We've quaffed the soma bright
And are immortal grown;
We've entered into light
And all the gods have known.
Easter, then, is the climactic festival of all the year, since it, signalizes the consummation of all man's life in triumph and bliss transcending present knowing. It is set in the calendar to intimate to the feeble human intellect the wonder of the transfiguration of our earthly
life from periodical decay and death into immortal grandeur of being. At his Easter man leaves forever the kingdom of mortality, of his attachment to the elements of the world, and steps across the golden threshold into the Paradise of a conscious bliss that indeed is not too extravagantly poetized as a home of crystal radiance and bright seraphic beatitude sweetened by transporting music.
For, be it said at the outset, Easter celebrates an event that is yet to be, not an event that is past. To the inevitable extent that past events lose their cogency for deep impressiveness and become shadowy and unrealized memories, the mighty power of the Easter occasion loses its pungent goad to conscious recognitions in proportion as its celebration is taken to be the commemoration of an event that has long ago happened and passed into history. It will therefore amaze most readers to be shown that no less an authority than St. Paul (in
2 Timothy 2:16-18) emphasizes this very consideration when he warns the brethren: "But shun profane and vain babblings; for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; who, concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some." As, according to all scholarly datings of St. Paul's Epistles, this admonition to Timothy would have been penned near the year 60 A. D., i.e., within two or three decades
after the resurrection of Jesus in Jerusalem, its reminder to the brethren that the resurrection was a concept of doctrinal import, the reality of which was to be actualized by man in his exaltation yet to be must be received as a message of totally unrealized import for all future Christianity.
The great religion of the Western world suffered a fatal loss when from about the third century down to the present the cryptic sense of a purely dramatic representation of man's still unattained burgeoning into godhood on the bright morn of his evolutionary Easter was buried and forgotten under the ignorant misconception of the event as the physical arising of one man's human body from its rocky hillside tomb on a given first Easter dawn. If that is what, under Christian persuasion, we are to believe happened two thousand years ago and that is what we are asked to assume that the great equinoctial memorial celebrates, then the ceremony of halleluiah merely embellishes the memory of an event long gone, whose cosmically heralded universal deification of human life is in fact to be searched for in vain in the record of history since it occurred. Christian history records not a trace of the fulfilment of that human glorification which the epochal event was proclaimed as promising. Every choral in the intervening centuries rang with the exultant cry that "Death is swallowed up in victory. The grave has lost its sting. Man no more shall die. Christ's resurrection gave man his immortality." Yet death has seized every man born since that day and the cemetery graves still hold their dead.
It is as St. Paul has said: the majesty, the beauty and the true exultation that alone can lift the human soul to the heights on every recurring Easter morning inheres in the certain knowledge that the Easter glory is still the goal of our progressive march up the hill of being. OurEaster: Birthday of the Gods
Just another very old and intelligent pagan (Egyptian) celebratory lesson ruined by christian thieves and vandals who to a man (women) don't know what the party is about.