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In one sense this will be the least directly spiritualistic of my
lectures in Boston. But it is a most essential part of my work to
try and destroy the false-bottomed Spiritualism that only deals in the
figments of faith and is founded in fables perverted to suit its
purposes, whereby we have so long been led astray. Theology has
reared its Babel of dogmas upon a ground of mythology, and I can best
serve the cause of true Spiritualism by identifying and recovering the
primitive meanings of the ancient myths.
2. After I had had some twenty years' acquaintance
with the facts of Modern Spiritualism, and thought the matter over more
or less, I began to write a work on the subject of the abnormal
phenomena in all times. I was, in common with all others, haunted
with the notion of a revelation to mankind given ready-made instead of
its being evolved bit by bit through the mind of man; and I fancied that
in Spiritualism I might find the proof and explanation. From what
I had seen I was amazed at the light which Spiritualism did throw on the
dark things and into the secrecies of the past, and I thought by this
light the old inexplicable customs or misinterpreted myths, and almost
featureless symbols of effaced facts, and ancient mystic images of
things passed out of thought, might be made to live anew; the marks that
puzzled us so much as Friday's foot-print in the sand did Robinson
Crusoe, would reveal the earliest footprints of the spiritual world
fossilised in the natural world for us to recognise and read. That
which looked dull and meaningless before began to bud with new life, and
blush with their hidden beauty; just as if you found some old pipkin,
made in the far past, and the clay of the potter had contained the seed
of flowers, and these should spring up into life and exquisite relief
even while you held it in your hand. It seemed to give me, as it
were, the Masonic sign whereby we can interpret so many mysteries.
It gave me the grip, the symbol, the language known in all lands, which
underlies and underlines all the languages unknown to us.
3. It seemed to create a new seeing sense, or added
such a new illumination to the old seeing sense, as would make the whole
vast field of the past a great gold-diggings awaiting future discovery.
And in this new light, I saw the past had to be re-read and re-written;
so I went on to try and read the myths by this light, and for years have
been engaged on a series of deep-sea soundings, sometimes grasping a
handful of mud in my dredgings and now and then a precious pearl. The
best way of communicating to you something of may results, will be to
carry you partly through my process in an endeavour to get at the
significance of the Serpent-Symbol!
4. So universal has been the so-called Worship of the
Serpent, as to look like the one religion of a world. Its reign
has been widespread as that of night from the best-known to the remotest
parts of the earth. We are but just discovering its prevalence and
its power. It is only a dozen years or so since the temples
dedicated and devoted to its rites were found in Cambodia, surpassing in
size and magnificence the great cathedrals of York, Amiens, and Cologne.
5. The Serpent-Symbol has literally realised that
image of itself, in the mythologies, which depicts it as circling about
the world and clasping the whole wide round in its embrace. It was
the representative of renewed life or immortality on the doors of the
chambers of the dead in the Egyptian and Chaldean tombs; and it is yet a
Symbol of Eternity in the bracelet on an Englishwoman's arm. It is
the Great Dragon of the Celestial Empire; the Long Serpent of the old
Norse Sea Kings; the Lambton Worm; the Dragon of St. George, on our
public house sign-boards and old English penny pieces. It lives
and hisses in our letter S, and twists itself into the shape of
our ampersand! This makes one curious to know the meaning of it
all, if one could only be sure of touching the bottom.
6. Through all times and in many ways have men tried
to obtain some visible representative of the Unseen Power, and reared
their altars to the unknown God as they wandered in the wilderness and
deified the darkness with its creeping things on their upward way to a
Father of Love and a God of Light, and all the misapprehendings were
revelations in their degree.
7. We first really begin to know what God is as we
gradually learn to know what he is not! And we only find him in
proportion as we know that we have not found him! I think the
greatest myth in the world is the notion that man was created with a
primitive consciousness of God, the Spiritual Father. There is
evidence scattered all over the world that the first conception of a
Creator that man ever had was as the Procreator. And that is the
root idea of all religions possibly up to the time of Jesus. The
Serpent itself is but one of the symbols and proofs of that.
8. Have you ever thought of what the primitive man
must have been, as the conditions of his existence are day by day
revealed to us by Science? Why, his first conception of any unseen
Power above him could not have been much beyond that of a Caliban.
Life was so bitterly hard at times, the winters were so cruel cold, and
he had no fire to warm his desolate cave, what would have been his ideas
of a Maker if he had been cursed with light enough only to see his
darkness?—what sense of eternal justice if he had possessed the power to
arraign it? It could have been only the perception and conclusion
of a thinking horse brutally ridden, that might estimate its rider by
the incessant pain of the spur in its side! Fortunately he
did not think; if he had, God would hardly have got him along at all.
Such a God as he would have made out in the gloom could not have drawn
him. He only felt the thrust, the spur of want and desire, and to
these he responded more or less. And all this cruel spurring, as
it seems, was necessary to set him thinking and have his wits about him,
as we say. Hard necessity made him contrive to cover up the thorns
a little and make a softer bed to lie down upon—made him watch the
ongoings of external nature to see how things were done—made him try to
strike a light in his darkness—forced him to plot and plan to outwit his
enemies of the animal world, and after a while seek friends in the
spiritual world. A being who could take up his babe, dash out its
brains and make a meal when hard pressed by hunger, was not likely to
have a taste for the evanescent delicacies of landscape loveliness.
9. Man's primal idea of the Deity would be very dark.
Darkness, says Plutarch, is older than light. His first God may
have been that horrible thing darkness, that came crawling on and
winding round the world, the shadow of whose coming put out the light of
day, making all life shiver and shrink in a cold sweat till the night
was gone; and every now and then its hand was laid on the mouth of the
living, and it was still; on the eyes, and they grew lustreless, and
that which looked and made signs through them was drawn away into this
darkness which men came to know as death. The New Zealand
mythology represents the first children of earth, their Adam and Eve, as
"ever thinking what might be the difference between light and darkness."
And this would naturally be a most primitive study, or rather cause of
dread. The first feeling then would be a child-like shrinking from
the dark. The first gleam of religion would be a
feeling of fear; a good deal of what is called religion is so yet, hence
the recognition of a power that must be propitiated. "We believe
in a good spirit and a bad spirit," said a North American savage, "but
we offer our sacrifices to the evil one. He do us harm. Good
spirit no hurt us; he no need to be worshipped; he good." The
primitive man also dreaded the powers of darkness, which possibly might,
if offended, put out that source of light and warmth, the sun, which
evidently only rose on sufferance every morning, and whose life might at
any time be extinguished.
10. Then he began to wonder what shape this power possessed.
He saw it went round and round in a serpentine sort of manner. The
great lights went round, and the little lights went round, and the
darkness came winding round about like the coils of a Serpent that
finally, in death, held you fast for ever!
11. Surely the Serpent must be a representative, on earth,
of that terrible hidden force that dwelt in the darkness—that was
the Darkness: This vast and appalling thing that, when angry, would look
at you and speak outside its sky-cavern with eyes of lightning and voice
of thunder, and perhaps dart down death in those live Serpents of the
forked flashes that licked up a forest at a time with their tongues of
fire! The heavens would mirror back for him that which he knew and
dreaded most on earth. They would wear the awful aspect of a cruel
mind; and as he was a dweller in trees and caves, his most subtle, most
mortal foe, would be the Serpent. Not that man began by
worshipping the Serpent for itself! That never has been done on
this earth except by a monstrous taste intelligently perverted.
12. It was the recognition of the power beyond the Serpent
that bowed him to the knee. He divined and dreaded the invisible
destroyer lurking behind the visible veil, who sometimes lightened, and
stung you suddenly, and darted death out of his darkness. So, it
may be the first form of Serpent-worship was the deity of utter
darkness, as it were, a black live ring round the being of the primitive
man, that closed on him, tightened its folds and strangled him when
angry or when it pleased.
13. In one of the Brahmanic traditions, Chrishna, who is one
form of the Sun-God, defeats Kalli-Naga, the great Serpent-God, who is
the black or evil spirit with a thousand heads; an earlier rendering of
the Lernean Hydra of the Greeks, slain by Hercules. The Serpent
twisted himself about the body of Chrishna, but the God tore off his
heads one after the other and trampled them under his feet. But
Chrishna was vulnerable in the foot, and his heel was bruised
or bitten by the serpent. This is reproduced in the Hebrew
Genesis.
14. One form of the Serpent running or rather zig-zagging
through the maze of mythological symbolism, is the zig-zag of the
lightning. The Algonquins were asked by Father Buteaux, who was
among them in 1837 as a missionary, what they thought of the nature of
lightning? They replied it was an immense Serpent, which the
Manitou, the Great Spirit, was vomiting forth. "You can see the
twists and folds that he leaves on the trees where he strikes; and
underneath such trees we have often found snakes."
15. The Chinese believe in a Dragon of enormous strength and
sovereign power, which is in heaven, in the air, in the waters, and on
the mountains. We frequently meet with the myth of a Serpent of
vast bulk, which engirdles the world, as in the Norse Mid-Gard Serpent.
16. The Caribs speak of the God of the thunder-storm as a
Great Serpent dwelling in the fruit forests. Shawnees called
the thunder the hissing of the Great Snake; and Totlec, the Aztec God of
Thunder, was represented with a gold serpent in his hand. The
savages of Australia believe in the existence of a gigantic Serpent who
created the world, and who is the coiled-up cause of earthquakes.
In the Persian mythology the Polar Dragon is denominated Azacha, the
Serpent who drowns men and beasts. The word serpent literally
means the Destroyer; and with the Persians the original Destroyer was
the Winter. In the Zend-Avesta, Ahuza-Mazda creates s Summer
Garden which is a perfect Paradise. Then the Evil One, AuraMaynus,
the Death-Dealing, creates an opposition to the same, in the shape of a
Mighty Serpent. That Serpent is Winter; it inflicts death on men
and cattle with its bitter bite. The primal and the worst form of evil
is thus distinctly identified as, or be means of, Winter. This is
the primordial curse, and the bite of its sharp frost was the Serpent's
sting. I found in a very ancient Hindu map of the world, the North
is called the Land of Darkness, the Abyss of Waters, the Abode of the
Great Spirit. This Great Spirit was the Destroyer. Then, as
men began to watch the motions of the heavenly bodies they would sooner
or later make out one particular group or string of stars which every
autumn led on the winter. This would be the starry apparition of
the Destroyer in the shape of a serpent. It does not matter which
was the earliest constellation of the Serpent. That there was one,
we know. There are three or four in the heavens
to-night. Lucian, in his work on astrology, says a virgin
delivered the oracles at Delphi; hence the symbol of the constellation
Virgo. And a dragon spoke from under the Tripod, because of the
constellation Draco, the Dragon, appearing among the stars. The allusion
made by Job is alone sufficient to establish the fact that a Serpent
constellation had been recognised: "By his spirit he hath garnished the
heavens. His hand hath formed the crooked Serpent." A very
remarkable illustration of a process that the Hebrew writings have
undergone is afforded by the paraphrase of this passage by the
Septuagint, where we read: "By his hand he hath slain the Apostate
Serpent." I beg you will bear this fact in mind. Isaiah also
alludes to this crooked Serpent, whom he identifies as the Leviathan of
Job, which the commentators have always been looking for on the earth or
in the sea. There is something bungled in the translating of the
crooked or piercing serpent. You will see, in the margin, that it
is stiff or crossing like a bar. It really means that this
Serpent is the Opposing Power.
17. In fact, it is the original Satan who becomes the
spiritual opposer, the adversary of souls. Satan means the
adversary. Of course it was made out that this Serpent
Constellation, this deity of darkness, this opposer of the sun and
conqueror, who led up the destroying Winter every year, was the natural
enemy of man, and of such evil and malign an influence that the sun
itself sickened in its presence and lost its power. This Serpent
was identified in the Northern Hemisphere, the abode of Winter.
The Hebrews called it the North Zaphon; the Northern heavens were the
land of Zaphon. That is, Ziphon, the Serpent. Thus, the
Primeval adversary of man would be recognised in a physical shape both
the earth and in the heavens, and imaged by that reptile which was
always looked at with an eye of wonder and awe. They saw that as
soon as this Serpent deity ascended its throne, it let loose the storms
and winds of the Autumn Equinox, as if it would blow every leaf off the
Tree of Life, especially in the night-time, when it walked the world
darkly and raged furiously. In the Hesiodic Theogony Typhon is the
father of dreadful tempests, and destroying winds and fearful
hurricanes, the equinoctial enemy of man. This will no doubt
account for the association throughout the East of Serpents with storms
of wind and rain, and the power over these which they exercised at their
will, for the good or ill of man.
18. The lecturer here cited the fact that several tribes of
ancient Mexico had for their chief divinity "The Cloud Serpent," (as the
word signified in their dialect:) the same idea was to be found among
the natives of Panama; and our word hurricane, as applied to the
terrible tornado of the Carribean Sea, was derived from "Hurakan,"
"the heart of the sky," which signified some mysterious creative power
called "the strong serpent." Typhoon, as applied to the fearful
tempests of the Eastern seas, also acquired its name from Typhon, the
name of the Phœnician devil. In the motions of the circular
whirlwinds called cyclones were to be traced—to the mind of the Eastern
nations—the serpentine nature of this deity of darkness.
19. Sooner or later the constellation Ophiuchus was
identified as the bearer of the Serpent. He appeared in the
Heavens as grasping the form of a Serpent in his hand. This was
obviously a symbol of that power which the Destroyer might at any time
let loose on the world.
20. The Serpent worship is chiefly known as a superstition
of ignorance—a religion of utter darkness, practiced with bloody rites
and full of foul abominations. As we get glimpses of it in the
night of the past, luridly revealed as if by light of Tophet, it is most
horrible and ghastly. We peer through rent and rift into the
ruined house of its mysteries like shuddering children at the
slaughter-house door, from under which the warm life crawls ruddily.
21. The hair stirs snakily with horror: the blood creeps
with a reptile-like coldness; we shudder and shrink from what we cannot
see, because what we do see is so strange! so appalling! But no
religion has ever been wholly evil in its nature, or merely a foul
disease of human nature. We see the running sores that resulted in
death; but these never were the cause of its living. And
Serpent-Worship —which looks so absolutely a thing of night —was the
darkness out of which comes the first streak of dawn. It brought
the earliest light of Revelation into the world. It was one of the
primal forms of all Spiritualism. Every one has more or less
remarked the character of wisdom universally ascribed to the Serpent,
but no one has yet explained the nature of that wisdom. Sir Henry
Rawlinson observes that the most important titles of the Serpent-God,
who was the third person in the Chaldean triad, or Trinity of Gods,
refer to his functions as the source of knowledge and science. He
is a deified source of intelligence. He is the
personification of wisdom: "Be ye wise as serpents." But how came
such a beast as the Serpent to be the symbol of wiseness, worshipped as
the communicator of knowledge? It cannot be literally the wisdom
that is the consummate flower of human knowledge and perfected fruit of
experience which is signified. No Serpent ever possessed that.
As an animal the Serpent is not remarkably intelligent. It
certainly is reticent in expression, and has an admirable faculty of
silence; but the profoundest silence is not necessarily wisdom:
its hiss, from a critical point of view, is at times imposing, but, like
that of some other critics, it may be only an imposition; the hiss may
not mean that it knows more than we do, and could utter it if it would.
The Serpent is not the embodiment of wisdom in the animal world, but I
think the early Spiritualism that was practiced under the Serpent sign
contains one hidden clue to the wisdom meant. The wise Man, a
Wizard; the wise Woman, a Witch, we still call those who attain
knowledge in the abnormal way. The wise men of the East were
Persian Magi, or men who attained knowledge by magic arts; a wise man
was one who divined, saw, or interpreted by spiritual means, and mainly
by the abnormal method, whether he wrought for a good power or for an
evil purpose. "Thou shalt take no gift, for the gift blindeth the
wise," says Moses; that is, the seer in trance must not divine for
money; such a motive will destroy his vision. Divinity signified
this divination long before it meant Deity in our sense; it was
revelation by means of Deus—that is, spirits—our word Devil simply
meaning Spirit-Lord, which came to be looked upon as devilish. In
the early time the gift was held to be divine, and consecrated as such,
because it afforded the first glimpse into a spiritual world whereby man
discovered that he also was a spiritual being. Be ye wise as
serpents, then, may be interpreted as an allusion to the wiseness of the
magical knowledge, abnormally derived by vision or divination which was
primally attained by the Serpent-Worshippers. Be ye intuitive,
knowing as the cunningest of the sorcerers who had eaten of the Tree of
Knowledge, but do not use your divine gift harmfully. In one
sense, then, the wisdom of the Serpent was the occult knowledge obtained
through spiritual communication through mediumistic means by the ancient
worshippers of the Serpent-Symbol. It is a well known fact that in
every country the Serpent has been looked upon as a medium of
communicating knowledge or wisdom more than mortal.
22. The Serpent-Symbol, then, was not worshipped as the
embodiment of knowledge and wisdom in the animal world—not deified for
anything in the Serpent itself. It was made the spiritual symbol
of knowledge darkly derived in man's mortal night-time by the early
Star-Worshippers, whether by study of the starry book opened to them in
the heavens, or by interpretation of natural phenomena on earth, their
method including the trance condition of seership and communication with
spirits.
23. I used the term darkly derived, because they were
groping after knowledge in the dark, by magic means and dark arts, and
their religion of fear was a worship of the dark powers, or, at least,
of powers that were but darkly apprehended. It was under the reign
of the Serpent—which was one sign of the Star-Worshippers that became an
universal Symbol—that letters were discovered, and the earliest art of
healing was revealed.
24. When the Israelites were stung by the fiery-fanged
Serpents in the wilderness, they had to be cured by a return to the old
worship of the Serpent in its milder shape; and the image was sacredly
kept in the temple at Jerusalem for five hundred years. Surely
this goes to prove the Serpent-Worship to have been a familiar form of
faith with them, and that in their time of need they had a greater
belief in the Agatho-Demon than in the God of Israel? Also, their
faith seems to have been justification. At first sight it appears
somewhat strange and incongruous that the Serpent should have been held
up as the cause of the fall and degradation and death and damnation of
man in the Book of Genesis, the first Book of the Book of Books, and
then that the Serpent- Symbol should have been raised aloft as the
healer, the restorer, the saviour, to look on which, in the shape of a
brazen image, was to live.
25. The conclusion follows, of natural necessity, that if it
were a man, Moses, who lifted up the Serpent as a god of healing, it
could hardly be the same man who represented the Serpent as our mortal
and immortal enemy, and made him who struck the Semitic pair down in
spiritual death the magic restorer of the stricken Israelites to
physical health and life. The Hebrews had got their Serpents
mixed. The Serpent Divinity, then, is the Deity of Divination.
The Serpent is the symbol of abnormal seership, the vision and the
faculty divine of the trance-seers and ghost-seers.
26. After referring to the crowning with snakes of the
priestesses and initiates into the ancient serpent mysteries, in token
of wisdom and abnormal vision—second sight—the speaker proceeded to
illustrate his point by citations from the Chinese, Hindoostani, and
Grecian records. To his mind the face end look of the Gorgon, with
its power to turn the beholder into stone, did but symbolise the
magnetic influence that could catalepse the patient into the white
stillness of apparent death—stiff and stony in the state of trance.
27. It is interesting to note that augury—divination—is
derived from an old Aryan word that means
sight, and that the Scottish "spae-wife," from. whence we derive
our "spy," means a seeress, a prophetess, a wise woman, one who sees
covertly to gain occult knowledge.
28. The gift of seership or mediumship was at times called
by the name of the hidden treasure, or the hidden treasure of life; and
at the same time, represented as being under the guardianship of the
Serpent. The Jewish patriarch, Joseph, was the possessor of this
hidden treasure. He was a very great diviner, superior to all the
famous magicians of Egypt, unequalled as a prophet and interpreter.
It was on this account that Pharaoh, the king, exalted him over all the
people of Egypt: "And Pharaoh called Joseph's name Zaphnath-Paaneah," or
Zaphnath-Pionk, which in the Coptic signifies a revealer of secrets, or
one through whom secrets are revealed, literally a spiritual medium.
But in Egyptian the name means "the hidden treasure is life." And
to show how inseparably it is associated with the Serpent, we find the
name given to Joseph represents the Serpent as Zephon or Typhon; so that
the fact of Joseph's being a man in whom the spirit of revelation was so
remarkably manifested that he is an oracle of Deity is indicated to the
Egyptians by a sacred name which accredits his inspiration, his
wiseness, wizardry, to the Serpent. This hidden treasure, which is
life, and which is kept under the charge of the Serpent or Dragon, lies
at the root of many of the myths. The knowledge derived through
this mediumship was so highly prized of old that it became the secret
treasure of the mysteries; a secret to be kept in the dark.
29. The Serpent was likewise the representative of a hidden
treasure which continually gleamed out on us from the darkness where it
had long lain concealed. This treasure was the spiritual,
therefore the underlying real shape of that which was accursed in the
Norse mythology by the dwarf Andvari as it was in the Hebraic legend of
"the fall."
30. When Sigurd in the Norse story had killed the Dragon and
was roasting its heart, he burned his finger, and putting it hastily
into his mouth, accidentally tasted the life-blood of the monster, and
instantly his eyes (spiritual) were opened like those of Adam and Eve in
the Garden, and he heard (and understood) the voice of the birds, who
told him to eat the heart—which he did—and he would become the wisest of
men. This was the same advice as that given by the Serpent of
Genesis—the same temptation as that proffered to Eve, and the same
assurance that it would lead to the hidden treasure, with the same
fulfilment.
31. The belief anciently cherished of the existence of
Draconites, or precious stones, which could be taken from the brains of
Dragons—if secured before the death of the animal had
supervened, which had the power to render the wearer at times invisible,
(an exhibition of the natural obverse of the seeing power possessed by
the Serpent while in life)—was alluded to, and the speaker said:
One of the latest forms taken by this myth, is the
supposed jewel in the head of the toad; the shining preciousness hidden
in the dark and loathly evil—a true, even if unconscious recognition of
the soul of good in things evil, of the divineness of vision whereby the
seeing eye is lighted, and that the light which so often led astray was
light from heaven. When we kill our Dragon, let us mind and
preserve the hidden jewel, by tackling him while there is life left in
him.
32. The speaker proceeded to state and to give proof by
citations that in several languages, including the Hebrew, Arabic,
Algonquin, and Dakota, the word for Serpent had various derivations,
which signified the practice of magic, divination, the consulting of
spirits, and said: We frequently find the Serpent so inextricably
entwined with the human form as to seem synonymous with it, and
constitute one of the profoundest riddles of the unknown, propounded by
a sort of Serpent Sphinx. This has raised the suspicion that, in
its primal shape, the legend of the Hebrews and that of the Mexicans
gave the Serpent form to both the Father and the Mother of the human
race; one reason for this being that, in the annals of the Mexicans the
first woman whose name was translated by the old Spanish writers —"The
woman of our flesh," is always represented as accompanied by an enormous
male Serpent: and in the Mexican mythology the Goddess-Parent of
primitive man, the Serpent-Woman, was also called Tonantzin, our Mother.
According to Tanner's narrative the grandmother of mankind—"Me suk kum
me go kwa "—was represented indifferently by an old woman or a Serpent.
33. The Serpent-Woman is continually to be met with under
many names; but the mystery is not to be solved on the physical theory
of a serpent geniture. The Serpent-Woman is not a Woman-Serpent.
She is a Serpent-Woman because in the service of the Serpent. Eve
was a Serpent-Woman or Woman of the Serpent, but not a Woman-Serpent.
Alexandrinas says, according to the strict interpretation of the Hebrew
term, the name Hevia aspirated signifies a female serpent..... But we
shall understand the Serpent-Woman better if we look upon her as the
Pythoness. The damsel spoken of in the Book of Acts was possessed
by a spirit of divination, or, as it ought to be rendered, Python.
She was a Pythoness, as was the Priestess of the Delphi, and many other
shrines and oracles of old—a medium whose utterances were inspired by
spirits or gods of the Serpent Religion.
34. For we must bear in mind that Serpent-Worship,
Water-Worship, Star-Worship, Sun-Worship, as they are named, were all
connected with the same facts as are alleged to underlie our Modern
Spiritualism. And the devotees all made use of spiritual
mediumship for their oracles, and believed themselves to be in
communication with the unseen world. It was not the sun, or the
tree, or the water, that replied through the month of the prophet or
priestess. Each of these religious was founded on the
theory that they were divinely—that was, spiritually—inspired; and that
a God possessed the Pythoness, and unfolded the past or foretold the
future by means of her mediumship. This fact of Serpent-Worship,
as connected with the oracles in that form of Spiritualism called
Pythonism, will help us to explain many transformations of the myths,
although attempting to follow and arrest all the changes in the process
is somewhat like trying to photograph the figure of a man ascending a
ladder, and arresting a bit of him on several rounds. But this is
certain: the Python woman, the Python oracle, the whole Pythonic
mediumship, is continually and everywhere represented by the various
Serpent-Symbols.
35. In the light of his idea many of the myths—the
Hebrew included—could be resolved to their original elements. The
story of Hercules uniting himself with a monster who was half a woman
and half a serpent, by this illumination, meant that Hercules, the
man, wedded a woman who was a priestess of the Serpent-worship—a
Pythoness; and that told of Alexander, who was represented as
acknowledged by his father Philip, of Macedon, to be the son of a
Serpent or rather of a God, was to be fathomed in that Olympia; his
mother, was a Serpent-Woman of wonderful enthusiasm—a Pythoness of
extraordinary power, and was represented as being "remarkably ambitious
of these inspirations." What more natural to such a fervent ophite
than that the Serpent God, the Controlling of the oracles, should appear
in vision [as she is reported to have dreamed the night before her
marriage] to his devotee, and embrace her as a trance, or that she
should look on her hero son as divinely, i.e., spiritually
begotten?
36. The speaker referred at this point to the fact
that looking into the strange, unfathomable eyes of the Serpent was
probably the earliest method of attaining to the condition of the
magnetic trance—the ZendAvesta (among other authorities) distinctly
attributing the characteristic to the Serpent. This method widened
into the looking upon or into water , or crystal or anything bright.
It is possible that the jewelly brightness of the Urim and Thummim
produced the magnetic trance, and that this method of magnetising was
alluded to by St. Paul when he said, "We see as in a glass darkly," or
mystically.
37. Wherever I have gone deepest in trying to fathom my
subject, I seem never to have touched bottom without finding that
Serpent-worship is Phallic-worship on the one hand, whilst on the other
the bottom falls through altogether, and I find myself in spirit-world.
Many persons may not think of spirits as connected with such a subject.
38. But we have the great authority of Jesus Christ in
asserting the Spiritualism of the old Serpent-worship, and in
recognising the fact that their oracles were truly based on a false
Spiritualism; that is, they were often uttered by spirits which were
opposed to the immortal welfare of man.
39. When the seventy return to the Master, with great joy,
saying, exultingly, "Lord, even the devils are subject unto us through
Thy name," Jesus replies, in his musing, remote manner, as if half
absent in dream-land: "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven."
That is what John calls "the old Serpent." And then, turning on
them the full presence of his spiritual self, he says: "Behold I give
unto you power to tread on Serpents and Scorpions"—symbols of the old
Serpent-worship—"and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall
by any means hurt you. Notwithstanding, in this rejoice not that
the spirits are subject unto you, but rather rejoice because your names
are written in heaven."
40. Going on further to illustrate the signification of the
Serpent-Symbol, as a type of wisdom, the speaker said the time was when
the only healing known was performed by the priests and priestesses' of
the ancient mysteries, and by them many marvellous things were done,
many wonderful things foreknown and foretold. It is of course
possible, he said, that in the lower intellectual range the spiritual
signification of Serpent-Worship—the cryptothesis of the symbol—may have
been partially lost, and the Serpent literally accepted instead of the
symbol, or rather instead of the Spiritualism that was symbolled.
One of the most widely known of Greek myths is the destruction of the
Dragon or Python by the Sun-God Apollo, and taking possession of the
Oracle which the Serpent hath hitherto guarded. This myth
illustrates the fact that Serpent-worship was an earlier form of worship
than the Sun-worship, and marks the change when higher influences took
possession of the shrine and gave the Parnassian Oracles to men instead
of the lower spirits, that had kept possession and given the responses
under the Pythonic inspiration. The Serpent-worship originated in
fear of evil influences, and in dread of winter and darkness;
consequently the Sun-worship was an immense advance to humanity; it was
a recognition of the God of beneficence and joy—a religion of love,
compared with the earlier religion of terror on earth and malignancy in
Heaven; it was the incarnation of a spirit of brightness.
41. You see the world turning to it out of the shadows of a
miserable night of the past, and its face brightens sunward, and the
reptile influence begins to fail in power and unwind its coils and slink
apart into out-of-the-way lurking-places. The human mind rejoices and
expands in this new morning of the world, and in many shapes and under
divers names deifies the Destroyer of Serpents, primally the sun.
42. The Zoroastrians were among the first to represent God
as a spiritual essence whose symbol was in the fire and in the sun, and
to endeavour, by worship on housetop and mountain summit, to typify a
climbing a little nearer to the "Heart of Light." The Gods Horus,
Osiris, Apollo, Bacchus, Balder, Adonis, were personifications to the
nations worshipping them of this Sun-God warring with the Power of
Darkness which they ultimately destroy. St. John had taken the old
astrological allegory and made the conflict which took place yearly a
final fight betwixt the Lord of Light and the Demon of Darkness; and
turned the sun's victory of the vernal equinox into an eternal triumph
of the new Spiritual Sun which he held to have arisen on the world in
Jesus Christ.
43. The physical imagery furnished by the ancient myth, as
astronomically interpreted, has been adopted altogether as typical of
certain spiritual facts identified in the person, the birth, and other
circumstances connected with the life and religion of Christ. And
everything necessary was there ready for adoption, and fitting so
perfectly to the new needs that it would have seemed a sin against the
law of coincidence, or Providence, not to have taken advantage of the
old facts and given them a new interpretation. "And the Lord said,
I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between her seed and
thy seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."
In the first form, the seed of the woman was the Sun-God, the God of
Light, which was at enmity with the Serpent as leader of the hosts of
darkness. The Sun was, in the elder cosmogony, the power that repaired
all the wrong and healed all the evil done during the reign of
darkness—the evil introduced into the happy Garden of Summer by the
symbolical Serpent; hence the prophecy identified with Christ as the Sun
of Righteousness, who was as to rise with healing on his wings and
repair the consequences of the fall, and the loss of the Summer Garden
of humanity, by restoring it to the primal condition and rescuing it
from the empire of Darkness and the malign influences of the Serpent.
44. The Ormuzd of Zoroaster was the Sun-God, or Lord of
Light. Also the epithet of Adonis, or Lord, was given to the sun.
This Adonis was the Tammuz of Ezekiel. It was one of the
abominations mourned over by this prophet that he saw in the inner court
of the Lord's house about five-and-twenty men with their backs turned
toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east, and they
worshipped the sun toward the east. And at the door of the gate of
the Lord's house there sat women weeping for Tammtuz, lamenting in a
loud and idolatrous manner the death of Tammuz, that was Adonis, Lord of
Light; or the Sun, who was either setting or dwindling down for his
wintry death, and losing his strength daily. This is represented
in the Mithra-worship—that is, the so-called Sun-worship—as a man
stabbing the Bull, a Serpent biting him, and the Scorpion tearing him.
45. At the ancient mysteries the people were instructed by
means of representations, dramatic and pictorial—thus, thoughts and
obscure facts, however occultly obtained, had to be humanised by
parables, plays, &c., before they could be grasped by the common
understanding. And in this way the Constellation of the Virgin,
ascending the East by night, just at the turn of the year and the birth
of the Light- God—the Summer Sun—would be represented to the people
present at the mysteries as a woman (the Virgin) with her new-born child
in her arms or at her breast, together with such other personifications
and scenery as would complete the picture and convey the meaning.
Such representations must have been at times so familiar to the popular
mind that they easily took the place of the original facts; humanity
being much more interesting to itself as a subject of study than either
scientific truths or abstract speculation. The speaker proceeded
by several extracts from authorities on Arabian, Egyptian, and Persian
traditions to prove that this shadowing forth by the Virgin and child,
of the constellation of the same name, was wide-spread among the nations
of antiquity.
46. The Sun-God derives from the Father of Lights, and is
deified as the light of the world. He is born a tender child at
the winter solstice, under the sign of the constellation of the
celestial Virgin. The Romans celebrated this birth of the Sun-God
with festivities and games on the 25th of December — our Christmas-day.
"We celebrate," says the Emperor Julian, "some days before the first of
the year, magnificent games in honour of the Sun, to whom we give the
title of the Invincible."
47. "Oh, Sun-King," he continues, "Kin, of the Universe;
thou whom, from all eternity, the first God produced out of his pure
substance." In the Mysteries the God-Sun descends to the
under-world in his death. If we take it as Balder, he descends to
Hel, or the shadowy realm of Hela; if as Bacchus, he descends to Hades.
Then he is raised again, and ascends the heavens in greater power as the
first-born of the Father; and from thence we have the descent of fire to
vivify the world and renew its life.
48. It is somewhat startling to find what an amount of the
old Sun-worship reappears in the worship of the Son. At first
sight there seems to be no room for any other foundations for
Christianity than the ancient religion, on account of the facts being
forestalled.
49. This fact the speaker proceeded to prove by evidence
showing that the Egyptians celebrated in the winter solstice the birth
of the God of Light, holding in honour of their virgin goddess a famous
celebration of lights, which was represented in the Christian ceremonies
of Candlemas.
50. The Christian Sunday, or Lord's Day, was the day of the
Lord, Sun-Adonis, Tammuz, Domine, Sol, and Mithra, Lord of Light.
The hold of the Sun-worship was so strong upon the early Christians,
that, as late as the fifth century, Leo the Great made complaint that
many Christians, on entering the Basilica of St. Peter for early
worship, would turn round and make their obeisance to the rising sun.
The same thing exists in the English Church today, in the custom of
turning and bowing toward the East when the name of Jesus occurs in the
creed, thus actually making the identification geographical.
51. The speaker then entered into a further exposition of
the connection existing between the leading characteristics of
Christianity and the Sun-worship. The constellation Virgo arising
in the heavens would naturally appear to be pursued by the Serpent
constellation—and from thence came the story in the 12th chapter of
Revelations, wherein the great dragon stood ready to devour the child
whom the woman in labour was about to bring forth; and the war which
Michael waged with said dragon was typical of the fight annually
occurring between light and darkness, contending for supremacy.
"We know," said Albert the Great, "that the celestial Virgin ascended
over the horizon at the moment at which we fix the birth of our Lord
Jesus Christ. All the mysteries of this Divine incarnation, and
all the secrets of His wonderful life, from His conception to His
ascension, are to be found in the constellations, and figured in the
stars that announced them." And think what you may of it, he said,
the fact is that in many nations and under divers names, the Sun, born
of the Virgin constellation, was worshipped, and his birth celebrated as
the light of the world ages on ages before Jesus Christ was born.
52. This was proved by reference to the Chronicle of
Alexandria concerning the Egyptian mysteries of ancient times.
Thus did the Dragon of Darkness, the old Serpent of the Persian
Mythology, the Typhon of Egypt, the Crooked Serpent of Job, the Prince
and Power of the Air who ascended his throne of the winter world adopted
by St. John, become the Man-erpent Satan, our spiritual adversary on
earth, whose name is one with that of the ancient Saturn and Egyptian
Set, who was looked up to and feared of old as man's adversary in the
heavens. The Serpent has taken spiritual form, and been made to
cast its loathsome shadow on the shuddering souls of men.
53. Calvinism was the later and uglier and most gruesome
form of Serpent-worship; it deified and adored the same almighty Moloch,
whose anger could only be quenched by a great glut of gore, only
propitiated through the offering of innocent blood.
54. Such was, such is the mystery of the Beast, which the
speaker of the Revelation left for us to interpret as best we may.
That was the Beast ,which was, and is not, and yet is; for the Serpent
of Spiritual darkness still winds about the souls of men and chokes the
life out of them and steals their treasures, and has yet to be wrestled
with and conquered in struggles as stern as any that are told of in the
stories of the Dragon-slayers of old. Its name is Theology!
55. The lecturer here introduced what he considered the
unwinding of the last coil of the Serpent, whose turnings he had
followed through its primal convolutions of darkness and horror, its
astro-theological aspect, and its spiritualistic signification of
wisdom, and in so unwinding be proposed to show that in his opinion the
basis of the myth was physical. The early men who set forth their
meanings in the myths saw with Darwinian instinct that what really and
truly divided and differentiated them from the animals as a visible fact
was the catamenial period which marked the creation of humanity.
It was their creation—they did not trouble themselves about
world-making, as had been assured—and so they formulated it in carious
ways; among others under the symbol of the Serpent, the Renewer, the
Renovator of Life, the Continuer of Being. This catamenial period
was the preparer for creation—the first form of prophecy to man—its
duration was the first direct measure of time, and its methodical close
marked the seventh day, the sacred season of rest. Arguments and
facts in proof of his theory—in which Egyptian, Sanscrit, and Hebrew
writings alike were called in as evidence—were advanced by him with
cogency and power, and in the light of this hypothesis he declared
himself able to intelligently interpret any story related of the
Serpent, "whether it originated in the theology that made it typical of
good or emblematic of evil." Orthodox theology, he said, has
created its Satan out of the evil Serpent, and its Saviour out of the
Procreator called the Sun-God, under carious names, the natural opponent
of the old Red Dragon and Deity of the Dark. These constitute the
two halves of its scheme of damnation and salvation. Nothing else
in this world have they to go upon.
56. He concluded his lecture with a prophecy that the
theological ring would ere long be broken up, and that all sects would
see the necessity of abandoning their creeds and embracing the higher
revealments of Spiritualism.
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