08 Confusion Worse Confounded

CONFUSION WORSE CONFOUNDED The whole theological situation as regards the descent of deity to save man became involved in an inextricable tangle through the misreading of allegory and the confusion of two worlds where only one under two different names was intended. The confusion put in doubt the sheer matter of the direction, up or down, in which the dead were to move in proceeding to their cosmic destination, be that destination heaven, or hell and Hades. Already we have seen the muddle of inconsistency and contradiction created by the clash of ideas as to the heavenly destination of the good and the journey of the wicked to hell or Hades. One must go through such a book as MacCulloch’s to gain a realizing sense of how hopelessly Christian thinking and believing over the centuries have been mired in the absurdities of the traditional tenets of the Church covering this localization of the prospective post-mortem residence of souls. If all the orthodox were to read such a work, they would be horrified to realize that, on their own Christian teaching, they will not be able to determine whether at death they will go up to a better world above, or down to a Hades below. The confusion is so unresolvable that even up and down, heaven and hell, Paradise and Hades are indistinguishable.

Then imagine how much more their astonishment will be intensified if they are told, as now they can be told, that the matter of their going either up to heaven or down to hell is not, in theological meaning, in the remotest degree related to the question of where their souls will go following bodily decease on earth. This can be stated categorically and without possible refutation, because it is now seen that the directions taken by souls in descending and ascending have no reference to what transpires at what we call death, but refer always and only to the direction taken by souls descending from heaven to earth for incarnation, and ascending from earth back to heaven on their return. If that area of non-physical existence out of which souls migrate to earth be the region which religions have denominated "heaven", and on some basis of relativity in a scale of gradation it be considered to lie "above" our world, then souls have but one place to go on departing this life in body. They must return to heaven. The seer in the Old Testament portrayed their shuttling up and down between earth and heaven under the figure of angels ascending and descending Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:12). St. Paul makes this interpretation clear when he says, speaking of the Christ spirit: "Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? (Ephesians 4:9)" If souls are to return to God, they must first have left his kingdom above and descended to earth. This certainly at once reduces the possible localities and directions of the soul’s journeyings and returns to two, from heaven to earth and back again.

But, the literalist will heckle, this eliminates hell, or Hades, from the picture. Surely the Scriptures do not deceive us when they tell us of the terrors of the underworld. The logic of the situation begins to point to interesting conclusions. If there is no journeying for souls other than the shuttling back and forth between heaven above and earth beneath, logic leaves the case open but for one verdict. We have to conclude that as both earth and hell are located by all religious systems as lying below the realm called heaven, these two, earth and hell, must be one and the same place; and this same place must be the fabled "underworld". Let any intelligent mind examine the material collated in MacCulloch’s book - though it is glaring at us in nearly every book that surveys the field of early Christian writing - and it will be convinced by the overwhelming evidence that, behind the forms of a cryptic disguise, the theological hell is located nowhere else than on this earth and that the so-called "dead" are souls here incarnated.

If there is one popular and universal conception that has remained fixed in the essential simplicity of truth - among so many that mass thought has wretchedly vitiated - it is the general idea that life on this earth, by and large, is a tragic experience of hard toil, loss, pain, suffering and ultimate defeat, and that death comes as a fortunate release like that of a prisoner freed from miserable confinement. Here for once naïve popular belief agrees with the profundities of Greek philosophy. It is everywhere the instinctive religious conviction that souls thus released from the ordeal of existence in this world find surcease, rest and peace in heaven. Not only that, but nearly every better religion in the world postulates the soul’s re-entry into a state of celestial bliss after enduring the strenuous hardships of life "down here".

How completely at sixes and sevens the Christian ideas are found to be will become almost ludicrously apparent when it is seen how exactly divergent the various positions are. It is at one and the same instant believed that all souls return to peace, rest and comparative happiness through death’s door. Yet consistently expounded and upheld in the writings of the early Christian leaders is the doctrine that all souls go down to Hades after death. Here we see general Christian belief clashing with the tenets of Christian theology. The up-or-down itinerary awaiting their souls at death is thus a completely uncertain one for all Christians. No answer that carries positive assurance can be given even now. The misreading of Scriptural allegory as objective history has thrown the whole great debate into a battle of conflicting ideas. The Christian faith has yet no logical or philosophically grounded assurance to give its millions of devotees as to whether at death their released souls will ascend to the conventional heaven of peace and bliss, or descend to a Hades pictured in horrific colors as a region of darkness and torment. In this parlous condition does the most boastful religion in the world leave its people dangling. A light to aid the mind, whether of Christian or other faith, to discern the truth that earth is the hell and Hades of theology (and mythology) and the locale positively indicated as the point of reference of these terms in the revered Scriptures, illumines our understanding when this idea of "release" is scrutinized. Universal and instinctive is the naïve assumption, the natural belief, and indeed man’s most positive source of cheer and consolation in every hard situation, that bodily death will bring life’s suffering and tragedy to an end. With death the stern conflict is ended; "the strife is over, the battle done, the victory of life is won." This faith is so strong that it can support the desperate anguish of suicide. The common consolation that assuages death’s sorrow is that the dread visitor brings release.

It will therefore fall as an astounding disclosure to the ordinary Christian mind that the basic theology of the Fathers of the religion directly controverts this comforting belief, robs the believer of his hope of heaven and, horrible to contemplate, casts his soul down to Hades. Only those enraptured spirits whose bodies, covered with pitch, had served as torches in Nero’s gardens, or been mangled with the lion’s gory claws in the amphitheatre, escaped the descent to Hades. All, both the righteous and the wicked, pass down to Hades, there to await release at some distant epoch vaguely termed the Judgment Day. What must be the consternation of the devout Christian on learning that the theology of his faith, so far from assuring him of a blessed transition at death from the woes of earth to the glories of heaven, dooms him to confinement for an aeon in the dark caverns of hell! What must be his dismay when he finds it was the teaching of the founders of his Church that death would simply transfer his soul from one dreadful region to another still more frightful! To die was only to step from the frying-pan of the hell on earth into the fires of hell itself. It was but to exchange one "durance vile" for another presumably far more vile. If he reads the holy words of the sanctified Fathers of his Faith he will have to revise his expectations and resign himself to taking the dark downward journey to the diabolical underworld, there to agonize for unknown ages. From this dismal prospect escape is to be made only by awakening his torpid mind to sufficient sharpness to read aright his own Scriptures, interpreting them as allegories of his soul’s strenuous experience in this world, which is the only hell or Hades ever contemplated by the ancient sages who indited those sacred books, and release from which will free him to enter whatever grade of a heavenly consciousness his stage of evolutionary progress will make possible for him.

Here as elsewhere, Christian doctrinism runs into a closed lane, a trap manufactured by its own misreading of ancient poetic delineation of the conscious experience of divine souls in mortal bodies. How clear it comes through to understanding now that, since souls both on earth and in Hades are pictured as spirits in prison waiting the coming of Horus, or Jesus, of Balder, or Izdubar, or Marduk or other Savior to effect their release and their transition to a higher world of light and happiness, these two places, earth and Hades, must be the one single underworld from whose gloomy chambers the Christ power lodged in their own constitution must release them. This Christ within them is the only power that can burst asunder the bolts and bars of this soma-sema body-tomb which is their prison-house until the resurrection. In the sublime language of ancient figurative genius earth was portrayed in the character of warder of souls, a place of fiery torment for the infant Sons of God, stern despot tyrannizing over the lives of those entities unfortunate enough, by their childhood waywardness to have fallen from a Paradise of innocence and halcyon blessedness down into his kingdom of darkness. Yet earth, matter being ever the "eternal feminine", was at the same time the holy Mother of those mind-born Sons of God. And a true and balanced philosophy discerned that the "captivity" and "bondage" of these celestial juveniles - the "Innocents" of Biblical allegorism - was as propitious an evolutionary situation for them as is the tutelage of a human child in the home of its mother. As St. Paul puts it in fourth Galatians, the young progeny of God in their childhood had to be put under "tutors and guardians" until the time of the perfection of their own matured powers (Galatians 3:24-25). Nature, matter, that great Goddess Isis, "the Mother of all the Living", is this stern but fostering madonna of infant souls.

It is notable that MacCulloch, the author of the important book review, The Harrowing or Hell, seems to have taken no notice of the singular fact that in the excerpt quoted by him from Cyprian, there was the descent of two persons, two figures. The Lord bade Moses "descend and testify to the people" so that they might be prepared to receive the Lord, who would descend upon Mount Sinai on the third day (Exodus 19:21) . How is this complication to be understood? The only plausible elucidation, in harmony with the postulates of ancient occult knowledge, seems to emerge in studying the character and office of Moses, the forerunner and way-opener of Joshua (Jesus) - for the names are identical - and discerning that Moses bears to Joshua the same relation as John the Baptist bears to Jesus. Moses in Old Testament allegory and John in the New Testament stand as the first or natural man, who himself can not enter the kingdom of heaven, but who comes first to prepare the way for the advent of the "second man", the spiritual "Lord from heaven". Life must be established "down" here in the natural world, physis, as the Greeks called it, if it is to bear and mother God’s children of the spirit. So "Moses" must represent this grade of life involved in the lower world of matter. Consciousness is under the rule of life in the physical sphere before, at the symbolic age of twelve, like the boy at puberty, it begins to turn to the "things of the Father", mind and spirit. "When we were yet children", says St. Paul in Fourth Galatians, "we were in bondage to them that by nature are no gods" but the powers of physis, what he calls "elementals of the earth" and "elements of the world (Galatians 4:3)." But when nature’s preparatory work shall have made ready the physical conditions that will enable the higher frequencies and shorter wave lengths of the higher gamuts of consciousness to find expression, the Lord Christ will descend in his turn to awaken dormant capability and lead the developed soul out from under the strict motherhood of nature’s fixed laws into "the liberty of the sons of God." This transition carries consciousness from bondage to the letter of the law which killeth under the "old dispensation" over into the freedom of the spirit which giveth life under the new dispensation.

Yet all this evident clarity of elucidation remains still buried in the obscurity of incomprehension because of failure to grasp the symbolic significance of "Mount Sinai". The grand meaning of this heritage of wisdom will be lost as long as this Sinai (and the six other sacred mountains) is stupidly taken to be the supposed hill in northeastern Egypt. As explained before, "mount," "mountain," "holy hill," "hill of the Lord," "mount of Sin," "mount of the moon" and indeed finally the "mount of earth," is ancient semantic usage for the earth itself. And this is the final attestation - and it closes at last the blatant mouths of crass-minded Fundamentalists and literalists - that all the Scriptural transactions, such as the temptation, the crucifixion, the "sermon," the transfiguration and the ascension, all of which were allegorically localized "on the mount," simply transpire in the life and evolution of man on this old earth. "Sinai" incidentally derives etymologically from the Egyptian seni, senai, meaning "point of turning to return," and this earth is precisely that nadir point down to which souls descend, and there turn to return to the Father above! This is an item of scholarly discovery that carries in its single implication a whole revolution in Biblical exegesis. Mount Sinai is just this world and it is indeed the valley of the shadow of death.