RELIGION IN THE HEAVENS;
OR,
MYTHOLOGY UNVEILED
IN A SERIES OF LECTURES,
By Logan Mitchell,
A Follower Of Nature.
"Thus does it generally happen in human life, that when danger attends the discovery of truth, and the profession thereof, the prudent are silent, the multitude believe, and impostors triumph."—Mosheim's "Ecclesiastical History."
1881.
THE SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC.
Aries. Libra. Taurus. Scorpio. Gemini. Sagittarius. Cancer. Capricoraus. Leo, Aquarius. Virgo. Pisces.
In nearly 26000 years the Sun passes through the whole circle of the Zodiac. That is, he is in each sign at the Vernal Equinox 2,155 years.
One universal mythos, or fable wearing the garb of history, has been the basis of all religions, ancient and modern. This mythos is rooted in, and has secret allusion to the zodiac and the solar system, in which the sun and the rest of the "Host of Heaven," were turned into imaginary personages, under peculiar nomenclatures in each country; and fanciful narratives concerning them, were invented by the astronomising priests, in order to stultify and subject the minds of the ignorant populace. This deception continues to the present day, for the solar mythos wets the true Christianity. "When the French, under Napoleon, possessed Italy, they examined the chair of St. Peter, and found upon it the signs of the zodiac."
CONTENTS
[ LECTURE FIRST. ON MIRACLES ]
[ LECTURE SECOND. CHRISTIAN SUPERNATURALISM FURTHER CONSIDERED ]
[ LECTURE THIRD. THE CHRISTIAN FATHERS, AND THEIR DOGMAS ]
[ LECTURE FOURTH. PAGAN ALLEGORIES MADE CHRISTIAN DOGMAS (Continued.) ]
[ LECTURE FIFTH. ON THE EARLY EFFECTS OF THE CHRISTIAN SUPERSTITION ]
[ LECTURE SIXTH. EFFECTS OF THE CHRISTIAN SUPERSTITION (Continued) ]
PREFACE.
ACCORDING to the ignorant prejudices which priestcraft has interwoven through the human mind, the subjects treated of in the following Lectures, are considered as sacred ground by the votaries of superstition; and therefore every attempt to examine them with freedom, or to expose them to the test of reason and free discussion, appears shocking to the blindly bigoted, and alarming to interested priests. But as neither complaisance nor forbearance is due to either of these parties, the free inquirer, stimulated by the love of truth alone, will be earnestly desirous of emancipating the minds of his fellows from the fears and delusions of a sanguinary and distracting superstition, which has no foundation in reason, either as regards the past or the future; and from the gloomy grasp of its active, subtle, and vindictive priesthood, who want nothing but the power to imprison and roast alive, as they did in former ages. Yet even in the present times of science and reform, what has been the fate of the daring wight who has ventured to expose the origin and shown the terrible effects of Christianity during fifteen hundred years? He has drawn upon himself the concentrated essence of malice from all the hireling sacerdotal orders, abetted by their allies the aristocracy of every country, by whom he has commonly been robbed and imprisoned, or otherwise ruined both in fortune and reputation.*
* "Knowledge is called infidelity:
.... Hence the few who knew
Aught worth recording, and were fools enough
To vent their free opinions, what has been
Their recompense and their reward? The stake,
The fagot and the cross."
—Goethe's "Faust."
Infidelity—we say; but to what?
To vulgar superstitions enforced.
How does he incur the implacable vengeance of the theologians? Because his search after truth, in the paths of Nature, has a direct tendency to overturn that monstrous fabric of delusion, which enables so many hundreds of thousands of them to live in ease and luxury, at a prodigious expense to human industry. Why do the aristocracy and the rich of the land persecute and pursue him to ruin? The aristocracy being, in point of fact, the national rulers, as such, have hitherto considered it necessary to support some kind of superstition (any sort does equally well for the ignorant and vulgar), perceiving that, by an iniquitous confederacy with its priesthood for mutual support, the strongest arm of bad government is created. Moreover, the ranks of the hierarchy are recruited by scions from aristocratical stocks, who are called by the "Holy Ghost," to receive revenues sufficient for "the attraction of gentlemen" and whether these be younger sons, brothers, blackguards, or blockheads, it is all the same—they are good enough for Mother Church. This is a powerful—an almost irresistible scheme for fostering ignorance and falsehood—for upholding the foul connexion between Church and State, and for perpetuating the mental slavery of the people. The cause of truth and the welfare of society call loudly for the exposure of these enormous corruptions; and the dangerous task will be hailed and encouraged by every true friend to human improvement, as the surest means of banishing from amongst men the blasting and demoralizing belief in supenaturalism, for that is the principal, if not the sole source of all the moral evils on the face of the earth.
It was the strikingly eloquent saying of Mr. Paine, that "prejudice is the spider that spins its web on the mind." This entangling web is so interwoven into the tender and plastic mind of youth by systematized deception, that even the strongest intellect can hardly extricate itself during life; and this spell holds equally good with Jew, Christian, Mahommedan, or in any other of all the heaven-derived superstitions that have afflicted the human race. These are the universal plagues—the fatal barriers which stand perpetually between man and the harmonious union which he would ever maintain with nature. All religions have in succession sprung out of the superstitions which preceded them, and there is no difficulty in proving that the Christian scheme is no exception to the rule; for, on its very front, it carries the most conclusive evidence of having been drawn out of the exhaustless ethnical magazines of Paganism,* and metamorphosed there is not a vestige—not an iota of Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, that did not belong to Paganism, thousands of years before the reign of Tiberius; and that all the "religion" practised in Europe is merely the exoteric quackery of the old universal solar mythos. In like manner, it was only the initiated Jews of their cabbala, who knew the secret of the same mythos. This was called Gnosticism.
* Beyond the limits of the papal conclave of cardinals,
there is every reason to believe that very little true, or
esoteric Christianity is known; and that only among the
learned and most laborious in fearless research. In that
modern cabbala of the initiated, the secret is guarded with
the most solemn and profound vigilance; and the sacred trust
is, that into that unsightly and distorted texture of wild
and irrational superstition, which has deluded men by
teaching them to overlook the moral and physical realities
of nature—fixing their minds upon imaginary existence; and
by an intercourse which surpliced magicians have pretended
to, with a place called heaven, everything that is good and
congenial to man upon earth has been destroyed.
"For the the craft of priesthood that hath shaped
A future world,—the kings of distant days
Have countenanced the fraud, that fools content,
Might look for blessings in another scene,
And bear the yoke more tranquilly in this."
None but bigoted and priest-subdued minds will deny that it has been Christian superstition, and its offspring, cherished ignorance, that have distracted and made stages for theological gladiators, of Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, for a succession of ages. By its natural tendency to corrupt every kind of government, it has shed the blood of Erin's priest-ridden sons, to satisfy the rapacious hierarchy of a more favored sect! In England, at this moment, is it not a demonstrable fact that, as theology enters into, and taints everything, so it is the ready and insuperable barrier against every salutary improvement; for, whenever a reform of bad laws and abuses is proposed, or any measure attempted that would tend to the relief and benefit of the people at large, do not Churchcraft, Aristocracy and Co. put their veto upon it immediately? *
It is the essence of this pretended science of theology, particularly that of triune-Christianity, to oppose, and in everything to combat the light of Nature and reason—to degrade and crush the human mind in youth, as the best security against its future expansion; and hence it is that, poor deluded man, in his abject and ludicrous terrors, has been rendered the most bewildered, piteous, and contemptible of all animals,** wishing to live for ever after death, yet afraid to die! Such being the nature of this dark pestilence, the terrible evils it has produced in Europe for so many centuries, and is still producing even to this day are precisely what might be expected from such a cause.
* The demon of Toryism, which pervades Europe throughout, is
the legitimate offspring of Priestcraft, Aristocracy and
Co.—that is, a confederacy of the great monopolisers of the
land and the church hierarchy, for the honest purpose of
subjugating and fleecing the industrious wealth-producers.
** No man will ever write as a true philosopher who seeks
the approbation of more than one in every ten thousand of
men, as they are moulded at present by theology.
To any species of political tyranny that happened to be strong enough to bestow riches and power upon its priests, it has ever been ready to link itself; and to form the mainstay and support of that flagitious and shameful policy which promotes ignorance, as the surest medium through which to deceive mankind into submission to bad government. Even now, in the nineteenth century, there are no legislative disputes and dissensions in which it is not the perpetual bone of contention—no national interests discussed wherein it forms not the most inflaming ingredient.* From a cause that is thus essentially and innately evil, such effects must emanate of necessity; and, therefore, there would be the highest folly in expecting that this baleful superstition can ever change, or be anything else than that which it hitherto has been—a burden and a scourge to every country in the exact ratio of its influence.
The reproachful canting cry of heretic, infidel, atheist, etc., will be raised against the author of these lectures, by every fiery intolerant bigot into whose hands they may fall. But he alone is the true infidel who forsakes the laws of his Nature, and gives up his mind to a belief in fabulous and demoralising legends, which contradict all experience, and stand in opposition to the testimony of his own senses and reason.** In regard to the term Atheist, which, of all others, is meant to be the most opprobrious, let our angry zealot, in the first place, define precisely what he means by the word:—if he explains it by saying "it signifies one who supposes that there is no God;" we reply that it is impossible to understand this definition until he declares in express and intelligible terms what he means by the word "God." If it is used to designate that incomprehensible POWER by which the universe is ruled, there cannot be such a thing as an Atheist in existence.
* It was formerly maintained by hangmen and funeral piles,
and now by clerical riches and power, hereditary lawgivers,
harsh judges, ignorant juries, fines and imprisonments.
** Diderot, in illustrating the conflict of priests against
reason, says, "Bewildered in an immense forest during the
night, and having only one small torch for my guide, a
stranger approaches, and thus addresses me,—'Friend, blow
out thy light if thou wouldst make sure of the right
path.'"—This stranger was a priest.
Do the Jews, Christians, and Mahommedans, by their wild and degrading anthropomorphism, or by forming their deity in the likeness of any entity that the human mind can conceive, evince a worthy, or anything approaching to an adequate, conception of the unknown,* all-ruling Power? Quite the contrary; for in absurdly imbodying it as a located Being, or by conferring personification in any shape or manner whatsoever, they impiously create one of those idols which they pretend to abhor, and become themselves idolators. These alone are the real Atheists, as they not only endow their man-God with the worst of human frailties and passions, but contemn and repudiate the true revelation of Nature. The mean and grovelling notions which the half-inch mind of the priest-led fanatic has of his God (for instance the Jewish one), form a striking contrast with the elevated and pure ideas which fill the mind of Nature's free votary, towards the one universal Power,—a veneration infinitely too exalted to allow for a moment the puerile and ridiculous notion of its being personified in the form or likeness of any existing thing.**
* What do theologues now know of that which they call Deity
more than was known to the philosophic Brahmin, Egyptian, or
Zoroastrian, ten thousand years ago? Absolutely nothing.
What does the pampered Oxonian professor of theology know
more of it than the meanest cow-boy in England? Absolutely
nothing.
** The deist talks of "Nature's God," that is, the powers of
Nature personified, for it is impossible it should mean
anything else. As a poetic figure, we have no objection to
this.
But the priests of all religions that have at any time plagued the earth, have agreed in the absolute necessity of inventing such imbodied Gods or idols; and whether they be Jupiters or Jehovahs is no great matter, as they answer equally well as mystic sources from whence to derive the usurped power of the sacerdotal orders; and as relentless tormentors, to keep the minds of their frenzied dupes in perpetual terror. Without these pre-requisities, their trade would soon come to an end. Hence arises their well-known malignity against all who are sceptical respecting the existence of such supernatural personages; for those who have doubts about that which is indispensable to the theologians, are denounced by them as abominable Atheists, which, being explained, designates the few unfettered, ingenuous minds, who are capable of perceiving the matchless absurdity of attempting, by any entity, or personified representation whatsoever, to convey the slightest rational idea of that incomprehensible Power, by which countless millions of worlds are ruled.
LECTURE FIRST. ON MIRACLES
"Man is born in ignorance of everything around him; and this
ignorance of natural causes begat terror; terror,
superstition; superstition, priests and the priesthood:
whose interests and unbending efforts are exerted to
perpetuate the ignorance, the fear, and the superstition
that gave them birth"
THE ignorance of the natural causes of the effects which man sees around him, has ever been the foundation upon which the fabricators of all religions have built the whole machinery of those delusions by which the human race in all ages has been duped.. These impostors have invariably relied on their artful jugglery in the pretended science of supenaturalism, for the success of their respective systems; and of all such means of deception, that of working miracles by legerdemain, or collusive agency, has been the most successfully palmed off upon the credulous multitude in all countries; whilst men of knowledge and reflection have in all times rejected the pretended infractions of the immutable course of nature, as the inventions of knavery to delude and thereby prey upon ignorance. The faith reposed in these delusive prodigies was always in proportion to the degree of simplicity in the deceived; they were not generally believed by those who saw, but most firmly by those who did not see, them performed; and though not true at first, that is but a trivial matter, as time has established the veracity of those of the Jews and primitive Christians; and now when they are upheld by overwhelming clerical riches and power, backed by political corruption, they will continue to degrade, and be the grossest outrage upon common sense and experience, until the great and salutary moral change shall take place, when the mind of youth shall no longer be mortgaged to the priest in education.
Though a miracle, or pseudo violation of Nature's laws, be the most certain method of exciting the admiration of the vulgar, it is contrary to reason that anything of the kind should be true; but it is by no means contrary to the testimony of experience, that impostors might have lived two or three thousand years ago, and propagated falsehood. This conclusion is fully corroborated by all modern experience, in which we find that deception and falsehood form the medium through which knavery rules simple ignorance; and to such a degree do these ingredients pervade the whole of society, that they in a great measure constitute the religious and moral element in which man lives at the present day; and so besotted has the breathing of this atmosphere of error and delusion rendered him, that the more outrageous a miracle, or other theological fable, is against rational light and common sense, the more greedily has it ever been received by the unthinking and priest-ridden million, who delight in the marvellous and the incredible—believing everything, and examining nothing:—hence the success of the ludicrous medley that makes up our Christian Polytheism. Admitting, for a moment, the possibility of such physical prodigies being true, what do we gain by them,—do they either confer additional authority on moral truth, or prove it false? Can they make right wrong, or wrong right? It is a melancholy fallacy to attribute to them any such power or influence, and implies a lamentably low estimate of the dignity and greatness of moral truth. All that we gain by pretended violations of Nature's laws, is dogmatism, bigotry, spiritual fear, intolerance, and superstition; together with all the other curses which come in the train of religion, when backed by authority.
A modern philosopher has given the quietus to miracles in the following death-blow:—"A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined; and, therefore, no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish" This argument is absolutely invincible. The boundless plenum of Nature—the revolution of hundreds of millions of globes round a million of suns, may be called miraculous, but in all this, Nature, or the material universe in motion,* is still invariable, and acting by self-existing qualities or properties, which are therefore inviolable and immutable. If it is asked, "cannot a law that is made by the Supreme Power be suspended by its author?" we reply, that the innate or essential properties of matter, being principles, could have no author—no antecedent—no beginning:—they are co-eternal as matter and motion, or the immutable Power which we call Nature. This hypothesis is plain, simple, easy, and rational: but the theory of your personified, localised artificer, is the reverse of all this; for he himself would stand a thousand times more in need of an artificer or author than does the material universe. We know that matter exists:**—there can be only one infinite—ergo, matter must be that infinite.
* Lalande says that at the age of nineteen, he thought the
heavens proved a personified God (the anthropomorphism of
the Jews). but now, says he, I see in them nothing but
matter and motion. He said also that Materialism was beyond
the vulgar, to whom it would be neither agreeable nor
useful.
** Begging my Lord of Cloyne's pardon.
In their secret doctrines, the philosophers and priests of antiquity admitted no miraculous powers; and when they said that a certain thing was done by a god, or "the gods," they were merely using words suited to the capacity of the multitude, while the mystic or esoteric meaning was, that the thing arose from the concatenation of natural causes and effects, or the eternal order of necessity; and not, as the ignorant imagine, that the laws of nature were suspended by the interference of some personified god. With the above two classes of the initiated, all their mysteries were rooted in, and had constant allusion to zodiacal objects, and the physical powers of Nature; which objects and powers were, by the prosopopoeia, converted into abstract existences, called gods and goddesses. This was done by all the priests of antiquity, as their varied schemes of superstition gained footing so as to foster ignorance and mental blindness amongst their dupes; and herein they were imitated by their successors, the Christians, who likewise claimed a power in their gods, to suspend or make infractions in the unalterable course of Nature. Judaism was a barbarous version of some of the beautiful and lively fables of the Pagans; and the present superstition of Europe is a rude polytheistical caricature of the whole.
The miracle-working Deity of the Jews appears to have been of Egyptian extraction; and had his prototype in the god Jahouh, who held a high rank in the polytheism of the Thebans. This Jahouh was a personification of that power which giveth forms to matter (viz., motion), and organises animal and vegetable life, alias soul of the world. Moses, who is said to have been a priest of Isis, or Nature, the secret of whose mysteries was the unity of the supreme Power,* seems to have been wishful of preserving that unity in the Deity he had borrowed of the Thebans, as is stated by Strabo, in his Geography,** who informs us that Moses taught his followers to worship the god Jahouh without representing it by emblem.
* Moses borrowed this of the Egyptians. Cudworth, in his
Intellectual System, and Hyde, in his treatise on the
religion of the Persians, acknowledge that the unity of God
was the foundation of the religion of the Egyptians,
Chaldeans, and Persians.
** Strabo's account is corroborated by his contemporary,
Diodorus Siculus, and also by Plutarch. Diodorus's account
of Moses not being-agreeable to the Church, has been
suppressed.—See Translation of the Abbé Terrasson.
There can be no doubt as to the identity of this name and that of Jehovah. That Moses adopted this deity, and that the name when first introduced, was new to the Jews, appears from Exod. vi., 3. Neither Philo nor Josephus deny that the Jews borrowed circumcision from the Egyptians; why, then, might they not borrow a god also?*
As every nation had its cosmogony to account for the origin of things, the Jews must have theirs likewise; so the scribes, who compiled their legends, imitated very closely the Zoroastrian fable, according to which the gods made the world in six gahanbars, or periods; of which the story in Genesis, even to the detail of work done in each day, is a mere copy; but the Jewish compiler mistook the matter so far as to put days in place of periods, or gahanbars; which word was significant of the six summer months, when the sun, by his genial and all-powerful impulse, makes a fresh creation every year. The learned have farther declared that, in the Talmuds, the expression in the first verse of Genesis is in the plural, viz. "the Elohim" (the gods) placed in order the heavens and the earth that in the same verse, the word "barah," which signifies to arrange, to place in order, has been mistranslated "created" In like manner the words "ruh elohim," in the second verse, have been falsely rendered "spirit of God," though their true meaning is, the wind of the gods.***
* Dr. Geddes, however, is of opinion that Moses learnt the
name of Jehovah in Midian, while he resided with his father-
in-law.
** The Indians had their Vedas and Pouranas; the Egyptians,
the five books of Hermes; the Persians, the cosmogony of
Zoroaster; the Greeks, that of Hesiod; the Phoenicians, that
of Sanchoniatho. The Phoenician, though written in the style
of history, is made up of personifications of time, the sun,
the stars, earth, seasons, etc.
*** In St. John's Gospel iii, 5 and 6, the Greek word pneuma
(air or wind), is translated spirit; and in the 8th verse it
is translated, "wind" and "spirit" both. In Luke i, 85, is
not this word pneuma translated "Ghost"?
Thus, in the very first two verses of this pretended "word of God," we have no less than three instances of false translation. The learned Dr. Parkhurst has translated and shown that this word elohim or gods means the seven planetary bodies, as known to the ancients. He calls them the disposers of the affairs of men; an influence still attributed to them by the astronomical quacks called astrologers. These seven planets were the cabiri of the Egyptians and Phoenicians; of which Baal, "the Lord," was the chief, being added as the eighth. Baal (the Sun) was also one of the names of the Jewish god, Jehovah. See Hosea ii., 16. That the astro-theology of the eastern nations had exclusive allusion to physical objects—the elements, seasons, etc., was well known to all the learned Jews. Maimonides says: "We must not, like the vulgar, understand literally what is written in the book of the creation (Genesis); otherwise our men of old would not have so earnestly recommended to conceal its meaning, and refrain from raising the allegorical veil which covereth the truth under it. Understood literally, this work presenteth us with ideas of the deity which are most ridiculously absurd. The true meaning of the six days' work ought never to be divulged" The treatises of Philo Judæus have hardly any other object than the allegorical explanation of the Jewish scripture. The great Origen himself treated all these stories as astronomical emblems. "What man of sense," says he, "can persuade himself that there was a first, a second, and a third day, and that each of those days had a night, when there was yet neither sun,* moon, nor stars!!!"
* Of all the glaring blunders committed by the compiler of
Genesis, the most unfortunate was the miraculous production
of three whole days before he thought of making the sun.
Dupuis says, speaking of the astronomical origin of all religions: "The first six signs of the zodiac may be considered as forming the empire of God or Oromazdes; the remaining signs as that of the Devil or Ahrimanes (cold and darkness). After the evil principle has reigned during the six winter months, from the autumnal to the vernal equinox, the sun resumes his empire, bringing with him warmth and animation for a fresh creation; and causing the day to triumph over the night. The vernal equinox was therefore universally considered to be the time: of creation. It is then that the Persians, who call April the month of Paradise, celebrate their Neurouz or the new revolution. The Jesuit Petavius has remarked that the Rabbis, when speaking of the creation, use the word Bara, which signifies to arrange, or rather to renew."
Syncellus, Cedremus, St. Cyril, and others, agree that the word creation alludes to the vernal equinox; at which time they expect the coming of their god, who, as Cedrenus tells us, will arrive at the Lord's Passover; or the passage of the sun as he crosses the line of the equator at the vernal equinox point. Formerly, when the sun was in Taurus or the Bull, that sign presided over the vernal equinox, and it was to the Bull that the Persians attributed those ideas of regeneration, which a more recent superstition (the Christian) has naturally transferred to Aries, a sign called by the Persians 'the Lamb.'
But if the vernal equinox point be now in Pisces or the fishes, Christians have nothing more to do with the Ram, as he is the "Lamb of God" no longer; and therefore they should adopt, as of old, when the sun was in Pisces, the famous savior fish Oannes, which used to preach so prettily upon the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates. At that exceedingly remote period, say nearly 26,000 years ago, this fish must have been a principal god amongst the Egyptians and Chaldeans; and certainly, while the sun occupied the fishy sign in the zodiac at the vernal equinox, nothing could be more appropriate than that the emblem god should appear in the shape of a fish, to preach the annual salvation.* Each sign in succession has, by the slow precession of equinoxes, enjoyed a similar honor.
* The first of the nine incarnations of the Indian Redeemer,
Vishnu, was in the form of a fish.
That the Jewish priests, from not having science within themselves, were apt to be too late in borrowing their emblem gods from the more learned hierophants of Egypt, Chaldea, and Persia, appears in that unhandy mistake committed by Jeroboam (1 Kings xiii., 4), in sacrificing to the golden calf, the old representative of the sign Taurus, which was then out of date, when he ought to have been paying his respects to the "Lamb of God," the accredited envoy of the sign of the Ram, which had come into play by the Sun's having entered it some time previously. By the mouth of his messenger, "the Lord" (the Sun) seems to reproach Jeroboam in terms something like the following: "What ignorant ninnies you and your priests are, not to know that, having left my bull-house in the zodiacal town,* and taken a two thousand one hundred and fifty years' lease at the sign of the Ram, I have now nothing to do with calves: go, ye shallow novices, and learn better of your masters, my older and more scientific priests, the Magi and Chaldees, that the appropriate symbol of my worship, is now a Lamb, called the Lamb of God."**
*The New Jerusalem.
**April-fools are no doubt of vast antiquity; but Jeroboam
is perhaps the first we met with in the Bible. This reproach
was incurred by those who, like him, persisted in calf
adoration, after its archetype the Bull, or sign Taurus, had
ceased to be the "House of the Sun," at the-vernal equinox;
that is, after the Bull of April had given place to the Ram,
or Lamb of March; and, according to the Rev. Mr. Maurice,
that point could not have coincided with the first degree of
Aries, later than 1800 years before our era.
Wherever such digressions as the above are made in the course of these Lectures, they are intended to show that, although we treat the Bible according to its literal meaning, the respect we have for it, so far as it is a book of hidden science, induces us to give such explanations, as they alone do it justice according to knowledge. But since its priests and their ignorant dupes insist on adopting the outward, or sense nonsensical, the best way to expose their folly is to take them at their word..
The legend about the first man may have been taken from Apollodorus' fable of Prometheus, who made the first man and woman with clay, and afterwards animated them with fire which he had stolen from the chariot of the sun; or was the first creation in Genesis imitated from Plato's story of the androgynæ, or double homo, possessing both sexes? Such was the hermaphrodite, or first creation in Genesis; the second was purely masculine, and only one of his ribs turned into the feminine. In the ancient Persian traditions, there were two distinct fables about the creation of man, from which those in Genesis appear to have been taken: but the compiler of that book, knowing both of the stories, and being at a loss which to prefer, has foolishly mingled them together, yet still preserving the two creations. Thus it seems pretty certain that the Jewish fable about the first man and woman is of Persian origin. Henry Lord, in a book written at Surat, on the cosmogonies of India and Persia, and dedicated to the Archbishop of Canterbury, says: "In the Persian cosmogony, the name of the first man was Adamoh and of the woman Hevah. From hence come the Adam and Eve of the book of Genesis. Hevah is the name given to the woman, in an English edition of the Bible, printed in 1583."
In the Zoroastrian and Chaldean mysteries, the above supposed originals of the human race were personifications of the zodiacal signs, Bootés and Virgo; and their fall, or expulsion from the summer garden of fruits and flowers, was emblematical of the solar year, after the autumnal equinox. Anciently, in India and Chaldea, the phænomenon of the starry heavens was called Aden, or the Celestial Garden. In all probability the Jews picked up these shreds of figurative astronomy when they were slaves to the Babylonians, and, ignorantly taking them in the literal sense, foisted them into their heterogeneous miscellany. Supported by the sound knowledge of Philo, and all the learned Jews, Origen again shows his contempt for those who understood Genesis literally, and cries out: "What man can be stupid enough to believe that God, acting the part of a gardener, had planted a garden in the east; that the tree of life was a real tree, and that the fruit of it had the virtue of making those who eat of it live for ever?"* The first four chapters of that book contain parts of three, if not four distinct fables, all evidently derived from different sources. The rest of this extraordinary medley, called the Old Testament, is made up of some dramatic fragments of the Egyptians and Persians (as the plague, miracles, and the book of Job), fabulous legends plagiarized by the Jews, barbarous narrative, and the rhapsodies of vagrant minstrels, who sung of past events, seemingly in the future tense.
* St. Augustine, in his "City of God," allows that in his
time, the whole story about Adam, Eve, the serpent, and the
garden of Eden, with its forbidden fruit, was considered as
allegorical. There was not one, but there were two prohibited trees!
The Emperor Julian, with that wisdom which characterised
him, observed that, "If there ever had been, or could be a
tree of knowledge, instead of God forbidding man to eat
thereof, it would be that of which he would order him to eat
the most." Reason is the real forbidden tree of priestcraft.
From a mass of ill-strung fables, derived from such a variety of sources—a chaos of revolting prodigies, mixed up with a few probable facts, such as the expulsion or flight from Egyptian slavery, the murders and devastations in Southern Syria, etc., we cannot, in the bounds of a lecture, notice more than a few of the most prominent miracles, all of which had Pagan prototypes.
As every oriental country had its cosmogony, accounting very clearly, though contrarily to each other, for the origin of things, so all had traditionary floods, which each nation quoted as proof of its antiquity.* Why should not the Jews have one also? The Chaldeans said that theirs happened 25,000 years before the war of Troy, when the immense surface now occupied by the Mediterranean Sea was inundated.. The Egyptians had their inundations; and hence their ark of Osiris (the archetype of the Noah's ark) the same as the constellation Argo. The Greeks had their floods of Ogyges and Deucalion; the latter of which, was fully treated of by Berosus, and after him by Lucian, in his Syrian goddess; but the Jews, who took everything from their masters, borrowed the Chaldean pilot Noe, made him skipper of their ark, slightly changing his name to Noah, and appropriated to themselves the flood of Deucalion,** with all its details, almost word for word as fabled by Berosus and Lucian.. That this tradition was not adopted by the Jews until long after the alleged time of Jehovah's flood, is proved by the orders which he gave Noah respecting clean and unclean beasts, the distinction whereof not being made until several hundred years after the assumed time of Noah. Nothing can be more probable than that, amongst the initiated few, all these floods had secret reference to the supposed influence of the winter or watery constellations.
* Even the long lives of the antediluvians, according to the
Jews, are the exact copy of the Iogues of the Hindu
Indians.
** The flood of Xisuthrus was almost the same as that of
Deucalion.
The Pentateuch, or first five books of the old Jewish "will of God" have been attributed to Moses; though, from their internal evidence, it is altogether impossible that he could be the author, even if we allow him to have been a real personage. These books were most likely compiled and got up in imitation of the five books of the Egyptian Hermes, who was at one time the personified genius of the constellation Sirius; at another, of the planet Mercury. That the god Bacchus was the archetype of Moses, seems to have been the opinion of many learned men, particularly the celebrated Bishop Huet, and I. Vossius, who agree that the Arabian name of Bacchus is Meses; and the identity is further proved, inasmuch as the etymon of the two words is the same, signifying saved from the waters. Justin, in his "Historium Judærum," seems also to favor the fact that Moses was a fabulous person, where he says that it was not he, but Abraham, who led the Jews out of Egypt; that their number was 6,000, not 600,000;* and that they were turned out of the land for uncleanness, being all lepers.
* On almost all occasions, the Jewish tales, in relation to
numbers, whether of men or other animals, are so
ridiculously exaggerated, that if we adopt the scale of
allowing them one for every hundred enumerated in their
books, we shall do them ample justice. This gives Solomon
ten in place of his thousand ladies: a harem still
abundantly numerous to produce "vexation of spirit."
A vast and sublime idea was attached to the attributes of Jahouh, whilst he was at home in Egyptian Thebes; but, in accompanying Moses and his barbarians into the Arabian desert, we find him completely shorn of all grandeur and dignity of character. He was there drilled and moulded into a god, whose will and commands were precisely those of the robber-in-chief and his priests, jointly and severally; by whom he was converted into the Jewish Juggernaut, delighting in blood; and on all occasions standing forward to prompt and justify their villainous schemes of devastation and murder.* At a very early stage of his connexion with Moses, he is degraded by being brought into contact with the dramatic jugglers of lower Egypt; of whose legerdemain tricks we have a sample in the stage representation of what are called the plague miracles. As a priest, Moses was no doubt initiated into all the arts of these sleight-of-hand impostors. In the trial of skill exhibited by the contending operators in these conjurations, we have a tissue of the most absurd and ridiculous fooleries imaginable,—the writer having taken leave of his senses, we have the hyperbole run mad. Much of this jugglery was done by means of real or counterfeit serpents! After all the water in Egypt, even the great river Nile itself, had been turned into blood, the magicians do the same miracle, though Aaron had not left them a drop of water in all Egypt! Then follow other romances, wherein the "God" appears far more blameable than Pharaoh, whose sin of obstinacy is visited upon the innocent cattle; and in succeeding plagues, all the horses, asses, camels, oxen and sheep, having many lives, are killed over and over again. The story of the locusts is not miraculous; but we have an outrageous prodigy in a darkness for three days; to say nothing of its substantial property of being felt or handled. Why did not the Goshenites (who had their usual light) avail themselves of so good an opportunity to run away? They were waiting until "the Lord" should issue his general order to commit the robbery on the Egyptians. Though all Pharaoh's horses had been twice or thrice killed during these plagues, he finds no difficulty in mustering a numerous cavalry to pursue the fugitives. Moses being a mere copy of Bacchus, all the above stage trickery—the dividing of the Red Sea and the Jordan, are rude imitations of the exploits of the latter, who performed marvellous feats and gambols, turning water into blood, drying up rivers, converting water into wine, etc., etc.
* Oh! what a mountain of faith and prejudice is required to
hide this glaring, this palpable truth!
** See Lucian's "Alexander."
It appears an awkward business that the omniscient Jehovah could not safely undertake the midnight massacre of Egypt's firstborn, without some sign to prevent the possibility of his committing a blunder, by falling foul of his chosen Goshenites; and, therefore, another general order is issued, to smear their doorposts with blood as a mark of security, while the butchery was going on. This shocking tale might have arisen out of the historical fact, that the seventh Ptolemy caused all the young men of Alexandria to be murdered. This inference may be objected to on account of the supposed anachronism, respecting which we shall make a short digression. Precise historical dates have been carefully avoided or obscured by the Bible-makers; and there is scarcely any allusion to time, that is supported by concurrent testimony; and, therefore, it is only by a cross-examination of its internal evidence, that we can judge of the various periods when the Old Testament was compiled.*
* All the narrative writings of the Jews, which betrayed too
openly a recent composition, such as the Maccabees (which in
a historical point of view, are the most valuable parts of
the Bible), and many others were excluded, and declared
apocryphal by the Old Testament composers; yet numerous
tell-tale proofs escaped them; for instance, Nehemiah speaks
of "Darius the Persian." Now, between Cyrus and that prince,
there reigned fourteen kings of Persia, during a period of
280 years. Therefore, not only were the Jew books written
after their Babylonian slavery, but many centuries
afterwards.
The Decalogue, Chronicles, and other narrative parts, may have been written under the order of Hilkiah and Ezra, shortly after the Babylonian slavery; yet there is great reason to believe that many poetical rants called prophecies, and even some parts of the Pentateuch, were written after the Jews began to congregate at Alexandria, when the events which the itinerant Jewish bards pretended to foretel, had already taken place: for instance, Ezekiel makes the Lord say, "And I will make Pathros desolate." Can the cunning alteration made in the first syllable of this word conceal the evident allusion to that "wonder of the world," the famous light tower of Pharos, which was built by two of the Ptolemies! Daniel could not speak of the third being "like unto the Son of God," before the dogma was invented that god had a son.* Moreover, if it can be shown (as hath been affirmed) that the prophecies were partly translated and modelled from Greek originals, at a period subsequent to the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, what becomes of their antiquity? We repeat that most of the books of this collection contain abundant proofs of their having been fabricated from materials as aforesaid, at various periods between the Babylonian captivity and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, in the time of Vespasian.
We have seen that the passage of the Red Sea is drawn from the fable of the triumphal march of Bacchus, when from Egypt he went to conquer India. Josephus, though he often renders the romances of his countrymen still more monstrous, was ashamed to make a miracle of this story, and compares it to the passage of the Pamphylian Sea, by Alexander. In a jovial mood Bacchus drew wine from a rock by a stroke of his rod; but herein the imitator deviates from the original, wisely preferring water to wine in an arid wilderness.
The manna miracle has long been detected and exposed. Josephus tells us that, in his time, it was found in great quantities in Arabia; and the plant that produces it is now cultivated in Sicily and Southern Italy. Bishop Talleyrand, in a letter which he is said to have written to the Pope, after their quarrel, told his holiness that the real manna of Moses was the plunder he got in the desert by his robberies and murders; these were counted so many godsends.
* The Talmud acknowledges that the forgeries of Daniel,
Esdras, and others, were prodigious.
** Talleyrand tells the Pope also, that, of the numerous
blunders committed by Moses, not the least was his fixing
the time of the Creation at an epoch when the earth did not
only exist, but had an immense population, and actually
reckoned 50,000 years of civilisation: besides his
pretending to look upon the Hebrews as the most ancient
people on earth, forgetting or feigning to forget, that they
were a mere gang of slaves who had originally escaped from
Idumea, during the intestine wars which desolated that
country. After having passed into Egypt, where they were
again made slaves, it was after the lapse of many years, and
after having robbed their masters (as their forefathers had
robbed the Idumeans), that, induced by Moses, they crossed
the Red Sea in Ethiopian vessels; and having gained the wood
of Henon, in Arabia Deserta, they maintained themselves
there during forty years, living by the robberies they
committed on travellers and the people in the neighborhood.
As it is not necessary to notice these miracles in Bible order, it may here be observed, that the fable about Lot's wife might have been taken from that of Euodia; but, more probably, from the ancient fiction of Baucis and Philemon, as the first and this are essentially the same. Irenæus and Tertullian affirm that, in their times, the statue of Lots wife regularly menstruated at the usual period of women! Reader, these men were no unfair sample of the Christian fathers.
It was a part of military discipline amongst the Persians, and other nations of the East, when marching large armies through the deserts, to carry in the van, during the night, fires, made with such combustible matter as would make a great flame of fire, which was elevated so high as to be distinctly seen by all in the rear, appearing, in the distance, as "a pillar of fire," and serving to point out the line of march. To direct this line during the day, such combustibles were burnt as would produce the greatest cloud or "pillar of smoke." This military usage is mentioned both by Herodotus and Quintus Curtius; and Alexander himself adopted it of the Persians. If Moses was so well provided in a supernatural fire-and-smoke conductor, why was he so anxious and pressing to get his brother-in-law Hobab (against his will) to guide the march, and to "be to them instead of eyes" in leading them to proper places for encampment?* Here we have a striking instance of the matchless effrontery of the Jewish fabricators, in thus turning a common usage into a miracle.
* Numbers x., 29 to 32.
It was wise in Moses to retire to the top of a hill, when he played off his fire and smoke thunder-cloud to the astonishment of the dupes below. His Deity wrought a clever miracle in creating the universe in six days; but what a falling off was there, when he required nearly seven times as long to engrave two tables of stone, which a man might "take in his hand." As a proof that this job could not be done in less than forty days, the same time precisely was taken to cut the second tables, after Moses had (forgetting his meekness) smashed the first. His well-dissembled rage about the affair of the golden calf* was, no doubt, the result of a cunning scheme, concerted between him and brother Aaron, in order to possess themselves of the gold that had been swindled from the Egyptians. To gull the fools, and save this gold for themselves, the priest had only to paint a wooden calf yellow, which was easily reduced to powder—gold could not, by burning: a little powdered charcoal would do the people no harm. When the sun was in Taurus (the Bull), at the vernal equinox, the astronomising priests of Egypt turned bulls and calves into gods, that were quite good enough for the vulgar; and when the sun entered the sign of the ram, a lamb answered equally well for a god, and does so to the present day.
* In the story about this calf, our translation very
modestly says, the people "rose up to play," though it
acknowledges they "were naked;" but Dr. Clarke has had the
singular honesty to tell us that, in the Hebrew Bible, this
rising up to play was preparatory to pairing for open
sexual intercourse. Bruce tells us that this open
intercourse was common, and formed an essential part of
festive entertainments amongst the Abyssinians. There is
reason to believe that it was usual In many countries, both
in Africa and Asia.
The deity of Moses was rather extravagant in fitting out his tabernacle and ark. The latter was his travelling box, to afford him ease and comfort when making long marches, and was composed of very costly materials; but, in point of room and convenience, we should think it must have been inferior to some of Punch's portable palaces. However, the God grew so fond of, and so "jealous" about, his box, that, on one occasion, he perpetrated a tremendously bloody miracle, in killing 50,070 of the "glowrin' byke," for peeping into it. Putting aside the monstrosity of this story, in relation to number, could this offence arise from looking into an empty box? Certainly not. Sir William Drummond, in his "Ædipus Judaicus," asserts that, according to the Hebrew, the Jews carried about their idol in this box,* as was customary with the migrating hordes of the desert, all of whom, as well as the Jews, kept an ark for that purpose! Sir William's assertion is justified by the Bible itself, where it says that the Philistines were afraid, because the Jews brought their god into the battle when the ark was taken, a misfortune which their deity, with all his omnipotence, could not prevent; but he took terrible revenge on the captors by smiting them with emerods: hence the story in Rabelais against a certain most unholy and unsanctified use of that book.
* The Christian translators of the Bible, no doubt, did all
in their power to suppress the fact, that a representation
of the Jewish idol was kept in this box. The Levites being
the constituted priests of this idol, Micah, when he had his
god made of the stolen silver, did not consider it by any
means sufficient to have one of his own sons as priest. Why?
Because his new idol represented the Jewish deity; and,
therefore, a Levite as his priest was indispensable; for
then, says he, "I know the Lord will do me good." (See
Judges, xvii.) That this god was afterwards located at
Jerusalem, as the other district gods of the country were
stationed in their respective towns, we have many proofs in
the Bible. (See 1 Kings xii; Ezra i., 3; vii., 15, 19.)
** Did not the priests of Jupiter Ammon carry the magnet
with, them, in a compass-box, as the ark of the covenant of
their god, which, it was death for the unsanctifled to look
into.
The stupendous prodigy performed by that free-booter and murderer, Joshua, in laying an embargo upon, the sun and moon, in order to get time to kill a few thousands more of the Amorites, showed a ferocious thirst of blood, and was wholly uncalled for, victory being already secured through the powerful aid of Jahouh, who, sitting astride on the corner of a dark cloud was pelting the Amorites with great stones. Let us suppose that both the sun and the moon were in view at the same time, and that they stood still as commanded, would that make the massacre of the Amorites one iota less cruel and ferocious? It would only prove that Joshua's god was neither just nor merciful. This tale is, no doubt, a varied version of the fable of Jupiter's sending a shower of large hailstones upon the rebellious sons of Neptune. This may be coupled with another enormous fiction, the dial of Ahaz, upon which, by a bolder manoeuvre still, the sun is commanded to go backwards. Moses and Joshua appear to have had a sun and moon, as well as a Deity of their own. From all this does it not appear that the compilers of these fables, though under heavenly inspiration, were so ignorant as to suppose that the sun's motion caused the day, and that this globe stood still? Is it not evident also, that they took the stars to be little bright spangles set in a solid firmament (which had windows), as jewellers set brilliants in metal? The man who seriously believes in the literality of our version of these fables, is so stupidly and piteously credulous, as to be an object of compassion rather than of contempt. The two last miracles had more than one archetype in Pagan mythology:—the sun and moon were arrested by Bacchus on his march to India. In one of the love intrigues of Jupiter, he stayed the sun in order to get a double night in the arms of the fair Alcmena, when she conceived of the great Hercules. In later times the Christian priests performed a similar miracle in favor of the Emperor Charles V.
If Amphion, by the music of his lyre, made the stones dance into building order, so as to raise the walls of Thebes, why should not Joshua reverse the miracle, by tumbling down the walls of Jericho, to a tune played upon rams' horns by priests?
In the whole history of human cruelty and wickedness, there is nothing to equal, in cool and diabolical atrocity, the plunder and massacre of the Midianites. The horrible narrative partakes but little of the miraculous; yet, as Jahouh was said to be without a material body, and purely spiritual, it has been matter of wonder what he was going to do with the thirty-two young virgins who "had not known a man by lying with him," and who were awarded as his share of the spoil. This is a mystery which we must hold in silent reverence, as being altogether unaccountable, unless we surmise that his priests kindly intended to relieve him of so numerous a seraglio.*
* Horror succeeds to wonder, when it is known that by the
original meaning of the word, everything devoted to the
"Lord," was assuredly sacrificed, unless redeemed.
The speech of Balaam's ass, of edifying and sacred, memory with our holy church, had many precedents in antiquity. The cows of Mount Olympus had been distinguished for supernaturally inspired orations; the doves, the fountains, and even the oaks of Dodona, had delivered heavenly oracles; Xanthus, one of the horses of Achilles, predicted his master's death before the walls of Troy. Livy and Suetonius (we are sorry for them as they ought to have known better) furnish other examples.
Almost the same exploits have been attributed by the Jews to Samson that were related by the Phoenicians of their Hercules (according to Yarro, there were forty-four Herculeses), and the imitation is palpably servile in the story of the gates of Gaza, and that of Hercules with the pillars of Gadez. Lion-killing was imitated also. Hercules was one of the numerous personifications or emblems of the power of the sun; and the Arabian name Shams-on, or Samson, signifies the sun. Hercules is made prisoner by the Egyptians, who want to sacrifice him; but while they are preparing to slay him, he breaks loose and kills them all. Samson, when tied with new ropes, is given up to the Philistines, who want to kill him; he breaks the ropes, and kills a thousand of them with the jaw-bone of an ass. The fables are identical. Even the story of the fox-tails is rooted in astronomy.* About the time when the corn is cut down in Palestine and Lower Egypt, and shortly after the setting of the rainy constellation Hyadês, the sign of the fox arose, in whose tail or train came the fires or torches of the dog-days.
* See "New Researches."
The fable of Jephtha's sacrificing his daughter has some resemblance to the immolation of Iphigenia by her father, Agamemnon, in the famous expedition against Troy, which must have been taken by the Greeks many centuries before the Jews were known to have writings, or even a name.
The legend about the tower of Babel seems to have originated thus: The wise men of Egypt were jealous of the Chaldean philosophers; the former said that the latter were so proud of their knowledge in astronomy that they presumptuously endeavored to erect a column of science as high as the stars; but that their pride was humbled when all their efforts failed to complete the work.
The hideously unjust dogma of original sin might have grown out of the Pagan fable of Pandora's box, the occult meaning of which most probably was the evils arising from theology and priestcraft. However, it is high time that our Christian priesthoods should invent for it some less ridiculous origin than the apple story, for that is too absurd to serve their ends any longer.
Ludicrous as the whale fable of Jonah is, the copy is fairly outmatched by the original from which it is taken. It is a Jewish version of that of Hercules, who was enclosed for three days in the belly of a whale; but, being more witty and adroit than Jonah, he contrived to live sumptuously all the while, by feasting on the liver of the monster, which, by some means or other, he contrived to broil! Here, for once, the Jew is outdone at his own weapons—the romance run mad. It must surely have been in ridicule of these and similar god-fables that Lucian wrote his "True History."
Isaiah says (xxxvii., 36), "Then the angel of the Lord went forth and smote, in the camp of the Assyrians, 185,000; and when they arose in the morning, behold, they were all 'dead corpses.'" The Jonah of the Jew was completely thrown into the shade by Hercules, but here he is himself again. This miracle of miracles is altogether unmatched in heathen mythology; for we have 185,000 men, who were murdered in the night, getting up in the morning merely to find themselves "dead corpses." A commentator of the true impudent breed will easily explain all this by affirming that the prodigy was typical of the resurrection.
The three hours of an eclipse, which is said to have taken place on the death of one of our Christian gods, is a very modest imitation of the Pagan original, from which it has every appearance of being taken. We say modest, because on the death of the godling Phæton, his father Phoebus withheld his light from the earth a whole day.
All the Jewish and Christian fictions about resurrections and ascensions into what is called heaven, are also clumsily taken copies of originals in the ancient polytheism. The Egyptian Osiris died, returned again to life, and afterwards obtained divine honors; he was designated "the holy word" The god Atys was called the "God our Savior." Bacchus died, was buried, descended into, and slept three nights in Tartarus* (the only hell they had in those times), from whence he brought up his mother, with whom he ascended into heaven, and made her a goddess. His return to life was annually celebrated by the virgins and matrons of Delphi.
* All the tales about Tophet, Gehenna, Tartarus, or Hell,
had no foundation whatever "but the practice of burning
mankind, either on the funeral pile, or as a sacrifice to
the gods. The Greek word, Ades, or Hades, occurs eleven
times in the New Testament, and is falsely translated
Hell in all except one, where it is rightly translated
'the grave,' signifying the invisible state."
Ouranos, coelus, or heaven, merely signified the earth's
atmosphere in the summer months.
Thus the compilers of the Jew books had exemplars in, and drew their fables from, Paganism; and were themselves imitated in turn by the fabricators of the new Testament: the stories of the manna, and the twenty loaves of Elisha, very naturally suggested the wonderful growth of Jesus' loaves and fishes; and the manner in which that prophet turned brackish into pure water, would clearly point out how that element might be turned into wine, at the feast of Cana. The above are only a few of the numerous instances which might be quoted, wherein the ignorance of the Jewish scribes, disfigured the elegant and lively fables of Paganism; and it cannot escape observation that the rude recoinage in their barbarous mint has turned that which was pretty and amusing into the deformed and hideous, in a manner quite characteristic of their own semi-savage condition.
Having given a few specimens of the miracles attributed to the deity adopted by Moses, and their Pagan prototypes, we will take a retrospective glance at his general conduct and character, as depicted in his old Jewish Will. Never were higher qualities and powers ascribed to any god; and never were they so badly sustained; he is represented as omniscient, yet always taken by surprise; an omnipotent being, whose designs are commonly frustrated; immutable, yet ever changing; sufficient to his own happiness, yet always "jealous;" perfection itself, yet continually making imperfections, and repenting of that which he had previously approved; finally, he makes an eternal Being, about as powerful as himself, and for no other apparent purpose than to be crossed and circumvented in all his projects. Sometimes Moses and he had sharp bickerings, such as that tavern squabble in Egypt (Exodus iv., 2—4), when the god lurked about the inn,* "seeking to kill" his protégé.
* We do not mean to say that he frequented inns or taverns,
but it appears he was fond of a cheerful glass of wine. See
Judges ix. 13. Being composed of flesh and blood, Gen. vi.,
8.
At other times they were good friends, merry, and frolicksome, playing at bo-peep among the rocks (Exodus xxxiii., 22), the god showing his "back parts" only, for "no man could see his face and live"; yet on other occasions he talked "face to face" with his intimate friends. He forfeited all pretensions to the attributes of omniscience and omnipresence, when he confessed that he must "go down now and see" what the men of Sodom had been doing (Gen. xviii., 21). Nor could he, from his villa beyond the clouds, discover the Tower of Babel, but was under the necessity of coming "down to see" (Gen. xi.). That from his Egyptian greatness he was reduced, by Moses and his priests, to be merely a provincial deity, appears in various texts, as in Deuteronomy iv., 7, where it is said he was located near or living "nigh to them" (the Jews). A district god of this kind was fashionable all over Syria at that time, each petty state or tribe having one of its own; such as Astartê, with the cross, of the Phoenicians; Moloch, of the Ammonites; Astoroth and Dagon, of the Philistines; Tammuz, or Adonis, of the Sidonians; Chemosh,* of the Moabites, etc., etc.; and why should not the Jews be armed with a god as well as their neighbors? Well might Jahouh exclaim, "save me from my friends;" for his historians have represented him as a passionate, blustering, vengeful changeling, extremely "jealous" of all the other petty gods around him, and exciting nothing but fear and dislike in his followers; hence the Theocrat and his priesthood were continually struggling to keep the grist at their own mill, by preventing the people from "whoring after" the more amiable rites of Astartê and Adonis. In the seventeenth chapter of 1 Chronicles this deity gives intimation that, owing to a change of habits, he was not particularly desirous of living in a house;** that ever since he left Egypt, he had accustomed himself to go about "from tent to tent, and from one tabernacle to another" There is something exceedingly ludicrous in this; yet we trust that the "long-ear'd rout," the true believers, will have no difficulty in preserving their gravity. In short, of all the personified deities of antiquity, Moses has caricatured his the most egregiously. All these local or provincial gods were immeasurably inferior to the Jupiter of the Greeks, who, although he "liked the lasses," always sustained an awful dignity of character.
* See Judges xi., 24.
** The deity set up by priests stands in no want of a house
whilst among wandering tribes, who build none for
themselves; but while he is amongst the stationary
cultivators of the soil he requires one, in which his
immaterial presence is requested on stated days to hear
his own praise sung: men are fond of praise, therefore it
undoubtedly follows that the deity must be fond of it
likewise.
In additional proof that the Jew books have no just claim to antiquity, there is not a vestige of authentic testimony to show that they were in existence before the King of Babylon gave the Jews permission to settle in Palestine, after their slavery. The first thirteen of these appear to have been then fabricated from loose and unconnected traditions; of which the Pentateuch was in all probability compiled the last, as there is no mention of it either in Joshua, Judges, the two books of Samuel, Psalms, or in Kings or Chronicles, until the time of Josiah, that is, about 900 years after the pretended time of Moses.* If a man, without slavish fear or prejudice, will impartially examine the stories in 2 Kings xxii., and 2 Chron. xxxiv., xxxv., he will see palpably the collusion between the high priest Hilkiah and his pupil, the young king Josiah, aided by the prophet Jeremiah, Shaphan the scribe, and the prophetess Huldah. These persons, some of whom must have learnt to write while at Babylon, acted in concert under the high priest, in manufacturing the books of the law, which they pretended to have found in an old chest, where, according to their story, they must have mouldered for upwards of 900 years; yet Shaphan could read them as fluently as if he had written them himself. The object of this fraud being to wean the Jews from the gods of the Chaldean priests, it is probable that the books of the law only were forged on this occasion; for we find that the compilation of a large portion of the Bible traditions fell to the share of Esdras (who was identically Ezra the scribe), as he distinctly tells us in the fourteenth chapter of his second book, viz., that under the orders of the Lord (read, the high priest), he had a number of clerks engaged for forty days, during which time they completed amongst them 204 books or chapters.** As all these men had been captives in Babylon, and could nowhere else be taught to write, how could these books be composed in any other than the Chaldee character? The third chapter of the book of Chronicles gives a list of the Jewish kings from David to Zedekiah, and even to four generations after his time. Now, as Zedekiah was one of those who were carried to Babylon, we have a strong, an irrefragable proof that those books were written after that captivity.
* The proof that Moses could not possibly be the author of
the Pentateuch did not escape the luminous mind of Mr.
Paine. In Genesis xiv., 14, it is said, "And Abraham pursued
them to Dan." Now, there was no place called Dan until the
time of the Judges. See Judges xviii., 28 and 29.
In Genesis xxxvi., 31, it is said, "And these are the kings
that reigned in the land of Edom before the children of
Israel had any king" Therefore several kings, viz., Saul,
David, Solomon, etc., must have reigned before the first
book of the Pentateuch was written.
In the forty-ninth chapter the writer gives an account of
the ultimate fate of the tribes (forgetting the tribe of
Manasseh altogether). How could Moses know anything of this?
How could he speak of the sceptre of Judah? If it is said
that this was prophetic of Jesus, we reply that the sceptre
was not in Judah when he (Jesus), was bora.
St. Jerome, said to be one of the most learned of the
Fathers, confesses he dare not affirm that Moses was the
author of the Pentateuch. He even adds that he has no
objection to allow that it was written by Esdras. His words
are: "Sive Mosem dicere volueris auctorem Pentateuchi sive
Esdram ejusdem instauratorem operis, non recuso."
** That Esdras composed these books is further proved in his
first book, chap. 8, where it is said that he "had very
great skill, and omitted nothing of the law" of the Lord,
i.e., the laws of the king, and high priest.
Moreover, learned critics have shewn that the Bible names of angels, such as Gabriel, Uriel, Raphael, Michael, Satan, etc., are purely Chaldean or Persian! And this is confirmed by the Talmud of Jerusalem, which says expressly that the Jews borrowed the names of the angels from the Babylonians. Even the name Israel is not a Hebrew but a Chaldee word, as was fully explained by Philo Judæus, when on his embassy to the Emperor Caligula. This corroborates the opinion that, in the portions of the Pentateuch which existed only in tradition, previous to the captivity at Babylon, the angels had no names, and that they were afterwards added when these traditions were written. For instance, when Abraham entertained Jehovah and the two angels with roasted veal,* the party gave themselves no names; and those heavenly messengers whose virginity was so much endangered by the men of Sodom, when they honored Lot with a visit, were anonymous also; as was likewise the one that appeared to Manoah. The legend contained in the book said to be written by Enoch, concerning the war in heaven, fall of the angels, etc., must have travelled from India to Chaldea, where it was picked up by the Jews. It arose from one of the astro-fables in that most ancient of all books, the Shastras of the Brahmins, wherein it is recorded that heavenly beatitude was disturbed by the pride and ambition of Mozazor and Raabon, two princes of the angelic bands, who stirred up sedition, and drew after them myriads of angels in rebellion against the Eternal, who sent against them his vicegerent Brahma, with his two lieutenants, Vishnu and Siva, armed with almighty power, who hurled the rebels from heaven down to a place of darkness, called Ondera. This ancient fable of the Brahmins was probably the groundwork also of the Grecian fable of the Titan war.
* This story is taken from an old fable related in the Fasti
of Ovid, how Jupiter, Neptune, and Mercury, having supped
with an old man named Hyriens, and finding that impotence
was the cause of his having no children, each of the three
urined upon the skin of the calf 'that had been killed for
supper, and this celestial water impregnated the skin,
which, after nine months' inhumation, produced a beautiful
child, which became the constellation Orion. The learned say
that the true translation of the words which the angels
addressed to Abraham, is thus:—A child shall be born of
your calf.
A word more respecting Abraham. The planet Saturn was the Israel of the Chaldees; and it was personified both by them and the Phoenicians under the name of Abraham, which signifies the Father of a people figuratively, the stars of heaven, which are called "his seed for ever." Saturn was the son of Terra (the earth); Abraham was the son of Terah; Saturn married his own sister Rhea, a star; Abraham married his own sister Sarai or Sarah, which signifies a star (Sirius, the ever beautiful and young); Saturn had many sons, but only one whom he loved and protected as an only son; Abraham had many sons, though he is said to have had an only son named Isaac, whom he loved. According to the famous Sanchoniatho, Saturn offered up his beloved son Jeoud, as a holocaust, or burnt offering wholly consumed; Abraham was about to offer up his beloved son Isaac,* but a ram (zodiacal) was found as substitute. The planet Saturn was called Israel by the Phoenicians and Chaldees; the patriarch Abraham is synonymous with the name Israel throughout the Bible. Saturn, from his exceedingly remote situation in the solar system, and the long period taken to circle his immense orbit, was the emblem of time; hence the many Bible phrases about Abraham, as connected with time, such as "before Abraham was,"—i.e., before time was. Priests! are these merely chance coincidences?
* In this horrible story, as understood literally, Abraham
receives quite coolly, and without either surprise or
remonstrance, the order to sacrifice Isaac; which shows,
even in allegory, that among the Jews the sacrifice of the
first-born son by the father was nothing uncommon.
Stupidity itself, if honest and free from prejudice, would at once see and acknowledge the perfect sameness, the absolute identity of these astro-fables; and that the personal existence of Abraham rests precisely on the same ground as that of any other mythological or metaphysical existence whatsoever. But what will our gospel-grace baby of fifty say, when he has the mortification to see the truth of the above interpretations antecedently confirmed and justified by the gospel itself? Paul, in his epistle to the Galatians says: "For it is written that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bond-maid, the other by a free woman, which things are an allegory," that is, a fable. This story, then, no more belongs to the Hebrews than it does to the Laplanders, but is wholly Chaldaic, and was plagiarised by the Jews while slaves in Babylon; but the Chaldee priests would take special care that they should see only the veil that covered the allegory. Thus it is clear that Abraham's personal existence was as fictitious as that of Saturn, Jupiter, Orion, Mercury, Apollo, etc. He is also identified in the Hindu Brahma, with no other difference than a transposition of the letters of the name. The god Jehovah of the Bible announces himself to Abraham and Moses in almost the same terms as does the supreme god of India to Brahma, as recorded in the Bhagavat Pourana, the Holy Bible of the Hindus, translated from the Sanscrit by Sir William Jones, who allows the vastly higher antiquity of the Brahmin allegories.
We shall now touch slightly upon the curious question, whether the Jews did ever in reality possess any territory not subject to a higher power. The narrative of their colonisation by Cyrus is liable to much doubt and objection. No authentic historian of ancient times, Josephus excepted, has ever in any way mentioned them as an independent nation or state, or as being in possession of Palestine, or any part of Great Syria, before or in the time of Alexander. As a nation they appear to have been entirely unknown to Herodotus, and all other Greek historians. What had become of them when Xenophon wrote of the eastern nations, which was only 150 years after their alleged return from Babylon? He mentions the Syrians of Palestine as under the Persian government, but not a word about the Jews. Herodotus mentions two invasions of the Scythians, through Syria, even to the borders of Egypt; but acknowledges no Jews or Israelites. In the fragments that remain of Sanchoniatho, Ctesias, Berosus, and Manetho, they are not noticed even as a petty or subject state, so that we have the fullest negative evidence that in the times of these historians, no part of Syria was a Jewish country. Diodorus, in detailing the events in that country, the siege of Tyre, etc., during Alexander's conquests, says not a word of the Jews as forming a state or colony, or of their boasted city of Jerusalem: and he is equally silent as to their existence as a nation during the times of Alexander's immediate successors; nor have we any historical account of them deserving of credit until the time of Antiochus the 4th (Epiphanes), under whom they lived, and he was subject to the Romans. If the territory of Judea was given to them by the King of Babylon, only about 200 years before the Macedonian conqueror went to the east, why did not he and his historians find them there? The plain and simple truth is, the Jews NEVER formed an independent state; and that part of Syria called Palestine, was, in all known ages, subject either to the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks or Romans (according to the tide of conquest), as it now is to the Turks. In Bible times the Jews were much more ignorant than they now are, and this is all the difference in their condition; they were always the old-clothes'-men and gold clippers of the world. They were permitted by the King of Babylon to build a temple to their idol in the rocky district of Judea, which formed a nucleus—a Jewish Mecca—to which they congregated from all parts for worship. Josephus, while he speaks of his masters, the Romans, is tolerably correct; but when he treats of the "antiquities" of his countrymen he is not for a moment to be trusted, because he was then merely copying their legendary tales, and he frequently far exceeds the wild romance of the tales themselves. The pretended interview between Alexander and the high priest Jaddua, is evidently plagiarised from the well-authenticated scene that took place between that prince and the high priest of Jupiter Ammon.
From the times of Porphyry, Celsus, and Hierocles, to the present day, it has been the wonder of the rational philosopher, how a disjointed collection of writings, made by an obscure and barbarous race of people, came to have such mighty importance attached to them, more especially as their tendency has ever been inimical to, and subversive of, human happiness; but this sad anomaly may be accounted for. All such tyrants as Constantine saw in these books examples of the most unqualified despotism; and knew that, through the medium of carefully fostered ignorance, man is an animal that can be made to believe and bear anything, however absurd and tyrannical. Conquerors and devastators of countries found in them justifying precedents for all their enormities, and the rivers of blood which ambition and Christian fanaticism have shed in every part of the world. The Crusades, where millions upon millions of fanatics perished, are never-dying witnesses of this. Would any unshackled mind believe that the Spaniards could have been guilty of such inhuman and monstrous cruelties towards the simple and unoffending natives of America, if such horrid butcheries had not been sanctioned, nay, commanded, and pompously set forth, in the detailed massacres of the Bible? Here we have the exploits of some generals of banditti—blood-thirsty robbers, who blasphemously declare that their unequalled cruelties were committed by command of the ruling power of the universe! That the Spaniards thought themselves justified by the Bible, appears by the book which Sepulvado wrote for the express purpose of vindicating them in the murder of twelve millions of Indians, "by the example of the Israelites towards the people of Canaan." Las Casas says: "I have seen in the Islands of St. Domingo and Jamaica, gibbets erected all over the country to hang thirteen Indians at a time, in honor of the thirteen apostles.—I have seen," continues he, "young children thrown to dogs* to be devoured alive." In charging the shocking barbarities of the Bible upon the Jewish deity, the fanatic devoutly accuses him of crimes and acts of wicked injustice that are hardly ever committed, even by the worst of men, such as visiting the offences of the fathers upon the children, and requiring the sacrifice of the innocent to expiate the crimes of the guilty. To what a state of mental degradation, O man, have thy priests and thy superstition reduced thee!
Thus did kings, conquerors, and corrupt rulers of nations see the justifying precedents to be drawn from these books for all their enormities; and as for the fathers or heads of the Christian sect, and other religious impostors, they could be at no loss to find in them just whatever suited their respective schemes of deception. The learned amongst the early fathers saw and acknowledged the astro-allegories about Adam, Eve, the serpent, Garden of Eden, and fall of man; but their successors, about the beginning of the 4th century, when they decided upon getting up a new will and testament for Jehovah, in order to make their system hold together, thought it necessary to cause his departure from the usual practice of testators—that he should not be allowed to revoke the old Jewish will, which for good reasons, was to be retained in full force. Without this document their most essential dogmas would have had no foundation; and as it "would have been too bare-faced a fable to make Jesus die on account of an allegorical tree," the forbidden one of Genesis must be converted into a real tree; for then it would, together with its accompaniments, furnish mystical pegs upon which to hang the indispensable dogmas of original sin and redemption.
* In Hosea xiii., 16, we have a declaration "That their
infants shall be dashed in pieces, and their women with
child shall be ripped up"!!! This and the Midianitish
slaughter and extermination, together with that of the
Amalekites, will perhaps stand for ever unmatched in the
history of human cruelties.
These appear to have been the ruling motives of those who gradually manufactured the Christian scheme (for it was done by piecemeal, by a number of hands, and in different centuries) and in adopting the Old Testament it was necessary, by this affiliation, to connect its list of fabulous prodigies with the new code,* or fresh series of miracles which had been invented for, and are recorded in, the new will of the Jewish deity:—**
"Ay, and sound ones too,
Seen, heard, attested, every thing—but true"
In forcing this connexion still closer, the fabricators had no difficulty in finding that, in their series of wonders, the principal violations of Nature's laws had been foretold in the Jewish prophets.*** This was a clincher which served to confirm the supernatural texture of their religion, quite as well as the cloud-conveyed Shastras did that of Brahma, the laws of Moses from the cloud-capped Sinai, or any other of the numerous human laws which have originated beyond the clouds, and been palmed upon ignorance by impostors. Clouds, shadows, phantoms, ghosts, etc., have ever been the favorite machinery of priests. According to the notoriously false prediction of St. Paul, Jesus, on his second coming, was to be cloud-delivered; and this advent, it was positively asserted, would take place during his own (Paul's) lifetime.
* Matthew pretends that Jeremiah foretold that Christ should
be betrayed for thirty pieces of silver. Where is this to be
found in Jeremiah?
** When the latent astronomical sense of these two
testaments is made manifest, a necessary connexion between
them is perceived; owing to their common foundation in Solar
adoration, and that of the other physical powers of Nature.
*** These prophets were in reality nothing but strolling
soothsayers, fortune-tellers, psalmists or palmists; and
being mob orators by education and profession, with a
capability of reading and writing, they were fitted to
deceive the ignorant in many ways. Dodwell, De Jure
Laicorum, asserts that they prepared themselves to prophecy
by drinking wine. They were also jugglers, musicians,
etc., etc.
But our church mystagogues will very easily reconcile this unfortunate failure with "gospel truth." As the Old Testament compilers had made up their collection chiefly of any traditionary or legendary shreds they could gather,* so did their successors, the Christians, in their new miscellany. The Therapeutæ, or Egyptian monks, had supplied a large portion, as is confessed even by Eusebius himself (see Lecture Second), but by a luckless anachronism, the spurious writings that were selected to form the new will of god, were not (according to the best authorities) finally voted to be such until the Council of Laodicea;** so that the present document had no existence till three hundred and sixty-eight years after the death of the testator, for it is quite orthodox to say that Jesus was "God the Testator."
* The Pharisees of the second temple chose the books they
liked best among a multitude of forgeries. The Talmud
relates that this synagogue were about to reject by far the
best books of the Bible—viz., Proverbs, Job and
Ecclesiastes; not owing to their not being Jewish, but Pagan
writings, but because they were contradictory to the law of
god. It was not only the opinion of Ebenezra, but even of
Jerome himself, that Job is not a Hebrew book.
** The deadly animosity and quarrelling for which the
Council of Nice was so famous, would prevent anything like
decision; and, therefore, it is much more probable that the
finishing hand in voting what should form the New
Testament, was put at Laodicea, and not at Nice, especially
as we know that the book of Revelation was rejected at
Council of Laodicea; but again admitted long afterwards.
From the discordant and immoral tendency of the greater portion of the old will of the Jewish god, there could arise but little hope that his new one would benefit the human race; so according to the spirit of its own terrible denunciation (Matt, x., 34, 35, 36), we find that its votaries, the religious fanatics both of early and modern times, have not yielded in the slightest degree but been fully equal in holy cruelty to the Jews, who were utterly inaccessible to every feeling of pity or humanity. These two superhuman Testaments now form a book, which, from its ill-deserved conventional pre-eminence, and the hydra-priesthoods which it quarters upon industry, is the chief scourge of modern Europe. The contemptible ignorance, credulity, and fraud which support its tyrannous authority as a supernatural revelation; the futile attempt to enforce a belief in its literal meaning as indispensable to the happiness of mankind; and the universal degradation and misery which it perpetuates, by the inbred hostility which all its priesthoods have ever evinced towards every improvement that would enlighten and elevate the human mind, have done more to disgust and misanthropize all ingenuous and rational minds, and to inspire them with a settled aversion for the ways of man and his institutions, than all the other moral and physical evils now experienced in Christendom. While these master curses are maintained in their pestiferous sway, it will be impossible for their victim, man, to taste of happiness through the attainment of civil liberty to any beneficial extent, or to approach truth and virtue by philosophical researches in the path of Nature; for there is no arriving at these but by the utter extermination of all the fraudulent and idolatrous religions pretending to supernatural revelation.
END OF LECTURE FIRST. [ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]
LECTURE SECOND. CHRISTIAN SUPERNATURALISM FURTHER CONSIDERED
"Lest you start at these bold truths, and fly
These lines, as maxims of impiety,
Consider that Religion did, and will
CONTRIVE, PROMOTE, and ACT the greatest ill."
Lucretius.
IN the foregoing Lecture, it has been shown that the Jewish deity of Moses, on his being adopted and continued in power by the early sect of Christians, who were themselves Jews, was induced by his new hierarchy, as soon as they were established, to make a new Will (the old Jewish one not being altogether sufficient for their ends), into which they gradually, as occasion required, foisted different codicils, by which they multiplied the objects of worship, by introducing into partnership with him two colleagues, who, being each no other than himself, the three, quite arithmetically, made but "one God." But by this cunning and masterly manoeuvre, he soon found himself fairly outwitted by his priests, who were the sole gainers by this poly-theistical stratagem; whilst the supremacy which he held in the time of Moses dwindled into division, and he was obliged to share with the other two, and even with the mother* of one of them, the worship of his new votaries. Even the gods themselves, when Juno, the sister and wife of Jupiter, had divine honors paid to her; why then refuse the same to the mother of one of the "Christian Gods?"
* When the people of Ephesus were informed that the Fathers
of the Council had declared they might call the Virgin Mary
"The Mother of God" they were transported with joy; they
kissed the hands of the bishops—they embraced their knees,
and the whole city resounded with acclamations! St. Cyrils
Letter.
When they get entangled in the meshes of priestcraft, are seldom able to burst the trammels; and so it has happened in the case before us. The "New Will" was a most ingenious invention on the part of the Fathers of Christianism, as it afforded them an opportunity not only of re-modelling their deity, in person and family, but of abrogating or amending all such of his old laws as no longer suited the times or their views; and of making every change that was necessary to establish the new hierarchy in riches and power. The tithe of industry and settled money revenues must now be substituted for the bloody altars, and delectable viands of Jehovah's former priests; and as he was precisely a personification of the interests of these, so has he continued to be of those of their successors, who, having that object alone in view, have been but little solicitous about rendering him either more consistent or amiable; but on the contrary, they have sublimated his cruelty, by the invention of eternal fire torments, an idea so enormously absurd and wicked, that it never entered his head while he was merely Theocrat of the Jews.
Matters being thus settled by the rejection of the numerous theogony of which Jupiter was the head, and the adoption of unity in the godhead, under the Jehovah of the Jews, it was still considered necessary, in order to reconcile the polytheists, to preserve some vestiges of polytheism; and these were readily suggested by the waking dreams and spiritual speculations of Plato, whose "three hypostases" seemed wonderfully well adapted to form the basis of our triune mythology. Hence the divinity of Plato.
As the third part of that godhead which is now worshipped in modern Europe, was, as well as the other parts, borrowed from the heathen trinity, and forms an important dogma in our superstition, a sketch of its history may not be unnecessary. Like the metaphysical invention of the soul's immortality, it is altogether unacknowledged in the Old Testament, as a personified deity; for the "spirit of the Lord," if rightly translated, merely signifies wind of the gods, or wind that has a genial and salutary influence, as that of summer. This addition made to the Christian mythology by the Platonist writers of the New Testament, was eagerly embraced and improved upon by the Fathers, as the grand source, or fountain head, from whence they could continually draw their infallible inspirations. In accordance with its occult sense in the mysteries of the Gentile trinity, they very properly made their holy ghost "proceed from" the other two "persons," though he more immediately emanates from the "son" (i. e. the sun), and, by the apotheosis, they armed him with authority; but as a regularly constituted and personified god, he did not come fairly into play until the beginning of the fifth century, when he came in for his third share of godhead thus:—From council to council, new creeds and dogmas were hatched; and in that of Chalcedon, in 401, the first New Testament was set in the midst of the assembly, as the great appeal. The ecclesiastics who composed this council, found considerable difficulty in adding this third apotheosis to complete their trinity, until a priest, more cunning and more deceitful than the others, suggested an expedient, which was nothing less than to add to the beginning of St. John's Gospel that passage from Plato which now forms its first verse.
In the occult sense in which this windy metaphor is used in the New Testament, it is allegorical of the first winds of summer, "proceeding from" the increased power of the sun, which have a vivifying and salutary influence upon all animal and, vegetable life. The writer of the Gospel attributed to St. John astro-nomises, perhaps, a little too openly in chap. 7, v. 39, by declaring: "For as yet there was no Holy Ghost, because Jesus was not yet glorified."*
* This is the true translation from the Greek.
Here is a plain and unequivocal admission that even the very existence of the Holy Ghost depended on the glorification of Christ, the solution of which enigma is, that May was not then come, for it was not until about the middle of that month that the Hely, or Holy wind of Helios, that is, God the Sun, was said to commence; and this constituted, and is the only Holy Ghost. But before that period, as the sun is not sufficiently elevated and clear, or in other words, clarified (glorified) from the denser clouds and contagious vapors of early spring, his personification, Christ, could not be said to be glorified.* Hence the Holy Ghost is an annual visitor, and with his benign influence, comes with the festival of Whitsuntide or Pentecost; but not till that is "fully come."** It was then that, symbolised in the blessed, holy, sun-heated wind, he was said to descend on the apostles, giving them "the gift of tongues," which gifts seem to have been quite in character, and fleeting as the wind, for they soon evaporated, leaving the possessors "unlearned and ignorant men."
That which is called the "sin against the Holy Ghost," or sinning against the clearest light, cannot be rationally interpreted as meaning anything else than the denial of, or refusal duly to appreciate, the sun's almighty power upon this globe—the one glorious fountain "on High," out of which springs the renovated creation, and the annual salvation of man.
It was at the famous festival of Whitsuntide also, after the sun entered the sign Gemini, or the Twin Children, that the personified sun, Christ, is very significantly made to say, "suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven"—that is, such is my present "house" in the zodiac.
With respect to the second deity in the Christian plan of polytheism,*** it may be justly asserted, that amongst the numerous revealed religions that have from time to time plagued and enslaved the world, no set of theological dogmas, in any known age or country, has ever produced a tenth part of the contention, devastation and bloodshed that have arisen from those concerning Jesus Christ; and although Christendom has been the scene of the fiercest wars for more than fourteen centuries, for the absurd purpose of ascertaining his pedigree, rank and attributes, these preternatural problems are not only as far from being settled as ever, but strong doubts remain whether the person in question did ever exist in reality; many of the learned being of opinion that his positive existence rests on as visionary grounds as that of his Platonic colleague.
* Wherever the phrase, "The Glory of the Lord" is used
throughout the Bible, it signifies nothing else than the
brightness of the sun.
** Acts ii, 1, and iv. 18.
*** Jesus became God thus:—In the year 325, Constantine
having declared himself protector of the Church, convoked
the grand oecumenic council of Nice; and of all the Fathers
who composed that council, three hundred were of a contrary
opinion to that of Arius; and these it was who determined
to acknowledge the "Divinity of Jesus." They added to the
tenets and symbols the words consubstantial with the
Father; and concluded by anathematising the Arians.
Christ, or Christos, is not a proper name, but like the word paraclete, is an epithet, and signifies a principle or quality that is good and useful to man, and has been applied to the sun, as savior, and to human reason.* This nearly agrees with the hypothesis of the famous Dr. Strauss—that "the history of Christ, as related in the Gospels, is mythic—a kind of imaginative amplification of certain vague and slender traditions, formed with the design of developing an ideal character of Jesus, and to harmonise with the Jewish notions of a Messiah." That some obscure person of the name of Jesus may have lived, and been put to death by the Jewish mob for ridiculing their superstition is very probable; but that the hero of the New Testament was born, and lived, and died under all the circumstances, and attended by such violations of Nature's laws as are represented in that book, without the emphatic record of any historian, either Greek, Jewish, or Roman, seems quite impossible.
* Christ, the anointed, is physically significative of the
Sun, as being the sole source of all that man can rationally
call good; and in the moral sense it is expressive of reason
and knowledge. The etymology of the names of the ruling gods
in different ages and countries, such as Brahma, Osiris,
Chrishna, Budha, Foe, Oromazedes, Jupiter, Bacchus, Jehovah
and Jesus Christ, etc., will show that they were merely
allegorical personifications of the Sun. Dr. Lamb, of
Cambridge, has found the etymon even of the word sabbath to
signify "Daughter of the Sun"
Our O, as used in admiration, was symbolical of the
orbicular figure of the Sun, as in the exclamation, "O Dens
Sol invicte Mithra!" Celsus declares that such Mithriacs
were the first Christians.
Mattathias, the father of Josephus, must have been a witness to the miracles which are said to have been performed by Jesus, and Josephus was born within two years after the crucifixion, yet in all his works he says nothing whatever about the life or death of Jesus Christ; as for the interpolated passage it is now universally acknowledged to be a forgery. The arguments of the "Christian Ajax,"* even Lardner himself, against it are these:—"It was never quoted by any of our Christian ancestors before Eusebius. It disturbs the narrative. The language is quite Christian. It is not quoted by Chrysostom, though he often refers to Josephus, and could not have omitted quoting it had it been then in the text. It is not quoted by Photius, though he has three articles concerning Josephus; and this: author expressly states that this historian has not taken the least notice of Christ.** Neither Justin Martyr, in his dialogue with Trypho the Jew; nor Clemens Alexandrinus, who made so many extracts from ancient authors; nor Origen against Celsus, have ever mentioned this testimony. But, on the contrary, in chap. 35th of the first book of that work, Origen openly affirms that Josephus, who had mentioned John the Baptist, did not acknowledge Christ. That this passage is a false fabrication, is admitted also by Ittigius, Blondel, Le Clerc, Vandale, Bishop Warburton, and Tanaquil Faber."*** Josephus was not friendly towards Herod, but rather at enmity with him; he conceals none of his faults or cruelties, which makes it appear surpassing strange that he should silently pass over that most horrible of all butcheries ever perpetrated by-man—the general massacre of the infants, to the amount, it has been said, of fourteen thousand.
* See Taylor's "Diegesis."
** How could Photius, in the 9th century, find that in
Josephus which Origen, in the 3rd century, had declared was
not in him?
*** Is it probable, is it even possible that Josephus, a Jew
extremely zealous and obstinate in his own religion, would
confess that to be true which every Jew most positively and
religiously denies; that is, acknowledge that Jesus was the
Christ? This is making Josephus talk like a Christian in
four or five lines only.
How is it that this event, so unparalleled that history cannot show its-equal in atrocity, should not only be unknown to three-of the evangelists, Mark, Luke, and John, but entirely escape the notice of the minute and circumstantial, historian of the Jews? Josephus is equally silent respecting the miraculous darkness, the new star which appeared in the east, and the graves that opened of themselves to eject the dead, who, being undisposed of afterwards, may still be walking the streets of Jerusalem.. The younger Seneca, a voluminous writer, was then about thirty-nine years of age, and must have been at Rome at the time; yet he says nothing whatever of those shocking cruelties and violations of Nature's laws. The elder* and the younger Pliny came into the highest repute not many years afterwards, one of whom was a most valuable historian, and could not possibly have omitted to mention such extraordinary doings and prodigies if they had taken place in any part of the empire.
If anything could be more unaccountable than the silence of the above historians, it would be that of Philo-Judæus, who was contemporary with Caligula? "and in the folio edition of his works of 1552, he speaks of the state of the Jews, and their afflictions under Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, the very period embracing the whole extent of Christ's life; but he says not a word of Christ, Christians, or Christianity." This silence of Philo, a man highly esteemed for his learning and veracity, a cotemporary historian, and a public functionary, being agent for the Jews at the time, is so inexplicable, that interested priests alone can explain it away.
* The elder Pliny, about the year seventy-five, wrote the
"History of His Own Time," in thirty-one books, and was the
most celebrated historian of that time, yet we find him as
ignorant as Josephus, or any of the other writers mentioned,
of the thing called Christianity, or sect of Christians;
though, as an historian, he was so minute and circumstantial
as to suffer nothing of importance to escape him. Why did
the Christians, in after times destroy the work above-
mentioned, and leave his "Natural History?" Because he did
not perform an impossibility; that is, he neither did nor
could take notice of their sect, which had no known
existence in his time.
A question naturally presents itself—did the populace of Jerusalem and villages adjacent, who were spectators and witnesses when the miracles in question were wrought, believe in them? No, they did not; to them the operator, whoever he was, must have appeared an impostor, as fully appears by the catastrophe. That such extraordinary events and performances should make no impression upon those who were witnesses to them, is contrary to the natural feelings of mankind, particularly as regards the populace, for in all such cases where the bulk of the people believe in the truth of reputed miracles, they are more actuated by sentiments of reverential awe towards the performer, than a desire to put him to death.
After a lapse of nearly two thousand years since the epoch of these miraculous events, it must ever remain impossible to ascertain whether the second person of this triune godhead had bona fide an incarnate existence; or was merely a metaphorical personification of some principle, as the epithet Christ implies;* but it is certain that this appellative was assumed by a sect of superstitionists known in Egypt, from time immemorial, under the name of therapeutæ, or monks, whose tenets the Judaizing Christians adopted; and from whose writings they made selections in the compilation of their New Testament, as is proved by the testimony of Eusebius himself, who says in his history, book 2nd: "Those ancient therapeutæ were Christians, AND THEIR ANCIENT WRITINGS WERE OUR GOSPELS."
* "Christos being strictly a Greek epithet, would the Jewish
populace give a Greek name to a Jew by birth?"
Thus it is proved by the most zealous of all the Christian fathers, that these gospels, though not brought upon the stage until nearly two centuries after the reputed death of Jesus, existed among the Egyptian monks long before the pretended origin of Christianity. As to the four which have been selected and fitted up by the Church to make part of "the word of God," no man has ever been able to tell by whom, when, or where they were written; nor are they acknowledged by any person but as the learned Christian bishop, Faustus, declared the forgers of them affirmed, "that what was written by themselves, was written 'according' to those persons to whom they ascribed them." It appears that these adopted gospels were first mentioned by Irenæus, about the latter end of the second century; but as the writings of that saint must have come through the manufacturing hands of Eusebius, that early notice of them is rendered extremely suspicious; however, they were first known only as forming part of fifty-four gospels, all equally well authenticated; and some writers have asserted that it was this Irenæus who first selected them out of the above spurious mass, and by his own fiat alone made them canonical. Was it out of respect for the high authority of this saint that the Holy Ghost confirmed his selection, at the Council of Nice, about 175 years afterwards? It has been allowed, even by the most learned Christian divines (as will be shown in a subsequent lecture) that fraud, religious lying and forgery, were then the common practice in promoting the cause of public deception; and, therefore, we have no difficulty in believing that Irenæus had his full share in the fraudful traffic.
If the word of a saint is good for anything, we might quote that of Irenæus in corroboration of what we have elsewhere said respecting the books of the Old Testament; for does he not tell us that "they were fabricated' seventy years after the Babylonish captivity by Esdras"? These are revelations which Christians are extremely unwilling to meet, but they are much better authenticated than any of the artificial ones that claim a supernatural derivation.
Besides the writings of the Egyptian Essenes or monks, it is known that Alexandria abounded with every sort of sectarian rubbish, in the various forms of acts, gospels, epistles, &c.; so that the compilers of the New Testament had an ample supply of matter, out of which to choose what should be the new will of Jehovah. Such pieces as had been written by monks, and by their plastic spirituality, could easily be moulded so as to represent the interests of the priests, and increase their power and importance, very naturally slid in to form part of "God's last Will;" while those which exposed the tricks and knavery of priests, like the story of Bel and the Dragon, in the Old Testament, were rejected as apocryphal.* But as the chosen books were written by unknown or obscure persons of no notoriety, their names were erased, and those of reputed apostles substituted, in order to confer respectability. And whenever it was found that this "New Testament" did not at all points suit the interests of its priesthood, or the views of political rulers in league with them, the necessary alterations were made, and all sorts of pious frauds and forgeries were not only common, but justified by many of the fathers. This was a charge constantly brought against those trimmers by their opponents, whose writings they destroyed to the utmost of their power; but it is proved by a record in the Cronicon of Muis, an African bishop, and the same is also mentioned by Scaliger, that a general alteration of the four gospels took place in the sixth century, by order of the Emperor Anastasius, who decreed:—"That the holy gospels, as written, Idiotis Evangelistis, are to be corrected and amended."**
* It may be said that the Christian compilers would be
willing to expose the tricks of the Pagan priests; but the
esprit du corps is sacred. Priests will not betray that
fundamental deceitfulness that is common to the whole
profession, and inseparable from all supernatural
pretensions.
** Dr. Mill also vouches for the truth of this record, and
says that Messala was consul at the time.
The great father, Origen, in his commentary on Matthew's
gospel, speaking of the phrase, "thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself," which some thought to be spurious, he
says: "If, indeed, there was no disagreement in other
copies, it would be irreligious to suspect that expression
was interpolated and not pronounced by our Savior. But now,
alas! what with the blunders of transcribers—what with the
impious temerity of correcting the text—what with the
licentiousness of others, who interpolate or expunge just
what they please, it is plain the copies do strangely
disagree."
In forming the New Testament, selections were made at different councils; but from all we have been able to learn, it was principally at that of Nice that the compilation was put into form, after it had been decided upon by vote, what should be, and what should not be, the word of God! In order to get rid of the unpleasant truth, that this decision was made by a majority of votes, it has been pretended that the selection was made under supernatural agency, thus:—the whole collection of story, anecdote and fable, was placed upon a great table, and a prayer was addressed to the Holy Ghost, that he would be pleased to cause the apocryphal books to jump under the table, and they did so with prompt obedience, whilst the genuine canonicals proudly kept their stations above. This mode of trial was fair enough, as the Holy Ghost would surely know his own writings. This ridiculous story is recorded in the appendix to the proceedings of the Council of Nice.
A philosopher of the present day has compared the Christian Testament to Lord Chancellor Eldon's silk stocking, that was darned all over with worsted until there was no silk remaining; so, in like manner, it is now impossible to say with certainty what this book was originally, or by whom, where, or when, its component parts were written; and equally futile would it be to attempt to ascertain the number of alterations, additions, varying translations,* and forged interpolations which from time to time it has undergone. Capellus informs us that he was engaged for thirty-six years in writing the book in which he detects the numerous errors and frauds of the Protestant Bible; and even the venerable Calmet, that profound Bible critic, declares that the 7th and 8th verses of the 5th chapter of John's 1st Epistle, "are not in any ancient Bible." This interpolation was a bold stroke to strengthen the Trinity. Thirty years' researches upon the New Testament alone, enabled that most learned English divine, Dr. John Mill, to detect the enormous number of 80,000 different readings of that book, after a laborious examination of all the manuscripts, translations, and the many languages in which it is to be found. Can anything match the stupidity and monstrous credulity of calling such a book the word of God?
* A ludicrous instance of false translation appears in Mark
x., 25, where, according to the learned, the word in the
original means a cable-rope, not a camel. In the notion of a
cable going through the eye of a needle, an association of
ideas is preserved, but the other meaning is forced and
ridiculous.
It has been remarked that, besides the evident dissonance and glaring inconsistencies of these books, they contain numerous proofs that they could not have been written at the time alleged, or by the persons whose names are affixed to them; for instance, if Paul was an apostle, or lived in or near the same age with Jesus, how could he speak as he does in the epistle to the Colossians, about the Church of Laodicea, which was not founded until the middle of the second century? Again, in the book called Revelations, ascribed to John the evangelist, who was contemporary with Jesus,* the writer not only speaks of this church of Laodicea, but mentions its sloth and great corruptions, arising from the possession of riches and power. Now, though of all human institutions whatsoever, a church** has the most uniform and natural tendency to grow corrupt and profligate, from the acquirement of riches and power, yet we may allow one hundred years to have elapsed after the foundation of the one in question, before it arrived at the shameless condition described in these revelations; and, therefore, it is no unfair inference to conclude that these allegorical rhapsodies were not written before the middle of the third century. Tertullion says it was Saturninus, and Luke says it was Cyrenius who was governor of Syria, when a certain event happened,*** and Augustus issued his decree taxing "all the world" but Roman history seems to deny both accounts, by not acknowledging any such decree of Augustus, even over the Roman empire. Numerous other discrepancies and contradictions might be adduced, which all the forcing and twisting of church chronologists have not been able to reconcile.
* Yet in Matthew xi., 12, Jesus is made to say, "And from
the days of John the Baptist, until now," etc. Again,
xviii., 17, Jesus speaks of "the church" though there was
no such thing in existence in the alleged time of his life.
** Church—the shrine of credulity, where reason is weekly
sacrificed—a patent for hypocrisy—the refuge of fraud,
sloth, ignorance and superstition—the corner stone of
tyranny.
*** The birth of Jesus.
They tell us that Matthew wrote his gospel about the year thirty-five, and in that gospel the writer, whoever he was, makes Jesus tell the Scribes and Pharisees that "all the innocent blood that has been shed on earth, from that of Abel down to that of Zaccharias, son of Baruch, whom they slew between the temple and the altar, shall be upon their heads." Here let it be remarked that, according to Josephus, book 4th (and the fact is nowhere else to be found) this event did not take place until the siege of Jerusalem by Titus. This affords proof positive that the first of our gospels could not have been written before the year seventy, but that is no proof why it might not have been written after the middle of the second century.
Recurring to the miraculous parts of these books, we think it proper to observe that the natural good sense of Mahomet prevented his making any pretensions to the power of working miracles; for those laid to his charge by Christian opponents, were the inventions of his more ignorant and less judicious successors. It was no doubt in ridicule of the New Testament fables about removing mountains by faith, and such like nonsense, that he told his disciples one day: "To-morrow I will call yonder mountain to come to me." The morrow came, his hearers assembled to see the miracle. He called the mountain to come to him, but it sullenly kept its place. "Well," says he, "since the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go the mountain." If he gave out that he received his Koran by piecemeal from heaven, his pretensions went no farther than to be considered the humble agent of a higher power; and such it appears was the case with his brother prophet Jesus, who wrote nothing himself, but his followers, on rather the sect which assumed his name, bent upon the establishment of their new superstition on the ruins of the old, had recourse to a series of falsehoods and deceptions unexampled in all the other pages of history. They ascribed to their reputed founder a train of miracles and unsightly prodigies, so disgusting to reason and common sense, as to be sufficient of themselves to condemn any book at a single glance; and which could only be palmed upon extreme ignorance and credulity; while the inventors and propagators of these fictions agreed with each other in nothing but in the common duty of religious lying, forging and fabricating to serve the interests of the priesthood. The younger Scaliger expressly declares of these falsifying compilers, that "they put into their Gospels whatever they thought would serve their purpose." Faustus says: "We have frequently proved that these things were neither written by himself (Jesus) nor by his apostles; and that they were fabricated long after their decease, from vague stories and flying reports." As these miraculous fables are beneath criticism, the particular notice of one or two of them will suffice as a sample of the rest. It appears that the devils possessing the two demoniacs who lived among the tombs, could not be dislodged without terms of capitulation; one article of which bore, that they should be allowed to go into the swine. The treaty being concluded with the spokesman of these devils, who had announced that he was legion, or called legion (probably from being the chief of a detachment consisting of that number) the devils took possession of their new subjects accordingly; but they, finding a devilish commotion within them, committed suicide immediately. This "rash act" was not surprising when we consider that there were "about two thousand swine;" so that three devils would be crammed into each pig, reckoning a legion of devils to consist of the same number as a Roman legion. As nothing would operate so much against the interests of theology as any diminution of the number of devils, we may presume that the swine only were drowned. Mark and Luke say that one person possessed all these devils; he must have been a man of great capacity to contain that which drove two thousand swine mad. So numerous a herd of these animals in a country where swine and swine's flesh were held in abhorrence, is quite sufficient to stamp the tale as a fiction; but taking all the circumstances into consideration, it is perhaps the most ridiculous romance that ever was invented. If this exploit had been laid to the charge of Mahomet, would he not have been branded by all Christians as a most wicked and abominable wizard, independently of the robbery committed on the owners of the swine, in causing this wholesale and ruinous Hoggicide?
It is unfortunate for the foregoing miracle, that its allegorical bearings are not so apparent as to save it from being branded as a wild and vulgar romance, rather than an instructive parable. Such, however, is not the case in the fable about the resurrection of Lazarus, which is evidently a dramatic allegory of the demise of the old, and birth of the new year; the former of which is personated in Lazarus, whilst Christ is, as usual, the personification of the Sun. This unsightly miracle, as taken literally, is narrated by John only; a circumstance so suspicious that it alone ought to shake the credulity of even the swallowers of prodigy. Our false and deceitful translation of this drama, foists in; "Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus;" but there is no man named in the original, which merely says—"Now Lazarus was sick;" that is, figuratively, the year was spent or expiring, as in December, which month is personated by Martha, as January is by Mary. These two sister months send to Christ (the Sun) to inform him of the dying state of their brother (the old year). Now mark the equivocating answers he gives them regarding the real condition of their brother; that his "sickness is not unto death;" that he was dead in reality, and he was glad of it; that he only slept, and would revive or "rise again" These enigmatical or equivocal answers, and the four days which Lazarus is said to have been dead in the sepulchre, have most pointed allusion to the four days between the twenty-first and twenty-fifth of December, during which time the Sun seems to hang, as it were, in the solstitial balance; but at the latter period he gains his first degree of altitude, and is said to "rise from the dead," or to have been born again, that is he begins to rise from the dead of winter.
For very good reasons, the drama being finished, we are not told what became of Lazarus. What was his fate afterwards? He continued to gain strength till the summer solstice; but as he again became the old year, he died the following December, in the same manner.
Thus the Sun, as personified in Christ, says Rev., i., 18, "I am he that liveth, and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, Amen." Again, "I am the resurrection and the life; the day star on high, that redeemeth his people; I come a light into the world." This word Amen is nothing else than the disguise in which the translators have thought it proper to put Ammon*. The Sun, in the sign Aries, was personified in Jupiter Ammon, as well as in Christ. Ammon signifies the secret or concealed one, and sacred had originally no other meaning than secret. In Isaiah lxv., 16, is not the "God Ammon" mentioned in the original, and suppressed by the English translators?
The astro-drama of the Redeemer in the book of Job** is another sublime allegory of the sun and circle of the seasons.
* The difference between the words Aman, Amen, and Ammon,
says Sir William Drummond, "is nothing."
** For fuller explanation of the dramas of Job and Lasarus,
see the works of the Rev. Mr. Taylor.
Job, who here personates the declining year in its last ungenial and evil months, is of course dejected, sick, and grievously afflicted; his wife (whom we may presume to be Anna, from Annus, the circle of' the year) bids him curse God and die, that is, to cease putting his trust in the sun, who had metaphorically forsaken him for the present. But Job, though nearly worn out, as the year is in December, has still hopes of his revival, and exclaims, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," and at the last day (the 21st December) "I shall rise up", etc. Yet in his exhausted state, and sore afflictions, he is so nigh to despair that his God, the sun, reproaches him for his impatience under the immutable necessities of faith, and seems to say in way of admonition, "I cannot be with you always; nor is it reasonable in you to expect the enjoyment of perpetual summer," and in illustration thereof, he most beautifully instances the summer constellations, and asks, "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth the twelve signs in the season?" that is, canst thou have summer throughout the twelve months. "Canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?" The seven summer months, from March to September inclusive, are personated in the seven sons of Job, who are killed by a "great wind from the wilderness," (winter) that is, they are killed by the five winter months commencing in October,* but as this is only an allegorical death, the drama represents them as being all alive again in the succeeding summer; and Job, the year, is fully restored to health and happiness.
With regard to the whole of that miscellaneous and discordant mass of anecdote, narrative, prophecy, allegory, gospel, epistle, revelation, etc., which compose what is called the Bible (to say nothing at present of its immoral tendency), we cannot make anything rational out of the greater portion, unless we seek the true meaning under type or allegory; but when we turn aside that veil, the nonsense of the exoteric disappears, and we perceive that the allusions are exclusively made to physical or moral principles, under typical personifications.** This is particularly the case in all those books or fragments of books which are known not to be Jewish (the book of Job, for instance), but picked up by that people among the Chaldeans and Persians, who concealed from the vulgar all the higher branches of science under the veil of allegory; and when Levi's ignorant but privileged sons adopted these books, in making their compilation, they contented themselves with the literal, knowing nothing of the occult sense.
* These five winter months, beginning in October, when the
Sun is in the sign Scorpio, are metaphorically alluded to as
Scorpions, by St. John in Revelations ix., where it is said
they shall have power "to hurt men for five months." The
stings in their tails were figurative of the sharpness of
the four months that succeed October, which, though they
"should not kill," are nevertheless so stingingly cold as to
"hurt men."—See Revelations.
** Those parts of this collection in which we perceive that
the astronomical Chronology is veiled in the allegorical
picture, under the appearance of history, may be called the
word of science. Most of the psalms are evidently hymns to
the Sun, as they apply to nothing else.
***In dedicating one of their tribes for the priesthood
alone, the Jews imitated the oriental nations: their tribe
of Levi played the same part amongst them, that the
Chaldeans played amongst the Assyrians and Babylonians; the
Magi amongst the Modes and Persians; the Druids amongst the
Celtæ; the Brahmins amongst the Indians; the Lamas amongst
the Thibetians; and the Christian priesthoods now in Europe;
in all it has been the game of deception.
Even the trinity in unity, as we have already observed, was one of the secrets revealed to the initiated in the Pagan polytheism; and was taught in the mysteries long before the sect Christians adopted the ascetic habits of the Essenes and Egyptian Therapeutæ. In these mysteries this trinity had a twofold allusion—under one meaning it was a personification of physical, and under the other of moral, principles; in the physical sense, those natural principles were personified, which, by their inherent properties, viz., motion, attraction, repulsion, etc., produce these changes which we perceive in matter. But of all these principles, the Sun was looked up to as the grand omnipotent nucleus, whose all-vivifying power is the vital and sole source of animative and vegetative existence upon this globe—the glorious fountain out of which springs all that man ever has, or ever can call good, and as such, the only proper object of the homage and adoration of mankind. Hence the Sun, as we are informed by Pausanius, was worshipped at Eleusis under the name of "The Savior." If it is urged that the Sun cannot properly be regarded as a principle in Nature, the objection is good with respect to the universal systems which "circle other Suns;" but of our Solar system, he is the principal.
Of the thousand Pagan personifications of the Sun, which appear absurd and ridiculous when taken in the literal sense, but which are rational and highly scientific when the veil of allegory is withdrawn, one of the most beautiful is that of the solar Deity under the name of Adonai,* Tammuz, or the Adonis of the Syrians. This allegory represents him, after being glorified as "The most High God," in his exalted reign of summer, as resigning his place in the heavens to the zodiacal animals of the winter signs; and is figured as being slain or mutilated by them, more especially by the wild boar, under whose malefic ascendancy the sun seems annually to expire.
* Adonai is synonymous with Jahouh, or Jehovah. Throughout
the Psalms, the Sun is "the Lord God," and Zion means the
zodiac.
And, as personated in the beautiful Adonis, he is fabled as being mutilated in his genital parts by the boar; that is, by similitude, he is deprived of his genial or generative power over Nature during the winter. But when the annual rains of summer had swelled the river Adonis (so called from the god), its waters became tinged red by some mineral, and were fabled to be the blood of the beauteous Adonis, annually mutilated as aforesaid:—
"While smooth Adonis from his native rock
Ran purple to the sea,—supposed with blood
Of Tammuz, yearly wounded."
In lamentation over this most shocking outrage against genial Nature,—or rather to celebrate the yearly victory over it, the Sidonian damsels, not wholly without significance, assembled to hail the renovation of the prolific powers of Tammuz, or Adonis, as manifested in their God of summer.
That the Old Testament, as well as the New, is almost wholly allegorical of the sun, the year, and the seasons, is further proved in that apparently heart-felt complaint of St. Paul, 2 Corinthians iii., 15, "But even until this day, when Moses is read, the veil is upon their heart."
The moral principles allegorised in the Christian trinity, under the names of Father, the Word, and the Spirit, were metaphorical of human knowledge, reason and the spirit of truth. Similar to these are the interpretations lately given of the moral principles of the ancient trinity, by a philosopher of deep research;* and as they make out a reasonable meaning for the Christian trinity, which is otherwise a jumble of irrational mummeries, they are so far satisfactory. The ancient trinity of physical principles, of which the Sun was second to, and the most eximious representative of, the great All-in-All, was probably of Indian origin: and found its way west into Persia, Chaldea and Greece, where it was remodelled and spiritualised by Plato; but on its being pressed into the service of the Christian fathers, the sublime knowledge which it conveyed under emblems or symbols, was soon lost in ignorance, or abused and set aside by priestcraft; for even the apostolic fathers seemed to have had little or no knowledge of it, with the exception perhaps of St. Hermas, who most likely alluded to the share he had in falsifying those allegories (by adopting the literal in place of the occult meaning), when he declares that he "never spoke a true word in his life, but always lived in dissimulation, and affirmed a lie for truth to all men; and no man contradicted him, but all gave credit to his words" ("Pastor," Book iii., mandat. 3rd). The Pagan priesthood were too wise to apply the word revelation to anything else than the development of the secret meaning of the mysteries, which they made to the initiated; but that only true revelation has been entirely lost to all the successors of St. Hermas in the church called Christian for the last seventeen centuries.
* The modern Diagoras, who has done more towards
establishing; free discussion than any other man that ever
lived.
One word more respecting this ancient trinity, the gross and ludicrous perversion of which now forms so prominent a dogma in our superstition.* Those fathers who adopted and interwove it into the Christian system, did either ignorantly or wilfully distort the sense of the allegory (whether astronomical or moral) by turning it into three distinct personages, with human qualities, parts, and passions; but having gone thus far, they found themselves in a dilemma; inasmuch that, though their new polytheism was in a great measure intended as a salvo to reconcile the Pagans, yet it was inconsistent with the Mosaic unity of God, which they were desirous of preserving also; so they bundled up their three distinct personages into one identical person.
* Though the Christian scheme of fitting up a triune Deity
is in defiance of arithmetical demonstration, yet it is so
far an exemplification of all the Pagan mythologies—each of
them had a triad of principal gods; the Hindus had their
Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva; the Egyptians, their Osiris,
Horus, and Isis; the Persians, their Oromazdes, Mithras, and
Ahrimanes; the Syrians, their Monimus, Aziz, and Ares; the
Canaanites, their self-triplicated Baal; and the Peruvians
had their Father Sun, Brother Sun, and Son Sun. The Hindu
trinity were personifications of three principles, viz., the
Producer, the Preserver, and the Destroyer.
Being now knee-deep, and knowing well that the credulity of ignorant man is equal to the most monstrous deceptions, those fabricators thought they might as well plunge over head and ears into absurdity, by settling the pedigree and relationship between these triune parties; and this they did by mingling together a chaos of downright nonsense. Here is a child born, said to be begotten by two supernatural fathers—these fathers are two infinite beings, equal and co-existent from all eternity; and yet this son, begotten by them upon a woman, is as old as either of them! And although thus produced, and to all appearance a child of humanity, he instantly becomes the eternal son of the father, making the third infinite! Such stuff has turned the church called Christian into a domicilium insanorum.
If we may believe our senses, there is indeed a trinity in unity that proves its own existence—is eternal, and comprehends within itself everything which the human intellect can possibly conceive—that is, Time, Matter, and Motion.*
* Motion is the measure of Time: it is essential to, the
executive of, and may be said to be identical with, Matter.
In regard to the true history of our church during the three first centuries, we know nothing whatever, except that which comes through the most polluted channels; for the traditions and fabulous writings of the fathers who lived in those periods, are not deserving of the slightest credit; these men being notorious for nothing but pious frauds and forgeries; yet even in these professional arts they were far excelled in the following century, by the famous Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea, who had no equal in fitting up and trimming off a "word of God," to suit the general interests of the church. He says of himself "I have related whatever might redound to the glory, and I have suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace of our religion." Baronius, who was a sincere advocate of the Christian faith, branded him as "the great falsifier of ecclesiastical history—a wily sycophant—a consummate hypocrite*—a time-serving persecutor, who had nothing in his known life or writings, to support the belief that he himself believed in the Christian religion." So much for the character of this main pillar of the church. Another father of the fourth century, St. Gregory Nazianzen, was of opinion that "words are sufficient to deceive the vulgar, who admire the more, the less they understand." Again, he says, "Our fathers and teachers have often said, not what they thought, but what circumstances required." To show that the saints of the fourth century had not only improved upon their predecessors in the arts of deception, but had grown bold enough in some instances to avow them, we quote St. Chrysostom, who declares that "miracles are proper only to excite sluggish and vulgar minds; that men of sense have no occasion for them; and that they frequently carry some untoward suspicion with them" Mosheim, than whom a higher authority cannot be quoted, speaking of those times and of such men, says: "The simplicity and ignorance of the generality in those times, furnished the most favorable occasion for the exercise of fraud; and the impudence of impostors in contriving false miracles, was artfully proportioned to the credulity of the vulgar: whilst the sagacity of the wise, who perceived these cheats, were overawed into silence by the dangers that threatened their lives and fortunes, if they should expose the artifice. Thus does it generally happen in human life, that, when danger attends the discovery of truth, and the profession thereof, the prudent are silent—the multitude believe, and impostors triumph"—(Eccles. Hist.)
* In the title of the 81st chapter of the 12th book of his
Evangelical Preparation, Eusebius tells "how it may be
lawful and fitting to use falsehood as a medicine, for the
benefit of those who want to be deceived." In this chapter,
says Gibbon, he adduces a passage of Plato, which approves
the occasional practice of pious and salutary frauds; and he
justifies this sentiment of Plato, by the example of the
sacred writers of the Old Testament. So much for the
theological pharmacopæia of Eusebius.
In the fifth century, the church being backed by the strong arm of imperial power, the hierarchy converted their successful institution into a channel overflowing with riches; whilst their doctrines and dogmas, continually changing, got rid of any vestiges of reason and common sense which they had originally had amongst the Therapeutæ and Essenes. The ignorance of the laity was a secure protection for the clergy in all their tyrannical usurpations, and they in their turn became fierce persecutors.* Nature and her laws were overlooked as objects of no consideration, or rather, proscribed as the deadly enemies, of the theologian, and poor credulous man sunk into slavery and misery. In the following centuries, the infatuated belief in miracles of all sorts and sizes became the order of the day, and the heads of the church, no doubt, founded their regularly organised system of deception upon the authority of St. Paul, who, in his second letter to the Thessalonians, fairly avows that, "for this cause God shall send them strong delusion,** that they should believe a lie, that they all might be damned who believe not the truth"
* Not at all scrupulous about appropriating to themselves
the property of others, they have been accused of expelling
the Druids or Culdees, from their temples and monasteries,
and substituting their own orders; and this they called
founding monasteries. This was the fox taking possession of
the hole that had been dug by the badger.
** In this epistle to the Thessalonians, Paul seemed to have
attained the acme of falsehood and delusion. He assures his
dupes that the resurrection of the dead, and the ascension
of the living, will take place in his and their days. "Then
we (says he, chap iv., 17), which are alive and remain,
shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet
the Lord in the air," etc. Paul vouches for this being "the
word of the Lord." "The whole passage is in the first person
and present tense." By way of clinching this most notorious
falsehood, it is elsewhere affirmed that "this generation
shall not pass away till all these things be accomplished."
Priests, have these things taken place?
From this high authority, and from that of the Jew books, proceeded those lying miracles and stupendous prodigies which excited the idiot wonderment of mankind; hence the forged letters of Christ to Abgarus, king of Edessa, and the Apostle Peter; hence the letters of the Virgin Mary to St. Ignatius and the Sicilians, all dated in heaven; hence the 11,000 virgin martyrs of Cologne; hence wood enough of the true cross to build a first-rate man-of-war; hence the two or three heads of St. Ursula; hence the girdle of the Virgin Mary shown in eleven places at the same time; hence the remains of the ass, or asses, which carried Jesus to Jerusalem; hence the head of the Volto Santo, miraculously sent from heaven, and carried in a ship from Joppa to Lucca, without the aid of any human being on board; hence the annually liquefied blood of St. Januarus, imitated from the annual wound of the god Adonis,* in mount Libanus; and hence the flight of the Virgin Mary's cottage, which winged its way from Nazareth to Dalmatia, and thence to Loretto, where it still forms the headquarters of her ladyship.
* The Tammuz of Ezekiel:—
"Whose annual wound in Libanus allur'd
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In am'ous ditties all a summer's day."
—Milton.
You object to the above legends on account of their being the invention of the scarlet prostitute, as you call the Church of Rome, observing that the reformed church has given up all such fooleries. Be not deceived, the priesthoods of all religions are essentially and necessarily the same, inasmuch as fraud and delusion, skilfully played off upon ignorance, form the apparatus of all; and were it not that science is now beginning everywhere to grapple with the demon of artificial theology, miracles would be as abundant as ever amongst both Catholics and protestants. The increasing knowledge of the laity curbs and puts to shame all such pretentions in the present day; but do we not see how strenuously all the priests of Christendom uphold the prodigies which they say were performed nearly two thousand years ago? They do this, because, without the delusion of supernatural agency, immediate or remote, their trade could not stand.
Any attempt to rouse the ignorant, uncultivated mind to free inquiry, is almost a hopeless task, and it is altogether so when besotted religious prejudice stands in the way; but we ask the man who has got a vestige of mind he can call his own, whether his evidence is as satisfactory that Nature has been put out of her course by the working of miracles, as it is, on the contrary, that such violations of her laws have never in truth taken place! Has any such thing happened in his own, his father's, his grandfather's, or his great grandfather's time? He must answer in the negative, and thus far he has evidence from experience, we shall say, for 150 years, giving a succession of proof, which rests on the immutable order of things; and will he abandon that invariable director for the worthless and self-convicted testimony of a few strolling vagabonds, known only as the lawless disturbers of the peace in the countries where they were vagrants, and who lived nearly two thousand years ago? When legends and traditions are found inconsistent with nature, common sense, and experience, does their antiquity alone prove their truth against all these guides? On the contrary, antiquity can never be divested of the mantle of fable. We know that besides the marks of falsehood which the stories alluded to bore at the time of their fabrication, the true characters of the propagators were so well known to men of sense and education among the Pagans, that their impostures were utterly despised; and as the Jew books called the "Testaments," abundantly show that they were compiled throughout by men of similar character, to credit them is to give up all confidence in our senses, and to give the lie to natural light and reason.
Whence comes the anomaly that it is in supenaturals alone we find man departing totally from the common rules of evidence, and the respect which he owes to himself? In this case, denying as he does the authority of his own senses, and the reason which arises from them, he has rendered himself inferior to all other animals, and this is evidently owing to his not being allowed the exercise of his intellectual powers, priestcraft having decoyed him into the regions of non-reality and delusion, where everything congenial to his nature, where all entities, or things comprehensible, can have no admittance: there theological deception holds her dominion under the dark mask of mystery;* and out of the fears of ignorance forges mental chains for the human race, as they come into existence, the child succeeding to the woful inheritance of the father.
Men, says a modern philosopher, blindly follow the paths their fathers trode; they believe, because in infancy they were told they must believe; they hope, because their progenitors hoped; and they tremble, because they trembled. If by chance a young man examines his religion, he does it with partiality, or without perseverance; he is often disgusted with a single glance of the eye, on contemplating an object so revolting. In old age, the faculties are blunted; habits become incorporated with the machine, the senses are debilitated by time and infirmity, and we are no longer able to penetrate back to the source of our opinions; besides, the fear of death then renders an examination, over which terror commonly presides, very liable to suspicion. Civil authority also flies to the support of the prejudices of mankind; compels them to ignorance by forbidding inquiry; and holds itself in continual readiness to punish all who attempt to undeceive them.**
* Originally, the word mystery signified the veil (mistos)
which covered knowledge: but amongst Christian priests, it
has been made the veil by which the most wicked deceptions
are covered.
** For, blind and superstitious man is bred,
"And custom is his nurse!
Woe then to them
Who lay irreverent hands upon his old
House furniture, the dear inheritance
From his forefathers!
For time consecrates;
And what is grey with age becomes religion."
The morality which is derived from the religion of nature, and the social intercourse of man, is everywhere the same, and unchangeable; whereas that which is built upon priest-created theology is variable, impure, and always pernicious, inasmuch as it is made to square with the interests and power of the sacerdotal orders. This theology, from its being linked with political governments, has been enabled to insinuate its usurpations into every institution of society, where it has been the fruitful source of endless contention and sorrow. The innocent and necessary liberties of mankind are, by conventional laws of its procuring, converted into crimes; the freedom of the moral energies is crushed, and almost every pursuit that is conducive to, or connected with human happiness, is discouraged and blasted, through the influence and intrigues of this cunping and demoralising pest*—the natural enemy of everything that is natural.
* We know no other correct way to judge of any system, than
to look at the practical effects it has produced in the
world since it was promulgated. What then does the record of
the past discover to have been the effects of Christianity
upon men and nations? What has it done for the enlightenment
and progress of the mind—for man's elevation, improvement,
and happiness—his proper rank and station as a moral,
intellectual, rational being? Let those who have impartially
considered this melancholy subject, answer this question: do
we not know what it has done for the suppression, or rather
annihilation, of them all?
Are we told that the fires of the inquisition, with all its accompanying abominations, have been swept away by the reformation; and that the spirit of our religion is changed from that of the raging wolf, to the mildness of the lamb? We positively deny that its spirit is either changed or capable of change: the light of science, and a partial exercise of reason is at present keeping it in check; but it anxiously awaits and looks forward to the return of that congenial element—the intellectual darkness and ignorance which prevailed in the eleventh century. This blessed consummation would effectually restore its power; and thus armed, the demon would quickly show, in the strongest sect, whether Catholic or Protestant, its immutable spirit of tyranny and persecution,—the human mind would again be prostrated, and all the horrors of those times would again cover the face of Christendom.
We shall conclude this lecture by asking a few questions.
What is it that has, for the last fifteen centuries, obscured the light of Nature, put human reason out of her chair, and, as much as possible, prevented the development of all scientific truths?
What was it that first occasioned the shedding of human blood, on account of supernatural speculations, and imaginary existence?
What was it that spread war, devastation, and bloodshed over Europe, (agreeably to the New Testament denunciation,)* for more than thirteen hundred years?
What is it that still divides Europe into opposing sects; and keeps alive those deadly animosities about chimeras, for which men formerly cut each other's throats?
What is it that most generally sets the father's heart against the son, and makes the son abhor the presence of his father?
What is the thing which, cherished by ignorance, and sheltered by tyranny, has usurped one-tenth of the proceeds of man's industry; and in wringing this from starving poverty, is supported by cannon, bayonets, and sabres?
What is it that has, to serve its own ends, and wholly unsupported by New Testament authority, appropriated to itself one-seventh of the laboring man's time; compelling him to spend that time, either in houses of idolatry, or in idleness and vice at the ale-house, to the utter ruin of his family?
What is it that has poisoned love amongst the human species, and rendered the simple union of the sexes an unnatural bond of tyranny and slavery,** which, in nine cases in every ten, entails life-lasting misery upon the victims of the indissoluble marriages of Christian superstition!
* Vide Matt x., 84.
** In the headlong inexperience of youth, the sexes, under
an innocent impulse of Nature, enter into the perpetual
snare of marriage, with tempers and dispositions as
different as are their sexes; and in a state of penury
scarcely able to subsist themselves, they engage to give
subsistence to a numerous family. Here is the beginning of
that unhappy state of matrimonial life which exhibits the
darkest portraiture of human existence—a procreative nest
of nuptial misery. But as that abject condition of toilworn
bondage mainly entails and fosters ignorance, by allowing
the laborer no leisure for the cultivation of his mind, it
has ever been cherished as the safeguard of "Church and
State" despotism.
All these questions are answered in five words:—the artificial religion of priestcraft.
So shall the priest-ridden world go on, till
"From the lips of truth one mighty breath,
Shall, like a whirlwind, scatter in its breeze
The whole dark pile of human mockeries."
[Publishers' Note.]—Since this was written vast changes have been made in England in the laws relating to marriage and divorce, and if Logan Mitchell could rewrite this he would probably be satisfied with such increased facilities for divorce as exist now in the State of Massachusetts, coupled with more complete recognition by the law of the parental rights of the mother.
END OF LECTURE SECOND. [ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]
LECTURE THIRD. THE CHRISTIAN FATHERS, AND THEIR DOGMAS
On the back-ground appeared the Christian fathers, rearing a
form of superstition the most sanguinary and destructive of
human happiness that has ever afflicted the world. Her limbs
bestrode the prostrate nations to the extremities of the
earth; her head lowered to the clouds, whilst the right hand
of the gigantic monster brandished a burning torch.
Beware of a bull before, a horse behind, and a priest all round.
Old Proverb.
It has constantly been assumed by church chronologists that the Jewish sect of Galileans, who afterwards took the old Pagan appellation of Christian, had writings of their own as early as the first century; but this is mere gratuitous assumption, and rests only on the authority of men entirely undeserving of credit. As for this new Christian Theogony, and how it came to receive the first stitches of its patchwork during the second and third centuries, we know nothing about the matter, except what we have on the authority of Eusebius (see preceding lecture), Bishop of Cæsarea, a man who was confessedly the most notorious of all the Church historians for forgery and every other species of pious falsehood.* In getting up his history, he confesses that he entered upon "a solitary and untrodden way" that he could nowhere find as much as the bare steps of those who had passed the same path before him; that he had "not found any ecclesiastical writer which unto this day hath in this behalf employed any diligence."
* Vide Baronius.
These confessions from such a man are ample proof that he had no authentic matter to found his "history" upon; but he could call to his aid, legends, fables, and traditions, all very plastic and convertible materials, and in the use of them he has certainly shown himself a consummate workman. The rest of that class of men who are generally denominated the "Fathers of the Church," some of whom lived before, and others after the time of Eusebius, were persons equally addicted to holy frauds and forgeries (with perhaps one or two exceptions), but most of them were much inferior to him in zeal and industry. As habitual lying and deception were charged upon most of them by the learned of their Pagan contemporaries, and also by the candid and impartial amongst their modern successors in the church, it is proper to notice what some of the latter have written of them. In this delineation of character we find that a large majority of the vices and crimes which are found among the worst of mankind, have been fixed upon, them; viz., avarice, faction, ignorance, sedition, persecution of each other, lying, perjury, Clogherism* (the crime of the Church in all ages), cruelty, and murder. And some writers have gone so far as to declare that early ecclesiastical history is nothing but a compendium of their evil deeds.
* We learn from "Barnet's Exposition," that the practice of
unnatural lusts had been so common among the dignitaries of
the Church, that St. Bernard, in a sermon preached to the
clergy of France, affirmed sodomy to be so common in his
time, that bishops with bishops lived in it
In times still earlier, the grossest vices are acknowledged to have been common, if not habitual, among the "faithful;" for Paul, in his epistle to the Roman Christians, chapter first, charges, his friends and followers, and even the women amongst them, as guilty of the unnatural crime. In chapter vi., 19, he evidently alludes to it again. St. Barnabas, indeed, calls the first Christians, "the most wicked of all the wicked." Some of the fathers of the second century, such as Papias, and his admirer, Irenæus, were actuated by follies so absurd, that they seem rather to have deserved the name of madmen; witness the romances about the grape vines, and others of a similar nature, which are not exceeded by the wildest fictions of ancient or modern times. Such being the soil, Christians, out of which your religion sprung from old roots, we need not wonder that the fruit it has borne has been rather bitter. The historians of the Popes confess that many of them were condemned by their own general councils for adultery, dogherasty, simony, sorcery, and Atheism.
In the third and fourth centuries, the fathers had arrived at higher tact and skill, and became adepts in trimming up all kinds of pious deceptions and falsifications, and some of them were avowed forgers on principle and by profession. But it frequently happened that as hostilities grew up between the leaders of contending sects, they were useful in exposing the nefarious inventions of each other, which led to deadly animosities amongst their followers. It was, probably, a late knowledge of the utter fallaciousness of his newly adopted religion, and the perpetual contentions which he saw to be inseparable from such a system, that eventually disgusted Origen, and caused him, as is well known, to abandon Christianity, recur to Paganism, and sacrifice to idols, publicly denying his lord and master, Jesus Christ. This appears in his own writings, but more fully in his life, written in Greek by Suidas.
Episcopius says of the Council of Nice, and others of that early period, "that they were led on by fury, faction, and madness;" and this is corroborated by another author, who relates, that at the second Synod of Ephesus, Dioscorus, Bishop of Alexandria, "knocked and kicked Flavianus, Patriarch of Constantinople, with such fury, that within three days after he died." The philosopher Ammianus Marcellinus, complains that "no beasts were such deadly enemies to men as the more savage Christians were to each other." What better could be expected, when the example was shown by the leaders of sects, the fathers themselves, who were constantly quarrelling about the smallest as well as the greatest points, and for the smallest as well as the greatest they damned one another.*
In a former lecture, it has been observed that the famous passage which we find in Josephus about Jesus Christ, was never mentioned nor alluded to in any way whatever by any of the fathers of the first, second, or third centuries; nor until the time of Eusebius, "when it was first quoted by himself." The truth is, none of these fathers could quote or allude to a passage which did not exist in their times, but was, to all points short of absolute certainty, forged and interpolated by Eusebius, as suggested by Gibbon and others. Even the redoubtable Lardner has pronounced this passage to be a forgery.
That most ingenuous and fair dealing son of the Church, Mosheim, whose authority and unimpeachable veracity have never been questioned, even by divines, certifies as follows:—"The Platonists and Pythagoreans held it as a maxim, that it was not only lawful, but praiseworthy to deceive, and even to make use of the expedient of a lie in order to advance the cause of truth and piety.** The Jews, who had lived in Egypt, had learned and received this maxim from them (the Pythagoreans and Platonists) before the coming of Christ, as appears incontestably from a multitude of ancient records; and the Christians were infected from both these sources with the same pernicious error, as appears from the number of books attributed falsely to great and venerable names." The above extract refers to the second century only, when numerous gospels, epistles, etc., were fabricated and falsely fathered in the manner stated by Mosheim; but in the fourth century there were few exceptions to the standard maxim, that it was an act of the highest merit to deceive and lie, whenever the interests of the priesthood might be promoted thereby.
* In the inexhaustible arsenal of St. Paul's conundrums,
ambiguous oracles, and common-sense-defying quibbles, they
got arms, which answered equally well to combat each other,
and to confound all experience and reason.
** Upon this principle exactly, every priest, before he can
become a member of the English established church, is
obliged to perjure himself on his adoption by the bishop, in
swearing two tremendous, palpable, glaring lies; namely,
that he does not seek the living or office for the sake of
lucre; but that he is impelled thereto by the Holy Ghost! Hear, hear, stall-fed John Bull.
The writings of the most virtuous and meritorious authors among the Pagans, if they inculcated good morals alone, and condemned all vulgar superstitions, were reckoned superlatively dangerous by these fathers; for even the amiable Plutarch did not escape their wasteful malice, there being upwards of a hundred of his opuscula, or moral treatises destroyed. But while they indulged in this prudent destruction, they took care to preserve such extracts from the writings of Porphyry, Celsus, Hierocles, and others, as they could fit up by contortion, and press into the service of their new superstition, inserting, at the same time, concessions which were never made by these philosophers, whose works were exceedingly obnoxious, on account of the reason and good sense which they contained. Nay, it has even been known that some of the finest of these literary productions have, in certain parts, been entirely obliterated by these, falsifying priests, and their own knavish jargon substituted on the same parchment.
Daille freely avers, "that the writings of the fathers are in great part forged, either anciently or in latter times, full of frauds, both pious and malicious, against Pagan learning, mutually witnesses against each other, and are absolutely not to be believed. They would forge whole books to serve the ends of the priesthood."
These examples were too interesting and praiseworthy not to be followed, as far as possible, by the English clergy. They falsified, again and again, says Hume, the rolls of Parliament to serve their own dominion, taking care to publish only the articles that were favorable to themselves. And they were guilty of another imposture in adding one to the number—(See the first edition of Hume).
Jortin, in his remarks on ecclesiastical history, charges the fathers with perverting, misquoting, defaming, defacing and destroying the works of their adversaries, and even those of each other.
Blondel, when speaking of the second century, says, "whether you consider the immediate impudence of impostors, or the deplorable credulity of believers, it was a most miserable period, and exceeded all others in pious frauds; there was more aversion to lying, and more fidelity among profane, than among Christian, authors."
Bishop Fell confesses, that "in the first ages of the Church, so extensive was the license of forging, so credulous were the people in believing, that the evidence of transactions was grievously obscured." Casaubon complains as follows:—"I am much grieved to observe, in the early ages of the Church, that there were very many who deemed it praiseworthy to assist the divine word with their own fictions; that their new doctrine might find a readier admittance among the wise men of the Gentiles." This is confirmed by Scaliger, who declares that, so inefficacious did they deem their "word of God," that they distrusted the success of Christ's kingdom, "without the aid of lying."*
* Their "New Jerusalem" was heaven-constructed, and formed a
cube of five hundred leagues; it descended through the air
for forty nights successively. Tertullian saw it himself—
Bravo.
This "New Jerusalem" was figurative of the "Houses of the
sun," or the signs of the zodiac.
Bishop Burnet has shown that the Athanasian creed was a forgery of the eighth century.
To the testimony and authority of the above seven highly respectable divines, we might add that of a host of other theologians, which shows that it has generally been the sons of the Church themselves who have most fully exposed the utterly worthless and deceitful characters of the fabricators of our religion: but for the present we shall only cite the "Free Inquiry" of the ingenuous and learned Dr. Middleton, who, in quoting the authority of St. Cyprian as to the frauds of the Christians in the third century, observes as follows:—"From all these considerations taken together, it must, I think, be allowed that the forged miracles of the fourth century give us just reason to suspect the pretensions of every other age, both before and after it. My argument would be much the same if it were grounded on the allowed forgeries of any later age." Again, he says; "So far I agree with them both (Drs. Chapman and Berriman) and own their defence to be true, that the earlier miracles rest on no better foundation, nor are supported by any better evidence than the latter." It is true that elsewhere Dr. Middleton seems to concede the truth of the New Testament and apostolic miracles, but who does not see that this was a shift to ward off persecution and ruin?
It has elsewhere been observed, that according to the confessions of the apostolic father, St. Hermas, which we have in his book called "The Pastor," he was a liar upon principle and avowed profession. Beausobre says of, him: "His principle was, that faith was only fit for the rabblement."
"Saint Augustine, one of the most veracious, and the least given to lying of all the Fathers, declares in his 33rd sermon, and stakes his eternal salvation to the truth of the fact, which he said was as true as the Gospel, that while he was bishop of Hippo Regiup, he preached the gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to a whole nation of men and women, who had no heads, but had their eyes in their bosoms; and in countries still more southerly, he preached to a nation amongst whom each individual had but one eye, and that situate in the middle of the forehead!" What a glorious field this affords the "long-eared rout" for the exercise of their faith!
That falsehood was quite the order of the day amongst the Fathers, witness the maxim of Tertullian, "Credo quia impossibile est;" upon which unerring rule he founded his implicit belief in the resurrection and other such miracles, that is, he believed them true, because they were utterly impossible. Saint Jerome accuses not only St. Paul, but Jesus Christ, of frauds.
Justin Martyr speaks of the fable of the Phoenix as an incontrovertible truth. Tertullian affirms, in his usual manner, that when the Christians cast out devils, they (the devils) acknowledged themselves to be the heathen deities, Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, etc., etc. These, and such as these, are our Christian authorities!
At the head of all these Fathers of the Church, in point of rank and pre-eminence in wickedness, stands the imperial assassin, the Emperor Constantine. As a forger and falsifier, it was not in his line to equal his protégé Eusebius; but in all the arts of dissimulation he seems not to have been his inferior. As a cool family murderer, Nero and Caligula may hide their diminished heads in his presence. He drowned his wife in boiling water; put to death his son Crispus; murdered the two husbands of his sisters, Constantia and Anastasia; murdered his own father-in-law, Maximiam Hercules; murdered his nephew, his sister Constantia's son, only twelve years of age; with some others, not so nearly related, amongst whom was Sapator, a pagan priest, who refused absolution for the crimes of the royal assassin.
There is nothing easier to conceive than the eagerness with which such tyrants as Constantine, and his son Constantins, would embrace so convenient a religion as the one newly vamped. The Pagan priest, Sapator, was put to death for expressing horror at the crimes of the former, which were readily absolved by the Christian priests; and when the latter wanted to commit similar murders, he found a ready assistant in the Bishop of Nicomedia, a holy father of the fourth century, who forged a fatal deed, which he affirmed to be the testament of the deceased emperor; in which his son Constantius was enjoined and conjured to murder his two uncles (one of whom was his father-in-law), Optatus, the husband of his aunt, and seven cousins german, one of whom was his brother-in-law. These were the first imperial patrons of Christianity! The good bishop no doubt justified Constantine in the bloody injunction laid in his forged will, by the example of David, who, with his last breath, enjoined his son Solomon to murder his faithful general, Joab, and Shimei, though he had sworn not to harm the latter; in like manner Constantius had pledged his solemn oath for the security of his kinsmen.
When the foregoing sketches and opinions are considered as proof specimen of the true characters and conduct of a few of the men called "the Fathers," an estimate of the general worthlessness and fraudulent motives of the whole may easily be formed; yet such were the men who systematized Christianism, headed by St. Paul, who afforded them a notable example in all the arts of mystery or fraud, these two terms being synonymous. His justification of lying is as follows:—"For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory, why yet am I also judged as a sinner?" Rom. iii., 7. It ought not, therefore, to excite any surprise, that from so foul a source should emanate those unsightly and revolting dogmas, which, sooner or later, must bring this superstition into utter contempt, before the tribunal of reason and science. The root of all these dogmas is distinctly traceable to the astro-theology of the ancient Pagans; but the whole has been hideously perverted by the fabricator of our religion, either by knavishly teaching the exoteric, or literal sense, though they knew the esoteric, or hidden meaning; or by adopting the former through ignorance of the mythological mysteries. The fable of the fall of man, the garden of Eden, the serpent and Eve, etc., are clearly astronomical allegories;* and the most learned of the early fathers held them to be so; but they were abused by others, and taken in the literal sense, in order that they might serve as tenterhooks, upon which to stretch the New Testament dogmas of original sin and redemption.
* "At the autumnal equinox, when the celestial sign, Virgo
(Eye) is setting heliacally, she seems to be followed by the
constellation Bootes (Adam, or a personification of solar
heat) and by seeming to hold out to him a branch with
beautiful fruit upon it, was said to tempt or seduce Adam,
whom she appears to draw after her; and when the two link
below the western horizon, they are said to fall; and to
resign the heavens to the dominion of the serpent, and other
wintry signs, i.e. cold and darkness, figuratively, evil.
While the man and woman are retiring from the summer garden
of fruits and flowers, the sign Perseus is seen rising in
the east, and with his flaming sword is said to drive the
happy pair from the reign of summer. As Virgo sinks first in
the west, she is said to be first in transgression."
That these fables have allusion to the signs of the zodiac, the solar system, the elements and seasons, has been shown by Volney, Dupuis, and others. Many of the apparently gross absurdities of the Bible are easily explained by the key of ancient astronomy. Indeed, all the principal personages of that book, as well as those of remote pagan antiquity, whether, ranking as deities or men, were either personifications of constellations, planets, seasons, or other natural objects, or their affects; and whenever miraculous powers were ascribed to those fanciful creations, all men who understood the mysteries, such as Herodotus, Philo, Origen, etc., knew that the literal sense could not be true; and that the right interpretation was allegorical. The ancient languages of the East having no neuter gender, the host of celestial existences were denominated in the masculine or feminine. Amongst these, their grand immaculate chieftain, the sun, in all the eastern theogonies, and under a thousand different names, was always adored as the omnipotent Creator and Regulator. "O Sun," cried the great prophet of Persia, "thou art powerful in thy blaze! glorious in thy lustre! the burster of darkness! head of the world! king of stars! mightiest of beings above!"
That those polytheisms of the East, from which emanated Judaism and Christianity, had their root in astronomy, is proved from the most authentic sources. "The Egyptians," says Plutarch, "inserted nothing into their worship without a reason, nothing merely fabulous, nothing superstitious, as many suppose; but their institutions have either a reference to morals, or to something useful in life; and many of them bear a beautiful resemblance of some appearance in nature." Chæremon, the Egyptian philosopher, says: "What is said of Osiris and Isis,* and all the sacred fables, may be resolved into the stars—their occultations and risings—into the course of the Sun through the zodiac; or the nocturnal and diurnal hemispheres."
* According to Eratosthenes, the celestial Virgin was
supposed to be Isis, that is, the symbol of the returning
year. It was in honor of this goddess that the Egyptians
celebrated the famous festival of light, which was imitated
by the Christians in their feast of Candlemas. From the
Egyptians, the Romans took their Solar festivals, in honor
of the birth of the god of light, celebrated on the 25th
December, at which time, says Sexvius, the Sun may, properly
speaking, be said to be new, or to have a new birth. Hence
the Christmas of the Christians, which had also been,
previously, a Druidical festival, in honor of the solar
God's birth; hence the evergreen emblems—the holly, the
mistletoe, etc., all sacred among the Druids thousands of
years before Christ.
Porphyry corroborates the above thus:—"The learned Egyptians admit the existence of no other gods except what are called the planets, the gods which give completion to the zodiac; and such as rise together with these; and likewise the sections of the zodiac into decans." Such were the Egyptian and Chaldeans roots of Christianity; and such was Christianity itself, until it became abused and falsified by the introduction of Platonic visions, and a belief in the reality of supernatural personifications, which by degrees supplanted the sublime natural and moral principles of the Pagan stock.
The metaphysical phantasma called soul (revived by Plato from the divine philosophy of the Pagans), and its future state of rewards and punishments, is one of the most pernicious and fatal of those dogmas. Without this notion priests would be comparatively harmless, as it forms the basis of their secret influence, by working upon the hopes and fears of ignorance, and thereby becomes the chief source of riches and power. By this mischievous invention they have turned this fair world into an abode of gloomy despair, terrifying their weak-minded victims into slavish obedience, by keeping them in perpetual dread of imaginary punishments, in the infliction of which they paint their god as a capricious and malevolent tyrant. This story of the soul's immortality must have been unknown, or at least not fashionable at the time in which it is said Moses lived, since no allusion whatever is made to it throughout the books attributed to him;* and David, Solomon, and Job deny it in the most positive manner. Even the testator of the Jewish will seems at that time to have had no such idea. The fact is, the Jews had heard nothing of the matter until they learnt it of the Platonist Greeks, as is proved by many parts of the Bible; for instance, Moses makes the Jewish god threaten to "visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." The rewards were also purely temporal, such as "their corn their wine shall abound." These were all the ideas that Moses had of future rewards and punishments; and the Pharisees did not publicly maintain the dogma of the soul's immortality, etc., until about the time of Herod.
* The great Warburton has shown that the Jews in the time of
Moses, entertained no such opinion as the immortality of the
soul. "This is admitted (says Ensor) although unwillingly,
by Tillotson and Wilkins, and candidly by Le Clereq and
Geddes." This platonic notion is flatly denied in Psalms
cxlvi., 4; and in Eccles. iii, 19, 20.
Pythagoras and Plato seemed to have been the mere revivers of this ancient doctrine, which, as the learned, say, sprang from the Brahminism of India, the most ancient of all the mythologies, the priests of which are said to have been the first who corrupted human society, by the invention of souls, and other spiritual or celestial existences; but, unlike their imitators of' the west, they neither persecuted nor shed a drop of blood for religion's sake; nor the blood of animals for food. Christians! we know ye can very ill bear to be told, that from India through Persia ye have your cosmogony, fall of man, immortality of the soul, redemption, incarnation, future rewards and punishments, heaven and hell, desolation of all things, universal restoration, trinity in unity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence of God;* all are derived from the Vedas and Shastras, or Bible of the Brahmins, and the Sadder of the Zoroastrians. Out of these oriental materials, all the successive religions that have sprung up in the west have been fabricated, with such variations in the machinery as suited the civil and clerical despotism in the different countries, and the degree of ignorance in the people.
One of the insidious and baneful arts of theology, has ever been to make man believe that he is something else than that which nature has made him in reality; and this delusive flattery has moulded him into that self-important and credulous animal, which best suits the interests of his deceivers;** hence his proudly assumed knowledge of his personified deity. If this be true his boasted spiritual knowledge seems to have the effect of making him more wicked and vicious than any other animal, for he is not only the scourge of all the rest, but will, to gratify the pride and ambition of lay and spiritual tyrants (leagured together for his oppression), cut the throats of his own species; though, by so doing, he the more closely rivets the chains of his own subjection, and maintains those very delusions which enslave his mind, poison society, and distract the world.
* And this God was no other than the Sun!
** In commencing this nefarious process no time is lost man
is seized upon the moment he is born, and the first
sacerdotal spell is the water incantation; after which his
mind is gradually mortgaged to the priest by more potent
charms; he is carefully shorn of his natural liberties, and
thus donkified, all his motions are regulated until death,
when the last priestly spell is performed. But this is not
all—clerical rapacity holds property even in the corpse
which cannot be interred until this last grasping charge is
satisfied.
The spiritual arsenal of Plato having thus supplied the human animal with what is called an "immortal soul,"* our Christian priests have ever since found it an excellent foundation for their scheme, and a secure medium through which to make permanent their riches and power.
* As the word soul, heaven, spirit, hell, metaphysio, ghost,
immaterial, etc., are not representatives of things which
exist in reality, why are they suffered to confound common
sense? Because, in serving that purpose, they are the most
useful auxiliaries of priest-mare delusion. The Theologian's
definition of them is his best refutation.
Plato would not at this day know his foster-child, disfigured as it now is by a train of hideous inventions, the theory of which is, that death is the only way to a new and eternal life; that all who believe in this paradoxical speculation of the priest shall be rewarded, and that all who believe him not shall be tortured by an eternal roasting in that life. Considering the weak and credulous nature of the human mind in a state of ignorance, we must acknowledge the bold ingenuity which invented this tremendous dogma; it is calculated to confound even the strongest intellect; for the terrors of death, under so frightful a predicament, utterly debase and enslave the prostrate mind, making it a prey to all the combined efforts of sacerdotal fraud. By this pernicious fiction, the morality of nations has been destroyed, the blackest crimes that man can commit have been pardoned,* and the priest has filled his coffers to the glory of the three divinities! Theology, in its vain attempts to raise man above that sphere in which nature has placed him, as a link in her animated chain, hath thus created for him an imaginary futurity; but, in so doing, by a strange incongruity, the creature so exalted above himself, and made the exclusive object of divine clemency, has against him, nevertheless, 999 chances in the 1,000 that he is predestined to everlasting torments, (yet even this inexorably forlorn hope flatters his pride) whilst the remaining unit only shall enjoy the beatitude of celestial bliss:—
No matter,
Better to be in hell, it seems, than
Not to be at all. We say negatur.
* Oh, Plato! Plato! you have paved the way
With your confounded fantasies, to more
Immoral conduct, by the fancied sway.
Your systems feign o'er the controlless core
Of human hearts, than all the long array
Of poets and romances; you're a bore,
A charlatan, a coxcomb, and have been,
At best, no better than a go-between.—Byron.
To create that essential difference between man and the other animals which is necessary to the ends of priestcraft, the spiritualist conjures up his chimerical invention called soul; which, for certain considerations to him well and truly paid, he bestows exclusively upon man; and as the other animals have no money, he declares, in the not-to-be-questioned tone, that not one of them has a rag of any such appendage. There is no necessity for proving this in the usual manner, nor even to demonstrate that the article in question has a real existence, as these are points of faith imposed by dint of infallible dogmas, the truth of which is sufficiently proved by the power which nine millions a-year confers upon our spiritual guides; and by the ignorance which that power and influence fosters.
The bee, the beaver, the ant, and many more of those called "inferior animals," have shown in community, equal, if not superior wisdom, in all their customs and social institutions, to that displayed by man in society; yet priests will not allow them a scrap of soul. But this deficiency will be remedied whenever spiritual impostors, pretending to heavenly inspiration, shall spring up amongst themselves; for then supernatural religions, with their accompaniments of priesthoods, will be simultaneous blessings, as the latter will not only supply in abundance the little "immortal" articles in question, but save and cure them for the voyage to heaven, for the trifling remuneration of being allowed the means of living in luxury and ease for life, at the expense of the wealth producers. These conditions are so customary and moderate, that a priesthood, even amongst ants, could not be expected both to create and save souls on more reasonable terms. Before these tiny examples of industry give way to the introduction of supernaturalism, and its hierarchical plagues, let them well weigh whether the possession of souls (subject to the terrible risks above stated), and a postmortem life will compensate for the corruption of government, the debasement of character, the immoralities, the vices, and shocking crimes which will most assuredly pervade their communities for ever in this life, whenever they adopt spiritualism, and its train of locusts to prey upon their industry. We have been more particular in regard to ants, owing to its having been ascertained that in many of their republics, a military force, or "standing army," in peace as well as in war, has been established; and as that scourge has never been known among men, but as part of a grand enslaving scheme, which embraced, as a vital correlative, some system of superstition and its priesthood, it is greatly to be feared that the ants are verging towards the sacerdotal mania, which is the hand and glove concomitant of the former evil.
The indisputable fact that man, taking him as the Christian superstition has moulded him, has more vices, than any other animal whatsoever, and not a single virtue that may not be found in most of them, is rather a lame proof of his exclusive possession of the immortal item to which he pretends.
That which was called "soul" in Platonism and Christianity, was precisely the Pneuma of the Greeks, and the Anima of the Latins, to which they attached no other meaning than simply the breath of life* in all animals; and as that is composed of elements which are eternal, immortality may, in this sense, be justly ascribed to it.| But mind or soul is not a thing of itself (res sui), but a consequence resulting from, and depending upon, animal organisation. In regard to the "innate ideas" which it has pleased our theological doctors to bestow upon the human mind, the better to adapt it for their own purpose, it would be quite as philosophical and true, to assert that a violin had innate music. This physical property called mind, the result of organisation, and, in degree, common to everything that has life, is, at birth, a tabula rasa, but acquires ideas as it grows to maturity, from the senses being acted upon by external objects, much in the same manner that the mechanically organised violin produces music, from the external action of the bow.
* Its supposed existence after death is merely a fresh
version of the ancient Metempsychosis.
** Aristotle maintained the eternity of matter, and did not
believe that the governing power of the universe extended
any particular providence to sublunary things. As for the
immortality of the soul, or even the existence of any such
thing, as taught in modern theology, it was quite
inconsistent with his principles; yet he was, at one and the
same tune, the master of theologians, and the chief of the
Atheists.
The next dogma we shall notice is that of Savior, or Mediator. This is evidently derived from the Christna of the Hindu trinity, who, as the Redeemer of the human race, was the most important of the three. This personification of the sun seems to have been adopted by the Persian lawgiver, Zoroaster, under the name of Mithra (which still meant Mediator), when he founded the religion of the Mithriacs, or worshippers of the sun. According to Plutarch, Zoroaster taught that there existed two principles, one good, and the other evil; the first was called Oromazes, "the ancient of days," being the principle of good or light; the other, Ahrimanes, was the principle of evil, or cold and darkness. Between these personified principles, he placed his Mithra, who, as the source of genial heat and life, annually redeems the human race from the power of evil or cold and darkness.* From this beautiful allegory of the sun, is derived the Christian dogma of Savior, of which proof maybe found even amongst the fathers. (See Tertullian, Adv. Qentes.) Celsus asserts that the early Christians were merely a sect of adorers of the sun, and such a sect were the Manicheans. The principles of what man calls good and evil, have also been personified** in the Osiris and Typhon of the Egyptians, the Jupiter and Pandora of the Greeks, the Jehovah and Satan of the Jews, and the present God and devil of the Christians.
* This Indian and Persian Trinity was symbolical of the
three-fold, power of the Sun, or God Mithra: in spring and
summer, he is the Producer; in autumn, the Preserver; and by
his absence in winter, the Destroyer.
** The fraud of personifying principles, and the physical
powers of Nature has always been easy and indispensable with
priests in all ages. During the French revolution, Gobet,
Bishop of Paris, acknowledged that up to that time, himself
and his clergy had taught the people nothing but a mass of
falsehood, for which he apologised; disowned the god he had
taught the people to worship, and promised to devote himself
to the worship of reason, morality, liberty and virtue. But
the stupid and credulous mob soon personified these
qualities, and worshipped, them as deities and real
entities. At Rome, in like manner, the compliments of the
new year, Perpetua Felicitas, were turned into two
goddesses, and receive divine honors to this day.
Diogenes Laertius says expressly that the Jews adopted the doctrine of the two principles from the Magi; and St. Augustine assures us that it was the foundation of the religion of the Assyrians, who were so often the masters of the little miserable Jewish horde. Manicheism (so called from Manes, the founder) was one of the first branches of Christianism; but adhered more than any other of the heresies, to the original Zoroastrian stock, though it lay as a stage between that religion and the recent version of Christianity, which, as well as Judaism, is a mere heresy from the religion of the Persians. Since the Persian cosmogony and religion, as well as all others of the East, were purely and confessedly allegorical, is it rational to suppose that anything of the kind got up by the Jews, could be other than a rough and ignorant version of that of their masters?
It has been admitted by most of the learned that the Shastras and Vedas, or scriptures of the Hindus, were in existence 1,400 years before the alleged time of Moses; and, in all probability, the Zendavesta, or Persian Bible, was long anterior also. Sir William Jones, of pious and orthodox memory, confesses that, "the name of Chrishna,* and the general outline of his story, was long anterior to the birth of our Savior, and, to the time of Homer, we know very certainly. I am persuaded also (continues he), that a connexion existed between the old idolatrous nations of Egypt, India, Greece, and Italy, long before the time of Moses. In the Sanscrit Dictionary, compiled more than two thousand years ago, we have the whole story of the incarnate Deity, BORN OF A VIRGIN, and miraculously escaping in his infancy from the reigning tyrant of his country."
* Sir William Jones says, in his "Asiatic Researches," that
he was assured by Colonel Valency, that Chrishna in Irish
means the sun. The Baal-fire feast, or meeting, was a great
festival in Ireland, on the 25th of December, and midsummer
eye. Baal, or Bel, was a name of the sun all over the east.
** This probably alludes to the great period of nearly
26,000 years, in which time the sun passes through the whole
circle of the zodiac. That is, he is in each sign, at the
venial equinox, for the space of 2,155 years.
This tyrant, alarmed at some prophecy, sought the infant's life; and, to make sure work, he ordered all the male children under two years of age to be put to death. Here is the true origin of the horrid story about Herod, of which no Greek or Roman historian says a single word. That the Christian story was taken from the Indian allegory, is traceable in every circumstance—the reputed father of Chrishna was a carpenter—a new star appeared at the child's birth—he was laid in a manger—(celestial)—he underwent many incarnations! to redeem the world from sin and mental darkness, (ignorance and winter) and was, therefore, called Savior;—he was put to death between two thieves—he arose from the dead, and returned to his heavenly seat in Vaicontha. In corroboration of this, Albert the Great admits as follows "We know that the sign of the celestial Virgin did come to the horizon at the moment where we have fixed the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. All the mysteries of the incarnation of our Savior Christ: and all the circumstances of his marvellous life, from his conception to his ascension, are to be traced out in the constellations, and are figured in the stars." Volney, Dupuis, and others, have shown that these, and many more of our Scripture stories, which are absurd and revolting, if taken literally, were originally, in the learning of the east, pregnant with truth as astronomical allegories; having primary allusion to the sun, the elements and seasons, and to the progress of that luminary through the different signs of the zodiac; but more particularly, as he is the sole and glorious source from which flows all and everything that man can rationally call good. We repeat the melancholy truth, that all these beautiful astro-allegories have been lost in the ignorance or roguery of priestcraft.
Miraculous conceptions.—All antiquity is full of such conceptions and births, springing from the fabulous amours of gods with virgins, whereby "sons of God" were engendered. These fables also had their origin in physical and moral allegories; but they were subsequently found to be extremely convenient to cover the real fruits of sacerdotal intrigues and seductions, which the priests could always saddle upon some good-natured god. In all probability the virgin votaries of Vesta were instituted for no other purpose than the private devotions of the priesthood* and when it happened that they were unable to conceal the natural effects of these amours, the paternity was charged upon some easy accommodating god; by which means the girl remained in spotless virginity. This opinion is the more valid from their being allowed to marry at thirty, when the priests no longer wanted their services, but those of the younger girls: if they chose to remain, in the temple, however, they were
"Doomed to deck the bed they once enjoyed."
* In the highest apartment of the Temple of Belas, in
Babylon, a woman was kept for the private devotion of the
priest whose turn it was to make astronomical observations.
This was done under the pretence that the lady was visited
once a year by the god Bel. History dees not inform us in
regard to Bel's progeny, by these housekeepers.
By such artful intrigues, the Hindu virgin, Rohini, conceived and brought forth a "son of God," one of the Brahmin trinity. A Chinese virgin, impregnated by a ray of the Sun, became the mother of the god Foê, who always acted as the mediator between his followers and another god of still greater power. Mademoiselle Creusa, in all her virgin purity, was safely delivered of another "son of God" as was also the virgin mother of Somonocodom, who, according to the scriptures of the Talapoins of Siam, was the god expected to save the universe. Jupiter himself was fabled to have given birth to children from all parts of his body, from forehead to leg: thus Minerva sprang from his head.* The followers of Plato, two hundred and fifty years after his death, and one hundred before the Christian era, raised the story that he was born of a virgin:—Aristo, his father, was on his marriage, warned in a dream by Apollo, not to have any commerce with his wife, because she was with child by him (Apollo); Aristo obeyed; and Plato was born as another "son of God" It was no doubt owing to the holy paternity of some priest, that Sylva Rhea, under cover of a love affair with the god Mars, had the honor to lay the foundation of the Roman religion, by producing another "son of God."
* The severe study, or brain-labor necessary in acquiring
sound knowledge, is here prettily allegorized in the birth,
of Minerva, who was the personification of wisdom.
The writers of the most ancient chronicles of Alexandria, after attesting the universal prevalence of our gospel religion in Egypt for ages before the date of its alleged origin, in the reign of Tiberius, testify as follows:—
"To this day, Egypt has consecrated the pregnancy of a virgin, and the nativity of her son, whom they annually present in a cradle, to the adoration of the people; and when king Ptolemy, three hundred and fifty years before our Christian era, demanded of the priests the significancy of this religions ceremony, they told him it was a mystery."*
All the above conceptions and incarnations are merely the poetical and allegorical fictions of Paganism. We have already seen that the first fabricators and compilers of our religion were men of the greatest honesty and veraciousness of character: and as they had just received the divine light of "the only true revelation," we are "bound to believe" that their story of a miraculous conception is the only true one, confirmed as it is by ghosts, dreams, angels, and shadows. It is true that it cannot boast of such remote antiquity as the foregoing prodigies; but it is ancient enough to constitute truth in the orthodox eye of Faith; and we must not give way to the impiety of supposing that it is an imitatio of any one of the heathen fables enumerated;** or the "blasphemy" of surmising that God's sending "his message to a carpenter's wife," is a varied version of Jupiter's loving message to Alcmena, by Mercury.
* According to Macrobius, this was the solar god Bacchus,
who appears at the winter solstice, as an infant. Plutarch
says that at the winter solstice, Isis (Nature) brought
forth a son, a weak and feeble infant. On the inscription at
Sais, Isis says, "The fruit which I have produced, was, and
will become a Sun."
** The whole story about the conception and birth, was told
in precisely the same manner as it is now, in India, Persia,
Egypt, and Greece, for more than 1,600 years before its
alleged occurrence in Palestine.
Neither must we entertain the shocking idea that the conception of Mary was occasioned by any carnal agency; or that either the shadow or substance of any priest was at all concerned in the holy mystery. Yet heresy will tell untoward tales; for her pregnancy has been accounted for in the most natural way imaginable, thus:—"According to the apocryphal gospel of the nativity of Mary which Father Jerome Xavier entirely adopts, Mary, when a child, was consecrated to the Lord (that is, to the priests), by the usual vow; and was brought up in the temple, which she did not leave until she was sixteen years of age. This created a suspicion that her pregnancy was the effect of some intrigue with the priests, who made her believe, or say, that it was the Holy Ghost who had begotten a child upon her."*—(Codex. Apox. N. T.) Some profane persons have said that the high priest was himself the chief actor in this sacerdotal amour; for he anxiously, pitched upon old Joseph to be the husband of Mary. St. Epiphanjus assures us in his book "Adv. Heresies," that Joseph was very old at the time of his marriage with the virgin; and adds that he was the father of six children by his first wife. Moreover, the gospel ascribed to St. James the younger affirms that the good old man espoused Mary with much reluctance, owing to the disparity of their ages; but the high priest prevailed on him at last; and it further informs us of the very ill-humor of Joseph, when he found that his wife had been with child before their marriage, and the reproaches with which he loaded her, on account of her lewdness, unworthy, as he thought, of a virgin reared under the eyes of priests. Mary excused herself with tears and protestations, and swore by the living God that she did not know who begot the child. In her distress, the best excuse would have been her adventure with the archangel Gabriel; but it appears she forgot that. [It is indeed passing strange that Mary, according to Matthew, is wholly ignorant of her justification, according, to Luke.]
The fathers of our Church have disputed and quarreled in the most obscene terms, about this mystic impregnation by the Holy Ghost. St. Ambrose says:—"Non enim, secreta reseravit, sed immaculatum semen inviolabili utero spiritus sanctus infudit!"**
* The followers of Loatze say, that his mother became
pregnant of him, by a junction of heaven and earth. This is
a sublime and bold conception; and far excels the puerile
prating about ghosts, angels, dreams, and shadows.
** Of the miraculous impregnation, St. Ambrose says, "Maria
per aurem impregnata est."
In one of the Church hymns it was sung, "Non ex virili, sed mystico spiramine." Justin Martyr, in his apology, justifies these dogmas as modified by the Christians, not because they were true, but from the example of the heathen; he says:—"By declaring the Logos, the first begotten of God, our Master Jesus Christ, to be born of a virgin, without any human mixture, and to be crucified and dead, and to have risen again, and ascended into heaven,—we say no more in this, than what you say of those whom you style the sons of Jove." This was honestly lugging in one fable to apologise for another. The logic of Tertullian on this subject was decisive, and peculiar to himself—it might be called an axiomatic, or self-evident mode of reasoning; for instance, he says, "I am not ashamed of maintaining that the son of God was born, because it is itself a shameful thing. I maintain that he died and rose again, because it is absurd" When preachers use such convincing arguments, there is no excuse for the incredulity of hearers. This great Father contended also, that souls were material—that they had sexes, and were as much begotten by each other; as our bodies are by the bodies of our immediate parents. He asserted also, that "God is a body."
"The word begotten necessarily infers and associates the ideas of three distinct and separate Beings—the begetters, the begotten, and the person on whom he was begotten; and the term begotten, alluding as it does to the performance of a particular action, must imply a particular time when that action was performed and of course that there was a time when that action was performed; now as the very, definition of the word eternity is that which is without beginning as well as without end, to talk of a person begotten from eternity, is to compose a sentence of words the most contradictory to each other, or downright nonsense; it is to tell us of an action that was begun without any beginning; of a finite infinite, or an immortal mortal!" But the mystic conceptions, births, and incarnations of Paganism, being rooted in, and having exclusive allusion either to physical or moral principles, there were no such absurdities, terms, or monstrous perversions of them, as the early Christiana fell into, by converting mere words into beings, in forming their mythology.
That the Christian dogma of the immaculate conception and birth of Christ, was originally an astronomical allegory of the Sun, "the day-spring from on high," can be proved by a hundred corroborating facts, which, are irresistibly convincing, except where interest, or the most inveterate prejudice, stands in the way. These facts have been elucidated by Albert, Alphonso, Volney, Boulanger, Dupuis, Taylor, and by all astronomers, who have not been deterred from speaking the truth by their interests, their fears, or their prejudices. On the 19th of August, the constellation of the Virgin disappears in the sun's rays; and hence the figurative expression in Luke i., 35, "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall OVERSHADOW thee." On the same day the ancients celebrated the assumption of Astrea,* (another name of the Virgin,) and about the same time, the Christians celebrate the assumption of the blessed Virgin. On the 9th of September, this constellation emerges out of the Sun's rays, at which time the Catholics celebrate the nativity of the mother of the Sun, or Christ.
* That is, the starry goddess. She was also the Miriam (the
same as Mary, Eve, Ac.,) of Numbers xii., 14, and the seven
days' leprosy of her face was allegorical of the same number
of days exactly, when the brightness of the zodiacal virgin
is wholly absorbed, or obscured, by the effulgence of the
solar rays.
The "star in the east," (a sign containing more than a hundred stars,) mentioned in Matthew, was no other than this zodiacal sign of the celestial Virgin, which arose on the eastern horizon precisely at the time at which we fix the birth of Jesus Christ, viz., the 25th of December, when the sun has risen one degree above the solstitial point: which answers to a moment to the births of the Egyptian Osiris, the Grecian Bacchus, and the Mithra of the Persians. These mystic births are manifestly identical, being metaphorical of the Sun's annual birth at the winter solstice, after which he gradually becomes, not only figuratively, but positively, the Savior of the world. The resemblance, or rather the sameness of every circumstance relating to Mithras, the Mediator of the Persians, and those connected with the Savior, or Mediator of the Christians, is so apparent, that no rational man can doubt, or hesitate a moment, in pronouncing the latter to be a counterpart of the former.
Zoroaster taught the Magi that this celestial birth would be announced by the rising of this star, or constellation of Virgo, in the middle of which would appear the figure of a young woman, suckling an infant child, called Jesus by some nations, and Christ, or Christos,* in Greek. This was the goddess of the year nursing the god of day. Under this beautiful symbol, the new born child is said to be feeble, weak, and obscure, which is metaphoric of the Sun below the horizon in winter; that he was brought forth in a stable, and laid in a manger, alluding to the "stabulum jovium," one of the winter constellations. At the vernal equinox, when the Sun entered the sign Aries, or the Bam, the emblem was a lamb, (the lamb of God,) and as he gained strength towards the summer solstice, he became the conqueror of the powers of darkness and evil, that is, the constellations of winter; and was figuratively said to bruise the serpent's head, that constellation being, as it were, depressed below the horizon. By a like metonymy of language, the "Ascension" of Christ has also allusion to the Sun at the summer solstice.
* In the ancient zodiacs of India and Egypt, there is seen
this virgin nursing a male child with sun rays around his
head, (frown not, ye priests!) which is emblematical of the
infant sun at the winter solstice, and of his being then in
the sign Virgo. When he was in that sign in summer, the
virgin was represented with a bunch of fruit; and when in
harvest, she appropriately held out an ear of corn. These
zodiacs were devised at various periods of antiquity, as the
sun passed through the different signs, in the phenomena of
which the learned priests always found plenty of gods and
goddesses for the worship of the vulgar, as is still done in
Christianism.
Upon the sun's annual progression through the twelve signs of the zodiac was founded the mythological or allegorical astronomy of the ancients, (Christianity has no other foundation); and in this zodiacal picture, the allegory supposes that sign to have rule, through which the sun is passing; the knowledge of which science was conveyed in a striking and sublime manner, under the disguise of miraculous narrative: of this sort is the story of the three children, in the book of Daniel, a relic of Chaldean astronomy. The "burning fiery furnace" was nothing else than an emblem of that region of the great circle which the sun enters at midsummer, or the sign Cancer. Each of the twelve signs of the zodiac had a presiding genius, or imaginary personification, and these were the twelve greater gods of Paganism. Each of these signs was again subdivided into three parts, called Decans, who were also personified; and, consequently, there were three of these geniuses in each of the signs: therefore, when the sun enters Cancer, there must be three of these Decans, or personifications, in the burning fiery furnace. Here the astronomer in Daniel,* concealing his science under the veil of allegory, exclaims: "Did we not reckon three children in the burning fiery furnace? Behold, I see four, and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God!" No person but a Christian, under his strongest prejudices, is capable of denying the manifest meaning of this metaphor, that being evidently the sun itself; which, with three personified Decans, Shadrach, Mesach, and Abednego, in the sign Cancer, makes the fourth. It is almost needless to point out that Nebuchadnezzar, the king, is a personification of the constellation Sirius, or the dog-star, which is always supposed to heat "the burning fiery furnace," in a sevenfold degree, while the sun is in its vicinity, that is, from the 3rd of July till about the 11th of August.
* The zodiacal sign of the lion being below the horizon, and
the sun appearing to set in the direction of that
constellation, "Dom-el, Daniel, or Daniel, that is, the Sun"
was said to be cast into the Lion's Den.
** The author is much indebted to the Rev. Mr. Taylor for
the satisfactory manner in which he proves many of these
astronomical allegories.
What is the signification of the many Bible allusions to the "Horse and his Rider," the "triumphant" breaking of the arrows and his bow, he being always denoted as essentially opposed to what is good, and forming part of, or belonging to, that which is evil? This allegory evidently points to the Centaur sign, Sagittarius, half horse and half man, armed with bow and arrows. This is the zodiacal sign of November; and the sun being in that adverse constellation in that dark and gloomy month, it is naturally spoken against, as being emblematical of his weak, low, and depressed influence; and, consequently, its inseparable connexion with evil, or cold and darkness. But when the sun rises "triumphantly" in the heavens, and is most truly "the day star on high," as he ascends towards the summer solstice, and becomes the "Lion of Juda," in July, he has victoriously thrown the zodiacal archer, Sagittarius, as it were, "into the sea" that is, below where the sea bounds the horizon. Then have we Miriam's sublime song of victory:—"Sing ye to the Lord (the sun), for he hath triumphed gloriously; the Horse and his Rider hath he thrown into the sea." As this victory is achieved annually, the song is equally applicable at every midsummer. Thus, though a large portion of the miscellany called the Bible appears in the guise of immoral or absurd narrative, much of it is really and truly the allegorised astronomy of the Chaldees and Persian Magi, and therefore rooted in science.
Like everything else relating to Christ, or Christos, the dogma of the ascension has no doubt its allegorical root in the Sun's apparent exaltation in the heavens, from the vernal equinox to the summer solstice. This miraculous story, as we have seen it in the New Testament, is more replete with inconsistency than even any of the others of that book. The Fathers have attributed the anonymous book called the "Acts" to Luke; but his gospel contradicts the Acts: the latter makes Jesus remain on earth forty days after his crucifixion; whereas Luke makes him ascend into heaven the very same day he arose from the dead. Those who are stated to have been eye-witnesses of the ascension, being present as disciples at the time, viz., Matthew, John, Peter, James, and Jude, have not, in the epistles ascribed to them, left even an allusion to that most wonderful phænomenon. Matthew and John were said to be present—how came they to omit even the slightest notice of this vital root of Christianity? Mark and Luke were not present; yet they alone notice it, in rather a vague and abrupt manner. In short, no person whatever says he saw it. Mark says that Jesus ascended at Jerusalem; Luke says it was at Bethany, places two miles distant from each other. Matthew says the last seen with the disciples was on a mountain in Galilee; Luke, that it was at Bethany, which is at least seventy-five miles from Galilee.
The dogma of the redemption of man by Jesus Christ, appears not to have been thought of by the New Testament fabricators; and is clearly a subsequent invention of the Church of Rome. Paul, In Corinthians xv., gives us abundant assertions about the resurrection of the same body, which is his chief doctrine, but there is not a word about redemption. This dogma, then, is the lucrative forgery of priestcraft, after the councils of Nice and Laodicea had decided by vote that the spurious miscellany called the New Testament should be the new Will of God. The amount of moral evil done by this fable, is enormous beyond all expression. When men are taught that their wicked deeds and vices are to be rubbed off by a device so unjust and iniquitous as the sacrifice of the innocent, to atone for the crimes of the guilty, we cannot wonder at the horrid depravity of society.
Having already shown that Christianism is merely a compound emanating from the Egyptian, Brahmin, and Zoroastrian systems, or a new version of the fables of Prometheus, Christna, Mithras, Adonis, Bacchus,** etc., engrafted with some variations upon the Jewish scriptures; and that the above names, with hundreds of others, are so many personified emblems of the Sun, which, together with the planetary system and the fixed stars (in Bible phrase, "the host of heaven") formed the occult basis of all the religions of Paganism,*** the important question will be asked—has "may penetrate into the signification of all oriental mysteries; but the Vulgar can only see the exterior symbol, or the bark which covers them." Again, he says, "It is allowed by all who have any knowledge of the scriptures, that everything is mentioned enigmatically."
* That man should be redeemed from the sin of eating an
apple, by the murder of an innocent person called Jesus, is
certainly by far the strangest system of religion that ever
was palmed upon the world. Never was there so great an
outrage on common-sense!
** Even the word Divine, pluralised in Dii Vini, deities
of wine, or priests of Bacchus, is taken from heathenism,
and pressed into the service of a very different order of
priests, save that wine-loving has ever been common to both.
*** Origen tells Celsus that the Egyptian philosophers
veiled their knowledge of things in fables and allegories.
"The learned," he adds,
Christianity has no tangible or anthentic historical foundation, to be understood according to the literal sense of the New Testament? If such events or incidents in any way similar to those detailed in the New Testament, had in reality taken place at the times and places stated, they could not possibly have failed to excite the intense attention of the public authorities amongst the Romans, even if denuded of their miraculous accompaniments the infant butchery of Herod would alone have caused this attention. But as no one of all the historians or noted writers, Roman, Jewish, or Greek, who lived in the period of the alleged prodigies, nor those who came upon the public stage immediately after them, though there were upwards of twenty such distinguished authors, who wrote between the years 20 and 140 A.D., have taken the slightest notice of the life or crucifixion of a person called Christ—(the passage in Josephus is universally given up as forgery)—the inadmissible violations of Nature's laws, said to have accompanied that event, as narrated in the Gospels, which contradict each other in almost every important circumstance, we are forced to the conclusion that independently of everything miraculous, the story is totally unsupported by any concurrent testimony;* but when the miracles are taken into consideration in the literal sense, reason and all experience at once decide the whole to be grossly fabulous; and seems to be a circumstantial imitation of the crucifixion of Prometheus, as we have it in the tragedy of Æschylus, which is a dramatic allegory of the sun, and the planetary system.
* Bishop Talleyrand, in a letter which, he is said to have
written to the Pope, after their quarrel, states that after
Christianity had made some noise in the Empire, the entire
absence of all testimony in regard to its pretended origin,
excited the curiosity of the Roman Senate, to know what
really was the foundation of the story; so they "ordered
affidavits to be procured in the very centre of Palestine,
in places fixed by them, which affidavits were sent to Rome,
with the most conclusive evidence of the correctness of the
report. These proved that Mary, who was of the tribe of
Levi, and wife of the carpenter Joseph, who was of the tribe
of Juda, had had an illicit intercourse with a Roman
soldier, named Panther, who served in the 14th legion,
stationed in Egypt, whence he was detached into Palestine.
From this criminal intercourse a child was born, whom they
called Arenias; and who was adopted by Joseph, according to
the Roman practice, though it was contrary to the Jewish
customs. With Joseph he learned the carpenter's trade; but
after the death of his putative father, he abandoned his
home and mother, and became a vagrant. Having met a few
vagrants like himself, they all took the road to Galilee,
where they lived for some time by begging. Having at last
become the leader of a band of freebooters, he was arrested
by the police of Jerusalem, and finally condemned to death
by the general acclamation of the people." By thus
instituting inquiries in the country in which he was born,
the Roman Senate became acquainted with the origin of Mary's
son, which, in regard to paternity, differs from the
apocryphal gospel of the nativity of Mary.
This new version of the old mythology was gradually constructed by priestcraft during the second, third, and fourth centuries, of materials taken from all the oriental polytheisms; and is a similar sort of fraudful quackery upon these allegorical religions, that astrology is upon legitimate astronomy. Thus, (let us repeat the melancholy truth) out of the comparatively harmless astro-fables of antiquity hath sprung a foul collusion of religious and political tyranny, that has been dreadful in its effects; and every successive invention to strengthen this accursed coalition of an aristocracy of nobles and priests, linked together with royalty,* has tended more and more to depress the interests of the laboring population, or wealth producers of Europe, and served to crush them under the most merciless of all despotisms. And as it is utterly hopeless that our English hereditary lawgivers, who are virtually our feudal rulers, and whose interests are entirely exclusive, will ever pass any laws but such as support and perpetuate these interests, it is much to be feared that, as in France before the revolution, nothing but a sanguinary reaction on the part of the people, will reestablish their right to just representation in Parliament, equal laws, and a dissolution of that baneful state-confederacy between our aristocratic rulers and the reigning superstition; the support of which, we are tempted to conclude, is more the object of government than the interests of the common weal.
* In 1822, the clergy of Austria persuaded the monarch of
over forty millions of people to declare, "I want no men of
science; I want only obedient subjects. I want no education
among my subjects, but what is given by the priesthood."
END OF LECTURE THIRD. [ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]
LECTURE FOURTH. PAGAN ALLEGORIES MADE CHRISTIAN DOGMAS (Continued.)
All these fragments of crack-brained opiniatry and silly
solaces, played off, in the sweetness of song, by deceitful
poets, have, by you too credulous creatures, been shamefully
reformed and made over to your own God. MINUTIUS FELIX.
DOES not the New Testament speak very distinctly of two crucifixions, viz., one as having taken place upon Mount Calvary, and another at, or in a Garden? There is even a third mentioned, as having occurred in Egypt, "where also our Lord was crucified," Rev. xi., 8; which is a plain recognition of the astro-religion, and solar worship of the Egyptian priests. The crucifixion upon Mount* Calvary was allegorical of the sun's passing over, or crossing the equator in March; of which month the Ram, or Lamb of God, was the zodiacal emblem, God, the sun, being in that sign at the spring equinox. This was also the origin of the Pascal Lamb, and the Passover of the Jews, which they borrowed of their masters, the Egyptians.
* The word mount, as here used, is figurative of the sun's
being in the state of elevation in the horizon, at the
spring equinox.
This crossing of the sun, while in the Ram of March, was likewise metonymised into the phrase about "The Lamb that was slain from the beginning of the world," that is, the Lamb that was figuratively crucified at every vernal equinox, while the sun was in the sign Aries or the Lamb. The Evangelist John, in describing God, declares that the hair of his head was like wool; (O, John, you are too apt to tell tales ont of school!) which setting aside the ludicrous simile, is a sublime symbol of God, the sun, in the sign of the Bam, in March. Why is the second crucifixion, as narrated by this tell-tale, John, said to have happened, not upon a mount, but in or near a garden? Because this crucifixion has allusion to the autumnal equinox, when the sun crosses the line of the equator, in September; and nothing can be a prettier, or more appropriate emblem of that month than a fruit garden, or vineyard. Why is the mother of Jesus said to be standing by, or near him, at the garden crucifixion, as stated by John, though her presence is not at all acknowledged by any of the other evangelists? His mother could no more be near him at his Calvary crucifixion, than August can be near March; but as she, as the sign Virgo, or the Virgin, is also the genius of August, she was, of course, near, or standing "by the cross," when her son Jesus Christ, that is, the sun, was crossified, or crossed the equator in September, that month being next door neighbor to August. The Christ, or Savior of the vernal equinox ascends into the Heaven of summer, and saves, or recreates the organised existences of this globe, by his genial and animative power; whereas the Christ of the autumnal Cross descends gradually to the winter solstice, and is said, therefore, to descend into Hell, that is, to enter the signs and constellations of winter, which, being antagonistic to those of summer, are emblematical of evil. In the September crucifixion, Christ, as the sun, is called "the Just One," because he is then in the zodiacal sign, Libra, or the Balance.
The Egyptian deity, Bacchus, or the wine-producing god, being also a personification of the sun, is the same as Christ, and of course, like him, visited the "lowest regions" after being unjustly put to death. These being only the Egyptian and Indian names for the same divinity, it was quite in analogy to preserve a symbolical allusion to the vine and blood of the grape, in the crucifixion of Christ. But it requires little penetration to perceive that all we find there said about the "agony,"* in the garden, and sweating "great drops of blood," has a very plain allusion to the wine-press and the compression of the grapes;** and here the secret meaning is as near the surface as it possibly can be in allegory. The rich, sweet juice is at first expressed in "great drops," or copiously, and is called "the blood of the grape;" by a second pressure, the thin lees, or "vinegar," is compressed, which they are allegorically said to have given him to drink; and after this last process the business is truly said to be "finished." After this manner, and in every age and country of the world, down to the present day, have the allegories invented by priests, and cunningly drawn from the astronomical phænomena of nature, passed for religion amongst the unthinking million.*** If the cruel usage given to John Barleycorn, in the process of turning him into beer, had been allegorised to us in our present ignorance, and priest-nursed stupidity, it would have answered equally as well as the fable of Christ and the "blood of the wine-press."
* "An Agony literally is a wine-press."—Taylor.
** "And the wine-press was trodden without the city, and
blood came out of the wine-press" (Rey. xiv., 20).
*** The Crucifixion of Christ is so manifestly a new version
of that of Prometheus (another name of the sun), that in our
translations of that tragedy of Æschylus, the crucifixion of
the original is never, acknowledged; but he is always
fraudulently said to be bound. "The object of this impudent
fraud," says Mr. Higgins, "need not be pointed out."
The name of Chrishna, Christna, or Christ, was common to Egypt as well as to India, in the remotest known antiquity. In the Sanscrit Dictionary, the name of the Nile is Christna; which is further proof of what Sir William Jones says about the exceedingly ancient intercourse which subsisted between India and Egypt "before the time of Homer." And although this pious author, and several other writers on eastern affairs, seem carefully to have avoided saying a word about the crucifixion of the Hindu Savior, and many Christians have exulted in the similarity of the legends being entirely broken off by this pretended discrepancy, yet the fact is incontrovertible, that not only was Christ, or Christna, crucified in India, but in Egypt "also," as we have already shown on Scripture authority. Mr. Higgins asserts that the Brahmin "crucifixion was well known in the time of St. Jerome," who, like the Evangelist John, was rather apt to tell astronomical secrets.
Mons. Guigniant says—"The death of Chrishna is variously related: one averred tradition very remarkably represents him to have perished on a fatal tree, or cross where he was pinned, or nailed with an arrow." Mr. Moor, in the "Hindu Pantheon," states, that many of the plates and pictures of India, of undoubted antiquity, represent the god Christna, with cicatrix, or scars in his hands and feet, the very points of the nails by which he was suspended on that fatal tree. Plate 98, in the "Hindu Pantheon," shows the figure of a man suspended on a cross; and it appears, that when the Romish artists imitated this Indian crucifixion, in their carvings and paintings, they omitted the cross itself; their reason for this is very obvious. The figure appears hanging in the sky, with arms distended, and the feet overlapping each other, so that one nail might perforate both at once. Now it is not a little extraordinary, that some of the earlier Christian sects maintained, that Christ was crucified in the sky. Here is a direct demonstration, that the Brahmin crucifixion is, wholly and radically, an astronomical allegory of the equatorial crossings of the sun at the Equinoxes; and that the Christian fable is identically the same, but the scientific meaning is lost, through the fraud of priestcraft, and the ignorance it fosters.
Mr. Moor further observes, that having some apprehension of giving offence to the bigoted and prejudiced on these points, he showed the plates and paintings above-mentioned to a friend, who suggested the propriety of omitting plate 98.
"I very much suspect," says Mr. Higgins, in his Anacalypsis, "that it is from some story, now unknown, or kept out of sight, relating to this Avata, that the ancient heretics alluded to, obtained their tradition of Jesus being crucified in the clouds." He says again, "That nothing more is known respecting this Avata, I cannot help suspecting, may be attributed to the same kind of feeling, which induced Mr. Moor's friend to wish him to remove print 98 from his book. The innumerable pious frauds of which Christian priests stand convicted, and the principle of the expediency of fraud, admitted to have existed by Mosheim, are a perfect justification of my suspicions respecting the concealment of the history of this Avata. I repeat, I cannot help suspecting that it is from this Avata," (incarnation) "of Chrishna, that the sect of Christian heretics got their Christ crucified in the clouds."