Art Magic

Amongst the emblems most commonly seen in this connection are the Phallus or Lingham, the Triangle, all the different methods of exhibiting the Cross, the Serpent with his tail in his mouth, and a vast number of such geometrical signs as include the triangle, cross and circle. Many learned archaeologists are of opinion that sex worship, if it did not actually antedate, is still of as ancient an origin as that of the stars.

The author of this work deems that the primal faith of humanity was unmixed solar and astral worship, but the authoritative reasons for this belief are of little consequence to the general reader. It is enough to say that the emblems of solar and sex worship are so constantly combined in the same monumental remains, that we must infer both were understood, and in a measure reduced to systematic expression, at this earliest period where man began to leave records of his thoughts.

There are no shadows without a substance, no fables without a genuine idea to allegorize upon.

The fable of the Garden of Eden, the temptation and fall of man, is very generally assumed by materialistic writers to have a purely astronomical origin, and to have been founded on the following astral order. The August constellation of the Virgin, represents a woman holding a flower, sprig or fruit in her hand, beckoning to Botes or Joseph, the constellation a little to the north of the Virgin, but in close proximity to her. This configuration of the heavenly signs, it is alleged, may be as often interpreted into the fabled relations of Adam and Eve as the Virgin Mary and Joseph. The radiance, bloom and beauty of the season in which these constellations appear, signifies the earthly Eden. The astral woman tempts the astral man, she herself is tempted by the Serpent, who presently appears in the skies as the Great Dragon. The woman gives of the fruit she holds to man, he eats and falls. The Cherubim and Seraphim of the skies (the typical signs of constellated stars), drive them forth from the Eden of Summer into the gloom and famine of Winter. To restore the fallen man to a future paradise, a Savior must be found, and this is effected in the birth of the Sun-God, at midwinter, and his renovating influence during the succeeding Spring and Summer.

To accept of this fable without allowing for a spiritual significance concealed beneath it, is equivalent to the assumption that the ancients actually worshiped the sun, moon and stars as personal Gods; but the ancients never enunciated sacred ideas except in allegorical forms of speech, and never mapped out the scheme of an allegory without a profoundly spiritual meaning veiled by it.

"As it is above, so it is below," "On the earth as in the skies," were the sentences by which the mystics of old were accustomed to affirm the universal correspondence between the harmonies of the natural and spiritual in every department of being.

To understand how the ancients interpreted these astral hieroglyphics into such a system as would explain the fall of man, and yet preserve the correspondence between his estate on earth and the movement of the heavenly bodies, it is necessary to revert to the theory enunciated in Section I, where it was shown that the Soul originally dwelt in a purely spiritual state of existence; but being tempted by the craving desire for earthly knowledge, it became attracted to this planet - incarnated in the form of man - and hence " the fall" of spirit into matter. With all that reverence which finite being must feel when it presumes to speculate on infinity, we may imagine that the form of the highest spiritual existences may admit of no parts or angles, but may be, indeed, like the perfection of the spiritual Sun, a globe; but all organic forms are sections of the perfect sphere, and man is obviously a complex assemblage of lines and circles, united in himself all the details of mathematical proportion, subordinate to the perfection of figure assumed to exist in the Spiritual Sun.

In taking on a material existence, therefore, and changing from a purely spiritual entity to become an organized material being, the first principle of earthly life to be evolved must needs be the means to produce and reproduce it.

This, in an earthly state of being, is just as sacred and paramount a theme as the formation of worlds, and the birth of suns and systems in the aggregate of the Universe.

As the function of creation is the highest and most wonderful with which the mind can invest Deity, so the imitative law must become the noblest and most sacred function of God's creatures. In the beginning of earthly existence, we believe it was thus esteemed, and in those remote ages when sex worship was incorporated into a religious system, the highest and noblest elements of human thought clustered around the subject of generation, elevating it to the topmost pinnacle of human worship.

As the clear intuitions of the early man carried him back to his state of primeval, spiritual innocence, and recognized in his birth into matter a descent in the scale of being synonymous with the idea of a fall, so he imagined he perceived the order of this scheme mapped out in the constellated Zodiac of the skies. As he recognized the generative functions to be the immediate means of the Soul's birth into matter, so he elevated them into divine significance and set up the emblems as fit subjects for religious reverence. In process of time the instinctive appetites of man's sensual nature stimulated sex worship into excess, and degraded a holy idea into gross licentiousness. But this was the abuse, not the true origin of sex worship. Physical generation was once esteemed as the gate by which the Soul entered upon the stupendous pathway of progress, and became fitted for its angelic destiny in the celestial heavens; but, like all sacred ideas when translated into matter, the law of physical generation came to be regarded as mere physical enjoyment; it sank into sensuality, and hence the necessity which the wise and philosophic priesthood of old perceived, of veiling all teachings on this subject in mysteries, and expressing all ideas in its connection in obscure symbolism.

There are marked evidences in the vestiges of antiquity as to how the sexual idea encroached upon the forms of Solar worship.

The primitive conceptions of creation were exalted, sublime; but when the idea of sex worship became universal, even the Astral religion became imbued with its materialistic influence. The impersonations of the stars and the powers of nature were divided into male and female.

The story of creation was woven into romantic legends of amorous Gods and Goddesses; the emblems of generation were profusely interspersed with astronomical signs and any description of animal, however loathsome, as long as it was remarkable for procreative power, became deified as a type of the creative energy.

To those who esteem the spiritual idea as antagonistic to the material, and believe with the most exalted of the Essences, that in heaven, angelic essences are pure and free from all the impulses and attributes of matter, it must indeed have seemed a fall for the Soul to descend to earth and become incarnate only through the process of physical generation. And yet such is obviously the law of physical being. In the order of the Universe, spirit is the primal essence in which there is neither sex, age, sin, nor capacity for pain.

With the descent of Soul into physical life, man becomes dual, male and female, with sex as the dividing line between them. Then, too, ensues that mysterious transformation of the soul's faculties which converts spiritual love into material passion, institutional knowledge into human reason, boundless perception into dim memory and vague prescience, eternal things into temporal, and a creature without parts or passions, into one all organs, and swayed by every emotion that ranges from the depths of vice to the heights of virtue.

The brief race on earth run, spiritual spheres of progress opening up fresh avenues of purification to the pilgrim Soul, still preserving all the faculties acquired by its birth and association with matter, the celestial Angel stands related to the germ spirit, as the fully unfolded blossom to the embryonic seed. In this order of progress it is clearly shown that the means whereby the spirit-dweller of the original Eden becomes the perfected Angel of a celestial heaven, are: mortal birth, a pilgrimage through spheres of trial, discipline and purification, and an organism made up of separate parts with appropriate functions, the due and legitimate exercise of which constitute the methods of progress. In such a scheme, every trial and suffering has its meaning, and every passion (even the tendencies to vice and crime), their use in shaping the rudimental Angel, through remorse and penalty, into ultimate strength and divine proportion.

A familiar but apposite illustration of the relative difference between the germ spirit that descends from realms of primeval innocence to be born into matter, and that same spirit unfolded through spheres of discipline into the perfected Angel, is found, if we liken the two states to those of the acorn and the full-grown oak.

The one is still the oak in germ, but the noble proportions of the tree, its overshadowing branches, the vast girth of its mighty trunk, the splendor of its Briareus arms wide-stretched to the winds, with its ten thousand leafy hands tossed abroad on the ambient air; its rich harvest of countless germs, and the unborn forests that are to be furnished from their reproductive powers, all grow out of the association of the primal acorn with the formative matrix of earth.

Even so it is with the Soul. To become an Angel it must first be a Man, then a Spirit, struggling on through spheres of graduated unfoldment, and when all is done, the Soul originally expelled from its Eden of innocence and ignorance will regain it with the strength, wisdom and love with alone can constitute it an Angel of God.

It was with this perception of the Soul's destiny that the ancients esteemed the generative functions as divine, and the deification of their emblems as an act of religious duty. Whilst we believe this view of the origin of sex worship the true one, those who regard it simply from the standpoint of results, and contemplate the abominations practiced in its celebration, might well believe it to be the offspring of man's merely animal and instinctive nature; such it undoubtedly became when it sank into that corruption and abuse which too often attends the decadence of ideas, however exalted in their source. There was much, too, in the Jewish Theogony to favor the tendency to excess in sex worship.

Throughout the writings of the Pentateuch the utmost importance is attached to the production of offspring. Every means was adopted by the priestly law-givers to promote the propagation of the species.

Childless women were branded with the bitterest reproach. Dunuchs or persons afflicted with personal blemishes were forbidden to hold sacred offices. Every inducement which a stringent law could hold out to compel the people to "multiply and replenish the earth" was an essential of the Jewish religion. On the other hand, the prophetic writings of the Jews abound with fulminations of the Divine wrath against those who carried their ideas of sex worship to excess and sensualism. The unsparing denunciations of the Hebrew prophets against the practice of sacrificing to "strange Gods," are accompanied by the plainest descriptions of what those sacrificial rites were, and give color to the belief that the religious veneration which had once sanctified the idea of the generative functions as a divine mystery, had sunk into an all-pervading and soul-corrupting sensualism.

In comparison with Egypt, Chaldea, Assyria and Hindo-stan, Judea was but a modern nation.

The nomadic tribes of the Jews had made no mark on the world's history when Egypt was hoary with age, and India had recorded cycles of time, lost in the night of antiquity. The exoteric remains of solar and sex worship, together with all their signs and symbols, presented to the Jews only a dying vestige of faiths of whose resplendent maturity no historic epoch, however remote, can show an authentic record.

We only know it must have been so. Maps of the heavens, and perfected charts of astral motions, involving intricate calculations, which must have required thousands of years to arrive at, were all handed down from pre-historic to the commencement of historic times, and that with a completeness which fully sustains the enormous claims of the Hindoos for the existence of their dynasty during cycles of time which baffle the human mind to conceive of.

How many times have the silent but most eloquent catacombs of the old earth, in the form of upturned plains, the beds of rivers, the depths of artesian wells, and the recesses of newly discovered caverns, brought to light conclusive testimony that man lived, labored, wrought in clay, stone, pottery and metals, tens of thousands of years ago, on the face of the earth!

The author has himself spent years in India studying out that wonderful system of numerals which point to the antiquity of man, and the fact that he commenced astronomical calculations more than twenty thousand years ago. Some of these silent voices indicate axial changes in this planet which could not have transpired in less than a hundred thousand years. Others prove that the Hindoos clearly understood the precession of the equinoxes ages before the Christian era.

About the commencement of that period the colossal forms of the mystic Sphinx might have been found in long and majestic rows in the various temples of old India, and yet the mystery of the Sphinx could only have been solved by a people who had correctly understood the precession of the equinoxes. To effect a change in the position of the sun in the Zodiacal path from one sign to another must occupy at least 2140 years; and yet such changes had occurred, been fully calculated and recorded in the astronomical riddle of the Sphinx, a composite figure, designed to celebrate the sun's passage from the sign of the Virgin to that of the Lion, when the Jews were unknown as a people.

What amount of intellectual power had the mind of man arrived at ere these records of astronomical lore, mechanical skill and artistic power were achieved?

The remains of tropical plants now found amidst the awful desolation of the Arctic and Antarctic regions - the constant stream of revelation silently but surely upheaving its mystic writings from the superincumbent debris under which the earth of a million years ago lies buried - the stony voices that thunder through the colossal remains of ruined cities, and the swift but immutable footprints of the fiery squadrons whose march through the skies, the mind of man has followed up through ages of unrecorded time, all proclaim that the movements of the Universe transpire in spiral and ever-revolving cycles.

Like the path of the sun on the Ecliptic, now ascending on the royal arch of the northern hemisphere, now descending into the southern bow, but ever moving in gyrating circles upward, typifying the march of planets, nations, ages of time and human souls, so that those who study the part may comprehend the whole, all these stupendous witnesses figure out the laws by which cycles of civilization are born, grow, ascend to their culminating point of splendor, then turn the hill of time, descend lower and lower into engulfing depths, lower and lower into corruption, degradation, death! And yet they rise again, and, Phoenix-like, spring from the funeral ashes of their pyre to be reborn in nobler, higher forms of younger civilizations.

So has it been with man and his religious beliefs. Solar and sex worship, born of man's highest conceptions of the Divine plan, rose into an almost perfect science, the science by which the antique man perceived the correspondence between the earth and the heavens, the Creator and his creatures. This famous era of ancient civilization culminated, crossed the equinox of prophetic death, descended into the night of corruption and sensualism, and perished with the closing up of Oriental dynasties.

The real spiritual truths of antiquity have never died; but yet their exhibition has only at times illuminated the ages with coruscation of light, so little understood that their holy radiance has been mistaken for the baleful glare of "Supernaturalism." They have never died; but, as yet, they only give promise, not a full assurance, of the resurrection that is at hand.

Mankind, absorbed in its devotion to the pursuits of material science, has ignored its spiritual interests, or carelessly committed them to the charge of an ignorant and selfish Priesthood; but when the day of true spiritual awakening comes, then the Soul of the Universe shall be known and felt in the Souls of His Creatures, the light of this spiritual revelation will shine upon husks and figments of the dead past, of which reason, no less than intuition will be ashamed. It will show the lifeless bodies of ancient faiths, from which the soul has long fled, leaving nothing but dust and ashes, forms and ceremonies, surplices and shaven crowns behind.

It will show the painted Clown and many colored Harlequins of an ecclesiastical circus still performing their dreary tricks in an amphitheatre from which the stately personages of the grand Drama have vanished, where the curtain has fallen, the lights are quenched, on which the eternal midnight of a dead age has set in, with nothing to relieve the silence but the fluttering wings of the spectral ideas which already begin to flit forth into the morning of a new day, seeking the resurrecting life and light of a new Spiritual religion.