03 Through Death to Life

THROUGH DEATH TO LIFE

How, then, we will be challenged, can it be declared that the central doctrine of all the sacred writings of old, the death and resurrection of divinity, refers to that very part of man which can not die? It is a legitimate challenge, but it can be met. The divine soul, sent by the Father to earth to inhabit a mortal body, can never die, in the sense of total extinction, or loss of being, else it could not return to its heavenly home after its term of life in body. But there is a form of "death", rather a state or condition of "deadness", a partial or semi-death, a torpidity, inertness, slumber, coma and veiling of full consciousness, which the soul was said to undergo when it first took residence in the earthly body, and in which it lay, like the human child in its cradle, until the body’s growth to adulthood unfolded its dormant or latent powers to full manifestation. Plato denominated this state as the soul’s loss of its divine memory, its descent into the realm of darkness and oblivion, out of which it would have to struggle through the mists and fogs of earthly sense and the distractions of the passional nature arising from the side of body, to regain its lost Edenic felicity. Through the succession of many such descents and returns it pursues its evolutionary course from its infancy in elementary existence, through animal instinct, then human self-consciousness to eventual godhood. Like all things that live, God’s immortal Sons must be begotten out of elemental essence of being, then created through birth in a body of the eternal Mother, matter. But while the soul lay in its initial long period of unawakened and undeveloped divine potential, the sages of antiquity expounded, it lay in "death". If it is to have its resurrection, it must suffer its "death". St. Paul so clearly states this feature of our psychogenesis when he writes (Ephesians 4:9): "Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended into the lower parts of the earth?" - grossly mistaken, as this essay will demonstrate, for some supposititious region underground. "The first man is of the earth, earthy (1 Corinthians 15:47)," declares St. Paul, and when the soul descends into body, which is composed of earthy elements, it truly can be said to have descended into the bowels of the earth. And this is that "death" from which it will have its ecstatic resurrection on its glorious "Easter morn". This word "death", then, connotes both mythically and mystically, but most truly and actually, the anthropogenetic process in the soul’s evolution, which is the central stone in the arch of the spiritual science delineated in the Scriptures. And the flagrant misreading of its recondite esoteric connotation as referring to ordinary bodily decease instead of its profounder mystical reference to the unawakened, or "dead" state of the soul in its initial incorporation in earthly body, has been the hidden source-spring of all the frightful insanities of theology and the idiocies of popular superstition that have grown, a rank crop of noxious weeds in the garden of human credence, out of a derationalization of the religious mind of Western humanity through the ignorant mistaking spiritual allegory for literal history. The failure of ecclesiastical scholarship to retain, or recover, this proper sense of "death" and its mythical locale, the "underworld", or "lower earth" of religious dramatism, was in turn due to the attitude of inveterate contempt and hostility of the rabid early Christianity (which was not really Christianity, but a hybrid Christianism) toward antecedent Pagan systems of theological science. By turning deaf ears, unseeing eyes and closed minds upon the majestic ancient Chaldean, Greek and Egyptian philosophies, the Christian exegetists shut tight the one door, that leading out from the profound rational system of Greek thought, itself a derivative from still more ancient Egypt, which might have kept them in communication with the abstruse sense of this word of concealed wisdom, this fairy word of enlightening power, the occult meaning of "death". But, blind to that light-giving beam in the darkness, the assignment of a body reference to "death" bore the fateful consequence of shifting the locale of the meaning of the most important doctrine of theology from the world of man’s conscious experience, subjective, mystical and spiritual, out into another world, objective, material and historical, in which world the physical realities are only the crystallised deposit of divine thought in matter. In the train of this shift of locale and reference, in the turning of religious thought outward upon the death and resurrection of that which must die and can have no resurrection, came that disastrous transfer of relevant significance of all the Scriptures, whose axial theme is the death and resurrection of a thing, the divine soul which can "die" and have its resurrection from the dead, from the area of man’s ever-fateful soul life out into the area of inconsequential literal history. With this stupid literalization of spiritual allegories in mythology and in the Scriptures ensued the stupefaction of theological genius, and that fatal inoculation of the general mind with a run of doctrines that stultified the common sense and unsettled the rational balance of sixty generations of Occidental life down to the present. And in the confusion of meaning and reference that followed upon this perversion of a cryptic sense there was tossed up like foam on the surface of this wrong connotation of "death" and its mislocation in a false and unreal world, or limbo of theological imagination, of three cardinal doctrines, those of the judgment, Purgatory and the hell-fire torment. The meaning of "death" having been turned outward upon the body - and that of one alleged historical person alone - inevitably the judgment, purgatory and the ordeal of hell-fire fell, in popular superstition, into a world localized in some region - never even yet definitely placed - into which souls passed after bodily demise here on earth. And the final deposit of common belief in the minds of the populace during all these centuries in the West has been the fixed persuasion that at physical death souls pass from earth to one or the other of the two hypothetical chambers of an after-death mansion, the one exalted in character as heaven, the other deprecated as hell. With this crotchety caricature of the true ancient rationale of the fate of human souls after separation from bodies on earth, the Christian faith has corrupted the mental life of its millions of devotees over twenty centuries. With what consequences in the form of neurotic instability and mental derangement engendered by fear, by uncertainty, by credulity flouting all reason, by the warping of sanity through commitment to fantasies and falsities history volubly and tragically attests.

How the system of Christian theology thus blindly, to its everlasting hurt, stumbled and fell over the metaphorical significations of that single word "death" in the sacred tomes of antiquity is now oriented into true perspective for the first time since ancient days. The astute esoteric strategy of concealing the profoundest of conceptions under cryptic glyph and arcane symbol took a far heavier toll of mystification and deception than perhaps the esotericists ever expected to accrue from their designed methodology. It virtually wrecked Christianity. It afflicted with fatuity the rational genius of the Occident in all the field of religion and philosophy. The mistaking of spiritual allegories for ostensible history, the resultant conversion of ideal characters and type-figures into assumed historical persons, and then the mistiming of the "death" of the central god-figure in the mystery drama that resulted from the misreading soul-death as bodily death, along with the shifting of the fabled underworld, or Hades, from the present earth-life to the post-mortem hell, - all this interlocking confusion generated the entire distortion of the Christian theology into the most eccentric vitiation of sane anthropological science ever known in civilized society.