07 Moses Also Descends

MOSES ALSO DESCENDS From the standpoint of sheer expediency the Church was fortunate that it could find at hand a plausible apologetic for this episode in the Scriptural narrative in the Christ’s mission of preaching to the dead spirits in prison. His descent could therefore be haloed with the aura of a sacrificial condescension on the part of divinity, a gratuity divinely vouchsafed, not a cosmic compulsion or obligation. So Christian polity has rested on the assumption that Jesus’ descent to the "bowels of the earth" was motivated by his divine compassion for the unfortunate dwellers in the underworld and that he undertook their release, since only through him could their prison bars be broken. Had not the organic structure of the ancient esoteric systematism been totally lost, the theologians of the Church could have seen that the matter of the Lord’s descent to the land of the dead was not a thing or whim or impulse on the part of the Son of God, left to his voluntary initiative, but was integrally in the order of beneficent evolutionary schematism. For it is the law of life in the ranks of graded being that the organic life on a higher plane must inject the seed of its potential renewal of life in the beings subsisting on the plane next below it in the scale. But sight was lost of this basic formula when the night of stark ignorance settled over the near-East nations in the centuries of decline of deeper spiritual science following the heyday of philosophical glory of the Periclean Age of Greece. The savage upsurge of resentment on the part of the illiterate masses against anything savoring of learning, had by the third century swept out of common ken all knowledge of the esoteric thesis of the soul’s continued progression up the ladder of life through recurrent incarnations in earthly body. Hence along with the obsession of the idea of the limitation of earth experience to the one-only life, an idea at once over-whelmingly destructive of any philosophical attitude toward life on earth, there fell upon the general mind the persuasion of the finality of death, once its reference had been shifted from the spiritual deadening of the soul while in the body to the decease of the body itself. Here and here alone is the formula of understanding that recreates the psychical environment which in that direful third century transmogrified the nascent Christianity from its original character of Gnostic wisdom to a scarecrow caricature of that wisdom, a veritable fetish worship of symbols and images carnalized and petrified by literalism.

Christian theology from the start found itself impaled on its affirmation of the Biblical declaration that there was no other way to salvation than through the historical Jesus and him crucified. It was on this thesis logically confronted with the obligation of effecting some link between this Savior and all earth’s antecedent dead, so that those also might meet, know and profit by the grace of salvation. Hence the avidity with which the apologists of the faith seized upon the three days visit of Jesus to the nether world. The pietistic Church Father Cyprian quotes in Latin the statement in 1 Peter 4:6 : "For in this also it was preached to the dead, in order that they might be brought again to life." The obtuseness of perception on the part of Christian scholars can be vividly sensed if one turns back to a passage in Exodus 19:10-11, where a perfect analogue of the descent of divinity and preaching "to the people" is found. Cyprian, blind to the clear implications of such a construction of esoteric adroitness pointing to the non-historicity of a similar event in the "life" of Jesus, expressly cites it as proof of that event’s historicity. The citation runs: "The Lord said to Moses, Descend and testify to the people, and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their clothing and be ready against the day after tomorrow. For on the third day the Lord will descend upon Mount Sinai." Quoting these verses MacCulloch asks if this means that Moses was a forerunner of Jesus to Hades, heralding the Lord’s coming there, - another John the Baptist. Obviously what it means is just what the orthodox commentators have obdurately refused to see: that all such recurrences of theme are elements of the arcane allegorism of ancient writing, and not real as objective occurrences at all. Not historical as events, they are yet realities in the life of man spiritual, for they present to the mind the veridical forms of spiritual reality. As far as it goes, this little sketch of the soul’s advent and incarnation on earth is item for item a paralogue of the New Testament’s descent and preaching of Jesus. As long, of course, as the venerable Scriptures are envisaged as literal history of one ancient people, instead of typegraphs of the form and meaning of human life, no theologian would be in a thousand years of identifying "Moses" of the Old Testament with John the Baptist of the New. Moses himself could not enter the Promised Land, but prepared the way for the full-fledged "Jesus" (Joshua) to cross the Jordan into the land flowing with milk and honey. "Moses" therefore is the way-opener in evolution for the advent of Christly spirit power, and stands to Joshua as John the Baptist stands to Jesus. It is well to point out several identities in the two constructions. God sent his "one-ly born" Son down to earth, and this mission entailed his descent to Hades; rather, be it said categorically, this was that descent to Hades. In the Old Testament allegory, the Lord ordered Moses to descend. Jesus descended and preached to them three days (two actually); Moses’ exhortation was to continue for two days, ending on the third day.

Here we have an astonishing parallelism, if not patent identity, between an alleged episode in the life of the first-century character Jesus and a very similar incident in the life of Moses. This is by no means an isolated instance of such close similarity between Jesus and one or other of the prominent characters in the Old Testament, - not to overlook the one hundred and eighty such identities between Jesus and the certainly non-existent Horus, the long antecedent typal Christ of ancient Egypt. Yet - let it be emphasized to the last degree of its significance, Christian scholars have for two thousand years stood face to face with these evidences of the non-factuality, the non-historicity of the life of Jesus in the Gospels, yet continue to deny the existence of any evidence to indicate that the Christian literature was derived in any direct or significant measure from antecedent Pagan sources. Our scholar MacCulloch concludes his book with reiterations of a statement to this effect. He does allow derivation of Christian material from Hebraism, by some subtlety of classification dissociating Jews from the category of Pagans. This item of parallelism confronts Christian theology with another problem. Let it be borne in mind that in the Christian book of apologetics, the descent and the three-days preaching of Jesus was the only opportunity made available to the billions of humanity living before 33 A.D. For their salvation. Yet here is the Old Testament’s recital of a precisely similar descent and spiritual sanctification, which on a historical basis of interpretation and reckoning would have occurred some fifteen hundred years before Jesus came to Hades. The people that had to be preached out of the region of darkness and sin into the blessedness of beatification in three days had at least once before (and several other like situations are to be found in the literature of old Egypt) been visited by divine messengers and had the door of salvation opened to them. All this (and many similar complications) throws contradiction and confusion into the counsels of Christian exegetics. But - the riposte will come - we are comparing two things that have no connection or relation whatever, since Jesus’ descent was to spirits in the prison of Hades, or hell, a region allocated in the purely spiritual state of being; whereas Moses was sent down to a group of living people on this earth, in Palestine or in the Sinai district of Egypt. How can we classify these two men as identical characters, performing the same mission, when they were as different historical personages as were Caesar and Napoleon. So will the argument run as long as one contends for the historical character of the Scriptures.

Two men in history are of course two men, distinct and individual. But in allegory a dozen "men" with different names can all "be" one and the same character, and "he" not a living man of history, but a type-figure of some element in man’s make-up. And this, one can assert with positiveness, is what the main Biblical figures are, in both Old and New Testaments. Yes, "Jesus" descended to hell and "Moses" went down on Mount Sinai, and we venture to flout all the authority of orthodox Christian theology by proclaiming that this allegorism is one of many solid reasons why one can now positively assert that "hell" and "Mount Sinai" are one and the same place! And that place is neither under (the surface of) this earth, nor in spirit-land, nor in the territory of Egypt, the country in north-east Africa, but is just this good old earth itself! The cryptic, but clear intimation of every reference to this place to which, in all ancient Scriptures, a divine here descends, leads a discerning mind to the perception at last that the dark underworld, the hell and Hades of theology is our rolling globe.

Forever settled, then, is the early Fathers’ dispute over who goes down to hell, when they do so, and who are awakened, and also where. For earth, of course, is the site of the universal school of evolutionary education for all those mind-born Sons of God for whom cosmic fate decreed a set task in the economy of life in this corner of the galaxy. Also this earth is the "underworld" of all mythology and theology, as being "under" the empyrean, or heaven, which is the undisputed point of departure for all entities sent "down" to a lower sphere of life. The first misjudgment that threw off the unschooled early interpreters was the failure to grasp this proper signification of "under". Under is always relative to what is above; and since all the allegorical depictions of spiritual situations or processes in the Scriptures were - erroneously - taken to refer to the man Jesus in his earthly historical objectivity, naturally every reference to his descent into a lower world was naïvely taken to be an account of a journey which he took from this earth into a lower limbo. Never has it dawned upon purblind religious zealotry that this descent was the transition of a unit of divine soul from a higher world than ours and down into man’s constitution, not from man’s station on earth into a place below our world, but spirit’s descent from a heaven above us to us men on earth. We men on earth are those "spirits in prison", lying dormant, unawakened, those spiritually "dead" in their tombs of flesh. There is abundant certification of all this scattered widely over the field of ancient literature. But it is irrefutably demonstrated by the identity of the Greek words soma for "body" and sema for "tomb". For a long time the infant soul of potential deity implanted "from above" as the Scriptures have it, lies deeply buried under the weight of the lower animal nature and instincts, until these are gradually overcome and it is resurrected from this "dead" condition. In this elucidation is covertly hidden the core of significance of all theology, and its rediscovery after nineteen centuries of oblivion will inaugurate a new Reformation in all Western religion far transcending in range, depth and significance the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. It will for the first time enable the twisted scheme of Christian theology to re-establish its harmony with that wondrously beautiful structure of esoteric wisdom from which it veered so tragically far away in the third century. The ancient light that Christianity dimmed and well nigh extinguished will be rekindled and in the clear view of truth which it will provide can be constructed that one-world religion that alone can give peace to the earth, the fervent dream of idealist humanity. For the realization at last that the consciousness of man here on earth is the arena of a potential heaven of blessedness and a very present hell of ignorance and benightedness of the spirit is the great "lost key" to the true meaning of the Scriptures, the lost clue also to the cryptic purport of all mythology. All religions will go on misunderstanding the illuminating message of their ancient Bibles until they rebase their interpretations on this rebuilt foundation.

It is only when a mind enlightened with this clearer view scans the Scriptures anew that it becomes sharply aware of the unconscionable asininity of many constructions in these venerable tomes when they are rendered as literal history. It takes bright light to reveal the grotesqueness of the bogies that bad vision has created in the darkness. For instance in the text we have quoted from Exodus the Lord instructs Moses to order the people to "wash their clothing" to be ready for reception of the Lord when he descended on the third day. Esoteric symbolism uses natural phenomena and physical objects to analogize spiritual realities, but unless the mind can lift its conceptions from the phenomena or the objects to the noumenal realities thus objectified, the outer picture will generally remain bizarre or ludicrous. Looked at realistically the scene of a general or national washday for the children of Israel can yield humorous suggestions. But, with the esoteric key to the marvelous language of symbolism it is readily seen that the "clothing" that souls put on as they descend from ethereal realms to earth is the several bodies of courser matter overlaid finally by the physical body, and that the impurity which these bodies catch from contact with the earth necessitates cleaning if the soul itself is not to be contaminated. How exalted the sense and inspiring the incentive to nobler living, when one grasps the loftier conception deftly woven into the allegory, that man must purge his lower "clothing" of its accumulated dross of animalism, sensualism and coarseness and refine it till it shines with spiritual purity. Should the moral of this situation need elaboration, it can be said simply that obviously the edifying power of this Scriptural presentation, typical of hundreds of others, would be immeasurably, almost magically, enhanced, if the sublime spiritual connotation is apprehended instead of a Monday’s washtub operation. When one takes the serpent of Genesis as a snake, takes the ark as a wooden boat floating on a universal flood covering the mountain-tops, takes Jonah’s great fish as a mammoth whale, the cross as two wooden beams, the resurrection as the re-animation of a physical cadaver, one succeeds only in clamping his mind down to the dead level of pure idolatry, worshipping the symbol and remaining blind to what in a higher world of conceptuality it was intended to symbolize. The literal interpreters of the Bible are the greatest of the idolaters.