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The Toltecs called the cross the Tree of Sustenance and the Tree of Life. The tree and cross are identical, and even the staff or rod is a reduced form of the tree-type, for Aaron’s rod was fabled to be a stem from the Tree of Life in
Genesis.
In the famed
caduceus of Mercury the two serpents intertwined around the staff or wand are united at the bottom, because spirit and matter are joined in man’s physical life.
To the conscientious student who will give to the matter sufficient time and reflection it becomes a conviction that the most devastating cultural calamity that has befallen the human race in all its history was the degradation of the esoteric spiritual purport of ancient scripture into a debased literal and historical sense, entailing centuries of mental benightedness and spiritual thwarting, that took place at about the third century of the Christian era. And in this catastrophic conversion of cosmography, evolutionary pictography and racial history over into alleged factual occurrence, the single feature most signally fruitful of age-long fatuity was the transformation of the dramatic figure of the Christos, or divine essence of man’s nature, over into a historical person. It is not too much to say that the withering wind of this distorted doctrine spread its blight upon all sane comprehension of the sublime message of ancient sacred literature over all the sixteen centuries since that fatal epoch. Indeed the truth of the situation warrants the statement that the injection of a living man into the spiritual drama in the place of the personified divine Ego in man has held the rational mind of the Western world in the grip of the most arrant superstition to be found in the history of civilized humanity. This work will amass the data to support the sharp asseveration that this was the central item in the entire debacle of theological systematism which then ensued and which must be rated as the most tragic catastrophe in world history. The causes that led to the fatal transference of character from the dramatic personification of an element in human consciousness into an alleged man of historical entification will be the central theme of this essay. To what inadequate degree the iniquitous consequences of the blunder can be seen and delineated, these will be dealt with in the unfoldment. But the task involves little less than the penetrating analysis of all ancient sacred writ, and the amassing of a vast array of factual data and basic argument in support of the momentous conclusions adduced in the sequel.
Christos-Messiah Tradition
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ix
I. FAITH WEDS FOLLY 1
II. MYTH TRUER THAN HISTORY 14
III. TRUTH WEARS A MASK 48
IV. WISDOM HAUNTS THE COUNTRYSIDE 80
V. FANCY’S FABRIC TURNS INTO HISTORY 90
VI. CANONIZED ROMANTICISM 129
VII. THROES OF A BAD CONSCIENCE 169
VIII. SUBLIME MYTH MAKES GROTESQUE HISTORY 181
IX. FAITH’S ODD WONDERLAND 226
X. COSMIC MAJESTY WITH LOCAL ITEMS 248
XI. STAGGERING TRUTH ON EGYPT’S WALLS 257
XII. THE SHOUT OF PAUL’S SILENCE 276
XIII. ROBBING PAUL TO PAY PETER 301
XIV. A QUEEN DETHRONED 312
XV. A STAR--AND LUNA 332
XVI. AN EPOCHAL DISCOVERY 372
XVII. TRUTH EXORCISES DEMONIAC OBSESSIONS 388
XVIII. THE ANOINTING OF MAN 401
XIX. LOST CYCLES OF THE SUN 419
XX. TWELVE LAMPS OF DEITY 432
XXI. ORION AND HIS DOG 457
XXII. OUR DAY-STAR RISES 469
INDEX 487
Alvin Boyd Kuhn
There can be no question of this necessity on its part. Almost alone one significant item enforces it. From the scrolls of papyri five thousand to ten thousand years old there comes stalking forth to view the whole story of an Egyptian Jesus raising from the dead an Egyptian Lazarus at an Egyptian Bethany, with two Egyptian Maries present, the non-historical prototype of the incident related (only) in John’s Gospel. From the walls of the temple of Luxor, carved there at a date at least 1700 years B.C., there faces Christianity a group of four scenes that spell the non-historicity of four episodes purveyed as history in the Gospel’s recital of the Christ nativity: the angel’s pronouncement to the shepherds tending their flocks by night in the fields; the annunciation of the angel to the virgin; the adoration of the infant by three Magi; and the nativity scene itself. Egypt had used the symbol of a star rising in the east as the portent of coming deity for millennia anterior to the Christian era. Egypt had knelt at the shrine of the Madonna and child, Isis and Horus, for long centuries before a historical Mary lifted a historical Jesus in her arms. Egypt had from remote times
x
adored a Christ who had raised the dead and healed the lame, halt, blind, paralytic, leprous and all afflicted, who had restored speech to the dumb, exorcized demons from the possessed, dispersed his enemies with a word or look, wrestled with his Satan adversary, overcome all temptation and performed the works of his heavenly Father to the victorious end. Egypt had long known a Jesus, Iusa, who had been born amid celestial portents of an immaculate parenthood, circumcised, baptized, tempted, glorified on the mount, persecuted, arrested, tried, condemned, crucified, buried, resurrected and elevated to heaven. Egypt had listened to the Sermon on the Mount and the Sayings of Iusa for ages. Egypt had known a Jesus who long antedated the Gospel Messiah and who presents to the student some one hundred and eighty items of identity, similarity and correspondence in word, deed and function with his later copy.