Religion in the Heavens; Or, Mythology Unveiled in a Series of Lectures
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Title: Religion in the Heavens; Or, Mythology Unveiled in a Series of Lectures
Author: Logan Mitchell
Release date: December 22, 2011 [eBook #38375]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELIGION IN THE HEAVENS; OR, MYTHOLOGY UNVEILED IN A SERIES OF LECTURES ***
Produced by David Widger
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.
LONDON:
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."
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 Abbe 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 Judaeus 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 androgynae, 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, Bootes
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 phaenomenon 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 Judaerum," 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.
Irenaeus 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 "AEdipus 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 Hyades, 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 Phaeton, 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 protege.
* 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
Astarte, _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 Astarte 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 Judaeus, 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 Therapeutae, 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.
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-Judaeus, 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 therapeutae, 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 therapeutae 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 Irenaeus, 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 Irenaeus 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 Irenaeus had his full share in the fraudful
traffic.
If the word of a saint is good for anything, we might quote that of
Irenaeus 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
Celtae; 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 Therapeutae. 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 Caesarea, 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 pharmacopaeia 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 Therapeutae 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.
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 Caesarea, 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, Irenaeus, 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 protege 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." Chaeremon,
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 Foe, 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
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