterates his asseveration that it is this very objective, and all the more decisively because of the very assiduity and conscientiousness of its pursuit, that creates the spiritual vacuum in the inner life of the devotee and defeats the one sole and final aim of any true religion, which is the spiritualization of the individual worshipper in the inner core of his souls being. Since the psychologists position is controversial and seems highly paradoxical, it is well to cite the basic statement that he has made. I am speaking, therefor, not of the deepest and best understanding of Christianity, but of the superficialities and disastrous misunderstandings that are plain for all to see. The demand made by the Imitatio Christi--that we should follow the ideal and seek to become like it--ought logically to have the result of developing and exalting the inner man. In actual fact, however, the ideal has been turned by superficial and formalistically-minded believers into an external object of worship, and it is precisely this veneration for the object that prevents it from reaching down into the depths of the soul and transforming it into a wholeness in keeping with the ideal. Accordingly the divine mediator stands outside as an image, while meaning remains fragmentary and untouched in the deepest part of him. The sincere effort to emulate the Son of God, the psychologist affirms, should edify, spiritualize and exalt the individual Christian. But, and not too strangely, he says it does not work out to this result. And it fails to do so precisely in proportion to the intensity of the effort exerted to push the imitative enterprise outward and focus it upon the external historical model. To achieve true efficacy in religious worship, he implies, the intensity of effort must be directed to stirring to life a power resident within. The cause of failure is the outward direction of the devotion. The very act of imitation of an external model turns the edifying force away from its proper objective, the inner man. The worship of an outer god leaves the divinity within untouched, unknown and unawakened. To adore the exterior paragon, by so much leaves unrealized the potential perfectibility of the soul itself. While it can be contended--and Jung concedes the point--that in sincere emulation of the divine man some at least of his virtue and transforming power must rub off onto the imitator, it is nevertheless an irrefutable deduction that the psychologist here makes from the premises: if the devoted religionist focuses the potency of his psychological consecration upon an external exemplar, he misses the benefaction of developing his own inner deity. In proportion as one exalts and looks to the imaged perfection without, he lets his own soul lie fallow. It is not a distant historical Christs soul that he needs to exalt; it is his own that cries for attention, recognition and adoration. Like the knight who roamed afar to find the Holy Grail, he will return from his quest to uplift the historical Jesus, only to discover the real Christ pleading for his devotion deep down in his own soul. EASTER ________________________ The Birthday of the Gods By Alvin Boyd Kuhn
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 16:32:55 +0000
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